April Queen (11 page)

The donations were organised in the manner of an
auxilum
tax, for the basilica was the daughter of the Church and every grandee of France had contributed something precious. Thibault of Champagne had given a present of cabochon rubies and zircons for the altar. Euphoric with the spirit of the proceedings, Louis found himself face to face with the count he had done much to injure in the seven years since coming to the throne. Abbé Bernard had come from Clairvaux for the occasion. Louis' evident contrition confirmed the future saint's belief that the king was not to blame for the evil advice which had led to Vitry. Instead of haranguing him on the sinfulness of his ways, Bernard spoke of redemption and forgiveness, warning Eleanor to use her great influence over Louis to save his soul from eternal damnation.

She showed none of the king's anguish and soul-seeking, but instead tried to manoeuvre Bernard into getting the pope to reverse his decision and bless the marriage of Aelith and Vermandois. Despite her use of dialectic to prove the rightness of her cause and the offer of what amounted to a bribe for his monastery, Bernard refused. How could this daughter of Eve be so insensible to her husband's agony of soul, for which she was responsible? Rebuking her for meddling in the affairs of state, he turned his back on her and strode away.

It was the first time he had met her since the Council of Sens, but not even an anchorite could have failed to hear about her scan-dalous life of music and poetry, cosmetics and jewellery, in which modesty and piety were absent. Even in his cell, reputedly the least comfortable of any in the abbey of Clairvaux – more of a broom cupboard under the stairs than a proper room – her reputation had reached him.

Like father, like daughter, he must have thought. For Bernard knew Eleanor's family well, being distantly related to them. After refusing to rubber-stamp the election of bishops, William X had, like his father, been excommunicated and refused to give in to pressure from his subjects in those sees deprived by interdict of the sacrament on his account. To resolve the deadlock, the bishops of Poitou appealed to Bernard, who relentlessly pursued the duke, seeking a confrontation on their behalf.

Determined to sort out the meddlesome cleric, William rode to Parthenay where Bernard was preaching. Since not even he dared defy excommunication by entering the church, he dismounted and waited in the narthex.
¹⁷
Hearing his arrival, Bernard interrupted the service, grabbed the pyx – the ornamented box in which consecrated bread was kept – and ran down the aisle, to emerge brandishing it in William's face like an exorcist defying the foul fiend.

The disparity in their physical appearance verged on the ridiculous: Bernard tall and gaunt from illness and fasting; William a broad-shouldered warrior with all the confidence of one born to rule. But it was he who quailed and Bernard who prevailed, adjuring the duke to restore his dispossessed bishops, confess his sins and do penance. Recoiling from this verbal assault, William stumbled and fell, speechless and foaming at the mouth, whether from rage or because he was stunned. Eyewitness accounts of the brief fracas became part of the legend of Bernard of Clairvaux, for shortly thereafter the Host was restored in Aquitaine and bells summoned the faithful to Mass once more after William's acceptance of his elected bishops.

Suger's success was less miraculous, but by bringing together Louis and Thibault at the consecration ceremony, he had laid the foundation for a treaty. Louis agreed to recant his impetuous oath preventing Pierre de la Châtre from taking up his duties as bishop of Bourges and to restore to the count his war-ravaged territory in return for some concessions on the other side. However, despite Eleanor's intervention, there was no mention of lifting the interdict on the house of Vermandois. Nor could anyone think of a suitable penance to atone for the king's sin at Vitry.

Eleanor's public rebuttal by Bernard at St Denis did not stop her consulting him over a more intimate problem. This time, she approached him not as a queen but as a humble supplicant, knowing that he turned away no one in need. Widows, orphans, the dispossessed and those seeking guidance on matters spiritual – they wrote to Bernard in their hundreds. To judge by the extant copies of his correspondence, he was never too busy to use his influence in their favour in prayer or by threatening with hellfire or seducing with sweet talk their temporal oppressors.

Louis' queen was twenty-two and had yet to produce a living child. Given the frequent pregnancies of her second marriage, her fertility is in no doubt. Louis also fathered children without problems after their separation. The seven childless years since the wedding in Bordeaux Cathedral were due to the rarity of their coupling. Possibly he was unmanned from the beginning by her physical beauty and sexual appetite. Certainly, weighed down by his burden of guilt, he spent more nights after Vitry on his knees in the royal chapel than in her bed. Eleanor's frequent complaint, ‘I thought I had wed a king and found I had married a monk',
¹⁸
says everything about the frustration of her marriage.

Bernard assured her that he would support her prayers to the Virgin Mary for a child. Since many monks worked as doctors until this was
forbidden by canon law, it is possible that the assistance he gave went further than prayer. Or perhaps a letter of Bernard's urging the king to do his conjugal duty has gone astray? At any rate, shortly afterwards Eleanor was pregnant.

Midwifery as then practised was non-interventionist; although the French
sage-femme
implies some learning, the corresponding Anglo-Saxon term ‘midwife' means merely an attendant who is ‘with the woman'. The probably Salernitan
¹⁹
midwife attending Eleanor was no different from any other specialist servant with herbal lotions, fumigation and pepper, used to speed up a birth by making the mother sneeze repeatedly. The only intervention permitted was a Caesarean section such as Eleanor's daughter Matilda would undergo in Rouen, but this was sanctioned by the Church uniquely when the mother was already dead and it was the only way to save the soul of the infant by baptism, even if it died immediately afterwards.

The birth went well. Eleanor's first live child was born in the palace on the Ile de la Cité without complications but in front of witnesses, so that there could be no substitution. This was not the son Louis needed, but a daughter named Marie in honour of the Virgin hearing the queen's and Bernard's prayers. The fashion of the times required noble ladies to have small, high bosoms and offered little in the way of underpinnings to counterfeit this. Partly for that reason and also because breast-feeding was thought to prevent production of ‘female sperm' necessary for conception and the state still urgently needed a prince, the infant princess was put out to a carefully selected wet-nurse and therefore took up little of her mother's time.

B
oredom – or
accidia
, the condition of spiritual aridity – was a mortal sin. But Eleanor, raised in the intellectual freedom of Aquitaine, could not be satisfied for ever by debates about Universals and the unfathomable nature of the Holy Trinity. Her reaction was mingled relief and excitement when messengers from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem brought to Paris early in 1145 an appeal that was to trigger the Second Crusade.
¹

The Latin Kingdom – referred to as Outremer, or ‘Overseas’ – corresponded roughly to modern Israel plus parts of southern and coastal Lebanon and a section of Jordan. It included four baronies – the lordship of Krak or Montréal in the south, the county of Jaffa and Ascalon on the coast, and the principalities of Galilee and Sidon in the north – with Jerusalem and Judea plus the cities of Tyre and Acre comprising the royal domain. To the north of the kingdom lay the crusader buffer states of Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa, whose strategic function was to keep at bay the warring Seljuk Turks, followers of Mahomet although ethnically unrelated to the Arab races.

It was already rumoured in Europe that their wily
atabeg
Zengi had made an unprovoked sneak attack during the festivities of Christmas on the Christian city of Edessa, known as Rohais in the West, and
desecrated its altars, murdering 16,000 of its inhabitants and driving the rest off into slavery.

The truth was that Count Joscelin of Edessa, who preferred living in sybaritic luxury at his estate of Tel Bashir on the upper reaches of the Euphrates to governing his city-state, had been buying off the Turks with presents of European horses, arms and specialists in the making of horse armour. Zengi, as a good strategist, had simply awaited the right moment to besiege Edessa, inhabited by peaceful Armenian and Syrian traders, at a time when it was defended only by a small corps of discontented mercenaries to whom Joscelin owed a year’s back-pay. The Syrian Bishop Abu el-Farraj, who was in the city, declared that Joscelin had left few men to man the walls apart from ‘shoemakers, weavers, silk merchants, tailors and priests’.
²
He also maintained that Zengi gave the citizens several chances of surrendering and saving their lives.

The nearest crusader city from which help could have been dispatched was Antioch, just north of the modern Syrian/Turkish border. But Antioch was ruled by Eleanor’s uncle Raymond, who detested Joscelin to the point of refusing help in the hour of need. Given the rules of the game, Zengi would have been a poor player not to strike when he did.

As reported by Archbishop William of Tyre in his generally trustworthy
History of Deeds Done Overseas
,
³
the Turkish attack had been a textbook military operation. While Joscelin kept out of the way at Tel Bashir, waiting for help from Jerusalem or Antioch, an efficient blockade of Edessa, stocked neither with food nor weapons thanks to his parsimony and indolence, was followed by a brief siege. Barrages of arrows from the ground and the platforms of siege-towers higher than the walls kept them virtually unmanned as catapults and rams battered away at their bases and sappers tunnelled beneath them. When the props were fired and a section of wall collapsed, the Turks rushed through the breach into the city.

The terrified inhabitants made for the safety of the citadel, in whose entrance there was such a crush of people that, long before the Turks reached them, men and women were climbing over the bodies of those crushed to death in the effort to get in.
⁴
Casualties included Archbishop Hugh of Edessa, clutching a chest full of the taxes he had levied to pay the mercenaries, but kept for himself.

Zengi personally intervened to halt the massacre of civilians, sending his second-in-command to negotiate with Abu el-Farraj, in return for whose oath of loyalty sworn on the New Testament safe conducts were given to the Syrians and Armenians. From the Franks, however,
everything was taken: gold, silver, holy objects and jewellery. Their priests and notables were led off in chains to the slave market of Aleppo, while skilled artisans were put to work at their trades. About 100 Frankish knights and men-at-arms were executed.
⁵

During the entire disaster, in which 6,000 people died, Prince Raymond did nothing, despite the fact that the fall of Edessa put his principality next in line for Turkish attack. By the time distant and disorganised Jerusalem had concerted help, it was too late.

Founded after the First Crusade, the Latin Kingdom was carpet-bagger territory, up for grabs from start to finish by French lords audacious enough to carve out a fief for themselves and strong and ruthless enough to hold it. Many died prematurely from disease or in combat with each other or the common enemy, leaving sons too young to govern or daughters who were forcibly taken in marriage to give a cloak of legitimacy to their successors. Between the conflicts with Muslim neighbours, the princes and barons of Outremer squabbled and skirmished, conspiring with Greeks against Turks and with Turks against their fellow Christians and welcoming traders of any race or religion.