French Royalty. A French Princess and Countess of Champagne, also known as Marie Capet or Marie de France, but she is mostly known as Marie de Champagne, like her daughter and her sister-in-law, the Abbess of Fontevraud. She was the oldest daughter of King Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine. As an eight-year-old she was promised to the nineteen years older Count Henri I de Champagne, son of Thibaut, Count of Champagne and Blois and brother of King Stephen I., and was sent in the same year in the Champagne to be raised there. She married him in 1164 and bore him 4 children. After Henri's death in 1181 she reigned the Champagne for her son. She acted as his regent again after Henri's II departure for the crusade. Like her mother she is known as a great patron of literature and many poets and troubadours, like Chretien de Troyes, Trouvère and Conon de Béthune, attended her court. She had close contact with her sister Alice, who had married Henri's younger brother, and with the children from her parents second marriages. Richard I dedicated a poem to her that he wrote in prison. She also had a close friendship with her father's third daughter Marguerite, who married the younger Henry Plantagenet and was therefore her half-sister as well as her sister-in-law. After Henry's death in 1185 Marguerite lived at Marie's court and together they attended the funeral for Geoffrey de Bretagne. There was much controversy about whether she and her mother visited each other, since there seem to be no documents that say so, but it is actually pretty possible. They could have met during the time that Eleanor had her own court in Poitiers or when she returned from Sicily, to where she had brought Berengaria to marry her son Richard. When the news of the deaths of Marguerite and her son Henri II., who had both died shortly after one another in the Holy Land, reached her she was disconsolate, and died three months later. Her tomb was destroyed during the Reformation.