Eleanor of Aquitaine is still as elusive as quicksilver

Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of kings — ‘lionhearted’ Richard and ‘bad’ John — and ancestress to the royal dynasties of Europe. Yet more nonsense has been written about her than almost any other woman. Much of what we think we know is falsehood or half-truth, and many respected historians fall foul of her myth, endlessly repeating misinformation as fact. For someone so renowned, the written record is astonishingly thin.

Even her birth date (1122 or 1124) is uncertain, as is her place of birth. We know nothing of her looks, personality, education or early familial attachments. In fact we know very little until the death of her second husband, Henry II, in 1189, when Eleanor was 65 (or 67). Then, released from 16 years of captivity — Henry locked her up after she joined their sons in rebellion against him — she burst on to the European political scene and achieved extraordinary things. She ruled in Richard I’s place while he was on crusade and raised an eye-watering ransom when he was captured; she shored up John’s hopeless regime; and she made a perilous journey across the Alps to collect her Spanish granddaughter, Blanca, for marriage to the future Louis VIII of France. But the real Eleanor, for the majority of her long life, is as elusive as quicksilver.

Lack of knowledge has done nothing to prevent her from becoming a cipher for everything society would like her to be. The myths woven around her for nearly a millennium remain irresistible; almost everyone who has written about her falls foul of the ‘Eleanor trap’. In the Black Legend version, she is guilty of incest with her uncle and her father-in-law, of an affair with the ‘infidel’ Saladin, of seducing priests, of riding bare-breasted, and poisoning Henry’s mistress, Rosamund Clifford.