by Marion Meade
He was not alone in his hostility toward Raymond. The ancient enmity between the Franks and Aquitainians had been building to a crescendo ever since Mount Cadmos, and now all the Franks could read into Raymond’s battle plans was that more territory would be added to the domains of a southerner. At this point, they were in no mood to add prestige to the house of Poitou. As to what the Crusaders from Aquitaine thought about all this, the record unfortunately provides no clue. Their Crusader vows, apparently, bound them to abide by the decisions of their commander.
One would get the impression from these happenings that logic played little part in their outcome. The situation was even more absurd, for underneath the welter of all the bickering and political maneuvering hid the real reason for Louis’s inexplicable decision: the familiar emotion of jealousy. Put at its simplest, the king suspected that Eleanor had taken the prince as her lover.
The contradictions of Eleanor’s marital life that had been curled like a worm in the center of her slumbering sensuality now erupted into full view. Circumstances had given her a throne, but since it had brought her nothing but unhappiness, she counted it worthless; marriage had brought her a king for a husband, but this king more nearly resembled a monk. While Louis had been a faithful husband, the reason for his fidelity was, ironically, that he had utterly no interest in sex. As if all this were not enough, he was incurably dull, and while she could never truly have loved a dull man, she certainly could have lived with one. What she could not live with was a fool, and since the beginning of the Crusade, Louis’s stupidity, his cataclysmic insecurities, had been writ clear for all to see.
It would have been natural for a woman of Eleanor’s position in the twelfth century to have had these negative feelings about her husband. Other queens had been desperately unhappy in their marriages, but they had accepted the situation, either because the prestige made them so much better off than other women or perhaps from the feeling that husbands were lords and masters, free to treat wives as they wished. If a queen suffered, she did so in private. If her marriage ended, it was her lord’s decision, and she retreated in silent humiliation to her father’s castle or into a convent. But this was not Eleanor’s temperament.
Toward the end of March, the queen confronted her husband with a demand for divorce. She would go no farther with his Crusade. Not only was she washing her hands of the holy expedition, she also avowed her intention, one undoubtedly encouraged by Raymond, to relinquish both the crown of France and its king. In the future, she would remain in Antioch and resume her title of duchess of Aquitaine. Her words, evidently, caught Louis unprepared, for although the signs had been everywhere for him to read, he had never anticipated such a declaration. Undoubtedly he recalled her “constant, almost continuous conversations” with Raymond, and now her decision to stay in Antioch only strengthened his suspicions about their relationship. Inhibited and ill equipped to satisfy a woman sexually, he nonetheless did not find the role of cuckold appealing. He was hurt, bewildered, and somewhat angry, but he still loved her and needed her. How Louis initially reacted to Eleanor’s declaration of independence was described by John of Salisbury, who may have heard it from Louis himself the following year. The king, John reported cryptically, “made haste to tear her away.” Tear her away from whom? From Raymond, who, conceivably, might have been present at the meeting? Or did Louis demand merely that she leave the prince’s palace immediately?
In the final analysis, a queen throws away a crown for much the same reason that any woman ends her marriage, that is, when she reaches that point where her life with the man has become unendurable. To deny Eleanor’s strong emotions about Louis’s deficiencies as a husband would be to do her less than justice. And yet her stated reason for wanting a divorce sounds almost impersonal. Undoubtedly this reason had been carefully planned in advance, because it was the only one that might have carried any weight with the king. So when Louis objected to leaving her behind, “she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related into the fourth and fifth degrees.”
Nothing she could have said was more certain to alarm the king. As she surely would have pointed out, there had been rumors about the illegality of their marriage for many years. Five years earlier, Abbot Bernard had written a letter to the bishop of Palestrina in which he flatly stated so, and the late bishop of Laon had also taken the trouble to calculate the degrees of their kinship. Louis could not deny that two centuries earlier Adelaide, the sister of Duke William IV of Aquitaine, had married Hugh Capet, from whom the kings of France were descended. It was not certain, of course, whether the bishop of Laon’s reckoning was correct, but Eleanor herself believed, or so she said, that their having only one child and no sons during eleven years proved conclusively God’s displeasure with their union.
However “deeply moved” Louis must have felt, however loath to give up a prized possession, he finally agreed to the divorce on one condition : “if his counselors and the French nobility would allow it.” With characteristic indecisiveness, he neatly removed the matter from his own area of responsibility and thrust it upon others. It might be argued that a royal divorce was, after all, a state concern and should be decided in committee, but a stronger man would not have dealt with such a personal matter in this haphazard way. With what frustration Eleanor must have heard his reply can be imagined without too much trouble.
Events now began to move rapidly. Hurrying back to his quarters, Louis unburdened his distress to his intimates. Odo de Deuil was certainly among those who learned of the royal quarrel, and as the king’s chronicler, companion, and confessor he must have been familiar with the minutest details of the affair. But Odo, no scandalmonger, decided that it would be politic to end his chronicle with the departure from Adalia. The other person of whom Louis asked advice was his secretary, Thierry Galeran. He was, it will be remembered, the eunuch whom Eleanor detested, and at Antioch she had mocked him among her friends, doubtless pointing out the amusing implications of her monkish husband spending his time with a eunuch. As these things have a way of doing, her imitations of Galeran, so entertaining to her friends, got back to the eunuch, and now he did not pass up the opportunity for revenge. “He boldly persuaded the king not to suffer her to dally longer at Antioch because ‘guilt under kinship’s guise could lie concealed’ and because it would be a lasting shame to the kingdom of the Franks if, in addition to all the other disasters, it was reported that the king had been deserted by his wife, or robbed of her.”
Whether Galeran presented these arguments because he hated the queen—certainly he had reason—or because he genuinely believed her unfaithful is a question Eleanor’s contemporaries were unable to decide. One thing is certain, however: At this point Eleanor and her uncle supplied the chief topic of gossip among the Crusaders.
The claim of Eleanor’s detractors that she had an affair with Raymond is based on very shaky foundations, among them the account of William of Tyre, who wrote thirty years after the Crusade. The archbishop would say maliciously of Eleanor: “Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.”
The anonymous chronicle by the Minstrel of Reims, written in the thirteenth century, calls Eleanor “a very evil woman.” More historical fiction than fact, the minstrel has Eleanor about to elope with Saladin, when Louis, alerted by a serving maid, throws on his clothes and rushes off to stop her just as she is about to set sail in one of the Saracen ruler’s galleys. “And there he found the queen, who was standing with one foot upon the galley. And he taketh her by the hand and leadeth her back to her chamber.” When Louis asks the queen why she is running away, the author of the chronicle puts the following words into Eleanor’s mouth: “In God’s name, because of your own naughtiness! For ye are not worth one rotten pear! And I have heard so much good of Saladin that I love him better th
an you; and know ye of a truth that henceforth shall ye have no joy of keeping me!”
Such sentiments could not have been uttered by Eleanor, since in 1148 Saladin was still a child of twelve or thirteen, but they doubtless convey a faithful enough representation of Eleanor’s feelings toward Louis at that time.
The exact relationship between Eleanor and her uncle will never be known exactly, but this much seems virtually certain. She adored him because he typified the masculine splendor she had worshiped in her mighty grandfather and father, and there may also have been a physical resemblance among the three men. Deprived of her father at an early age, she would have responded eagerly and affectionately to a relative who so nearly resembled him, especially one whom she had regarded as almost an older brother during her childhood. Had Raymond not been her uncle, there is reason to believe that she would have slept with him, because she longed for physical passion, and later it will be seen that her preference in men would entirely be limited to his type. In her time, sexual relations between an uncle and niece would have been regarded . as incestuous, and incest was not stylish, even in liberal Aquitaine. She could no more have slept with Raymond than with her father or, if he had lived, her brother. The possibility of an affair becomes even more preposterous when Raymond’s character is taken into account. In an age when male debauchery was taken for granted, Raymond was reputed to be a faithful husband to his twenty-one-year-old wife. No puritan, he was nonetheless known to be moderate in his habits; he did not eat or drink to excess, nor did he romance women. Considering that he had shown little interest in amorous exploits so far, it seems hard to believe that he would now attempt to seduce his own niece.
However improbable the gossip in Antioch, the fact that it was widely repeated and considered apt was indicative. What happened next only confirmed, however, the rumors. On March 28, Louis quietly began mobilizing his forces for departure. Sometime after midnight, when the city lay in darkness save for the fires on the watchtowers, the army began moving out through the Saint Paul Gate, an evacuation carried out with as much secrecy as was possible for a force of several thousand persons. At the last moment, in a sort of commando operation, the queen was snatched from Raymond’s palace. The chronicles provide little illumination as to Eleanor’s reaction except that “she was torn away and forced to leave for Jerusalem with her husband.” That she would not have accompanied Louis voluntarily is clear and probably accounts for the fact that she was seized after dark. After what kind of struggle and in what state of rage she was forcibly conducted from Antioch we can only imagine. But here was tangible proof to the Franks that their captive queen had done something shockingly indiscreet. How Raymond may have figured in the secret exodus and abduction is non-recoverable. We only know that he was unable to prevent Eleanor’s undignified departure.
Louis’s arrival in Syria “had been attended with pomp and glory, but fortune is fickle and his departure was ignominious,” an observation that might well serve as an epitaph for the entire Crusade. By sunup, the queen was being hustled along the road to Tripoli under tight security, the hated crown still firmly atop her head.
The Unwanted Crown
When the Crusaders caught their first glimpse of Jerusalem’s white walls, they prostrated themselves on the ground weeping like children and asking forgiveness for their sins. Later, unable to sleep, they kept vigil together throughout the long night. If Eleanor had once looked forward to visiting the Holy City, her spirits were now thoroughly dampened. Winding over the Pilgrim’s Ladder through the mountains high above the Mediterranean, she had stared at the groves of orange trees, the thick flocks of sheep, and at Cyprus, a silver streak on the horizon, but her face appeared hard, as if sculpted in stone. With the passing days, she had foraged her mind for alternatives, and as she saw it, there were several choices: She could arrange an escape and flee back to Raymond in his kingdom above the sea; possibly she might cajole Louis into a more reasonable frame of mind and secure his consent for a divorce without the interference of his hated advisers; at worst she would have to wait until they returned to Paris before appealing her case to Abbot Bernard or the pope. In the end, Louis surely could not hold her against her will, short of resorting to imprisonment, and that would effectively rule out his chances of siring an heir by another wife. Somehow she would find a way to return, if not to Antioch, then to Poitiers, where she would put her Eastern experience to good use by creating a milieu worthy of the duchess of Aquitaine. In the meantime, there had been cypresses and olive groves to contemplate while she attempted to reconcile herself to this temporary delay in her objectives.
At the Jaffa Gate, the regent, Queen Melisende, and her eighteen-year-old son, Baldwin, led the entire population of Jerusalem in welcoming Louis with such a remarkable outpouring of fervor that one would have thought him a messenger of the Lord. Heralded by palms and olive branches, banners and hymns, the impatient Crusaders paraded through gaily decked streets to the Holy Sepulcher, which enclosed the rock of Calvary and the tomb of the Savior. There the king laid upon the holiest of all altars the oriflamme he had brought from Saint-Denis, and then he sank down on his knees as if he had no cares in the world but those of an ordinary pilgrim. Afterward, he and his nobles made a tour of the city’s precious shrines, scattering alms as they went, and finally the royal party was led to its lodgings in the Tower of David. Only then did Louis consent to rest or break his fast.
What part Eleanor played in this pilgrim’s progress we do not know. John of Salisbury reported that during this period the mutual anger between Eleanor and Louis festered and increased but that they hid it as best they could. No doubt on this public and historic occasion both of them masked their private feelings and performed their expected roles as if still the most cordial of husbands and wives. In any case, Eleanor had too much pride to allow herself to be carried into the city in a litter with the curtains drawn. With regal demeanor, she, like the other Crusaders, must have trod the traditional Pilgrim’s Way in her tunic bearing the cross that she had received at Vézelay. In those first days in Jerusalem she was accorded the honor due a queen, but the story of her unceremonious departure from Antioch, too juicy a piece of gossip to be suppressed, certainly influenced her treatment by the Hierosolymitans, and while not actually ignored, she certainly was not made much of, as she had been in Antioch. Any attempts by Louis to prevent her moving freely about the city would have been beneath both their dignities and would have, moreover, angered Eleanor’s vassals, who were already outraged by Louis’s treatment of her. Nevertheless, if not closely guarded, she was placed under discreet surveillance.
During her conversations with Raymond in Antioch, Eleanor had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with the rivalries of the Latin Kingdom. From childhood she had been an uncommonly astute student of political subtleties, and unlike the bewildered Louis, who insisted upon regarding Jerusalem as the place in need of defense, she was quick to grasp that the Holy City stood in no danger at that moment. Furthermore, everything she had personally observed so far had made her distrustful of the Frankish Christians in Palestine.
The Latin Kingdom of the mid twelfth century was a land of intrigue, corruption, and feverish competition. During the half century since the Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, all pretense of being soldiers of Christ had disappeared in a no-holds-barred race for land and gold. Avarice and jealousy had made them suspicious of one another and equally distrustful of newcomers from the West, since immigration inevitably led to further division of spoils.
At this time, Frankish Syria was divided into four principalities: the kingdom of Jerusalem in the south; to its north, the county of Tripoli, which extended along the Mediterranean; still farther north, the principality of Antioch; and finally northeast of Antioch, the county of Edessa, which spread eastward beyond the Euphrates River. Since the announcement of the Second Crusade in 1145, the great lords of each of these areas had hoped that through the assistance of Western sovereigns they might be
able to enlarge their own territories at the expense of either their Moslem or their Christian neighbors. Each was anxious about its own affairs, each eager to extend its boundaries, and it is not surprising that each sent messengers and expensive gifts to Louis, trying to enlist his aid for their individual causes. The citizens of Jerusalem, in particular, were anxious to make the most of Louis’s arrival. Mindful of the ties between the house of Capet and the prince of Antioch, they feared, however, that Raymond might persuade the king to mount a campaign against Nureddin in the vicinity of Aleppo or Edessa, and the presence of Queen Eleanor on the Crusade made this all the more likely. Therefore, it was with undisguised relief that they learned of Louis’s acrimonious breach with Raymond and his midnight departure from Antioch. To make certain that Louis continued south without changing his mind along the way, the Hierosolymitan barons had sent Patriarch Fulcher to intercept the king and escort him without delay into the Holy City.
In mid-May, shortly after their arrival, an assembly was convened at Acre, an impressive gathering that included Conrad, who had recently arrived by ship from Constantinople with the remnants of his German contingent, the leading prelates and barons of Jerusalem, and the nobility of Louis’s army. Queen Melisende and other noblewomen were present, but Eleanor was not. She may not have been invited, although in view of her anger at Louis, it would seem more likely that she refused to attend. Also notably absent, although the implications were only dimly perceived by Louis, were representatives from the other three Latin principalities.