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Episode 11, Berengaria of Navarre, the Lionheart's Absent Queen. We now go from one of England's best-known queens to one of her least.

Say the name Berengari of Navine in any but the nerdiest of history circles,

and you're likely to get a confused, who? In reply.

Like most queens from the period, we don't know when she was born, as no one thought

to write it down, but testing done on her skeletons suggested it was sometime between 1165 and 1170.

Her parents were Sancho the 6th of Navarre and her conveniently named mother, Sancher, who was the

daughter of the King of Castile and Leon. Berengari herself was their third child and eldest daughter.

Navarre was a small kingdom in the modern Basque country in Spain. Like all Iberian kingdoms,

their size fluctuated wildly through the Middle Ages, but at the time that Berengari was born,

it was at one of its smallest extents, having had huge chunk carved out of it by Hestiel and Leon.

Not much has known of her childhood at all, really. Her mother's son should died in 1179,

and her father never remarried, meaning that Berengaria probably took on most of the queenly duties

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