The latter is above all ‘an heiress of territorial principalities, on the western boundaries of the Holy Empire, who at the age of fifteen years found herself at the head of three counties, occupying a strategic position in the geopolitics of the time, and who sixteen years later had to definitively renounce her possessions,’ writes Eric Bousmar (Saint-Louis, Brussels), who devotes a long chapter to her subtitled ‘The inevitable excesses of a women of power?’ The daughter of William IV of Hainaut (also known by the name of William VI of Holland) and Margaret of Burgundy, the sister of John the Fearless, she found herself, whilst she was only aged 16, the widow of the Dauphin of France, John of Touraine, her first husband, and at the same time the orphan of her father William IV (she consequently also became heiress to three of the latter’s counties). It was 1417. Still without a direct heir for the three counties, but also guided by political collaboration designs, Jacqueline took the strategic decision to marry again, to John IV, Duke of Brabant and Limburg. Very quickly, nevertheless, in a dispute over succession, Jacqueline discovered herself dispossessed of two-thirds of her lands and her honour as a territorial Princess flouted. She thus found herself, according to Éric Bousmar, ‘at the heart of a contradiction between the duty of marital subordination to her status as a wife, and her princely duties, essential to her status as an heiress.’

Far from being condemned to passivity, Jacqueline then took a radical decision, after several years of fierce fighting to have her rights respected, to leave her husband. She remarried in 1422, in England, to Humphrey of Gloucester, who would soon aid her to undertake a re-conquest of her territories, which John IV estimated his own. In 1425, Jacqueline of Bavaria, ‘the valiant woman’, always careful to appear as a legitimate women of power, would nonetheless be once again held in check by her second husband, and capitulated definitively in 1433, with a treatise as testimony, in which she was forced to write: ‘we who are women, we are neither feared nor obeyed to the extent (...) that we cannot manage, rule or govern with peace, unity, equity and tranquillity as well as we would like and as is necessary.’ She died three years later.