Eleanor of Aquitaine Read Free Page A

until after the wedding did he realize that she had inherited a streak of her father’s sour disposition. Ermengarde, he discovered, had good periods and bad periods, her moods swinging drastically between vivacity and the most alarming sullenness, although it was possible that William’s great weakness for chasing women contributed to her fits of bad temper. Moreover, she revealed a tendency to nag, a trait that thoroughly annoyed the carefree William, and the marriage got off to a bad start. After a quarrel, Ermengarde would retire to a convenient cloister, where she would sever all communication with the outside world, her husband included. But after a period of solitary retreat, she would suddenly reappear at court, magnificently dressed and smothered in jewels, behaving with a merriment that enchanted the courtiers and belied the fact that she had ever shown a sulky face. Her schizophrenic behavior soon proved too much for William, and since she had failed to conceive, he probably felt justified in sending her back to Anjou. The marriage was dissolved in 1091, and a year later Ermengarde married the duke of Brittany.
    William took his time about remarrying. Not until 1094 did he hastily journey south of the Pyrenees to Aragon, where King Sancho Ramirez had just been killed in battle, leaving his twenty-year-old queen, Philippa, a widow. Serious-minded, politically astute, she was not only a formidable woman but a great heiress, and this accounted for the fact that William was not the only suitor to cross the Pyrenees in pursuit of her hand. The daughter of Count William IV of Toulouse, the county of France adjoining Aquitaine on the southeast, Philippa was one of those emancipated southern women whom circumstances threw up every so often. Her father had married twice and sired two sons, neither of whom lived. Without a male to succeed him, Count William IV realized, of course, that he would leave no heir save his daughter, a greatly disturbing fact because, even though Toulousain custom permitted women to inherit, it was considered better that they inherit a minor fief rather than the entire county itself. When Philippa was twelve, William IV sent her to Aragon to be the wife of Sancho Ramirez, a destiny of sufficient brilliance that he hoped she would have no cause for complaint. Like all the Spanish Christian kingdoms, Aragon had a sizable Moorish population, and owing to the cultural exchange between Christians and Moors, especially in architecture and poetry, the Arabized court at Aragon had attained a degree of oriental luxury foreign to European courts.
    Two years after he had disposed of his daughter, Count William IV, discouraged and frustrated, suddenly resolved the crucial matter of succession by a most unusual step: He announced that he was departing for the Holy Land. In his absence—although it is perfectly clear that the count had no intention of returning—he appointed his brother, Raymond, count of Saint-Gilles, to rule in his stead. Within five years William was dead and his brother had assumed the title, despite the fact that Raymond’s claim to Toulouse was highly disputable. Nevertheless, in law, as in all things, might became right. Raymond was a fifty-year-old male on the scene, the reins of power already in his hands; his niece but a nineteen-year-old female living beyond the Pyrenees.
    Philippa, seething, could expect no help from her husband, since at that time he was fully occupied in a bitter campaign of reconquest against the Berber Moors, who had slowly managed to gain control of most of the Spanish peninsula. When Sancho Ramirez was killed by an arrow at the siege of Huesca, she determined to remarry as quickly as possible with the object of allying herself to a man who would help her regain her patrimony. It is not surprising that her choice fell upon Duke William of Aquitaine, a handsome man who knew how to woo a woman and who could offer a position worthy of her station in life. More