born to noble parents in the Main Valley. As a boy, Einhard was educated at the
monastery of Fulda and soon after 791 went to the palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle,
headed by Alcuin. He became a close friend of Charlemagne (r. 768–814) as well as his
adviser, official representative, and probably the supervisor of the building program at
Aix.
After Charlemagne’s death in 814, Einhard remained at the court of Louis the Pious (r.
814–840), as adviser to Louis’s eldest son, Lothair I (d. 855). In 830, he retired with his
wife, Imma, to a monastery founded by him on lands granted by Louis. The area became
known as Seligenstadt (City of the Saints) after the church there that Einhard had
dedicated to SS.Marcellinus and Peter and in which he placed relics of the two saints
acquired by nefarious means. He died March 14, 840.
Einhard’s extant writings include seventy letters, the treatise Historia translationis BB.
Christi martyrum Marcellini et Petri, the short Quaestio de adoranda cruce, and the Vita
Caroli (ca. 829–36). The biography is based on Einhard’s personal knowledge of
Charlemagne and events at Aix between his arrival there and 814, as well as on written
sources and likely the eyewitness accounts of older members of the court for the years
before ca. 791. Composed in an excellent Latin, the Vita shows the influence of various
classical writers, above all of Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum, particularly the life of
Augustus. Like many Carolingian authors, however, Einhard did not borrow mindlessly
from his sources but selected and manipulated his material to accord with what he wanted
to say.
Celia Chazelle
[See also: BIOGRAPHY; CHARLEMAGNE]
Einhard. Einhard: Vita Caroli Magni. The Life of Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Evelyn Scherabon
Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972.
Thorpe, Lewis, trans. Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Beumann, Helmut. Ideengeschichtliche Studien zu Einhard und anderen Geschichtsschreibern des
früheren Mittelalters. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969.
Fleckenstein, Josef. “Einhard, seine Gründung und sein Vermächtnis in Seligenstadt.” In Das
Einhardkreuz: Vortraege und Studien der Muensteraner Diskussion zum arcus Einhardi, ed.
Karl Hauck. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1974, pp. 96–121.
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE
(1122–1204). When Duke William X of Aquitaine died in 1137, he entrusted his fifteen-
year-old daughter and heiress, Eleanor, to King Louis VI. The king quickly arranged to
marry her to his own heir, Louis VII (r. 1137–80). Eleanor brought to the marriage the
important duchy of Aquitaine, the southwest quadrant of France, which had long been
fairly independent of the king.
Eleanor and Louis VII, who succeeded to the throne almost immediately after his
marriage, were related within the “forbidden degrees,” and their union was thus officially
consanguineous. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux pointed out to them that they were related
within “four or five degrees”: both were descended from King Robert II, as Eleanor’s
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