Eleanor of Aquitaine (11 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Considering the fact that Louis failed to attract her physically and that she had small respect for him as a man, they were, oddly enough, compatible in less personal areas. Eleanor prided herself on taking a role in the regulation of affairs in Aquitaine, and as we shall see subsequently, she also felt herself competent to advise him in matters pertaining to the kingdom of France. Nevertheless, in this latter ambition she would prove notably unsuccessful, because during the first ten years of her reign, the documents reveal her to have been virtually powerless. Unlike previous French queens, including Queen Adelaide, who shared in executive and policy-making decisions with Louis the Fat, Eleanor’s name rarely appears on her husband’s charters nor is there any record of her presence in the royal curia. Beginning with Eleanor, the Capetian queens of France ceased to be working sovereigns, a curious coincidence, for Eleanor would prove to be one of the most politically astute women of the medieval era. A great deal of the credit for this break in tradition can be attributed to the domination of Abbot Suger, who regarded both Louis and Eleanor as insufficiently mature to govern wisely. While Suger may have relegated the queen to an official backseat, he could not prevent her from wielding a wifely influence over her husband. That many of Louis’s actions, whether or not on her advice it is impossible to gauge, appeared to be ill considered did not seem to trouble her, nor did his destructiveness impinge strongly upon Suger either. When, for instance, Louis finally got around to punishing William of Lezay by personally hacking off his hands, no one felt concern about the fate of an obscure baron who had stolen a few birds in faraway Talmont.
By 1141, however, a number of Louis’s vassals began to suspect that there was more than met the eye to the boy king, so pious, so kind, so timid. For some time now Eleanor had been preoccupied with the idea of invading the county of Toulouse, which, in her opinion, belonged to her through her grandmother Philippa. That the domain should remain in the usurping hands of Alphonse-Jourdain riled her, and she repeatedly suggested to her husband that this wrong be remedied. To be sure, Alphonse-Jourdain had ruled Toulouse for some twenty years, and even Eleanor’s father, who had signed his charters “William the Toulousain,” had never seriously considered reclaiming his mother’s patrimony. But for the queen, Toulouse had the appeal of an irresistible cause.
Swept along by Eleanor’s enthusiasm, Louis readily understood that the acquisition of Toulouse would enhance Frankish national prestige, not to mention his own personal reputation. In the opening months of 1141, the two of them spent many excited hours mapping out their adventure. Like inexperienced children titillated by a new game but having no knowledge of the rules, they blundered along without any sense of direction and disdained to ask for advice. To some of Louis’s vassals, among them the powerful Count Theobald of Champagne, the proposed expedition against Toulouse appeared to be a senseless and even unjust project, and they declined to support their overlord. Theobald had neglected to assist in the military action against the Poitiers commune, and when the time for departure arrived on June 24, he again failed to appear in person, nor did he trouble to send a contingent of troops. Louis, furious at the count, was forced to leave without him, but this second defection would not be easily forgiven.
Louis had absolutely no sense of military intuition, and Eleanor, who accompanied him as far south as Poitiers, had little to contribute in this area. As a result the army was haphazardly organized and ineptly led. Only a small amount of siege equipment had been brought along, because Louis and Eleanor apparently counted on taking the city by surprise, a tactic based more on wishful thinking than on any particular strategy. Perhaps Eleanor cherished illusions that Louis, like her grandparents, would capture Toulouse without a blow struck.
Alphonse-Jourdain, of course, had no intention of handing over his fief to the young duchess and her husband; warned of the Franks’ approach long before they reached his ramparts, he had organized a thorough defense and sat waiting for them like a tomcat about to gobble up a puny mouse. Louis, reluctant to sacrifice his army on the altar of Eleanor’s ambition, met the challenge by beating a hasty retreat, fleeing north into Angoulême and then rejoining his wife in Poitiers. Eleanor’s private feelings about Louis’s fiasco can be imagined; the qualities that she counted supreme in a man were valor, readiness for military adventure, knightly honor, and physical prowess. Everything else was merely garnish, as though a man had to be transformed into a killer before he could be loved or respected. Still, perhaps from pity, she must have managed to conceal much of her disappointment, because it was at this time that she opened the treasures of the dukes of Aquitaine and presented him with a magnificent crystal vase ornamented with pearls and precious stones.
The victory she had so ardently desired was forfeit; nevertheless, she decided to linger in Poitou for the remainder of the summer. She would make a holiday of it, and with Louis, Petronilla, and others in her retinue, she embarked on a
chevauchée
over the trails she remembered so nostalgically from her childhood: They visited the monastery of Nieuil-sur-l’Autise, where her mother was buried; granted favors to her Aunt Agnes’s convent; and spent a few days by the sea in Talmont. Although she counted it a pleasant summer, the holiday was shadowed by failure.
chevauchée
over the trails she remembered so nostalgically from her childhood: They visited the monastery of Nieuil-sur-l’Autise, where her mother was buried; granted favors to her Aunt Agnes’s convent; and spent a few days by the sea in Talmont. Although she counted it a pleasant summer, the holiday was shadowed by failure.
When they returned to Paris in the autumn, Louis’s mood alternated between depression and frenetic exuberance. Whatever the reason—lingering humiliation over Toulouse, possibly a desire to raise his prestige in Eleanor’s eyes—he seemed determined to cast off the last vestiges of discretion. That year the archbishopric of Bourges fell vacant, and Louis, for reasons that baffled his barons, took it into his head to appoint his own candidate, a man named Carduc, who happened to be one of his chancellors. Technically, he did not actually insist on Carduc but extended the see freedom of choice, while at the same time vetoing the one suitable candidate, Peter de la Chatre. Since Carduc was singularly unfitted for office, the canons of Bourges ignored Louis’s interference and proceeded to elect Peter. He was duly consecrated by Pope Innocent II and sent to Bourges to assume his duties when, to his chagrin, he discovered the city gates bolted against him.
When Innocent learned of this outrage, his suspicions were immediately aroused, and he jumped to conclusions that probably fell close to the truth. It seemed obvious to him that Louis, a mere schoolboy, an innocent who had never strayed from the path of duty to the Church, could not be responsible. The culprit must be another, and it took him no time at all to locate her. The pontiff well remembered Eleanor’s family: the stubborn duke who had failed to support him and who had exiled from Poitou all ecclesiastics loyal to Innocent, filling the sees with his own candidates. Was this not clearly a case of “like father, like daughter”? The extent to which Eleanor involved herself in this matter is not clear, but it seems reasonable to assume that she did not discourage Louis from his dangerous course. Bitterly offended when he heard of the pope’s condescending remark that Louis was only a child and should be taught manners, the king responded by maneuvering himself into the most awkward corner possible. In melodramatic defiance, he placed his hands upon sacred relics and took a public oath that so long as he lived Peter de la Chatre should never set foot in Bourges.
Across the Alps, Innocent hurtled his thunderbolts of excommunication and interdict, casting the young king into outer darkness. Not only was Louis excluded from all sacraments, but in any town or castle where he dwelled no bells could ring, no church services be performed, nor marriages, confessions, baptisms, or burials. In a century when heaven and hell were real and men and women worried about their souls, excommunication was a serious business. For Louis, a man with an exceptional passion for the hallowed harmony of the cloister, it was an unimaginable blow, and yet he plunged ahead furiously, his obstinacy hardening as the months passed. His anger flared even higher when it came to his attention that Peter de la Châtre was being sheltered in Champagne by a sympathetic Count Theobald.
Louis and Eleanor made a mental list of their enemies; Theobald headed the roster.
At the spinsterly age of nineteen, Eleanor’s sister remained unmarried. This unusual state of affairs was the subject of considerable comment, for Petronilla, an attractive girl, owned dower property in Burgundy and simply by virtue of her relationship to the king and queen would have made an acceptable wife. But eligible lords who came courting found their attentions politely refused; the queen’s sister had long been casting her eyes elsewhere. Five years earlier, at Eleanor’s wedding, she had first made the acquaintance of Count Ralph of Vermandois, the king’s elderly relative and seneschal of France. Ralph was over fifty, but he bore his years lightly; the fact that he was old enough to be Petronilla’s father was not exactly the trouble, however. He was a married man, and moreover, his wife, Leonora, happened to be the niece of Count Theobald.
In the summer of 1141, while Eleanor and Louis were dawdling in Poitou, their retinue included Petronilla and Ralph. Although the couple’s attraction to each other was scarcely news to the more observant in the royal household, on that trip it was impossible for outsiders not to notice what was happening. Petronilla had long been a source of concern for Eleanor, who, as the elder, felt responsible for her. Like Eleanor, Petronilla possessed a strong sex drive and few inhibitions; Ralph had the reputation of being a seducer of women, and according to John of Salisbury, “he was always dominated by lust.” It is safe to assume that the two were hardly conducting a platonic love affair, which meant the ever-present threat of illegitimacy and scandal. While Eleanor may have wished that Petronilla had chosen a more suitable cavalier, she also understood that her sister loved the count and would have no other as a husband. Under the circumstances, a means had to be found for them to marry, and to Eleanor, with her customary simplicity of purpose, the solution seemed clear: Ralph must secure a divorce.
Late that year the matter was quietly and swiftly remedied. Louis located three friendly bishops, one of them Ralph’s brother, who annulled the marriage on the ground of consanguinity and immediately united Ralph to the Lady Petronilla. When the incredulous count of Champagne was notified that he must come and collect his discarded niece and her children, he protested vigorously. For decades Ralph and
Theobald had been sworn enemies, and this latest personal injury could not help but tax the limits of Theobald’s patience. With detailed care and a calculated desire for revenge, he prepared a case against Ralph and wasted no time in dispatching it to Pope Innocent: The count of Vermandois, he explained, had failed to secure papal consent for the annulment; for that matter, the annulment had been handled in a most irregular fashion and clearly was illegal; and Louis had once again interfered in matters that fell under eccesiastical rather than secular jurisdiction.
Innocent’s response was icily meticulous. In June of 1142, a Church council assembled at Lagny-sur-Marne in Champagne, at which time the papal legate, Cardinal Yves, reaffirmed the validity of Ralph’s first marriage and excommunicated Ralph and Petronilla, as well as the three complaisant bishops who had stretched the law in their favor.
A more secure man than Louis might have paused to examine the impossibility of the situation. But neither Louis nor Eleanor was in any mood to exercise caution. They blamed Theobald for their troubles; twice the remiss count had dodged his responsibilities as a vassal, and furthermore, he had actually dared to provoke Louis by harboring Peter de la Châtre. Their prestige at stake, the Capets refused to submit meekly to Rome nor did they intend to set a precedent that would imperil their authority in ruling their subjects. If they capitulated to the pope’s ruling, Ralph would be forced to return to Leonora, and Petronilla, most likely pregnant by then, would bear a bastard; as it was, the excommunications had cast an ignominious stain on the house of Vermandois and, indirectly, on the honor of the Capets. Both Eleanor and Louis were emphatic on one point: On no account would they compromise.
Even though Louis’s first flush of anger had diminished somewhat, he still boiled with indignation and an unswerving determination to prove himself a forceful monarch. Resolved to defy the pope and to humble Theobald, he had Eleanor’s full approval in taking a step that pivoted a cold war into a hot one. In January 1143, he personally led an army into Champagne and laid siege to the little town of Vitry-sur-Marne. From his encampment on the La Fourche hills above the town Louis watched his troops pour down the slope and advance on a castle belonging to Theobald. The charge was answered by a volley of arrows fired from the summits of the castle’s wooden towers, but within a short period of time it became apparent that its resistance would be easily crushed. Louis’s archers catapulted fiery arrows over the walls, and soon the castle crackled in flames.
The townspeople of Vitry, paralyzed at suddenly finding themselves in the midst of a war, came out of their houses and stared in bewilderment at the wild-eyed soldiers swarming through their quiet lanes and brandishing swords and torches. The men and women stopped work and gathered up their children. Although a few villagers took up knives and makeshift cudgels, most had no weapons with which to beat off the king’s soldiers. Beyond the control of their officers, the troops tossed torches into the doorways of wooden houses and onto thatched roofs, and soon the fire spread through the whole town. Terror-stricken, eyes smarting from smoke, the burghers of Vitry surged down the streets leading to their cathedral, the traditional place of refuge where non-combatants might find sanctuary. There, where none could lay a finger on them, they carried the sick, the elderly, the infants. Presumably it was a large church because eventually the entire population, thirteen hundred persons, it is said, managed to squeeze inside.
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