Eleanor Of Aquitaine (7 page)

THE HETEROGENEOUS ARMY OF THE FRANKS made a surprisingly rapid passage to Ratisbon, where a part at least of the forces embarked upon the Danube. It was in Ratisbon that the French high command made its first contact with the imperial Comneni, their Greek allies, with whom, as with the famous Ulysses, war was an affair of the intellect, though greatly refined since the days of the crude Trojan horse. To Ratisbon the envoys of the ineffable Manuel Comnenus, Porphyrogemtus, the lofty, sublime, august, Emperor of Byzantium, etc., came to meet the King of the Franks.

Manuel's sentiments in regard to crusades from western Europe were strangely mixed. As a Christian emperor, he was concerned over the possible loss of Jerusalem to the Saracens; but he had no great confidence in the Latins as instruments of his own welfare in the Levant. He was torn between the temptation to employ them in the destruction of his enemies, the Turks in Asia Minor, and the fear that they might, if too successful, rob him of the fruits of their enterprise. The ideal thing would be to feed the Turks and the crusaders into each others' jaws until no remnant of either remained, but this was exceedingly difficult and dangerous to arrange. Manuel could not forget the defiance of the late Bohemund of Antioch to the emperor his father, nor the unspeakable treachery and violence of Prince Raymond of Antioch to the emperor, his brother John, when these relatives of his had asserted their rights as overlords of Antioch. He was not without anxiety about the intentions of the hordes from Poitou and Aquitaine, those old compatriots of Raymond, in the army of the Franks. But Manuel did not betray his uneasiness to the French Through his envoys dispatched far up the Danube he renewed the cordial and flattering sentiments with which he had long before greeted Louis's overtures from Paris.

However, as the French approached the Bosporus, they were perplexed by the difficulty of according their actual experiences with the civility of the envoys The courtesy and punctilio of these emissaries had been utterly refined, the sentiments they conveyed most cordial. Yet, although the Greeks indeed lent their altars to the crusaders for mass, they purged them afterwards, as if they had been profaned Although the Franks had been promised markets for forage, they were obliged, in order to buy necessities, to exchange their silver oboles and their demers, weight by weight, for large bronze coins struck with effigies of the King of Kings, but having no great purchasing value. Presently there were no longer open markets for victuals and fodder. The Greeks through whose lands they passed were huddled in well-garrisoned citadels as if expecting a siege, and the Franks paid well for whatever the guards chose to let down in baskets from their armed towers. In Adnanople the French crusaders were sorely puzzled to interpret two prodigious facts that there emerged one, that Conrad, who was to have awaited them near Byzantium, had already crossed the Bosporus and was on his prosperous way toward Cappadocia; and two, that Manuel had lately concluded a twelve-year truce with his mortal enemies the Turks, which left them free for any enterprises of their own in Asia Minor which were not directly menacing to the Byzantine dynasty.

On hearing of these matters a suspicion of treachery entered the minds of the high command. At this point it was recalled in the councils of the French king that every previous crusade passing by this route had seriously considered destroying Byzantium as a stone in its way. So had the great Bohemund; so had the queen's grandfather, the crusading troubadour Count of Poitou. Louis's best military strategist, the Bishop of Langres, outlined a plan for diverting all the sweet waters from the city and taking it by siege. All regretted that Conrad's army had already proceeded too far to add its forces to this enterprise. But Louis, remembering the admonitions of Abbé Bernard not to be diverted by any counsels whatsoever from the clear-cut objective of the crusade to save Jerusalem, determined to press on.
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He remembered the injunction of Abbé Bernard, "Like a sparrow with careful watchfulness, avoid the snares of the fowler."

It was in September that the weary pilgrim from France with the cross and seal of the Latin Pope of Rome gleaming upon his tunic drew up his hosts before the double walls of Byzantium — his barons, his wise men, his bishops, his foot soldiers, the impious rabble described by Abbé Bernard, the Amazons, the camp followers, the wagons and sumpter trains bearing the heavy armor and the business equipment for warfare and the baggage of the women. The queen city of Christendom with her blazing domes shone among her waters like a crown of carbuncles. And beyond the Bosporus, where the shores of Asia, as blue as grapes, came down to greet the shores of Europe, lay, still far away, beleaguered Jerusalem, the precious shrines, the foe. On the ramparts encircling the domes and minarets, the populace of the city and the emperor's men-at-arms thronged to have sight of this second horde of barbarians from the West, swarming like locusts from the plains of Thrace.

The French, who did not yet understand the sublime elevation that separated the Greek emperors born in the purple from all other earthly potentates, were at first surprised that Manuel did not, according to the custom of the West, come out of his city processionally with shawms and viols to welcome the most Christian King of the Franks and his baronage, but sent them only emissaries who with salaams directed them to pitch their tents outside the walls at the tip of the Golden Horn. However, there came presently a delegation of satraps bringing gifts of a splendid luster to persons of consequence in Louis's suite and an invitation to the king and a few of his nearest to wait upon the emperor in his imperial palace, the Boukoleon,
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on the Bosporus.

Louis's chaplain describes the interview of the two Christian monarchs. They met, with the customary feudal precaution against treachery, in the open, and, each flanked by his bodyguard, exchanged the kiss of peace. The king and the emperor, says Odo, were nearly of an age and of almost equal stature, and from the amiability of their intercourse might have seemed brothers. After the greeting, they went inside the palace to an antechamber, sat upon two seats which had been prepared, and conversed through an interpreter in the idiom of diplomacy. The emperor inquired, for instance, about the king's health and his desires and called upon heaven to prosper his purposes. Louis, in his penitential garb with his obvious simplicity and his candid mien, seemed not so very frightening after all. Manuel did not invite the French to lodge fraternally in the Boukoleon with the imperial household, but offered the king and his suite his second palace, the Blaquernae, overlooking the Golden Horn, and assigned a cohort of satraps to escort him thither.

There, while the common soldiers of the cross rested from their fatigues in the meadows outside the walls and exhausted the resources for which Abbé Suger groaned at home, Louis and his high command and the royal ladies were entertained with the wonders of Byzantium. As soon as he was lodged, Louis sent off a letter to Abbé Suger: "Following with divine help the laborious journey of our pilgrimage, we have passed through intolerable hardships and infinite dangers, and we have come safe and joyful to Constantinople." He then urged Suger to use every available means to send him, as quickly as possible, as much money as he could raise.

If the sojourn among the shrines of Byzantium was a nine days' wonder to the king, it was an awakening experience for the queen, whose education had progressed just far enough to make her travels profitable. It opened her eyes to vast, lofty, undreamed-of possibilities for majesty, and all the
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from which she had suffered at home was purged from her soul. The magnificent entertainment of the crusaders in Manuel's capital was of a nature to fire the imagination of the young Queen of France. The reality was far above the rumor, and every way extravagant. She learned that Paris was not, as she had been taught by her clerks, the highest of all high places in Christendom. Byzantium, set in its pomp of water and of light, was not only incredibly vaster; it was infinitely more refined. The famous city had inherited much of the outward grandeur of ancient Rome, but it was as well a treasury of artistic marvels that had drifted down to the Bosporus from Persia and Cathay, from Baghdad and Mosul.

The vast imperial palaces, surrounded by their parks sloping to the waters of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, were as brilliant and as well tended as shrines, and more intricate than hives. These establishments housed not only the domestic but the official activities of the Comneni, and they were administered by hierarchies of functionaries that moved with the supernal majesty and order of the heavenly constellations.

In the palace of the Blaquernae which Manuel vacated for the noblest of the Franks, there were two or three hundred chambers and at least a score of chapels gleaming with gold and mosaic, the whole set in the midst of gardens and groves and shaded alleys giving on the Horn. The rooms were immense, the floors brilliantly paved, the columns gilded, the walls hung with tapestries depicting the triumphs of the Comneni over their barbarian foes. Chandeliers twinkled with the fire of precious stones. Pavilions in the shade offered invitation to enjoy marine vistas framed by cypresses; and from the balconies of upper windows the pilgrims could look back over the plains of Thrace, whence they had lately come. Within the confines of the palace grounds were parks stocked with game for the imperial hunt. The crusaders, as one of their chroniclers observes, knew not whether to admire more the rich materials used in the arts of the East, or the remarkable skill with which these were employed.

From the Boukoleon a long arcaded street opened westward, broken at intervals by wide forums adorned with monuments and fountains and flanked by churches crowned with domes and the graceful inflorescence of minarets. These open squares, embellished with obelisks and triumphal arches, diffused an air of grandeur, as if some magic had arrested the fleeting beauty of the world and endued it with permanence; and the magic seemed to lie not merely in the unique virtue of the separate objects of admiration, but in the arrangement, in which each responded to the other. Nothing came to view haphazardly. In the bazaars that lined the shady passages of the arcades, goldwork and gems from the Orient, the brocades of Tripoli and Baghdad, the glass of Hebron and Antioch, carved ivories, perfumes, embroideries, the linens of Alexandria, illuminated books, were offered in abundance to the purse of royalty.

An imposing hippodrome adjacent to the palace of the Boukoleon was consecrated to races and tournaments and public games, with which the citizens were constantly amused. The amphitheater with its thirty or forty ranks of seats was enclosed by a wall truncated at a height of fifteen feet to make a platform for the display of heroic bronze figures of men and women, horses, oxen, camels, lions, bears, of such marvelous execution that there were no longer craftsmen in Christendom or pagandom who could produce such noble works; and some of these by a magical ingenuity of contrivance could be made to roar, or sing, or move, to the unmeasured delight of the populace. The imperial party entered the hippodrome by private passages and occupied a loge, "very dainty and very noble," whence, without suffering contact with their baser human fellows, they could at the same time view the contests and contribute to the spectacle.

In Byzantium the Franks visited church after church rich with marble and mosaic, enshrining the most precious relics; and crowning them all Sancta Sophia, with its heaped-up domes, fantasies caught out of the September sunshine of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn and resting, "lightly as cloud upon pillars of porphyry." In the dazzling glimmer of that vast sanctuary the crusaders attended masses intoned with impeccable felicity; and they heard the three-rhymed chant of the eunuchs and the celestial polyphony of the Greek church sung by choirs disciplined to perfection. Upon the sustained vibrant bass drone, the tenor pattern rose and fell in finely graduated notes that seemed to get their perfect contour by traversing the exquisite curves of the domes; and when the sound ceased, the silence was solid and palpable. At the recent dedication of Saint Dems, Louis himself had wielded a rod to keep the rabble from thronging the passages of the y church.
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Here such a prostitution of the purple would have been unthinkable. There were orders upon orders of functionaries to preserve the imperturbable dignity of the Comneni and their guests.

Where half a century before the Emperor Alexius had entertained Godfrey of Bouillon in the triclinium of the Grand Palace, Manuel now entertained Louis and his suite, who doubtless saw behind the imperial throne that already fabled golden tree upon which, when the emperor listed, little golden birds sang with harmonious chirrupings. Here the Franks were bedazzled with such exhibitions of imperial splendor that some of the westerners found them overdone in view of the pious object of their expedition. Reclining upon couches in the Roman fashion, the pilgrims from Gaul were served with farfetched delicacies subtly compounded and wines cooled with snows from the Caucasus; entertained with dancing women and acrobats; refreshed by fountains jetting perfume, and by music blending many instruments in strange harmonies.

In the Boukoleon the French noted that the emperor and empress dwelt apart in seclusion, withdrawn from profane eyes in chambers with rich carpets and hangings of gorgeous stuffs and in gardens and pavilions provided with unimaginable luxury of tile and fountain, and there they were served by slaves whose perfect discipline made the French menials seem altogether loutish. For Louis's feast of his patron saint, Dionysms the Areopagite, the emperor, graciously recalling the Greek origin of this saint, sent a chorus of Greek priests, and the Franks were entranced not merely by their vestments and painted tapers, but by their dramatic genuflections and the ensemble of bass and treble voices.