LITMIR.BIZ

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natus est filius, equivoce Guillelmus vocatus ("a son was born to Count William, named William like himself"). Later that same year, much to Philippa's ire, Duke William IX mortgaged Toulouse to Philippa's cousin, Bertrand of Toulouse, and then left on Crusade.

      Philippa and her infant son William X were left in Poitiers. When Duke William IX returned from his unsuccessful crusade, he took up with another woman named Dangerose, the wife of a vassal, and set aside his rightful wife, Philippa. This caused strain between father and son, until 1121 when William X married Aenor de Chatellerault, a daughter of his father's mistress Dangerose by her first husband, Aimery. William had three children with Aenor.

      He possibly had one natural son, William. For a long time it was thought that he had another natural son called Joscelin and some biographies still erroneously state this fact, but Joscelin has been shown to be the brother of Adeliza of Louvain. The attribution of Joscelin as a son of William X has been caused by a mistaken reading of the Pipe Rolls which are documemts pertaining to the reign of Henry II, where 'brother of the queen' has been taken as Queen Eleanor, when the queen in question is actually Adeliza of Louvain. William, called of Poitiers in the Pipe Rolls may have been a half brother of Eleanor. Chronicler John of Salisbury tells us that Petronilla died in 1151 or 1152, after which her husband Raoul of Vermandois briefly remarried.

      William administered his Aquitaine duchy as both a lover of the arts and a warrior. He became involved in conflicts with Normandy (nee England) (which he raided in 1136, in alliance with Geoffrey V. Count of Anjou who claimed it in his wife's name) and for France.

      Even inside his borders, William faced an alliance of the Lusignans and the Parthenays against him, an issue resolved with total destruction of the enemies. In international politics, William X initially supported anti-pope Anacletus II in the papal schism of 1130, opposite to Pope Innocent III, against the will of his own bishops. In 1134, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux convinced William to drop his support for Anacletus and join Innocent III.

      In 1137 William joined the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but he died during the trip. On his deathbed, he expressed his wish to see King Louis VI of France as protector of his fifteen-year-old daughter Eleanor, and to find her a suitable husband. Louis VI naturally accepted this guardianship and married the heiress of Aquitaine to his own son, Louis VII.

       What was the historical line?

      For many generations the fate of the Counts of Toulouse was intimately tied to that of the Dukes of Aquitaine.

      William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (the Troubadour) (October 22, 1071 - February 10, 1126)

      Guilhèm IX duc d'Aquitània e de Gasconha, Guilhèm VII comte de Peitieus.

      Guilaume IX duc d'Aquitaine

      William IX was Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou between 1086 and 1126. He was the son of William VIII of Aquitaine by his third wife Hildegarde of Burgundy. He inherited the duchy at the age of fifteen. In 1088, at the age of sixteen, William married his first wife, Ermengarde of Anjou (the daughter of Count Fulk, "Fulk the Contrary"). Ermengarde was pretty and well-educated but suffered from extreme mood-swings. This, coupled with her failure to conceive a child, led William to send her back to her father and have the marriage dissolved in 1091.

      In 1094 William married Philippa of Toulouse, the daughter and heiress of Guilhem (William) IV of Toulouse. (Phillipa had been recently widowed by the death of her first husband, Sancho Ramírez of Aragon). William had two sons and five daughters by Philippa, including William's heir, another William later to become William X of Aquitaine, Eleanor's father.

      Pope Urban II spent Christmas 1095 at the court of William IX. The pope urged him to take the cross and leave for the Holy Land, but William was more interested in the territories of the Counts of Toulouse, to which the Dukes of Aquitaine believed they had a long standing claim, now bolstered by William's marriage to Philippa. He took advantage of the absence of Raymond IV Count of Toulouse, his wife's uncle, to press his claim to Toulouse. Urban was not convinced, so without the help of the Church, William and Philippa captured Toulouse in 1098, an act for which they were threatened with excommunication. Partly out of a desire to avoid this, William joined the Crusade of 1101 an expedition inspired by the success of the First Crusade in 1099. To fund this he mortgaged Toulouse to Bertrand of Toulouse, the son of Raymond IV. He arrived in the Holy Land in 1101 and stayed there until the following year. William fought mostly skirmishes in Anatolia without notable success. His recklessness led to his army being ambushed on several occasions. In September 1101 his entire army was destroyed by the Turks at Heraclea; William himself barely escaped and, according to Orderic Vitalis, he reached Antioch with only six surviving companions.

      William was excommunicated twice, the first time in 1114 for an alleged infringement of the Church's tax privileges. He was excommunicated a second time for abducting Viscountess Dangereuse (Occitan Dangerosa), the wife of his vassal Aimery I de Rochefoucauld, Viscount of Châtellerault, (I thought it should be said that Dangerosa herself seems to have been a willing party according to my research). William installed her in the Maubergeonne tower of his castle in Poitiers, which lead to her nickname 'La Maubergeonne'). Returning to Poitiers from Toulouse, Philipa was enraged to discover Dangerosa living in her palace. Humiliated, Philippa left in 1116 to retire to the Abbey of Fontevraud, where she was befriended by William's first wife Ermengarde of Anjou,. According to the abbey records Philippa died there on the 28th of November 1118.

      Relations between the Duke and his elder son William also became strained. Father and son improved their relationship, however, after the marriage of the younger William to Aenor of Châtellerault in 1121. (To close the family circle, Aenor was the daughter of Dangerosa and her lawful husband Aimery I de Rochefoucauld, Viscount of Châtellerault)

      After Phillipa's death, Ermengarde, William's first wife, stormed down from Abbey at Fontevraud to the Aquitainian court. She demanded to be reinstated as the Duchess of Aquitaine. In October 1119, she popped up at the Council of Reims, presided over by Pope Calixtus II, demanding that the Pope excommunicate William (though he was already excommunicated), oust Dangereuse from the ducal palace, and restore her (Erningarde) to her rightful place. The Pope declined to accommodate her, and William's existing excommunication was lifted in 1220, but she continued to trouble William for several years afterwards, which may have contributed to his decision to join the armies fighting the Moors in Spain. William joined forces with the kingdoms of Castile and León. Between 1120 and 1123, Aquitanian troops fought side by side with Queen Urraca of Castile, in an effort to conquer the Moors of Cordoba and complete the Reconquista.

      In 1122, he lost Toulouse, Philippa's dower land and now rightfully the domain of his eldest son, to Alphonse Jordan of Toulouse.

      William added to the palace of the counts of Poitou which had stood since the Merovingian Era. Later added to by his granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine. It survives as the Palace of Justice in Poitiers to the present day. (Imagine that, a thousand years and we demolish buildings which are less than fifty years of age in America, the throw-away society.)

      William's greatest legacy to history was as a poet. He was the first known Troubadour, or lyric poet employing the Occitan language. Eleven of his songs survive. They are attributed to him under his title as Count of Poitou (lo coms de Peitieus). The topics vary, treating sex, love, women, his own sexual prowess, and feudal politics. He is among the first Romance poets of the Middle Ages, one of the founders of the troubadour tradition.

      His frankness, wit and vivacity caused scandal and won admiration at the same time. William was a man who loved scandal and no doubt enjoyed shocking his audiences. He composed a song about founding a convent in his lands, where the nuns would be picked from among the most beautiful whores in the region, depending on the translation. By most standards he can fairly be described as a character. An anonymous 13th century biography of William, forming part of the collection Biographies des Troubadours, remembers him as follows:

       [William] The Count of Poitiers was one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his womanizing, and a fine composer

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