Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  Unable to prevent the Crusade, his best and perhaps only hope was to somehow use the armies of the West to further his own interests and policies. In 1147, he had been emperor for only four years. Not yet thirty, a young man renowned for his brilliance (he had studied medicine), he had never expected to reach the throne for the simple reason that he had three older brothers. However, within the space of a few years, death had removed two of them, and when his father, John, was shot in a hunting accident, the dying emperor deliberately passed over an older son and set the crown on Manuel’s head. Now, whether or not he was fully conscious of the fact, he was presiding over an empire in the process of disintegration. After fifty years and more of campaigns, only the coastal districts were free from Turkish invasions. Almost annually, raiding parties would sweep over his Asiatic provinces, causing the inhabitants of those frontier lands to abandon their villages and flee to the cities.

  The connecting principle running through Manuel’s policies was the need to play off the various Moslem princes against each other and isolate each of them in turn. The Crusade, once promulgated, had thrown askew his diplomatic maneuvers, for it was bringing together the Moslems in an inflamed united front against Christendom. Since Manuel stood on the brink of war with a Christian power, King Roger of Sicily, he could not possibly conduct major expeditions on two fronts at once. For this reason, in the spring of 1147, he concluded a twelve-year truce with his mortal enemies, the Turks. As double-crossing as this would appear to Louis when he learned of it, Manuel had little choice, for any alternative would have placed his empire in grave risk. In the short term, it was in his interest to speed the Crusaders into Asia Minor as quickly as possible in the hopes that by feeding them into the mouths of the Turks, both groups might devour each other.

  Not yet privy to the intricacies of Byzantine policy, which would always remain beyond their grasp, Louis and his Crusaders were blithely proceeding south through Hungary toward the Greek border. By this time Eleanor had received the first of several letters from Empress Irene, stating how joyfully she was looking forward to the visit. Odo, having nothing of military importance to record, was reduced to describing the Hungarian countryside: “It abounds in good things which grow of their own accord and would be suitable for other things if the region had cultivators. It is neither as flat-lying as a plain nor rugged with mountains, but is located among hills which are suitable for vines and grains, and it is watered by the very clearest springs and streams.” While Odo noted agricultural trivia in his diary, Louis, too, seemed free of cares for the time being. Since Hungary offered plenty of food, there had been no problems. In a mood of self-congratulation, he wrote to Abbot Suger that “the Lord is aiding us at every turn,” and “the princes of the lands meet us with rejoicing and receive us with pleasure and gladly take care of our wants and devoutly show us honor.”

  At the end of August, the Crusaders crossed the border into the Byzantine Empire, and for all Louis’s fine talk, they immediately began to encounter trouble, although at first they were not quite sure whom to blame for their problems. Odo noted that wrongs began to arise for the first time and, moreover, to be noticed by highborn and lowborn alike. “For the other countries, which sold us supplies properly, found us entirely peaceful. The Greeks, however, closed their cities and fortresses and offered their wares by letting them down on ropes.” Even allowing for Odo’s hysterically anti-Greek bias, as well as his convenient memory loss about the food riot at Worms, it is clear that the Greeks felt little affection for the Crusaders. It was at this point that Eleanor must have made the enormously upsetting discovery that the Crusade might not turn out to be the grand adventure she had envisioned. She knew that the meager, overpriced rations that the Greeks lowered over their walls were not enough to feed the army, nor could she blame Louis for failing to punish those who fed themselves by plundering. Rather than blame the Greeks, whom she was prepared to like because she planned to enjoy herself once she reached the pleasure palaces of Constantinople, it was easier to assign blame to Conrad’s Germans, who had passed that way a few weeks earlier. Occasionally the two armies met, that is to say, the Frankish vanguard met stragglers from the German army, the result invariably being killing and brawling. As for the Greeks, the normally astute Eleanor seems to have made no attempt at this time to analyze the curiously hostile behavior of a Christian country that had extended a warm official welcome. Instead, in some bewilderment, she surveyed the mounting disorder and may have rationalized along the same lines as did Odo when he said, “The Germans disturbed everything as they proceeded and the Greeks therefore fled our peaceful king who followed thereafter.” Since everyone loathed the Germans, she could hardly blame the Greeks for similar feelings.

  The only Greeks to receive them with a modicum of enthusiasm were the clergy, who emerged from their barricaded cities carrying “icons and other Greek paraphernalia” and showed Louis the reverence due a king. As Eleanor must have known, however, after the Frankish priests celebrated Mass on local altars, the Greeks would purify them with propitiary offerings and ablutions, as if they had been defiled. The Greek churches were opulently decorated with paintings and marble, and even though both Greeks and Franks were Catholics, there was such a vast difference in ritual between the two churches that the Franks could not help but regard the Greeks as heathens. “Because of this,” explained Odo, “they were judged not to be Christians and the Franks considered killing them of no importance.” In other words, the situation had come to this: Louis proved unequal to the task of preventing excesses, and eventually he stopped trying.

  It was September now. As the summer waned, so did the party mood that had sustained Eleanor for the past months. Her troubadours had packed away their lutes, her Amazon ladies from Aquitaine no longer seemed interested in nightly chatter about the delights of love; for everyone the atmosphere had suddenly turned somber. They had only to look about them to notice that the land, once beautiful and rich, had become a charnel house with rotting bodies of dead Germans contaminating the landscape like casually discarded garbage. Apparently, as long as the German soldiers had remained in orderly formation on the road, they were safe: those, however, who had stopped to refresh themselves at the taverns and had wandered off drunk were unceremoniously hacked to death. “Since the bodies were not buried,” wrote Odo, “all things were polluted, so that to the Franks who came later, less harm arose from the armed Greeks than from the dead Germans.” Eleanor and her companions wrapped their veils across their faces and grimly rode on. The crusading ballads of her swashbuckling grandfather had not prepared her for the sickening stench of corpses.

  On October 3, Constantinople lay only one day’s march ahead. At a meeting of the Frankish high command that night, Louis’s advisers counseled him to forget about Manuel as an ally and, instead, lay siege to the imperial city. Recalling Bernard’s warning to attend to holy business, Louis rejected the idea, and the following day, a Sunday, he appeared at the gates of the city to find himself the object of a mighty welcoming committee. Parading out to meet the Crusaders were nobles and wealthy men, clerics and laypersons, all humbly urging him to hasten to the basileus, whose greatest desire was to meet the sublime king of the Franks. No doubt the size and excessive geniality of the welcoming party had been greatly enhanced by reports from Manuel’s spies that just the previous day the Franks had been talking of ransacking his capital. Accompanied by a small group of intimates, including Odo de Deuil but excluding Eleanor, Louis was conducted to the Boukoleon Palace, where a smiling and affable Manuel waited for him on the portico and planted, restrainedly, the kiss of peace upon his brow.

  Eight hundred years earlier a Roman emperor had moved his government to this triangular site jutting out into the Bosporus, the dark blue waters of the Marmara Sea on one side and the Golden Horn on the other, and named the city after himself: Constantinopolis, the city of Constantine. While Rome had sunk into decay, Constantine’s capital—“glory of the Greeks, rich in renown an
d richer still in possessions”—had grown into the wealthiest city in the known world. Even though, by the time of Eleanor’s visit, much of the empire’s territory had fallen to the Turks and Arabs, its economic ascendancy was still unrivaled, with two-thirds of the world’s wealth enclosed within the walls of Constantinople alone.

  Like the humblest foot soldier, the queen of France stood outside the walls of the fabled city, gaping in amazement. A double curtain wall girdled a metropolis so large that her eyes could not comprehend it in one glance. In the harbor, the largest in the world, bobbed the masts of hundreds upon hundreds of vessels. Inside the walls, the city’s squares tinkled with splashing fountains, the abundant sweet water piped into the city by aqueducts that had been cut through the walls and stored in immense underground reservoirs, some of which still exist today. More than four thousand buildings—palaces, churches, convents, tall stone houses decorated with paintings of flowers and birds—lined the spotless thoroughfares upon which the Byzantines, unlike the Franks, would not have dared urinate. These sights, however, were not seen by the majority of the Crusaders, since Manuel had not the slightest intention of permitting what he considered an undisciplined mob of savages to enter his gates. They were ordered to make camp outside the walls, among the orchards and vegetable gardens. Even Eleanor and Louis were lodged outside the walls, in the Philopation, Manuel’s hunting lodge near the Golden Horn, which had been hastily refurbished after its recent occupancy by the ill-mannered Germans.

  This did not mean that the royal couple were ignored during their thirteen-day state visit. Far from it; Manuel personally escorted Louis on a tour of the various shrines, especially to Constantine’s Great Palace, in whose chapel resided (so the Greeks claimed) such revered holy relics as the Holy Lance, the Holy Cross, the Crown of Thorns, a nail from the Crucifixion, and the stone from Christ’s tomb. In the city’s basilica of Santa Sophia, immense enough that two or three ordinary churches could have fitted under its golden dome, there were so many candles that its interior looked as bright as the outdoors, its walls and pillars glittered with mosaics of precious stones, and its eunuch choir emitted heavenly sounds. Touring the Blachernae Palace. Manuel’s official residence, was such an overwhelming experience that Odo de Deuil found himself virtually speechless: “Its exterior is of almost matchless beauty, but its interior surpasses anything that I can say about it. Throughout it is decorated elaborately with gold and a great variety of colors, and the floor is marble, paved with cunning workmanship.”

  Constantinople enchanted Eleanor, as it had countless previous Crusaders, and helped to ameliorate her earlier, unfavorable impression of the Greeks. Its wonders may have compensated for other things that disturbed her, no doubt one of these being the empress of Byzantium.

  Only a series of fortunate accidents had lifted Empress Irene, nee Bertha of Sulzbach, from the backwater of Bavaria to the mighty throne of Byzantium, and now she struggled to perform her assigned duty as consort of the basileus without allowing justifiable insecurities to overwhelm her. The daughter of a German count, she happened to have had a sister who married the Holy Roman emperor, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, a union that conferred considerably more status than she would normally have had. In 1142, Conrad forged an alliance with John Comnenus (then the emperor of Byzantium) against their mutual enemy of Sicily; to seal the friendship he bestowed his sister-in-law on John’s youngest son, Manuel. Even though the likelihood of Manuel reaching the throne seemed remote, marriage into the Comnenus family was more than Bertha had ever dreamed of. Her fortunes transformed overnight, she had been taken to the Greek court for an intensive program of grooming, and the obliteration of her Germanness had been completed with the change of her name to Irene.

  When Eleanor met her in the fall of 1147, Irene had been married less than two years and had yet to produce an heir; in fact during her thirteen years as empress she would prove capable of bearing only one child and that one a daughter. Living in the lavish grandeur of the Blachernae, garlanded by ropes of pearls from the East and surrounded by slaves and eunuchs, Irene appeared to Eleanor as the possessor of a glamorous destiny, one that the queen could see herself easily fulfilling. Under Irene’s flamboyant exterior, however, hid a trembling young woman, still as much Bertha as Irene. The Crusade, to which in her homesickness she had initially responded with high anticipation, was turning out to be not only an ordeal but the most painful kind of embarrassment. In early summer, before the German segment of the Crusade had reached Constantinople, they had been preceded by reports of looting, burning, and killing; her husband had been obliged to dispatch an army to “escort” Conrad and his troops through Greece so that damage to people and property might be held to a minimum. Upon Conrad’s arrival in the imperial city, the heretofore friendly relations between her husband and brother-in-law took an abrupt turn for the worse.

  Anxious to rid himself of an unwelcome guest, Manuel suggested that since Conrad appeared to be in a hurry to reach Jerusalem, he might prefer to cross the Hellespont immediately and thus avoid a tedious delay in Constantinople. Conrad, incensed at what he considered Manuel’s lack of hospitality, refused, and he was finally escorted to the suburban palace of Philopation, which, in the course of a few days, his army managed to pillage so effectively that both the palace and its surrounding park were no longer inhabitable. It became necessary to move the German emperor across the Golden Horn to the palace of Picridium. Adding to Irene’s mortification, German soldiers seemed intent on committing as many atrocities as possible against city residents, scarcely a day passing without a major skirmish between Conrad’s men and Greek troops. When her husband asked Conrad for redress, the emperor shrugged off the violence as unimportant and then angrily threatened to return the next year and sack Manuel’s capital.

  It was only by the greatest exercise of her diplomatic talents that Irene was able to pacify the two men, and outwardly at least, amity was restored. To her enormous relief, Conrad set off toward the end of September, helpfully sped on his way across the Straits of Saint George by Manuel’s navy. Her poignant recollections of her native land somewhat diminished by that time, Irene retired to her quarters, but she could not avoid the general consternation, not to mention condemnation, among the Greeks over the barbaric behavior of her countrymen, and to a large degree, she had come to share their opinion. Now, only a week later, she was called upon to grapple once again with the role of cordial hostess to another army of Crusaders, this one, unlike the German contingent, containing a queen who would expect even more personal entertainment than the coarse-grained soldiers. Conscientiously she organized sightseeing jaunts, shopping expeditions, and banquets that “afforded pleasure to ear, mouth and eye with pomp as marvelous, viands as delicate, and pastimes as pleasant as the guests were illustrious.” Daily she spooned out doses of novelty: slaves whose only function was to anticipate Eleanor’s wishes; visits to Santa Sophia to see a statue of the Virgin ceaselessly dripping tears from its eyes and a casket containing the three Magis’ gifts to the Christ child; a trip to the tower of the Golden Gate, where Eleanor could gaze down upon caravans whose laden camels brought sandalwood, brass, and exotic silks from the East. In short, Irene carried out her duties with meticulous formality but without any note of warmth.

  From the start Eleanor had genuinely mystified the empress and the other glittering females in her entourage. What puzzled them most was why any woman would wish to travel to Jerusalem when even the relatively short trip from Constantinople to Antioch was considered treacherous for a woman. Apart from the very real possibility of being massacred en route by the Turks, there were the discomforts of dusty roads, scarce water, and general lack of amenities, which would cause any true noblewoman to recoil. When the Greek women learned that Eleanor disdained a canopied litter and usually rode on horseback like a man, it only reinforced their suspicions that the Franks, Christian though they might call themselves, were truly a primitive people. In the end, they could only conclude archly that
the queen had joined the Crusade because she did not trust Louis out of her sight.

  Their patronization extended to yet another area. Despite Eleanor’s self-image as western Europe’s foremost fashionplate, the critical Greek women compared her attire to their own sartorial splendor and found her dowdy, if not outlandish. This they took for granted, not expecting elegance from the queen of an underdeveloped kingdom such as the Franks’, and it was hardly likely that their superiority did not rankle Eleanor. That those controversial trunks packed with her best finery should count for less than nothing was, however, only one of the many shocks that awaited her in Constantinople. She must have been surprised to learn how little respect the Greeks had for Crusaders, and she could not fail to see their flagrant boredom, how they listened with weary smiles to the plans Louis laid before them. The Byzantines had a poor opinion of the intellectual level of the Franks, for that matter of all Latin peoples, thinking them naive and superstitious, but at the same time Manuel feared them and was willing to go to any length to humor them. Thus, he wooed them with lavish gifts, believing as did his grandfather Alexius that the Crusaders were motivated solely by greed and ambition, but also believing that any favors he did for them would not be returned, any promises extracted would be broken without a second thought. Although Eleanor had been dazzled by Byzantine luxury—this was how kings and queens should live—at times she must have felt their gorgeous pageantry a bit excessive, if only because the Greeks seemed intent on making the Latins feel inferior.

  Eleanor could hardly have failed to contrast Louis with the basileus. The two men were about the same age and physical stature, but there the resemblance ended: Manuel appeared resplendent in his purple robes, Louis colorless in the sad cloth of his Crusader’s tunic; Manuel was suave, alert, overflowing with charm, Louis solemn and awkward. No medieval sovereign had a more acute sense of his own limitless power than Manuel Comnenus, and to Eleanor, it must have been a rude jolt to notice how no courtier dared, approach the basileus except with bowed head and bended knee, while anyone could, and did, amble up to converse with the unprepossessing Louis. All his life he would prove woefully lacking in sophistication and majesty, but as he aged, these so-called defects of his character would grow more beguiling to his contemporaries. Nevertheless, in Constantinople, it is not too difficult to understand why his wife did not appreciate his simple traits, and those thirteen days—so uplifting, so humiliating—would mark the beginning of Eleanor’s extreme disenchantment with the king.