The Princess in the Tower
Alex Sanmark tells the strange tale of the ill-fated marriage of Philip Augustus of France and his Danish princess at the end of the twelfth century.
Princess Ingeborg of Denmark (1175-1237/8) and King Philip II ‘Augustus’ of France (1165-1223) were married in August 1193 at Amiens in northern France. The following day the couple were crowned in the town cathedral. Some time later, Philip, however, unexpectedly declared that the marriage must be dissolved, since he, for ‘bodily reasons’, could no longer be Ingeborg’s husband. Philip may well have expected a quick end to this marriage, but this was not to be. Instead his struggle for an annulment dragged on for twenty years, and brought him into a serious conflict with the papacy. All this time, Ingeborg was held more or less as a prisoner in various royal castles. The matter was finally resolved in 1213 when Philip gave in and announced that he would reinstate Ingeborg as Queen of France, although not as his wife.
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