Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  Most people’s lives are shaped by what they remember of childhood, and Eleanor was no different. Accustomed to the extravagant green vistas of the south, those gardens full of acid sunlight and the mellow crooning of nightingales, she was not entranced by Paris. She saw only its squalor, heard only its noise. Although she had her sister for company, she was lonely and utterly bored; she missed the sound of the langue d’oc and the easygoing humor of the southerners. Even Louis was perceptive enough to notice her gloom, and since he felt solicitous of his wife’s happiness, he did not object when she spent frivolously on costly silks and jewels.

  Along with the throne, Louis inherited Abbot Suger from his father. The royal counselor hoped for the best from the young king whom he had known and loved since infancy and whose education he had personally directed at Saint-Denis. He would always remain, for Suger, “a child, in the flower of his age and of great sweetness of temper, the hope of the good and the terror of the wicked.” The queen Suger liked a great deal less, although he was forced to admit that she was “nobilissima puella,” a most nobly born girl, which, strictly speaking, is more a statement of fact than an expression of opinion. If any man could have herded Louis and Eleanor along the narrow path of responsibility, it was the tiny prelate whom fortune had lifted from the poor rural peasantry to be chief minister of kings, head of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, and notable author. While still a boy, Suger had met Louis the Fat at the school for novices at Saint-Denis, where they both were students. It might be thought that the son of a peasant would have little in common with the great figures of the aristocracy, but Suger, no ordinary priest, was undeniably a man of enormous culture. “He had such a great knowledge of history that no matter what prince or king of the Franks one mentioned, he immediately and without hesitation would hasten to recount his deeds.” Endowed with a prodigious memory, the abbot knew the Scriptures virtually by heart and could reply succinctly to any question put to him, and he could also recite from memory the “heathen” verses of Horatio. Ovid, Juvenal, and Terence.

  By temperament, he was unsuited for a life of austerity and for many years had indulged his love of luxury with soft woolen shirts, dainty coverlets, and warm furs. In recent years, however, he had been severely criticized by Bernard of Clairvaux: “From early time yours was a noble abbey of royal dignity.... Without any deception or delay it rendered to Caesar his dues, but not with equal enthusiasm what was due to God.... They say the cloister of the monastery was often crowded with soldiers, that business was done there, that it echoed to the sound of men wrangling, and that sometimes women were to be found there. In all this hubbub how could anyone have attended to heavenly, divine, and spiritual things?”

  How indeed. As a result, Suger had given up his fine horses and splendid livery and exchanged his spacious home for a tiny barren cell. However, in his most current project, the restoration of Saint-Denis, he continued to indulge his love of beautiful objects by embellishing the new church with gorgeous stained glass and precious ornaments. After 1140, he devoted his entire time to Saint-Denis; this did not reflect any lessening of his interest in affairs of state but rather his fall from favor with the young king, or, more precisely, with the young queen. Eleanor rejected the notion that her husband should be closely supervised like a schoolboy instead of relying on his own judgment. And if Louis needed advice about Aquitaine, he had only to ask his wife, for, after all, who had more practical knowledge than she? After the departure of Suger and his balancing stability, the young couple were left to their own devices.

  As is often the case with weak men who wish to prove their masculinity, Louis felt compelled to meet each affront to his royal authority with a display of ferocity bordering on the brutal, but much of this stemmed indirectly from a desire to impress his wife. Constantly, he looked over his shoulder to gauge her reaction, a habit that must have simultaneously pleased and annoyed her. He would never understand her, but from the first, he had adored her in the way an inexperienced boy worships a gay, confident girl; with passionate admiration he responded to her charm, to a cleverness that he himself lacked, and he indulged her extravagantly. If she was headstrong and demanding—and unquestionably she was—he excused it as perfectly normal behavior for one of her richly endowed nature. There was, of course, another side to the story: Eleanor was anxious to control everything she regarded as hers, that is, her person, about which she was hysterically vain; her life; and her lands, which she felt, quite rightly, she knew more about than Louis or any of his royal ministers. As she repeatedly pointed out to Louis, the Aquitainians, for all their splendid qualities, were a pigheaded people who would only extend their respect to a firm ruler.

  Before the death of Eleanor’s father, the political situation in Aquitaine had been unsatisfactory, and by now it had grown steadily worse.

  For that matter, trouble had been brewing in Louis’s own domains, and only a few days after his succession he had been obliged to put down a rebellion in the town of Orleans. Some sixty years earlier there had begun the growth of the communal movement whereby a few towns, in a reaction against feudal exploitation, tried to obtain a measure of self-government by establishing collective seigneuries that would recognize their economic and political interests. In some cases, Louis the Fat had encouraged communes, because he saw them as a device to curb the power of both his barons and the Church. When, however, the proposed commune occurred on the king’s land, as was the case with Orleans, it was a different story, and when the Orleans bourgeois bitterly complained about outrageous taxes and demanded a charter of rights, he refused. Within days of his death, the burghers suffered a convenient memory loss and proclaimed themselves a commune. The young king, fresh from his baptism of fire in the Talmont, marched against the town and promptly executed the conspirators who had sought to foster insurrection; then, evidently reluctant to be known as a tyrant, he abruptly reversed his position and granted most of the demanded reforms. In the future, this trait of indecision would mark most of his political actions.

  The rebellion in Orléans proved to be anything but an isolated case, and a similar mutiny soon occurred in Eleanor’s domains—as it happened, in her own capital city of Poitiers. In late 1137, after having had a few months to digest the changes in their political fortunes as a result of William X’s death, the Poitevins exhibited reluctance to put themselves into the hands of a foreign king merely because their land happened to be part of his wife’s real estate. Accordingly, they repudiated Louis’s authority and boldly announced themselves a free city, a serious blow to the prestige of both Eleanor and her husband. Angry and humiliated, Louis hastily threw together an army, short on knights but well equipped with siege machines, and marched on the rebellious town. Since the surprised Poitevins had barely had time to organize their defense, the king was able to easily capture the city without a single casualty on either side. In victory, however, he was unable to handle the uprising in a diplomatic or even sensible manner, or rather he dealt with the rebels in a manner that he believed would meet with Eleanor’s approval.

  His demands were positively ruthless: Instead of simply disbanding the commune and letting it go at that, he vindictively insisted that the sons and daughters of leading citizens be offered as hostages and sent away into exile in France. On an appointed day, the burghers were to bring their children, with baggage, to the main square before the ducal palace. The howls of the horrified Poitevins carried far beyond the boundaries of Aquitaine all the way to the Abbey of Saint-Denis, where Suger, a more impartial judge, was summoned to Poitiers to reason with his flower child. After a long talk with Louis, Suger appeared in person to the burghers and stilled their lamentations; Louis, in seclusion, had changed his mind and would allow their heirs to go free.

  In Paris, Eleanor observed this incident with irritation. Mistaking brutality for strength, she longed for Louis to assert himself so that she might feel, if not love, then respect for him. His weakness overwhelmed her. Obviously, he could not be coun
ted on to handle a simple revolt with any sense of proportion; and then, like a clumsy child, he needed to be rescued by Suger. Furthermore, resentful of Suger’s interference in a matter that she felt did not concern him, she determined that his advice would not be sought in the future.

  Although Eleanor did not accompany Louis to Poitiers, she made several trips back to the south during the early years of her marriage, the first of which may have been in September 1138, when she attended the festival of Notre Dame at Puy. Generally, she was accompanied by her husband, as well as her sister, who remained her closest friend and confidante. Undoubtedly, she found her relationship with Petronilla comforting, because life in Paris was even more alien than she had ever imagined. While she had not expected marriage to bring her the lover of her dreams, presumably she had hoped to find a degree of emotional and sexual satisfaction. If she had possessed these, she might have borne the shock of her new life, but as it turned out, circumstances had not brought her loving, and therefore she determined to drink deeply of living. To her, this meant excitement and novelty. There had been, of course, special occasions, as on that first Christmas of their marriage when Louis had taken her to Bourges to be crowned queen, but these temporary diversions could not replace the pleasure she had anticipated as the wife of a great lord. She knew that her happiness had been left behind in Poitiers. Was the rest of her life to be spent permanently sealed on that dreary island, condemned to live with a submissive man who feared to look at her body and felt loath to touch her even in the dark?

  Considering the fact that Louis failed to attract her physically and that she had small respect for him as a man, they were, oddly enough, compatible in less personal areas. Eleanor prided herself on taking a role in the regulation of affairs in Aquitaine, and as we shall see subsequently, she also felt herself competent to advise him in matters pertaining to the kingdom of France. Nevertheless, in this latter ambition she would prove notably unsuccessful, because during the first ten years of her reign, the documents reveal her to have been virtually powerless. Unlike previous French queens, including Queen Adelaide, who shared in executive and policy-making decisions with Louis the Fat, Eleanor’s name rarely appears on her husband’s charters nor is there any record of her presence in the royal curia. Beginning with Eleanor, the Capetian queens of France ceased to be working sovereigns, a curious coincidence, for Eleanor would prove to be one of the most politically astute women of the medieval era. A great deal of the credit for this break in tradition can be attributed to the domination of Abbot Suger, who regarded both Louis and Eleanor as insufficiently mature to govern wisely. While Suger may have relegated the queen to an official backseat, he could not prevent her from wielding a wifely influence over her husband. That many of Louis’s actions, whether or not on her advice it is impossible to gauge, appeared to be ill considered did not seem to trouble her, nor did his destructiveness impinge strongly upon Suger either. When, for instance, Louis finally got around to punishing William of Lezay by personally hacking off his hands, no one felt concern about the fate of an obscure baron who had stolen a few birds in faraway Talmont.

  By 1141, however, a number of Louis’s vassals began to suspect that there was more than met the eye to the boy king, so pious, so kind, so timid. For some time now Eleanor had been preoccupied with the idea of invading the county of Toulouse, which, in her opinion, belonged to her through her grandmother Philippa. That the domain should remain in the usurping hands of Alphonse-Jourdain riled her, and she repeatedly suggested to her husband that this wrong be remedied. To be sure, Alphonse-Jourdain had ruled Toulouse for some twenty years, and even Eleanor’s father, who had signed his charters “William the Toulousain,” had never seriously considered reclaiming his mother’s patrimony. But for the queen, Toulouse had the appeal of an irresistible cause.

  Swept along by Eleanor’s enthusiasm, Louis readily understood that the acquisition of Toulouse would enhance Frankish national prestige, not to mention his own personal reputation. In the opening months of 1141, the two of them spent many excited hours mapping out their adventure. Like inexperienced children titillated by a new game but having no knowledge of the rules, they blundered along without any sense of direction and disdained to ask for advice. To some of Louis’s vassals, among them the powerful Count Theobald of Champagne, the proposed expedition against Toulouse appeared to be a senseless and even unjust project, and they declined to support their overlord. Theobald had neglected to assist in the military action against the Poitiers commune, and when the time for departure arrived on June 24, he again failed to appear in person, nor did he trouble to send a contingent of troops. Louis, furious at the count, was forced to leave without him, but this second defection would not be easily forgiven.

  Louis had absolutely no sense of military intuition, and Eleanor, who accompanied him as far south as Poitiers, had little to contribute in this area. As a result the army was haphazardly organized and ineptly led. Only a small amount of siege equipment had been brought along, because Louis and Eleanor apparently counted on taking the city by surprise, a tactic based more on wishful thinking than on any particular strategy. Perhaps Eleanor cherished illusions that Louis, like her grandparents, would capture Toulouse without a blow struck.

  Alphonse-Jourdain, of course, had no intention of handing over his fief to the young duchess and her husband; warned of the Franks’ approach long before they reached his ramparts, he had organized a thorough defense and sat waiting for them like a tomcat about to gobble up a puny mouse. Louis, reluctant to sacrifice his army on the altar of Eleanor’s ambition, met the challenge by beating a hasty retreat, fleeing north into Angoulême and then rejoining his wife in Poitiers. Eleanor’s private feelings about Louis’s fiasco can be imagined; the qualities that she counted supreme in a man were valor, readiness for military adventure, knightly honor, and physical prowess. Everything else was merely garnish, as though a man had to be transformed into a killer before he could be loved or respected. Still, perhaps from pity, she must have managed to conceal much of her disappointment, because it was at this time that she opened the treasures of the dukes of Aquitaine and presented him with a magnificent crystal vase ornamented with pearls and precious stones.

  The victory she had so ardently desired was forfeit; nevertheless, she decided to linger in Poitou for the remainder of the summer. She would make a holiday of it, and with Louis, Petronilla, and others in her retinue, she embarked on a chevauchée over the trails she remembered so nostalgically from her childhood: They visited the monastery of Nieuil-sur-l’Autise, where her mother was buried; granted favors to her Aunt Agnes’s convent; and spent a few days by the sea in Talmont. Although she counted it a pleasant summer, the holiday was shadowed by failure.

  When they returned to Paris in the autumn, Louis’s mood alternated between depression and frenetic exuberance. Whatever the reason—lingering humiliation over Toulouse, possibly a desire to raise his prestige in Eleanor’s eyes—he seemed determined to cast off the last vestiges of discretion. That year the archbishopric of Bourges fell vacant, and Louis, for reasons that baffled his barons, took it into his head to appoint his own candidate, a man named Carduc, who happened to be one of his chancellors. Technically, he did not actually insist on Carduc but extended the see freedom of choice, while at the same time vetoing the one suitable candidate, Peter de la Chatre. Since Carduc was singularly unfitted for office, the canons of Bourges ignored Louis’s interference and proceeded to elect Peter. He was duly consecrated by Pope Innocent II and sent to Bourges to assume his duties when, to his chagrin, he discovered the city gates bolted against him.

  When Innocent learned of this outrage, his suspicions were immediately aroused, and he jumped to conclusions that probably fell close to the truth. It seemed obvious to him that Louis, a mere schoolboy, an innocent who had never strayed from the path of duty to the Church, could not be responsible. The culprit must be another, and it took him no time at all to locate her. The pontiff well remembere
d Eleanor’s family: the stubborn duke who had failed to support him and who had exiled from Poitou all ecclesiastics loyal to Innocent, filling the sees with his own candidates. Was this not clearly a case of “like father, like daughter”? The extent to which Eleanor involved herself in this matter is not clear, but it seems reasonable to assume that she did not discourage Louis from his dangerous course. Bitterly offended when he heard of the pope’s condescending remark that Louis was only a child and should be taught manners, the king responded by maneuvering himself into the most awkward corner possible. In melodramatic defiance, he placed his hands upon sacred relics and took a public oath that so long as he lived Peter de la Chatre should never set foot in Bourges.

  Across the Alps, Innocent hurtled his thunderbolts of excommunication and interdict, casting the young king into outer darkness. Not only was Louis excluded from all sacraments, but in any town or castle where he dwelled no bells could ring, no church services be performed, nor marriages, confessions, baptisms, or burials. In a century when heaven and hell were real and men and women worried about their souls, excommunication was a serious business. For Louis, a man with an exceptional passion for the hallowed harmony of the cloister, it was an unimaginable blow, and yet he plunged ahead furiously, his obstinacy hardening as the months passed. His anger flared even higher when it came to his attention that Peter de la Châtre was being sheltered in Champagne by a sympathetic Count Theobald.

  Louis and Eleanor made a mental list of their enemies; Theobald headed the roster.

  At the spinsterly age of nineteen, Eleanor’s sister remained unmarried. This unusual state of affairs was the subject of considerable comment, for Petronilla, an attractive girl, owned dower property in Burgundy and simply by virtue of her relationship to the king and queen would have made an acceptable wife. But eligible lords who came courting found their attentions politely refused; the queen’s sister had long been casting her eyes elsewhere. Five years earlier, at Eleanor’s wedding, she had first made the acquaintance of Count Ralph of Vermandois, the king’s elderly relative and seneschal of France. Ralph was over fifty, but he bore his years lightly; the fact that he was old enough to be Petronilla’s father was not exactly the trouble, however. He was a married man, and moreover, his wife, Leonora, happened to be the niece of Count Theobald.