Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen (4 page)

The countess of Vermandois took refuge with her uncle, Thibault of Champagne, and begged him to help her. Thibault’s territory surrounded the Capetian domains; besides being count of Champagne, he was also count of Brie and count of Blois. His attempts to intervene and his protection of Pierre of Le Châtre infuriated the king who, in 1142, invaded Champagne and laid it waste far and wide. The campaign reached its climax in 1143, when royal troops set fire to the town of Vitry-en-Perthois and over a thousand refugees — mainly women and children — perished when the church was burnt to the ground. (The town has been known as ‘Vitry-le-Brulé’ ever since.) Louis, who was there, was appalled, but no doubt more by the sacrilege than by the slaughter.

The king now received terrible letters from St Bernard, whose abbey of Clairvaux was in Champagne. He was accused of ‘slaying, burning, tearing down churches, driving poor men from their dwelling places, consorting with bandits and robbers’, and warned that he was in imminent danger of being punished by a wrathful God. The abbot then visited Louis at Corbeil but the interview ended in one of the king’s terrible fits of rage. Even so, Louis was overwhelmed by guilt, and badly shaken by the grim monk.

Bernard of Clairvaux had dominated western Christendom — and French public opinion in particular — for many years. When he joined the new Cistercian order in 1113, it possessed only one monastery; at his death, in 1153, it had nearly 350, and the expansion was almost entirely due to his genius as a publicist. From his tiny cell under a staircase at Clairvaux he continually sent out a stream of letters and pamphlets on almost every secular and spiritual issue of the day. In appearance he was like some Old Testament prophet, very tall and emaciated, with a ghastly pallor and white hair, caused by austerities that had aged him before his time. His voice terrified even the bravest opponent. It was inevitable that Louis would give way in the end, but he held out for a surprisingly long time.

Eleanor realized that Louis must be reconciled with Bernard, even though she herself must have been a little afraid of the alarming abbot. The opportunity came at the dedication of Suger’s new abbey church at Saint-Denis on Sunday, 11 June 1144. This was the realization of the amiable Suger’s dearest dream, the glorification of God by a tangible beauty. This was the first great Gothic church in France, and made full use of the revolutionary pointed arch and rib vault. It was a treasure house, lit by gem-like stained glass and filled with sacred vessels of precious metals studded with rare jewels; the altar furnishings included a gold cross twenty feet tall, and the reliquary of St Denis was cased entirely in silver. Every noble in the realm had contributed some costly ornament, and one of Louis’s presents was the crystal vase that the queen had given to him. The crowd was so dense that it was said that inside the church a man might have walked over their shoulders without touching the ground. Everyone of note was there. Among them — perhaps a little surprisingly — was Bernard; he would not tolerate gold and jewels, or even coloured glass, in his order’s bleak churches. King and saint were both deeply moved by the ceremony, and exchanged friendly words.

Bernard’s meeting with the queen was less successful. It was inevitable that he should disapprove of her: he would not allow his monks to see even their own mothers or sisters, so fearful was he of feminine charms. In a letter intended for the nuns of his order he referred to the devilish vanity of court ladies in their rich dresses made from ‘the toil of worms’ (i.e. silk), and deplored the painted faces that they removed at night. He had obviously observed these ladies at close hand with shocked fascination: ‘Their arms are weighed down with bracelets, and from their ears dangle pendants containing precious stones. For head-dresses they wear kerchiefs of fine linen that they drape around their neck and shoulders, a corner falling over the left arm. This is their wimple, usually fastened to their foreheads by a wreath, band or circlet of carved gold.’ He must have unsettled his nuns still further by his description of the ladies walking ‘with mincing steps, busts thrust forward, garnished and decorated in a fashion more fitting for temples, pulling trains of rich materials after them to raise clouds of dust’. He speaks of some who are not so much ornamented as laden with gold and silver and jewels and ‘everything else that accompanies queenly splendour’. One cannot help suspecting that the last phrase refers to Eleanor herself. Apart from her appearance, there was a good deal else that he detested about the queen: her troubadours for example, and her reputation for luxury and frivolity. She did not come of a family that inspired confidence. Her father and mother had been excommunicated, supporters of an anti-pope; as well as being a scourge of bishops and dying outside the church, her grandfather had been a byword for loose living; and her grandmother was the whore and concubine Dangerosa.

To Eleanor, Bernard must have seemed an horrific figure, a white bird of ill omen. Yet she was not shaken. Bernard grumbled that the queen had more power over Louis than anyone else. Later he accused her of meddling, and told her to stop interfering with matters of state. But she persuaded the king to talk to the abbot and to accept a qualified peace with the pope and the count of Champagne. What seems to have enraged Bernard was the suspicion that Eleanor was telling her husband to make conditions rather than to surrender abjectly. The king agreed to withdraw his troops from Champagne, but only if the interdict was lifted.

The queen was sufficiently impressed by the saint to request his prayers in the matter of her barrenness. Apart from one early miscarriage she had not conceived in all her seven years of marriage. Bernard replied: ‘Work for peace in the kingdom and I tell you that God of His great mercy will grant your request.’

Peace did not come at once. The new pope, Celestine II, refused to lift the interdict and fighting broke out once more. Finally Bernard persuaded Celestine to remove the interdict, but in return Louis had to install Pierre of Le Châtre as archbishop of Bourges. Bernard and Suger then reconciled the king with Thibault of Champagne. The pope eventually recognized the marriage of Petronilla and Raoul of Vermandois. Eleanor must take a good deal of the blame for this war.

As Bernard had promised, the queen gave birth to a child as soon as there was peace. Unfortunately it was a girl. She was christened Marie and was one day to marry Thibault’s heir and become countess of Champagne.

About this time there occurred the first suggestion of incompatibility between Eleanor and her husband. Although chroniclers and popular historians have accused her of promiscuity, even comparing her to Messalina, nowadays few serious authorities believe that she was physically unfaithful to Louis. On the other hand it is more than likely that she enjoyed flirting. Moreover her frivolity and luxury, her taste for romantic poets, her amusing (and probably frequently erotic) conversation and her sympathy for lovers — e.g. during her sister’s elopement — understandably aroused suspicion in monastic minds. The puritanical king himself may well have suspected her, as in the Marcabru affair. The queen had invited this famous Gascon troubadour to Paris; a pupil of her father’s favourite Cercamon, his verses were sung and admired throughout the Provencal-speaking world. Marcabru immediately developed the obligatory platonic passion for his beautiful patron, expressing it in songs that were sung everywhere. King Louis took violent exception and angrily banished the all too eloquent poet. (Ironically, most of Marcabru’s other poems show a marked contempt for women.)

With hindsight one can see that Eleanor’s marriage, which had begun so well, was now threatened from many directions. Louis had suffered a severe nervous crisis during the Champagne war and it is likely that in some way he blamed his wife. She had made a most dangerous enemy in St Bernard, who regarded her as an unsuitable consort for a Christian king. And she had failed to produce an heir to the throne, the first duty of every queen. However, Louis still seemed besotted with her.

3 The Crusader

‘Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui!
’

Racine,
Bérénice

‘Debates already ’twixt his wife and him Thicken and run to head; she, as ’tis said, Slightens his love and he abandons hers.’

Ford,
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

On Christmas Eve 1144, Edessa (the capital of a Latin county on the far side of the Euphrates) fell to the Saracens. Christendom was appalled; it seemed that the Holy Land, won back at so much cost only a generation before, might again be lost. After much thought the new pope, Eugenius III, decided that the only way to save it was by a second crusade. In December 1145 he sent a bull to Louis VII, calling upon the king and his vassals to launch an expedition with every resource at their command; in return they would receive forgiveness for all their sins. Later the pope sent a similar bull to the emperor in Germany, Conrad III.

Louis was delighted by the idea. No doubt he sincerely believed that every Christian had a duty to save the land of Christ and His mother from the infidel; and he continued to feel guilty about the holocaust at Vitry, which still had to be expiated by a suitable penance. Eleanor was equally enthusiastic; not only did the prospect appeal to her vigorous and imaginative spirit, but it would provide the change of scene that might well save her threatened marriage, and might even bring down a blessing to end her barrenness. However, Louis’s vassals, assembled at Bourges during Christmas, were lukewarm in their response. No king in Christendom — or at least in western Europe — had ever gone to Syria before; and although the First Crusade had been successful, thousands of those who had taken part had perished. Abbot Suger spoke out publicly against the project, expressing his alarm at the thought of the king being so long out of his kingdom. It was a long time before Louis was able to muster sufficient support.

Pope Eugenius therefore turned to his fellow Cistercian, St Bernard, and with Louis begged the eloquent abbot to preach a crusade. The king summoned another assembly to meet at Easter 1146 at Vézélay in Burgundy so that Bernard could appeal to them. It was the last day of March but the weather seems to have been fine. The beautiful Romanesque basilica (for which the town is still famous) was too small to hold the vast multitude that had gathered, so the abbot addressed them from a high makeshift pulpit in the fields nearby. His sermon has not survived, but his burning eloquence had a magical effect. Soon his hearers were shouting ‘crosses, give us crosses!’ So many wished to sew them onto their clothes in token of their vow that they quickly used up every bit of white cloth available and Bernard had to sacrifice his own white Cistercian choir mantle. Not only the great vassals joined their king in taking the vow, but simple folk in vast numbers also swore an oath to go on crusade. The abbot reported without false modesty to pope Eugenius: ‘You ordered and I obeyed; the authority of him who gave the order makes fruitful my obedience; I opened my mouth and I spoke and the crusaders at once multiplied into infinity. Villages and towns are deserted and you will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you will see widows whose husbands are still alive.’ Bernard then went to Germany, where at Speier, just after Christmas, he shamed the unwilling emperor Conrad into taking the cross.

One woman who was not among the widows made by the abbot’s eloquence was Eleanor. She vowed to go to the Holy Land and to pray at Christ’s sepulchre in Jerusalem. After all, princesses had accompanied their husbands on the First Crusade: Ida of Austria was believed to have ended her life in a harem. Eleanor had personally sworn on her knees to Bernard that she would bring her vassals, a summons that was her prerogative alone in feudal law, and it would have been impossible to stop her. In any case Louis would not leave her behind; William of Newburgh tells us that he was too jealous of his beautiful wife to do so. She was joined by other great ladies including the countess of Flanders, Torqueri of Bouillon, Faydide of Toulouse and Florine of Burgundy. Indeed William of Newburgh grumbles at the number of female crusaders, and one may suspect that their motives were not always entirely spiritual; tales of the fabulous luxuries of Outremer (as the French then called Syria and Palestine) were alluring. But not even the chroniclers question Eleanor’s sincerity.

The next months were spent preparing for the expedition. A heavy tax was imposed throughout France to raise funds, causing much hardship. Eleanor’s officials mulcted her domains with particular ferocity. She herself was busy summoning her chivalry, and among those who promised to come were the lords of Lusignan, Thouars and Taillebourg. Troubadours also responded to her summons, including Jaufré Rudel, who was not to return, and Marcabru, who wrote some crusader songs. The queen made provision for her soul in case she should not come back, endowing abbeys and convents so that they would pray for her — the first evidence of orthodox religious sentiment on her part. Among these was Fontevrault.