Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  Amid the clash of battle, the king escaped notice, for in his soldier’s tunic he looked like everyone else, his disdain for the trappings of royalty inadvertently saving his life. His royal bodyguard exterminated in a mess of smashed skulls and severed limbs, “he nimbly and bravely scaled a rock by making use of some tree roots which God had provided for his safety” and, his back to the mountainside, defended himself until his assailants moved on. “No aid came from heaven, except that night fell.”

  Meanwhile, Eleanor and the others in the vanguard were unaware of the skirmish. As the afternoon wore on, however, Geoffrey de Rancon began to grow apprehensive and at dusk he sent a party of knights back to investigate. Not until nearly midnight did the search party chance to come across their king, bloody and exhausted, stumbling on foot over the mountain with a few companions.

  There was to be no sleep that night. From one end of the camp to the other could be heard the sound of voices, weeping, mourning, shrieking grief. “With tremulous voice and tearful sighs,” women went out to search the mountain road for sons and husbands, servants sought their masters. During the night the stragglers drifted in, those who had escaped death “rather by chance than their own wisdom” after hiding among the bushes and rocks until nightfall.

  Beside herself with anxiety during that agonizing evening, Eleanor’s first reactions at the sight of her husband must have been shock and relief—shock at the immensity of the disaster, relief at the knowledge that she and Louis had escaped. At that point, however, she had no assurance that they were out of danger, indeed the facts greatly pointed to the opposite conclusion, for in the morning she could see the Turks spread over the mountainside, waiting. They were gabbling in loud voices, plucking hair from their heads, and throwing it on the ground. These exaggerated gestures, she learned, meant that they would not be dislodged from their posts.

  Once the first horror had subsided, the angry survivors began to cast about for someone on whom to affix the blame. The man they chose as scapegoat, interestingly enough, was Geoffrey de Rancon; he and the king’s uncle had disobeyed orders and therefore should be hung, suggestions that Louis ignored. By many of the Franks, Eleanor, too, was cast in the role of leper. It was, they said, her luggage that had prevented the rear guard from overcoming the Turkish attack, her friend Geoffrey de Rancon who had disobeyed orders, her Aquitainians who had been traveling in the vanguard and thus had escaped the brunt of the massacre. That these charges were exaggerated is obvious; that the real reason for the catastrophe was, not Geoffrey’s disobedience, but Louis’s maladroit leadership the Franks were not willing to acknowledge. From this time on, however, resentment against the queen began to mount, and although none declared that she deserved hanging, even her women friends treated her coldly. It is against this omnipresent feeling that she had contributed to the fiasco that consequent events must be seen.

  Now that the worst had happened, Louis began to behave with perfect correctness as a commander. Marshaling what remained of his forces, he ordered them to maintain an order of march, obey their officers, and stand their ground in combat until given orders to withdraw. In this way, then, they began the tortuous descent down the mountain, the Turks aware of their weakness and harassing them every foot of the way. They had little food and no water. Those sufficiently parched with thirst bled horses or asses and drank the blood, for meals they grilled dead horses, both their own and those left behind by the Turks. “With this food,” we learn from Odo, “and bread baked in the ashes of campfires, even the wealthy were satisfied.”

  The Crusaders who emerged from the mountains on January 20 could hardly have been called an army. Many of their horses and mules had died or been eaten. Swords and equipment had been thrown away or long since sold for food. Their baggage had enriched the Turks, and what had not been captured lay at the bottom of ravines. They had raw blistered hands, cracked lips, and their filthy clothes hung in tatters. Many, including a number of bishops, had no shoes. The condition of Queen Eleanor was not recorded by Odo, but it is certain that she was in no better shape than anyone else. If they had naively harbored illusions about having finally reached a safe haven, they were quickly disabused, for the next five weeks in the Greek city of Adalia were to be as agonizing as any they had theretofore experienced. Once a delightful seaside town boasting fertile fields and orchards, Adalia was now a beleaguered city unable to cultivate its fields for fear of Turkish attacks and dependent upon food brought in by ship. What provisions the townspeople did possess they were willing to share for only the most exorbitant prices.

  The unutterably traumatic events of the last two months had tempered Eleanor’s bold spirit; her nerves were strained to the snapping point. Coming down the mountain, fearful that the next minute would bring a hailstorm of arrows, she had concentrated on only one thing: survival. Now it appeared that she had hoped for too much as misfortune piled on misfortune. The chilling information from the Greeks at Adalia was that Antioch, the gateway to the Holy Land, still lay a forty days’ march over mountainous, Turk-infested terrain. By sea the trip took merely three days, but even supposing ships could be found on that deserted coast in midwinter, there was no money to pay the fare of four silver marks for each person.

  Sleeting rain and snow accompanied by lightning and thunder lashed the few tiny tents remaining; sickness and starvation swept the camp; horses died for lack of fodder. During that first week in Adalia, the camp rumbled with dissension. Louis made his views explicit: Since they could not transport the whole group by sea, they clearly had no choice but to resume marching overland. His disgruntled barons were equally adamant about wishing to put to sea, even if it meant leaving thousands behind. “Let us,” the king insisted, “follow the route of our fathers whose incomparable valor endowed them with renown on earth and glory in heaven.” His head full of visions of crusading triumphs, he talked about “martyrs” and “valor,” but to his barons. and knights, the words conveyed only a bizarre kind of death wish that they had no desire to share, and they told him so. There is no evidence of Eleanor’s reaction to all this, but with the refuge of her uncle’s court only three days away, she must have been anxious to exit by any available escape hatch. If Louis wished to pursue some mad dream of martyrdom, she would leave him to his destiny, but under no circumstances would she accompany him. It is not difficult to conjecture that she was among those who, after violent debate, “forced” (the word is Odo’s) the pliable king to a saner point of view.

  The decision was made in the nick of time because, with each passing week, the odds increased against leaving Adalia alive. The beginnings of plague had broken out in the camp, and the size of the burial ground needed to be enlarged daily. Not until the end of February, however, did there arrive both the ordered vessels and a favorable wind. Those Crusaders who still had money and horses, or a noble name, hastened aboard the hastily convened convoy, while the rest were left to manage as best they could. Many would perish of disease OT starvation outside the walls of Adalia, many would be killed or captured, and over three thousand, converted to the Moslem faith in exchange for bread, would vanish without a ripple into the lands of the Turks.

  Finally there rang out the familiar cries of the master mariners, “Unfurl the sails for God’s sake.” In a short time, the wind filled the sails and bore Eleanor and Louis, barely on speaking terms by this time, out of sight of land. The journey, the Greeks had promised, would take three days, but they had not allowed for the unpredictability of the weather. Battered by winter storms, the convoy was carried farther from the coast of Asia Minor but no nearer Syria, and when Eleanor lay down at night, she did not know whether the morning would find her at the bottom of the sea.

  Three weeks later, on March 19, 1148, the king and queen of France, ragged and seasick, sailed into the port of Saint Simeon near Antioch.

  Eleanor spent only ten days in Antioch, but those days would affect the history of western Europe for the next three hundred years. Nonetheless, on that fir
st day when she stepped, pale and exhausted in health, into the arms of Prince Raymond, no such far-reaching consequences could have been predicted. In Syria, the winter rains had ended. It was spring, and the hillsides were covered with red and blue anemones. Unlike the haughty Manuel Comnenus, Raymond had not waited in his palace for the arrival of the Crusaders but had hastened the ten miles down the Orontes River to the port, with almost the whole population of the city in his wake. To the chanting of the Te Deum and the cheers of the throng, he had escorted them up to his terraced city on the slopes of Mount Silpius. After the privations of the winter, Antioch must have seemed like an hallucination to Eleanor. It was more like a vast garden than a city, with green pastureland, orchards, granaries, and ancient Roman baths enclosed within its walls. Fourteen hundred years of history were layered here. Once it was the third most important city in the Roman Empire, Julius Caesar had sat in its amphitheater, Herod had paved its streets with marble, Diocletian had built its cisterns. Through its groves of parasol pines and its hanging gardens had trooped the Arabs of Harun al-Rashid, purple-mantled Byzantine emperors, the Turks, and finally the Christians. Ancient, wise, civilized, it immediately reminded Eleanor of Bordeaux and Poitiers and brought back a flood of nostalgia for her native land. But more than the physical beauty of the place made her feel that she had come home: The official language of the city was the langue d’oc, the knights and priests in Raymond’s service were Poitevins, and several of them she had known as neighbors during her childhood. Best of all, however, there was the magnificent Raymond himself.

  Like all the men of her family, the prince was handsome and virile, a hearty adventurer who combined the traits of prowess and beauty that Eleanor admired so highly in a man and that of course she had failed to find in her husband. A true son of the Troubadour, Raymond had, like his father, considerable charm—charisma we would call it now—as well as a wry sense of humor, which often colored his actions: Indeed, his life story would have made an ideal theme for one of William’s poems. Thirteen years earlier, while a knight at the English court, he had been tapped by King Fulk of Jerusalem as a husband for Princess Constance, the eight-year-old heiress of Antioch. There were, nevertheless, a number of obstacles to the marriage, the most serious being Constance’s mother. Acting as regent, Alice had been ruling the principality and had no intention of giving up her power. Furthermore, she seems to have disliked her daughter and planned to marry her to Manuel Comnenus, an alliance whose political implications thoroughly horrified the Frankish barons of Syria. Therefore it was with the utmost secrecy that Raymond had journeyed to the Holy Land disguised as a peddler. Once there, he dealt with Alice by asking her to marry him, a not inappropriate match, since Raymond was twenty-one and Alice not yet thirty. Flattered, she was silly enough to allow Raymond entrance to the city, going so far, in fact, as to welcome him with an excess of emotion. While preparing for the wedding, she received the news that Raymond had just married her daughter, making himself the undisputed ruler of Antioch.

  Now thirty-four, the youngest son of William IX was in his prime; he was, however, also fighting for his life. Instrumental in setting the Crusade in motion, he had hoped that his good fortune at having a niece who was queen of France would ultimately rescue his kingdom from the Turks. More than hoped, he had assumed that his close relationship with the Frankish royal house would hold the key to survival. That he was perched on the edge of a volcano he must have been acutely aware, and in fact, a year later his severed head would be adorning a gate in Baghdad. If the size and strength of the life preserver now being offered was unquestionably puny, nevertheless he still regarded it as sufficient for his purposes. The crusading army that disembarked at Saint Simeon was only a shadow of its bulk at Metz, but even so, many of those slain or abandoned along the way had been pilgrims or infantry, and Louis’s host remained the most formidable Christian force to appear in the Holy Land in half a century. The news of its coming had succeeded in terrifying the Moslem world to the extent “that now they not only mistrusted their own strength but even despaired of life itself,” a response that Raymond wished to take advantage of. First, however, with traditional Aquitainian hospitality, he spared no expense in making his guests feel welcome.

  For the next few days the Franks were treated to a dizzying round of banquets and hunting parties. Installed in Raymond’s palace with its running tap water, glass windows, and perfumed candles, Eleanor was able to discard her stinking rags and bathe with the luxurious soap for which Antioch was famous. Her uncle furnished her with a new wardrobe of silken gowns so exquisitely woven by the silk makers of Antioch that only the highest ecclesiastics in France could afford them. At the fêtes, Eleanor shared a place of honor with Raymond. The entertainment—the troubadours, minstrels, and Saracen dancers—was all very gay, very ribald, very characteristic of her grandfather’s court at Poitiers. At table, they drank Persian wines cooled with snow from Lebanon mountains and Mount Hermon and dined on the specialties of the land: sugar, oranges, figs, dates, quinces, and melons. Syria was famous for its white bread and apples of paradise, which we know as bananas, as well as for artichokes, asparagus, truffles, and lettuce, the latter being considered a choice dish. All of this acted as an aphrodisiac on Eleanor’s sensibilities, and her natural appetite for pleasure quickly revived. Now that the journey over the mountains was receding into an anguishing memory, she threw herself almost tumultuously into living. Her affection for her uncle, and his for her, was widely noted, and though their intimacy seems natural under the circumstances, it was not received with any special favor by the Franks, who regarded his attentions to their queen as excessive. Eleanor’s exuberance did not escape comment from the increasingly hostile Franks, who continued to blame the incident at Mount Cadmos on her luggage and who undoubtedly read into the racy conversations in the langued’oc, which they could not fully understand, more than was actually there.

  If Raymond made an inordinate fuss over the queen, he did not forget the others. “Raymond showed the king every attention on his arrival,” reported William of Tyre. “He likewise displayed a similar care for the nobles and chief men in the royal retinue and gave them many proofs of his great liberality. In short, he outdid all in showing honor to each one according to his rank and handled everything with the greatest Magnificence.”

  But it was Eleanor with whom he spent his time. After a twenty-year separation, they had much of a personal nature to discuss, but their conversations must certainly have focused on politics, that is, Raymond’s precarious position with the Turks. Aware of his niece’s intelligence, he would have explained that Nureddin had established himself along the Christian frontier from Edessa to Hama and had spent the last six months methodically snatching, one by one, the Frankish fortresses east of the Orontes River. As for Count Joscelin, whose laxness had caused Edessa to fall into Turkish hands four years earlier, he could barely hold his own. If the Turks were to attack Antioch in force, Raymond would be lost. But now, with the arrival of the Crusaders, he could easily take the offensive and strike at the heart of Nureddin’s power by taking his city of Aleppo. He might also reclaim his lost provinces along the Orontes, but most importantly, he could recapture Edessa, whose fall had given rise to the Crusade.

  To Eleanor, his plan seemed eminently reasonable. Should the Turks succeed in overrunning northern Syria and capturing Antioch, the entire Holy Land would be threatened, and nothing would then prevent them from sweeping down to Jerusalem. Obviously the security of the Holy City would best be established by driving back the Turks in the north. If the merits of Raymond’s plan were obvious to Eleanor, they were not so to Louis. To her amazement, the king refused to hear of the scheme. He said, incredibly, that his Crusader vow obliged him to visit Jerusalem before he undertook any campaign, and he had no intention of fighting anyone until he had first worshiped Jesus Christ at the Holy Sepulcher. His reasoning seemed so childish, not to say irresponsible, that Eleanor may not have believed him at first. Th
e recapture of Edessa had been the whole purpose of the Crusade. Had he dragged thousands of people on a three-thousand-mile journey merely to pray? The idea was too bizarre to be credible. Since he was behaving irrationally, she curbed her fury and humored him like a child, counting on Raymond to bring him back to reality.

  The days that followed were full of conflict. At a full meeting of the Crusader barons, Raymond formally outlined his tactics—and Louis disdainfully rejected them. When the king realized that Eleanor supported her uncle, it only strengthened his resolve to have nothing to do with Raymond’s plan. His decision, he declared stubbornly, was irrevocable, and in this his barons supported him. Raymond was not only baffled at this turn of events but enraged. “When Raymond found that he could not induce the king to join him, his attitude changed. Frustrated in his ambitious designs, he began to hate the king’s ways; he openly plotted against him and took means to do him injury.”

  Raymond’s nets had been cast carefully, but they caught only the wind. Despite the beauty of Antioch, despite Raymond’s gifts, Louis felt offended, as did the rest of the Franks, by what they found there. The principality did not appear in danger, indeed its people lived a life of pleasure in mosaic-tiled houses and splendid gardens with fountains and marble-tiled pools; even the common people lived more ostentatiously than any king of France. Raymond himself, far from defending the Holy Sepulcher, wore soft slippers and loose gowns like some oriental potentate. For that matter, Louis could barely distinguish the Saracens from the Frankish Syrians, who imitated the Moslems by wearing flowing garments, beards, and turbans and who, to his horror, had even intermarried with the natives. To add to his consternation, their offspring, the Pullani, had been invited to the banquets he had attended, and failing to understand that many Moslems lived on perfectly amicable terms with the Christians, Louis deplored having to dine with his enemies. Most shocking to him, however, was the sight of mosques in Antioch; even the Christian churches, which had been decorated by Saracen artists, looked like mosques.