A fateful royal marriage only a few weeks after Eleanor’s annulment

Today marks another anniversary of a royal marriage that helped create the vast and once very powerful Angevin Empire.  On the 18th of May, 1152, Henry Plantagenet, also known as Henry Curtmantle and Henry FitzEmpress who would soon become King Henry II of England, married Eleanor (Aliénor) of Aquitaine in a private ceremony...

Marriage of François d’Angoulême and Claude of France

On the 18th of May 1514, François d’Angoulême, the future King François I of France, married his distant cousin Claude, the eldest of the two surviving daughters of Queen Anne and King Louis XII.  The quiet ceremony took place in the atmosphere of lament in a chapel at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which...