Geoffroi V of Thouars

Notes:

Viscount of Thouars.

Family/Spouse: Aumur. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

1. Guy de Thouars was born about 1155; died on 13 Apr 1213 in Chemillé, France.

Notes:

Or Aimery. Viscount of Thouars.

Amaury married Agnes of Aquitaine before 1117. Agnes (daughter of William IX of Aquitaine and Philippa of Toulouse) was born about 1105; died about 1159. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

In Spanish, called Ines de Poitou.

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate death: 10 Feb 1127

Notes:

Also called Guilhèm de Peitieus; Guillaume de Poitiers. Duke of Aquitaine; also, as William VII, Count of Poitou. A leader of the Crusade of 1101, he is much more famous as the first troubador poet whose work has survived.

"Ab la dolcher del temps novel"
By William IX, Duke of Aquitaine

Out of the sweetness of the spring,
The branches leaf, the small birds sing,
Each one chanting in its own speech,
Forming the verse of its new song,
Then is it good a man should reach
For that for which he most does long.

From finest sweetest place I see
No messenger, no word for me,
So my heart can't laugh or rest,
And I don't dare try my hand,
Until I know, and can attest,
That all things are as I demand.

This love of ours it seems to be
Like a twig on a hawthorn tree
That on the tree trembles there
All night, in rain and frost it grieves,
Till morning, when the rays appear
Among the branches and the leaves.

So the memory of that dawn to me
When we ended our hostility,
And a most precious gift she gave,
Her loving friendship and her ring:
Let me live long enough, I pray,
Beneath her cloak my hand to bring.

I've no fear that tongues too free
Might part me from Sweet Company,
I know with words how they can stray
In gossip, yet that's a fact of life:
No matter if others boast of love,
We have the loaf, we have the knife!

Translated by A. S. Kline. © 2009; All Rights Reserved. This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.

"For any of the later Provençals, i.e., the high-brows, we have to...'put ourselves into the Twelfth Century' etc. Guillaume, writing a century earlier, is just as much of our age as of his own."
[Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance]

And Poictiers, you know, Guillaume Poictiers,
had brought the song up out of Spain
with the singers and viels...
[Ezra Pound, Canto VIII]

He is also remembered for his specularly public affair with a woman named Dangereuse, the wife of his vassal Aimery I of Châtellerault. Aside from its interest as pure medieval melodrama, he was the paternal grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Dangereuse was Eleanor's maternal grandmother.

William married Philippa of Toulouse in 1094. Philippa (daughter of William IV of Toulouse and Emma of Mortain) died on 28 Nov 1117. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate death: 28 Nov 1118, Fontévrault Abbey, near Chinon, Anjou, France

Notes:

Also called Mathilda; Maud. Regent of Toulouse.

Ancestral Roots and other sources to the contrary, she was probably never married to Sancho V Ramirez (1043-94), king of Aragon. Wikipedia's article on Philippa of Toulouse cites two sources to this effect:

"Szabolcs de Vajay, 'Ramire II le Moine, roi d'Aragon et Agnes de Poitou dans l'histoire et la légende', in Me?langes offerts a? Rene? Crozet, 2 vol, Poitiers, 1966, vol 2, p 727-750; and Ruth E Harvey, 'The wives of the first troubadour Duke William IX of Aquitaine', in Journal of Medieval History, vol 19, 1993, p 315. Harvey states that, contrary to prior assumptions, William IX was certainly Philippa of Toulouse's only husband. Vajay states that the marriage to an unnamed king of Aragon reported by a non-contemporary chronicler is imaginary even though it has appeared broadly in modern histories, and likewise he cites J de Salarrullana de Dios, Documentos correspondientes al reinado de Sancho Ramirez, Saragossa, 1907, vol I, nr 51, p 204-207 to document that Sancho's wife Felicie was clearly still married to him just months before his death, making the marriage to Philippa several years earlier, as reported in several modern popular biographies of her granddaughter, completely unsupportable."

Notes:

As Count of Poitou, he was called William VI; as Duke of Aquitaine, William VIII. Also Duke of Gascony.

Guy-Geoffrey married Hildegarde of Burgundy in 1069. Hildegarde (daughter of Robert I and Ermengarde of Anjou) was born about 1050; died after 1104. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Duke and Count of Toulouse.

William married Emma of Mortain before 1080. Emma (daughter of Robert de Mortain and Maud de Montgomery) died after 1134. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Ancestral Roots and Richardson's Royal Ancestry have a 54-year spread between their two different death dates for Emma of Mortain.