volume 1, chapter 10.

See, also, TOULOUSE: 10TH AND 11TH CENTURIES.

AQUITAINE: A. D. 1137-1152. Transferred by marriage from the crown of France to the crown of England.

In 1137, "the last of the old line of the dukes of Aquitaine--William IX., son of the gay crusader and troubadour whom the Red King had hoped to succeed--died on a pilgrimage at Compostella. His only son was already dead, and before setting out for his pilgrimage he did what a greater personage had done ten years before: with the consent of his barons, he left the whole of his dominions to his daughter. Moreover, he bequeathed the girl herself as wife to the young king Louis [VII.] of France. This marriage more than doubled the strength of the French crown. It gave to Louis absolute possession of all western Aquitaine, or Guyenne as it was now beginning to be called; that is the counties of Poitou and Gascony, with the immediate overlordship of the whole district lying between the Loire and the Pyrenees, the Rhone and the ocean:--a territory five or six times as large as his own royal domain and over which his predecessors had never been able to assert more than the merest shadow of a nominal superiority." In 1152 Louis obtained a divorce from Eleanor, surrendering all the great territory which she had added to his dominions, rather than maintain an unhappy union. The same year the gay duchess was wedded to Henry Plantagenet, then Duke of Normandy, afterwards Henry II. King of England. By this marriage Aquitaine became joined to the crown of England and remained so for three hundred years.

_K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings,