Another English Queen comes to Rome: the visit of Eleanor of Aquitaine

King Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, may have been the first king and queen of England to visit the Vatican since the Reformation. But they were certainly not the first English rulers to do so; they were treading in what had once been a well-worn path. One of the more remarkable visits occurred in early April of 1191. The ruler in question was not a king, however, but a queen: the glamorous – and perhaps over-glamourised – Eleanor of Aquitaine.

She remains the only known queen of England to have made the journey to Rome on her own.

When she made the journey, Eleanor was almost seventy. She had outlived two husbands and two adult sons. The first of these husbands was Louis VII, king of France; they had separated in 1153. The second husband was perhaps the greatest ruler of his generation: Henry II, king of England, duke of Normandy, and count of Anjou.

A combination of single-minded ruthlessness and formidable good luck had endowed King Henry with a complex of lands that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees. But Eleanor had not only survived two husbands. She had also borne them a total of nine children. At a time when child birth claimed the lives of so many women, this in itself was no small achievement.

Eleanor clearly had a love for children. In an episode almost entirely neglected by her many modern biographers, Eleanor was celebrated for having rescued a baby boy left to die on the roadside. She took in the child and found him a well-appointed home with an episcopal friend. There was more to Eleanor than the ambitious power broker of The Lion in Winter.

And so it was that in the spring of 1191, she travelled to Rome on behalf of one of those children, her eldest surviving son, now King Richard I. Richard had succeeded his father in July 1189 and had immediately freed Eleanor from the luxurious captivity in which she had been held since her disastrous involvement in the rebellion of 1173-4.

The background to her trip lay in the seismic events surrounding Jerusalem. In 1187, the great Kurdish war leader Saladin had crushed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem and then quickly seized the holy city itself. When news of these disasters reached the West, Richard had been the first prince to take a crusading vow.

Within a year of his coronation, true to his word, he had set off eastwards. Before doing so, he called upon his mother to assist him in his endeavour. Queen Eleanor rose to the challenge admirably. In the ten months before her arrival in Rome, she had journeyed from Chinon to Pamplona and, in the company of the king’s bride, from Pamplona to Sicily, crossing the Pyrenees twice, traversing the Alps in the midst of winter, and sailing back and forth to Sicily – a journey of more than 2,200 miles.  

Only two chroniclers record Queen Eleanor’s visit to Rome. For various reasons, neither, unfortunately, goes into any detail; even the precise timing and length of her visit is uncertain. But it very likely took place in early April of 1191, and may even have been organised to coincide with Easter (which fell on 13 April that year).

Rome had just elected a new pope, Celestine III. He was then about 86 years old and could look back on a long career as a deacon and diplomat. He had even played an important role – as Queen Eleanor may have recalled – during the great struggle between her second husband and Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. When many others had preferred to sit it out on the proverbial fence, he had stood firm, never once deserting Thomas; but also, with an eye to finding a workable solution to the crisis, counselling him to trust in the good will and affection of the king.

As papal legate to the Iberian kingdoms in 1173-4, he may even have a played an important role in introducing the cult of the murdered archbishop to the kingdom of Portugal. It was precisely these talents for skilful moderation and wise counsel that finally secured his elevation to the see of St Peter at the end of March 1191.

The election of a new pope may explain why Eleanor should have undertaken her visit. King Richard had ostentatiously refused to meet Celestine’s predecessor when breaking his journey at Ostia, famously complaining about the greed of the Curia. The very recent election of Pope Celestine now offered a chance to rebuild the king’s ties to the Roman Church.

But one well-informed chronicler also makes clear that there was another reason why the king despatched his mother to Rome. After much conflict and disagreement, the king had finally resolved to recognise the election of his half-brother Geoffrey, an illegitimate son of Henry II, as Archbishop of York. He was evidently seeking to make the best of a deteriorating situation in England. But the election needed papal confirmation. And so Queen Eleanor was despatched to Rome to secure both.

The last time Eleanor had encountered a pope it was at Tusculum in 1149, when Pope Eugenius III had escorted her and her first husband to a papal bedchamber in a desperate bid to salvage their collapsing marriage. By 1191, however, Eleanor was well-versed in dealing with powerful churchmen. This experience must have proved crucial in her encounters with Pope Celestine.

If we believe one contemporary, Queen Eleanor detested Geoffrey, her step-son, “with a step-mother’s hatred”. If so, she nevertheless performed her task to perfection, convincing Pope Celestine to confirm Geoffrey’s election and to sanction his immediate consecration. Ultimately, alas, her success proved something of a pyrrhic victory for the queen and her son, with Archbishop Geoffrey only adding to the many woes of the English kingdom during the king’s absence.

But this should not detract from the queen’s achievement. She had delivered an important victory for King Richard and won him a valuable ally in Rome. When Richard was later imprisoned by the Western emperor on his return from the crusade, it was Pope Celestine who led the denunciations.

But there must have more to Eleanor's visit than just diplomatic negotiations. When Philip II, king of France, visited Rome in October of the same year, the Pope not only received the king “with great reverence and honour” (in the words of an English eyewitness). He also hosted him and his household for eight days and showed him the heads of saints Peter and Paul and the Veronica – the famous relic bearing the imprint of Christ’s face. Something similar was doubtless organised for the visit of Queen Eleanor. It is even possible that Celestine’s hosting of King Philip was in some way modelled on his reception of Queen Eleanor.

We may wonder, too, about the churches and monuments seen by Queen Eleanor. A guidebook for English pilgrims to the city, composed in c. 1200, recommended various options, from “the immense horse with rider whom the pilgrims call Theoderic” (the equestrian statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) to “the palace of Diocletian” (the baths of Diocletian).

But Queen Eleanor may have had little time for a Roman holiday. She would certainly have made her devotions at the Lateran basilica of S. Giovanni and before the shrine of St Peter on the Vatican. If she was shown the new narthex of the Lateran basilica – constructed at some point in the late twelfth century and demolished in 1731 – she would very likely have glimpsed the two mosaic scenes depicting the Roman fleet under Vespasian sailing for Palestine and the subsequent siege of Jerusalem by Titus.

The fact that her son, King Richard, was currently undertaking a similar expedition, on a similar scale and with a similar objective, can only have added to the power of the scenes. She herself had visited Jerusalem in 1148, following the failure of her own crusade expedition.

By the spring of 1191, there cannot have many in Rome who could claim to have prayed in both cities. As such, even today one might well hail Eleanor as incomparable.

Photo: The tomb effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine at the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud (l'Abbaye royale de Fontevraud), Fontevraud, France, 19 September 2024 (Photo by GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP via Getty Images)

Dr Hugh Doherty is a lecturer in Medieval History at the University of East Anglia

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