Erik Visits a (Non) American Grave, Part 2,108

This is the grave of Eleanor of Castile.

Born in 1241 in Burgos, Castile, not yet part of Spain since that country didn’t exist yet, Eleanor was the daughter of King Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu. Things in Europe were moving close enough to nation-states that marriage within noble families from quite far away was already happening. Joan was descended from Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and so then was Eleanor. Unlike many princesses, Eleanor was educated nearly as well as the princes. She was destined to marriage in some other royal family to promote Castile’s interests. Ferdinand died in 1252 and his brother Alfonso X became the next king since there were no male children. He wanted to marry Eleanor to Theobald II of Navarre because Navarre bordered Castille, but it didn’t work in part because he was young and his mother did not want that and so had him married to someone from Aragon instead. So instead, she was married to the future Edward I of England and Alfonso and Henry III of England worked to settle a bunch of claims at once through this marriage. Hard to keep track of all this royal marriage ridiculousness.

Well, most queens of this era were not big power players. That was not the case for Eleanor, at least not after awhile. They were married in 1254. In 1264, the Second Barons War broke against Henry III and then Edward I and forces under Simon de Montfort imprisoned Eleanor in the Tower of London for a time. Later, they traveled together, including during the Ninth Crusade. She went all the way to the Holy Land in the Islamophobic wars that began to define Christendom with all of its violence and evil against the much more tolerant Muslims who were wondering why they were being attacked like this by these violent smelly dirty thugs who gave Christianity a bad name. She had children while on the Crusaders too. Their daughter Joan became known as Joan of Acre because she was born in modern-day Israel in 1272. She probably encouraged Edward to engage in the Crusade. Her parents were deeply involved in the Crusades and so she grew up around these stories and probably wanted to see the Holy Land for herself. In fact, they were in Sicily on their way back to England when they heard that Henry III had died. They weren’t in some huge hurry to get back though. They detoured to Gascony for awhile and finally showed up in England to be crowned in August 1274.

After all this, when Edward consolidated his power, as king he turned to Eleanor as his closest advisor as well as beloved wife, which was unusual on both fronts for a royal marriage back in the arranged dynasty era. Now, many of the English nobles hated her and the reason they hated her is that they could not keep their finances in order. They were largely stupid thugs who liked to spend and had no idea how to balance their books, in part because most of them couldn’t read. So they were in debt. Who would they go to for loans? Jews. Then they couldn’t pay back the loans because they were still stupid thugs. They hated this a lot. Then, because Jews were taxed at such absurdly high rates as party of the nation’s anti-Semitism, they had trouble holding onto these lands too.

So Eleanor had no problem buying up the properties put that the moneylenders took over when the nobles fell into arrears. Despite the official anti-Semitism, these connections between the royalty and the Jews were also part of the Second Barons War, when there was a lot of anti-Jewish violence. None of this seems to have reflected well on Eleanor. When the anti-Semitic violence reached heights that the crown could not control, even if they cared, she was happy to profit. There was a mass execution of moneylenders who were supposedly clipping coins in 1290 and about 300 people were hanged. She happily picked up their properties too. One of these was the Canterbury Synagogue. She gave it and the land to her tailor.

What this made Eleanor was financially independent and powerful outside of the king. This permanently raised the stature of English queens too. She became a benefactor of her own right. A lot of those lands she took she then gave to the Dominicans for their friaries and gave a lot to the two burgeoning English universities at Oxford and Cambridge as well. She could have real political power, though always under Edward. Sometimes, he had to hold her back. She was very greedy with the land acquisitions and a lot of people resented those, so sometimes he had to stop them if it was going too far. She also gladly signed up female cousins up for marriage to English noble men. Not the other way around though because there was a lot of anti-foreign resentment in England at that time and so that would have meant more English money flowing back to France and elsewhere. But expanding Edward’s reach and power through connecting nobles to his in-laws was quite welcomed by many.

Now, if there’s one thing that was happening between Edward and Eleanor, it was a lot of sex and a lot of pregnancies. Eleanor was pregnant at least 16 times. All of this led to exactly 1 son surviving to become the next king–that was Edward II and he was born in 1284. He was her last child. After that, her health declined. I mean, 16 pregnancies would lead anyone’s health to decline, though by 13th century standards, it had been pretty good up to this point. Too bad Edward’s older brother hadn’t lived though, then England would have had King Alfonso, which would have made for better names in the royal family.

Anyway, Eleanor is described with conditions that would suggest malaria in 1287 and since the English royal family was still spending a lot of time in France at this point, this isn’t super surprising. It was probably pretty advanced with all the conditions that leads to. She tried to continue on her travels of her properties but by 1290, it was clear she was dying. She kept going even then, but she finally died in the house of a member of Parliament named Richard de Weston. She was 49 years old.

Eleanor of Castile is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

If you would like this series to visit some American Eleanors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd, an early 20th century writer of novels for girls, is in Iowa City, Iowa. Eleanor Hiestand Moore, a prominent suffragist, is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.