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Title: Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe
Author: Nancy Goldstone
Genre: 13th Century European history
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: One Provencal family in the 13th century had four daughters, who went on to be Queens of France, England, Germany, and Sicily. A tragic lack of enough names to go around, leading to half the people in the book being named Eleanor, caused them to repeatedly invade Muslim countries in a misguided attempt to discover new girls-names-mines.
Thoughts: A particularly weak pair of kings (of England and France) and their particularly strong younger brothers marry all four daughters of one very ambitious Provencal family, leaving room for their queens to have far more influence than stereotypes suggest for women of the middle ages. (Of course, there have been queens throughout history who have wielded far more power than one would think from sweeping generalizations of the time.)
This book follows one queen at a time, bouncing to one of her sisters' stories after a few chapters each. It makes it possible to follow the events of each woman's life, although there are some repetitive moments as you change chapters and abruptly bounce back a few years to follow a new thread. Overall, though, it's a good organizational tactic.
I ended up liking Marguerite (who married Louis of France) best, although she was rather awful to her baby sister Beatrice over their inheritances. Poor Marguerite got dragged on a hideous disaster of a crusade by her pious but not particularly strategic spouse and ended up having to ransom the broken man back from the Mamluks and then hold his kingdom together for the next several decades, since he was more interested in going back on a suicidal mission to free Jerusalem than in actually looking after his people. (Eventually, he did make it back and managed to kill off nearly their entire family. Marguerite wisely opted to stay home from that one.)
Eleanor's Henry of England was no better with warfare than her brother-in-law. Most of their story involves Eleanor's increasingly elaborate attempts to raise enough money to support her husband's hairbrained military operations, including fighting off a civil war at home. Henry's younger brother Richard married Sanchia (who has the best name of the bunch and was prettiest, but didn't have much else going for her, poor thing) and acquired himself the crown of Germany, mostly because he was jealous of his older brother. Louis' brother Charles and his wife Beatrice nabbed Sicily, much for the same reasons. The more I learn about European royalty and how little they necessarily had to do with the land they reigned over, the more astonished I am at the whole system.
This is a brisk, well-paced history that covers quite a lot of ground and filled in a bunch of gaps in my own knowledge (such as why the French kings stopped going on crusades--after that last one, you really can't blame them.) It's nice to see as much of the behind-the-scenes dynastic maneuverings on the parts of the women as the named-historical-battle struggles of the men, and see how they feed into each other. People haven't changed much in a few hundred years--this book gives these historical figures enough depth to see them as real people.
Author: Nancy Goldstone
Genre: 13th Century European history
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: One Provencal family in the 13th century had four daughters, who went on to be Queens of France, England, Germany, and Sicily. A tragic lack of enough names to go around, leading to half the people in the book being named Eleanor, caused them to repeatedly invade Muslim countries in a misguided attempt to discover new girls-names-mines.
Thoughts: A particularly weak pair of kings (of England and France) and their particularly strong younger brothers marry all four daughters of one very ambitious Provencal family, leaving room for their queens to have far more influence than stereotypes suggest for women of the middle ages. (Of course, there have been queens throughout history who have wielded far more power than one would think from sweeping generalizations of the time.)
This book follows one queen at a time, bouncing to one of her sisters' stories after a few chapters each. It makes it possible to follow the events of each woman's life, although there are some repetitive moments as you change chapters and abruptly bounce back a few years to follow a new thread. Overall, though, it's a good organizational tactic.
I ended up liking Marguerite (who married Louis of France) best, although she was rather awful to her baby sister Beatrice over their inheritances. Poor Marguerite got dragged on a hideous disaster of a crusade by her pious but not particularly strategic spouse and ended up having to ransom the broken man back from the Mamluks and then hold his kingdom together for the next several decades, since he was more interested in going back on a suicidal mission to free Jerusalem than in actually looking after his people. (Eventually, he did make it back and managed to kill off nearly their entire family. Marguerite wisely opted to stay home from that one.)
Eleanor's Henry of England was no better with warfare than her brother-in-law. Most of their story involves Eleanor's increasingly elaborate attempts to raise enough money to support her husband's hairbrained military operations, including fighting off a civil war at home. Henry's younger brother Richard married Sanchia (who has the best name of the bunch and was prettiest, but didn't have much else going for her, poor thing) and acquired himself the crown of Germany, mostly because he was jealous of his older brother. Louis' brother Charles and his wife Beatrice nabbed Sicily, much for the same reasons. The more I learn about European royalty and how little they necessarily had to do with the land they reigned over, the more astonished I am at the whole system.
This is a brisk, well-paced history that covers quite a lot of ground and filled in a bunch of gaps in my own knowledge (such as why the French kings stopped going on crusades--after that last one, you really can't blame them.) It's nice to see as much of the behind-the-scenes dynastic maneuverings on the parts of the women as the named-historical-battle struggles of the men, and see how they feed into each other. People haven't changed much in a few hundred years--this book gives these historical figures enough depth to see them as real people.
