Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Side by Side at Fontevraud
The tomb effigies of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the abbey church of Fontevraud. Their marriage in 1152 attached Aquitaine to Anjou and Normandy and then to England, creating a holding that no French king could accept and no English king could keep.
The Plantagenet lands were assembled by marriage and unravelled the same way. Eleanor brought Aquitaine out of a French royal marriage into an Angevin one within eight weeks of its annulment; her daughters were married into Castile, Sicily and Saxony; her sons married into France itself. Every one of those matches was a treaty, and several of them were the cause of the next war. They lie together at Fontevraud having spent the last sixteen years of Henry's life estranged. See the Plantagenet matrimonial web.
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