Constance of Castile
|Constance of Castile|
|Queen consort of France|
|Died||4 October 1160|
|Burial||Basilica of St Denis|
|Spouse||Louis VII of France (m. 1154)|
|Issue||Margaret, Queen of England and Hungary
Alys, Countess of the Vexin
|Father||Alfonso VII of León and Castile|
|Mother||Berenguela of Barcelona|
Constance of Castile (c 1140 - 4 October 1160) was Queen of France as the second wife of Louis VII, who married her following the annulment of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was a daughter of Alfonso VII of León and Berengaria of Barcelona, but her year of birth is not certainly known.
The official reason for her husband's annulment from Eleanor of Aquitaine had been that he was too close a relative of Eleanor for the marriage to be legal by Church standards; however, he was even more closely related to Constance.
Constance died giving birth to her second child. Desperate for a son, her husband remarried a mere five weeks after her death.
Constance was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, France.
Constance had two children:
- Margaret, 1157–1197, who married first Henry the Young King of England, and then Béla III of Hungary
- Alys, 1160–1220, who married William IV of Ponthieu
|Ancestors of Constance of Castile|
- Bouchard, Constance (2001). Those of My Blood: Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia. University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Bradbury, Jim (2007). The Capetians. Hambledon Continuum.
- Jaritz, Gerhard; Szende, Katalin, eds. (2016). Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective. Routledge.
- Warren, W.L. (1978). King John. University of California Press.
Eleanor of Aquitaine
|Queen of France
Adele of Champagne