Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  All the while, the political situation with Manuel remained heavy with ambiguity. For the time being, thoughts of attacking Constantinople had been abandoned—they needed Manuel too much—but how far they could trust him was unclear. Furthermore, it was emphatically obvious to all that they were quickly wearing out their welcome. Some of the rowdier pilgrims had burned houses, cut down olive trees, and generally acted like drunken fools. Odo tells us that “the king frequently punished offenders by cutting off their ears, hands and feet, yet he could not check the folly of the whole group. Indeed one of two things was necessary, either to kill many thousands at one time or to put up with their numerous evil deeds.” One day a Fleming soldier barged into the Greek money changers’ stalls and went berserk, shouting Havo! Havo! seizing handfuls of gold and inspiring other Crusaders in the vicinity to do likewise. “The noise and confusion increased, the stalls came falling down, the gold was trampled on and seized.” Although Louis hung the Fleming in full view of the city, he also felt obliged to make restitution to the money changers, most of whom demanded greater sums than they had actually lost. Incidents like this one helped to deplete Louis’s treasury, which was badly in need of succor anyway, as his letters to Suger requesting additional funds attest. Everthing considered, it was thought best to move on.

  On October 16, Eleanor left Constantinople with a sense of relief. The city, for all its spendor, had brought her nothing but disquieting and exasperating thoughts, and she relinquished her perfumed chamber in the Philopation to take up residence in a tent once more. Even though their departure had been announced, Louis characteristically dawdled outside the city walls. Five days were spent on the near side of the Bosporus, the queen and her ladies whiling away their time hawking, the noblemen fulminating against Manuel. There was nothing to do but gossip and threaten. Nobody enjoyed the delay, least of all Manuel, who continued to harass Louis in the hope that it would speed him along. He badgered the king with provocative requests: to turn over any captured towns or castles to the Byzantines, to give up one of Eleanor’s ladies as a bride for his nephew, and so on, but he received no acknowledgment. Finally Manuel, an intrepid schemer, suggested that the army cross the Straits of Saint George to the far coast of Asia Minor, where it might be more comfortable. Louis’s delay, however, was not based on pure capriciousness; he was waiting for a small contingent of late-arriving Crusaders who had taken an Italian route under the command of his uncles, the count of Maurienne and the marquis of Montferrat. Nevertheless, on October 21, he moved the army to the coast of Asia Minor, where they lingered another five days. What Louis hoped to gain by waiting for a small detachment of men is not clear, but it turned out to be a grave error in judgment, for during the delay the Franks, in an orgy of high spirits, ate most of the food that had been set aside for the journey to Antioch.

  With each passing day, Louis’s actions could not but have added to Eleanor’s anxieties. On October 26, the order to break camp was finally given, but at the last moment, for inexplicable reasons of his own, Louis suddenly decided to return to Constantinople for a last-minute conference with Manuel. As the army set off across the plains without him, the sky darkened with an eclipse, a phenomenon that the superstitious medieval person invariably regarded as a menacing omen. For most of the day, the sun was shaped like a half loaf of bread. No one doubted what this meant: “It was feared that the king, who above all others shone with faith, glowed with charity, and attained celestial heights because of this hope, had been deprived of some part of his light by the treachery of the Greeks.” What appeared to Louis’s everworshipful admirer, Odo, as celestial grandeur of soul only meant to Eleanor that the king’s slow wit had led him into some fresh disaster. Later in the day, however, he caught up with the army, safe and full of elation at the good news he had just heard from Manuel: Conrad and his Germans had fought a victorious battle against the Turks.

  In fact, Manuel had lied. Unknown to the basileus, there had been a battle that very day in the region of Dorylaeum, but nine-tenths of Conrad’s army had been annihilated. “The victorious Turks, laden with spoils and enriched by countless treasure, with horses and arms even to superabundance, retired to their own fortresses. There they eagerly awaited the coming of the king of France.”

  The king of France, along with his queen, was skirting the peninsula of Asia Minor in the late October sunshine in a mood of heady, if short-lived optimism. The weather was still mild and fine, just mellow and brisk enough to make one feel like traveling, and they dined on good bread and wine and illusions. Manuel had sent them a bon voyage gift of victuals, but as Eleanor must have known, the provisions would not last a week. Although Manuel sent them neither enough food for a long journey nor the guides he had promised, nevertheless, at that moment, the queen may have forgotten his windy words and been having kind thoughts about the emperor. Buoyed up by the news of Conrad’s victory, these disappointments did not seem so significant after all. Divine intervention had, evidently, come to their aid at last. The Turks, after their rout by Conrad, would not be in a mood to trouble them. Traveling through a part of Asia Minor rich in biblical and Crusader history, they neared the venerable Christian city of Nicaea, which had fallen into the hands of the Turks in 1080 and whose capture had been the previous crusading army’s first great victory. While camping near the Nicene lake, reviewing the heroic deeds of their grandparents, they were startled by the arrival of surprising visitors, the guides that Manuel had provided for Conrad. How the Greeks satisfactorily explained their sudden abandonment of Conrad and their return to Constantinople is not clear, but they did more or less confirm Manuel’s reports of victory, for different reasons. In essence, the highly seductive news they gave Louis was that yes, Conrad had defeated a Turkish army and yes, God be praised, there had been an outstanding massacre. It was, of course, precisely what Louis wanted to hear.

  The next day, or perhaps the day following, the first blow of reality fell when the advance guard reported a curious sight ahead—Germans headed in their direction, Germans who in no way resembled victors. They straggled into Louis’s camp, thirsty, starved, bloody, and dazed with terror. Their comrades dead, they were the lucky few, several hundred out of ten thousand, who had survived, and it took little imagination to envision the scenes they described. For Eleanor, these amounted to echoes of what she recalled of her grandfather’s experiences: ambush, thousands slain, the escape of a traumatized few. In addition to the massacre of his men, the Holy Roman emperor had lost the entire contents of his camp, his horses, arms, and gold. Already the booty was finding its way to bazaars throughout the Moslem East and would eventually be sold as far away as Persia.

  Eleanor, like everyone else, was totally unprepared for the German disaster, and not unnaturally her mind must have raced ahead to wonder whether she would come to a similar grisly end. Louis, nevertheless, urged his army forward, “grieved with stupefaction and stupefied with grief,” in hopes of aiding other survivors and finding the remnants of German headquarters. On November 2 or 3, he encountered a nearly incapacitated Conrad, rheumy-eyed and nursing a serious head wound. The two kings consulted together in an effort to analyze what had happened and what they should do next. There were plenty of theories to explain the massacre: Some said it was the treachery of the Greek guides, who had sneaked off after they had betrayed Conrad to the Turks; some said it was the Holy Roman emperor’s own fault for taking a short cut to reach Antioch more quickly; others said it was God, punishing a holy army that thought more about wine and luxurious meals than providing themselves with arms and equipment. Most likely Conrad was right when he told Louis and his nobles: “Know that I am not therefore angry at God but at myself; for God is just but I and my people are foolish.” Hearing these words, Louis began to cry and invited Conrad to share his tent.

  According to Conrad, there were two possible routes to northern Syria: a wide road, which could be traversed in eight days but offered little access to food, or the indirect coastal road, wh
ich he believed to be better supplied. “Although you do not fear the power of any people” he advised Louis, “yet you likewise do not have arrows which can subdue hunger.”

  Winter was beginning as they set out along the seacoast, threading their way down stony canyons and through gorges made by mountain torrents. Whether or not she would live to see the spring is a question Eleanor must have asked herself more than once, especially in view of Louis’s continuing blunders. Once he and a group of companions left the main body of Crusaders to search for a shortcut. For three days the king remained among the missing, wandering in bewilderment over mountain crags until he became hopelessly lost. Eventually he came across mountain dwellers—“rustics,” Odo calls them, “the companions of wild beasts”—who escorted the king, looking very small and tired, back to his army. With each passing day, his losses began to mount. Pack animals died, as did the dogs and falcons who had been carried for so many months by their loving mistresses. The Greek forest dwellers became rich overnight as hungry Crusaders parted with gold and silver pieces, enameled helms and shields, costly cloaks and gowns. As the year drew to a close, there was little in which Eleanor could take comfort, since it seems likely that many of her Amazon trunks had been emptied to purchase food. More worrisome to her was the incredible disintegration of the army, Louis having given up issuing even the most elemental orders. As a result, each battalion did as it pleased, with no particular order of march being maintained and men failing to obey their officers. As far as Eleanor could observe, the group had ceased to deserve the name of an army—it was a mob roaming through the wilderness, desperately in need of a Moses to lead them. When they stopped for Christmas at Ephesus, an increasingly ill Conrad decided to board a ship bound for Constantinople. “Perchance,” wrote William of Tyre, “he found the arrogance of the Franks unendurable.” A far more likely assumption is that he found Louis’s mismanagement of the army intolerable.

  On Christmas Eve, in the fertile valley of Decervion near Ephesus, they pitched their tents on the mossy banks of the river Maeander. Horses were put out to graze in the luxuriant grass, water jars filled from the river, fires lit for cooking. As black-robed monks gathered under the trees to begin Mass, a detachment of Turks, howling and shouting like demons, suddenly appeared on the opposite bank. This was the first time that Louis’s Crusaders had met the enemy, and hot to avenge the Germans, they seized the nearest horses and weapons, forded the river, and raced to meet the Turkish horsemen. Perhaps astonished by the ferocity of the Franks, the Turks broke and fled for the hills, the Crusaders in exultant pursuit.

  This initially successful confrontation filled the army with extravagant false confidence. They had killed many Turks and, even better, seized an enemy camp that was well-stocked with gold. “Filled with joy over the victory and the rich spoils which they had seized, the Christians passed a quiet night and, at dawn, prepared to resume the march.” At daybreak, however, they awoke to find that the Levantine winter had arrived in full force. Darkened skies loosed torrential rains and sheets of sleet, the river began to overflow, and in the distance they could see mountain tops whitening with snow. Along with the downpour, which would hammer them steadily for the next four days, violent winds ripped through the camp, overturning the gay pavilions of their tent city, which had seemed so festive the previous day, and the rising waters of the Maeander began to flood the banks. Men, horses, and equipment were crushed on the rocks and drowned. The year 1147 ended bleakly, but it would have been far more dismal if the Crusaders could have seen what the new year held.

  It had now been nearly seven months since they had left Metz. According to their schedule, they should be nearing Jerusalem, and Eleanor must have pondered uneasily upon the reasons why they still were floundering in the wilds of Asia Minor. Since June, Louis had been considerably less than zealous about his duties as commander. He had closeted himself with his confidants, Thierry Galeran and Odo de Deuil; written letters to Abbot Suger pleading for money; visited shrines; and prayed interminably. Under the guise of democracy, he had divided responsibility for leadership among his barons, each night designating a different commander for the next day in a kind of round-robin chain of command. As a result, everyone—and no one—was in charge, a policy that must have added to Eleanor’s contempt for him. Up until this point, Louis’s inadequacy had never actually imperiled the army, but now, with one misstep, anything could go wrong. As the army left the seacoast and began to push its way inland, it must have been pathetically obvious to Eleanor that Louis scarcely knew where he was, let alone how to proceed. In November, he had followed Conrad’s advice, only to realize that the coastal route was devoid of the food he needed and the weather might decimate his army. Now he determined to seek the safety of Eleanor’s uncle at Antioch by proceeding as the crow flies—that is, straight over the Phrygian mountains. That this was the direction being taken by Conrad when his Teutons had been massacred was a fact he carefully evaded, no doubt believing that he had no other choice.

  Leaving the valley of the Maeander, they climbed to higher ground, winding up into the foothills of the Phrygian mountains toward the apostolic city of Laodicea, where Louis planned to rest and replenish his supplies. Harassed at every step by the Turks, who assaulted boldly and retreated skillfully and easily, they arrived at Laodicea on January 3, 1148, to find the city virtually deserted. The Greek inhabitants had fled, taking with them all the edibles they could carry. For over a week the Crusaders lingered at Laodicea in a mood of cockiness, for they had driven off the Turks several times by now. The route to their most immediate destination, Adalia (the modern Antalya), on the same seacoast from whence they had recently come, wound over high desolate mountains and through the rugged pass at Mount Cadmos. Lacking native guides, having in fact no clear idea of direction, they were compelled to take their bearings from the sun and hope that God would see fit to shepherd them over the mountains. At the best of times it was a treacherous journey, but for a starving, undisciplined army who had to contend with winter storms and Turks stealthily nipping at their heels, it had all the makings of a nightmare.

  Toward the middle of January, under the watchful eye of the enemy, the column slowly began moving up the mountain through a landscape as still as death. The hillsides were scattered with the skeletons of entire horses; with skulls, legs, rib cages of men, many picked clean by vultures but others still covered with rotting clothes and flesh. The corpses sprawled grotesquely where they had fallen, on their knees or faces, some on their backs with eyeless sockets staring up at the sky. For Conrad’s ill-fated Germans, the Crusade had terminated here.

  On the day set for the crossing of Mount Cadmos, Louis took charge of the column’s rear, which included the unarmed pilgrims and the baggage. Commanding the vanguard was one of Eleanor’s vassals, her old friend Geoffrey de Rancon, in whose castle she and Louis had spent their wedding night. It would be said later that Eleanor was marching with Geoffrey at the head of the column, a highly unlikely and dangerous position for an important personage such as the queen of France. Nevertheless, she must have been riding closer to the front of the line than the back. At noon, Geoffrey, unencumbered by baggage, reached the mountain’s windy summit, where he was supposed to make camp for the night. Disregarding his orders, he decided to advance a bit farther, for he felt that the march had been too short that day. Scouts whom he had sent ahead assured him that there was a more wholesome spot for the camp on a nearby plateau, and after consulting with Louis’s uncle the count of Maurienne, de Rancon ordered the column to move on. Geoffrey’s disobedience, if such a word can be applied to an action so normal in Louis’s disorganized army, alarmed no one, least of all the queen. When in the past had anyone, from the highest nobleman to the common foot soldier, paid attention to Louis’s edicts, especially this one, since the king had clearly misjudged the amount of time needed to cross the mountain? Little did the queen know that the seeds of carelessness that Louis had allowed to be sown during the past eight m
onths were now about to bear fatal fruit.

  By midafternoon, the rear of the column, believing, in happy ignorance, that they had almost reached the end of the day’s march, began carelessly to lag behind. Soon the army was divided, some having already crossed the summit, others still loitering along the ridge, their progress impeded by falling rocks. The Turks, who had been keeping a close watch from a distance, immediately recognized the situation for what it was, and now they quickly moved in to press their advantage. Swarming over the mountain with howls of “Allah akbar” (“God is great”), thrusting and slashing as if with scythes among wheat, they fell upon the panicked Christians, soldiers as well as unarmed pilgrims. As the rocky paths grew slippery with blood, humans, horses, and baggage hurtled over the precipices into the canyon below. Although there was no avenue of escape, for the Turks had seized the top of the mountain, those who tried to flee were pursued and butchered, “overwhelmed among the thick-pressing enemy as if they were drowned in the sea.” William of Tyre wrote that “our people were hindered by the narrow defiles, and their horses were exhausted by the enormous amount of baggage,” baggage that, as everyone believed, must have belonged to the women.