Duchy of Aquitaine

A southern French principality that was independent, then English, and whose heiress redrew the map of Europe by marrying twice. Aquitaine emerged as a distinct duchy under Frankish overlordship in the seventh century and was effectively independent under Odo the Great, who beat an Umayyad army outside Toulouse in 721 - eleven years before Tours, and largely forgotten because the victory that mattered politically was won by somebody else. Charles Martel's family absorbed the duchy and it passed through Carolingian and then local dynasties, keeping its own language, law and identity: the langue d'oc south, culturally closer to Catalonia than to Paris, and the region where the troubadours invented courtly love in the eleventh century. In 1137 Eleanor of Aquitaine inherited it and married the king of France; in 1152 the marriage was annulled and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became king of England two years later. Aquitaine went with her. For three centuries the kings of England held a third of France as vassals of the French crown, an arrangement no legal formula could make stable, and the Hundred Years' War is the long argument about it. English rule was commercial before it was political. Bordeaux shipped wine to England on a scale that made it one of the largest ports in Europe, the customs on it were among the English crown's better revenues, and the trade paid for the ships and men that defended the duchy. Gascon lords held their courts in their own language and appealed to Westminster over the head of Paris, which is precisely what the French kings would not accept. Bordeaux was the last English possession to fall. The wine trade had tied the city to England for three hundred years, and it declared for England twice; the French took it finally in 1453 after Castillon, the battle where artillery destroyed a mounted charge and ended the war.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history