Eleanor of Aquitaine was fifteen when she became Duchess of Aquitaine, the largest and wealthiest territory in France. She was fifteen when she married Louis VII and became Queen of France. She was thirty when she divorced him. She was thirty when she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II of England two years later, making her Queen of England. She bore ten children, ruled as regent, went on crusade, survived sixteen years of imprisonment by her own husband, and outlived nearly everyone who tried to control her. She died at eighty-two, which in the twelfth century was roughly equivalent to dying at a hundred and twenty.

Alison Weir's biography makes a point that seems obvious but apparently needs stating: Eleanor was not remarkable because she was a woman who accumulated power. She was remarkable because she was a person who accumulated power across two kingdoms, two marriages, and six decades, in a political environment where a single misstep could mean death. The fact that she did this while female made it harder. It did not make it less impressive.

She Went on Crusade Because Nobody Said She Could Not

In 1147, Eleanor accompanied Louis VII on the Second Crusade. She brought three hundred of her own vassals. She rode on horseback through territory that would have been considered dangerous for armed soldiers, let alone a queen. The crusade was a military disaster, but Eleanor's participation in it tells you everything about how she understood her role. She was not a consort who stayed home and embroidered while her husband fought. She was a sovereign in her own right who happened to also be married to a king.

Ralph Turner's biography documents the extent to which Eleanor's presence on the crusade shocked and alarmed the male establishment. Chronicles of the period alternately praised her courage and condemned her presumption, sometimes in the same paragraph. The criticism followed a pattern that would persist for the rest of her life: Eleanor did things that powerful men did routinely, and she was criticized for it on the grounds that she was not a powerful man.

She Was Imprisoned for Sixteen Years and Came Out Ruling

After her marriage to Henry II deteriorated, Eleanor supported her sons in their rebellion against their father. Henry's response was to imprison her. She spent sixteen years in various forms of captivity, from 1173 to 1189, during which she was periodically brought out for public occasions to maintain the fiction that she was a willing participant in her own confinement.

When Henry died in 1189, her son Richard the Lionheart immediately released her. She was sixty-seven years old. She spent the next fifteen years governing England during Richard's absence on the Third Crusade, managing the ransom when he was captured, arbitrating disputes between her sons, and conducting diplomatic missions across Europe. Weir's account of this period presents a woman who emerged from sixteen years of imprisonment not diminished but clarified, as if the years of enforced stillness had concentrated rather than depleted her political intelligence.

At Eighty She Crossed the Pyrenees to Fetch a Bride

In 1200, at approximately seventy-eight years old, Eleanor crossed the Pyrenees mountains in winter to retrieve her granddaughter Blanche of Castile, who would marry the future Louis VIII of France. She made the journey on horseback, through mountain passes, in January. She then returned to Fontevraud Abbey, where she retired and eventually died in 1204.

She was eighty-two. She had been queen of two countries, mother of two kings, and the most politically active woman in twelfth-century Europe. She had survived a crusade, a divorce, a rebellion, sixteen years of imprisonment, and the deaths of most of her children. History calls her Eleanor of Aquitaine because that was the territory she inherited at fifteen and never stopped governing, even when the rest of the world kept handing her different titles and different prisons.