This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
Ah, yes, but after some months of habitation by the king’s enormous retinue, “sweet” would not be the adjective that would come nimbly to mind. The clammy castle would need to be vacated for some time so as to be adequately aired. The chaos occasioned by all this to-ing and fro-ing served as an additional aid to the privy assignations of gay ladies with their adoring knights.
The language by which the knight addressed his prey was so reverent that it could be easily mistaken for prayer, even prompting one jolly North-country mistress to set her poetical suitor straight:
I’m no the Queen o’ Heaven, Thomas,
I never carried my head sae hee,
For I am but a lady gay
Come out to hunt in my follee.
This quatrain expertly reverses the dramatis personae of the hunt: it is the lady, not her knight, who does the hunting. The idea of the knight as pursuer was a convenient social construct. He writes the romantic poetry, gives the gifts, and mopes mournfully about, but it is the down-to-earth lady, smarter and more strategic than he (and even more intent on her “follee”), who secretly controls the pace of the chase, having determined well in advance whether or not the poor devil will get his reward in the end.
As in fact the abundant literature flowing from the courts of love makes clear, the lady is to render conquest as difficult as possible:
An easy conquest sells love on the cheap;
a hard one shows the cost of love runs deep,
instructs Andreas Capellanus, a somewhat plodding late twelfth-century imitator of Ovid, in his best-selling Latin treatise De Amore (On Love). Among Andreas’s many “rules of love”: “It is genuine jealousy that makes the feeling of love grow.” So go ahead, torture him.
No one knew the rules better than Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, afterwards queen of France, then of England, a courtly lady who played a singular role in the history of her time. She was born in 1122 to a family that reigned not only over Aquitaine but over Gascony, which gave access to the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, and Aragon (and thence to the delicacies of the Spanish-Muslim south), and over Poitou and its très riche capital of Poitiers. The affluent vineyards of Bordeaux lay within the family’s domains, as did the lucrative salt flats of Saintonge. At the time, France was still a tiny kingdom, an island of property squeezed between Champagne and Blois, while the dukes of Aquitaine ruled a swath of territories ten times as large. Aquitaine itself was a sunny and fertile land of waters (“Aquitania,” as the Romans had named it), dotted with charming red-tiled villages, whitewashed walls, yellow gates, rolling hills, fields of deep green, yellow-green, and velvet brown, prosperous monasteries, and gloriously welcoming castles. Its people, aware of their happy fortune, were easy, attractive southerners known for their good manners. Men, eschewing the usual bowl-top haircut, wore their hair long and commonly shaved their faces—a most uncommon sight in the rest of Europe—and both sexes delighted in fine fabrics and elegant costuming. A mixture of Basque natives and Roman colonists, they were viewed by the sterner Franks of the Germanic north as trivial pleasure-seekers.
Eleanor’s palace at Poitiers. The Maubergeonne Tower to the right, built by Eleanor’s grandfather, housed his mistress Dangerosa. (Photo Credit 2.1)
She was christened Alienore, an elision of the Latin Alia Aenor—for her mother was Aenor and the baby was to be “Another Aenor.” She seems to have set herself the task of becoming anything but a copy of her unfortunate mother; she would not be another anyone but the world’s first (and for some time only) Eleanor. Granddaughter of William IX, the world’s first romantic poet and a “vehement lover of women,” Eleanor grew up in a household of extraordinary refinement, where poetry and music were honored and sex and power were prized above all.
The dukes of Aquitaine were distinguished by their violent willfulness. Finding himself attracted to the wife of one of his vassals, a woman aptly named Dangerosa, William IX stole her from her castle at Châtelleraud and bore her to his palace at Poitiers, installing her during his wife’s absence in his newly built Maubergeonne Tower. When the shocked duchess returned from her charitable enterprises, she engaged the papal legate to do battle on her behalf. William was perennially on the outs with churchmen: he had once drawn his sword in the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre and threatened to behead a bishop in the act of excommunicating him. So the legate’s warning of a second such sentence fell on deaf ears; and William swore at the bald man that hair would grow on the legate’s head before the duke would return Dangerosa to her meekly silent husband. After his second excommunication, the defiant duke had his paramour’s portrait painted on his shield, announcing that “it was his will to bear her in battle as she had borne him in bed,” according to a contemporary account by the lively monastic historian William of Malmsbury. The duchess ceded the field and hid herself in Fontevraud Abbey, her favorite nunnery, where she soon died.
Before long, Dangerosa proposed that William’s son, William, should be married to her daughter, Aenor. And so it happened—though young William had little love for the woman who had displaced his mother or for her daughter. As heir to his father’s ducal lands, however, he had no choice but to bow to the dominatrix’s wishes if he did not want to be disinherited. Eleanor was born a year after the wedding, and five years after that William IX was dead, duly succeeded by Eleanor’s father, now William X. Three years further on, Aenor died, as did Eleanor’s only brother, William Aigret. Eleanor at eight was heiress of Aquitaine.
Her father, a perspicacious man less violent than his father, saw to it that Eleanor was taught the unwomanly art of reading both her own language, the langue d’occ (or Provençal, or Old French of the south), and Latin. “Brought up in delicacy and reared with abundance of all delights, living in the bosom of wealth,” in the words of a contemporary chronicler, Eleanor loved musical performances, especially the newly harmonized chansons and gai saber (gay knowledge) of the troubadours—of whom her grandfather had been the first, a sort of knightly Chuck Berry to a younger generation of Beatles and Rolling Stones. Throughout her life she was a patron to singers and instrumentalists, especially those who sang of love and les chagrins d’amour.
These performers, still a novelty in Eleanor’s girlhood, had exactly the same revolutionary effect on the sensibility of her time that rock music would have on Westerners in the mid-twentieth century. As their elders recoiled in disgust, young people everywhere loosened up and rocked their bodies and their lives to a new beat. In the courts of the south, the new music encouraged the delightfully novel practice of mixed dancing. Whereas dancing had formerly been exclusively homosexual, men performing only with men and women with women, now a knight was taught the art of bowing to a lady, gracefully offering his hand, and gliding forth with her in a series of complicated steps that mimicked the art of courtly wooing.
Before undertaking a pilgrimage for his sins and the sins of his fathers to the shrine of Saint James the Apostle—Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain—William summoned all his vassals and commanded them to swear public homage to Eleanor. They came from every corner of the duke’s domains and found themselves kneeling before a tall young woman of surpassing beauty—“perpulchra,” they described her—a blue-eyed, reddish blonde who carried herself with regal assurance. At thirty-eight, the duke had every intention of returning from pilgrimage, marrying again, and engendering a male heir to carry his legacy. But just to be safe, he made Eleanor a ward of King Louis VI of France, who was nominal overlord to the more powerful William. As part of their agreement, Eleanor was affianced to Louis’s son Louis. William’s foresight paid off: he never returned from Compostela, dying in the cathedral there after drinking polluted water on his journey. At fifteen, Eleanor was duchess of Aquitaine and Gascony, countess of Poitou, soon to marry the crown prince of France.
Alas for royal marriages, always arranged, se
ldom satisfying. Louis the Fat—for such was the nickname of Louis VI—became so adipose in his later years that he could no longer rise from his bed. His chief adviser, the brilliant Suger, child of peasants and abbot of Saint-Denis, knew that he would not last much longer. Unfortunately, Louis’s heir, Philip, had broken his neck when his horse threw him; the younger son, Louis, who had been meant for the church, was therefore brought out of mothballs and crowned as his father’s successor—during his father’s lifetime in accordance with French custom. Little Louis would have made a fine monk, but he would make a less impressive king and a husband of dubious value. Less than four months after her father’s death, a scarlet-gowned Eleanor and her Louis—he at sixteen just a year older than his wife—were married amid great pomp on a Sunday in late July of 1137 in the cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux. Afterwards, as they journeyed north to Paris, they received the news: Louis the Fat had expired; they were king and queen of France.
Eleanor did not admire the Cité, Louis’s old Parisian palace, which she found drafty and grim. Very soon her apartments were modernized in the southern manner and redecorated with colorful tapestries from the workshops of Bruges. She introduced tablecloths and napkins and even insisted that her pages wash their hands before serving her dinner. She invited troubadours, jongleurs, and theatrical troupes to entertain the court. The courtiers were not amused; they found the emotions expressed in the words of the south to be downright scandalous. It would take another generation before these northerners would succumb to the sensual delights of this nouvelle vague. Though Louis seems to have been unimpressed by all her innovations, he loved his wife “almost beyond reason,” in the words of John of Salisbury, later bishop of Chartres and an astute commentator.
Someone in whom the troubadours found a responsive listener was Eleanor’s younger sister, Petronilla, who soon commenced a steamy affair with Count Raoul of Vermandois, a married man thirty-five years her senior. In an unrelated move, Louis refused to allow the pope’s candidate to take his seat as archbishop of Bourges, which impelled the pope to impose an interdict on Louis’s household, which meant that no member of the household could receive the sacraments of the church till the interdict was lifted. Not only could no masses be offered for the benefit of the living and the dead, but no marriages could be celebrated, no confessions heard, and neither communion nor anointing could be given to those in danger of death. They must face their deaths unshriven, unreconciled, most likely damned, nor could their bodies be buried with funeral rites in consecrated ground; and babies who perished without baptism must face the same unceremonious damnation.d This was rough justice, to say the least, and for the pious Louis a tragic reversal.
As if this were not misfortune enough, Raoul succeeded in having his marriage annulled by three suborned bishops, who then proceeded to solemnize his marriage to Petronilla. But Raoul’s castoff wife was not without defenders, especially her powerful brother, Count Theobald of Champagne, who brought her case to the pope. The pope suspended the three offending bishops, excommunicated the lovers, and laid their lands under interdict. Louis, who felt his manhood threatened, marched an army into Champagne and surrounded the town of Vitry-sur-Marne, which lay in the shadow of one of Theobald’s castles. The town was burned to the ground by the flaming arrows of Louis’s army, and more than a thousand innocents—children, women, the elderly and infirm—who had taken refuge in the cathedral died by fire. Louis could never afterwards forget the smell of burning flesh and the screams of the hopeless victims.
None of Louis’s aggressive initiatives, whether against church or Champagne, were sanctioned by Abbot Suger, canny adviser to the elder Louis, who suddenly found his sage advice unheeded and unwelcome. Weir suggests that Eleanor had become young Louis’s chief adviser and was urging him to cut a more dashing figure on the international scene. This is certainly what Bernard of Clairvaux surmised. The intimidating ascetic, who would in this same decade of the 1140s champion the writings of Hildegard, was nonetheless no friend to women, especially to women of the world beyond the reach of the cloister’s severities. For Eleanor, whom he met, he had nothing but scorn and suspicion. Carefully noting her regal bearing, her high chin, her stately (or, as Bernard said, “mincing”) step, and all the particulars of the fashion in which she was dressed—the lined silk, the flowing sleeves, the bright colors, the fur, the bracelets, the earrings, the headdress, the diadem—he reached the conclusion that she was “one of those daughters of Belial,” a biblical name for Satan. “Fie on a beauty that is put on in the morning and laid aside at night! The ornaments of a queen have no beauty like the blushes of natural modesty that color the cheeks of a virgin.” Virgins good; queens bad; women who make themselves sexually desirable, certainly one of a queen’s chief duties, daughters of the Devil. Bernard’s approach may be said to have the stark virtue of simplicity, but the truth is he was terrified of real women, especially one like Eleanor who, perfumed and painted, dared look him straight in the eye and speak as if addressing any other subject.
Though he continued to love his wife, Louis, full of guilt over the atrocities committed by his army in Champagne, fell more and more under the influence of monks like Bernard, even dressing like a monk himself, fasting, wearing a torturous hairshirt against his skin, and spending many hours on his knees in prayer. Eleanor, widely described as the most beautiful woman of her time, dressed ever more splendidly and, now in her twenties, grew restless with her role as queen of France and childless wife to Louis. She had had more engagement (and more fun) in the short time she had ruled alone as duchess of Aquitaine.
Bernard and Suger managed to patch up the quarrel between Louis and Theobald and prevailed upon Louis to set aside his opposition to the pope’s choice for archbishop of Bourges, so that the interdict could be lifted. In time, as part of a shrouded quid pro quo, the pope recognized Petronilla’s irregular marriage, awarding Raoul the same annulment that the three suspended bishops had once given: Raoul and his first wife were third cousins, which was considered by the church to be a consanguinous relationship too close for marriage. Marriage law is one of the most notorious arcana of the medieval church. Since so many European nobles and royals were related, it was relatively easy to discover after the fact some sort of “consanguinous relationship,” however attenuated, that could nullify a marriage and leave the partners free. This Divorce Medieval–Style, though useless to ordinary people (who hadn’t the financial resources or the influence to pursue their cases in church courts), was a great help to the leading families of Europe in their ever-shifting alliances.e
In the course of the extended melodrama of the Petronilla affair, Bernard raised an issue no one had voiced before: Louis and Eleanor were third cousins. Why was Louis so contemptuous of Raoul’s first marriage when the same standard could be applied against his own? Louis paid no heed, but Eleanor was transfixed.
In 1145, some eight years after their Bordeaux nuptials, Eleanor gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Marie. Marie could not inherit the throne of France as her mother had inherited Aquitaine, Gascony, and Poitou, for the Salic law of Charlemagne and his successors, still in force in France, excluded females from dynastic succession;f but she would one day become Marie de Champagne, “the joyous and gay countess, the light of Champagne,” and a famous patron of poets. On Christmas Day in the year of Marie’s birth, Louis revealed to his assembled vassals that he would, at the urging of the new pope, Eugene III, and of the pope’s mentor Bernard of Clairvaux, “take the Cross,” that is, lead the Second Crusade to further the “liberation” of the Holy Land from “the Crescent”—the Muslims. The initial announcement met with few cheers, since the vassals viewed Louis as something less than a leader of men and rightly suspected that the king’s new undertaking was for him a further form of penance rather than an adventure of conquest.
The First Crusade, preached by the wily Pope Urban II in 1095, had proved a roaring success, capturing Edessa, Antioch, and Jerusalem for West
ern forces and shedding the blood of countless combatants and not a few noncombatants, including communities of Jews the crusaders encountered along their way. The surviving crusaders (as well as the ones who did not survive, for that matter) were buoyed in their conviction that the pope had promised Christian participants a plenary indulgence, erasing all their sins and rendering them Heaven-ready. Pope Eugene now promised no less; and Bernard’s eloquence lent an aura of sacred destiny to the mustering of troops across the ancient realms of Charlemagne. In a departure from previous tradition, Eleanor enthusiastically announced that she too would take the Cross, which brought many of her vassals, personally loyal to Eleanor, to her side, increasing considerably the army’s muscle. As, impelled by Bernard’s tireless voice, the coming crusade began to sound its drumroll of historical inevitability, enormous numbers of men and not a few women in French- and German-speaking lands joined up, red and black crosses pinned to their clothing, shouting “Deus vult!” (God wills it!) and “To Jerusalem!” as they set out southeastward across Europe.
Louis’s vassals, however, had had the right reaction in the first place. For all its fiery rhetoric and holy panoply, the Second Crusade turned quickly into an anarchic mess and, finally, an unmitigated disaster. It is an axiom of history—which it would reward contemporary politicians to consider—that few human endeavors prove as pointless as projects of religiously inspired military idealism unaccompanied by worldly understanding, strategic thoughtfulness, and common sense.
The German army was under the command of the reluctant emperor Conrad III, who had been shamed by Bernard into participating. On their way to the Holy Land, the Germans made permanent enemies of the Orthodox Greeks—for whom all Catholic Europeans were (and still are) “Franks”—by senselessly pillaging, burning, raping, and murdering as they marched. In battles against the Turks, however, nine-tenths of them were slaughtered. The remaining Germans straggled home, their emperor sliced by head wounds—which caused Louis to weep when he saw them.
Mysteries of the Middle Ages Page 13