Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe -- Nancy Goldstone
Nancy Goldstone’s lucid, witty prose made this a fun exploration of 13th century European politics (I mean, if you’re nerd enough to like that sort of thing, which I am). The four sisters - confident Marguerite, beleagured Eleanor, wealthy Sanchia, and scheming Beatrice - are fascinating personalities. Goldstone does an excellent job of depicting their alternate alliances and feuds with each other as they fulfill their duties as royalty: influencing, or outright manipulating, their husbands. Medieval politics was conducted and negotiated via betrothals, weddings, marriages, and births, and though it isn’t Goldstone’s explicit focus, her book illustrates vividly how the structure of marriage and the family is ultimately about power and property; our notions of how husbands and wives and children should relate to each other were shaped by dynastic priorities. The four sisters, as powerful queens, are not only expected, they’re required to persuade and push their husbands to make decisions that benefit their own families. Which is all very well if, like Eleanor and Beatrice, your husband (and your husband’s family) have interests that match your own (and your family’s. Nobody’s simply an individual in medieval Europe). The concept that women can exert influence and power through controlling their husbands is a common one even today, but it convienently ignores the fact that a wife, at the end of the day, can’t make a husband do anything he doesn’t want to do already. Eleanor and Beatrice’s marriages are examples of when husband and wives become a team united for their own political advancement. It works out well for Beatrice. Unfortunately for Eleanor, her husband Henry is kinda crap at kingship, getting his butt kicked repeatedly in France and driving his barons to rebellion on numerous occaisions. Goldstone hilariously describes the leader of once such doomed rebellion:
But it is harder to run a kingdom than it looks, particularly if the majority of your supporters in the baronage are young, passionate, and callow, and you yourself, despite the noblest of intentions with regard to representative government, are inclined to avarice.
Still, Eleanor and Henry were equal partners in the political alliance that was their marriage. Sanchia, however, gets the worst deal of all her sisters. Because as a queen, she isn’t allowed to not try and manipulate her husband for dynastic reasons. That’s part of the job. And she’s not only unwilling and unable to do it, her husband doesn’t listen to her anyway. She probably would have been happier in the religious life she loved; as it was, she died young, and unhappy.
None of the husbands come across particularly well, being typical medieval monarchs: rapacious, greedy, tyrranical, incompetant, or downright obsessive. Beatrice and Sanchia are married to men who are determined to be king of somewhere; the particular country itself doesn’t really matter so much. Thanks to a combination of warfare and bribery they manage it in the end. Marguerite’s husband Louis IX takes the cake though. Morbidly religious, he was obsessed with conquering the holy land, leading two disastrous crusades. At one point he abandons his responsibilities in France entirely, insisting on remaining in the Middle East alone. Marguerite was a powerful, assertive woman, but even she couldn’t convince her husband to come back and govern his own country. Louis IX did make some reforms in France, but as Goldstone states:
But in the end he used all of that trust, goodwill, and influence not to impove his subjects’ well-being about which he professed to care so much, but as an excuse to lead them to a ghastly, fetid plain in Tunisia with the intent of annihilating an alien culture for the greater glory of God…Well should Louis IX, King of France sigh for Jerusalem. That saintly man twice led thousands of his countrymen to their deaths and bankrupted his kingdom, and he never even got to set foot in the city.
The Church, predictably, made him a saint.
If you’re like me and enjoy being scandalized by medieval rulers behaving badly, it’s a good read. Goldstone does an impressive job of untangling sometimes incomprehensible 13th century politics. I’m definitely going to look out for more of her books in the future
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