Entry taken from the book The Plantagenets
The one known as the Angevin Empire or Plantagenet Empire came to extend from Scotland to the Pyrenees. To the territories contributed by Henry of Anjou (Henry II of England) as an inheritance from his mother the Empress Matilda and his father Godfrey of Anjou (England, Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine) he joined the Duchy of Aquitaine from his wife Eleanor ( which included the Duchy of Gascony and the County of Poitou) and later, through the marriage of his son Geoffrey, the Duchy of Brittany. The Plantagenets came to add as much territory to the continent as the King of France himself.
In the year 1170, the marriage between one of the daughters of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, named after her mother, was celebrated with the King of Castile Alfonso VIII . The Castilian made available to his wife numerous villas and rents, as well as the cities of Nájera, Burgos and Catrojeriz with all his rights and rents, as well as half of the conquests he made in Muslim lands.
For her part, the bride contributed the Duchy of Gascony as a dowry, which was ceded to her by her mother, who the previous year had also ceded the Duchy of Aquitaine and the County of Poitou to his favorite son, Ricardo (the future Lionheart).
The succession issues of the abundant progeny of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, for which the opinion of the King of France should also be taken into account due to the vassalage to which they were subjected the continental possessions of the Plantagenet, seemed to have been resolved in a conference that both monarchs held in Montmirail. Henry's plans were for his son of the same name to inherit England, Normandy, Touraine and Anjou, Brittany to go to Godfrey (married to the daughter of the former Duke of Brittany) and Aquitaine, Poitou and Gascony to be reserved for Richard, although the latter she had been assigned to her sister Eleanor's dowry as queen of Castile. Juan, barely three years old, and about whom it was not yet known if he would reach adulthood, was left out of the cast (hence his nickname Sin Tierra).
During the reign of Henry II, Aquitaine, Poitou and Gascony were ruled by his son Richard, who directly took charge of the government of the rest of his father's possessions when he died in 1189. The new monarch of England spent a good part of his ten years of reign outside his country, either in the Crusades, or captive after returning from them in Germany, or warring against Philip of France on the continent. This made Gascony, whose nobility was already unfriendly to submission to its Angevin feudal lords, strengthen its natural detachment from the ducal government and its autonomy.
Nor was Alfonso VIII, King of Castile, initially in a position to pay much attention to the ultra-Pyrenean possessions of his wife. Subjected to great pressure by the Almohad invasion that cost him the painful defeat of the Battle of Alarcos (1195), when he did not face the Arab threat he did so with his Christian neighbours. The fact that the kings of Aragon, Navarra and León were his cousins did not prevent each one from taking advantage of the weaknesses of the other kingdoms to try to prosper at their expense, to the despair of the papal legates who urged the Christian kings of the peninsula to forget their troubles and unite in the fight against the infidel.
In addition to the above, Alfonso could do little in relation to Gascony, when initially he could not even access the duchy from his Castilian possessions, since between one territory and another there was no border but it was necessary to cross the kingdom of Navarre, with whose monarch, Sancho VII the Strong the Castilian, was not on friendly terms, as we have mentioned.
But this situation took a turn when in the years 1199 and 1200 Alfonso VIII carried out a campaign to recover, at the expense of the kingdom of Navarre, the old borders of the kingdom of Castile reached in the year 1076 by Alfonso VI in the territories of Álava and Guipúzcoa. But Alfonso VIII exceeded this border in the northeastern part, which was marked in its day by the Urumea river, and extended it to the Bidasoa riverbank. It was a modest gain in terms of extension, but important from a strategic point of view, since it allowed him to achieve a common border corridor between Castile and Gascony.
However, it was not until the year 1205 that Alfonso VIII decided to make a move to reclaim his wife's rights to the Duchy of Gascony. Perhaps he had to do with the fact that, although Richard the Lionheart had died in 1199 and his brother Juan sin Tierra had succeeded him, until 1204 the mother of his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was still alive. Or that in that same year Philip Augustus of France attacked the continental possessions of the King of England and seized Poitou.
The Gascon nobles did not know to whom to entrust themselves. Many of them decided on Alfonso de Castilla. Without the need to mobilize troops, in October 1204 he received in San Sebastian the homage as Lord of Gascony from the Bishop of Dax, the Count of Armagnac and the Viscounts of Bearn, Orhez and Tarras.
Shortly afterwards, at the request of Pope Innocent III, Alfonso reached a truce with the rest of the Christian kingdoms on the peninsula, which made him decide to undertake an expedition to Gascony. This campaign began at the end of the summer of 1205 and, although Alfonso brought with him an armed contingent, it was more of a takeover of the lands whose nobles had sworn homage to him than a campaign of military conquest.
In fact, in the places where the inhabitants closed their doors to him and declared themselves loyal to the king of England (Bayonne, La Réole and Bordeaux) only a symbolic siege took place without none of these places was conquered by the king of Castile. Alfonso VIII returned to Burgos at the beginning of the following year where he had a document issued where a good part of the Gascon nobles and prelates recognized him as Lord of Gascony, although that document was not accompanied by an effective domain in the Gascon duchy.
Later, in Guadalajara in October 1207, Castile and Navarre signed a peace treaty in which, among other agreements, the free passage of troops from each kingdom to through the other. Whether this was a forecast for a future Castilian military campaign in Gascony to enforce the rights of Queen Eleanor, we will never know, since it coincided with the beginning of tensions on the southern border of the kingdom of Castile that focused all Castilian war efforts. in confronting the Almohad threat and which culminated in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
Years later, in 1253, the great-grandson of Alfonso VIII and Eleanor Plantagenet, Alfonso X, at the request of various Gascon nobles dissatisfied with English rule, took up the question of the rights of kings from Castile to the Duchy of Gascony. However, as narrated in a blog entry, the matter ended with a marriage between the heir to the English crown (the future Edward I) and the sister of the Castilian king, also called Leonor. With this agreement, Castile definitively renounced her rights over Gascony.