I seem to remember a story about Louis the VII wherein he was away from France, on crusade (the second crusade, this is), when he became very sick. The priests / monks / assorted physicians around him claimed that for his health to improve he needed to have sex. He refused. They offered prostitutes, he still refused. In the end, they had to ferry his wife, Elinor, from wherever-she-was (as I seem to remember she went on crusade too), and…either they had sex, or he refused again.
The whole thing ended with them going to the Pope to annul their marriage on (fake) grounds of kinship.
Can anyone point me to any sources for this story? It would be much appreciated.
Wiki includes Louis getting married to Eleanor, and the annulment on a false pretext of kinship, but nothing about him needed to get laid. Eleanor was elsewhere because she wanted to continue the crusades with her uncle and Louis did not. They apparently never got along well.
Yeah, I don’t have my main E of A reference handy, but one assumes this was part of the general smear campaign against Eleanor. Louis and her had no problem procreating in a general sense. She gave birth to a daughter before the Second Crusade ( and had a miscarriage before that ) and one afterwards.
But they got on poorly and Eleanor was accused of adultery with her uncle during the Crusade, as part of the general slander against her. In that time women were considered ( by the Church ) slaves to lust and the court of Eleanor’s father in particular had had a reputation for open licentiousness. Men, by contrast, with their greater capacity to reason ( so the theory went ) were best off abstaining except when necessary for procreation. The very pious Louis VII has generally been considered to have tried to follow that precept, though who knows - might be more propaganda. The main accusation I’d see from this story was that Eleanor wasn’t on hand attending Louis like she should have been, but rather spending time with her uncle Raymond ( who had political/military disagreements with Louis ).
In the end the marriage was anulled on grounds on consanguinity, all the other accusations being just juicy gossip designed to make Eleanor out as the lust-crazed “bad guy” in the aftermath.
Actually, I’ve found the source I was looking for now: Internet History Sourcebooks: Medieval Sourcebook - second paragraph down, written during his son’s reign. Says he was suffering from “defectu coitus”.
Ah, that was his third wife, not Eleanor. Interestingly enough they don’t seem to include Eleanor in the count for all that her daughters were declared legitimate, because of course the marriage was annulled ;). Seems to be just part of the standard royal propaganda surrounding Louis’ piety.
[QUOTE=Tamerlane]
I don’t have my main E of A reference handy,
[/QUOTE]
It’s posts like that that keep me coming back here.
Tamerlane has more than one E of A reference.
I imagine his quickie version as being a little paperback: “Who’s Who in Eleanor’s Life?” Gossipy, verging on trashy, but with the dirt.
He also has a main E of A reference. This, I imagine like a 4 or 5 volume “Eleanor: The Definitive Story”, probably written by some obsessive German historian and impeccably translated by some British scholar. Likely includes the name of Eleanor’s horse she rode while on Crusade, as well as a thorough, sceptical review of Eleanor’s role in Fair Rosamund’s death. Tamerlane keeps it off-site, in his permanent fire-proof locker for his rare sources.
You might be surprised at how much lacunae exist about Eleanor - even a good chunk of Turner’s somewhat more scholarly book is a bit speculative, full of phrases like “she may have” and “it is possible that”. An impressive woman, but still a bit elusive.
Anyway, everybody should have an Eleanor volume or three - there is certainly a ton of them out there. A very popular figure among amateur and professional historians alike is the Duchess of Aquitaine.
We don’t even have a description of her, not even the color of her hair.
I love that Eleanor’s marriage to Louis was annulled on grounds of consanguinity, then she promptly marries Henry to whom she is even more closely related and proceeds to have eight children with him.
Marion Meade’s biography is pretty good, although it’s also necessarily full of speculation. For fiction, I like Sharon Kay Penman’s series about Eleanor and Henry II. It begins with the civil war between Stephen and Maud in When Christ and His Saints Slept.
I tend to imagine most people from Britain and France in the middle ages as having somewhere between dirty blond and muddy brown hair normally, unless it is mentioned that they were ginger, or black haired or blond. Sort of between my brother who is a dirty blond/dark ash blond [he gets a range of ash blond through ginger to brown hairs in his beard, though now at 56 he is getting some grey as well] through me with mouse brown hair with some tendancy to go red if I spend way too much sun time mixed with blondish grey hairs. No idea, but my grey hairs are more blond than anything. Go figure.
Though there were ways to bleach hair out to make it blonder, I figure most women didn’t as it was very damaging to hair, and frequently it was worn covered up so nobody saw it. I wouldn’t damage my hair if it wasn’t being seen.
- it’s Alison Weir’s 
- there is certainly a ton of them out there. A very popular figure among amateur and professional historians alike is the Duchess of Aquitaine.