Marie of Champagne(1145 — 1198)

It was at the request of Marie of Champagne that Chrétien de Troyes wrote “Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart,” the romance in which Lancelot's love for Queen Guinevere appears. In his prologue, the poet himself acknowledges that the countess provided him with “the matter and the meaning” of the story: a rare case in which we know exactly which patron lies behind a medieval masterpiece.

Marie was the daughter of King Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine. When her parents had their marriage annulled in 1152 and Eleanor married the future King Henry II of England, Marie found herself half-sister both to Richard the Lionheart (on her mother's side) and to King Philip Augustus (on her father's side): she was kin to the two rival royal families of Europe.

The treatise “On Love” by Andreas Capellanus stages, at the court of Troyes, genuine “judgments of love” handed down by great ladies. A verdict attributed to Marie, dated 1174, declares that true love cannot exist between a married couple: a refined literary game that shows how central a role the countess played in the courtly art of love.

On two occasions, Marie governed the county of Champagne on her own: first during the pilgrimage and then after the death of her husband Henry the Liberal, as regent for her young son; then again when that son, now grown, left for the Third Crusade and became King of Jerusalem. For years, a woman thus administered one of the richest territories in the kingdom.

Marie did not only patronize romances written for entertainment: she also commissioned the cleric Évrat to produce a French verse translation of the biblical book of Genesis. Carrying a sacred text over from Latin into the “Romance” vernacular was a new and daring undertaking, one that made learned culture accessible to a lay audience.