♀Jeanne de Dammartin

Jeanne de Dammartin (died 15 March 1278/9) was Queen of Castile and Leon as the second wife of King Fernando III, and Countess of Ponthieu, Montreuil and Aumale in her own right. She was the twenty-third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Eleanor of Castile (died 1290).

Early life

Jeanne, also called Juana, was the eldest daughter and a co-heiress of Simon de Dammartin, Count of Ponthieu and Montreuil in right of his wife, and of Marie, the heiress of Guillaume II Talvas, Count of Ponthieu^W. She was probably born about 1220. In 1235 she was married by proxy to King Henry III of England, but the marriage was never consummated, and on 27 April 1236 it was annulled because the two were related in the fourth degree of kindred.

Queen of Castile

Fernando and Jeanne married at Burgos before 31 October 1237, under a papal dispensation^W dated 31 August 1237, because they were related in the third and fourth degrees of kindred. They had four sons, Fernando, Luis, Simón and Juan, and one daughter, Eleanor, who married Edward, the heir to the English throne, in 1254.

Jeanne succeeded her mother as Countess of Ponthieu in 1251. A year later, on 30 May 1252, Fernando died at Seville.

Countess at Abbeville

In October 1254 the widowed queen went back to France and made her home at Abbeville in Ponthieu. In 1259 she was one of the heirs of her cousin Mahaut de Dammartin, Countess of Boulogne and Dammartin, and through that share she gained the county of Aumale^W. Between May 1260 and 9 February 1261 she married Jean de Nesle, seigneur of Falvy-sur-Somme and la Hérelle, who held Ponthieu, Montreuil and Aumale as count in her right, and they had one daughter, Jeanne.

Jeanne made a will and died at Abbeville on 15 March 1278/9. She was buried at the abbey of Valoires. In England the Annals of Worcester recorded her death, naming her as the countess of Ponthieu who had once been queen of Spain.

Notes

Sources

Jeanne’s parentage, birth, both royal marriages, her children, her inheritances, her second husband and her death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, CASTILE 5, pp. 495–496; the proxy marriage to Henry III and its annulment are from ENGLAND 4, p. 42, and Eleanor’s marriage from ENGLAND 5, p. 49. This is a printed genealogy of the medieval royal families, which cites the charters of the counts of Ponthieu, the papal registers and the chronicles. Her birth year is Richardson’s estimate, “born about 1220”.

The Worcester annal

Richardson quotes the Annals of Worcester under the year 1279, which say that about Ascension Day King Edward crossed the sea with the queen, “cujus mater, comitissa Pontivi, quondam regina Hyspaniae, transierat ex hoc mundo” (whose mother, the countess of Ponthieu, once queen of Spain, had passed from this world).