Eleanor of Aquitaine

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Visit history.com/subscrib. If you want a job done properly, get a woman to do it. That seems to me the unanswerable lesson of that wild ride that was held period in the Western European history, which was the late 12th and early 13th century.

The era of the Angeravan Empire, the era of the Lionheart, the soft sword, the road to Magna Carta, the era, we should call it of Eleanor of Aquitaine, King's love to men died for her, she re-drew the map of medieval Europe. She was the only woman to be crowned both Queen of France and England. She marched on the second crusade to the Holy Land.

She led a coup against her own husband, even the Pope feared her. Eleanor of Aquitaine was the beating heart. She was the matriarch of that most powerful and explosive families, the Plantaginites. Her wealth from Accutaine bankrolled kings, her patronage shaped, caughtly culture, and her children, her crusade by her children, including Rich The Lionheart and King John, they ruled

and they rebelled, made quarrel and conquered and were defeated. She was twice a queen, she was mother of monarch, she was the glue that held Europe's most unlikely empire together. Now take us through it, I am joined by the medieval queen of history hit, the historian, the host, the frankly, online phenomenon.

That is the gone medieval podcast host, Dr. Eleanor Yanega. This is dance notes history, and this is the story of one of history's most powerful and dysfunctional dynasties and the queen at the centre of it all. And to tell us about it, we have the queen, and just let you know some of the stuff we chat about in this episode, maybe he's unsuitable for listening with kids.

If you look back on the podcast, then you can't stop me. You and I have done a lot of work together, but when we talk about interacting, I feel

“that's when you hit your flow, because I think there's an affinity there, she's your”

kind of spirit animal.

She is, I mean, listen, I was literally named after the woman, I never had a choice in my

destiny anything that happened, and it's one of those things where I think once you're told from an early age, this is someone who is important in your name, and of course I was going to become obsessed with her, of course it. My mother was reading a book about her when she was pregnant with me. Really?

Yeah, so I was always getting it through, baby. Well, now we're going to get the benefit of that. Let's talk about her birth from the beginning, was it clear she was someone's, but there was a lot riding on it, she was an eras. Absolutely, you know, she is born into one of the most important land holding families

in France. So, I'll contain it at the time, it's essentially all of South Western France. Okay, so, Aquitaine's a glorious place. We are talking about, so round borders, South and West. Yep.

And then almost, like a nice little reach out to the alps as well, I've always heard.

That's right. It goes a little bit further east than you would think. And it goes a little bit further north than you would think. Okay. You know, when we tend to talk about it, we say, oh, South Western France, but Plote, the

capital, it is actually really kind of sensual. And so, yeah, I mean, culturally it is southern, but now you wouldn't call Plote, Southern France, I don't think. Okay. This is around Paris, I'm just roughly northeast France now.

Exactly. And now this is an incredibly wealthy part of France.

“It's got an incredibly important prestige.”

It is where Paris is. So she's born into this very particularized milieu, and it's also a little bit different from other places like up in Northern France, there are a little bit more staggy. Sure. There are a little bit more by the book.

So she's born into a place where you also educate women.

Yeah, when she's born, she does have older brothers. She isn't meant to be the ares, but they die in that way that children do in the middle ages. And her dad is just kind of like, oh, yeah, okay, great. Well, I guess it's, you know, you'll be there.

And there isn't even that much of discussion about it. It's just sort of like, yeah, of course, woman can inherit. And let's quickly talk about France. We think that it is a state today. It has a kind of coherence.

We're really familiar with it was part of France, but what's her dad was he effectively independent? Was he running his own show? Yeah, I mean, what we have to understand is that, you know, kingdoms, it's a lot looser in the middle ages than it is now.

Yes, there is a king of France. He essentially rules Paris, which like, do not get me wrong. That is a really nice spot. It is the biggest city in Europe. There's a ton of money in that racket, but you also have particular vassal states underneath

you, right? And so that means that Eleanor's father is a vassal to the French king.

“And what happens is basically when you get a new king, you've got to go, you have to”

kneel before them, go like this. The king will take your hands in his and say, oh, yeah, you're my vassal great job. What that means is that you have to kick some taxes up to the king. And if the king decides that he is going to go to war with someone, then you owe a certain number of troops.

The king doesn't oversee the courts in your land. He doesn't get to necessarily push you around that much.

Individual nobles are incredibly powerful.

And this is something that will come up in a lot of places, including England, right, like under Eleanor's garbage sun, John, when he tries to like push the envelope to who are here in England and you get magnet card at. Everybody understands that nobles across Europe have rather a lot of power in their own localities.

So if you're living in a Coutaine, you've got a different language to French. You've got a different culture. You look up to their Duke of Accoutaine, the king of France is sort of not a huge character in your life. You were kind of feel sorry for him because you were like damn that must suck.

Yeah, it's like when paper is yet. The king of everything. Yeah, but they've got a couple of nice palaces up there. And yeah, they do get to kind of dangle the, I'm the king over you, but that's essentially what they've got.

You are down in Plotier, you're hearing the best music that Europe has to offer, and you are living the life fundamentally. And if the king of France, like I'm just sending it all me into Accoutaine to go and arrest this guy. The Duke of Accoutaine just lost.

Oh, absolutely not. It was like cute. Yeah. That's real nice.

“You even have the ability to do that you need to get the Duke on side.”

Okay. And that, I guess brings us neatly to the point that the king of France is desperate to marry Eleanor. Yeah, God damn it. That brings that brings Accoutaine in a real sense into that royal family, not just in that

vague sense. But like let's bond to people, the prince of France, the heir to the throne of France, and Eleanor's together. And then from then on, those lands will actually be part of that kind of royal French kingdom. Exactly.

And Eleanor's father dies, she becomes the hottest ticket in Europe.

And basically the king locks that down immediately.

He's like, oh, that's great. You're going to marry my son, Louis. They're all named Louis. We're in Louis. Louis.

Louis, period of time. Let's just say. And so it's basically within days. And there is a real danger here. Because if you can kidnap Eleanor and marry her, then you get hold of all this land.

So the French king is like, we're not playing that game. She's marrying my son. But one of the things that they do manage to negotiate here, which is quite interesting, is Eleanor is able to say, well, these are my lands until such time as I give birth to a son.

Oh. And then my lands will pass to my son.

“And so as far as the king of France is concerned, she's like, oh, well, that's kind”

of fine. Because it will be my son. Exactly. So that's my grandson. That's great.

It brings it under the auspices of the French crown eventually. But it doesn't quite work out like that for Eleanor.

So in the first place, Eleanor kind of gets up to Paris, and she's like, wow, you

live like this? Yeah. Yeah. Like this is crazy. Louis, the Daphat, is by all accounts quite a boring guy.

And what age we at the moment? We're teenagers. We're teenagers. Because he's Louis boring. His boring.

Yeah. And he's like really religious. Like he really, really buys into it. You know, that's his whole thing. And it takes a long time for Eleanor to get pregnant.

As a result of this, that might just be that, you know, she's quite young and these things are difficult. It might be that Louis is too busy praying. We don't exactly. There are a lot of days.

If you're being strictly religious, there are a lot of days in which you're not supposed to do it. Yeah, exactly. So I would probably argue that it is just quite difficult to get pregnant if you are doing everything correctly.

Right? You're not allowed to be shagging on a Saturday for a month or so. No Saturdays. No Sundays. No Wednesdays.

No Wednesdays. Yeah, it'd be, well, Wednesdays a confession day. Is it? Yeah. So, you know, even if you're not confessing, you can't be going to do an all that Friday.

Again, confession day. Saturday, you're still going to be too turned on when you're in mass on Sunday. Ready, you're building up. Yeah. So you've got to, you know, basically it's like Mondays or nothing.

Mondays.

So, no advent. No advent. You're supposed to be thinking about it. Okay. So it's difficult.

So they don't have. Yeah. They have any kids. They do eventually have two daughters. Okay.

You know, eventually we prove that Eleanor can get pregnant, but the sun simply aren't forthcoming. But by this point in time, the marriage is incredibly rocky anyway. Louie is kind of an idiot. He is constantly getting in fights with the church.

“You know, he wants to put key figures in positions of power.”

He wants to choose bishops. The church is less. He wants to get evil stuff. Oh, God. You know, it's just the thing that is done at the time.

So Eleanor often has to intercede. She's got to go, like, do incredibly funny things with a St. Bernard of Clarevoe, who is working for the church at the time. Like, she has to kind of go in and pretty cry in front of him being like, "My husband, he just doesn't listen to me, and I'm just a girl."

She basically has to iron all these things out, which is classic queen stuff.

So she's highly educated and she's playing a part in the politics of France already. No question. Obviously. Yeah. Right.

So she's an important political figure. Okay. Then, like all relationships, they test it by going on some rugged foreign triumph. That is right. That's right.

Well, they decide that they are going to go on crusade rather than done thing at the time. This is the second crusade. So it turns out, stop me if you heard this one before, but it's really difficult to maintain taking over a part of the Middle East when you're not from there.

Right. Okay. I know that sounds wild. The locals do not want you there. Yeah.

It's funny that they didn't love a whole bunch of norms coming and taking over. It wasn't.

So first crusade is against all the odds.

Very successful. And so in the captured juxtaputaries, they established these crusade, a Christian kingdoms in what is now, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, that kind of area. And then it becomes the job of the Muslim neighbors to get rid of those guys. Exactly.

And so, you know, it turns out it's a lot easier to do that if you already live there. Yeah. And you don't have to have a look. Everyone get on a boat and come on over.

“But Eleanor and Louis, they rise to the occasion, right?”

They rise to the call. The papacy is really keen on sending people over. And you know, Louis religious, right? Louis, Louis is a really religious guy. And he feels moved to take part of this.

And why does Eleanor go? Well, you know, for Eleanor, this is also an opportunity to flex her own political muscles. But I partially, you kind of need to stay with your husband in order to get pregnant quite famously. But also, she leads her own army.

So she leads her own contingent from Aquitaine. And so she's like, well, this is what I'm going to do. Yeah, well, my husband is going over as the King of France. I'm going over as the Duchess of Aquitaine. Really?

And she's very keen to carve out her own separate role. That's amazing. Really interesting at the time. And it was remarkable. People were very impressed by this when Louis, Nellonore, and up at the court of Constant

Nopal. Everyone goes Gaga for Eleanor. They're like, a wuga in the first place. They're like, hot babe came over and they talk about her as being a new Amazonian queen. They love this.

“In Constantinople, they're like, this is exactly what I love to see.”

Fantastic work Eleanor, what an incredible babe.

And they talk about how smart she is and how she really seems to be the one with a vision of what to do. And that is probably not such a surprise because she's got an uncle over in the Holy land. So she's got an uncle over in Antioch and she's been in quite constant contact with

him back and forth. So her idea is, well, I'm going to be bringing over the contingents of Aquitaine. And I'm going to be sort of upholding the legacy of my uncle and we are going to get his lands back in this way over there. And that tends to put the string on the marriage.

So Louis is pounding already because at Constantinople, no one cares about Louis. They're like, yeah, I would also some guy like a drip, real wet blanket. And he gets kind of overly high-flute ideas of what he's going to do, which is like surprise a king thinks that he's capable of more than he is. Like I can't imagine how that happened, right?

But Eleanor is kind of like, let's go see my uncle Raymond. We're going to take back Antioch and then we are going to assess the situation and see what can be accomplished. Louis is like, oh, where are you taking Jerusalem? Right.

Interesting. That's what we're doing. And it's just not feasible with what they have got going. But because of how sources work at the time and the way people feel about certain things, the failure of the second crusade is kind of blamed on Eleanor because you know how

women are. Okay. Right. I mean, it's kind of bonkers at the end. You know, sometimes we think that the way that people talk about Eleanor leading

an army is specifically to denigrate her, and specifically to say that the reason this failed is that a woman is like, whoa, they're like, whoa, they're all these rumors about like, oh, well, the procession of the soldiers is slowed down because Eleanor has too much luggage. Okay.

You know, like she brought, oh, you know, like, as women be shopping, women be overpacking. Yeah. You know, things like this. And so they're like, oh, yeah. And that slowed the baggage strained down.

When in reality, Louis is kind of like going out in front, when Eleanor is like, hold up, hold up, hold up.

And essentially the army gets routed, they're split into too many pieces, and nobody knows

“what they're doing, right, because this is always going to be the trouble with crusade.”

If you genuinely believe in your heart that you've been called by God, and you are blessed by the oversight of the Lord, the idea that you could lose a battle is a little bit more difficult, right? Okay. And so the crusades of disaster, we shouldn't be super special about that because they were

about eight to nine crusades, and seven right for them, one disaster. That's right. Okay. So we should be too hot, man. But as ever, being part of a routed army, straining across a brutal landscape, harried

on all sides, it's going to make a break in relationship, and it definitely breaks.

Oh, with it breaks them, and they hate each other, and basically at this point in time, Eleanor

is like, I am done. We're going to get back to wherever it is we need to get to in Europe, and we are getting divorced. So she begins to write to the papacy and says, wow, it's crazy because this guy's my cousin.

Yeah. And which he is, he's like her second cousin, but you know, gosh, everyone who's royal or noble in Europe is the second cousin, third cousin, and this will go on for quite some time. So it's easy to get out clues.

Yeah, exactly. And so the church doesn't love this because the church doesn't love divorce, but on the other hand, Eleanor is forced to be reckoned with if she's sort of asked for this thing, then fine, there aren't any sons yet. So it's kind of easier to break them up at this point.

And to a certain extent, the church is like, well, let's get Louie with someone more tractable. Let's get Louie together with someone that we feel we can have a little bit more control over. So the church says, yeah, fine, your cousin, that's great.

So they get back to Europe after quite some time. They are blown off course. They divorce.

And the first thing that Eleanor has to do now is get hold of a new husband because there

are multiple kidnapping attempts on her, which is back. Because people are like, I will take the largest landholder in France. Thank you very much. I will forcibly marry her against her. Well, yep.

Don't care about that. But Eleanor's got a plan, right? And Eleanor's plan involves a young king named Henry. And this is a thunderbolt. This is one of the biggest blind sites in medieval history.

“It is absolutely wild because Henry is a teenager, right?”

And Eleanor is in her later 20s at this point in time. So Henry is a teenager. Uh-huh. He is also the hated king of England. That is right.

Well, Eleanor doesn't want to be not a queen. Come on. And also, you know, Eleanor hates her ex. So it's like she kind of goes out of her way to find the person that would piss Louis off the most.

And she knows, Henry has the hotse for her because they've met on several occasions before, you know, doing queenly kingly things. And he was very clearly like a wuga at her. So I mean, this is the equivalent of like the pin-up you keep on your wall as a teenager saying, hey, you want to get married.

It would be like if Sidney Swaney asked a 16 year old boy to marry her now, right? And so he is like, hell, yeah, let's get this done immediately. And they marry and there isn't really anything that anyone can do about it. I've runically Henry and Eleanor are more closely related than Eleanor and Louis were. But you know, Eleanor wants to do this.

So it's kind of fine. So the woman who was queen of France ditches a husband and Mary's Queen of England astonishing. But even more astonishing in doing so, she takes with her all of her own land to add it to those of her new English husband. Exactly.

There were no sons. There were no sons in her marriage to Louis. And so all of those lands revert to her. Now, Louis is fuming. He is absolutely fuming.

But there's also nothing you can do because it's very difficult for us to kind of understand now. But what Henry controls and what Eleanor controls is like most of France. This is so important.

“So marriage, a love match, but also one of the biggest power hookups in history, right?”

Because England ends up with this vast empire. Eleanor and Henry end up with this vast empire. So talk me through the plantagen at lands, well, England and Wales, we've got England and Wales.

So basically, most, well, I've seen, like, it's lots of Wales's independent, but there's

little encroachments. Obviously, the Welsh are not happy about it. There is some like ongoing tip for the most part. The English are subjugating them, and they're very least. And in fact, Henry would have argued he's over a lot of Scotland as well, but critically

for this point, jokes of Normandy, thanks to their form that William and Conqueror. And Normandy is really large at the time. It goes out onto the Brittany peninsula. Right. You know, we've got Calle, we certainly have Calle.

And for all intents and purposes, they are still quite Norman. They can push. They're speaking French at home. They're like English who is she. I don't know.

So this new power couple controlled directly control a lot more France, for example. I'm the king of France. Oh, God, yeah, absolutely. He's an ex husband, which is absolutely bizarre. And then they also have a little bite out of Eastern Ireland as well.

Well, that's, you know, because, but fundamentally, they've kind of taken over Dublin and the

Right. So this is tons of land. Yeah.

“So you are the king of England, absolutely every single king when they are putting”

down what their titles are on any document.

It'll always say, Raksanglorum, the king of the English, and the second thing it always

says is Duck's Norman Oram and the Duke of the Normans. And then now Henry can slap Duck's Aquatinorum as well on there. And this is a huge amount of land. It's such a large amount of land that as you've already mentioned, we now tend to refer to this as the end of an empire.

Because these are wildly disparate groups of people who speak different languages, have different cultures, really see the world in differing ways that are all controlled by one family. Yeah. And listeners and viewers of this podcast will know that I am very nostalgic for the Angerman.

I would love to live in a country that stretched from the wilds of the north all the way down to La Rochelle, down to the Pyrenees, we could just travel around anyway, but I won't get stuck. And you know, the beer is great up all the wine is great down south. Got everything.

The crack is altogether mighty so it is. I think that we will all find. So you know, you've got some of the best cultures in Europe hanging out and doing their thing. Up and now ruling over the Angerman Empire and also, no, that may be a tough hit for

their ex-husband and there has lots and lots of kids so it's funny kids. It's a lusty sun. Oh my goodness.

“So it, what you know that Louie is absolutely fuming because basically the kids start”

coming thick and fast. She immediately immediately has several sons, so we get three sons basically right off the bat. So she's got two daughters with Louie. So she got these two daughters.

And now, unfortunately, because of the way that divorce works in the middle ages, they stay with their father, you know, they are French princesses to be fair. So obviously, they are going to be brought up at the French court. It most, frankly. And they do stay in good contact with their mother.

They have a lot of letters written back and forth and we do know that that is a relationship

which is sustained, but they are never going to live with their mother accord again.

Okay. And these sons, by the way, this is what the rest of this podcast is going to be about. Yeah. Oh God. Oh Lord, we have sons.

Oh, many sons. So first of all, we get the young Henry because obviously, you know, so the oldest one dies young. Yeah. We get the young Henry who we call him the young Henry very specifically because when

you control this much land, Henry, the king, is very keen to make sure that his son Henry is understood as the heir apparent to the kingdom. And also, you've got to understand that Henry the second is crown king as a result of the ending of a period that we refer to as the energy civil war. Yeah, exactly.

“So for him, the most important thing is that everybody understands what the line of”

succession is. So Henry the young king is crowned quite young, while his father is still ruling the kingdom technically, just so that everybody knows where this is going.

He's like a pretend king.

He's got a court and he's got it, but he doesn't actually rule him. Exactly. Gamers guy. Yeah. Hot.

Good. And he is very much. Like in him to kind of like a rugby boy now, where like his thing is jousting, he's doing the circuit around Europe. Everybody loves him.

Everyone loves it when the young king shows up. He's a real glamorous sort rides with a pretty strong crew best buddies with William the Marshall. That is right. So he spends a rather a lot of time with the French princes and these sorts of things.

And so he's actually not bad at playing the political game with other people at his level. But his father is actually rather a good king. So he doesn't have a whole lot to do around the size. Yeah.

Exactly. So then we got Richard surviving son number two. That's right. Nick name the line hall. Ah, quarterly on.

One of our worst kings, but we don't need to come into that all that. Yeah. Kickstarter. Oh, yeah. And so he is very much a mama's boy.

He is Eleanor's favorite by all accounts. And he is very specifically raised as though he is going to take over Aquitaine. Okay. So he is with his mother constantly. He's often down in Plotia.

She likes staying down there, does she? Yeah. She does. She's back and forth. You know, and who could blame her?

Who could blame her? Who could blame her? So he is very much raised to understand that he is going to take over Aquitaine when the time comes. So he is very much raised in this particular eyes position.

And that involves just fighting all the time because those tables down there are wild. Oh, they are fractures. And obviously, I'm now that the French king is not married to Eleanor. There is rather a lot of attempting to bite into the land. So there's a lot of back and forth, who knows what's possible.

Yeah. Nobles switching sides. So while Henry is being glamorous, Richard is actually doing the job. He's a rule. Okay.

We also shouldn't remember. They have daughters all of a sudden. Yeah. Very advantageous marriages. People talk about Queen Victoria grandmother of your, I mean, Eleanor is absolutely

doing that in this. 100% and by all accounts, all of her daughters are really on top of it.

Right.

“Women who go on to be incredible rulers of their own.”

Did you Roman Empire? Oh, God. Yeah.

You know, they're marrying into Spain.

They're marrying into the Holy Roman Empire. They are doing really great things. And they're all quite clever. So forget Victoria. This is the real grandmother of you.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. We get some Jeffrey here. Who, again, is pastled out a little bit of this big empire as well.

Yeah. Absolutely. So Jeffrey is also being trained to understand that he is going to be more involved in like Normandy. Okay.

For example, we have to understand that, yeah, premature exists this idea that, like, you know, you inherit your father's lands, right, but also there is limitations to that. The end of an empire as a concept is incredibly new. You're not just going to hand it all to Henry.

“You're not just going to say, oh, you're going to go ahead and take it.”

They're like, hmm, to be fair. This is rather a lot of land together on wielding. Yeah. And, you know, this way, it's hope that maybe your sons won't be at each other's throat. Here's your land.

Here's your land. Good luck with that. And fundamentally, you know, like Normandy. That's not bad. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. We love to see it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. The dance nice history. I'm going to wear it.

It's more to come. Now, we come. Now, we come with enormous reluctance. We come to this young gentleman, John, John, Prince, John. Yeah.

Lackland. Lackland. It's soft sword. Well, we'll get to soft sword. But he likes land because he doesn't get anything in this big.

No. He's too young. He's sort of come along a little bit too late. I mean, this is son number four that they've got. And he's kid number eight.

This is just like a whole handful of kids. So as a result, they don't really know what to do with him. Now, he's Henry's favorite. So, so which, you know, that's where the problem.

This is where the problem is.

So, he kind of goes around with his father all the time and we've got the derogatory Lackland for him. But also one of the things that we know is that this causes a lot of tension with people because basically a Henry will show up with little John and toe. And he'll say, oh, oh, nice land.

You got here. Be a shame if someone's son inherited it, and so he's kind of constantly biting off smaller pieces of other people's lands to roll over to John and turn into something. And now, if there was any justice in this world, which there is not, that is the end we would ever have heard of young Prince John.

Eighth kid. One of the old royal also runs, but sadly, he'll be hearing a lot more about John as this conversation goes on because there is no justice in this world now. The empires on wieldy rights. Yeah.

These sons, they rebel against the death. Oh, yeah. They absolutely do. And so by the time that John is born, Eleanor's done, Eleanor's done with having all these kids.

This is kid number 10. Let us keep in mind. And the marriage between Henry and Eleanor is now strange. They have got on for quite some time, but you know, Eleanor and Henry are no longer getting on in the way that they once did.

And Eleanor's like, yeah, this is real cute. You'll find me in Plotia. Goodbye. Well, whether or not this is entirely amicable, we can only speculate at. We know that by this time, Henry is taking up with several hot young things.

So he has a very prominent girlfriend, Rosemann Clifford, who is a celebrated beauty. She kind of takes over as Henry's date to the occasions in England. Eleanor doesn't seem to cut up about it. Eleanor's like, yeah, wow, that's wild. Anyway, you will find me in France goodbye.

I do not really need to be sitting around in a soggy salad bowl all day. I could be off having a lovely time at my own court with my son. And yeah, have a girlfriend. That's wild. Bye.

Great.

It wouldn't be the first time that English kings had a very prominent

mistresses. So that's fine. Then we have these revolts of the sons. Now we do tend to think that maybe Eleanor is involved with this. It could be that she doesn't like her husband very much.

And who would blame her, you know, with that?

“I kind of tend to think that she's like, yeah, sure, rolled a dice like who cares, right?”

Henry, the young king resents his father because he feels as though he has not been given enough to do, right? Richard's got stuff to do down in aquataine. Henry does have the tournament circuit, but he's like, it does seem to me that I should be doing some work if I'm going to end up being the king.

Like, rebel against our father of that sounds fun. So they all get together and they begin in open rebellion against their father, which goes so, so, yeah, let's just say that. So it causes a lot of strife, obviously, no one is quite sure who's side to be on. But Henry is fundamentally, he is a pretty good king, but life in the old dog.

Yeah, exactly. So he manages to sort of trounce his sons also as a part of this Eleanor ends up getting kidnapped. I swear, this woman has been kidnapped more than anyone in her life. Now what happens next is that Eleanor gets brought back to England as a prisoner in some

style. Let's just say that. She is still fundamentally the queen of England. You can't like throw her in a jail. And so she gets taken to one of her very, very favorite castles, which is just outside

“of Sol'sbury, Old Saram, and they're basically like, you are under house arrest, right?”

Not a huge fan of this, obviously, she would rather be in Pate, obviously, she would rather be doing her thing, and she loses the ability to regulate her own lands. But as part of this, Henry forgives the sons, and so this could be something that Eleanor negotiates. I would argue.

You know, I don't think that she wanted to be taken captive at all whatsoever, but seeing how the cards have been laid out, I do think that she says, look, you've got me banged to rights, yes, I was encouraging our sons to rebel against you, but you've got me. And so a great thing that you could do just for the stability of everything is you could just let the boys go.

You've got me, blame it on me, and everybody loves to blame a woman, right?

So basically, Eleanor goes to jail, and the boys kind of get on with their life.

They will do some light rebelling. They will rebelling again against their father, continuously, and their mom has locked enough, and you've got to understand if you're Richard, he doesn't like this, he loves his mom. He wants his mom back, and he really, really hates this.

But for Henry, basically, what Henry gets his more money, his dad is like, don't you love the tournaments, and he's like, oh, yeah, I do love tournaments, and his dad is like, well, what if I like doubled your tournament budget, yeah, and Henry's like, oh, more money you say, like, well, I'll be off with the boys to find. More Jeffrey is kind of like the one who doesn't get a whole lot out of this.

But what will end up happening is now a series of deaths in the way that there is, and it's all dysentery all the way down, which is, no one ever talks about dysentery because it's really unpleasant, but on campaign against their father, first Henry dies. Henry, the young King dies. All right, P to a real one.

This is a really interesting sliding doors moment.

“I think I really wonder what it would have been like if he'd managed to take over, but”

dysentery will get you. What's your hand, boys? Do it. And then Henry, the fifth, he goes to his hands, none of us are being this mess. Exactly.

Anyway.

So, Henry, first gets to check it out.

That leaves Jeffrey. Yeah. Jeffrey's still rebelling against his father because Jeffrey is like, well, I don't see any reason to stop this. He gets dysentery.

This is a really sad one because his father is all campaign against him in the French lands. And he writes to his dad and says, Dad, I'm on my deathbed. And I'm really sorry about all this. And I just want us to get right before I die.

Henry thinks it's like a trap and doesn't go to see his son and so Jeffrey dies. And I find that like really quite heart-wrenching because we do have the correspondence where he's like, I just want to see my dad more time. And this is the weird thing. This is not like a family of people who are rebelling against each other, but actually

have no, there's a real human, like when they get back together after these vouchers of rebelling, they seem really happy, no, like it's a genuine family. Yeah. And they're going off to each other. Yeah.

I tell you what, like, money messes people up. That's all I can say. But money more problems later. Yeah. And so at this point in time, that means that now the crown has passed to Richard, which

nobody saw coming. Yeah. But at least of all him, he is not particularly interested in all of this. He won't speak reciting. Oh, God.

Yeah.

And this is basically, he's like, well, I guess that I am the heir apparent and Henry almost immediately

dies after this. We should say then, Henry, the second dies whilst campaigning in Richard by the way. And Henry dies a broken man. Yeah. Absolutely.

Everyone abandoned. It's so sad. It is really sad. And it is a really ignominious end to what I would argue is one of the best. One of the best ever.

So I mean, has his problems interpersonal, but he does a great job of actually ruling England, which his sons, not since his four bears and his sons, not so much. So he dies abandoned by his courtiers, his son, besieging him almost. Are they briefly reconciled right at the end? Yeah.

“I think it's very right at the end, basically.”

When Richard sees where the wind is blowing, he realizes his dad is going to die. There's kind of like a tearful like I love you, apart.

So Richard is now unexpectedly king of the whole shooting match, the whole orange of an empire.

“The first thing he does is let his mom out of jail because he loves her so much.”

And it's hilarious. The story is that the first thing he does is say, let my mom go. And he sends people up, messengers, they're charging through the night on horses on boats to get to Sarham. And they got there and I was like, hey, let myself out.

Oh, really? Yeah. Because she, a hundred percent, was like, we all know where this is going. Henry's dead. You know Henry's dead.

What you think that Richard isn't going to let me out. So she is able to walk free.

Now what Richard decides to do is go on crusade, he's always wanted to go on crusade.

He, you know, has grown up at his mother's knee, sort of hearing about this. And he is a real guy's guy. He likes being on campaign. So I've heard. You know, a buy king.

This is like, well, listen, they're the rumours. These are the rumours, right? So we know that he has some illegitimate children, so can't be disinterested in the ladies. But you know, he's not disinterested in the guys either. And you know, I've simply loved to see it.

I love to see like, you know, he's just got some very close friends, who he's always on campaign with. And you know, baby, help yourself. Treat yourself. This is absolutely fine with me.

We, we like it, you know. So he decides that the thing that he's going to do is he's going to love you a big tax on England, which is called the Saladin tie, because we are obviously after fight Saladin over in the middle of it. It's much more modern.

Oh, we're threatening all of the Christian castles left in Hollywood, which also weirdly like the Christians love, it's the strangest thing. It's like they've got this real love hate relationship with Saladin. They're like, oh, well, we really should be controlling the Holy Land. But they're like, oh, isn't it great?

Yeah. Yeah. Very romantic figure Saladin.

“So Richard is like, well, that's what this world needs is a guy to go over and sort this out.”

And I think that he has like this real chivalric idea about grandiose men fighting each other on. And then he's like, well, the biggest land over in England should be on the champion of Christendom. He's the champion of his love.

So we're going to sort it all out once and for all. So basically, he love his this huge tie on England.

And it's like, Sinar, sucker is all never see you again.

I mean, this man came to England like four times altogether and mostly it was because his dad said so and then to like get a bunch of money and he did not speak English. He did not particularly care about it. You know, he was really raised to understand himself as part of the French milieu. And that's why there's a gigantic statue of him outside the house of Parliament in London.

It's confusing. No, it is a confusing one, but you know, partially I think what was going on here is one of the reasons he could go on crusade is because he knew that you could sort of like leave his mum in charge. Okay.

So he leaves a council of regions in which is like a lot of the worries of England in charge. Like varying bishops, big or land owners, his mum is overseeing it. And he's like, well, Lord knows she knows how to rule the kingdom. So that's fine.

And just quickly, is this unusual in medieval history or are there other examples of powerful

“women born at the right time of the right place for sure, being region's exercising actual”

political power in their own region? Oh, absolutely. So you know, it's not super unusual. It's not super unusual. We tend to think of it as unusual, but it happened so for example now granted that we

did have the anarchy about it, but fundamentally Richard's grandmother, Matilda was arguably Queen of England. She had been a Holy Roman Empress. There is this understanding that you can leave women in charge. And William McConker left his wife to run in the show.

Oh, yeah. Well, Henry the first wife used to do lots of stuff. This is why you marry other royals and nobles is because they are trained to understand how kingdoms are run and people need to go on maybe not necessarily crusade, but men are often awake.

They're very busy. Yeah. So you're doing with the boys. Yeah. Up country.

Yeah. Like they're doing a lot of things. And so they move around a lot and someone has to do the work around here. So is it weird to ask your mum to do it? Yeah.

But he and basically ends up going over to the Middle East again, spoiler alert. The whole crusade. Look, whole other series of podcasts we've done here. Third crusade. Not so much.

Doesn't go particularly well. And he ends up getting married sort of as he's on his way over because his mum is like, listen, I understand that you're not particularly interested in being the king of England, but you are. And we're going to need some kids out of you.

So here's your wife. And he's like, well, that's crazy. Anyway, by like I'm off to the Holy Land on his way back on his way back. He wins a few buckles. He has done this.

Yeah. He boost his reputation. Yeah. He doesn't succeed. And what he didn't retake Jerusalem.

He didn't know. And there are some rumors. Okay. There's a rare reason the Holy Land. Right.

So now Jerusalem has never retaken.

But everyone is like, it is so obvious that we were going to take retake Jerusalem. We should elect a new king of Jerusalem. And Richard's like, yeah, we should do that. And they're like, oh honey, we weren't talking about you. So there is some pouting on Richard's part about the fact that there is a new king of

Jerusalem that is not him.

And I mean, an OG assassin.

I mean, a hashashin, who is a schooled by the old band of the mountain and had like comes down and kills him. And Richard's like, that's crazy. Wow. Anyway, I got to go.

And everyone is like Richard killed this guy, right? Okay. It's believed by the French and the Holy Roman imperial representatives in the Holy Land that Richard hired in a assassin. We cannot say, for sure, who killed who?

I'm going to be real with you. But on the ground, individuals blamed Richard. Okay. And Richard was like, well, I got to go. You know, and then also the timing is suspicious, right?

So Richard then takes off. Richard on the way home is then kidnapped by one of the dukes of the Holy Roman Empire. Now, there was some bad blood between them when Richard went over because, for example, I squirpled. Yeah.

When Richard showed up, homie had control of a castle and was like flying his own flag.

“And Richard was like, you're not a king, you should fly.”

All right. Yeah. And then they were like, oh, don't take my flag down. I mean, I didn't even know. It was actually pathetic.

Yeah. I mean, Rich boys and it's pathetic. He then kidnapped Richard and it's like, you're responsible for several things. And Richard is like, how dare you? How dare you?

But everyone kind of hates Richard. Eventually, the Pope doesn't think that you should go around kidnapping. Linking of England, Pope does excommunicate his kidnapper. But then Richard is given over to the Holy Roman Emperor. And the Holy Roman Emperor is like, Elinore, come get your trash son.

Yeah. Love it, it absolutely insane ransom. And Elinore has got to go around all of the lands to get this money together. What she does? It's crazy.

It's like 10,000 pounds. Which is a lot.

It's like saying like $100 billion, right?

It's crazy stuff. So Elinore manages to do it. She has to go around, beg bar and steal, levy all kinds of taxes. She gets the money together and she gets Richard out.

“And I think that this is really one of the most interesting parts of their relationship”

because we see what Elinore's willing to do for her children. We also see what Elinore's capable of. Even in these circumstances when Richard has at his lowest possible Ed, people are still willing to bet on this family. Yeah.

They're still willing to say, OK, yeah, go get your son. Even when people don't like him, and the Holy Roman Emperor is very happy to have quite a lot of money as a result of this. And very tellingly, when he lets Richard out, he writes letters to his underlying saying, the devil is loose, look to yourself for safety.

And so this is an indication of what Richard is capable of. He is very much seen as someone who is a worthy adversary and someone who might come and mess with you. And he celebrates getting out by immediately messing with all the other. Yeah.

You listen to Dan Snow's History, thank you for watching. It's more coming. And the King of France has been nibbling where it has been. Where there lands and Richard goes on the tier. Reconcurs.

There's basically a Reconcurs.

Yeah. Mum and Dad's big empire. And does it? Does it? Does Mum helping?

They managed to do it. And then Richard, besieging some useless little backwaters. Tiny little castle. And he gets got by a 14 year old with a crossbow. Boom, right in the shoulder.

Oh. Two Richards credit. Richard was like fair play. I've been shot by a 14 year old. And I'm dying.

Basically, he dies of stuff. Basically slow days. It's really slow. It's horrible. And one of the things that Richard says is leave that little 14 year old alone, like fair

play. Do they leave the little 14 year old alone? They do not. They kill him horribly.

“But actually, I think it really says something about Richard.”

I like that anecdote. That was good. And I think it's like a little Shapo moment where he kind of says, don't do that. But anyway, he's dead one way or another. Oh, we face terror of a decision.

So the grandies get together. Talk to them in this role here. We should say, by the way, at this point, the Jeffrey is brothers. They're, so in fact, all the brothers are there. We got no brothers.

There's no brothers left. We're out of brothers. Except John. Hi. This guy.

We're in the Drugs of the Plantasia family now. But Jeffrey has had a son called Arthur, hasn't he?

So there's a myth. So in theory. Yeah. In theory, really Arthur should be the king. What we're doing is straight succession, premature old a son, and then their kids get

it. But the ground is super shaky here. Eleanor again, incredibly canny understands what has happened before. This is part of what the problem was with the succession underneath the anarchy. Right?

Is it's like, well, who's going to rule what? Having a tiny child has the king when everything has been in flux. Richard has just had to go and recalculate a bunch of the territory in France doesn't look great. Instead, they decide to roll the dice and put John who is an adult.

I'm sorry. This is what's going for him. He's an adult. He has, his mom and dad's blood in his veins is an adult, and he can breathe. Yes.

That's really it.

“And I think that this is an important point, though, because people tend to think that there”

is one way that people become kings in the Middle Ages, and it's just kind of, yeah, straight premature, you follow this line down. That's just not how things work. Decisions are being made all the time in terms of who can rule, when, and why. And if you accept that and just go with it, it explains a lot more later on.

And he's islander now all the states from, and she's critical in this, right?

Oh, God, yes. Because Eleanor is also kind of thinking, well, I don't know how much more life I've got in me. She's constantly trying to retire. She is constantly trying to go away to the convent that she wishes to retire to, and kind

of like being like pulled back in. So she's really frustrated by this. And I think one of the things that goes on here is that Eleanor doesn't necessarily trust Arthur's mother to be the queen region, and Eleanor says, well, you know, I can have a little bit more influence over John.

John is an adult. Let's just roll the dice and see what we can do here. Maybe I can go back into retirement a little bit more.

“She doesn't want to be in London doing all these things.”

She's old, you know, she's been in a mother of 10 for God's sake. She just wants to have like a well earned retirement doing what it is she wants to do. So for her, John looks a little bit more stable. Again, this is a sliding door as a moment. Who knows?

And then as with every succession, it's an opportunity for people to rebel, to steal some land and to close some trouble. She ends up holding a castle against forces loyal to her grand son Arthur has got some

rebel nobles to back him, because there's always a home of them.

Of course, of course. There's a siege guy on the cheese and charge the siege and she's how old, I mean, this is crazy. And this is the thing is that this woman should be pretending to be a nun right now. And instead she's having to do all this, she's having to hold castles.

She's having to write letters trying to garner support from other people. Her useless son John is being useless. It really is coming down to her, to negotiate and then God it was because John completely useless can keep a single thing together. But this just goes to show how fractures things are and why she stayed involved as long

“as she did, because you just simply cannot trust John with anything.”

Including the safety of his nephew Arthur. So eventually this rebellion piece is out, John gets custody of his nephew, this kid Arthur. And people talk about Richard the third, but people should be talking about John and she's many crimes. What happens to the author?

Well, nothing good is the answer something, something death, something you can say. Some things happen. And you know, it is, again, one of these things where it's like, oh, wow, that's crazy. That kid's dead now. You know, side eye.

Now, exactly what happened, it's difficult to say, but also like, let us be so real here. Now to be fair, children die all the time, children die all the time in the middle ages, I don't die all the time in the middle ages. Royal princes in the custody of their uncles died a lot. It's crazy how much Royal princes die in the custody of their uncles.

It's funny how that happens. The author dead possibly staffed the death we don't know. Yeah. It's not good. At the very least, what I tend to say is that the very least, I would call it murder

through neglect. Okay. That's what I would say. Okay. So John comes the throne through murder through neglect.

But Eleanor has managed in these dying years. She has managed to pass on that unwieldy empire to another son. So it's she and her husband have run it. It's gone through Richard. She's now managed to get the hands of John.

And at that point, sadly for the empire and everybody else, she checks out. Yeah, she does. She manages eventually to get back to her convent. She's been managing things for so long, like you know, basically still overseeing every single one of her grandchildren, getting advantageous marriages.

She gets kidnapped for a million more times, like in the process of doing it.

And then she's like, I am done, it's none time. And then she almost immediately croaks, which makes me really sad because I really wish

She wanted it to function for her.

“Like I really wish that she had had a great couple of years where she could just relax”

and feel as though her work here was done. But her sons were so garbage. So it's actually dies in 12 or four and it just off to a few months in retirement. Yeah. Interesting.

The empire falls apart within a few years. Oh, God, yeah. Of her death. Is that unrelated? No, 100% it takes a force of will like hers.

I would say to keep that much land together, it's an absolute ton of land. And it isn't traditionally associated. There isn't anything like a network of people who are overseeing these lands underneath the all spaces of the King of England, which is what we see over in the Holy Roman Empire. So you have like an Emperor rules everything, but the King of Bohemian is doing his thing, the

Duke of the various doing his thing, and everybody knows who they kick up to. This is something that takes a force of will and an incredibly active clever family to keep together.

And you can say anything you want about 100 a second and 11 hour of awkward change, but

these are two incredibly intelligent people with a real force of will and they were able to keep this going. But even then, they weren't able to keep it going without infighting, without some scrapping back and forth. So it's just a lot of land to keep together and especially it's a lot of land to keep

together if you're not very bright.

“Yeah, and this is an important point is that you don't just call an enemy together, everyone”

discuss, yes, I'm right here, individual balance, the individual motivation. You know, you can gather a massive army, if everyone kind of likes you, all of your underlings. But John will cool and they just want to know, oh, I'm so sorry, we're at a few bridges blown out. Yeah, they're like, oh, wow, oh, gosh, yeah, I didn't get your letter for seven months,

which is also a viable thing to say in the Middle Ages. You know, when Eleanor comes calling people to say, oh, well, no, great. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, you don't want to piss her off when it's John, you actually do want to piss him off. You don't like that guy.

Nobody likes that guy. So, and so John will be defeated in military campaigns, well, frankly, every military campaign in the rest of his short life. This man cannot buy a win, it's ridiculous. And France conquers Normandy, the ancestral hotlands of this family, which is really that

one hurts. That really hurts, you know, they think of themselves as being Norman. And so for them, that is kind of like an existential problem.

“And it's something that we will see kings of England over and over again, attempting to get”

this back. And when John dies, just over a decade after his mum, his empire, so large is now a little slice of the East Midlands. I think it's so sad. It's a decent tree.

Hey, that's yes, it's a, you know, a family all, you know, hobby. They love to dive this into these guys. And that is the end of this, this big trans channel, as you say, lots and lots of their descendants will try and reconquered and they'll be urban flood. But this orange of an empire is a brief moment.

And really, it is. I don't know, there's empire in some ways, is that she makes that empire possible. She holds it together. Absolutely, you know, she is the glue that is able to bring this huge portion of France under the control of the crown.

And it's her political nows that really allows her to do that. She understands not just how French people work, but how people in Occutain work. She has really close connections with her northern family in France, you know, her mother's family and the people who were kind of local around there. So she understands how to play people off against each other.

She is very involved in English politics. She understands what makes the very nobles their tick. And, you know, she can talk to Normans as well. So she's this real player who can move between worlds. And one of the issues with having a lot of sons, you know, good healthy sons is they were

all kind of brought up to understand that they only had to do one thing. And, you know, John was brought up to understand that he was going to have to do question mark. Like, oh, no, you know, so I mean, to extend, it isn't surprising that he was such a bad king because he was not really brought up to be one.

He never had the education to do that.

So it's a story that would differ if these men had managed to live. And I do think that they were doing the right thing. I do think that understanding you have this many sons and someone's going to have to have land, it was smart to kind of try to parcel things off. But who would know that you were only left with the random glitter left with the worst

one? Well, and that, as I was expecting, that was a royal tour de force about your namesake. Thank you very much. Come in the podcast. Thank you so much.

I will never, ever tire of talking about this one. Thanks for listening folks. And the Anika. What a phenomenon. So lucky to have her in the history of family.

Don't forget to hit follow for more episodes of the podcast every week. And if you want more deep diving this wild period of history, I've got a couple of excellent recommendations. If I do say so myself and the show notes, we've linked to our episode on Richard lion

But also willing the Marshall, which is wrong, possibly my favorite podcast I've ever done.

“I never thought to say that about the medieval period, but there we go.”

I'm an 18th century traitor.

He's the greatest knight who ever lived.

That's a fact. If you believe the biography commissioned by his sons, but you know, I do. So there we go.

“He's the key person to get your head around if you understand the plantation at period.”

You've got to check out that episode. Thank you very much for doing so. See you next time.

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