Eleanor Of Aquitaine (2 page)

The duchess herself was no liability to her rich dower. She was no simple marriage prize to be gathered in by the Capets for her weight in gold. She claimed descent from Charlemagne, whose effigy was still borne on the coins of Poitou, and knew herself the heiress of a great tradition, who could acquire no incomparable luster from the marriage decreed for her by circumstance.

When her grandfather, the famous troubadour, returned from his disastrous crusade early in the century in a very cynical mood, he found his countess, Philippa of Toulouse, taken up with one of those religious movements perennially arising on the soil of Aquitaine. Being at the time less than usually inclined to spiritual restoratives, he abandoned his lady with her innocent nose in a breviary and rapt away the Countess of Châtellerault to enliven his middle years.
¹³
The new countess was the mother of a daughter Anor by her previous marriage; and this demoiselle the troubadour married to his own heir, born of Philippa. It was a marriage designed to canalize the ducal fortunes, sadly diminished by the disasters
outre-mer
. Of this union the Duchess Eleanor was born in 1122 in some high place of the far south (Bordeaux and Belm both claim her birth site), and she was named after her mother, as the legend says, Alia-Anor, or as history has chosen to call her, Eleanor.
¹⁴
There was a sister Petronilla, and a brother Agret; but the boy and his mother Anor died in the Talmont while Eleanor was still a child.

That the young heiress was fair enough to content any king appears from subsequent accounts. "Charming," "welcoming," and "lively,"
(avenante, vaillante, courtoise)
are the words used by the chroniclers to portray her.
¹⁵
While the Prince of France had been indentured to canons and abbés to learn his destined role as archbishop, Eleanor had made another use of time. What the magnates of the prince's escort noted especially when they met her in Bordeaux was her maturity of mind. She had grown in the enlightened traditions of her family. Her education had not of course furnished her with the orderly intellectual baggage fit for an ss. Though doubtless, like all the heirs of her race, she had had her tutors, her real school had been a varied experience. Movement with the itinerant ducal family from castle to castle had afforded that training in taste and judgment that comes from frequent contrast of persons, places, things. Though but fifteen, and therefore the prince's junior by two years, in practical experience, in that decisiveness gained from instant appraisals, she far outdistanced him. Her education had taught her especially to be intolerant of ennui.

As a girl she must have traveled much with the peripatetic household from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the Loire on those long
chevauchées
made necessary by the ducal business of overlooking intriguing vassals and presumptuous clergy, and carrying law and justice to the remoter corners of creation. She knew a land of mellow harvests, where grain shocks bent like humble homagers; of forests dark at noon; of scarped heights where the baronial strongholds loomed with their clustering mud hamlets; the vast agglomerations of the ys, their mills, salt marshes, vineyards, wine and olive presses, their fantastic dovecotes and apiaries spread along garden walls.

She knew the aspect of the red-roofed towns, and the traffic of each one, here a fair, there a market; here a lazar house, there a hostel thronging with pilgrims returning from Saint James or the shrines of the pious Limousin. Familiar were the domes of Saint Jean d'Angély showing from afar as the road wound in; familiar the church of Saint Eutrope of Samtes, its dark Romanesque nave cut across with swords of sunlight, the great collegials of Limoges. Melle she knew where there was a mint, and Blaye, where, in the glow of forges, armorers repaired their traveling gear; and Maillezais, where her aunt, the ss Agnes, never failed to halt the ducal progress for a largess. At the end of
chevauchée
she found herself in motley assemblies of castellans, bishops, abbots, merchant princes, poets, travelers, and all the entertainers and hangers on that gave an outward air of careless wealth and gaiety to a solid program of feudal business.

*

Of course, the emotions of the prince and the duchess were of no concern to the chroniclers Later events suggest that Louis was somewhat more transported by his fortunes than Eleanor; but even she would not have thought of questioning manifest destiny. Like all feudal marriages, the union of the young pair was a purely rational matter. The duchess simply went with her fiefs, and she went, as befitted her rich patrimony, to the proudest station in Europe. Louis's cloistral disciplines had not aptly equipped him for the functions thrust upon him in the ducal court. In those days of his awakening, he dismayed his mentors by unpredictable conduct, now headlong, now uneasy and diffident, as if already, in the secret citadel of his being, the king did violence to the archbishop, and the archbishop accused the king.

Two weeks elapsed before the vassals of the south could be gathered from the corners of Gascony and Poitou to do homage to their new overlord.
¹⁰
Even then some of the most powerful, through fear or umbrage, stayed away. In spite of the heat and their fatigues, we are told that the barons of France enjoyed such feasts as Seneca and Terence could hardly have described.
¹⁷
They tasted the fish, salt meadow mutton, and planked meats for which the land was famous, and quaffed the red, white, and amber vintages of Poitou and the Limousin. They viewed Bordeaux, that polished cornerstone of Europe, its abundant churches, its rich relics of Charlemagne and his paladins, its semitropical gardens, embellished with tiles and fountains, the flotillas of its maritime trade moving on the bosom of the Garonne, the gay and rich disorder of the palace of the Ombirère.

At last, on a Sunday of midsummer, the nuptials were celebrated in the church of Saint Andre.
¹⁸
Through streets where housefronts were hung with tapestries and banners and green boughs went processions with tabor and flute. The decorous chant of choristers mingled with the gross epithalamia of the people, who stamped out the rhythms with their sabots in the cobbled squares and shouted,"Plentë, plentë," as if their duchess were a common bride. In the dimness of the church, its rounded apse blazing with tapers, its vaults clouded with incense, its domes gathering the chant of choirs, the prince and the duchess, having fasted and confessed, were married in the presence of their vassals by Geoffrey, Archbishop of Bordeaux. After the sacrament, Louis put on the coronet of the Dukes of Aquitaine.

From the tables spread with the wedding feast the royal escort rose hastily, leaving the populace drowsed with satiety in the midday heat. The
mesnies
of the duke and the duchess were already assembled on the far side of the Garonne on the road for Poitiers. Eleanor's withdrawal from her southern city with a troop armed cap-a-pie was very like a flight. Avoiding the roads overlooked by the fortresses of Duke Guillaume's enemy vassals, the cavalcade pressed on until they had put the river Charente between themselves and ambush. Two leagues above Saintes the huge castle of Taillebourg, the stronghold of the loyal Geoffroi de Ranjon, loomed reassuringly. Here aloft above the valley, whence the land stretched away in the burning distance, Louis and Eleanor were first left alone to explore each other's thoughts and talk of the high destiny to which they had been so abruptly summoned.

At the beginning of August the cortege reached Poitiers, and the duchess and her bridegroom lodged in the ancestral palace of the Counts of Poitou, in the beautiful tower of Maubergeonne, which Eleanor's grandfather, Guillaume the troubadour poet, had built for the Countess of Chatellerault. In Poitiers, says Abbé Suger, the duke and duchess were received by clergy and populace with transports of joy. Here Louis put on the coronet of, the Counts of Poitou, and the pair and their escort lingered for some days to receive the homage of certain laggard vassals not eager to give allegiance to their new overlord.

While the reluctant homagers delayed the cavalcade in Poitiers, the King of the Franks, laboring in extremity, "ended his life-days in the world." Messengers posting over the bridge of Moutierneuf brought the news from Bethizy. Louis the Fat, the astute king who never slept, was dead. There had been no time to realize his wish to die in the guise of a monk. But in his last hour he had called for a carpet strewn with ashes. On this rude bed, after confession and viaticum, he had stretched out his arms to simulate a cross, and so had made his end. He had not stayed to greet his dear son, nor to turn his dim eyes upon the Duchess Eleanor, nor to confirm the rich accession to his fiefs.

It thus befell that when the Duchess of Aquitaine came to Paris in the late summer of 1137, she arrived as Queen of the Franks. Her escort led her amongst tall houses thrusting their narrow fronts upon the crooked streets. She came at last to royal gates thrown open to admit her to a precinct in which uprose the dim old palace that had lodged the Merovingian kings. A long flight of marble steps, worn hollow by all the vassalage of France, ascended to the tower of the Capets. Beside an ancient olive tree, where the Kings of France were wont to dismount from their horses, the weary duchess at last alighted and went up the stairs to take her place in history.

To know is more than to believe.

Clement of Alexandria

O queen among cities, O island of royal palaces, whereon Philosophy hath set her ancient seat, Philosophy who alone, with study her sole companion, holds the city of light and immortality, and sets her victorious foot on the withering flower of the fast aging world.

Guy de Bazoches, Eloge de Paris, translated by Helen Waddell

THE YOUNG QUEEN OF FRANCE was familiar with archaic cities built from Roman ruins and worn with the immemorial uses of long vanished generations. But her new capital crowded on its little island in the Seine had the appearance of very long survival. It had not yet shaken off its Merovingian decay nor felt the refashioning stir of the Renaissance in its ancient fabric.

The city on the Ile gathered about two quarters, that of the archbishop and that of the king
¹
The domain of the archbishop in the eastern end centered about the old basilica of Notre Dame that then still stood near the site where the modern cathedral now lifts its towers. Louis the Fat had lately expended treasure to repair its sagging roof. Around it, in the episcopal purlieus and on the margin of the parvis, lodged the prelates and the canons. In the royal quarter in the western end, the Capets still held their court in the ancient tower and precincts of the Merovingian kings. There rose the fortress pile that,"shouldered above the roofs of the whole city,"
²
tunneled with dim passages and hollow stairs giving access to somber rooms and glowering chambers that seemed quarried from the solid stone. From deep embrasures admitting shafts of sunlight or little areas of stars, the solar looked down upon the embankment of the Seine, whence ascended by day the cries of boatmen and by night the songs of students turning in from their pothouse congregations to the hostels provided in the quarter by the bounty of the king. Beyond the palace a little garden plot set with figs and cypresses, trellised vines and shrubbery, extended to the tip of the lie, where the divided currents of the Seine rejoined and moved onward in a broad stream toward Rouen and the sea.

Outside the walled citadels of the archbishop and the king the Ile was crowded with churches great and small, their facades storied with the epic of salvation wrought in shining mosaics or dim carvings; with sprawling cloisters; with the huddled
fenestrae
of the Jewry; with taverns and lodgings and the eating places of swarming students; with the dwellings of burghers thrusting their nodding upper stories over streets no wider than a corridor and crooked as a maze. Above the lively traffic of the thoroughfares, among the steep gables and tiled roofs where pigeons wheeled, there was a frequent clamor of bells overlying each other in a kind of round or descant, in which the denizens of the Ile and the
faubourgs
discerned the brazen voices, big or thin, calling the roster of their parish saints: Saint Peter and Saint John; Saint Stephen and Saint Bartholomew; Saint Denis and Saint Christopher; Saint Croix and Saint Marine; Saint Martial and Saint Eloi; and discoursing amidst them all, they heard the mistress voice of Notre Dame. The portals of the sanctuaries moved to and fro for the worshipers, letting out to the world drafts of incense and the fading murmurs of plain song:
Et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, amen
.

The corners of the streets were angles of surprise, where a bread or a fish cart ran plump into the equipage of a baron or a bishop; where a pot-boy or a poor scholar collided with some famous doctor of the schools. Everywhere passengers avoided milch goats and roving swine. The old Roman paving stones, worn and askew, made beds for mud and household bilge, for dust and refuse, and scavengers with great rakes and besoms were forever raising stench and shifting filth from hole to hole. Never were the proud affirmation of man's immortality and the moldy evidences of his transiency so closely juxtaposed.

An old Roman wall had once encircled the Ile and the segments that remained were here and there cut away to give landings; and in these places, near bridges, even under their very arches, mill wheels churned the waters of the Seine. On the river the noisy traffic came and went, fish wherries and ferryboats and the slow barges from Mantes or Rouen laden with merchandise — millet and cattle, hides, faggots, turf, rushes, wattle-osiers, salt, wax, and wine.

Two stone bridges moored the Ile to the farther banks of the Seine, where the expanding new city spread on either side amidst spacious orchards and vineyards. On the north, near the royal palace, the Grand Pont linked the island with the commercial area from whose concessions the king drew rich revenues. Here the corporations, the butchers, the bakers, tanners and clothiers, ironmongers and carpenters, bellfounders, hemp-dressers and potters— those craftsmen wise in their work without whom cities can neither be builded nor inhabited — plied their arts and sold their wares. In the little stalls on the bridge itself the licensed money-changers jangled their coins to hawk their trade and weighed the money of Paris against the coinage of London and Anjou, Venice and Cologne.

On the southern side, debouching from the parvis of Notre Dame and the episcopal domain, the Petit Pont joined the Ile with the more rustic left bank of the Seine; and here the schools, outgrowing the narrow space and doctrinal authority of Notre Dame, had found a refuge for philosophy. This smaller bridge, says one of the scholars, was given over to strollers and disputers in logic. Along the quays the doctors walked, and in little exedrae open to the sun, students feeling themselves poised on the ripe end of time and heirs of all the ages discussed the latest heresies or weighed Plato against the doctors of the church. In the shallow houses on the bridge itself lodged the apothecaries, and in the rooms overhead the doctors discoursed of, "universals," to audiences that overflowed upon the entries and the stairs.

In Paris these,"nations," of scholars were distinguished from each other by legible marks of provincial dress and accent. There were scores of hard-drinking English in fur-lined coats and leather hose; brawling Germans in toploftical fur hats; Burgundians brutal and thick-headed; Bretons impudent, frivolous, full of song; the native Franks, foppish and arrogant; men of Beam, challenging all and sundry with their dry quips; Italians richly dressed in oriental stuffs; Champagnois, men of Flanders and Normandy — the yeast and ferment of the world.
³
Master Abélard, it was said, had emptied the episcopal schools of Chartres and Reims and Laon, and drawn the flower of creation to Paris. And these flocked there, declares the chronicler,
⁴
not only because of the delightsomeness of the place and the abundance of good things to be found there, but because of the air of freedom that prevailed and because all manner of instruction was there provided, the seven liberal arts, civil and canon law, medicine and theology.

All these young men, merging the dialects of distant provinces in a muddy Latin, swarmed together in noisy independence under no common discipline, in unsupervised places where they were free to think, drink, love, and fight, according to their humor. In the lecture rooms on the Petit Pont and on the left bank in the leafy groves of academe, the masters and scholars of Paris ransacked the lore of the ancient world, defined the, "universals," and clinched their dialectic with the syllogism. To have no knowledge of Aristotle and the fathers of the church, no dogma, to have no art in framing syllogisms was to live the darkling life of a mole in Paris. The prime concerns of the city were intellectual. The breath of its life was controversy.

"When we speak," said the doctors, "in universal terms of class and category, do these terms correspond to realities existing outside the mind? When we speak of the species
man
and the species
animal
, do these terms awaken ideas of
collection
? But does the idea of
collection
correspond to a reality outside the mind, or is it a mere concept of the mind? And if these terms, or 'universals,' are not mere concepts, but do correspond to realities, what is their nature? Are they corporeal entities? And further, what is their mode of existing? Do they have their being outside the sensual domain, that is, outside the individual, or do they lodge within?"

Young men with the lust of life in them went without their suppers and consumed their last inch of candle wax to snare universals, corporeal or incorporeal. They devised syllogisms fortified with citations, chapter and verse, from Aristotle or Plato or fathers of the church.

Thomas Becket and John of Salisbury were giving their young minds to philosophy in Paris in those days. To John one of the masters wrote reminiscently long after, of the city on the Seine: "How apt art thou, O Paris, to bewitch and seduce! There was an affluence of men suave and agreeable, an abundance of all good things, gay streets, rare food, incomparable wine."
⁶
John, dwelling in one of his letters to Becket on his student days, recalls that in Paris he saw abundance of life, popular joy, a crowd of philosophers absorbed in studies. As he listened to the celestial discourse of the doctors, he was moved with admiration and bethought him of Jacob's ladder whereon angels mounted and descended. Men who were in Paris in the mid-century were stirred with a kind of ecstasy by the vision that opened to the mind.

*

Les Francs à la bataille, les Provenfaux aux vivres.

Raoul of Caen

The young king and queen, arriving in 1137 to rule over the city of light, at first made little impression beyond the precincts of the palace. Because of his youth, Louis was put back, after his marriage, to his studies and his cloistral disciplines. He returned to his masters and to the steadying routine of Notre Dame and learned to improve his natural gifts by industry. On Fridays he fasted with the monks on bread and water; he kept the vigils; he sang in choir and was never so much himself as when he stood to read the canticles. The youth was so pious, so kind, so mild, that a person, unless he knew him, would not guess from the simplicity of his dress and his demeanor that he was king, but might suppose him some monk. He loved justice above all things, and his conversation and behavior would have done credit to a priest. Louis was often seen in the church of Notre Dame, following after the bishop and looking about to make sure that he was displacing no clerk or scholar, or even any insignificant worshiper. There was about him a dovelike sweetness and humility. He was so meek that any monk might precede him to his stall.
⁸
For the young king pursuing his studies there were few interruptions; only now and then some crisis called for a sporadic exercise of royal authority.

We do not know expressly that Queen Eleanor shared in counterpart her lord's monastic disciplines. However, to fit her for her high pretensions in the court of the Franks, there would have been need to improve her use of the langue d'o'il spoken in the Ile, her knowledge of local hagiography and of the Capetian dynasty, about which she was sure to have entertained many erroneous notions acquired in random ways in the rival courts of her forebears. It seems certain that she mastered the rudiments of dialectic and examined the structure of the syllogism, for she was able later in her own behalf to cite Scripture, chapter and verse, even to popes and cardinals, and to employ the syllogism with good effect in Rome and Tusculum.

At the time of her debut, beguiling specimens of Aristotelian logic were going the rounds in Paris, perhaps designed, some of them, for the exercise of nuns. There were formulae applicable to the unresolved question as to whether the Blessed Virgin had mastered the trivium and the quadrivium; whether the
langue d'oil
was the language of paradise; and there were tricky little contrivances to prove that even logic can lie, such as that poser, popular in garrets where starveling students met, which proved that six breakfast eggs were twelve. Dialectic settled the puzzle as to whether the pig that is being taken to market is held by the driver or the rope, as to whether goat's hair may be called wool. A shield is white on one side, black on the other. What color does it boast? Exercises like these made learning lovable and accessible to the wayfaring intelligence of women. Anyone desiring enlightenment, said Peter of Blois, ought to resort to Paris, where the most inextricable knots were unsnarled. In those days the queen was surely not vainly losing her time.

On certain days the king's gardens were thrown open to the schools, and there in the sweet open air, in the shade of the cypresses, with the Seine sparkling on either side, the masters held their disputations. That the kingdom of the mind was open to women in Paris we know from Abélard, who at that very time had been giving fresh charm to study. He himself boasted that noble ladies flocked to his lectures, and Héloise tells how they twitched aside their wimples or pressed to windows but to see him passing in the street.
¹⁰
If the queen developed no such erudition in Paris as had betrayed Héloise to the Paraclete in this world and to perdition in the next, she at least dipped into the refreshing currents of her time.

But if in the Ile as a whole the new monarchs at first made themselves little felt, there were presently agitations in the limited palace precincts that troubled the clerical mentors of the dynasty. The young queen, as a matter of course, brought a household with her. The Poitevins, says the Frankish chronicler, "were better feeders than fighters." The ménage was expensive, and the ecclesiastical entourage of the Capets found much of it superfluous. However, it was not the Poitevins who presently retired in order to simplify the establishment. It was the dowager queen, Agnes of Maurienne, who, relieved of much of her marriage portion, withdrew with her retinue to one of her dower castles in Champagne. Thereupon the Poitevins stretched their legs more comfortably in the palace, and such of the monastic entourage as weathered the change were introduced willy nilly to aspects of secular life that had found no place in the sober court of Louis the Fat.