by Marion Meade
In the summer of 1141, while Eleanor and Louis were dawdling in Poitou, their retinue included Petronilla and Ralph. Although the couple’s attraction to each other was scarcely news to the more observant in the royal household, on that trip it was impossible for outsiders not to notice what was happening. Petronilla had long been a source of concern for Eleanor, who, as the elder, felt responsible for her. Like Eleanor, Petronilla possessed a strong sex drive and few inhibitions; Ralph had the reputation of being a seducer of women, and according to John of Salisbury, “he was always dominated by lust.” It is safe to assume that the two were hardly conducting a platonic love affair, which meant the ever-present threat of illegitimacy and scandal. While Eleanor may have wished that Petronilla had chosen a more suitable cavalier, she also understood that her sister loved the count and would have no other as a husband. Under the circumstances, a means had to be found for them to marry, and to Eleanor, with her customary simplicity of purpose, the solution seemed clear: Ralph must secure a divorce.
Late that year the matter was quietly and swiftly remedied. Louis located three friendly bishops, one of them Ralph’s brother, who annulled the marriage on the ground of consanguinity and immediately united Ralph to the Lady Petronilla. When the incredulous count of Champagne was notified that he must come and collect his discarded niece and her children, he protested vigorously. For decades Ralph and
Theobald had been sworn enemies, and this latest personal injury could not help but tax the limits of Theobald’s patience. With detailed care and a calculated desire for revenge, he prepared a case against Ralph and wasted no time in dispatching it to Pope Innocent: The count of Vermandois, he explained, had failed to secure papal consent for the annulment; for that matter, the annulment had been handled in a most irregular fashion and clearly was illegal; and Louis had once again interfered in matters that fell under eccesiastical rather than secular jurisdiction.
Innocent’s response was icily meticulous. In June of 1142, a Church council assembled at Lagny-sur-Marne in Champagne, at which time the papal legate, Cardinal Yves, reaffirmed the validity of Ralph’s first marriage and excommunicated Ralph and Petronilla, as well as the three complaisant bishops who had stretched the law in their favor.
A more secure man than Louis might have paused to examine the impossibility of the situation. But neither Louis nor Eleanor was in any mood to exercise caution. They blamed Theobald for their troubles; twice the remiss count had dodged his responsibilities as a vassal, and furthermore, he had actually dared to provoke Louis by harboring Peter de la Châtre. Their prestige at stake, the Capets refused to submit meekly to Rome nor did they intend to set a precedent that would imperil their authority in ruling their subjects. If they capitulated to the pope’s ruling, Ralph would be forced to return to Leonora, and Petronilla, most likely pregnant by then, would bear a bastard; as it was, the excommunications had cast an ignominious stain on the house of Vermandois and, indirectly, on the honor of the Capets. Both Eleanor and Louis were emphatic on one point: On no account would they compromise.
Even though Louis’s first flush of anger had diminished somewhat, he still boiled with indignation and an unswerving determination to prove himself a forceful monarch. Resolved to defy the pope and to humble Theobald, he had Eleanor’s full approval in taking a step that pivoted a cold war into a hot one. In January 1143, he personally led an army into Champagne and laid siege to the little town of Vitry-sur-Marne. From his encampment on the La Fourche hills above the town Louis watched his troops pour down the slope and advance on a castle belonging to Theobald. The charge was answered by a volley of arrows fired from the summits of the castle’s wooden towers, but within a short period of time it became apparent that its resistance would be easily crushed. Louis’s archers catapulted fiery arrows over the walls, and soon the castle crackled in flames.
The townspeople of Vitry, paralyzed at suddenly finding themselves in the midst of a war, came out of their houses and stared in bewilderment at the wild-eyed soldiers swarming through their quiet lanes and brandishing swords and torches. The men and women stopped work and gathered up their children. Although a few villagers took up knives and makeshift cudgels, most had no weapons with which to beat off the king’s soldiers. Beyond the control of their officers, the troops tossed torches into the doorways of wooden houses and onto thatched roofs, and soon the fire spread through the whole town. Terror-stricken, eyes smarting from smoke, the burghers of Vitry surged down the streets leading to their cathedral, the traditional place of refuge where non-combatants might find sanctuary. There, where none could lay a finger on them, they carried the sick, the elderly, the infants. Presumably it was a large church because eventually the entire population, thirteen hundred persons, it is said, managed to squeeze inside.
From the hill above Vitry, Louis saw a double wall of flame suddenly shoot up from the church in a shower of sparks. Caught by the wind, the flames began to snap and lick the walls until the cathedral was enveloped by a thousand crimson tongues. Above the noise of the flames arose cries that carried clearly to Louis’s vantage point: The curses turned to piercing screams as the trapped began to trample one another, trying to beat down the barred doors. But no one emerged through the gateway of flames, for in a few minutes the timbers of the roof collapsed, burying those who a few hours earlier had been absentmindedly stirring pots of soup or sitting at their looms.
A cloud of thick black smoke rose into the blood-red sky above the roofs of Vitry until the town was nearly engulfed, but still Louis could hear the animal howls and smell the human flesh burning to a cindered crisp. The ghastly shrieks blinded him with tears, and when his aidesde-camp came to make their reports, they found a strange and terrible sight. Louis stood immobile, his face blanched and his teeth chattering. His eyes had no expression in them. When they spoke to him, he appeared not to hear, and finally, alarmed, they led him into his field tent and made him lie down.
At twilight, the acrid smoke had spread out over the valley, and the breeze carried the stench of burnt flesh up the hillside to the doorway of Louis’s tent. Soldiers sitting around the campfires could still see a few coppery embers glowing through the smoke. But the king did not emerge from his tent, not that night nor the next day nor the one after that. He lay motionless on his cot, refusing to eat or drink or speak. When he closed his eyes, time stood still, and he heard the hissing and singing of the flames and screams hideous enough to cleave the sky. Waves of rose-colored light filled his vision until the whole world had shriveled to the size of a great fiery ball of flame.
Behind the Red Cross
Over the rolling hills and valleys of Champagne swept the royal army, leaving behind a carpet of ravaged fields and smoking villages, corpses pierced by lances and disemboweled horses lying in frozen raspberry pools. That winter and chilly spring the unthawed earth ran red with blood as village after terrorized village fell before the deaf and blind ardor of Louis’s soldiers. Numbers of those who ordinarily earned their bread as murderers and thieves had flocked to join the king’s troops, for the aroma of plunder proved a powerful lure, and Louis welcomed all who would aid his cause. Cries of fear and hatred rent the lands of Count Theobald, and still the king’s men did not tire of killing and looting. It was, some said, a splendid war.
At the Cite Palace, Eleanor followed the progress of the war with understandable relish. She rejoiced for Louis’s successes, although her satisfaction was moderated by an uneasy feeling that the victories were not quite as glorious as she had expected. For months at a time her husband remained in Champagne, and when they did meet, it did not escape her notice that the war had imposed a strain on his health. He was—there was no disguising the fact—ill and broken. To her consternation, he would awake in the night sobbing or stare into the unperceived distance, hiding his demonic nightmares behind a mask of indifference. It was alarming to contrast the shy, pretty youth he had been at sixteen with the haggard, woebegone man of twenty-two, though Eleanor did her
best to reassure him and raise his spirits. The catastrophe at Vitry, she told him, was not his fault; if God had permitted the church to burn, that was God’s business. The war against Theobald was a just one, involving the honor of both their families. Was not Ralph of his own blood, the son of his grandfather’s brother? Was not Petronilla her only sister? But Louis, feeling his soul imperiled, lifted glassy eyes and whimpered that he did not care about victory over Count Theobald. Although he managed to pull himself together and return to Champagne, he continued to suffer agonies of guilt and depression, his every action horrifying and disgusting him. Alone, Eleanor pondered the fate that had tied her to a man she considered contemptible. There was something about his lamentations strongly reminiscent of her father’s agitated mood before he set off for Compostela, memories she preferred to forget. She wanted a husband who, like her grandfather, could fight and kill, who would sing songs and pay compliments. Days should be gay and nights spent in the arms of a passionate lover, not with a trembling man who buried himself in her skirts with a child’s sobs and whose dreams were convulsed by horrifying visions. Nevertheless, she kept her thoughts to herself and tried to quiet his madness, for she lacked the heart to reproach him.
During these woeful months, those who had ignored omens of danger during the initial years of Louis’s reign were no longer able to remain engrossed in their own affairs. Public outcry against the disorders in the realm was such that it became necessary to allocate blame and responsibility for the boy king, no longer a boy. From the stillness of Clairvaux, Abbot Bernard scribbled frenzied letters to discover what had gone wrong. Why did his beloved boy insist upon heaping sin atop sin, perversely laying waste his kingdom until it seemed in danger of cracking? “All this I was able to see,” he wrote to Pope Innocent, “but alas! not able to prevent.”
To Louis, Bernard worded a sharp demand:From whom but the devil could this advice come under which you are acting, advice which causes burnings upon burnings, slaughter upon slaughter, and the voice of the poor and the groans of captives and the blood of the slain to echo once more in the ears of the Father of orphans and the Judge of widows? ... Those who are urging you to repeat your former wrongdoing against an innocent person [he meant Count Theobald] are seeking in this not your honor but their own convenience, or rather not so much their convenience as the will of the devil; they are trying to use the power of the king to secure the mad purposes which they are not sure of being able to achieve by themselves, and are clearly the enemies of your crown and the disturbers of your realm.
Meanwhile, buoyed by the knowledge that much of Champagne had fallen into Capetian hands, an offer of peace had been tentatively submitted to Count Theobald. The terms were simple: Louis and Eleanor promised to restore his possessions on the condition that he somehow manage to get lifted the sentences of excommunication and interdict on Ralph and Petronilla. Bernard, exhibiting more of the serpent’s adroitness than his customary dovelike simplicity, urged Innocent to remove the bans long enough for Louis to return Theobald’s territory—and then renew it immediately afterward. “Thus artifice would be outwitted by artifice, and peace obtained without the tyrant ... gaining anything.”
Never suspecting that Innocent, nor certainly Bernard, would be capable of such a deception, Louis ingenuously withdrew his troops, at which time Innocent played his hand expertly by offering Ralph the opportunity to give up Petronilla. When the count refused, Innocent promptly reexcommunicated the pair; Louis, hysterical, sped his army back to Champagne, wreaking such destruction that Bernard was forced to further remonstrating. “I can tell you that, provoked by the constant excesses you commit almost daily, I am beginning to regret having stupidly favored your youth more than I should have done, and I am determined that in future to the best of my limited capacity I shall expose the whole truth about you.... I have spoken harshly because I fear an even harsher fate for you.”
On September 24, 1143, Pope Innocent died, and his successor, Celestine II, was sufficiently moved by the disturbances in France to lift the bans of excommunication and interdict against Louis, a measure of clemency that nevertheless brought the king little solace. Nor did tranquility come quickly or easily to France. In early 1144, Suger and Bernard arranged a peace conference at Corbeil, only to watch Louis explode into a fit of blind rage when one of the Frankish barons made a gibe to the effect that Count Ralph led him by the nose. Like a small boy in the grip of a tantrum, he angrily stormed from the parley into the consoling arms of his wife.
The irrepressible high spirits that Eleanor had displayed during the summer when she became queen of France had now been greatly tempered by tragedy, frustration, and an endless procession of small unhappinesses. Her restlessness, the impression she gave of always seeking some new exhilaration, was not so much in evidence, and the delirious melancholy that enveloped her husband inevitably began to rub off on her. As in the first days after her arrival, the Cite Palace had once again assumed the atmosphere of a monastery: no dancing and feasting, no songs of the troubadours. The poets sought more receptive patrons. There was increasing tension between Eleanor and Louis. In public they were polite to each other, but alone in their chambers, it was difficult to maintain even a simple conversation. Taking refuge in impenetrable silences, Louis read his breviary, meditated, and sank deeper into his private hell. Throughout the spring of 1144, he became increasingly remote and either slept alone or shared the royal bed like a sister. Failure weighed heavily on Eleanor, who fixed unseeing eyes on the parchment pages of her books while she brooded over her not-so-secret shame: In seven years of marriage she had not been able to bear a child. After that first pregnancy, she had never conceived again.
Her barrenness was the subject of considerable speculation among the Franks, but Eleanor, starved for sexual satisfaction, needed no prophet to divine the reason for her infertility, and she could not help feeling resentment toward the disconsolate man who caressed his rosary instead of her perfumed and massaged body. Unable to recall the last time he had embraced her, she feared that if his present emotional state continued, the opportunity for conception would not come again. It had been some years since she had counted the days on her fingers and made novenas to Our Lady, or, for that matter, worried about dying in childbirth. At fifteen and sixteen she had menstruated each month without regret, but at twenty-two, she reminded herself that by her age her mother had already borne three children and lay in her tomb at Nieuil-sur-l’Autise. Still, when all was said and done, she suspected that the fault for her empty womb might lie, not with Louis, but within herself. As a queen, her prime duty was to provide the country with an heir to the throne, and the fact that she had not come close to fulfilling this obligation weighted her with humiliation and the faint suspicion that she, like Louis, had somehow offended God. It depressed her to think that the wife of the most miserable varlet could bear a dozen babies, that servingwomen had bastards to drown; even Petronilla, who had plenty of sins for which to atone, had brought forth a son. During that dreary winter, her desire to have children—strong, handsome boys—grew to almost an obsession.
Nevertheless, as it was not her nature to bear discontent tranquilly, she determined to locate an exit from the turmoil encircling the royal family. In June, spirits at the Cite Palace began to slowly levitate as the day approached for the unveiling of Suger’s newly built cathedral at Saint-Denis. Louis’s spiritual advisers, as concerned about his despondency as Eleanor, hoped that the king’s participation in this momentous event might bolster his confidence; in fact, the dedication of the cathedral was to be combined with a second peace conference to mend the conflicts with Champagne.
Saturday, the tenth of June, was a brilliant blue day as Eleanor and Louis began the seven-mile journey to Saint-Denis. They made slow progress because the old Roman road was clogged with scores of cheerful pilgrims—parties of monks, ladies of gentle blood accompanied by their belted knights, whores, thieves, cripples, hymn chanters, and assorted folks from Paris—the
whole motley host bound for the abbey to see what miracles had been wrought by Suger’s stonemasons and glaziers. Owing to the slow-moving traffic on the highway, Eleanor gave herself up to the small pleasures afforded along the roadside: the tiered vineyards and ruins of an old Roman temple adorning the slopes of Montmartre, the Martyrologium, a small chapel marking the spot where Saint Denis had been martyred. Eventually, they passed into open countryside, where the road ran between ploughed fields, and then it was not long before they arrived at the stone wall and dry ditch enclosing the little town that had grown up around the abbey. As far as Eleanor could see, the fields were dotted with tents hastily thrown up to shelter the multitudes who had no access to accommodations in the local households.
The arrival of the king and queen drew shouts from the crowd and the hurried appearance of Abbot Suger, who came out to personally escort them to the abbey’s guest quarters. As Louis hurried off to the cathedral, where he spent the night praying and keeping the vigils with the monks of Saint-Denis, Eleanor was left alone with her thoughts and her maids. The next morning, the feast day of Saint Barnabas, she rose at dawn to take her place in the cathedral. Abbot Suger may have exorcised his personal fascination with corrupting secular luxuries, but he could not believe that the splendor of gold and rubies would be displeasing when dedicated to God. The most expensive marble, glass, and gems had been deposited in the hands of master craftsmen from many nations to produce a symphony in stone and glass. Gone was the earthbound Romanesque style with its massive walls and rounded arches, and in its place Suger had pioneered a bold new architecture that flung pointed arches and towering vaults against the Frankish sky. Inside, vast stained-glass windows bathed his Gothic cathedral in pools of light the color of gems. There was not one altar but twenty; above the high altar glowed a magnificent twenty-foot gold cross glittering with diamonds, rubies, and pearls, the result of two years’ work by the goldsmiths of Lorraine. Incense swirled like a gray haze against the altar where the relics of the saint would be placed, and the voices of the congregation surged and mingled with the soaring notes from hundreds of clerics in the choir.