Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (19 page)
Leaving the valley of the Maeander, they climbed to higher ground, winding up into the foothills of the Phrygian mountains toward the apostolic city of Laodicea, where Louis planned to rest and replenish his supplies. Harassed at every step by the Turks, who assaulted boldly and retreated skillfully and easily, they arrived at Laodicea on January 3, 1148, to find the city virtually deserted. The Greek inhabitants had fled, taking with them all the edibles they could carry. For over a week the Crusaders lingered at Laodicea in a mood of cockiness, for they had driven off the Turks several times by now. The route to their most immediate destination, Adalia (the modern Antalya), on the same seacoast from whence they had recently come, wound over high desolate mountains and through the rugged pass at Mount Cadmos. Lacking native guides, having in fact no clear idea of direction, they were compelled to take their bearings from the sun and hope that God would see fit to shepherd them over the mountains. At the best of times it was a treacherous journey, but for a starving, undisciplined army who had to contend with winter storms and Turks stealthily nipping at their heels, it had all the makings of a nightmare.
Toward the middle of January, under the watchful eye of the enemy, the column slowly began moving up the mountain through a landscape as still as death. The hillsides were scattered with the skeletons of entire horses; with skulls, legs, rib cages of men, many picked clean by vultures but others still covered with rotting clothes and flesh. The corpses sprawled grotesquely where they had fallen, on their knees or faces, some on their backs with eyeless sockets staring up at the sky. For Conrad’s ill-fated Germans, the Crusade had terminated here.
On the day set for the crossing of Mount Cadmos, Louis took charge of the column’s rear, which included the unarmed pilgrims and the baggage. Commanding the vanguard was one of Eleanor’s vassals, her old friend Geoffrey de Rancon, in whose castle she and Louis had spent their wedding night. It would be said later that Eleanor was marching with Geoffrey at the head of the column, a highly unlikely and dangerous position for an important personage such as the queen of France. Nevertheless, she must have been riding closer to the front of the line than the back. At noon, Geoffrey, unencumbered by baggage, reached the mountain’s windy summit, where he was supposed to make camp for the night. Disregarding his orders, he decided to advance a bit farther, for he felt that the march had been too short that day. Scouts whom he had sent ahead assured him that there was a more wholesome spot for the camp on a nearby plateau, and after consulting with Louis’s uncle the count of Maurienne, de Rancon ordered the column to move on. Geoffrey’s disobedience, if such a word can be applied to an action so normal in Louis’s disorganized army, alarmed no one, least of all the queen. When in the past had anyone, from the highest nobleman to the common foot soldier, paid attention to Louis’s edicts, especially this one, since the king had clearly misjudged the amount of time needed to cross the mountain? Little did the queen know that the seeds of carelessness that Louis had allowed to be sown during the past eight months were now about to bear fatal fruit.
By midafternoon, the rear of the column, believing, in happy ignorance, that they had almost reached the end of the day’s march, began carelessly to lag behind. Soon the army was divided, some having already crossed the summit, others still loitering along the ridge, their progress impeded by falling rocks. The Turks, who had been keeping a close watch from a distance, immediately recognized the situation for what it was, and now they quickly moved in to press their advantage. Swarming over the mountain with howls of
“Allah akbar”
(“God is great”), thrusting and slashing as if with scythes among wheat, they fell upon the panicked Christians, soldiers as well as unarmed pilgrims. As the rocky paths grew slippery with blood, humans, horses, and baggage hurtled over the precipices into the canyon below. Although there was no avenue of escape, for the Turks had seized the top of the mountain, those who tried to flee were pursued and butchered, “overwhelmed among the thick-pressing enemy as if they were drowned in the sea.” William of Tyre wrote that “our people were hindered by the narrow defiles, and their horses were exhausted by the enormous amount of baggage,” baggage that, as everyone believed, must have belonged to the women.
“Allah akbar”
(“God is great”), thrusting and slashing as if with scythes among wheat, they fell upon the panicked Christians, soldiers as well as unarmed pilgrims. As the rocky paths grew slippery with blood, humans, horses, and baggage hurtled over the precipices into the canyon below. Although there was no avenue of escape, for the Turks had seized the top of the mountain, those who tried to flee were pursued and butchered, “overwhelmed among the thick-pressing enemy as if they were drowned in the sea.” William of Tyre wrote that “our people were hindered by the narrow defiles, and their horses were exhausted by the enormous amount of baggage,” baggage that, as everyone believed, must have belonged to the women.
Amid the clash of battle, the king escaped notice, for in his soldier’s tunic he looked like everyone else, his disdain for the trappings of royalty inadvertently saving his life. His royal bodyguard exterminated in a mess of smashed skulls and severed limbs, “he nimbly and bravely scaled a rock by making use of some tree roots which God had provided for his safety” and, his back to the mountainside, defended himself until his assailants moved on. “No aid came from heaven, except that night fell.”
Meanwhile, Eleanor and the others in the vanguard were unaware of the skirmish. As the afternoon wore on, however, Geoffrey de Rancon began to grow apprehensive and at dusk he sent a party of knights back to investigate. Not until nearly midnight did the search party chance to come across their king, bloody and exhausted, stumbling on foot over the mountain with a few companions.
There was to be no sleep that night. From one end of the camp to the other could be heard the sound of voices, weeping, mourning, shrieking grief. “With tremulous voice and tearful sighs,” women went out to search the mountain road for sons and husbands, servants sought their masters. During the night the stragglers drifted in, those who had escaped death “rather by chance than their own wisdom” after hiding among the bushes and rocks until nightfall.
Beside herself with anxiety during that agonizing evening, Eleanor’s first reactions at the sight of her husband must have been shock and relief—shock at the immensity of the disaster, relief at the knowledge that she and Louis had escaped. At that point, however, she had no assurance that they were out of danger, indeed the facts greatly pointed to the opposite conclusion, for in the morning she could see the Turks spread over the mountainside, waiting. They were gabbling in loud voices, plucking hair from their heads, and throwing it on the ground. These exaggerated gestures, she learned, meant that they would not be dislodged from their posts.
Once the first horror had subsided, the angry survivors began to cast about for someone on whom to affix the blame. The man they chose as scapegoat, interestingly enough, was Geoffrey de Rancon; he and the king’s uncle had disobeyed orders and therefore should be hung, suggestions that Louis ignored. By many of the Franks, Eleanor, too, was cast in the role of leper. It was, they said, her luggage that had prevented the rear guard from overcoming the Turkish attack, her friend Geoffrey de Rancon who had disobeyed orders, her Aquitainians who had been traveling in the vanguard and thus had escaped the brunt of the massacre. That these charges were exaggerated is obvious; that the real reason for the catastrophe was, not Geoffrey’s disobedience, but Louis’s maladroit leadership the Franks were not willing to acknowledge. From this time on, however, resentment against the queen began to mount, and although none declared that she deserved hanging, even her women friends treated her coldly. It is against this omnipresent feeling that she had contributed to the fiasco that consequent events must be seen.
Now that the worst had happened, Louis began to behave with perfect correctness as a commander. Marshaling what remained of his forces, he ordered them to maintain an order of march, obey their officers, and stand their ground in combat until given orders to withdraw. In this way, then, they began the tortuous descent down the mountain, the Turks aware of their weakness and harassing them every foot of the way. They had little food and no water. Those sufficiently parched with thirst bled horses or asses and drank the blood, for meals they grilled dead horses, both their own and those left behind by the Turks. “With this food,” we learn from Odo, “and bread baked in the ashes of campfires, even the wealthy were satisfied.”
The Crusaders who emerged from the mountains on January 20 could hardly have been called an army. Many of their horses and mules had died or been eaten. Swords and equipment had been thrown away or long since sold for food. Their baggage had enriched the Turks, and what had not been captured lay at the bottom of ravines. They had raw blistered hands, cracked lips, and their filthy clothes hung in tatters. Many, including a number of bishops, had no shoes. The condition of Queen Eleanor was not recorded by Odo, but it is certain that she was in no better shape than anyone else. If they had naively harbored illusions about having finally reached a safe haven, they were quickly disabused, for the next five weeks in the Greek city of Adalia were to be as agonizing as any they had theretofore experienced. Once a delightful seaside town boasting fertile fields and orchards, Adalia was now a beleaguered city unable to cultivate its fields for fear of Turkish attacks and dependent upon food brought in by ship. What provisions the townspeople did possess they were willing to share for only the most exorbitant prices.
The unutterably traumatic events of the last two months had tempered Eleanor’s bold spirit; her nerves were strained to the snapping point. Coming down the mountain, fearful that the next minute would bring a hailstorm of arrows, she had concentrated on only one thing: survival. Now it appeared that she had hoped for too much as misfortune piled on misfortune. The chilling information from the Greeks at Adalia was that Antioch, the gateway to the Holy Land, still lay a forty days’ march over mountainous, Turk-infested terrain. By sea the trip took merely three days, but even supposing ships could be found on that deserted coast in midwinter, there was no money to pay the fare of four silver marks for each person.
Sleeting rain and snow accompanied by lightning and thunder lashed the few tiny tents remaining; sickness and starvation swept the camp; horses died for lack of fodder. During that first week in Adalia, the camp rumbled with dissension. Louis made his views explicit: Since they could not transport the whole group by sea, they clearly had no choice but to resume marching overland. His disgruntled barons were equally adamant about wishing to put to sea, even if it meant leaving thousands behind. “Let us,” the king insisted, “follow the route of our fathers whose incomparable valor endowed them with renown on earth and glory in heaven.” His head full of visions of crusading triumphs, he talked about “martyrs” and “valor,” but to his barons. and knights, the words conveyed only a bizarre kind of death wish that they had no desire to share, and they told him so. There is no evidence of Eleanor’s reaction to all this, but with the refuge of her uncle’s court only three days away, she must have been anxious to exit by any available escape hatch. If Louis wished to pursue some mad dream of martyrdom, she would leave him to his destiny, but under no circumstances would she accompany him. It is not difficult to conjecture that she was among those who, after violent debate, “forced” (the word is Odo’s) the pliable king to a saner point of view.
The decision was made in the nick of time because, with each passing week, the odds increased against leaving Adalia alive. The beginnings of plague had broken out in the camp, and the size of the burial ground needed to be enlarged daily. Not until the end of February, however, did there arrive both the ordered vessels and a favorable wind. Those Crusaders who still had money and horses, or a noble name, hastened aboard the hastily convened convoy, while the rest were left to manage as best they could. Many would perish of disease OT starvation outside the walls of Adalia, many would be killed or captured, and over three thousand, converted to the Moslem faith in exchange for bread, would vanish without a ripple into the lands of the Turks.
Finally there rang out the familiar cries of the master mariners, “Unfurl the sails for God’s sake.” In a short time, the wind filled the sails and bore Eleanor and Louis, barely on speaking terms by this time, out of sight of land. The journey, the Greeks had promised, would take three days, but they had not allowed for the unpredictability of the weather. Battered by winter storms, the convoy was carried farther from the coast of Asia Minor but no nearer Syria, and when Eleanor lay down at night, she did not know whether the morning would find her at the bottom of the sea.
Three weeks later, on March 19, 1148, the king and queen of France, ragged and seasick, sailed into the port of Saint Simeon near Antioch.
Eleanor spent only ten days in Antioch, but those days would affect the history of western Europe for the next three hundred years. Nonetheless, on that first day when she stepped, pale and exhausted in health, into the arms of Prince Raymond, no such far-reaching consequences could have been predicted. In Syria, the winter rains had ended. It was spring, and the hillsides were covered with red and blue anemones. Unlike the haughty Manuel Comnenus, Raymond had not waited in his palace for the arrival of the Crusaders but had hastened the ten miles down the Orontes River to the port, with almost the whole population of the city in his wake. To the chanting of the Te Deum and the cheers of the throng, he had escorted them up to his terraced city on the slopes of Mount Silpius. After the privations of the winter, Antioch must have seemed like an hallucination to Eleanor. It was more like a vast garden than a city, with green pastureland, orchards, granaries, and ancient Roman baths enclosed within its walls. Fourteen hundred years of history were layered here. Once it was the third most important city in the Roman Empire, Julius Caesar had sat in its amphitheater, Herod had paved its streets with marble, Diocletian had built its cisterns. Through its groves of parasol pines and its hanging gardens had trooped the Arabs of Harun al-Rashid, purple-mantled Byzantine emperors, the Turks, and finally the Christians. Ancient, wise, civilized, it immediately reminded Eleanor of Bordeaux and Poitiers and brought back a flood of nostalgia for her native land. But more than the physical beauty of the place made her feel that she had come home: The official language of the city was the langue d’oc, the knights and priests in Raymond’s service were Poitevins, and several of them she had known as neighbors during her childhood. Best of all, however, there was the magnificent Raymond himself.
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