Eleanor Of Aquitaine (5 page)

During the civil war that desolated France from Reims to Troyes, Abbé Suger was at the climax of his reconstruction of the royal y of Saint Denis. He had made his y a vast atelier for the study and fabrication of every kind of beauty that devotion could sanctify. He searched the world for the richest materials and the most skillful craftsmen. He saw the shrine of the patron saint of France as the object of a vast pilgrimage, and he had studied all that architectural stir in the Ile dé France responsive to new need for ampler spaces and more light and a more passionate votive worship for the thousands that swarmed to holy places upon days of fete. He had studied the y of Cluny and the rising cathedrals in the diocese of Sens, among them the growing splendors of Chartres. In his atelier, under compulsion of needs arising from urban development and pilgrimage, he and his builders half designed and half divined the nascent forms of Gothic.

In 1144 the y church, with the stonecutter's dust white as frost upon it, was ready for dedication. Bronze doors on the west front exhibited the Passion and the Resurrection; in the tympanum above the majestic figure of Christ in Judgment sat enthroned above the elders of Israel, and in a humble corner, as if by way of signature to his good work of restoration, showed the small figure of Abbé Suger himself. Inside it seemed that the dim frowning walls and squat arches of the old Romanesque basilica had been beaten into a vast and airy shell blazing with light, gleaming with gold and color. Here tall windows, retelling in brilliant glaze the epic of salvation, dissolved the walls to radiance and shed upon the pavement pools of light that shone here and there as red as martyrs' blood.

It seemed to Abbé Suger that the dedication of the royal y, the shrine of the patron saint of France, the necropolis of the Capetian house, might lift the king from the prostration that now so utterly depressed his spirits. He planned a program in which the king, by bearing a noble part, should recover his confidence. The feast of Saint Barnabas, the 11th of June, was chosen for the translation of the relics of Dionysius the Areopagite from the crypt where they had rested for so many years to the new reliquary tomb in the choir. Not since the dedication of Cluny by Pope Innocent in 1132 had there been a like event of such significance.

Louis, Eleanor, and the queen mother arrived at Saint Denis on the loth, so that Louis might share the vigils of the monks and be present for the services at dawn. At daybreak the bishops not only of the Ile, but of Bordeaux and Rouen and Canterbury, with many others, assembled to asperge the edifice with lustral water. A late biographer of Suger adds some details. There were processions in which the king, carrying the most precious of the reliquaries, led queues of monks and prelates through the cloister to the sound of chanting choirs and instruments; and all the lesser chasses dipped before his reliquary, like the sheaves of Joseph's brethren before the master sheaf. "No one would have taken the king," says the chronicler, "for that scourge of war who had lately destroyed so many towns, burned so many churches, shed so much blood. The spirit of penitence shone in his whole aspect."

At the translation of the relics, the king, the bishops, and Abbé Suger, overcome with holy awe, saw the bones of Saint Denis placed in the choir. Where the relics reposed, marble and porphyry, gold and blue, gleamed on every side. Above the tomb Suger had placed a retable of gold encrusted with precious stones; and at the passage of the transept towered the majestic cross blazing with gold and filigree, jewels and cabochons, which was the central glory of the shrine. The throng was so vast that it was said one could have walked upon the shoulders of the crowd. The day was so hot and the press so great that Eleanor and the queen mother were all but suffocated.

The occasion did the king much good. In the course of it he met Abbé Bernard with whom he had been in such long and painful collision. Though the Abbé of Clairvaux was oppressed by crowds and spectacles, and though he deplored the ostentation of the royal y church, he was induced to quit the solitude of Champagne for the dedication of this famous shrine in the hope of serving there the interests of peace. He had expected to be stern with Louis, but he was impressed with the king's dovelike humility and his wretchedness. It was obvious that he had not deliberately plotted his evil courses, but that he had been the victim of rash advice. Although the abbé had declared that many tears would be required to extinguish the fires of Vitry, he was now put to it to find a means of raising Louis's spirits. He explained that the king was increasing his sins by giving way to despair; that he must be sad, not disconsolate; fearful, but not desperate; contrite without weakness; ashamed, but holding the hope of forgiveness. He then said such touching things of the goodness of God and the largeness of His mercy, that the king recovered a faint hope.

The abbé then, whether upon his own initiative or upon some urgency from Louis, had a talk with the queen. He had seen her before, but he now perhaps for the first time opened his eyes upon her fully, taking the measure of her stature from top to toe. He exhorted her to use her wife's influence over the erring king to bring him to a better mind, and he was prepared, when she was chastened, to offer her spiritual consolations for the woeful tragedies that had befallen the royal house.

But he was amazed to find that she was not sharing in the same degree the king's agony over Vitry, nor seeking counsel about a suitable penance for that catastrophe. She seems to have had uppermost in her mind a bargain, and she had apparently concluded that a compact negotiated with Abbé Bernard would hold in Rome. What she desired was that the abbé should use his influence with the Pope to lift the ban from the Count of Vermandois and recognize his marriage with the Lady Petronilla She seems to have employed dialectic and proffered some exchange of benefits in the parley, for the abbé was presently obliged to wave her out of the arena of debate.

That the queen should venture on discussion of the issues at stake was very surprising to the abbé. In a sudden illumination he recognized the evil genius of the king, that, "counsel of the devil," that had plunged Louis into abysses of sin and remorse. Why had he, so wary of the snares of the flesh, been blind to this primordial ruse, Satan in the guise of a fair seeming woman.
¹
The Abbé of Clairvaux realized that he should in all conscience have been more prescient, and reproached himself for having been so slow in resolving the mystery of the pious king's godless behavior He was forced to rebuke the queen sternly for meddling in what were certainly not her concerns. "Put an end," he said, "to your interference with affairs of state."

Thibault also shared in the dedication of Saint Denis. He made a rich gift of rubies and jacinths to Abbé Suger for the fabric in gratitude for the latter's good offices in helping to extricate him from the impasse with Louis and the Pope.

Suger had reason to feel that the consecration of his y church was pleasing to heaven. The ceremony was rich in itself, but richer in the fruits of peace. A treaty ended the long confusions It shows the marks of compromise and was certainly not the untrammeled device of Abbé Bernard, nor of Louis, nor of Thibault of Champagne. It recited, among other things, that Louis should restore to Thibault his ravaged provinces; and that he should renounce the rash oath he had sworn on the relics and admit Pierre de la Châtre to Bourges. Thibault made his concessions too. Of course, the treaty does not broach the matter of the interdict on the house of Vermandois, which burdened the queen's mind at the conference. It seems that here the irresistible force encountered the impenetrable obstacle and the effect of the collision could not be written down, since none eventuated from the argument. It was visible only in subsequent events. The interdict remained in force; but the royal house rendered its operation null and void by the simple expedient of ignoring the bans that it imposed. This result offers a singular instance in which Abbé Bernard was obliged to skirt a moral obstacle and content himself with less than a loaf in a contention with transgressors.

When peace had been restored and enmities allayed, the queen confided in the abbé in his character as thaumaturge. She had another urgent matter on her mind, in which, in a more subdued mood, she sought his help and advice. She had been Queen of France for seven years and she was now twenty-two, but she had not yet presented to her people the heir so earnestly desired. Could the man of God who had healed the halt, the blind, the deaf, move heaven to bestow on her the grace of motherhood?
³⁵
The Abbé, rejoicing in what seemed a favorable alteration of the queen's purposes, and judging this at least a pious aspiration, promised to support the royal novenas to the Virgin. Whereupon, in the course of 1145, Eleanor gave birth, not to the son so fondly desired by Louis, but to a daughter whom she named Marie in honor of the Queen of Heaven.

AFTER THE CONCORD AT SAINT DENIS there still remained the question of Louis's penance The concern of the bishops for his spiritual state and the deference to his royal person exhibited at the dedication of the y church had restored a measure of his confidence and self esteem. He had been led to see that there was hope in expiation. But how expiate? The hair shirt and other mortifications of the flesh yielded only a moderate relief . Sin so deadly in one in whom virtue was so great an obligation called for no ordinary propitiation. Nothing could be suggested sufficient to demonstrate the extent of the king's remorse. He did what he could to redress the grievances of his people; he lifted his wrath from the provinces he had ravaged with fire and sword; he admitted bishops to the sees of Reims, Paris, and Chalons, which his long obstinacy and blindness had held vacant; but these were mere acts of justice, righting wrongs; they had no virtue as propitiations.

Naturally he considered the salutary effects of pilgrimage.
¹
From his days as oblate of Notre Dame, when the vision of a miter swam before him, he had harbored a project of going as a palmer to Jerusalem and of being in the church of the Holy Sepulcher for the Easter miracle of the sacred fire by which the resurrection of our Lord was annually commemorated. And when his destiny was suddenly confounded, he hoped at some time to fulfill by proxy the vow his brother Philip had made to carry the oriflamme of France to the tomb of Christ.
²
Presently, amidst the groanings of his spirit, it was revealed to Louis what he should do to wipe out his guilt, and these old dreams merged suddenly into a plan of scope and grandeur befitting a king who had put his soul in jeopardy and brought anathema upon his people. It was as if Divine Wrath and Clemency had summoned him with a trumpet to an ordeal signal, impressive, adequate.

Early in 1145 official messengers arrived in Europe from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem with accounts of the disasters that threatened that Christian state as a result of the fall of Edessa in the closing days of 1144. The fact of the catastrophe had long since shed gloom in Europe. It was known that while Count Joscelin of Edessa had been celebrating the season of the Nativity at one of his estates upon the upper reaches of the Euphrates, Moslem hordes had fallen upon his principal city on the northern outposts of the Latin Kingdom, breached its walls, laid low its altars, and taken its burghers into captivity. But what had at füst accounts appeared a distressing incident in the history of those eastern fiefs was now revealed by the messengers as a threat to the very existence of the Christian state of which Edessa was a part. The whole Kingdom of Jerusalem lay exposed by its downfall to the onsets of the infidel. The heroic conquests of the first crusaders were in peril. The patrimony of Christ, the highways of His pilgrimage upon the earth, His Holy Sepulcher, were again laid open to the wanton despite of the Saracens. It seemed that the paynim, revived after two generations, were in the way of digesting the first crusade. If the Latin Kingdom, beleaguered by fresh foes and enfeebled by the dwindling of its own princely houses, was to maintain custody of the holy places, the West must rise to a great occasion.

These tidings, urgent and authentic, produced widespread consternation in Europe, though not all people reacted to them spontaneously in the same way. As a practical matter, the loss of Edessa exposed first and especially the Fief of Antioch; and the Prince of Antioch, Raymond of Toulouse, was the uncle of Queen Eleanor, son of her grandfather the crusading troubadour, and her nearest male relative. The Bishop of Djebail, who was one of the harbingers of disaster, was Raymond's friend and vassal. Naturally, the Prince of Antioch hoped that the danger to which his fief was exposed would move especially the house of Capet to which his house of Poitou and Aquitaine was now related.

Of all the freebooters in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Raymond had been, through both chance and enterprise, one of the most successful. He was a gentleman adventurer whom no obstacles could daunt and no misfortunes could depress. Queen Eleanor remembered him as a youth but eight years her senior in the courts of Poitou, a landless and fatherless kinsman, a younger brother casting about for his place in the sun. He had no relish for the younger brother's portion in the church, preferring a sword to a crosier and the lively
chansons de geste
to the Latin litanies. Henry I of England, after the calamity of the White Ship had bereft his house of so many princes, had adopted the foot-loose Raymond into his household, bred him to a knight's service, and given him the accolade. Even so, he was but an errant knight, a cavalier without a fief, a prince without a prince's state, and at the death of his patron he was again set wholly adrift.

But while Raymond in the flower of his youth was casting about for a career, fortune was seeking him with both land and titles. Bohemund, the overlord of the great Fief of Antioch, died in the Latin Kingdom overseas, leaving among the dwindling nobility of the East only women to defend his county, which was encompassed by enemies on every hand. The barons of Antioch, not wishing to fall subject to the Fief of Jerusalem, scanned the West for an untrammeled knight of high lineage, bred to the exercise of true chivalry, but not too closely related to any crown, to marry their heiress, the widow of their late Count Bohemund, and defend their feudal state. Their eyes lighted upon Raymond For the overlordship of this rich fief there were rivals of course, but Raymond, who was, as the chronicle says,
sages et apercevanz
, outwitted them. To avoid arrest by his enemies on the way out from Poitou to take possession, he divided his followers into little companies, who, adopting various disguises, journeyed at intervals of a day or two along the Mediterranean littoral. He himself, garbed now as a pilgrim, now as a merchant's colporteur, made the journey unassumingly and arrived in his new provinces without being recognized. In adroit collaboration with the Patriarch of Antioch, who, in the interregnum, held the reins of government, he was able also to outwit the widow and presumptive heir of the late Bohemund, who had expected to share the government with him. He succeeded in banishing her from her provinces and espousing in her stead her nine year-old daughter Constance, thus forming an alliance which left him with a much freer hand in pursuing his policies. Since Constance was cousin of the King of Jerusalem, Raymond at once found himself in an enviable station. For ten years before the call to rescue Edessa had alarmed the western world, he had prospered in Antioch and had become so thoroughly expatriate that he no longer coveted any part of the heritage of the house of Poitou. But when Joscelin, by the loss of Edessa, exposed his own Fief of Antioch to the ravages of Turks and Arabs, Raymond's thoughts turned back to that reservoir of superfluous men and inactive treasure in the old Limousin and to his niece, the Queen of the Franks, who could command those resources.

It is very probable that the Capets had early and direct communication from Raymond of Antioch, presenting his own views with regard to the calamity of Edessa. William of Tyre relates that Raymond plied his Capetian relatives in Paris with rich gifts from the bazaars of the Levant.
⁵
But the sovereigns of the Franks, as it happened, needed no seduction. Boredom
(accidia)
was one of the seven deadly sins, and the queen had need of absolution. In the eight years since she had come up from the lively courts of the south, she had exhausted the Ile de France as a theater of interest. Paris offered no proper arena for women, for duchesses, for queens. She was bored with dialectic, bored with universals, with discourse upon the unfathomable nature of the Trinity, bored with bishops and with abbés and the ecclesiastical conclaves over which they presided, bored with dedications and with pious pilgrimages She was not a little bored by her overlord, by his naivete, his scruple over trifles, his slavery to ritual, his lingering immaturity. She longed for the ease and freedom of the road that she had known in Aquitaine, its random contacts, its accidents, its laughter. Antioch, where she was certain to be of the greatest consideration in her uncle's court, offered a purge for the evil that threatened her. As for Louis, his heart burned at the thought of leading his people to the succor of Jerusalem. His mission had been made manifest.
⁶
Without hesitation — and also without the unanimous consent of his counselors — he expressed the warmth and depth of his feeling to the new Pope, and Eugenius replied commending his valor and bestowing his papal blessing upon the enterprise.

Perhaps the uncertainties of his own situation at the time may have influenced Pope Eugenius' theories in regard to the propitiousness of a crusade in the mid-century. The messengers from the Orient found him in exile in Viterbo, unable to occupy Rome and distraught by factions that menaced, on both sides of the Alps, his universal see. What might a common ardor, kindled by the loftiest motives, do to exorcise the heresy and schism and restore Christendom to concord and unity? And since Eugenius relied, in the crises of his career, upon Abbé Bernard, he turned the development of his plans over to the Abbé of Clairvaux, and the abbé, much as he detested war, suppressed his own sentiments and early gave his sanction to the cause. It thus happened that, long before the people of Europe had sensed their destiny, they had been committed to crusade.

In 1145 the king and queen assembled their barons for their Christmas court again in Bourges? On the crossroad between France and Poitou, the court was the grand gathering of the year, an assembly in which to grasp and direct the driving currents of the feudal will. When the Capets had received the homage of their vassals in the palatine city, Louis addressed the concourse gathered from the far corners of Gaul on the matter he had so much at heart. The fall of Edessa had stirred the West; but there was obvious consternation at the king's proposal of a new holy war to redress that grievance. The barons of France, and especially those of the queen's provinces, had been made circumspect by the costly and inconclusive character of former expeditions to the Orient. They remembered the seventy thousand Provencaux who had accompanied the troubadour Count of Poitou upon his ill-starred pilgrimage and whose bones now lay whitening in a far-off Cappadocian wadi many leagues from Jerusalem. Perhaps Louis leaned too much upon the penitential idea in his address, and the barons were not inclined to undertake so much merely to relieve the king from the danger of damnation. The militant Bishop of Langres alone among his vassals rose to the occasion in a striking burst of eloquence. But there was no popular demand to set forth. There was on the contrary a disposition to let those who had fattened in the Orient draw upon their own resources in fallow times.

Abbé Suger surveyed with distinct alarm his sovereigns and his wards in the high mood that possessed them in Bourges.
⁸
He perceived somewhat belatedly that Louis's education, his indoctrination first with the ideology of a bishop and then with that of a king, had produced a strange confusion in his brain. Louis's ideas of himself were mixed, his decisions clouded with conflict. The issue seemed likely to be folly. It was certain that the queen meant to accompany the expedition. Whether her going were to be preferred to her abiding at home was an important question; but it was a vain one. Who could detain her or circumvent her resolution? Could the king, or the Pope, or Abbé Bernard? She could muster more soldiers for the succor of Jerusalem than her lord, and the revenues of her duchy were indispensable. Her spirit fanned the king's aspirations. With
élan
she moved among the barons of Aquitaine who remembered Raymond of Antioch — the sieurs of Rancon and Lusignan, of Limoges and Angoulême, of Thouars and Poitiers Speaking as one of them in the amiable
langue d'oc
, she exhorted the hesitant, jibed at poltroons, fired the ambitious, called upon the ardors of the old Limousin, invoked its saints. Who could say that her motives were less pure than the king's? While the momentous decision was still in the balance, Abbé Suger gave his support to the hesitation of the vassalage. With the courage that challenges martyrdom, he raised his solitary voice against the royal plans, urging reflection and delay. But how could even the Abbé of Saint Denis oppose the Pope, the Abbé of Clairvaux, his king and queen?

From Bourges the ferment spread over the three quarters of Gaul. It crossed the Rhine, the Alps, the Channel, the Pyrenees. In Paris the universals were neglected. Heresies died down even in Aquitaine. The armorer's industry throve from Cologne to Blaye. Barons mortgaged their lands for the wherewithal to go to Palestine. Common men, peering into the matter from the outside, got their minds off the famine that had raged for the past five years and forgot the desolations of the recent civil war.

At the end of Lent in 1146 the barons of Gaul met in council in Burgundy at Vézelay.
¹⁰
But the vast new pilgrim church of Saint Mary Magdalene could by no means shelter the throngs that gathered to hear the papal bull, the predication of Abbé Bernard, to learn what barons were certainly mustering their vassals for overseas, what the tithes would be. From a tribune built on the hillside beyond the walls of the town, Abbé Bernard spoke to the people of his century under the wide roof of the sky, which alone could cover them.

Behind him, enthroned among their barons and their bishops, sat the king and queen, lately shriven, apotheosized by the solemnity of their Easter vows. The abbé was frail and ill, already spent with his wrestlings and his fastings, a mere specter. But setting his lips, as he said, "to the apostolic trumpet," he called with a loud voice upon his generation, and his potent words were, "carried alive into their hearts." He unfurled the bull and read the call to arms, the proffered indulgence for all who, for the remission of their sins, should hasten to rescue the patrimony of Christ from the swelling pride of the infidel. All saw that the king wore upon his shoulder the cross which the Pope had sent for his dedication. Bernard could hardly finish his discourse. Louis, his heart dissolved within him, gave way abundantly to tears, of which he had the gift. He prostrated himself before the abbé in the presence of all his people and received the holy accolade. The barons of Gaul fell in ranks before the Abbé of Clairvaux, eager to have from the man of God their sign and seal. The redoubtable Bishops of Langres and Lisieux pledged their hosts. Every noble house offered its lord, or at least its heir. The common enthusiasm was a purge for private enmities. Old foes closed their ranks. Alphonse-Jourdain of Toulouse placed his banners beside those of the king. Thibault of Champagne enrolled Henry, his eldest son, under the lilies of France.