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Note: Aquitaine, the région encompassing the départements of Dordogne, Gironde, Landes, Lot-et-Garonne, and Pyrénées-Atlantiques in southwestern France. The name Aquitaine is probably a form of Auscetani, which in turn is a lengthened form of Ausces and is thus cognate with the words Basque and Wasconia (Gascogne). The capital is Bordeaux.
In Julius Caesar's description of Gaul, "Aquitania" was an area extending from the Pyrenees to the Garonne River. The Roman emperor Augustus (reigned 27 BC-AD 14) made it a Roman administrative district, and its borders were extended as far north as the Loire River and east to the Massif Central.
A Visigothic province in the 5th century, Aquitaine came under Frankish rule in the 6th century, retaining a measure of provincial identity exploited by local rulers. Long resistant in the 8th century, it was finally subdued by Charlemagne, who bestowed it (less Gascogne) as a kingdom upon his son Louis (the future emperor Louis I). It remained a kingdom under Louis's son Pepin I and the latter's son Pepin II, its chief towns being Toulouse, Limoges, and Poitiers. Devastation by the Normans in the 9th century resulted in political and social upheavals during the course of which various feudal domains were established. A little before 845, the title Duke of Aquitaine, was revived, and in 893 King Charles III ordered that Count Rainulf II, who then held Aquitaine, should be poisoned, after which the King bestowed the duchy upon William the Pious, Count of Auvergne, founder of the Abbey of Cluny. He was succeeded by his nephew, Count William II, in 918, and there followed a long line of dukes.
In the first half of the 10th century the counts of Auvergne, of Toulouse, and of Poitiers each claimed this ducal title, but it was eventually secured by William I, count of Poitiers (William III of Aquitaine). The powerful house of the counts of Poitiers retained Aquitaine during the 10th and 11th centuries. William IV fought against Hugh Capet, King of France; William VI added Cascony; and William IX became famous as a crusader and troubadour. Then, on the death without heirs of the last duke, William X (William VIII of Poitiers), in 1137, his daughter Eleanor united Aquitaine to the kingdom of France by her marriage with Louis VII. When Louis divorced her, however, Eleanor of Aquitaine married in 1152 the count of Anjou, Henry Plantagenet, who two years later became king of England as Henry II. The duchy thus passed to her new husband, who, having suppressed a revolt there, gave it to his son, Richard the Lion-Heart (later Richard I of England), who spent most of his life in Aquitaine, often subduing rebellious vassals. When Richard died in 1199, the duchy reverted to Eleanor, and, on her death five years later, it was united to the English crown and henceforward followed the fortunes of the English possessions in France.
Aquitaine, as it came to the English kings, stretched as of old from the Loire to the Pyrenees, but its extent was curtailed on the southeast by the wide lands of the counts of Toulouse. The name Guyenne (or Guienne), a corruption of Aquitaine, seems to have come into use about the 10th century, and the subsequent history of Aquitaine is merged in that of Gascogne and Guyenne, which were completely reunited to France by the end of the Hundred Years' War. [Encyclopaedia Britannica CD '97]
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