Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (22 page)
During the course of the assembly, the necessity of presenting some achievement to Christendom became overriding, and bit by bit, a plan, though foolish, began to take shape. After some token opposition, it was unanimously resolved to attack Damascus. This was, to put it mildly, a decision of immense stupidity, because of all the Moslem states, the kingdom of Damascus alone was eager to maintain friendly relations with the Franks, and like the Westerners, its emir was at odds with Nureddin. To attack Damascus, which asked nothing better than peace, would prove to be the fastest way to throw its rulers into the arms of Nureddin and a political blunder of monumental proportions. But for some time the barons of Jerusalem had been greedily eyeing the fertile lands of the Damascenes, and to the visiting Crusaders, who knew nothing of the local situation and to whom all Moslems looked alike, the idea of rescuing from the infidel a hallowed Christian city like Damascus had an irresistible appeal.
On Saturday, July 24, the Christian army pitched its tents amid the orchards and vegetable gardens on the outskirts of Damascus. These orchards, stretching like “a dense gloomy forest” for more than five miles around the northern and western sides of the city, were crisscrossed by paths wide enough only to allow the gardeners to pass through with their pack animals. Therefore, the emir of Damascus, who at first had refused to take the threat seriously, was surprised to see the army approach from the northwest, because the walls on that side of the city were the most heavily fortified. Despite a constant downpour of arrows, the Christians were able, nevertheless, to move up quickly to the city walls, and by Monday they had successfully occupied the orchard. At this point, the terrified citizens of Damascus began to lose hope; during the weekend some had already fled the city, and now others began to barricade the streets for a last desperate struggle, while the emir was forced to dispatch a messenger to Nureddin with a request for aid and reinforcements.
On Tuesday, however, the besieged Damascenes watched in astonishment as the Crusaders struck camp in what appeared to be a retreat. Actually they were not retreating but shifting from their present winning position in the orchards to the eastern side of the city, a site that, incidentally, lacked food and water. The reason for this decision was not wholly understood even by those who participated in it, and many of the Franks believed that certain Hierosolymitan barons had been bribed by the emir of Damascus to give up the siege. Later, in fact, it would be fairly well ascertained that money did change hands. While murmurs of treachery swept through the army, its leaders began to snarl openly over the division of Damascus once it would be captured. On Wednesday, July 28, Louis, unable to follow the subtle bickering much less surmount it, ordered the retreat. In confusion and fear, the army struck out for Jerusalem with Damascene horsemen in pursuit. Arab historian ibn-al-Qalanisi, an eyewitness to the retreat, describes how the Moslems “showered them with arrows and killed many of their rearguard in this way, and horses and pack animals as well. Innumerable corpses of men and their splendid mounts were found in the bivouacs and along the route of their flight, the bodies stinking so powerfully that the birds almost fell out of the sky.”
The Moslem world could scarcely contain its glee. Since the First Crusade fifty years earlier, they had been obliged to contend with the legend of the invincible knights from the West, but now this image seemed to be effectively smashed. That this ferocious army, heralded as a scourge of Allah, should have abandoned its one and only campaign after four days and retreated ingloriously acted as an anodyne on their spirits. There was, they felt, nothing more to fear from intervention by the Europeans, at least not for a long time to come. In this, they proved correct. The next Western army they would have reason to fear would be led, ironically enough, by
“MalikRic,
” the lion-hearted son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but in the interim, the Moslems would have recovered Jerusalem.
“MalikRic,
” the lion-hearted son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but in the interim, the Moslems would have recovered Jerusalem.
Although it was abundantly clear that the prestige of the Franks had sunk to a mortifying low, it was by no means certain how this disaster had come about; Syrians and Crusaders hurled recriminations, each blasting the other for the abortive expedition. They had come thousands of miles, the Franks declared, and lost thousands of men to no avail; the Syrians were greedy, ungodly, and—a calculated insult—less courageous than the Moslems. The local Christians, equally eager to assign blame, charged that the Westerners, who lived comfortably in safe Christian lands, had the temerity to accuse them of cowardice; the constant danger of Palestine had made them realize the worth of life, and they had no taste for useless martyrdom. On both sides, some blamed Raymond of Antioch for sabotaging the Damascus siege, claiming that “he prevailed on some of the nobles in the army to manage affairs in such a way that the king was compelled to abandon the project and retire ingloriously.”
What Eleanor thought about the expedition is not hard to imagine. She was accustomed to associating failure with any enterprise undertaken by her husband, and she had little respect for the Syrian Franks, whose jealousy and petty bickering had disillusioned her beyond measure. Still, she must have felt keenly the ignominy of that weary retreat from Damascus, which had signaled the crumbling of the Crusade, her sadness compounded by depression over her own uncertain future.
During the autumn, there was much talk of ships and sailing; even the most hardened knights had become homesick and longed for the cool breezes of the Seine and the Loire. Slowly the crusading army began to melt away: On September 8, Conrad sailed for Constantinople, and Louis’s forces, “impelled by want,” also wished to go home. Somehow, passage money was found for all who wished to leave. Eleanor, too, her chests packed with perfume and damask and other souvenirs of bitterness, fully expected to take ship any day, but eventually she could see that Louis was making no effort to stir. How impatiently she must have chafed at his delays and postponements. For a person who was happiest when she could fling herself into work, the enforced idleness of Jerusalem, the debilitating glare of the noonday sun, the evenings with an unwanted spouse must have caused her enormous frustration. The wounds that she and Louis had inflicted on each other, say the chronicles, did not heal during this time. The weeks dragged; winds rose suddenly off the desert, wrapping the city in a haze of hot parched air laden with fine sand; Christmas came and went; the year became 1149; and still Louis refused to move.
Many times Abbot Suger wrote reproachful letters demanding to know why Louis did not return. The country needed him, he warned; the people were bitterly lamenting their dead relatives, the churches complaining about the dissipation of their treasure, those gold and silver vessels that had been sold for food in Hungary and Asia Minor. Louis’s brother Robert was threatening an armed uprising, contending that the king was unfit for kingship and should join their brother Henry as a monk in the Abbey of Clairvaux. And, briefly, Suger mentioned more personal matters. Shortly after the army had left Antioch in the spring of 1148, Louis had poured out his troubles with Eleanor to the abbot. His letter has been lost, but Suger’s reply remains. Thinly disguised can be seen his annoyance with Louis: “Concerning the Queen, your wife,” wrote Suger, “I suggest you conceal the rancor of your spirit, if there is any, until you have returned to your kingdom, when you may attend to both these and other things.”
Suger’s advice notwithstanding, the rancor had not abated, but had in fact increased. All winter the battle of wills raged, although at times Louis may have appeared to have been impressed with Eleanor’s arguments. Nevertheless, he made his own feelings perfectly clear: There was nothing he would not readily grant her, except what she most desired. Unable to draw much comfort from such discussions, Eleanor grew increasingly resentful and bored, and the continuing presence of Thierry Galeran in the royal party did not help. During the summer while the Crusaders had been occupied in Damascus, she had been left to her own devices in Jerusalem. At first the celestial city had held countless wonders, but over the months it had become a city like any other. By now she had grown accustomed to the arcaded courts and narrow, stepped streets, to the stalls of the Armenian merchants in the bazaars, to the Moslem scribes and the Jews and the black slaves, and to the swaying camel caravans bearing sacks of Indian spices and musk from Tibet. Countless times she had made the pilgrimage along the most famous of all Jerusalem’s streets, the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, to hear Mass in the Holy Sepulcher. “O eternal God, who has willed to declare to us by the mouth of the prophets that in the glorious sepulchre of thine only begotten Son his flesh should not see corruptions....”
Nevertheless, for Eleanor, Jerusalem had become a city of waiting, a spoiled city where even the landmarks finally lost their fascination. She had seen the cell, roofed with one stone, where Solomon had written the book of wisdom; the pine groves on Mount Zion, where tradition said that the Last Supper had taken place; the site of the pool of Bethesda, where Jesus had healed the paralytic. She had climbed the Mount of Olives, its grassy slopes white with asphodel, and toured “the village called Gethsemane and, close by, across the torrent of the Kedron, the Garden where Judas had betrayed Jesus.” For years she had listened to tales about Outremer, heard minstrels croon her grandfather’s songs, and like every pilgrim who entered Jerusalem’s gates, she had expected it to be the most miraculous event of her life. But one could not sustain oneself forever with ruins, no matter how holy. Now, weary and restless, she was ready to go home and set her life in order.
Shifting perspective, it is possible to intuit Louis’s state of mind in Jerusalem. Behind his reluctance to return to France, his confusion and aimless loitering, lay a number of ordinary human emotions. During that troubled winter and spring when his kingdom sat kingless, fear and humiliation warred with a desperate need to salvage some remnant of a life that now resembled a cracking ice floe. Afraid to look back and equally hesitant to set his feet toward the future, he was able to effectively stop the clock in Jerusalem, a place that, admittedly, seemed admirably suited to his monkish nature. One can be sure that much of his time was spent in prayer and religious sightseeing. There is less certainty of the exact nature of his relationship with Eleanor. It may well be that, alone, they heaved recriminations at each other, she berating him for his desertion of Raymond and the indignities that he had imposed on her at Antioch, he abusing her for indiscretions that provoked him into such unchivalrous behavior.
Given Louis’s limitations, he had conducted the Crusade to the best of his ability, however little credit that may be to allot him. It took courage to go home, where unpleasant postmortems were already being conducted in an effort to explain his failures. It was recalled, for example, that early in 1148 the pope had been celebrating Mass when one of his assistants spilled consecrated wine on the carpet before the altar. “Many thinking men were deeply alarmed, for the prevailing belief was that such a thing could never happen in any church unless some serious evil threatened it. And indeed this belief did not err.” Less charitable chroniclers decided to ignore the Crusade, only noting that Louis “was not able to do anything useful, anything worthy of mention, or actually anything worthy of France.” Even Odo de Deuil had abruptly ended his history of the Crusade midway because he had nothing more to say. There was no avoiding the enormously troubling fact that thousands of lives had been lost for nothing; not one foot of ground had been won. Even so, at that time what must have agitated Louis even more than his failure to the Church was the imminent loss of his queen. The issue of divorce was both puzzling and agonizing to Louis, for his marriage truly did seem to be cursed, with only one daughter in a dozen years. To a king who desperately needed a son, this was virtually the same as being childless, and his conscience trembled that he had transgressed God’s laws by living in sin with a third cousin. Nevertheless, Eleanor’s determination to separate constantly warred with his own unremitting desire to keep her, for, as John of Salisbury tells us, “he loved the queen almost beyond reason.” His ego terribly buffeted by military fiasco, he must have sought to restore a semblance of normality in his domestic affairs by going out of his way to regain Eleanor’s affection. As subsequent events will show, he fought for her with more zeal than he had waged any military campaign.
Apart from everything else was the matter of his pride. Should he meet Eleanor’s demands for divorce, if he accepted her theory that consanguinity had irrevocably tainted their marriage, then he must return empty-handed to France, having lost not only a war but his wife and that portion of his kingdom that belonged to her. From whom could he expect moral support? Bernard had declared their relationship within the forbidden degree, and for all Louis knew, Pope Eugenius might very well concur. His only recourse at this time was procrastination in the hope that time might resolve his problems and, perhaps, soften Eleanor’s implacable anger.
Toward the end of April, after the Easter celebrations had been completed. Eleanor and Louis sailed from Acre. With them were less than three hundred persons, all that remained of the mighty Crusade that had set out from Metz nearly two years earlier. Only two vessels were needed to accommodate the entire party and its baggage. That the coolness between the royal couple had continued is evidenced by the fact that Eleanor and her ladies sailed in one ship, Louis with Thierry Galeran and Odo in the other. Not only did Eleanor seem eager to avoid her husband on the voyage, but she also had no desire for the company of men whom she regarded as enemies. Despite her excitement and relief at leaving Palestine, the discomforts and boredom of a long sea trip made it far from an unmitigated pleasure. To add to this, the spring of 1149 was not the safest time to be making a voyage through the eastern Mediterranean, for Sicily and Byzantium were still at war, and squadrons of both powers regularly patrolled those waters. While Eleanor and Louis were passengers aboard Sicilian ships, they may have believed that, as neutrals, they had nothing to fear. Without incident, they passed Cyprus and Rhodes and, by early summer, were rounding the Peloponnese, probably in the vicinity of Cape Malea, when they were suddenly accosted by Manuel Comnenus’s navy. Louis hurriedly ordered the Frankish flag run up on his ship, a tactic that did not succeed in deterring the Greeks, who had orders to capture the royal pair and escort them to Constantinople. “The King was appealed to to return to his Byzantine brother and friend, and force was being brought to bear on him, when the galleys of the king of Sicily came to the rescue.” Before long the Sicilian counterattack proved successful in routing the Greeks, and the king and queen were able to continue on their way toward Sicily, the unpleasant incident forgotten.
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