by Ed West
This cruelty seemed to run deep: the dynasty’s founder, Geoffrey of Anjou’s great-great-grandfather Fulk the Black, was a cheery-sounding fellow with unusual interests in sexual degradations. Although notoriously violating anything that moved, he could be a bit jealous, and had his first wife burned at the stake in her wedding dress in the middle of the marketplace in Angers on discovering her adultery with a goatherd. He then burned down the town a few years later. When Fulk put down a rebellion by Geoffrey the Hammer, his equally awful son, ‘he made him crawl around the floor in front of his courtiers, saddled and bridled like a horse, begging for mercy, while his father screamed, “you’re broken in, broken in!”’1 Later on a trip to the Holy Land, Fulk made his servants flog him through the streets of Jerusalem as he howled for forgiveness. It’s possible all wasn’t entirely well with him, mentally.
Geoffrey Plantaganet’s grandfather, Fulk the Quarreler, had imprisoned his own brother and divorced three of his five wives, while he was described by chronicler Orderic Vitalis as ‘a man with many reprehensible, even scandalous, habits,’ whatever that means. Geoffrey was not exactly a progressive, either; having ruled Normandy from 1144, while his wife was fighting Stephen in England, he had gained a reputation for extreme cruelty. When the canons of Sees elected as bishop one Arnulf, a man whom Geoffrey didn’t like, he had him castrated, and the churchmen had to walk through the city holding the poor man’s penis in a basin to show that he was not qualified as bishop.
The popular story of the Angevin family origins was that while out hunting, Fulk the Black’s grandfather had met and married a lady called Melusine, who was very mysterious and very beautiful and who gave him four sons. However, he began to grow suspicious when at church she always left before Holy Communion, and eventually the husband ordered his knights to grab her as she exited—but she slipped out of her cloak and flew off with two sons under her arms, leaving the other two. This was Gerald of Wales’s story, at any rate, although he did admittedly hate the royal family. Another chronicler, Walter Map, said that Melusine was a sort of dragon, who shrieked horribly as she disappeared through the roof of the church. Map also said the Plantagenets were heirs to the mythological huntsman, King Herlequin, the leader of a group of devils who would haunt the northern coast of France (this French myth evolved into harlequins, who aren’t devils as such but are still slightly sinister figures).
The less interesting truth is that the Plantagenets probably originated with a Breton outlaw called Tertulle the Forester, a sort of bandit in the ninth century who fought the Vikings in the Loire Valley and came to rule his own mini-kingdom in western France.
But later subjects of the Plantagenets would claim that Satan himself was the ultimate dynastic founder, which suggests that the royal family’s PR team faced something of an uphill struggle at the time. Henry II’s son Richard the Lionheart joked that ‘We come from the Devil and we’ll end by going to the Devil.’ Typical of the popular view of the family was that of a mystic called Godric of Finchale, who once had a vision in which King Henry II and his four sons prostrated themselves in a church and climbed up to the altar where they began to clean the crucifix. But as they reached the top of the cross ‘horrible to relate, they began to defile the altar on every side with their urine and excrement.’2
Henry II came to the throne at an exciting time; as the twelfth century was a period of tremendous economic and cultural growth in Europe, an explosion in some ways as dramatic as the Renaissance three centuries later. It saw the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, the growth of the first universities, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great, new and exciting ways of killing people in war, and a rapidly expanding economy and population. There was a huge rediscovery of Greek thinking, much of it through contact with the Muslim world; two Englishmen, Adelard of Bath and Robert of Chester, helped base western science on Elements of Euclid and Ptomley’s Almagest through Latin translations of Arabic copies of the original Greek; Adelard also helped to introduce Arabic numerals to Europe.
There was also a great breakthrough in technology, with inventions such as paper (first recorded around 1100), clocks, oil painting, compasses, buttons for clothes, and mirrors. The center of this burgeoning renaissance was Paris and its university, where between 1179 and 1215 one-third of all students were English.
Europe was also becoming less barbaric. The Normans ate in big halls where food was thrown onto the floor, where it was quickly grabbed by dogs and beggars who were allowed to hang around for scraps, but in the twelfth century came the Liber Urbani, the Book of the Civilized Man. This advised people ‘when, where and how to belch, defecate, fart, spit and urinate politely’ and stated among other things that ‘only the head of household, for example, was entitled to urinate in the hall.’ It was the beginning of etiquette or ‘courtesy,’ although the fact that guests had to be instructed not to pee in the hallway suggests they had some ways, to go.3
But in England, in particular, the twelfth century also saw the emergence of a centralized state and legal system, with law courts, proper records, and juries. In charge of it was the rapacious monarchy, growing in size and hungry for money, and resented by the people funding it; an indication of the Crown’s growth can be seen in its ownership of castles, so that while in 1154, the monarch held 35 percent of England’s 350 fortresses, by John’s reign it owned nearly half of them.
Geoffrey’s son, who took power in 1154, was described by Gerald of Wales as ‘a man of reddish, freckled complexion, with a large, round head, grey eyes that glowed fiercely then grew bloodshot in anger, a fierce countenance and a harsh, cracked voice.’ From an early age, Henry II had shown the sort of spirit that made great medieval kings: as a thirteen-year-old he’d had taken a group of heavily armed friends over to England and demanded money from King Stephen. The monarch agreed to his charming young cousin’s menaces, and six years later handed over the entire kingdom.
By the time Henry became King of England and Duke of Normandy, he was already ruler of his native Anjou, and by the age of twenty-two he controlled the entire west coast of France. He also went on to invade Ireland, a decision that down the years has caused one or two problems.4
This first Angevin king was highly intelligent, and as well as being able to read and write (he was one of only a few kings in medieval times known to read in bed), Henry could speak at least passable English, Latin, two types of French, and Welsh. He had a good memory and knowledge of history, and could converse with people of education, although his tastes weren’t that highbrow. His favorite court jester was one Roland the Farter, who was given a manor in Suffolk on condition that every Christmas he ‘gave a jump, a whistle and a fart before Henry and his courtiers.’ It was not a time of great courtly sophistication, although in fairness Roland apparently trained himself to fart whole tunes.
Full of nervous energy and very fidgety, the king was described as a ‘human chariot dragging all after him’ and was always on his feet, which was a pain as courtiers were not allowed to sit while he stood. He was unable to stay still, even at Mass, and would travel around his realm, drafting laws and hearing cases, his underlings having to sleep in woodlands and fighting over who got the pigsty while the king lay in a nice comfy bed.
Intelligent and energetic, the king could also be stubborn, and once he decided he didn’t like someone, he never changed his opinion of them. However, Henry’s main problem was his temper, and as a result he spent his entire reign fighting. Once, believing that a servant had betrayed him, he ‘aflame into his usual rage, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and sitting as it might be on some dung heap started chewing pieces of straw as if he were sitting in a ditch.’ The servant in question had said something positive about the king of the Scots, which Henry took as a slight. On another occasion, the king accused his butler, Robert Belet, of insolence because he had not given him a sparrowhawk as a present; Be
let was forced to pay a fine of £100, which according to records he was still shelling out eighteen years later. Another of his men, Henry of Essex, dropped the king’s banner during an invasion of Wales in 1157, and was forced to undergo trial by ordeal. His opponent beat him and his lands were confiscated, with Henry of Essex left for dead; however, he recovered and lived for another thirteen miserable years as a monk.
The king’s furious temper would aggravate the central conflict of the era—with the Church, St. Thomas Becket’s murder being one of the few medieval events that has stuck in the public consciousness; but it also fueled the far more hateful war with his own sons, four of the most monstrous individuals of the period.
William of Newburgh said Henry ‘was hateful to nearly everyone,’ and he certainly had a vicious streak. During his standoff with the Church, hundreds of Thomas Becket’s supporters were stripped of possessions, exiled, or imprisoned in chains; clerics could even have their eyes gouged out or genitals hacked off, while a young man who took the king a message from the Pope was blinded and forced to drink boiling water.5 There was also a notorious incident in 1165 when Henry had taken young people hostage in Wales and ordered all the males to be blinded and castrated while the females had their noses and ears cut off.
But, to be fair, Henry was one of the less cruel members of his family.
Eleanor
As well as his land in England, Normandy, and Anjou, Henry had acquired another huge chunk of territory two years before he became king by marrying the slightly risqué Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor was a divorcée previously wed to King Louis VII of France and was so scandalous that a gossipy English monk, called Richard of Devizes, observed none-too-subtly that: ‘Many know what I would that none of us knew. Let no one say any more about it. I know too well. Keep silent.’ Henry’s father Geoffrey had also supposedly ‘personally verified Eleanor’s appetite for passion before recommending her to his son,’6 which says something about how messed up the family was.
Eleanor was one of the most culturally influential people of the medieval period, both in France and England, to a large part helping to create our idea of romance. She came from the intensely passionate and sensual region of Aquitaine, now southwest France but at that time an entirely separate country with its own language, culture, and mind-set.
Eleanor’s grandfather Duke Guilhelm (William) IX was a ‘crusader, womanizer and poet of love and loss—the first of the troubedours,’ that is the romantic poets of Aquitaine.7 William of Malmesbury had ‘recounted scandalous rumors of the duke’s provocative exploits and his sardonic wit,’ among which that ‘he ordered that his mistress’s portrait should be painted on his shield . . . declaring that “it was his will to bear her in battle as she had borne him in bed.”’ The Aquitainians matched corny romance with deep faith, and Eleanor’s father Guilhelm X had died on pilgrimage to the relics of St. James at Compostenla in Spain. Eleanor, therefore, became duchess aged only twelve or at most fifteen, an incredibly eligible heiress who brought with her one of the fertile regions of Europe, including the best wine producing area in the world. Had she looked like Shrek she would have been a great catch, but as it was she was also fiercely intelligent and beautiful.*
Eleanor was the epitome of sultry Latin sensuality, while her husband Louis was the height of northern European uptightness. The royal couple were comically mismatched.
At the time the King of France, Louis the Fat, was dying of dysentery but was keen to have Aquitaine to add to his realm. He had arranged for Eleanor to marry his eldest son Philip, but unfortunately he was killed after tripping up on a stray pig in Paris (just one of those twelfth-century hazards). Instead, she was wed to Philip’s younger brother Louis, who had been educated to be a cleric by Suger, the abbot of St. Denis near Paris and one of the greatest minds of the age. It wasn’t ideal, for ‘Louis was too pious and rigid for his young, beautiful, and vivacious wife, who declared that she had married a monk not a king.’8 The younger Louis was ‘by all accounts, besotted with his wife, offering her an infatuated, puppyish devotion,’9 but it was never going to be enough, even when he massacred over a thousand people in order to prove himself to her.
The notorious incident happened after the king had arranged for Eleanor’s sister Petronilla to marry his cousin Raoul. Raoul, however, was already married and Petronilla was engaged to a count, Theobald of Blois and Champagne, and so naturally the Pope didn’t approve. Nor did Theobald, obviously, and in an effort to show his masculine dominance to his wife, Louis marched into Champagne and at Viray killed 1,300 people who had hidden in a church, burning it down.
The newlyweds soon got to see the world when Louis took his young wife on crusade, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster. While the Arabs had conquered Jerusalem almost four centuries earlier, it was the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, a threat to the eastern Christians of Constantinople, which had inspired the western Catholic Church to try to conquer back the Near East. Although the crusade had been preached by Pope Urban II, much of the original drive had come from an obscure figure called Peter the Hermit, who led a huge army of peasants and desperados across Europe before most were slaughtered in the Middle East, if not before. The crusaders had conquered Jerusalem in 1099, and this led to the establishment of a number of Christian kingdoms on the coast of what is now Lebanon and Israel, in a region they called ‘Outremere’ (‘overseas’). However, while the original crusaders had settled down and even began to trade with their Muslim neighbors, they were soon disrupted by new arrivals eager to fight a holy war in a region they knew absolutely nothing about, ‘newcomers from the west who were both stupidly aggressive and aggressively stupid,’ in the words of one historian.’10 The result was endless conflict.
The trigger for the new crusade was a series of disasters that befell the crusader kingdoms. Bohemund II, prince of Antioch, was fighting some Christian Armenians when the Turks came along and cut his head off, the local emir having it embalmed and sent to the Caliph of Baghdad, who was said to be delighted. Then in 1131, Baldwin II of Jerusalem had died while fighting, leaving a daughter, and Geoffrey of Anjou’s father Fulk came all the way from Flanders to marry this Melisende on the understanding that he would become king. However, the crusaders soon fell out among themselves after rumors Melisende was having an affair with the Lord of Jaffa, and then Fulk died after being thrown from a horse while chasing a hare. Then the city of Edessa fell to the Muslims; this triggered a new crusade, preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and among those who volunteered to take the Cross was King Louis of France.
It didn’t go well; for a start Eleanor’s baggage train was said to be so large it ‘impaired the army’s mobility’11 and when they got to the Middle East she seems to have had an affair with her own uncle, the handsome Ramon. To start with, Ramon and Louis had disagreed over military tactics, and Eleanor took her uncle’s side. ‘The long, laughing conversations between uncle and niece became embarrassing for everyone,’12 especially as the two spoke in Occitan, the language of Aquitaine, which the people of Paris couldn’t understand. When Louis declared his plans to leave Antioch for Jerusalem, she refused to go with him. He remonstrated with her and she reminded him that they were actually related, implying that under Church law she could get the marriage annulled.
The royal matrimonial troubles became common knowledge and Abbot Suger wrote to Louis in 1149 saying ‘we venture to congratulate you, if we may, upon the extent to which you suppress your anger.’ Which must have calmed him down.
Eventually, the royal couple arrived home, after months traveling through Europe during which they were both sick most of the time. The Second Crusade achieved very little and only ended when the Muslim leader was murdered by his own dwarf. Poor uncle Ramon was killed soon after by the Arabs and his head was sent in a silver box as a trophy for the caliph of Baghdad, who must have been amassing quite a collection of heads by now.
Louis and Eleanor soon split, the pretext being how closely related they w
ere, which the Church was very strict about at the time; soon an august assembly of French bishops at Paris ruled the marriage illegal. Although the couple had two daughters, this wasn’t an issue as under French law not only could they not become monarchs but the crown could only pass through the male line.*
The marriage was over. However, Eleanor was such a catch that on her way from Paris to her homeland she was ambushed by two separate suitors hoping to win her hand by rather unorthodox means.
One of her admirers was Theobald V, the new count of Champagne, whose father had previously been attacked by Louis; she managed to avoid him, and Theobald later married Eleanor and Louis’s daughter Alix.† The other was Geoffrey of Anjou, younger son of Geoffrey and Matilda, who also failed. So it was a huge shock when she was betrothed to Geoffrey’s older brother Henry, with whom her husband had previously been at war, especially as Eleanor was eleven years older than her new man.
Eleanor had a lasting cultural influence in France and England, introducing the romantic poetic tradition that may have originated in her native Aquitaine, and which did much to shape medieval and so modern ideas about love. Although romantic love is presumably as old as humanity, the tradition of erotic poetry and love songs originated in southwest France, although it may have been influenced by Persia, via Moorish Spain (there are different theories). Courtly love poems often featured repressed and impossible love between aristocratic women and knights of a lower social status whose job it was to guard them, still essentially quite a popular genre in fiction although more recently involving bodyguards or gardeners. Walter Map tells of a story of a queen who lusted after a knight called Galo, and after he got one of his friends to tell her he was a eunuch, she sent one of her ladies in waiting to seduce him and ‘put her finger on the spot [and] bring back word of whether he was man or no.’