by Marion Meade
Crossing Champagne from Saint-Denis to Metz, swaying in the chair-saddle strapped sideways on her palfrey, invisible shackles dropped from Eleanor’s arms. Thanks be to God, there would be countless months before she need return to the humdrum beat of ordinary life. Each day would bring fresh sights, unimaginable wonders to delight the eye and dazzle the senses. Already she could see the glassy green waters of the Danube, the saffron-colored sunsets over the Golden Horn, the rich bazaars and domed churches of Constantinople. In Antioch she would be reunited with her Uncle Raymond, and there would be laughter and singing in the langue d’oc just as in the old days. By spring they would reach the Holy Land in time to celebrate Easter in the very spot where Lord Jesus had walked and the Blessed Virgin had wept. Thanks be to God, she had everything to look forward to.
Secretly Eleanor must have felt grateful that she would not be traveling with Louis, for he had surrounded himself with the most sanctimonious of sycophants: Odo de Deuil, his former secretary, would be acting as chaplain and scribbling notes for a proposed chronicle of the expedition, and Thierry Galeran, a grim-visaged eunuch who had always disliked her, had been chosen as Louis’s personal bodyguard and business adviser. Both men, she knew, would be sharing her husband’s tent. Under the circumstances, she preferred her own entourage, handpicked to suit her taste: knights from Aquitaine, favorite ladies cast along the same lines as herself, troubadours and jongleurs who had flocked to her side despite the Vézelay bull expressly forbidding their presence—all congenial traveling companions who knew how to laugh and sing freely and who made prayers of appropriate length.
Long before they reached Metz, the road became jammed with troops hastening for the mobilization point, and the air was filled with the thump of hoofs, with creaking wagon wheels, and with the excited voices of the crossbearers. There were nearly 100,000 of them, so many that when they had all finally pitched their tents on the banks of the Moselle, it seemed as though some great metropolis had magically erupted from the bowels of the earth overnight. At the sight of the army that she had been instrumental in bringing to life, Eleanor could not have helped but feel proud. Never could she have dreamed that seething ocean of people, horses, tents, and wagons, herds of sheep and cattle. The weather was fair, and an atmosphere of joyful liberation from all restraints of ordinary living pervaded the camp. The meadows, which had rippled with grass a few days earlier, were soon crisscrossed by ruts and whipped into a bed of mud and dung from so many men and animals. The pavilions resounded with laughter and the sound of minstrels playing lays on their viols, and everywhere people sang hymns and marching songs. The arrival of each new company—Poitevins, Normans, Bretons, Toulousains—would be greeted with boisterous cheers as kinsman, old friends, and comrades from past campaigns were reunited. People strolled from tent to tent, feverishly talking and drinking good wine, until the pandemonium drowned out the cries of the birds and the neighs of the chargers and packhorses. In the tents of the victuallers, there were wine, bread and pastries, fruit and fish, roasted birds, cakes and venison; everywhere there was plenty to buy—for those who had the means to pay.
In the dew-soaked dawn of a morning in mid-June, the army began to move at last. As the procession made its way past the walls of Metz, church bells were pealing and crowds of women, children, old men, and beggars came to witness the greatest show they would ever see: They leaned from windows and turrets decked with red banners, they sat on the tops of walls, they lined the road and clustered at crossroads to watch the column pass. At the sight of the queen, they cried out in amazement, exclaiming over her gorgeous robes embroidered with the royal fleur-de-lis and her magnificent riding horse with its silver-trimmed saddle and plaited mane. “Pray for us in Jerusalem, lady!” they called out, and “Holy Cross” and “For Christ Jesus!” They gazed with shining eyes at King Louis, off to Jerusalem on God’s business, and they cheered his distinguished lords, who bore their handsome bodies stiff and upright. Down the road marched the iron men, the enamelhelmeted knights, who bore banners emblazoned with the cross and swords studded with gems and pieces of the True Cross set in the hilts, swords that had been blessed and twice-blessed by priests and bishops. Alongside the knights rode young squires leading destriers and carrying their masters’ shields. And then came the foot soldiers, so many companies of them that they could not even be counted.
As the hours passed, the townsfolk grew weary of staring and cheering. There was so much to see, more than the senses could bear: horses, donkeys, and mules, leaving heaps of warm yellow dung in the road; archers with long bows and quivers slung over their shoulders; technicians who possessed the critical skills for building siege engines and battering walls; carts and wagons piled high with arms, baggage, tents, tools, and field kitchens. Brilliant as peacocks, the noble ladies moved by on horseback and litters, surrounded by their maids and minstrels; some carried falcons on their wrists and could be seen loosing them at birds circling overhead. The earth seemed to tremble with the clatter of hoofs, and still the waves of humanity rushed steadily forward down the road leading to God’s Holy City: tatterdemalion pilgrims plodding on penitent feet, washerwomen, volunteer martyrs, seamstresses, bishops, criminals seeking salvation, beggars and those temporarily unemployed, vagabonds of all descriptions, concubines and free-lance whores, packs of hunting dogs and pet monkeys and hooded birds. Somewhere in that unruly torrent rode Jaufre Rudel, the prince of Blaye, that high-born Provençal troubadour who wrote passionate verse about a mysterious lady he had never seen, his “faraway love.” The carts creaked and the rein chains jangled; gusts of laughter were muffled by the clanking of shields, and from time to time a flute trilled lazily in the early-summer heat.
Looking at the bright blue sky overhead, at the vast column blending into the horizon behind her, Eleanor forgot the dark lanes of the Île-de-France, forgot the infant Marie, even forgot that somewhere in that awesome procession rode her husband. Her past, those twenty-five years washed with sweetness and sorrow, lay behind. Ahead were rivers and mountains and celestial cities.
To Jerusalem
The crusading army moved at a brisk pace over central Europe toward the Rhine, often covering ten to twenty miles each day. Through wooded country, past a wealth of streams, springs, and meadows, the host sprawled out along the road as far as the eye could see and sometimes spilled over into the adjoining fields. Rolling along like an awkward thousand-legged dinosaur, it brought to a standstill the normal activities of the towns in its path and caused civilian travelers to relinquish their places on the highway until the Crusaders had moved by.
During those last days of June 1147, it was easy to forget the religious nature of their mission. Gawking like sightseers on a conducted tour, admiring castles and clucking extravagantly over each toy village, the cruciati swore the woods to be a lusher shade of jade than they had ever seen before, the ploughed fields moister and blacker. After a week or so, however, they became acclimated to the scenery. One mountain, after all, was not so different from another, the towns all began to look alike, and gradually they stopped staring and admiring. The indistinguishable summer days began to melt together, with the first week passing like a dream in which time has lost its ordinary meaning. In all this excitement, Eleanor did not remain untouched. Surrounded by the ladies and knights of her native land, she perhaps felt this sense of disassociation more strongly than others. Immediately, there sprang up between her and the Aquitainians an easy camaraderie that must have recalled her childhood. Days would pass when she would speak nothing but her native dialect, which is to say there were long stretches when she did not see Louis and probably rarely thought of him. Hearing the easy laughter and familiar drawling voices, she was certainly transported back in time to the warm afternoons when she rode through Poitou on one of her father’s chevauchées. If now she laughed and flirted, conducted herself more like a giddy young girl than a twenty-five-year-old queen, presumably that was because she did not feel obliged to behave otherwise. After
the restless years in Paris, a summer of happy, if temporary, distraction was much to her taste.
Her aimless days adhered, nevertheless, to a strict pattern. Each morning she awoke before dawn to hear the camp bustling to life around her, the tents being dismantled, the carts harnessed. By the time the first embers of day began to heat the sky, she had dressed, attended to her devotions, and joined the bleary-eyed throngs on the road. Not until late afternoon would the call to halt sound. Then, as the soldiers began to set up the camp for the night, fires would be lit, dusty robes changed, and for Eleanor and the other high-born ladies, baths drawn. Later, when the wind was soft, the darkness would resonate with sounds of music and laughter as Eleanor and her household gathered in torch-lit tents or outside around a fire. All types of performers, including the forbidden troubadours, provided a veritable host of festivities and merriment for the entertainment of the nobility. This is not to suggest that hilarity prevailed throughout the entire camp; indeed, it was limited almost entirely to the contingent from Aquitaine, a fact that did not fail to attract the notice of the more devout Franks, who muttered that the Crusade was quickly degenerating into a pleasure party.
On the previous Crusade, women following the cross had lived as men and endured the same conditions, neither asking for special privileges nor receiving any. This time, obviously, it was to be different. Clearly the ladies were suffering no hardships; on the contrary, they appeared to regard the expedition as a movable feast to be adjourned during the day and resumed immediately upon halting for the night. Inevitably, tongues began to wag, with scandalmongers grumbling that the loose atmosphere would only lead to demoralization and vice. Per-force, when any sexual activity came to light, when a peasant soldier crept into the woods with a chambermaid, the episode was immediately attributed to the southern influence.
All in all, it was not surprising that the gossip soon spread to include the queen herself, since it was widely known that her entourage spent their evenings debating about love and playing games of chivalry with the troubadours. Her critics in later life insinuated that she did not lead an entirely blameless life from the outset of the Crusade, but it is difficult to gauge the extent of her indiscretion if, indeed, there was any at this stage. In all likelihood, her natural exuberance had reasserted itself, and she was merely enjoying herself to the utmost. Anxious to be the center of attention, disliking any authority save her own, she would have blandly ignored suggestions that she behave more circumspectly. However much her husband must have disapproved of the revels, he did not interfere, for Louis certainly could not afford to antagonize the southerners, who made up an important sector of his army, and, in addition, his attention was now occupied by matters more pressing than the queen’s amusements.
By Louis’s reckoning, it would take nearly three months of unbroken marching before they completed the first stage of their journey at Constantinople, where they would stop for a brief rest and confer with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus. Before embarking from Metz, Louis had laid down rules of conduct for the army, but by the time they reached the city of Worms on June 29, it was abundantly clear that his orders were not being observed. Odo de Deuil, chronicling the Crusade, wrote in disgust that it would be a waste of time to list the rules, for they went unheeded. But undoubtedly one of the prohibitions stated that towns through which they passed must not be plundered for food. At Worms, where a flotilla of small craft had been assembled to ferry the army across the Rhine, there occurred the first of a series of untoward incidents that underscored Louis’s deficiencies as a military commander and his inability to maintain discipline. As it happened, the army had scarcely crossed over to their encampment on the German side of the river when a quarrel broke out in the marketplace near the landing quay. As the pilgrims quickly discovered, food supplies were scarce, and the money changers charged exorbitant rates; many realized that only a wealthy person was going to reach Jerusalem without starving. When a boat laden with provisions landed at the dock, it was mobbed by a band of hungry Crusaders, who threw its crew overboard and proceeded to help themselves to the cargo. This unruly act brought immediate reprisals from the city’s merchants, who sprang into the fray with oars and knives, wounding several Crusaders and killing one of them.
Louis, lost in a faraway reverie, always resentful of time taken away from his prayers, seemed perplexed about how to handle the situation. Finally, almost nonchalantly, he referred the matter to his counselor Thierry Galeran, who, in turn, suggested sending the bishop of Arras to negotiate with the aggrieved citizens of Worms, who refused to sell any more food to the Crusaders; eventually, after some difficulty, the bishop persuaded the merchants to resume commerce. Louis’s initial mismanagement of the food supplies, no small failure, was making it increasingly clear to the rank and file of his army that a hasty retreat, the rescue of the Holy Land notwithstanding, was their best hope of extricating themselves from a wretched situation. If the shepherd could barely feed his flock in friendly territory, what would happen when they reached the lands of the Turks? Accordingly, the cynical, the disgusted, thought it wise to abandon the Crusade while still relatively close to home.
In the brilliant days of early July, Eleanor paid scant heed to the defection of a few malcontents. Nevertheless, well acquainted as she was with Louis’s shortcomings, she might well have felt forebodings as to her husband’s adequacy as a commander. In any case, if intimations of future disaster disturbed her at this time, there was little that she could do. Long ago she had been barred from the policy-making sphere, chastised by the great Bernard himself for meddling, and in recent weeks it had been a relief to distance herself, both from the Frankish high command and from her husband, who cloistered himself with his favorite attendants. Resigning herself to secondhand news of Louis’s actions from Geoffrey de Rancon and other southern nobles, she was willing, evidently, to accept an anonymous role, so much so that chronicler Odo does not mention her presence among the Crusaders until some weeks later.
From Worms the route lay overland through south German territories to Ratisbon, on the Danube. Waiting there, surrounded by a suite of fawning courtiers, were two ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor. This preview of Byzantium could not help but make an impression on the Franks, although the impression was not necessarily positive. Manuel’s envoys addressed Louis in such obsequious terms that he blushed, while others attending the interview were hard put to smother their smiles. The bishop of Langres, his patience exhausted by the listing of Louis’s virtues, finally cried out, “Brothers, do not repeat ‘glory,’ ‘majesty,’ ‘wisdom’ and ’piety’ so often in reference to the king. He knows himself and we know him well. Just indicate your wishes more briefly and fully.” Coming to the point at last, the Greeks presented two demands that in effect asked only for guarantees that Louis came in friendship. The first, that he should not take any of their cities, was readily granted. But the second—a request to return to Manuel any city or castle, captured from the Turks, that had formerly belonged to Byzantium—was considered unreasonable and deferred until the two sovereigns could discuss the matter personally.
Manuel Comnenus, despite his gross flatteries, was unhappy and resentful. Since “Byzantine perfidy” was a political byword among the Franks, it will be useful at this point to examine the man more closely. A half century earlier, the Greek historian Anna Comnena had watched the arrival of the first Crusaders with dismay and awe, counting them as innumerable as the leaves on the trees and the stars in the skies. To the thirteen-year-old girl it seemed that the “whole of the West, with all the barbarians that live between the farther side of the Adriatic and the Pillars of Hercules, had migrated in a body, and were marching into Asia through intervening Europe, making the journey with all their household.” Now all her nephew Manuel could see was the return of that very same cloud of locusts that had swarmed into the realm in 1096. In some perverse replay of history, the Crusaders were once again set to march across Byzantine territory, installin
g themselves on the outskirts of his imperial city and demanding help to make a war on territory that, until captured by the Turks, had belonged to Byzantium for centuries. At the same time, he suspected that the Crusaders, in a maddening display of illogic, would make no attempt to understand the political situation in the Mideast, would refuse to listen to advice, and would ignore the fact that driving the Turks out of Asia Minor concerned Byzantium as much as it did themselves. His grandfather Alexius Comnenus had been in no mood to serve the Crusaders; Manuel, busy with his own wars, his own political problems, felt exactly the same.