France was born at Poitiers, as all French schoolchildren know, with the victory of Clovis and his Franks over Alaric and his Wisigoths at the (first) Battle of Poitiers, in 507 AD. Then French history got a little wobbly: under Charlemagne and the Carolingians, the land of the Franks became part of a much larger empire, loosely known farther to the East as the “Frankish Empire;” then as that Empire crumbled, power was dispersed in smaller statelets and dukedoms and lordships. By the end of the first Millennium, with Hugh Capet just beginning the next dynasty, French kings directly controlled some 10% of the land which had become France under Clovis. Little by little their territories expanded around the Ile-de-France, though by the time Eleanor of Aquitaine was born “France” was barely the size of Normandy, or the County of Toulouse, and certainly smaller than the great Duchy of Aquitaine.
In one week, in the year 1137, it all changed. With the marriage in Bordeaux of Prince Louis, son of King Louis VI, to Eleanor of Aquitaine, daughter of Guillaume X, the last Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, the prospect of a joining of “France” and Aquitaine was opened up. A week later Louis VI was dead, and at the Cathedral of Poitiers, on August 1, 1137, Prince Louis became King Louis VII, monarch of a greater state than his predecessors had governed for centuries. He and Eleanor were now King and Queen of a re-born country, close in size to what France is today. One can imagine the new king in front of the Cathedral, wondering how that dream came together so quickly.
Less than two decades later, it all changed again. Growing friction between the spouses – Eleanor, used to southern sun and troubadour gaiety, outgoing, and Louis, used to gray northern skies and a lover of quiet, introverted, proved not to be an ideal match. Worse, Eleanor did not provide any male heirs. In early 1152, they divorced – unusual but not unprecedented among medieval royalty. But whereas most divorced queens quietly made their way to a nunnery or some out of the way country house, Eleanor remarried – and married, only weeks after the divorce on May 18, 1152, one of Louis VII’s great rivals: Henry, Count of Anjou, an expanding province with claims to no less than the throne of neighboring England. By 1154 her new spouse Henry of Anjou was indeed King Henry II of England, with lands across the channel that included Anjou, Normandy and all of Aquitaine. A kingdom far larger than the once-again diminished “France” of Louis VII. Eleanor’s momentous second marriage took place in the Cathedral of Poitiers. One can imagine the Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and now Duke of Aquitaine, Henry, coming out of the Cathedral, wondering how he had, overnight, become the greatest landholder in “France.” And one can imagine Louis VII, perhaps thinking back to that day in 1137 at the Cathedral in Poitiers, and wondering how the dream had been torn asunder so quickly. And all with Poitiers’ Cathedral at the center of the action.
From this marriage in 1152 flowed Anglo-French conflicts which seemed to have no end: tensions of the 12th Century, between Henry II and Louis VII; the fighting between King Philippe-Auguste of France and Eleanor’s sons, Richard the Lion-Hearted and “Lackland” John, which led to France’s reconquest of Normandy, Anjou and Poitou; The Hundred Year’s War, with the 14th century raids of the Black Prince and the English victory at the 1356 Battle of Poitiers, the brief reconquest of territory by France, and then the famed St Crispin’s Day battle at Agincourt in 1415, where England’s Henry V effectively took control of Paris and northern France; and the arrival of Joan of Arc, in whose career Poitiers also played a role (for more on this latter episode, see “Joan of Arc and the King of Poitiers”).
The Cathedral the visitor sees in Poitiers today is where the great events of 1137 and 1152 took place, but is no longer the same Cathedral. In 1162, a decade after becoming Queen of England, Eleanor began the rebuilding of the great church of her hometown. And she saw to it that the new church reflected the way she had changed Poitiers, and indeed Europe. The new and expanded Cathedral of Poitiers would from now look like the Anglo-Norman cathedrals of England, and not like those being built in the lands of her former husband Louis. This cathedral was to be a symbol of Angevin and Plantagenet power, and of where the links of the “new Aquitaine” lay most strongly – across the channel to the land of York, Canterbury, and Winchester cathedrals, and not in the direction of Paris, the land of Rheims, Beauvais and Chartres cathedrals.
