timetravelings:

HISTORY MEME | nine kings/queens: eleanor of aquitaine

“Ever since she was thirteen years old, Eleanor had stood at the heart of European politics. For a decade and a half she had been Queen of France; for two decades more she had been Queen of England. Throughout, she had cherished her rights and responsibilities as Duchess of Aquitaine […]

Always a political creature, she had begun as a charismatically unpredictable force of instinct and will - qualities which the trials of her long incarceration had tempered with a sophisticated diplomatic sense and what came to be the surest of political touches. The woman whose rebellion against her own husband had once threatened, it seemed, to overturn the natural order of creation in time had become the mother of the English kingdom, and the watchful guardian of her beloved Aquitaine.” - Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth