Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (14 page)
The Capets—both of them—responded eagerly to the call, a development that Eugenius could scarcely have foreseen. In truth, the arrival of the papal bull catapulted Eleanor out of her malaise and suddenly opened up unlimited horizons certain to purge whatever afflictions ailed her. At Christmas court, Eleanor sat impatiently at Louis’s side as he addressed the assembled barons and prelates and revealed “the secret in his heart.” At once she could see that he was going about the announcement in precisely the wrong manner by stressing the idea of penance and awkwardly rambling on about his personal desire to take the cross as an expiation for his sins at Vitry. Even though Bishop Geoffrey of Langres delivered an eloquent sermon exhorting the barons of France and Aquitaine to follow their sovereign’s lead, the Crusade was received with chilly indifference. Eleanor, disappointed but hardly surprised, had already spoken privately with many of her southern chieftains, and she knew that few of them cared about the possible damnation of Louis’s soul. Instead, the proposal for a new Crusade only succeeded in awakening memories of the last one, that disastrous expedition led by Eleanor’s grandfather. Many were of the opinion that it would be foolhardy to emulate their fathers and grandfathers, who had been in such a hurry to reach heaven that they mortgaged their lands and rushed off to be martyred many leagues before they reached Jerusalem. With that, she could not argue.
But it was not only the southerners who held back; the Franks exhibited little enthusiasm for a Crusade, too. Among those who voiced disapproval was the elder statesman of the realm, Abbot Suger: God, he said, would be best served by the efficient and peaceful administration of the kingdom; if Louis absented himself for a year or more, the country might very well lapse into widespread disorder again. If the king truly wished to fight the enemies of Christ, there were plenty of heretics he could wipe out in France. Beneath Suger’s careful reasoning lay ripples of panic that were not totally irrational. The ebullient mood of the king and queen made him profoundly nervous, a feeling only increased by the information that Eleanor also planned to take the cross. From past experience, he knew that their high spirits often preceded some unfortunate incident; with Louis’s immaturity, there was no telling what folly might befall a crusading army under his leadership. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that he might be killed, leaving the kingdom without a male heir. Most of these misgivings Suger did not voice, but nevertheless he strongly urged the king and queen, if not to abandon their plan, at least to delay and reflect.
Despite Suger’s open opposition, Eleanor stoutly set about counteracting Louis’s negative appeal. Using her influence as best she could, she moved among her Aquitainian vassals with a fiery tongue, urging them to reconsider, playing upon their pride, chastising the cowardly and encouraging the ambitious. After a number of intimate parleys in the langue d’oc, she was able to change a few minds but clearly not enough for her purposes. If she could rally the lords of Aquitaine to her side, they would outnumber Louis’s French vassals and assure the Crusade as a viable project. Still, as the Christmas court drew to a close, the expedition hung in the balance. It was Suger, hoping to gain time as well as partisans, who suggested that the decision be postponed until March 31, 1146, when a plenary assembly was scheduled to be held at Vézelay. Meanwhile, an appeal had already gone out from Pope Eugenius to the one man in France who might sway a nation into embarking on a holy war: Bernard of Clairvaux. To Suger’s dismay, Bernard readily agreed to preach the Crusade.
A weak spring sunshine covered the hills of Burgundy. For months the news that Saint Bernard would preach at Vézelay on Easter Sunday had been radiating to the far corners of the kingdom and beyond. The town bustled with the cheerful noise of a crowd on a holiday, sightseers eager to glimpse the saint and to inspect the new Cathedral of Saint Mary Magdalene, which crowned the city on the hill. As at Clermont a half century earlier, the throngs were too great to be contained under any other roof but heaven. “And since there was no place within the town which could accommodate such a large crowd, a wooden platform was erected outside in a field, so that the abbot could speak from an elevation to the people standing about.” It might have been a fairground, the field rippling with wimples and skullcaps and hoods, the platform blossoming with the colorful robes of the king and queen accompanied by their retinue of counselors and noblemen, bishops and statesmen. At the sight of Bernard mounting the dais, a tense silence descended on the crowd, for the old man, emaciated from his years of fasting, appeared close to death. Nevertheless, once he began to speak, his voice trumpeted forth loud and clear, reverberating through the crowd to tear their hearts and stir their holy rage. As the sound of his voice rang over the hillside, the words seemed, to those gathered there, as music from an angel who had suddenly dropped from the clouds. His words have not been handed down; we know only that he read the papal bull calling for a holy expedition and promising absolution for all who took the cross, but to think that he would not have embellished the papal letter with his incomparable rhetoric is inconceivable. At last, unable to restrain themselves, the people broke into discordant waves of applause and shouts of “To Jerusalem” and then there was silence once more. King Louis was moving forward to speak, but after only a few words he dissolved into the tears that came so easily to him and prostrated himself before the abbot to receive the cross.
Still under Bernard’s spell, Louis’s vassals forgot their earlier coolness in their eagerness to receive a cross from the abbot’s own wasted hands. In every dialect of Gaul, they began to cry out, “Crosses, give us crosses!” and so great was the clamor that the hills and fields and woods seemed to echo back, “Crosses!” Soon Bernard’s supply was exhausted, “and when he had sowed, rather than distributed, the parcel of crosses which he had prepared beforehand, he was forced to tear his own garments and to sow them abroad.” It went on until nightfall. The feudal lords had fallen into orderly ranks, and by the light of cressets and lanterns they waited their turn to approach the man of God. Private feuds forgotten, enemies standing shoulder to shoulder, that Sunday they were all brothers enlisting in the army of Christ. In the file could be seen Count Theobald’s eldest son, Henry; Alphonse-Jourdain, from whom Louis and Eleanor had tried to wrest Toulouse; Louis’s brother Robert, count of Dreux; Thierry, count of Flanders; Archibald of Bourbon; Enguerrand of Coucy; the king’s uncle, Count Amadeus II; the bishops of Langres, Arras, and Lisieux; and many, many others, whose names the chroniclers did not know or lacked the parchment to list.
At some point during the daylong procession, Eleanor knelt before the abbot to receive her cross. By no means was she the only woman to do so; among the noble ladies who took the cross on Easter Sunday, we know the names of Sybille of Flanders. Faydide of Toulouse, Torqueri of Bouillon, and Florine of Burgundy, and there were wives and daughters of other great lords who followed the queen’s example. Later, after the newly blessed
cruciati
had returned to their homes, stories were told describing Queen Eleanor and her ladies as a troop of armed Amazons. Dressed in cherry red boots and white tunics, with the crimson cross splashed across their breasts, they had galloped on white horses over the hillside at Vézelay brandishing swords and spurring the faint-hearted to heed the call of the Almighty. Or so it was said. From what most people knew of their flamboyant queen, the tale sounded completely in character, and those who had been present at Vézelay did not bother to disillusion them, indeed they themselves may have embroidered a few of the fabulous details. The stories only added to the general excitement and, for that matter, probably stimulated recruiting.
cruciati
had returned to their homes, stories were told describing Queen Eleanor and her ladies as a troop of armed Amazons. Dressed in cherry red boots and white tunics, with the crimson cross splashed across their breasts, they had galloped on white horses over the hillside at Vézelay brandishing swords and spurring the faint-hearted to heed the call of the Almighty. Or so it was said. From what most people knew of their flamboyant queen, the tale sounded completely in character, and those who had been present at Vézelay did not bother to disillusion them, indeed they themselves may have embroidered a few of the fabulous details. The stories only added to the general excitement and, for that matter, probably stimulated recruiting.
Later, Louis would be severely censured for permitting Eleanor to accompany him. The chroniclers would claim that, mistrusting the queen out of his sight, he had been motivated by burning jealousy. William of Newburgh, writing some fifty years after Vézelay, advances the theory that the king so adored his beautiful wife that he could not bear to be separated from her. A more reasonable explanation is simply that in the spring of 1145 few, except perhaps Abbot Suger, ever thought to question Eleanor’s decision to take the cross. Contrary to what is sometimes believed, there was nothing very unusual about a woman going on Crusade. During the first expedition to the Holy Land, many noble ladies accompanied their lords. Count Alphonse-Jourdain of Toulouse had been born in the East and owed his name to the fact that he had been baptized in the waters of the river Jordan. Even on the so-called People’s Crusade led by Peter the Hermit, the army of the poor was not made up principally of men; there were also a great many women and children. Throughout Eleanor’s childhood, she had grown accustomed to the sight of female pilgrims; in the spring and summer, the roads of Aquitaine had been thronged with travelers bound for Compostela or Rome or Jerusalem, and many of them were women.
But, of course, there was more to her decision. At the very word crusade, intoxicating memories moved in her mind. Despite William the Troubadour’s unfortunate experiences on the road to Jerusalem, he had managed to transcend disaster by writing of it in honeyed rhyme. Creating material for jongleur and minstrel, his odyssey had been transmuted into high adventure, and Eleanor remembered his songs with inexpressible nostalgia. With her grandfather’s Crusade had traveled one of the most famous beauties of her time, the Margravine Ida of Austria, who had raised a contingent of troops and rode at their head. The fact remained that the Margravine had been among those lost during the massacre, but Eleanor no doubt preferred to believe that this admirable woman had somehow escaped. That a similar fate might await women during the Second Crusade seemed absurd. By the middle of the twelfth century, pilgrimages to the Holy Land were no longer novel; in fact, they had become the medieval version of the grand tour, excursions that persons of consequence undertook for their own spiritual and cultural enrichment.
The desire to visit the Holy Land was widespread and deeply implanted in the nature of medieval men and women. To many Christians, the desire to worship Christ in Jerusalem was an overriding emotion that enabled them to endure the dangers of a medieval journey, to face slow death from starvation or sudden death by murder en route, or to risk capture and enslavement by the Moslems. The reasons for taking the cross were as varied as the Crusaders themselves. For some, like Louis, the journey held out the hope of pardon from sin; for others, it was a means of escape from a dreary existence. While Eleanor would seem to fall into the latter category, she was by no means devoid of religious zeal; however, she was most religious when her interests and God’s interests happened to coincide. Bathed in extreme boredom at her drafty castle on the Seine, how she must have leaped at the opportunity to become a Crusader. What incomparable avenues opened to her, what marvels waited Beyond the Sea, where there was no rain or snow, what tales she would bring back to mesmerize her grandchildren on long winter evenings!
Her yearnings for adventure were no more suspect than Louis’s. “To him, taking the cross was a mystical adventure rather than a political move. But after a half century of rule in Jerusalem, he was convinced, as King of France, that the French crown had a messianic role to play and believed that he was following in the footsteps of Charlemagne, who, according to generally accepted tradition, had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.” Popular legend had it that a Christian monarch, perhaps a reincarnation of Charlemagne, would bring about the millenium by taking possession of Jerusalem. In those months after Vézelay, there could be found numerous “prophets” swearing that Louis was the king who would usher in the thousand years of peace preceding the final triumph of Jesus Christ.
Largely overlooked in the excitement was one crucial fact: Louis’s Crusade had arisen from dire political necessity. Not only had Jerusalem’s Queen Melisende sounded the alarm for help, but Prince Raymond of Antioch could also see calamity overtaking him unless reinforcements appeared from the West. Unlike Count Joscelin, he observed the dangers clearly, and it was only natural that he should think of his niece, the queen of the Franks. In September of that year, when Zengi was assassinated by a disgruntled servant, he believed his troubles to be over; to his consternation, however, he soon discovered that Zengi’s son, Nureddin, was no less fierce and warlike than his father, and a religious fanatic to boot. It is certain that Raymond sent his own messengers to the Capetian court, acquainting Louis and Eleanor with the details of the Turkish threat and stressing the gravity of his plight. William of Tyre relates that the prince wooed his relatives in Paris with “noble gifts and treasures of great price in the hope of winning favor.” He might have saved himself the trouble, for Eleanor and Louis needed no added inducements.
The Crusade was scheduled to depart in the spring of 1147, but in the meantime there was much to be done. More was needed than merely the approval of the pope and the promises of princes; such an enterprise would have been doomed without the support of the general populace. There is no question that Eleanor worked tirelessly to assure the success of the operation by contributing to the recruiting of soldiers and the collection of money. After returning from the stirring events at Vézelay, she immediately set off on a personal tour of Aquitaine, proclaiming tournaments to rally knights and petty castellans and renewing special privileges enjoyed by abbeys in exchange for their financial support. At Fontevrault, for instance, she guaranteed the abbey a profit of five hundred sous from a fair held in Poitiers, and similar gifts were made to Montierneuf, La Grace-Dieu, and other religious foundations. Owing to her efforts and, very likely, to her dashing example, a remarkably high proportion of the Crusaders would come from Aquitaine, among them Geoffrey de Rancon, the lord of Taillebourg castle, where she and Louis had spent their wedding night; Saldebreuil of Sanzay, whom she had made her constable; Hugh of Lusignan; and Guy of Thouars. If Bernard of Clairvaux viewed her activity as a form of backsliding from their agreement, he did not voice his objections, for at least her efforts were focused on a pious cause.
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