Showing posts with label Eleanor of Castile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eleanor of Castile. Show all posts

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Gascony/Aquitaine

North of the Pyrenees in what we now think of as southwestern France is an area the Romans called Aquitania from the Latin aqua, "water," because of the many rivers flowing from the Pyrenees. We think. The people living there were the Ausci, mentioned by Caesar (whose men conquered it in the 50s BCE), and so the name of the land might have come about to mean "the land of the Ausci."

Skipping a few centuries and some Roman name and border changes, we find the Royal Frankish Annals refer to the "Wascones" in the area. The w=g linguistic link (William=Guillaume, warranty=guarantee, warden=guardian) that we find suggests that the Wascones turned into Gascons; hence the name Gascony.

In 1152, Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine. Aquitaine was by this time a much larger area that included the Duchy of Gascony, and was now in the hands of the kings of England. Henry's grandson, Henry III, personally went to the Duchy of Gascony to look into mismanagement by the not-always-faithful-to-Henry Simon de Montfort. While in the area, Henry arranged the marriage of his son Edward (later King Edward I) to Eleanor of Castile, daughter of Alfonso X who had been making claims on Gascony, since it was adjacent to his own territory. Alfonso renounced his claims as part of the marriage contract, and aided Henry in dealing with rebels living in the Pyrenees.

Even today Gascony is France's most rural area; then it was so little populated that Edward I decided it needed peopling, and he sent his men to create villages called bastides so that the land was not going to waste.

In 1328, when King Charles IV of France died, his nearest male relative was the son of his sister Isabella, King Edward III of England. Having the English king inherit the throne of France—although perfectly legal according to Salic Law—did not sit well with France, and so they ruled against it. Edward objected, the Hundred Years War began, and in 1453 Gascony became permanently French.

I want to offer a brief biography of Edward I next.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The Alphonso Psalter

Page from the Alphonso Psalter (BL 24686)
depicting King David playing his harp; at the
bottom are David (left)  preparing to sling a
stone at Goliath (right)
King Edward I had 16 children by Eleanor of Castile (and three by Margaret of France after that). His ninth child was Alphonso, made the Earl of Chester. Alphonso was named for his godfather and uncle on his mother's side, King Alfonso X of Castile. Despite being the third son, Alphonso was named as his father's heir because of the early death of his older brothers.

Alphonso, who was born 24 November 1273, was engaged to marry Margaret of Holland, daughter of Count Floris V. In preparation for the wedding, a beautiful psalter (an illuminated copy of the Book of Psalms) was being prepared as a wedding gift. Unfortunately, Alphonso died on 19 August 1284,* and the psalter was left unfinished, only to be completed 10 years later for the wedding of his sister Elizabeth to Margaret's brother, Count John I of Holland.

The Alphonso Psalter is 9.5 inches tall and 6.5 inches wide, and it sits in the British Library today (designated 24686). It is considered the first major work of the "East Anglian style" of gothic illumination. The East Anglian style is what we often picture today when we think of illuminated gothic manuscripts: filled with border illustrations that are entertaining and distracting rather than directly enhancing the text.

Besides the psalms, it includes obituary information for many members of King Edward's family, the Athanasian Creed, and the litany of the saints (a prayer that invokes all the saints).


*730 years ago today. Alphonso's younger brother, Edward, was the only surviving son of Edward, and became Edward II.