Eleanor of Aquitaine (20 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Like all the men of her family, the prince was handsome and virile, a hearty adventurer who combined the traits of prowess and beauty that Eleanor admired so highly in a man and that of course she had failed to find in her husband. A true son of the Troubadour, Raymond had, like his father, considerable charm—charisma we would call it now—as well as a wry sense of humor, which often colored his actions: Indeed, his life story would have made an ideal theme for one of William’s poems. Thirteen years earlier, while a knight at the English court, he had been tapped by King Fulk of Jerusalem as a husband for Princess Constance, the eight-year-old heiress of Antioch. There were, nevertheless, a number of obstacles to the marriage, the most serious being Constance’s mother. Acting as regent, Alice had been ruling the principality and had no intention of giving up her power. Furthermore, she seems to have disliked her daughter and planned to marry her to Manuel Comnenus, an alliance whose political implications thoroughly horrified the Frankish barons of Syria. Therefore it was with the utmost secrecy that Raymond had journeyed to the Holy Land disguised as a peddler. Once there, he dealt with Alice by asking her to marry him, a not inappropriate match, since Raymond was twenty-one and Alice not yet thirty. Flattered, she was silly enough to allow Raymond entrance to the city, going so far, in fact, as to welcome him with an excess of emotion. While preparing for the wedding, she received the news that Raymond had just married her daughter, making himself the undisputed ruler of Antioch.
Now thirty-four, the youngest son of William IX was in his prime; he was, however, also fighting for his life. Instrumental in setting the Crusade in motion, he had hoped that his good fortune at having a niece who was queen of France would ultimately rescue his kingdom from the Turks. More than hoped, he had assumed that his close relationship with the Frankish royal house would hold the key to survival. That he was perched on the edge of a volcano he must have been acutely aware, and in fact, a year later his severed head would be adorning a gate in Baghdad. If the size and strength of the life preserver now being offered was unquestionably puny, nevertheless he still regarded it as sufficient for his purposes. The crusading army that disembarked at Saint Simeon was only a shadow of its bulk at Metz, but even so, many of those slain or abandoned along the way had been pilgrims or infantry, and Louis’s host remained the most formidable Christian force to appear in the Holy Land in half a century. The news of its coming had succeeded in terrifying the Moslem world to the extent “that now they not only mistrusted their own strength but even despaired of life itself,” a response that Raymond wished to take advantage of. First, however, with traditional Aquitainian hospitality, he spared no expense in making his guests feel welcome.
For the next few days the Franks were treated to a dizzying round of banquets and hunting parties. Installed in Raymond’s palace with its running tap water, glass windows, and perfumed candles, Eleanor was able to discard her stinking rags and bathe with the luxurious soap for which Antioch was famous. Her uncle furnished her with a new wardrobe of silken gowns so exquisitely woven by the silk makers of Antioch that only the highest ecclesiastics in France could afford them. At the fêtes, Eleanor shared a place of honor with Raymond. The entertainment—the troubadours, minstrels, and Saracen dancers—was all very gay, very ribald, very characteristic of her grandfather’s court at Poitiers. At table, they drank Persian wines cooled with snow from Lebanon mountains and Mount Hermon and dined on the specialties of the land: sugar, oranges, figs, dates, quinces, and melons. Syria was famous for its white bread and apples of paradise, which we know as bananas, as well as for artichokes, asparagus, truffles, and lettuce, the latter being considered a choice dish. All of this acted as an aphrodisiac on Eleanor’s sensibilities, and her natural appetite for pleasure quickly revived. Now that the journey over the mountains was receding into an anguishing memory, she threw herself almost tumultuously into living. Her affection for her uncle, and his for her, was widely noted, and though their intimacy seems natural under the circumstances, it was not received with any special favor by the Franks, who regarded his attentions to their queen as excessive. Eleanor’s exuberance did not escape comment from the increasingly hostile Franks, who continued to blame the incident at Mount Cadmos on her luggage and who undoubtedly read into the racy conversations in the
langued’oc,
which they could not fully understand, more than was actually there.
langued’oc,
which they could not fully understand, more than was actually there.
If Raymond made an inordinate fuss over the queen, he did not forget the others. “Raymond showed the king every attention on his arrival,” reported William of Tyre. “He likewise displayed a similar care for the nobles and chief men in the royal retinue and gave them many proofs of his great liberality. In short, he outdid all in showing honor to each one according to his rank and handled everything with the greatest Magnificence.”
But it was Eleanor with whom he spent his time. After a twenty-year separation, they had much of a personal nature to discuss, but their conversations must certainly have focused on politics, that is, Raymond’s precarious position with the Turks. Aware of his niece’s intelligence, he would have explained that Nureddin had established himself along the Christian frontier from Edessa to Hama and had spent the last six months methodically snatching, one by one, the Frankish fortresses east of the Orontes River. As for Count Joscelin, whose laxness had caused Edessa to fall into Turkish hands four years earlier, he could barely hold his own. If the Turks were to attack Antioch in force, Raymond would be lost. But now, with the arrival of the Crusaders, he could easily take the offensive and strike at the heart of Nureddin’s power by taking his city of Aleppo. He might also reclaim his lost provinces along the Orontes, but most importantly, he could recapture Edessa, whose fall had given rise to the Crusade.
To Eleanor, his plan seemed eminently reasonable. Should the Turks succeed in overrunning northern Syria and capturing Antioch, the entire Holy Land would be threatened, and nothing would then prevent them from sweeping down to Jerusalem. Obviously the security of the Holy City would best be established by driving back the Turks in the north. If the merits of Raymond’s plan were obvious to Eleanor, they were not so to Louis. To her amazement, the king refused to hear of the scheme. He said, incredibly, that his Crusader vow obliged him to visit Jerusalem before he undertook any campaign, and he had no intention of fighting anyone until he had first worshiped Jesus Christ at the Holy Sepulcher. His reasoning seemed so childish, not to say irresponsible, that Eleanor may not have believed him at first. The recapture of Edessa had been the whole purpose of the Crusade. Had he dragged thousands of people on a three-thousand-mile journey merely to pray? The idea was too bizarre to be credible. Since he was behaving irrationally, she curbed her fury and humored him like a child, counting on Raymond to bring him back to reality.
The days that followed were full of conflict. At a full meeting of the Crusader barons, Raymond formally outlined his tactics—and Louis disdainfully rejected them. When the king realized that Eleanor supported her uncle, it only strengthened his resolve to have nothing to do with Raymond’s plan. His decision, he declared stubbornly, was irrevocable, and in this his barons supported him. Raymond was not only baffled at this turn of events but enraged. “When Raymond found that he could not induce the king to join him, his attitude changed. Frustrated in his ambitious designs, he began to hate the king’s ways; he openly plotted against him and took means to do him injury.”
Raymond’s nets had been cast carefully, but they caught only the wind. Despite the beauty of Antioch, despite Raymond’s gifts, Louis felt offended, as did the rest of the Franks, by what they found there. The principality did not appear in danger, indeed its people lived a life of pleasure in mosaic-tiled houses and splendid gardens with fountains and marble-tiled pools; even the common people lived more ostentatiously than any king of France. Raymond himself, far from defending the Holy Sepulcher, wore soft slippers and loose gowns like some oriental potentate. For that matter, Louis could barely distinguish the Saracens from the Frankish Syrians, who imitated the Moslems by wearing flowing garments, beards, and turbans and who, to his horror, had even intermarried with the natives. To add to his consternation, their offspring, the Pullani, had been invited to the banquets he had attended, and failing to understand that many Moslems lived on perfectly amicable terms with the Christians, Louis deplored having to dine with his enemies. Most shocking to him, however, was the sight of mosques in Antioch; even the Christian churches, which had been decorated by Saracen artists, looked like mosques.
He was not alone in his hostility toward Raymond. The ancient enmity between the Franks and Aquitainians had been building to a crescendo ever since Mount Cadmos, and now all the Franks could read into Raymond’s battle plans was that more territory would be added to the domains of a southerner. At this point, they were in no mood to add prestige to the house of Poitou. As to what the Crusaders from Aquitaine thought about all this, the record unfortunately provides no clue. Their Crusader vows, apparently, bound them to abide by the decisions of their commander.
One would get the impression from these happenings that logic played little part in their outcome. The situation was even more absurd, for underneath the welter of all the bickering and political maneuvering hid the real reason for Louis’s inexplicable decision: the familiar emotion of jealousy. Put at its simplest, the king suspected that Eleanor had taken the prince as her lover.
The contradictions of Eleanor’s marital life that had been curled like a worm in the center of her slumbering sensuality now erupted into full view. Circumstances had given her a throne, but since it had brought her nothing but unhappiness, she counted it worthless; marriage had brought her a king for a husband, but this king more nearly resembled a monk. While Louis had been a faithful husband, the reason for his fidelity was, ironically, that he had utterly no interest in sex. As if all this were not enough, he was incurably dull, and while she could never truly have loved a dull man, she certainly could have lived with one. What she could not live with was a fool, and since the beginning of the Crusade, Louis’s stupidity, his cataclysmic insecurities, had been writ clear for all to see.
It would have been natural for a woman of Eleanor’s position in the twelfth century to have had these negative feelings about her husband. Other queens had been desperately unhappy in their marriages, but they had accepted the situation, either because the prestige made them so much better off than other women or perhaps from the feeling that husbands were lords and masters, free to treat wives as they wished. If a queen suffered, she did so in private. If her marriage ended, it was her lord’s decision, and she retreated in silent humiliation to her father’s castle or into a convent. But this was not Eleanor’s temperament.
Toward the end of March, the queen confronted her husband with a demand for divorce. She would go no farther with his Crusade. Not only was she washing her hands of the holy expedition, she also avowed her intention, one undoubtedly encouraged by Raymond, to relinquish both the crown of France and its king. In the future, she would remain in Antioch and resume her title of duchess of Aquitaine. Her words, evidently, caught Louis unprepared, for although the signs had been everywhere for him to read, he had never anticipated such a declaration. Undoubtedly he recalled her “constant, almost continuous conversations” with Raymond, and now her decision to stay in Antioch only strengthened his suspicions about their relationship. Inhibited and ill equipped to satisfy a woman sexually, he nonetheless did not find the role of cuckold appealing. He was hurt, bewildered, and somewhat angry, but he still loved her and needed her. How Louis initially reacted to Eleanor’s declaration of independence was described by John of Salisbury, who may have heard it from Louis himself the following year. The king, John reported cryptically, “made haste to tear her away.” Tear her away from whom? From Raymond, who, conceivably, might have been present at the meeting? Or did Louis demand merely that she leave the prince’s palace immediately?
In the final analysis, a queen throws away a crown for much the same reason that any woman ends her marriage, that is, when she reaches that point where her life with the man has become unendurable. To deny Eleanor’s strong emotions about Louis’s deficiencies as a husband would be to do her less than justice. And yet her stated reason for wanting a divorce sounds almost impersonal. Undoubtedly this reason had been carefully planned in advance, because it was the only one that might have carried any weight with the king. So when Louis objected to leaving her behind, “she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related into the fourth and fifth degrees.”
Nothing she could have said was more certain to alarm the king. As she surely would have pointed out, there had been rumors about the illegality of their marriage for many years. Five years earlier, Abbot Bernard had written a letter to the bishop of Palestrina in which he flatly stated so, and the late bishop of Laon had also taken the trouble to calculate the degrees of their kinship. Louis could not deny that two centuries earlier Adelaide, the sister of Duke William IV of Aquitaine, had married Hugh Capet, from whom the kings of France were descended. It was not certain, of course, whether the bishop of Laon’s reckoning was correct, but Eleanor herself believed, or so she said, that their having only one child and no sons during eleven years proved conclusively God’s displeasure with their union.
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