A major duchy of southwestern France whose inheritance shaped Capetian and Angevin politics.
Aquitaine — the vast duchy between the Loire and the Pyrenees — was medieval France's great south-west: Roman in its towns, troubadour in its courts, and for three centuries the pivot of the Anglo-French struggle after Eleanor of Aquitaine's marriage to Henry II of England in 1152 attached it to the Plantagenet crown.
Its story runs from the Carolingian sub-kingdom and the ducal house of Poitiers, through Eleanor's century and the wine-rich English Gascony that followed, to its place as the legal detonator of the Hundred Years' War — confiscated by Paris in 1337, made a principality under Edward, the Black Prince, and finally conquered by France at the Battle of Castillon in 1453.
Aquitaine entered the Middle Ages as a Roman survival: the land of the Garonne and the old provincia Aquitania, whose Gallo-Roman aristocracy and city-culture (Bordeaux, Poitiers, Limoges) long stood apart from the Frankish north. Clovis took it from the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507; independent-minded dukes like Eudes — who beat the Umayyads before Toulouse in 721 and stood with Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 — kept the distance alive.
Charlemagne made it a sub-kingdom for his son Louis the Pious in 781; as the Carolingian order decayed the ducal title settled by the tenth century on the counts of Poitiers, the "Guilhem" dynasty whose William V held court like a king and whose William IX (1071–1126) — the first troubadour — began the line's cultural legend. Their duchy was a federation of restless counties (Angoulême, Périgord, the Limousin, Gascony absorbed after 1058) held together by homage, marriage, and the dukes' relentless itineration.
The duchy's pivot was a marriage-bed. Duke William X died in 1137 leaving Eleanor of Aquitaine his heiress; married at once to Louis VII, she was queen of France for fifteen years, then — the marriage annulled at Beaugency in March 1152 — married Henry Plantagenet within eight weeks, carrying Poitou, Gascony, and everything between to the future Henry II of England. Half of France changed weight in a single spring.
Plantagenet Aquitaine was governed hard and held loosely: Richard the Lionheart learned war breaking its baronial revolts through the 1170s–80s; Eleanor's own court at Poitiers made the duchy the troubadour world's capital. After 1204, when Philip II Augustus stripped John of Normandy and Poitou's north, the duchy contracted toward Gascony — and the Treaty of Paris (1259) fixed the fatal formula: the king of England holding Guyenne as a peer and liege vassal of the king of France, sovereignty's lawyers guaranteed a quarrel in every appeal to Paris.
Gascony's economy bound it to England more tightly than law: the wine fleet out of Bordeaux — over 80,000 tuns in the best years, medieval Europe's greatest single trade — against English grain, wool, and silver; the bastide new towns planted by both crowns across the countryside; Bordeaux and Bayonne governing themselves like little republics under a distant king-duke. When Philip VI declared the duchy confiscate in May 1337 — over appeals, Saint-Sardos's aftermath, and the harbouring of a French fugitive — the war that followed wore Aquitaine's law as its first cause.
The war made and unmade a principality: Brétigny (1360) granted the Plantagenets a sovereign Aquitaine a third of France wide; Edward, the Black Prince ruled it from Bordeaux in unmatched splendour, won Nájera for Peter of Castile, and taxed the duchy into the appeals — heard by Charles V in 1369 — that restarted the war and dissolved the principality within six years under Du Guesclin's pressure. The fifteenth century reduced English Aquitaine to its Bordelais core; Charles VII's armies took Bordeaux in 1451, and John Talbot's death at Castillon in July 1453 ended three hundred years of the English connection — Bordeaux submitting for good that October.
Eudes of Aquitaine, d. 735 — victor of Toulouse (721), ally of Charles Martel at Tours: the duchy's early independence personified.
William IX, 1086–1126 — "the first troubadour": crusader, scandal, and the founder of vernacular lyric.
William X, 1126–1137 — his death on pilgrimage left Europe's greatest heiress.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1137–1204 — duchess in her own right through two crowns; the duchy's destiny in one person.
Richard the Lionheart, duke 1172–1199 — the duchy's hard schoolmaster before and during his kingship.
Edward, the Black Prince, prince of Aquitaine 1362–1372 — the sovereign principality's brilliant, brief experiment.
Aquitaine's medieval fame is cultural: the troubadours from William IX through Bernart de Ventadorn and Bertran de Born singing in Occitan for the courts of Poitiers and beyond; Romanesque churches thick along the four pilgrim roads to Compostela that crossed the duchy (Saint-Sernin at Toulouse on its edge, Poitiers' Notre-Dame-la-Grande, Périgueux's domes); Limoges enamels furnishing Europe's altars; and the abbey of Fontevraud on its northern rim holding the Plantagenet tombs — Eleanor's effigy reading a book.
Its society was Occitan-speaking, custom-ruled (the written law of the south began at its edges), and precociously urban: Bordeaux's jurade and Bayonne's shipmen negotiating charters with their king-dukes; the bastides — Monpazier, Libourne, hundreds more — planting market-grid towns across the land as instruments of both settlement and sovereignty; and the wine, salt, and Bayonne's whalers binding the duchy's fortunes to the Atlantic long before the phrase existed.