Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1122-1204, was both the Queen of France
to Louis the Seventh and Queen of England to Henry the Second. That is history.

Her story is of a girl who comes to power as a romantic teenage leader overturning traditional definitions of love and marriage to establish the Western traditions of romance, chivalry, and courtly love. She does so by a clever centering within a warriors’s code of honor, a personal love for a women. At the same time she balances the cult of the new woman cleverly within the church’s emerging cult of Mary.

The vibrant Queen of France launches thousands of warriors headlong into the Second Crusade. It is an amazing journey. With all her might she is not able to overcome a fatally religious husband who makes one disastrous mistake after another.

Moving on she marries her Aquitaine power to Norman conquerors who have a sense of victory and becomes the Queen of England. After being the mother of ten she separates from her philandering murderous husband and begins her life project, the radical courts of love in her French homeland. At the height of her court’s success, fearing she is about to divorce, seeing his children flock to her, and having just murdered Archbishop Becket, Henry imprisons her for the rest of her life. He gains full control of her lands and unchallenged control of her children.

It takes fifteen years, but her husband is slain by her sons and she is freed. Outliving her jailor she emerges as England’s Queen Regent directing the Third Crusade with her son Richard the Lionhearted and suffers out the century to see the cruelty and avarice of the Fourth Crusade conducted by knights without a code of chivalry.

By her life’s end she has assisted her children in obtaining the thrones of every country in Europe. A rather triumphant ending to a turbulent life.