Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (16 page)
Looking at the bright blue sky overhead, at the vast column blending into the horizon behind her, Eleanor forgot the dark lanes of the Île-de-France, forgot the infant Marie, even forgot that somewhere in that awesome procession rode her husband. Her past, those twenty-five years washed with sweetness and sorrow, lay behind. Ahead were rivers and mountains and celestial cities.
To Jerusalem
The crusading army moved at a brisk pace over central Europe toward the Rhine, often covering ten to twenty miles each day. Through wooded country, past a wealth of streams, springs, and meadows, the host sprawled out along the road as far as the eye could see and sometimes spilled over into the adjoining fields. Rolling along like an awkward thousand-legged dinosaur, it brought to a standstill the normal activities of the towns in its path and caused civilian travelers to relinquish their places on the highway until the Crusaders had moved by.
During those last days of June 1147, it was easy to forget the religious nature of their mission. Gawking like sightseers on a conducted tour, admiring castles and clucking extravagantly over each toy village, the
cruciati
swore the woods to be a lusher shade of jade than they had ever seen before, the ploughed fields moister and blacker. After a week or so, however, they became acclimated to the scenery. One mountain, after all, was not so different from another, the towns all began to look alike, and gradually they stopped staring and admiring. The indistinguishable summer days began to melt together, with the first week passing like a dream in which time has lost its ordinary meaning. In all this excitement, Eleanor did not remain untouched. Surrounded by the ladies and knights of her native land, she perhaps felt this sense of disassociation more strongly than others. Immediately, there sprang up between her and the Aquitainians an easy camaraderie that must have recalled her childhood. Days would pass when she would speak nothing but her native dialect, which is to say there were long stretches when she did not see Louis and probably rarely thought of him. Hearing the easy laughter and familiar drawling voices, she was certainly transported back in time to the warm afternoons when she rode through Poitou on one of her father’s chevauchées. If now she laughed and flirted, conducted herself more like a giddy young girl than a twenty-five-year-old queen, presumably that was because she did not feel obliged to behave otherwise. After the restless years in Paris, a summer of happy, if temporary, distraction was much to her taste.
cruciati
swore the woods to be a lusher shade of jade than they had ever seen before, the ploughed fields moister and blacker. After a week or so, however, they became acclimated to the scenery. One mountain, after all, was not so different from another, the towns all began to look alike, and gradually they stopped staring and admiring. The indistinguishable summer days began to melt together, with the first week passing like a dream in which time has lost its ordinary meaning. In all this excitement, Eleanor did not remain untouched. Surrounded by the ladies and knights of her native land, she perhaps felt this sense of disassociation more strongly than others. Immediately, there sprang up between her and the Aquitainians an easy camaraderie that must have recalled her childhood. Days would pass when she would speak nothing but her native dialect, which is to say there were long stretches when she did not see Louis and probably rarely thought of him. Hearing the easy laughter and familiar drawling voices, she was certainly transported back in time to the warm afternoons when she rode through Poitou on one of her father’s chevauchées. If now she laughed and flirted, conducted herself more like a giddy young girl than a twenty-five-year-old queen, presumably that was because she did not feel obliged to behave otherwise. After the restless years in Paris, a summer of happy, if temporary, distraction was much to her taste.
Her aimless days adhered, nevertheless, to a strict pattern. Each morning she awoke before dawn to hear the camp bustling to life around her, the tents being dismantled, the carts harnessed. By the time the first embers of day began to heat the sky, she had dressed, attended to her devotions, and joined the bleary-eyed throngs on the road. Not until late afternoon would the call to halt sound. Then, as the soldiers began to set up the camp for the night, fires would be lit, dusty robes changed, and for Eleanor and the other high-born ladies, baths drawn. Later, when the wind was soft, the darkness would resonate with sounds of music and laughter as Eleanor and her household gathered in torch-lit tents or outside around a fire. All types of performers, including the forbidden troubadours, provided a veritable host of festivities and merriment for the entertainment of the nobility. This is not to suggest that hilarity prevailed throughout the entire camp; indeed, it was limited almost entirely to the contingent from Aquitaine, a fact that did not fail to attract the notice of the more devout Franks, who muttered that the Crusade was quickly degenerating into a pleasure party.
On the previous Crusade, women following the cross had lived as men and endured the same conditions, neither asking for special privileges nor receiving any. This time, obviously, it was to be different. Clearly the ladies were suffering no hardships; on the contrary, they appeared to regard the expedition as a movable feast to be adjourned during the day and resumed immediately upon halting for the night. Inevitably, tongues began to wag, with scandalmongers grumbling that the loose atmosphere would only lead to demoralization and vice. Per-force, when any sexual activity came to light, when a peasant soldier crept into the woods with a chambermaid, the episode was immediately attributed to the southern influence.
All in all, it was not surprising that the gossip soon spread to include the queen herself, since it was widely known that her entourage spent their evenings debating about love and playing games of chivalry with the troubadours. Her critics in later life insinuated that she did not lead an entirely blameless life from the outset of the Crusade, but it is difficult to gauge the extent of her indiscretion if, indeed, there was any at this stage. In all likelihood, her natural exuberance had reasserted itself, and she was merely enjoying herself to the utmost. Anxious to be the center of attention, disliking any authority save her own, she would have blandly ignored suggestions that she behave more circumspectly. However much her husband must have disapproved of the revels, he did not interfere, for Louis certainly could not afford to antagonize the southerners, who made up an important sector of his army, and, in addition, his attention was now occupied by matters more pressing than the queen’s amusements.
By Louis’s reckoning, it would take nearly three months of unbroken marching before they completed the first stage of their journey at Constantinople, where they would stop for a brief rest and confer with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus. Before embarking from Metz, Louis had laid down rules of conduct for the army, but by the time they reached the city of Worms on June 29, it was abundantly clear that his orders were not being observed. Odo de Deuil, chronicling the Crusade, wrote in disgust that it would be a waste of time to list the rules, for they went unheeded. But undoubtedly one of the prohibitions stated that towns through which they passed must not be plundered for food. At Worms, where a flotilla of small craft had been assembled to ferry the army across the Rhine, there occurred the first of a series of untoward incidents that underscored Louis’s deficiencies as a military commander and his inability to maintain discipline. As it happened, the army had scarcely crossed over to their encampment on the German side of the river when a quarrel broke out in the marketplace near the landing quay. As the pilgrims quickly discovered, food supplies were scarce, and the money changers charged exorbitant rates; many realized that only a wealthy person was going to reach Jerusalem without starving. When a boat laden with provisions landed at the dock, it was mobbed by a band of hungry Crusaders, who threw its crew overboard and proceeded to help themselves to the cargo. This unruly act brought immediate reprisals from the city’s merchants, who sprang into the fray with oars and knives, wounding several Crusaders and killing one of them.
Louis, lost in a faraway reverie, always resentful of time taken away from his prayers, seemed perplexed about how to handle the situation. Finally, almost nonchalantly, he referred the matter to his counselor Thierry Galeran, who, in turn, suggested sending the bishop of Arras to negotiate with the aggrieved citizens of Worms, who refused to sell any more food to the Crusaders; eventually, after some difficulty, the bishop persuaded the merchants to resume commerce. Louis’s initial mismanagement of the food supplies, no small failure, was making it increasingly clear to the rank and file of his army that a hasty retreat, the rescue of the Holy Land notwithstanding, was their best hope of extricating themselves from a wretched situation. If the shepherd could barely feed his flock in friendly territory, what would happen when they reached the lands of the Turks? Accordingly, the cynical, the disgusted, thought it wise to abandon the Crusade while still relatively close to home.
In the brilliant days of early July, Eleanor paid scant heed to the defection of a few malcontents. Nevertheless, well acquainted as she was with Louis’s shortcomings, she might well have felt forebodings as to her husband’s adequacy as a commander. In any case, if intimations of future disaster disturbed her at this time, there was little that she could do. Long ago she had been barred from the policy-making sphere, chastised by the great Bernard himself for meddling, and in recent weeks it had been a relief to distance herself, both from the Frankish high command and from her husband, who cloistered himself with his favorite attendants. Resigning herself to secondhand news of Louis’s actions from Geoffrey de Rancon and other southern nobles, she was willing, evidently, to accept an anonymous role, so much so that chronicler Odo does not mention her presence among the Crusaders until some weeks later.
From Worms the route lay overland through south German territories to Ratisbon, on the Danube. Waiting there, surrounded by a suite of fawning courtiers, were two ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor. This preview of Byzantium could not help but make an impression on the Franks, although the impression was not necessarily positive. Manuel’s envoys addressed Louis in such obsequious terms that he blushed, while others attending the interview were hard put to smother their smiles. The bishop of Langres, his patience exhausted by the listing of Louis’s virtues, finally cried out, “Brothers, do not repeat ‘glory,’ ‘majesty,’ ‘wisdom’ and ’piety’ so often in reference to the king. He knows himself and we know him well. Just indicate your wishes more briefly and fully.” Coming to the point at last, the Greeks presented two demands that in effect asked only for guarantees that Louis came in friendship. The first, that he should not take any of their cities, was readily granted. But the second—a request to return to Manuel any city or castle, captured from the Turks, that had formerly belonged to Byzantium—was considered unreasonable and deferred until the two sovereigns could discuss the matter personally.
Manuel Comnenus, despite his gross flatteries, was unhappy and resentful. Since “Byzantine perfidy” was a political byword among the Franks, it will be useful at this point to examine the man more closely. A half century earlier, the Greek historian Anna Comnena had watched the arrival of the first Crusaders with dismay and awe, counting them as innumerable as the leaves on the trees and the stars in the skies. To the thirteen-year-old girl it seemed that the “whole of the West, with all the barbarians that live between the farther side of the Adriatic and the Pillars of Hercules, had migrated in a body, and were marching into Asia through intervening Europe, making the journey with all their household.” Now all her nephew Manuel could see was the return of that very same cloud of locusts that had swarmed into the realm in 1096. In some perverse replay of history, the Crusaders were once again set to march across Byzantine territory, installing themselves on the outskirts of his imperial city and demanding help to make a war on territory that, until captured by the Turks, had belonged to Byzantium for centuries. At the same time, he suspected that the Crusaders, in a maddening display of illogic, would make no attempt to understand the political situation in the Mideast, would refuse to listen to advice, and would ignore the fact that driving the Turks out of Asia Minor concerned Byzantium as much as it did themselves. His grandfather Alexius Comnenus had been in no mood to serve the Crusaders; Manuel, busy with his own wars, his own political problems, felt exactly the same.
Unable to prevent the Crusade, his best and perhaps only hope was to somehow use the armies of the West to further his own interests and policies. In 1147, he had been emperor for only four years. Not yet thirty, a young man renowned for his brilliance (he had studied medicine), he had never expected to reach the throne for the simple reason that he had three older brothers. However, within the space of a few years, death had removed two of them, and when his father, John, was shot in a hunting accident, the dying emperor deliberately passed over an older son and set the crown on Manuel’s head. Now, whether or not he was fully conscious of the fact, he was presiding over an empire in the process of disintegration. After fifty years and more of campaigns, only the coastal districts were free from Turkish invasions. Almost annually, raiding parties would sweep over his Asiatic provinces, causing the inhabitants of those frontier lands to abandon their villages and flee to the cities.
The connecting principle running through Manuel’s policies was the need to play off the various Moslem princes against each other and isolate each of them in turn. The Crusade, once promulgated, had thrown askew his diplomatic maneuvers, for it was bringing together the Moslems in an inflamed united front against Christendom. Since Manuel stood on the brink of war with a Christian power, King Roger of Sicily, he could not possibly conduct major expeditions on two fronts at once. For this reason, in the spring of 1147, he concluded a twelve-year truce with his mortal enemies, the Turks. As double-crossing as this would appear to Louis when he learned of it, Manuel had little choice, for any alternative would have placed his empire in grave risk. In the short term, it was in his interest to speed the Crusaders into Asia Minor as quickly as possible in the hopes that by feeding them into the mouths of the Turks, both groups might devour each other.
Not yet privy to the intricacies of Byzantine policy, which would always remain beyond their grasp, Louis and his Crusaders were blithely proceeding south through Hungary toward the Greek border. By this time Eleanor had received the first of several letters from Empress Irene, stating how joyfully she was looking forward to the visit. Odo, having nothing of military importance to record, was reduced to describing the Hungarian countryside: “It abounds in good things which grow of their own accord and would be suitable for other things if the region had cultivators. It is neither as flat-lying as a plain nor rugged with mountains, but is located among hills which are suitable for vines and grains, and it is watered by the very clearest springs and streams.” While Odo noted agricultural trivia in his diary, Louis, too, seemed free of cares for the time being. Since Hungary offered plenty of food, there had been no problems. In a mood of self-congratulation, he wrote to Abbot Suger that “the Lord is aiding us at every turn,” and “the princes of the lands meet us with rejoicing and receive us with pleasure and gladly take care of our wants and devoutly show us honor.”
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