Eleanor Of Aquitaine (12 page)

Perhaps Louis had other than religious motives for his long delay in Palestine. At least he took respite for a time from the heavy and thankless task of being King of the Franks. If only Providence had so disposed the principalities of this world, the role of being King of Jerusalem might have suited him. Under guidance of the better minds of the East, he studied the possibility of leading out another crusade from Europe which should profit by all the hard-earned experience of the first. It is probable that he made a careful tour of the Holy Land, which then had its guidebooks and its guides from Dan to Beersheba. And especially he turned over in his mind the perplexing problem of the queen, whom he could neither leave behind nor persuade to accompany him home in amity.
¹⁰
A note in the annals of Monte Cassino, where the sovereigns lodged on their return from overseas, states that, after the siege of Damascus, Louis went back to Antioch — a statement which provokes speculation without supplying anything to give color to it.

Having lingered all around the calendar and celebrated the whole year's cycle of feasts and fasts, the king and queen passed Easter, that climax of the Christian's experience, in the holy city. Sometime after that fervor of vigil and rejoicing, they went down finally to Acre to take ship for home. There they embarked separately, each with a small
mesnie
, in two of those high-pooped, two-masted sailing vessels with supplementary oars
(galea)
that plied the Mediterranean for the pilgrim traffic.

They had safely passed the glistening isles of the Aegean and were skirting the Peloponnesus off Cape Melaea when they encountered a Sicilian vessel with men-at-arms. Louis went aboard this buss, after the manner of mariners, probably to get the news. On board he was astonished to learn that his ally, Roger of Sicily, was engaged by the agency of this very ship in a war against his other ally and friend, the Emperor Manuel of Byzantium. He was just considering the fact that his presence in Roger's ship might be gravely misunderstood by the Emperor of Byzantium when some of Manuel's vessels actually came down like pirates in the wind, captured the queen's galley, and bore her and her women off toward the shores of Greece. Louis himself escaped capture by running up on the Sicilian ship the flag of a Greek ally; but his escort and his baggage were borne off in the wake of Eleanor. The Sicilian fleet, drawing up in hot pursuit, overhauled the Greeks, rescued the queen, and subsequently recovered the king's effects. But the sovereigns, still in separate vessels, were carried apart out of each other's sight and borne in widely sundered routes upon the sea. The incidents of their Odyssey, which consumed a full two months, are lost to history.

On the 29th of July, after alarums and excursions, Louis was brought up like a wraith of himself on the shores of Calabria, perhaps at Brindisi. He had in the course of his experiences developed such a prejudice against the sea that nothing but extremity induced him in later years to set his foot again upon a landing stage. He was without his
mesnie;
he had lost all his baggage; and he was sick with anxiety about the queen, of whose fate he was altogether ignorant.

On the shores of Calabria, Roger of Sicily received him as the, "anointed of the Lord," comforted him for his calamities, provided for his necessities, which were of every sort, and best of all, gave him news of Eleanor. She had been driven by adverse winds off the, "coast of Barbary," and had lately, "by the mercy of God," come safely to the port of Palermo in Sicily. Her hardships had left her for the moment incapable of further journeyings. She gave promise of gratifying the Franks at last with an heir, and was hence an object of more than usual solicitude. In spite of his haste to get forward to his own estates, Louis waited three weeks for her crossing to the mainland. Together they made a brief visit in Potenza to Roger of Sicily, whose ships had rescued them, and then pressed on to meet the Pope in Tusculum.

Eugenius found himself still an exile from Rome by reason of the aggressions of Conrad of Hohenstaufen, which had been promptly renewed upon the latter's return from the crusade. The Pope received the young sovereigns of the Franks, whom he had dedicated more than two years before at Saint Denis, as he might have welcomed angels, and comforted them spiritually for all the calamities they had endured. There was a great deal for Eugenius to talk over with the king who had suffered so much as an instrument of the church, who had studied the lamentable condition of the Latin Kingdom long and thoroughly, and who cherished the hope of going out a second time to Palestine. At last they came to the grievous incident of Antioch.

The queen, the Pope discovered, was by no means appeased for her abduction from her uncle's citadel. Even after a year in the Holy Land, she clung to the idea of separation and harped capably upon the theme of consanguinity and the unquestionable authority of AbbéBernard. This insistence was now especially painful to Louis, since it added to his other afflictions anxiety about the legitimacy of the heir that heaven at last promised him. John of Salisbury, who was at this time papal secretary, relates the known details of the interviews. He remarks with an accent of wonder that Louis, in spite of his qualms about consanquinity, still seemed to cherish the queen immoderately with a kind of boyish ardor. Consanguinity! The thought had stuck like a barb in Louis's conscience through all the pilgrimage. To the royal astonishment, Eugenius with skillful leechcraft at once drew out that painful thing. Never again, he declared, should that fatal word be uttered by either of the spouses. He confirmed and blessed their marriage and their unborn heir. He declared that he would smite with anathema anyone so rash as to mention consanguinity as an obstacle to their union. This remedial dispensation, says John, proved very pleasing to the king. But to the queen, the apostolic gesture by which Eugenius swept aside her dialectic and voided both reason and the canons was disconcerting. The monks, she saw, had reached the Pope's ear before her. She perceived with sudden insight how inapt is logic, how much too specialized the syllogism, for dealing with matters of general policy. Following this perception, Eleanor appears to have shifted from purely logical grounds and spilled out rather freely her real grievances, her hatred of that ascetic Thierry Galeran, her resentment at being carried away ignominiously from Antioch, her restraints in the court of France.

Before this new outpouring Eugenius was incredulous and kind. He saw that these sovereigns were young, worn with their hardships, weary with the reiteration of their wrongs. He caused a couch to be prepared for them and spread it with some of his own most precious brocades against the autumn chill of Tusculum. There he bade them take their rest, trusting to nature and to sleep to finish the good work he had begun. For another day he sought with gifts, diversions, and familiar talks to beguile them to good will. Somehow Eugenius persuaded himself from these interviews that he had at least revived a hope of reconciliation. Though, as his secretary tells us, he was a reserved man, he gave way to tears when at last he turned these dear children of his over to an escort of cardinals and set them on their way to Rome.

The royal pilgrims and their company lodged a day and a night in Saint Benedict's famous monastery of Monte Cassino and the next day were met by a delegation of Roman senators and nobles come to offer them the freedom of the Imperial City. Rome, scarred with the grim marks of her long anarchy and the unhallowed depredations of the crusading Hohenstaufen, was no such glittering throne of religion as Byzantium. But there were the apostolic shrines. While Louis and Eleanor made a brief tour of these, citizens followed them in the streets chanting,
Sanctus, sanctus, qui venit in nomine Domini
. Thence again they were conducted by their ecclesiastical escort to the frontiers of papal territory. From Aqua Pendente, the sovereigns made their way over the Jural Alpine pass, were joined at Auxerre for secret conclave by Abbé Suger, and finally arrived in Paris in November 1149, in time for the fete of Saint Martin.

Paris, we are told, received Louis with rejoicing. The grateful citizens are said to have had a medal struck commemorating the king's exploits and his prosperous return from exile and peril of his life. On the face, the leader of the crusade was seen seated in a triumphal chariot with Victory soaring above, bearing him a palm and crown. The legend recited.
Regi invicto ab Onente reduct, Frementes Laetitia cives. 1149
(To the king returning victorious from the Orient the citizens give joyful welcome. 1149). Then, lest this expression of enthusiasm seem too general, a second medal was struck to record an actual circumstance in Asia Minor. On this the river Maeander was represented naturally, and on its shores appeared a trophy with the inscription:
Turcis ad ripas Meandn caesis fugatis
(Turks killed and in flight on the shores of the Maeander). No medal is found celebrating the share of the Amazons in these exploits.

In view of the majesty of the departure from Metz thirty months before, there was no concealing the fact that the accomplishment of the second crusade was disappointing, and this fact perplexed the best philosophers of the age. It was easy enough for slackers to dispose of the question by pointing to the godlessness of the army mustered for the holy war, and this many did. Others complained of the treachery of the allies both in Byzantium and in Palestine. More worthy of study are the reflections of those who bore the heat and burden of the day. The Bishop of Freising, who was Conrad's brother and the official German chronicler, divines that the crusade, if not precisely happy in its issue, was nevertheless a boon to those who thereby procured a martyr's crown.

"It is of the nature of terrestrial things," declared the Pope, "to change and perish. Prosperity should not swell the heart of man, nor misfortune overwhelm his courage. He must learn to bless heaven when it sends him woes and calamities in order that it may teach him to despise the things of this world."

The failure of the crusade, which heaven had seemed to authorize and sanctify, descended, an inscrutable visitation, upon Abbé Bernard. "We have fallen on evil times," he says; "it seemed as though… the Lord, provoked by our sins, were almost judging the world before the time, with equity indeed, but forgetful of His mercy… We all know that the judgments of the Lord are true. But this judgment is such a great deep that I could almost justify myself for calling him blessed who is not offended thereat."
¹¹

But the disposal of heaven in this affair remained for the ordinary man one of the impenetrable mysteries of Divine Grace. The general bewilderment is perhaps best summed up in the query of William of Tyre in his reflection upon the disaster in Paphlagoma- "No one may question the acts of God, for all His works are just and right. But it remains a mystery to the feeble judgment of mankind why our Lord should suffer the French, who of all the people in the world have the deepest faith and most honor Him, to be destroyed by the enemies of religion."
¹²

THE WINTER OF 1149-50 was one of unusual severity in northern Europe.
¹
Frosts stilled the rivers and drove travelers from the roads. Fortunately Abbé Suger, in the absence of the king, had repaired somewhat the dilapidation of the royal palaces and made all as cheerful as possible for the dejected pilgrims from Jerusalem. But the Capets were exposed on their arrival in Paris to a chill not due to the rigors of the winter. The barons and the wise men of the king's council overseas, who had preceded him home, had by no means awaited their sovereigns' return from Palestine to explain in detail the catastrophic finale of the holy war. In the unofficial chronicles that flourished in the Ile long before the royal advent, the Poitevin lese majesty in Paphlagonia, the Poitevin treason in Antioch, the Capetian delay in Jerusalem, were the rubrics of the piece.

Those failures that mystics were intent upon interpreting in terms of theology, the more extrovert among mankind were explaining in far simpler ways. While the ecclesiastical authorities were expounding the moral defects of certain of the allies and searching the heavens for signs, many barons and burghers, both those who had been pilgrims and those who had stayed at home, were already considering plans for deposing the king who, in spite of the blessings of the Pope and the Abbé of Clairvaux, and their own outpouring of treasure, had failed not only to relieve the Christians in the Holy Land, but had lost his hosts far from the scene of battle and had then held aloof for a year from his royal responsibilities at home.

Abbé Suger had with difficulty quenched seditious plots among the barons, including one to set Louis aside in favor of his brother Robert, Count of Dreux, with whom he had quarreled in Syria. It was not the least of the great statesman's services to the monarchy that he preserved the feudal law against the king's arrival. Louis's final return from shipwreck and disaster hardly served to lift the tone of popular sentiment. In spite of the commemorative medals, the only trophy of his long excursion overseas to which the king could point with pride was the sullen queen herself, offering the ambiguous promise of an heir for France.

It cannot be supposed that Eleanor made efforts to dispel the gloom. To her who had for months experienced the delicious stir and novelty of the road in the companionship of her Poitevins, the Ile must have seemed more than ever a ship bound as by incantations to the left and right banks of the Seine, unable to move against the currents of the stream; a ship in which she sat embarked, but as a mere voyager without the power to lift a sail. About her again, as in the early days, the cowled figures came and went, as if all the world were a cloister and this life but a precarious bridge to heaven or hell. Thierry Galeran, with his sour visage and censorious eye, held his place in the counsels of the king. Abbé Bernard, "croaked," again from the frog-mires of Champagne. Louis, beset by a variety of melancholy reflections to which she had contributed, was not in a state to raise her spirits. The old sin of
accidia
laid hold of her. After the vernal brilliance and agitation of Jerusalem, life seemed stifled in Paris, quenched in winter desolation. The plunge of mill wheels on the river was stilled. The criers of fish and wine, the goliards and their songs were gone from the streets. Troops of students, slithering on the muddy paving stones, made now and then a moment's gaiety, but these were mainly gathered in pothouses where the fires of a spit made a corner of warmth. Master Abélard was dead. Abbé Bernard had stilled the intellectual revolt. The peerless Héloise was grown a gray cenobite in the Paraclete. Eleanor saw her proper heritage foregone, her years of grace fleeing away, while she remained a king's hostage in the dim Merovingian dungeon on the Seine. The hope of rescue from this world grown cold and senile had receded as the queen journeyed from Tusculum to Paris. Her case had certainly not fared well with Eugenius. The apostolic gesture with which he had passed over the matter of consanguinity had thrown her back upon caprice in wishing to be free, and against caprice in women the feudal system was more than adequate.

At some time in this interval of cold and malaise, Eleanor gave birth to her second child. If she had borne a son to give joy to the Franks after all their miserable mischances, history might have taken a different turn by reason of that fortuity alone. Not only would a male child have gone far to attach the Franks to their unhappy queen, but a son might have bound her by stern necessity to the destinies of France. As it was, the disastrous Poitevin presented to her anxious world a second daughter.
³
Whatever the king's council may have made of her perversity, Eleanor herself was not perhaps inconsolable. Her dynastic incompetence at least left her freer to demand release and more certain to be heard. Even those clerics who had been so lenient about consanguinity now saw no reason for patience with a queen who, in addition to all the other catastrophes she had brought upon her people, failed to provide, in a span of fifteen years, a male heir for the house of Capet.

For a time the practical sagacity of Abbé Suger prevented a widening of the breach between Louis and Eleanor after the birth of the Princess Alix.
⁴
But the abbé approached his threescore years and ten, and the effort, in the face of popular sentiment, to provide men and treasure for a new crusade, brought him to his end. Early in 1151, without seeing the consummation of his hope to redeem Jerusalem, Suger, "passed from the world," rich in years and honors, leaving a fame that shines with good luster to this day. He had been a familiar figure in the palace throughout two generations, seasoning all counsels with his moderation and common talk with his mellow wisdom — a little, humble man, who wore his honors with simplicity and bore his burdens without complaint. It was one of Louis's happy phrases to name him, "Father of his country." Deprived of the abbé's counsels, Louis no longer struggled against the queen's discontent.

*

In August of 1151 two of Louis's chief vassals outside the French domain arrived in the court to pay their belated homage to their overlord for the lands they held of him. As a matter of fact, Louis had been obliged to send the Bishop of Lisieux to remind Count Geoffrey of Anjou and Henry, Duke of Normandy, of the devoirs they owed their liege lord upon his return from overseas, and even then they had shown only a feeble alacrity.
⁵
It had been for the purpose of bringing Geoffrey's domains into the jaws of a vast pair of pincers, the Ile on one hand and Poitou on the other, that Louis the Fat had been so eager fifteen years before to marry his heir to the Duchess Eleanor.

The Count of Anjou, Geoffrey the Fair, or Geoffrey Plantagenet, as he was called from his custom of pluming his helmet with golden sprays of broom,
⁶
was son and heir of that Foulques who had transmigrated to be King of Jerusalem; he was half brother to the boy king Baldwin, and lord in his own right of those central counties of Maine and Anjou without which neither the King of France nor the Duke of Normandy could be secure. In his late thirties, he was a striking figure, one of the handsomest, most lettered, and most courtly men of his generation, and he was a very hardy knight.
⁷
In spite of his close connections with the
haute cour
of Jerusalem, he had not deemed it best, in view of the uncertainty of his own affairs, to go upon crusade.
⁸
The Angevins were intensely practical men. For them crusades, with their distant fields of battle and their merely transcendental triumphs, seemed nothing to exchange for the solid advantages of local warfare. Geoffrey was no stranger to the court of France; nor was he stranger to the queen. With her father, Count Guillaume of Poitou, he had fought more than one campaign in Normandy, sometimes as his enemy, sometimes as his ally, but always with ferocity.

With Geoffrey came his son Henry Fitz-Empress, Duke of Normandy, a personage of prime consideration in himself. He was less important as Geoffrey's son and heir than as the heir of his mother, Matilda Empress, to Normandy, and through her, as pretender to the throne of England Henry was eighteen, recently knighted by his uncle, the King of Scotland, and lately invested with the Duchy of Normandy. He had been bred to be a king. His schooling, both in books and experience, had brought him to an early maturity. He appeared now striking, if not handsome, robust, capable, courteous, and resplendent as befitted a great prince. He too was not for the first time in the Ile de France, where his prospects made him an object of respect and lively interest. There had been among the Franks a hope of attaching him to the crown by offering him as a marriage prize the elder daughter of Louis and Eleanor; but this alliance had been forbidden by Abbé Bernard on grounds of consanguinity.
¹⁰
The abbé distrusted the Angevins. It was said that he had long before studied Henry's physiognomy and appeared to find something legible in his childish lineaments. After scanning him searchingly, the Abbé had thrust the infant Angevin away with a melancholy air, predicting that he would come to an evil end.

When Geoffrey the Fair came up to Paris from his provinces in 1151, it was not merely to pay his homage to the royal pilgrim returned from overseas. His principal business was to get Louis's formal assent to young Henry's investiture as Duke of Normandy, and the matter had a special urgency in view of Louis's natural sympathy with Eustace of Blois, who was Henry's rival pretender to the throne of England. But Geoffrey had also brought an acute grievance to his overlord for which he was determined to have redress before he made any proffers of homage. With him he dragged a prisoner, no less a personage than Louis's seneschal for Poitou, one Geraud Berlai, whom he charged Louis with abetting in depredations against him on the marches of Anjou. Nothing but the Truce of God during Louis's absence on pilgrimage had restrained him from taking his own vengeance on his captive. He had this high official of the Franks hauled ignominiously into the king's presence to answer the charges against him. For Geoffrey's summary treatment of his prisoner, Abbé Bernard had contrived to have him excommunicated, and it was the Abbé's idea that Geoffrey should be heartily glad to exchange his captive for a lifting of the ban. But Count Geoffrey stubbornly refused to give up his man or to ask for absolution, and prayed publicly that, if holding his prisoner were a sin, God would not forgive him for it. This astounding blasphemy led Bernard to predict for the count an early and sudden death.
¹²
Unwilling to yield, Geoffrey withdrew from parley, as was the custom of the Angevins when negotiations failed to please them, tormented, as says the chronicler, "by a black and bitter bile."

The Count of Anjou's stouthearted way of dealing with anathema must have stirred the blood of the queen, for she cannot have failed to remember it was the way of her forebears in Poitou, who had supported antipopes and plucked the beards of bishops when they came into collision with secular affairs. It would have been easy for Eleanor in her isolation and despair in the French court to disclose to her father's admirable friend the heaviness that weighed upon her in Paris. And it is certain that Geoffrey would have seized at once upon the political implications of her case. It was perhaps to Geoffrey that she said what has been so often quoted: "I thought to have married a king, but find I have wed a monk."
Giraldus Cambrensis suggests baldly that Geoffrey the Fair offered more than homage and friendship to Louis's queen, and found her willing to betray her overlord. But Giraldus dipped his quill in venom when he wrote of Eleanor, and he wrote long after the events he chronicles, when calumny was rife; and Map, repeating the story, admits he is reporting gossip. William of Newburgh, who was better placed to know, declares that Eleanor was enchanted by that rich and rising young Duke of Normandy and desired a marriage with him on mere grounds of compatibility. What seems clear is that Eleanor at this time grasped at some tangible prospect the Angevins offered her of freedom from; the Capetian yoke.

Henry, already a belted knight, who had entered upon a vast and goodly portion of his heritage, was for his part casting about for a solid alliance and one that should offer him every possible advantage in dealing with his overlord, the King of France, with whom he was certain to have conclusions to try. Of course, whatever the theories of women might be, the property value of great heiresses made it impractical for feudal lords to be carried away by regard for temperament in choosing wives. But in this case, though Henry was a born and bred feudal bargainer, he could see the queen was no liability to her dower. Newburgh, writing of this time, speaks of Eleanor's charms of person and her lively mind. As arbiter of the
haut monde
in the Ile, she was mistress of her queen's role, and Henry expected to have uses for a proper queen. She had seen the world at its very best, its notables in all the citadels of Christendom. Her knowledge of places and personages, of affairs, of gossip and intrigue, made her a helpmate nonpareil for an ascendant king. That she was the proud victim of calumny, enkindled by unmastered emotions, merely enhanced her with an air of melancholy sophistication. Youth, "the fast-withering flower," still bloomed triumphant in her mien. The queen was nearly thirty, Henry but eighteen; but such disparate marriages were not uncommon where great fiefs were at stake. Henry's own mother, the Empress Matilda, was fifteen years older than Geoffrey the Fair. Eleanor was unquestionably a prize with a dower meet for any king. With the acquisition of her fiefs, there would be new stores of men and treasure for the vindication of Henry's claim to England, and England the Angevins were determined shortly to wrest from the house of Blois.

Whatever may actually have passed between the Angevins and the queen was so secret that no syllable remains to betray the intrigue. But perhaps their understanding explains the otherwise curious change of front that Geoffrey suddenly displayed in his quarrel with Abbé Bernard and the king. He not only disimissed his captive Berlai without insisting on the fullness of his demands, but he gave up to his overlord the perennial bone of contention between the Capetians and the Normans, that frontier area between them, known as the Vexin,
¹⁷
with its castles; and he stood by while the Duke of Normandy did homage for his duchy (shorn of the Vexin), placed his hands in Louis's palms, and swore to defend his liege lord faithfully and to protect him from all his enemies, and he looked on while Louis gave Henry the kiss of peace
¹⁸
What had dissolved Geoffrey's, "black and bitter bile,"? Was he perhaps intimidated by his overlord, or alarmed by Abbé Bernard's predictions? Or could he, in view of understandings with the queen, afford to be generous?