Eleanor Of Aragon, Countess Of Toulouse

Eleanor of Aragon, Countess of Toulouse (1182–1226) was a daughter of King Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancha of Castile, Queen of Aragon.
She married Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse.

Life

According to the ''Ex Gestis Comitum Barcinonensium'', she was the second daughter and fourth of nine children of the troubadour king Alfonso II of Aragon and his wife Sancha of Castile. She had for older brothers Pierre II the Catholic and Alphonse II, count of Provence and Forcalquier, and for sisters Constance, first queen of Hungary, then empress by her marriage with Frederick II, and Sancie, countess of Toulouse.

According to the ''Crónica of San Juan de la Peña'', her brother Peter II, after having married the eldest of the three sisters, Constance, sealed the union of the younger, Eleanor, with Raymond VI of Toulouse, Duke of Narbonne and Marquis of Provence, in order to put an end to the dissensions with the counts of Toulouse.

Raymond VI was the eldest son of Raymond V and Constance de France, daughter of King Louis VI, known as Le Gros, and of Adelaide de Maurienne. His parents separated in 1165 after the birth of their fourth child. What already constituted the count's fifth marriage was celebrated in January 1204, as soon as he had repudiated his fourth wife, a Cypriot princess daughter of the usurper Emperor Isaac Comnenus, whose exact identity remains unknown. He had no children of Eleonore.

By this marriage, the girl became countess consort of Toulouse and thus sovereign of a land destined, in the following years, to undergo the pangs of the war, the Crusade of the Albigensians, which the Pope Innocent III had launched against her husband , several times excommunicated. In the testament of Raymond VI of 1209, Eleonore is quoted (Alienor uxor mea) 2: he also mentions his son Raymond, his brother Baudouin and his natural children.

References

Spanish nobility
1182 births
1226 deaths
Daughters of kings

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