A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Agnes of France
AGNES OF FRANCE,
The only child that Louis the Seventh, of France, had by his third wife, Alix de Champagne, was sent before she was ten years old to marry Cesar Alexis, the young son of Emmanuel Comnenus, emperor of Constantinople. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp, 1179, and the next year Alexis, though then only thirteen, succeeded his father in the government. But in 1183 a prince of the same family, Andronicus, deposed and murdered Alexis, forced Agnes to marry him, and ascended the throne. In 1185, Andronicus was deposed and killed. Being thus left a second time a widow, before she was sixteen, Agnes sought for a protector among the Greek nobility, and her choice fell on Theodore Branas, who defended her cause so well, that when the crusaders took Constantinople, they gave him the city of Napoli, and that of Adrianople, his country, and of Didyraoticus. He soon after married Agnes, and the rest of her life, so stormy in its commencement, was passed very tranquilly.