Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  The French, constantly harrassed by Turks over rough, unfamiliar terrain, made it to Antioch, then to Jerusalem, both cities still under the Western dominion imposed by the First Crusade. Louis, fasting in preparation for his entry into the Holy City, burst into tears of joy on first glimpsing the turreted walls of Jerusalem. He never came near achieving his main objective, to restore crusader dominion to Edessa, which had been overrun by Turks. He never even came near Edessa. The French did attack Damascus, till then a Muslim city friendly to the crusader states, and were ignominiously routed. In their many quixotic maneuvers, led by their oft-fasting, oft-weeping king, they were hardly helped by the need to protect the large numbers of noncombatant women and clergy who accompanied them, along with the many chests of costly robes, precious jewelry, and sacred vessels the noncombatants deemed necessary to their progress. By the end of the crusade, however, few gowns remained to the ladies, and even some bishops were forced to go barefoot. The French battlefield losses, though not as immense as the German, were great, the losses from hunger, plague, and accidental death even greater. More than three thousand French troops, lured by the first wholesome meal they’d had in months, remained behind and converted to Islam.

  By crusade’s end something had gone badly wrong between the royal couple. They were no longer speaking to each other and were seldom seen together. It was said that Eleanor had spent far too much time in the agreeable company of her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, the athletic ruler of Antioch. Prince Raymond had wanted the French to attack Aleppo before going on to Edessa—which would have been a better plan and would also have greatly shored up Antioch’s defenses. Eleanor pressed Raymond’s plan on Louis, who was already hot under the collar about his wife’s endless meetings with her uncle, “taller, better built, and more handsome than any man of his time,” according to a contemporary witness. When Louis voiced his pilgrim desire to visit Jerusalem before heading for Edessa, Eleanor said that in that case she would remain as Raymond’s guest at Antioch, along with her vassals—which would have crippled any further military effort on Louis’s part. Wounded in spirit, Louis threatened to remove Eleanor by force, at which point “she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife,” in the account of John of Salisbury.

  Louis did remove Eleanor by force and drag her to Jerusalem; and from that time forward she seems to have had as little as possible to do with her husband. As far as hard facts go, we have almost no more information. We can, as everyone did at the time and everyone has done since, speculate about what was going on between them. There can be little doubt that Eleanor had tired of Louis and that she had for some time played with the idea of the “consanguinous relationship” as a convenient excuse for ending their marriage. Whether or not she had an affair with her uncle—who was but ten years her senior—his manly vigor must have made a vivid contrast to Louis’s weepy pieties and may have clinched her determination to have done with the king. If she did have an affair with Raymond, it is unlikely to have been her first.

  The sexual carryings-on of European royalty were as fascinating to the chronicling clerk-clerics of the twelfth century as are the similar carryings-on of today’s celebrities to our own clerisy, whom we call journalists. We have a story from Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald the Welshman), which he claims to have had from the sainted lips of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, that Eleanor, even before the Second Crusade was launched, had managed a discreet pas de deux with the ambitious, overreaching Count Geoffrey of Anjou. Giraldus, a waspish gossip and first-class suck-up, is nonetheless generally accurate when it comes to royal peccadilloes. We know from John of Salisbury that Louis, in despair over Eleanor’s cold stubbornness, consulted his court eunuch, Thierry Galan (bad choice, Louis!), whom Eleanor loathed, and that it was the eunuch who urged Louis to use force on his wife to avert “lasting shame to the kingdom of the Franks.”

  Eleanor’s life would prove a long one, far too full of adventure and incident for us to follow adequately in one chapter. Here I would wish only to give some essential information on what happened to her next and then take a look at how she exemplifies certain trends of her time. What, finally, was the role of this unusual woman in an age of virginal saints?

  Eleanor dumped Louis, though not immediately. A smart cookie, she knew to bide her time and give the appearance of growing anxiety over the possible moral (and therefore eternal) consequences of their “incestuous” union. If their marriage was no marriage in the eyes of God, it could—horrid thought!—result in their damnation, could it not?

  Both Louis and Eleanor, crossing the Mediterranean on different ships of the same fleet, had much trouble reaching safe harbors, Louis somewhere in Calabria, Eleanor—after months of being blown about—at Palermo. The royal couple, then reunited after their long separation, journeyed north to visit the pope at Frascati, south of Rome, where he kept a palace. There Eugene acted as marriage counselor, hearing each side’s complaints and even personally setting up a sort of marriage bower—an alluringly decorated bedchamber, hung with precious silks—where he ordered the pair to resume relations. If from the perspective of the twenty-first century this fussing about with bed linens seems an odd activity for a pope, it may be said that Eugene was no disinterested third party. Urged on no doubt by the Abbot Suger’s dynastic preoccupations, he was also acting as the Catholic Church has always acted, preferring large political units to small, intending in this case to prevent the dissolution of the union of Eleanor’s vast inheritance with the kingdom of France. Eleanor, realizing she had been outflanked, kept her own counsel and gave in to the pope’s coaxing, becoming pregnant in the process.

  The issue was a second daughter, Alix, a crushing disappointment to the king, who needed a male heir. After nearly a decade and a half of marriage, his hope of a son was fading. He began to find the idea of an annulment more attractive.

  Eleanor, meanwhile, had met the man she intended to have as her second husband: Henry of Anjou, eleven years her junior, who would inherit Anjou, Le Maine, and Normandy from his father and had good reason to believe he might claim England as an inheritance from his mother, the très formidable Matilda, formerly empress of Germany. The red-haired Henry had the face of a lion, the body of a bull, and the voice of a crow. A natural leader, he possessed, according to the Anglo-Norman Walter Map, a favorite clerk of Henry’s, a countenance “upon which a man might gaze a thousand times, yet still feel drawn to.” A great horseman and huntsman, a man of gargantuan squalls of temper, who was never quiet and “shunned regular hours like poison,” he had all the energy and passion that Louis lacked. His much-feared anger could sometimes be averted by wit, for Henry himself had an impish sense of humor and loved a good joke. Yet he was also an educated man who enjoyed reading, especially the stories of King Arthur and Camelot, then coming into vogue. That he was rumored to be Satan’s spawn—as a scion of the house of Anjou, which according to legend was descended from the Devil’s daughter—may only have increased his attraction in Eleanor’s eyes.

  In late summer of 1151, they met in Paris, whither Henry had come, after threatening Louis with war, to pay grudging ceremonial homage to the French king and formally receive back his inheritance of Normandy, over which Louis reigned as nominal overlord. Bernard of Clairvaux, now old and ill, had stepped in to arrange a truce. In their first meeting, Eleanor, at the acme of her grace, and Henry, pulsing with adolescent energy, fixed each other with “unchaste eyes,” according to Map. Henry’s father, Geoffrey the Fair, forbade his son to have anything to do with the queen because she was, after all, the wife of his overlord and, well … “because he had known her himself”—according to the gossipy Giraldus, who turns up his nose at “these copulations.”

  Suger’s death earlier that year had deprived Louis of his most devoted adviser, one skilled in all the chess moves of power and a wise interpreter of every intrigue. More in the dark than ever, Louis at last gave way to Eleanor’s insistent requests and agreed t
o seek the annulment she so desired in the same month that Henry’s father, Geoffrey, died suddenly, making Henry duke of Anjou, Le Maine, and Normandy. A synod of archbishops, duly constituted, dissolved the royal marriage the Friday before Holy Week in 1152. The sole ground was consanguinity. With holy Bernard as go-between, even Pope Eugene gave his consent. The two princesses—Marie then six or seven, Alix not yet two—were found to be legitimate (because their parents had entered into marriage in good faith) and were made wards of their father. Both king and queen were present at the synod. After taking their leave, they would never see each other again, nor is there any record of a further meeting between Eleanor and either of her daughters, not that she had ever seen much of them before this parting of the ways.

  Eleanor, having escaped the gray-stone north and now at her capital of polychrome Poitiers to celebrate Easter, happily recommenced single rule of all her dower territories, given back to her under the stipulations of the annulment. Straightaway, she sent a message to Henry informing him of the annulment and praying him to ride out immediately and marry her. On Pentecost Sunday, less than two months after receiving her annulment, Eleanor, the wealthiest woman in Europe, was wed to Henry, count of Anjou, Le Maine, and Normandy, who was already planning his invasion of England. The ceremony, though celebrated in the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre at Poitiers, was a hastily arranged affair, having “neither the pomp nor the circumstance befitting their rank,” according to the tut-tutting authors of the Chronicle of Touraine. By uniting their continental possessions, this medieval power couple now held sway over nearly half of today’s France, dwarfing and fairly engulfing Louis’s Lilliputian kingdom.

  When Louis recovered from his extreme shock at hearing the news, he realized he had been blindsided by Eleanor. Since both she and Henry were Louis’s vassals and had no business marrying without his permission (and since they were related just as closely as he and Eleanor), Louis summoned the offending pair to his presence to explain themselves. When he received no reply, Louis marched into Normandy at the head of a small army that included noblemen who had quarrelled with Henry. In little more than a month, Henry defeated the king’s forces and, having made himself undisputed strongman of Europe, turned his attention once more to the matter of England, which, after a small war and some negotiations, was settled to his satisfaction.

  On December 19, 1154, in Westminster Abbey, Henry and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of England by the archbishop of Canterbury amid the general rejoicing of their subjects, who rightly saw in Henry an unswerving leader who would bring them peace and prosperity. In less than a score of years, Eleanor would bear Henry eight children, five of them male—seeming to ensure the succession of Henry’s line, which would become known as the Plantagenets.g Eleanor’s relationship to her children by Henry, especially to the boys, was much closer than had been her relationship to her daughters by Louis. The Plantagenets’ first child, however, was dead within three years of his birth, and two other males, Young Henry and Geoffrey, would die while still in their twenties. Henry would take care that his daughters made good marital alliances, Matilda with the powerful duke of Saxony and Bavaria, Eleanor with the king of Castile, and Joanna with the king of Sicily. (After her first husband’s death and Henry’s, Joanna would marry the count of Toulouse, a man of harrowing violence.) Only two of the male children would survive long enough to occupy the English throne after Henry, Richard Coeur de Lion (or Lionheart), who would die in 1199, and John Softsword, the youngest of the children, who would succeed Richard and reign till 1216. Despite the early deaths, the children of Eleanor and Henry would produce thirty-four legitimate grandchildren.

  But the Plantagenets were no Brady Bunch. As many observers noted, there was palpable electricity between the young king and his queen. They had, after all, chosen each other, the first married couple in recorded history to have managed to do so; and though Henry remained pleased with Eleanor for many years, it took him little time to resume his bits on the side. By the time Eleanor was done with childbearing, Henry had entered into his most buzzed-about adultery—with “Fair” Rosamund de Clifford, the barely pubescent daughter of one of his most loyal Norman knights. As years sped by, the poets of England, France, and Germany wrote ever more extravagant praise of Eleanor’s beauty:

  If all the world were mine

  From the seashore to the Rhine,

  That price were not too high

  To have England’s queen lie

  Close in my arms,

  goes the anonymous Latin of Carmina Burana, a celebrated collection of student songs composed in Germany in this period. But the only arms Eleanor had wanted round her were Henry’s; and the love of this peculiar man, not the predictable praise of poets, was what she had hoped for. Despite her disappointment, there is no evidence she was ever unfaithful to Henry. After many years of inevitably cooling relations, however, she did turn against him.

  From 1168 onward, Eleanor lived apart from her husband. The separation served Henry’s administrative requirements well, Eleanor watching over his continental realms while he continued to put his governing impress on England, which had been badly administered before his accession, though it was also true that Henry never stayed anywhere for long and was constantly, or so it seemed, flying back and forth across the Channel. As their sons reached manhood, Henry bestowed titles and inheritances on them but kept changing the terms and retained all real power for himself, leaving the sons resentful and in the dark as to his ultimate dynastic intentions. In 1173, at Eleanor’s urging, the three eldest living sons (John alone being too young to participate) rode to Paris, where they sought alliance with Louis for the purpose of bringing their father’s reign to an end. Their intention was to use the armies of France and of their mother’s vassals to carve up England, Normandy, and their mother’s dower territories among the three of them. Louis, who began to refer to Henry as “the former King of the English,” was delighted to sign on.

  The ensuing war was hard fought on both sides, the sons “laying waste their father’s [continental] lands on every side with fire, sword, and rapine,” in the words of Ralph of Diceto, dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, and a most conscientious historian. But Louis, who took command of his side, was no better at war than he’d ever been; and as Henry bore down upon him, “like a bear whose cubs have been stolen,” according to Ralph, Louis found it wise to sue for peace. “Thus the mighty learned that it was no easy task to wrest Hercules’s club from his hand,” commented Richard FitzNigel, bishop of London and Henry’s treasurer. The peace was a wobbly one, however, and would remain so for the rest of Henry’s life. Though Henry forgave with fatherly magnanimity “his sons whom he loved so much” (Ralph’s phrase), he could never again trust them; and they continued to smolder with resentment.

  Eleanor’s fate was unique. In the course of the familial hostilities, she fled her headquarters at Poitiers and, disguised as a man and brazenly riding astride her horse, was intercepted on her way to Paris. She was turned over to Henry and made his prisoner—and so she would remain for sixteen years, till Henry’s death in 1189. For a long time, no one even knew where she was; and it was hardly in the king’s interest to announce the site of her captivity. At any rate, public opinion now turned decisively against Eleanor. From time immemorial royal sons had rebelled against their fathers. In the Bible itself one reads of the uprising of the beloved ingrate Absalom against David, the greatest of Israel’s kings. But never in any chronicle had a royal wife turned on her husband. Eleanor’s betrayal was as unique as would be her punishment.

  She was kept under lock and key in various bleak fortresses, usually at Sarum or Winchester, where she was closely watched by men the king knew to be completely trustworthy. Allowed but one personal servant, she was assigned a tiny allowance for her few needs. Though never abused, there was no doubt she was the king’s prisoner. He hated her, in the account of Giraldus the gossipy celibate, and imprisoned her “as a punishment for the destru
ction of their marriage,” while he “returned incorrigibly to his usual abyss of vice.” More likely, he feared her indomitable will and felt far more capable of limiting his young sons than of confining Eleanor’s activities, were he to set her free.

  We know little of her life during these years. She was permitted few correspondents and almost no visitors, not even her sons, and the chroniclers fall silent about her, having no news to chew on. Eleanor had become a nonperson. Henry did toy with the possibility of seeking an annulment and proposed that the queen be vowed as a nun at Fontevraud Abbey in Poitou, her favorite monastic foundation, the very place her grandmother had sought refuge when displaced by Dangerosa. Henry even offered to have Eleanor made abbess. She declined him frostily and smuggled a message to the archbishop of Rouen, in whose diocese Fontevraud was situated, that she required his help, for Henry was attempting to force her into the convent. She would rather be Henry’s prisoner than God’s. And so she stayed.

  Four years into her imprisonment, Louis, her first husband, died, leaving his personal wealth to the poor. He was succeeded on the French throne by Philip II, his son by Adela of Champagne, his second wife; and Louis’s body, dressed in his monk’s habit, was exhibited to the people of Paris in the old nave of Notre-Dame. Six years later, Eleanor’s oldest surviving son, Young Henry, died in the midst of a war in Aquitaine against his brother Richard, who now became King Henry’s heir apparent. Before his death, Young Henry with deep emotion confessed his sins against his father and his brother and, like Louis, gave his wealth to the poor. His last request was to his father that he show mercy to Eleanor and set her free.

  The queen received the news of the death with tranquility, telling her messenger that she already knew that her son was dead, having seen him in a dream. She described her dead son with two crowns above his head, one the crown he had worn in life, the other a crown “so pure and resplendent” that it could signify only “the wonder of everlasting joy. This second crown was more beautiful than anything which can manifest itself to our senses here on earth. As the Gospel says, ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of Man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.’ ”