Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  Louis the Fat lost no time. Within hours, plans were under way to secure Aquitaine to the crown, and the resourceful Abbot Suger was designated as principal organizer of the wedding arrangements. The bishop of Chartres was dispatched on a secret mission to Bordeaux, where he would ostensibly pay his respects to the duchess but, in reality, make certain of Eleanor’s safety. According to the southern emissaries, the heiress was under heavy guard at the Ombrière Palace, but Louis wished to take no risks. If reports were to be believed, Aquitaine swarmed with anarchists who would not hesitate to filch their liege lady from her rightful destiny. With all the dangers menacing the roads, Louis could not expect Eleanor to travel alone to the heart of France; instead, it was necessary to make a special expedition to bring her back. Nor was it enough to simply fetch her. It had to be accomplished in a style befitting this unprecedented occasion, with a pageantry gorgeous enough to impress the frivolous Aquitainians.

  On June 18, 1137, a mighty cortege threaded its way over the hills of the Parisian suburbs in the direction of Orléans. Under the blue and gold banners of the fleur-de-lis they marched, two by two, first the heralds and standard-bearers, then the commanders: Count Theobald of Champagne and Count Ralph of Vermandois, who was the king’s cousin and seneschal of France. The two counts, bitter rivals who had been persuaded to bury their hostilities for the occasion, were accompanied by the man unofficially in charge, Abbot Suger. They were followed by the chivalry of France, but in addition to the noblest barons and knights in the land there was a sizable body of squires, infantry, and cavalry. Next came a train of pack animals carrying portable kitchens, tents, provisions, sacks of silver deniers, and presents for the bride. To call this procession of five hundred or more a nuptial escort would not be accurate. It was a veritable army that moved down the highroad, carefully keeping within the king’s lands. In the midst of the column rode the young prince, his eyes tired and bewildered under their pale blond lashes. Ringing in his ears were his father’s fervent words: “My most dear son, may the powerful hand of almighty God, by whose grace kings are enabled to reign, protect thee and thine. Because if I had the misfortune to lose thee and those I send to accompany thee, I should care neither for myself nor for my kingdom.”

  Louis the Fat’s precious son was sixteen. Uprooted Unceremoniously from his devotions, he had been washed, combed, and set on a steed facing south. It was not a matter of his questioning his destiny, because he had known for some years that his vocation would not lie in the Church after all and that he would be obliged to marry. But deep within his eyes dwelt fear. Events had moved too swiftly, and he had yet to accustom himself to the curious idea that he would have to sleep with a girl. Had the choice been his, he would have lived his entire life as chastely as the angels in heaven. Women, to him, were needed to preserve the species and provide food and drink, but at the same time they were also the gateway to the devil, in short, necessary but perilous objects. When his forthcoming marriage was spoken of, he smiled with regal good grace, but if the conversation turned coarse, he blushed and lowered his eyes. None of the Franks had seen Eleanor, but they seemed to know everything about his bride-elect: She was fair and white and pink, she had a mouth as soft as an apple blossom and she was also that rarity, a literate woman in an illiterate age. None of this information reassured Louis. Before their departure, his commonsensical father had taken him aside, lecturing him on how to behave: He must conduct himself with dignity and uphold the prestige of the monarchy; he must not arouse hostility by billeting his men in the homes of vassals or plundering their fields for supplies; he must offend no one, especially once he entered Aquitaine. But Louis the Fat had provided no sexual enlightenment.

  As the column marched slowly south in the insufferable heat, its reception among the peasants and burghers was not always cordial. To the indignation of more than one town, the king had financed this expedition by a special levy, and the poor grumbled over the additional and, in their opinion, oppressive, tax so that the prince could be married in style. It was no use saying that the marriage could have been executed at far less expense or that the king could have emptied the royal purse. Nevertheless, there were many who roundly cursed the cortege as it passed.

  By the time they crossed the Loire near Orléans, the heat was intense, the dust stung the riders’ eyes and parched throats. To escape the glaring sky, they began resting between sunrise and sunset and instead traveling by night; perhaps for this reason they entered Eleanor’s domain without fanfare. On July 1, they arrived in Limoges, just in time for the festival of Saint Martial, the patron of that province, and pitched camp along the banks of the Vienne below the walled town. A great crowd had assembled for the annual feast, among them Count Alphonse-Jourdain of Toulouse, and it was here that the duchess’s friends and enemies learned, to their amazement, of Duke William’s death and Eleanor’s imminent marriage to the heir of France. Obviously, it would have been impossible to conceal the presence of such a sizable army indefinitely but, still, Abbot Suger felt uneasy. Already riders had sped away from Limoges to spread the news, and while Suger thought it unlikely that any of Eleanor’s lawless vassals would be rash enough to cause trouble with the army only a week’s ride from Bordeaux, nevertheless he immediately set about creating a reservoir of good will. Shrewdly, he arranged for young Louis to make a triumphal procession into the city to worship at the shrine of Saint Martial, and he also urged the great lords of the Limousin to attend the wedding.

  On the morning of Sunday, July 11, the Capetian cavalcade arrived on the east bank of the Garonne. Had Eleanor climbed to the roof of the Ombrière’s keep at earliest dawn when the air was still cool, she could have watched the troop emerge from the misty hills of Larmont and pitch their richly colored tents in the meadow along the river bank. By noon the field had been transformed into a small-town carnival, the indistinct voices and laughter of knights and the oaths of varlets wafting in tantalizing puffs across the water. Since there was no bridge, small boats plied back and forth throughout the day, ferrying the most important lords into the city, where they were lodged in the ducal palace or in the homes of distinguished burghers. Eleanor’s guardian, Archbishop Geoffrey du Lauroux, had crossed the river himself to welcome Prince Louis and escort him to the archiepiscopal residence. It was on this day, or perhaps the next, that Eleanor met her betrothed for the first time.

  Having been exposed to a variety of persons, ideas, and events from earliest childhood, she had developed strong opinions on most subjects; similarly her ideas on the male sex were quite decided: There was no doubt of it, her prince was not a bold cavalier. Still, he did not lack appeal. Louis, scarcely a year older than she, was said to be a virgin. He seemed gentle and courteous, and his tall, slender, blond looks were attractive enough; but clearly he was not a fighter: His overdelicate mouth and sweet, simple smile almost made him look weak-minded. Eleanor surely was not in love with him, indeed it would have been odd if she had felt such an emotion for a husband cast her way by political circumstance. Nevertheless, she would have known boys whose whispered words had made her heart pound and the blood rush into her face and, by contrast, she knew that Louis did not arouse those sensations in her. On closer inspection, he was as pretty as a girl, and yet, whatever else he lacked in the way of masculinity, he did possess a touching sort of charm.

  Her reservations about the marriage, which of course were not of the slightest interest to anyone, ran far deeper than the personal qualities of Prince Louis. She had never expected to marry anyone but a high lord, in fact she demanded it as her right. In some respects, Louis satisfied these requirements, but at the same time, she must have believed that he ranked beneath her. A wider and deeper geographical barrier than the blue stream of the Loire stood between France and Aquitaine. To be sure, the Capets were anointed kings, but compared to the rich, cultured dukes of Aquitaine, they were an upstart dynasty who had come to the throne only one hundred and fifty years earlier, when the last descendant of Charlemagn
e died. The two lands were different worlds, peopled by different races. Between the Teutonized Celts of the north and the southern Celts, steeped in heady memories of the Romans. Goths, and Saracens, there was little community of blood, even less of speech, thought, and temper. For that reason, tensions developed between the French contingent and their southern hosts, each camp viewing the other with a certain amount of polite condescension, if not barely suppressed disdain. Owing to the delirious heat and possibly to the fact that a language barrier existed between those who spoke the langue d‘oc and the langue d’oil, tempers flared.

  In the days before the wedding, Eleanor rarely saw Louis alone, but as feast followed feast, she had ample opportunity to observe his reactions to her exuberant countrymen and their bold, daringly clad ladies who sang and jested and drank with merciless enthusiasm. Louis may have been reminded of the popular bon mot, “The Franks to battle, the Provencaux to table,” a remark that seemed amply borne out by the tedious froth of the nuptial festivities.

  Day after interminable day passed in feasting. The trestle tables in the Ombrière’s great hall were packed with lords and ladies whose names added up to a roll call of southern chivalry: Thouars, Lusignan, Auvergne. Perigord, Armagnac, Chateauroux, Ventadour, Parthenay, in addition to many more from the petty nobility; there were at least a thousand guests. The banqueting would begin early in the morning and last until midafternoon. “Scarcely the tongue of Cicero could do justice to the munificence of the multiform expenditures that had been made, nor could the pen of Seneca fully describe the variety of meats and rare delicacies that were there.” Such epicurean dishes as might have delighted the palate of Nero were passed among the white-clothed tables in unending succession: Swans decorated with ribbons and green leaves, ducks, geese, cranes, and peppered peacocks, basted roasts of pork hot from the turnspit; from the sea, mullet, sole, lobsters fried in half an egg, oysters, sperlings; sauces spiced with the bouquet of garlic, cumin, sage, and dittany; figs, candied fruits, rice cooked with milk of almond and powdered cinnamon, tarts and junkets. Course after course, washed down with the gifts of Bacchus, came and went until the men had loosened their belts and the ladies in anticipation of their siestas began to drowse and the water in the washing basins grew gray and oily from the dipping of so many greasy hands.

  The Aquitainians could not do without entertainment, and there could be heard the sweet rhythms of tambourine and flute, rebec and lute, and throughout it all, the songs of the troubadours. It is probable that this great event drew Cercamon and Marcabru, the troubadour favorites of Duke William X, and perhaps they sang the planhs composed in lament for their patron. “Saint James,” mourned Cercamon, “remember you that knight for whom I kneel and prayers have said.” But surely sadness did not prevail for long, and there were songs of love and sex and springtime on the green. Perhaps Marcabru, that musicman who claimed that no woman had ever loved him, was there with his sweet misogynistic melodies lashing out against the chicanery of unfaithful married women, his “flaming whores,” “Lady Goodand-excited,” “those cunts [who] are nymphos in bed.” The bawdy songs that set the southerners to clapping and laughing only succeeded in shocking the French, particularly the churchmen. “The French clerks looked upon profane and frivolous songs with contempt and condemnation, and would no more have thought of indulging in such pastimes than of consigning those futilities to precious parchment fit to serve for the transcription of lives of saints.”

  Certainly Louis was not a lad to disgrace himself before distinguished company, but there was no doubt that he, too, looked overwhelmed and uncomfortable. Plainly he did not have the vaguest idea of how to go about enjoying himself. Eleanor may have been amused as well as disconcerted to discover his lack of sophistication, and it must have confirmed some of her private prejudices about the land that would soon be her home. Bashfulness was not one of her weaknesses. Self-possessed, vivacious, she took charge of the proceedings with an undisputed authority garnered from years of basking in the spotlight. She had learned the art of dispensing hospitality at the courts of men famed for their largesse, and now, an ardent believer in enjoyment, her own as well as others’, she presided over the high table with ease and patience, seemingly oblivious of the guests craning their heads to stare. She performed her role with style, by sending tidbits of succulent game to her viscounts with the request that they do her honor by tasting them, directing the pages to refill with claret the goblets of the ladies, asking her important barons what music they would prefer to hear. With Louis at her side, hour after hour she remained at the high table, accepting her vassals’ salutations and congratulations, returning compliment with compliment.

  There were whispers from the tables as many a guest, staring at Louis, murmured that he almost looked like a monk. If these remarks reached Eleanor’s ears, she would have been the first to admit that her betrothed seemed as mild as a lamb. At times during the course of the festivities his grave, vulnerable eyes rested on her with a strange expression of wonderment and puppylike adoration, and Eleanor for her part was an astute enough observer of human beings to comprehend that here was a man susceptible to feminine manipulation. To her, this must have seemed fortunate because she had every intention of remodeling him to suit her specifications. As a first priority, she would make a man of him, perhaps not a warrior like her father and grandfather, for that might be too tall an order, but a man just the same, one who would scorn “a cow’s death” abed. And later there would be time enough for other fantasies, because her head swam thickly with ideas to add luster to her name and the house of her forebears.

  On Sunday, July 25, Eleanor and Louis rode through the cobbled streets of Bordeaux, past housefronts draped with banners and garlands, to the Cathedral of Saint André. Amid the ringing of bells, the heralding of trumpets and the shouting of her people come to do their duchess honor and have themselves a holiday, they entered the smoky dimness of the church to be married by her guardian, Archbishop Geoffrey. After the ceremony they solemnly bent their heads before him to receive the golden diadems that formally recognized the couple as duke and duchess of Aquitaine.

  Despite the warm welcome Louis had received in Bordeaux, Abbot Suger felt far from tranquil. Some of Eleanor’s important vassals, in particular the count of Angoulême, who had heisted Duke William’s fiancée, had failed to attend the marriage celebration, and now the abbot’s agents reported that other hostile barons were planning to stir up mischief. Thus, while the royal couple still knelt before the altar at Saint André, the Frankish camp across the Garonne was being hastily dismantled. Tents struck, pack animals loaded, the army stood in readiness by the road that led north to Poitiers. In the langorous heat of midafternoon, as her drunken guests were toasting her long life and the townspeople feasting on the roast meat distributed by the palace kitchens, Eleanor threw off her stifling scarlet robes and quietly crossed the river with her sister and a few members of her personal household. Before the sunlight had faded from the sky, the cavalcade had put a league or two between themselves and Bordeaux, but the scent of danger permeated the column. Abbot Suger, increasingly anxious, kept alert for an ambush, and while he avoided those roads that led past well-known hostile castles and the journey proceeded without incident, his apprehension did not contribute to lightheartedness. For the first few nights Eleanor slept, as always, with Petronilla. It was not until they had passed Saintes and arrived at Taillebourg, the rugged fortress owned by the loyal Geoffrey de Rancon, that they stopped to rest and enjoy the civilized hospitality of that great lord; it was there that Louis and Eleanor shared the same bed for the first time. That this event took place without any notable trauma seems apparent from the fact that afterward they seemed on more intimate terms than ever, despite whatever misgivings each may have had about the realities of conjugal life.

  After adding military reinforcements to the cortege, they pressed on and reached Poitiers on August 1. Before they had even arrived at the city gate, news of their approach s
pread through the town, and the Poitevins streamed into the squares and roads to roar a raucous welcome to their lady. It was a fearfully weary and disheveled royal party that drew up into the cool courtyard at the ducal palace, thankful for surcease from the remorseless heat of the road. Suger and other older members of the party verged on collapse, but with the energy of an enthusiastic fifteen-year-old, Eleanor immediately set about organizing a proper welcome for her illustrious guests. Back in the Maubergeonne Tower, the place she felt most at home, she opened the ducal chests and showered her new husband with costly gifts. Troubadours were summoned, and the signal for resumption of the feasting given out. Plans were made for the following Sunday, when Louis would be crowned count of Poitou, a solemn occasion that Suger wished to have rival in splendor the coronations of the Frankish kings at Reims.