Wikipedia, not always reliable source, gives 11 March as the day when
Marie, Countess of Champagne died in 1198, aged fifty-three. Marie did die in March 1198, but when it came to determine the day, I haven't been able to confirm the information. Still I
grasped the opportunity to write about Henry the Young King's sister.
Marie was Henry's half-sister, to be precise. To make it even more
complicated, she was both Henry's and his wife, Marguerite's
half-sister. The eldest child of both Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis
VII of France (I use “both”, for both Eleanor and Louis later had
more children from their second and, in case of Louis, third,
marriages). Marie was born in 1145, eight years after her parents
were married. The story of her arrival in this world is a well known
one. Marie's mother, young Eleanor, her royal husband and his
subjects must have been greatly disturbed by the fact that the years
passed and much awaited male heir to the throne did not appear. Many
became convinced that their queen was barren. Eleanor decided to seek
advice of Bernard of Clairvaux [later saint]. The meeting was
arranged on the occasion of the dedication of Abbe Suger's newly
built cathedral at Saint-Denis, in June 1144. Eleanor met Bernard in
private to discuss her sister Petronilla and her husband Raoul's
case. She asked him to intervene on the latters' behalf promising to
make concessions in the matter of Champagne (Louis and Count Thibaut
were waging war) and perhaps recognize Peter de la Châtre
as archbishop of Bourges. What she said and the “manly”
way she presented her
ideas must have horrified the holy man, for
he rebuked her harshly,
commanding her to stop meddling in affairs of state. Eleanor, a
shrewd tactician, humbled herself by saying what troubled her most,
namely her failure to produce
a child. Upon hearing this Bernard offered her a bargain. She was to
do everything she could to re-establish peace and he, in return, by
his prayers would obtain from the Lord what she requested. Eleanor
reported the abbot's words to Louis and kept her part of the bargain.
Bernard, as the time showed, was less successful. The royal child
indeed was born the following
year, but it was not a much awaited son, but a daughter, whom Eleanor
named Marie.
Marie was barely seven and her younger sister, Alix, one, when their
parents obtained the annulment of their marriage in 1152. The
princesses came under the protection of Louis. Both seem to have had
remarkably little contact with their mother thereafter. Louis had
them bethrothed to the brothers Henri of Champagne (1152-1181) and
Thibaut of Blois*. Marie had long been promised to Henri, whom her
father befriended on the Second Crusade and who at twenty-five
succeeded his father as count of Troyes and Meaux. In 1155, the year
when Marie's half-brother Henry [the future Young King] was born,
ten-year-old Marie was staying at the prestigious old Benedictine
convent of Avenay, near Epernay, where she had been sent to in 1153,
the year she reached the canonical age of consent and was formally
betrothed to Henri of Champagne. They were married in 1159, when
Marie was fourteen. In the twenty-two years of their marriage they
had four children: Henri, Marie, Scholastique and Thibaut.
Sometime in 1178, Marie's husband decided to revisit the Holy Land.
In the count’s eighteen-month absence (May 1179- February 1181)
Marie ruled the county in his stead. She had never done it before
because her husband had his system of governance well established
before she arrived in Troyes and because there was no such
need. She did it alone, without regency council, and she showed great
skill and decisiveness. She did not hesitate to join the opposition
against her half-brother Philip, when the latter acted against his
mother's family and married Isabelle of Hainaut, who was already
bethrothed to Marie's oldest son, Henri. Marie's husband returned
from the Holy Land in February 1181 only to die a month later, on 16
March 1181. After his death Marie exercised the comital office as
regent, this time for her son Henri (II), for six years (March 1181-
May 1187). We get the glimpse of Marie the politician thanks to
Gislebert of Mons, who, in his Chronicle of Hainaut, described the
conference at Sens, between Marie, her late husband's family, her
brother Philip [Augustus] on one side and Baldwin, the count of
Hainaut on the other. The latter was summoned by Philip to “keep
the cotracts of matrimony confirmed for his children and the countess
of Champagne's children, with faith given and oath offered.”
(Chronicle of Hainaut, p.104)** Baldwin asked for delays, but he was,
as Gislebert put it, “constrained” by the countess and her
in-laws. Cornered, the Count came from Sens to Troyes, where the
contracted marriage of his son Baldwin, and Marie of Champagne (the
daughter) was sworn on both sides.
When Henri reached maturity and assumed the countship Marie decided to
retire to Fontaines-les-Nannes, a Fontevrist priory near Meaux,
taking with her her second son, eight-year-old Thibaut. Marie herself
was forty-two at the time and probably could not have imagined she
was ever to rule again. The fall of the Holy City, however, made her
son, Henri, as many young men at the time, take “the Jerusalem
road”. In 1190, before he set off at the head of a large contignent
of barons and knights to accompany his uncle, Richard I , king of
England [Lionheart], on the Third Crusade, he summoned his barons and
knights to Sezanne to swear oaths of fidelity to his twelve-year-old
brother Thibaut in the event that he himself did not return from the
Holy Land. Upon his departure Marie resumed the office of a regent.
She could not have known she would never see her son again, for “...
although all the kings and princes returned from there to their own
lands, he remained there as if alone, and received through a certain
marriage the kingdom of that land, the wealth of which seemed greater
than his own regions’(Chronicle of Hainaut, pp.139-40). ‘A
certain marriage’ meant Henry’s marriage to Isabelle, daughter of
King Amaury I of Jerusalem and widow of Conrad of Montferat, whom
Henry took as his wife on 5 May 1192. Henry refused the title of
king, styling himself ‘lord of the kingdom of Jerusalem’ and to
the very end ‘count of Champagne'. He died tragically on 10
September 1197 in a most peculiar accident, falling from a window of
his palace at Acre. Was it a window or balcony railing that gave way
under his weight? The accounts differ when it comes to details. One
thing is certain, though: at the time of his death Henry was
thirty-one, too young and promising man to die. His untimely passing
must have left Marie utterly distraught. Still she continued as
regent for her younger son Thibaut (III) until her death in March
1198. A month later, Thibaut, aged nineteen, was knighted by his
uncle Philip of France [Augustus] and did homage for his lands at
Melun. He was to rule for three years, till May 1201, when he died
suddenly in the midst of the preparations for the Fourth Crusade.
Fortunately, Marie did not live long enough to see him passed away
prematurely and in the flower of his youth. Thibaut's widow, Blanche
of Navarre, being in the last weeks of her second pregnancy and
absolutely unprepared for a role she was thrust into, did the only
thing she could do. She immediately made her way to Sens, where she
did homage to King Philip, who became her protector and guardian of
the future Thibaut IV. The latter was born within days of Blanche's
return to Champagne. Blanche was to be regent for her son for the
next twenty-one years (according to the custom in Champagne, counts
could succeed their deceased fathers at twenty-one).
Very little is known of Marie's personal life. There is evidence she
was close to her half-brothers, Richard and Geoffrey. With the former
she shared Adam of Perseigne as confessor, for the latter- after his
untimely death in 1186- she dedicated an altar in Paris. She also
entertained her half-sister, Marguerite, the Young King's widow, at
the Christmas court of 1184. As for her relationship with Henry the
Young King, we should tread carefully. The two certainly met on the
occasion of coronation of young Philip Capet (All Saints' Day 1179),
who was Marie's half-brother and Henry's brother-in-law, and on 11
April 1182 at La Grange St Arnoult, between Senlis and Crepy, at the
conference held to discuss the Vermandois succession. I think we can
assume that they must have met also on different occasions, such as
tournaments, official meetings and royal banquets.
Marie remains best known as her mother's daughter and for her
associacions with Chretien de Troyes, who claimed he wrote Lancelot
at her request, and Andreas Capellanus according to whom the famous
“judgements on love" were jointly pronounced by Eleanor and Marie,
which, in the light of the recent research, is pure fiction.
* Louis VII himself married Henri and Thibaut's sister, Adele, meaning that the latter was both sister-in-law and stepmother of Marie's
** Young Baldwin of Hainaut was to marry young Marie, whereas young Henri of Champagne was to marry Baldwin's sister Yolende. Yolende never married Henri, but married Count Pierre II Courtenay of Nevers.
Sources:
Chronicle of Hainaut by Gilbert of Mons. Translated into English by Laura Napran. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2005
The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300 by Theodore Evergates. Google Books
"Aristocratic Women in the County of Champagne" by Theodore Evergates in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France ed. by T. Evergates. Google Books
Eleanor of Aquitaine by Marion Meade. London, 2001.
Eleanor of Aquitaine by Ralph V. Turner. New Haven and London, 2011.
