[Note : The Roman numerals after the names indicate which duke of that name they were and are not necessarily the same as their ordinals for their other titles.]
The persons who held the title of Duke of Aquitaine (which became part of France in 1449 but was an independent duchy before then), with the years they held it, were:
In 781 Charlemagne bestowed Aquitaine upon his young son, Louis, and as Louis was generally described as a king, Aquitaine is referred to during the Carolingian period as a kingdom, and not as a duchy.
Charles then bestowed the duchy upon William the Pious, count of Auvergne, the founder of the abbey of Cluny, who was succeeded in 918 by his nephew, Count William II., who died in 926.
Aquitaine as it came to the English kings stretched as of old from the Loire to the Pyrenees, but its extent was curtailed on the south-east by the wide lands of the counts of Toulouse.
The heirs of Charlemagne divided and redivided their inheritance, and Aquitaine passed out of the control of Neustria, the western kingdom of Charlemagne's house, and in the 9th century the leading local counts gradually freed themselves of the vestiges of royal control.
William V (ruling 995-1030) refounded a new duchy of Aquitaine, that was based in Poitou, and this power center survived.
When William X died (1137), his daughter Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress of France, married her guardian, Louis VII of France and followed him on crusade, then had the marriage annulled under the pretext of kinship in 1152 to marry his greatest rival Henry II of England.
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