Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  It is actually Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, not the gospel, that Eleanor is quoting. And though Paul, adopting phrases from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, is speaking of the revelation entrusted to the first Christians, medieval Christendom took his words as reference to the unearthly joys that will come to the faithful Christian after death. But it must be admitted that the queen’s words, composed, reflective, even visionary in a Hildegardian manner, suggest a new Eleanor.

  And now, because of the unsettled political situation on the continent, Henry needed her once more—to assert her right of ownership over certain properties the new French king was claiming and to quiet the continuing tension between their remaining sons and between the sons and their father. So Eleanor, still closely guarded, was allowed a trip to the continent. From this time forward, Henry would permit Eleanor more freedom of movement, though she was still in custody and would never again reside with him. “What he and Eleanor now achieved,” remarks Weir, “was a working, mutually beneficial relationship designed to preempt any resentment against the king on the part of their sons for the way in which he had treated her.”

  Eleanor, more practical than ever and casting aside whatever resentment she may have harbored, was happy to serve as mediatrix of familial peace. But it may not be too much to say that during her ten-year imprisonment she had, like so many long-term prisoners for whom the press of daily events is no longer meaningful, reached an inner peace that could not be taken from her. Certainly, there was no longer any hint of scheming on her part. She did refuse to be part of Henry’s plan to deprive Richard, her favorite, of her inheritance, which had been previously settled on him. But Henry was always reorganizing the territories to be awarded his sons according to whatever humor was on him—which made them all nervous as cats. For daring to gainsay her lord once more (though more circumspectly than she had ever done before), she was imprisoned again. But soon she would be given a role that only she could play and that no one could have foreseen.

  The sons continued to scheme, however, their ranks reduced in the summer of 1186 by the death of Geoffrey, trampled at a melee in Paris, where he had gone to plot with King Philip. For a while, Philip and Richard became extremely chummy, sleeping together in the same bed and dining from the same plate; and Richard was betrothed to Philip’s sister Alys. In the autumn of 1187, the Turks captured Jerusalem. By January, Henry, Philip, and Richard had all taken the Cross and committed themselves to regaining the Holy City in what would become the Third Crusade. But no one left for the East, as the intermittent, low-level war between England and France proceeded apace, the French king now assisted by Richard. Henry’s once-secure territories of Anjou, Le Maine, and Touraine began to desert to the French banner; and Philip’s forces even captured Le Mans, where Henry had been born.

  “Oh, God,” cried the ailing monarch, now old, fat, gray, and no longer invincible. “Thou hast vilely taken away the city I loved best on Earth! I will pay Thee back as best I can. I will rob Thee of the thing Thou lovest best in me, my soul!” Forced to accept terms and even to bestow the kiss of peace on Richard’s cheeks, Henry continued to fulminate, croaking at his son, “God grant that I may not die till I have had a fitting revenge on you.”

  “Why should I worship Christ?” Henry, no longer able to walk or ride and carried by litter, croaked hoarsely to the sky as he departed the peace parley. “Why should I deign to honor him who takes my earthly honor and allows me to be ignominiously confounded by a mere boy?” But that night, at the urging of the archbishop of Canterbury, he confessed his sins and received absolution. The next morning, he attended mass, as he had every day of his life, and received communion. But that day, he also received a fatal blow: he was informed that John, his youngest and favorite son, whom he had always counted as his ally, had been with Richard all along. As he descended into delirium, Henry muttered repeatedly, “Shame, shame on a conquered king.” On July 6, 1189, Henry II, surely one of the best monarchs the English ever had, died, attended only by the faithful Geoffrey, one of his bastards.

  The difficult Richard was now king—and Eleanor at sixty-seven was free, free as she had never been before. From the continent, Richard sent the trusted Plantagenet servant William Earl Marshal to England to end the queen’s captivity and ask her to act as monarch in his absence. She reigned with such sagacity that when in September Richard arrived for his coronation and barred all women from the event, Ralph of Diceto tells us that “the earls, barons, and sheriffs” of England demanded that Eleanor be present. Her rehabilitation was complete.

  After bleeding England dry to finance his crusade, Richard embarked for the Holy Land, leaving his mother in charge of all his European territories. She had much work on her hands, for John was not idle in stirring the pot and attempting to take away lands from his absent brother. But according to one chronicler, the old queen was “determined, with every fibre of her being, to ensure that faith would be kept between her younger sons, so that their mother might die more happily than had their father.” With tenacity she kept John in England when all he wished to do was sail to the continent where he could more easily claim territory with the aid of Philip, who was now willing to move against his old friend Richard because Richard, discovering that his father had slept for years with Philip’s sister Alys, was dragging his feet about marrying her.

  The Third Crusade was blighted by the death by drowning of Frederick Barbarossa, whose participation might have greatly improved the outcome. Returning from the Holy Land after a series of disappointing engagements—in which he captured a couple of cities but could not get near Jerusalem—Richard was taken prisoner outside Vienna by Duke Leopold of Austria, a man of mountainous pride whom Richard had mortally insulted in the course of the crusade. Triumphantly, Leopold refused to free Richard or even to divulge his whereabouts. It took more than a year for Eleanor to win Richard his liberty, as she badgered emperor, pope, and anyone who might be able to bring pressure on Leopold. Her letters to the new pope, the aged and spineless Celestine III, are masterpieces of canoodling, threat, and innuendo:

  For the Prince of the Apostles still rules and reigns in the Apostolic See, and his judicial rigor is set up as a means of resort. It rests with you, Father, to draw the sword of Peter against these evildoers, which for this purpose is set above peoples and kingdoms. The Cross of Christ excels the eagles of Caesar, the sword of Peter is a higher authority than the sword of Constantine, and the Apostolic See higher than the imperial power.

  Eleanor adopts this wheedling tone because she is trying to get Celestine to excommunicate the emperor, Leopold’s overlord. Celestine had a clear right to do so, for Leopold, with the emperor’s connivance, had broken the so-called Truce of God by which no European monarch was allowed to take advantage of a crusader during his absence from his realm. He was not permitted, for instance, either to invade another sovereign’s territory or to imprison him. Without this papal mechanism, no sovereign would have been willing to go on crusade in the first place. But Celestine, palsied with anxiety, could not bring himself to make a move.

  Besides having the full-time task of negotiating Richard’s release, Eleanor was regent of England, which she contrived to rule “with great wisdom and popularity,” becoming in the process “exceedingly respected and beloved” by her subjects, in the words of the fine thirteenth-century historian Matthew Paris.h Among her less agreeable tasks was keeping in line her sneaky son John, who saw a great opportunity in Richard’s imprisonment and even put out the rumor that his brother had died in captivity.

  On March 12, 1194, after submitting to a humiliating and extortionate settlement in Austria with the treacherous Leopold, Eleanor and Richard landed in England, Richard for the first time in five years. In two months’ time, however, they would depart their well-run country for the continent, in order to counter Philip, who had occupied Richard’s lands in Normandy. Neither the king nor the queen mother would ever return to the island kingdom.

 
; Eleanor ended her days as a nun at Fontevraud Abbey, having taken the veil she once refused. But her religious vows were made eight years after she and Richard sailed from Portsmouth to Barfleur on their last voyage across the Channel, two years before her own death at eighty-two. The eight years before she cloistered herself were among the most active of her life, getting Richard out of trouble with an uncompromising new pope—the fearless Innocent III—rescuing her daughter Joanna from the clutches of Joanna’s second husband, arranging retribution against rebellious vassals, fielding armies against Philip (and her own upstart grandson Arthur of Brittany), gladly granting charters to the freshly independent cities of her realms, crossing the Pyrenees to arrange a marriage between her granddaughter Blanche of Castile and Philip’s son and heir as part of a new pact of peace between Philip and the Plantagenets.

  Her worst ordeal during these years had little to do with travel, war, or policy. It was to mourn the deaths of two more of her children. Her first child by Henry had died long ago in 1156, Young Henry in 1183, Geoffrey in 1186, Matilda in 1189, Eleanor’s daughters by Louis, Alix and Marie, in 1198. The abused Joanna died in childbirth in 1199, and Richard Lionheart died in the same year of a suppurating arrow wound received in a minor skirmish. (He asked to be buried in Fontevraud at his father’s feet in reparation for having risen against him.) Only two of her ten children, Eleanor, queen of Castile and mother of Blanche, and John, Henry’s favorite but certainly not Eleanor’s, would survive their mother. Though she had long ago given up all rights to her daughters by Louis, she seems to have tried mightily to be a proper mother to her children by Henry and even to Berengaria, the sweet-tempered, abandoned wife of her son Richard, whom he had wed after decisively rejecting Alys of France. Her service to the desperate Joanna, who took the veil at Fontevraud just before dying, and her admiration for Joanna’s courage and spiritual intensity in her last hours may have been what prompted Eleanor’s own belated vocation.

  There can be no question, however, that Richard’s death was a blow from which Eleanor never recovered. He was as much of a mixed bag as his father, full of explosions, a cunning strategist, a fearless warrior, but cruel, willful, faithless (and possibly homosexual, which would have left the humble Berengaria up a tree). Eleanor may have been attracted to the same qualities in Richard that had once attracted her to Henry. Certainly, Richard, despite his gouging taxations and arbitrary judgments, was loved by the English people—which could never be said of his successor, the slimy John. Richard, a tower of a man nearly six and a half feet tall in a time when most men stood scarcely more than five feet, became a legend—the heroic, lionhearted crusader who befriended Robin Hood (though Robin Hood, if he actually existed, belongs to a later century)—whereas John became a historical lesson in how not to be king.

  John gained the nicknames “Softsword” and “Lackland” because he lost most of his continental fiefs to Philip, who, annexing Anjou, Le Maine, Normandy, Touraine, and most of Poitou, began to build what would become modern France. Having quarreled with Pope Innocent, John found England under interdict and himself excommunicated, which subsequently pushed him into the humiliating posture of becoming the pope’s vassal. Finally, he was forced by his barons to seal Magna Carta, the first time in European history that the power of a king was limited by law.

  What strikes me most forcibly about Eleanor at the end of her long life is her generosity—toward kin and in-law but also toward servants, toward the poor, and toward God. She became in her last years an almsgiver of marked largesse: to those living who had helped her or her children (cooks, governesses, even her jailers, all of whom received properties of consequence) and to many religious foundations that cared for the poor (and that received everything from chantries to enlarged kitchens “for the weal of her soul and of her worshipful husband of sacred memory, King Henry, of her son King Henry, of goodly memory, and of that mighty man King Richard, and of her other sons and daughters”). She freed many people from “all accustomed services” that had previously bound them, just as she had earlier freed cities by charter from their former feudal obligations. Among her descendants are the expectable kings, queens, and even an emperor, but also two royal saints: Louis IX of France, son of Blanche of Castile, a truly good king whose inveterate peacemaking serves as a prophecy of the peace of Europe in our time,i and Ferdinand III of Castile, a more conflicted figure than Louis IX but nonetheless rebuilder of the cathedral of Burgos and founder of the University of Salamanca. It may be said of Eleanor that she made more than one erratic start in life but she made a good end.

  To make a good end was indeed the chief goal of all medieval lives. One recalls the exceedingly incarnational Marian prayer, Ave Maria, which came into existence in its present Latin form only in the twelfth century: “Ave, Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen” (Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen).j The hour of one’s death is the decisive hour.

  Detail of Eleanor’s tomb. The face appears to be a late likeness of Eleanor, who kept her beauty despite her great age. (Photo Credit 2.2)

  The Middle Ages were, at least for the leading families of Europe, a combustible combination of sex, violence, and religion. The powerful have always had license to fulfill their sexual whims in ways unavailable to simple folk. But till the Age of Eleanor such fulfillment was almost entirely limited to males. Likewise, statecraft, political power, and armed combat were instruments for alpha males that no woman was invited to handle. Eleanor, despite the discretion and equilibrium her imprisonment would teach her, was the first woman in the history of civilized Europe to have the experience of choosing her husband, leading an army, going to war, and ruling over countries for considerable periods of time—all without the need to defer to husband, father, brother, or son.

  Eleanor’s tomb in Fontevraud Abbey, next to that of her second husband, King Henry II. Taller than Henry, Eleanor was the genetic source of their son Richard’s great height. (Photo Credit 2.3)

  Click here to a view a larger image.

  If her beauty and grace were legendary, her competence and decisiveness became more so. If Hildegard proved that a woman could be as profound a mystic and as orthodox a theologian as any man of her time, Eleanor proved that a queen could be as free a sexual being, as wise a ruler, as strategic a general as any king. But though Hildegard remains in important aspects forever medieval, Eleanor is an entirely modern woman. One feels that one meets her in the pages of history as one might meet any woman of consequence in the world we now inhabit. Her desires are ours, her objectives our own. And just as certain noble ladies throughout Europe held her up as a model, many ordinary women too came to find in Eleanor a standard by which they might measure their own actions and rehearse the roles they could win for themselves. For as King Henry V of England would remind the royal Katherine of France in Shakespeare’s history play, “We are the makers of manners, Kate.”

  Besides the living models of abbesses like Hildegard and queens like Eleanor, besides the omnipresent liturgical and artistic model of the Virgin Mary, there is the literary and musical model, the courtly love that provided constant subject matter for writers and composers of the twelfth century and later. In this endeavor, the poets and musicians repeatedly took inspiration from primitive Welsh and Breton stories, told and retold, of an early British king, Arthur, whose Knights of the Round Table were models of chivalry for all time, whose queen, Guinevere, was the most beautiful of all, and whose court of Camelot would have enjoyed eternal life, had it not been for the queen’s adultery with the king’s good friend Lancelot, the perfect knight. Did the life of Eleanor feed the legend of Guinevere or did early versions of Guinevere’s story, now lost in the mists of time, give Eleano
r the courage to act as she did?k

  It is unlikely that we shall ever know for sure. An educated guess would be that the expanding cult of the Virgin Mary in the language of prayer and in the images of art served as the inspiration for all subsequent exaltations of women in religious life, in the worshipful literature of the troubadours, and in the courts of Europe, which soon devised a more secular form of devotion—courtly love—which in turn influenced women like Eleanor to seize control of their destinies. Though this feminism is certainly not the result that churchmen would have wished when they reluctantly blessed the growing popular enthusiam for devotions to the Virgin, it is also true that all cultural revolutions tend sooner or later to press beyond whatever initial limits were set for them.

  In one aspect only does the singular Eleanor agree with the figures that surround her, the others whom we have met in the course of her story: her religious attitudes are the same as theirs. She was dismissive of churchmen—this is what Bernard of Clairvaux sensed in her—and her exasperation and irreverence toward the pretensions of the official church are unmistakable in her correspondence with the doddering Pope Celestine. But she is nonetheless a believer, who takes seriously the presence of an immortal soul in every person, a soul that will outlast the body and that is destined for eternal happiness with God or, because of a final refusal to seek God’s mercy and forgiveness, eternal damnation. Every medieval life, including Eleanor’s, was lived against this horizon of apocalypse, for life was a great drama ending awesomely in Four Last Things: death, God’s judgment, Heaven, and Hell.