Eleanor Of Aquitaine (10 page)

The second generation of those first crusaders, forgetting the mystical transport of their sires and the cradle of their nurture in the West, had intermarried, not only with the Greeks, but even with the Saracens, and their progeny the, "Pullani," were often men of substance and consequence who went arrogantly in the Christian city of Antioch. They wore flowing eastern dress, spoke the language of the infidel with native ease, fraternized in eating-houses with the enemies of Christ, and were unashamed. These mongrels, some of them bearing names famous in the West for valor and piety, amused and enriched themselves by despoiling innocent pilgrims of their substance.
⁸
Was it for the defense of this degenerate race that the Franks had mortgaged their fiefs and suffered their hardships and their losses?

It was otherwise with the queen, whose childhood in Bordeaux made not only turbaned Moslems but Roman temples and stadia and playful bacchanalian figures more companionable. To her Antioch was the essence of poetry, the, "trite touched with the strange." Here in the market of Pisan and Amalfitan, she stood in the gateway of that merchant route which, beginning beyond the harems of Scheherazade in the East, ended in the West beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Some of the red and brown sails of Moor and Jew and Sicilian would be shaken down at last in the river moats of Bordeaux below the towers of her own castle of the Ombrière. Paris was no longer to her the summit of the world. Byzantium was infinitely more glorious; Antioch was more intellectually quickening, more stirring to the heart, than the Ile with all its schools. As for the prayer call of the Saracens, it evoked memories of her own land. She had seen the Moors of Spain upon the highways of the Limousin and understood that Moslem traders will not come where they have no muezzin, no harem where they can wash the desert sand from their feet, no mihrab where they can set their faces toward Mecca.

It was embarrassing in the circumstances that the king was obliged to, accept so long the hospitality of the Prince of Antioch while awaiting the arrival of the troops from Satalia. But in this interval Raymond's hospitality knew no bounds. The Frankish lords hunted on the shaggy slopes of Baghras, chased gazelles beyond the lake of Antioch, loosed their falcons on the banks of the Orontes. In the full tide of spring the queen doubtless made
chevauchée
to that very grove where Apollo, pursuing Daphne among the cypresses and the waterfalls, found himself at last embracing a pink laurel bush.

In spite of all this splendid entertainment, Louis temporized. He would not commit himself to the strategies proposed in Antioch. And the more the queen declared for Raymond's military plans, the more certain he became that he must not support them. He hardly needed the wakefulness of the chaplain in his bedchamber to remind him that the queen's counsels in war had always been regrettable. He had only to bethink him of the ineffaceable tragedies of Laodicea and of Vitry. Hosts of unshriven dead cried out to him from purgatory to beware. Louis and his
mesnie
were frozen into distrust of the queen, and what they saw in Antioch did not serve to reassure them. Let the Poitevin plan seem never so expedient, the Franks could not have followed Eleanor or Raymond over the safest of bridges to the new Jerusalem.

During those brilliant spring days in which military plans were under discussion, Louis and his counselors had been disquieted by certain long and animated conversations in the
langue d'oc
that went on between the Prince of Antioch and the queen in the gardens of the Orontes and on the terraces of Mount Silpius. There was both eagerness and vivacity in these colloquies, and certain Poitevins, who were not excluded by the barrier of dialect, appeared to find the talk not only significant, but richly amusing. The prince and his friends seemed to waken latent gifts of speech and manner in the queen. She was twenty-five and conscious of her moment. In Antioch she held life in her hand like a goblet of untasted wine. Louis had never seen her shine with such colors nor maneuver such followings. Was it merely the return to familiar speech and custom in her uncle's palaces, or something in the sharp chiaroscuro of Syria that, reminding her of her own provinces, restored her to herself? It seemed that the clear black shadows of the cypresses, the crisp break of water in fountains, the definite scent of lemons in gardens and spice in the bazaar, cleared her senses and purged the humors from her brain.

It was in the course of these intimacies that Raymond learned about the queen's attacks of
accidia
, which, beginning with moderate onsets in Paris, had swollen to a first-rate malady between Metz and Antioch. He was not surprised to find she was discontented with her role as Queen of France and that her mind had strayed to alternatives. The bishops and abbés and chaplains assigned to hedge Louis from dangerous influences in the course of his pilgrimage had thwarted her native gifts for creating a milieu of her own that might have given a little luster to the enterprise of kings and nobles even on the dusty way to Palestine. The vigils of Odo of Duilio outside the king's chamber, and the grip of Thierry Galeran upon the coffers of the expedition, had deprived her of her lawful influence in the counsels of her lord, an influence to which not only her station as queen, but her contribution to the resources of crusade, seemed to entitle her.

There was a touch of chagrin too in her malaise. Louis's counsel of wise men found some fault with her and armed him and themselves against her with concerted disapproval. Abbé Bernard had discovered in her the evil genius of the king in his wretched wars with Thibault of Champagne; in ten years of marriage she had given the Franks no prince; and to cap the climax of their censure the high command blamed her liege vassal, Geoffrey de Rancon, for the disaster in the mountains of Paphlagonia.

Raymond and the Poitevins in Eleanor's vassalage were the last people in the world to admire the austerities of the Franks, and the sequestration of the king in the custody of the eunuch and the monk moved them to sardonic mirth. Thierry Galeran was the special butt of the queen's derision. She played him up amusingly in Antioch with touches of irony? If Louis suspected the pantomime upon the terraces of the palace in which he and his mentors were involved, he behaved with singular magnanimity.

In the midst of these doings in Antioch the apostasy of the infantry left behind in Satalia became known. The prestige of the Franks, now deprived of the valuable hope vested in the foot soldiers for the holy war, fell sharply. At the same time, envoys from Jerusalem with plans to utilize the Frankish hosts in the interests of that city were reported at the gates. Raymond in sudden alarm demanded a plenary council of the barons of France and Antioch on the question of military plans. Again the Prince of Antioch recapitulated his strategy. His was the capable plan of an experienced man, a plan better calculated than others to stay the disastrous course of affairs in the East and shore up the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem for another century. When the prince had made his last point clear, the king was called upon to subscribe. It was a terrible moment. Louis was no such orator as the Prince of Antioch, but he met the challenge with a noble courage. He rose with the Pope's silver cross gleaming on his shoulder and spoke with measure and discretion.

"I have made my vows to go to the Holy Sepulcher, and for this purpose expressly I took the cross. I have come from my country hardly, having endured many calamities. I have no disposition to undertake any wars until I shall have fulfilled my pilgrimage. Afterward I will hear the Prince of Antioch and the other barons of Syria, and following a general council, I will, according to my power, offer myself for the needs of our Lord."

The barons of Antioch, who had been to a terrific expense, were thus undone by the humble pilgrim from France. Raymond entered straightway into one of the rages for which his house was famous. He swore by all the effectual saints of the old Limousin that he would be speedily avenged upon the Franks and the Flemings, who had deceived his reasonable hope and laid the Latin Kingdom open to the despite of the Saracens. It was a fearful transport which appears to have been quoted and misquoted for a long time afterward. William of Tyre, writing forty years after the event, contents himself with saying that, whereas Raymond had surpassed himself in showering benefits upon the Franks, he now flew to the other extreme of doing all he could to injure them.

When the die had been cast in the council of war, there was no longer occasion for amenities. Raymond's fury was undisguised. There was no question of lingering in his villas and palaces. The necessity was obvious of getting out of Antioch with all speed and repairing to the shelter and the counsel of the barons of Jerusalem. Louis, alive now to the snares of Satan, was in the midst of the intricate and perplexing business of marshaling his hosts and getting his harness together when the queen demanded and obtained an audience. At this critical moment she brought him face to face with what proved in the long run the major incident of the holy war. In short, she let him know that she had taken a resolution to separate herself then and there from the Capetian dynasty, to go with him no further on crusade, to lay aside her crown adorned with the lilies of France, to resume her status as Duchess of Aquitaine, to fix her pilgrim staff in Antioch and remain with Raymond in his high place on Mount Silpius.

Significant as it was, the chroniclers give few details of the episode. However, John of Salisbury relates that Louis, who had not ceased to cherish the queen with an almost boyish ardor, was surprised, chagrined, and terribly upset by the outpouring of her grievances, and at once took measures to resist her purposes. If he asked her for the grounds of her discontent, she made no such saucy rejoinder as that ascribed to her by the Minstrel of Reims: "Why do I renounce you? Because of your fecklessness. You are not worth a rotten pear."
¹³
To attribute these words to her is a slander on the polished manners of the queen. It would have been easier to deal with her if she had been moved by mere caprice. But not for nothing had she been bred in dialectic among the scholars of the Ile. What she offered was no madcap impulse secure from reason, but a syllogism that not even the wisest doctors of Paris could refute. She reminded Louis, on no less an authority than that of Abbé Bernard himself, that she was related to him in a degree forbidden by the church, and that by holding her to a sinful marriage, he was putting his soul and hers in jeopardy.

It was true that in the day when Thibault of Champagne had sought to strengthen himself against the king by the marriage of two of his heirs to Louis's vassals, Louis had forbidden the bans on grounds of consanguinity; and Abbé Bernard had written with more than a tone of asperity to the Bishop of Preneste, "How is it that the king is so scrupulous about consanguinity in the case of Thibault's heirs, when everyone knows that he himself has married his cousin in the fourth degree?"
¹⁵
The words had then sounded like a tocsin in Louis's ears, but he had tried to shut them out as part of the clamor of war. Now on the lips of the queen, they rang with new and portentous import.

The council, to which Louis repaired in this crisis, was more alive to Raymond's role in the affair than to the novel and capricious ideas of the queen. Queen or no queen, syllogism or no syllogism, Eleanor was Louis's vassal and his lawful marriage prize, the most valuable piece on the chessboard of feudal Europe. In case of her separation from the king, she could not long remain at large as Duchess of Aquitaine. On whom then did the treasonous Raymond intend to bestow the king's ward in order to buttress his own estates? On himself? On a vassal? On one of the Pullani? On some merchant prince of Amalfi or Genoa? On some emir of the Saracens, with whom he seemed to be so privy? The council fell into a panic. How was Louis, the Pope's emissary, the most Christian King of the Franks, to appear in Jerusalem for conference on the holy war with King Baldwin and his barons, with the Templars, the Patriarch, the Holy Roman Emperor, if, after all his losses from Metz to Antioch, he were to lose besides, within the very limits of the Latin Kingdom, his queen and all her provinces? What story would this be for Abbé Bernard, for Abbé Suger, for the Pope?

The sound vigorous counsels of Thierry Galeran to keep the queen in custody at any cost prevailed. A signal was given to the French army in the night. The queen was seized and fetched, in what state of woe and anguish or downright Poitevin rage we can only guess, to Saint Paul's gate. Before the prayer call sounded from the minarets or Raymond's sleepy watch awoke upon the towers of Mount Silpius, the Frankish hosts for the rescue of
Dame-Dieu outre-mer
had shaken the dust of the city from their feet and taken the road past the fortress of Margab for Tripoli. The midnight exit of the King of the Franks from Antioch with his captive queen, observes William of Tyre, was by no means suitable to the dignity of the foremost king of Christendom, nor by any means comparable to his entrance a few weeks before with flying banners, the pomp of instruments, and the psalmody of choirs.

Over the, "Pilgrim's Ladder," that narrow defile above the sea, Louis bore southward with a terrible agitation in his breast. His brain swam in dialectic, but the universals helped him not at all. He might, he reflected, let the queen go in peace, whereupon he might marry another princess: but he would have to restore her provinces, and she might bestow them elsewhere. Or he might incarcerate the queen and keep her provinces as the price of treason; but he would then be unable to marry another princess, and he had no son. Or he might temporize and cocker the queen, and bring her to a better mind: but, even if this were possible, what about the sin of consanguinity?

As soon as he could, Louis unbosomed himself to Abbé Suger on the affair in Antioch. It is a great pity that his letter, like many other documents which fell into the hands of the discreet abbé, has been lost; but the reply, which came into more careless fingers, still remains. "If the queen has given you offense," wrote the abbé, "conceal your resentment as best you may until such time as you both shall have returned to your own estates, when this grievance and other matters may be attended to."
¹⁸
In view of their desperate procedure in Antioch, this letter was probably a solace not only to the king but to those mentors by whose advice he had been guided.