April Queen (12 page)

Among the emissaries sent to beg for military support from Europe after the fall of Edessa was Prince Raymond’s friend and vassal, the bishop of Djebail. To the first rumours of disaster in the East, he added political and military argument. The recent death of King Fulk of Jerusalem had left the Latin Kingdom in the hands of his widow Queen Melisende as regent for their thirteen-year-old son, Baldwin II. With Joscelin’s city firmly in the hands of the infidel and the ruling houses of the kingdom enfeebled by deaths and disputes over succession, the Holy Land might soon be lost again to the infidel.

If Louis listened in pious horror, Eleanor’s concern was personal. Prince Raymond was her father’s younger brother, only ten years older than herself. Casting about for his place in the sun, he had rejected the clerical career of a landless younger son of the nobility because he
preferred a sword in his hand, food in his belly and the rousing music of a
chanson de geste
in his ears to the bishop’s crosier, fasting and the sound of the litany.

The first time fortune smiled on him was after the calamity of the sinking of the White Ship at Barfleur in 1120, when Henry I of England lost his bastard sons and his heir. Taking Raymond into his household, he dubbed him knight – at the time
adouber
meant giving arms, a destrier and armour to the candidate, and ceremonially buckling on his sword belt.

As a landless knight errant Raymond still had to marry a rich heiress or show prowess in the field that might be rewarded by a fief of his own. His second break came in 1135 with the news that Bohemund, Prince of Antioch, had died leaving no son to succeed him. His vassals, unwilling to lose their privileges by being absorbed directly into the fief of Jerusalem, were seeking urgently to replace Bohemund by an unattached knight of noble lineage who was not too closely related to any royal family.

Politely described as
sage et apercevanz
, Raymond was both shrewd and ruthless. He was also courageous and skilled at arms, all of which made him an ideal choice. Knowing that he was not the only contender, and to make sure of arriving first in the field, he divided his entourage into small groups that travelled separately through France and along the Mediterranean littoral mingling with the stream of pilgrims, traders and fortune-hunters flowing from Europe to the East and back.

Arriving in Antioch disguised as a humble pilgrim or peddler, and with his rivals far behind, he quickly summed up the situation. The original offer had been for him to marry Bohemund’s pragmatic widow, who had been putting out feelers to the Turks in Edessa for an accommodation that would permit her to keep the reins of power in her hands. While initially accepting the widow’s lavish hospitality and letting her suppose he intended marriage, Raymond decided to espouse Bohemund’s more pliant nine-year-old daughter Constance, who was also a cousin of the king of Jerusalem.

What deal he cut with the patriarch of Antioch is unknown, but prelates in the Latin Kingdom closed their eyes to the moral shortcomings of those strong enough to protect the holy places. The marriage between Raymond and Constance was hastily celebrated in secret, after which the furious discarded widow was banished from the principality, leaving Eleanor’s uncle to rule Antioch for ten years of intermittent strife, during which he spared little thought for the land of his birth.

With the fall of Edessa, however, it was to Aquitaine he turned – or more precisely to its reservoir of footloose younger sons of the nobility, of whom he had been one. Later to be immortalised in fiction as the
cadets de Gascogne
in Edmond Rostand’s
Cyrano de Bergerac
and Alexandre Dumas’ character d’Artagnan, these hotheads with nothing to lose were a permanent source of unrest and brigandage at home, but ideal material for the all-or-nothing adventure of coming to the rescue of the Latin Kingdom established by their own grandfathers. And who better to organise their raising and equipping than Raymond’s niece, the queen of the Franks,
⁶
who, as countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine was also the overlord to whom many of their families owed allegiance?

William of Tyre relates that the prince of Antioch sent to the Capetian royal couple costly presents from all over the Levant. Eleanor certainly needed no such inducement; she would have grasped at any excuse to escape the stifling routine of court life in Paris. Whether they influenced Louis is doubtful, for material greed was not one of his failings, but at last he saw a penance big enough to atone for his sins. What better way to redeem his immortal soul than by answering the call to crusade launched by the new Pope Eugenius III, and at the same time executing his dead elder brother’s promise to carry the oriflamme – the golden banner of St Denis, patron saint of the Franks – to Jerusalem and there to deal such a blow to the Saracen hordes as to secure the holy city for ever from the infidel?
⁷

While Christian France was deploring the tragedy and whipping up crusading fever, Zengi had been forced to return to Edessa when a plot was discovered for Armenian supporters of Count Joscelin to massacre the Turkish garrison. After they had been killed, he moved into the city 300 Jewish families, on whose loyalty he could rely.
⁸

To his credit, Abbot Suger was both sceptical of the crusade’s chance of military success
⁹
and aware that the credulous and mystical
nature which would have been so appropriate for Louis’ intended career in the priesthood made his monarch, so ill equipped for statecraft, even worse fitted for warfare. Against the perspic-acious advice of Suger and his other counsellors that the problems of government required his presence in France, but encouraged by Eleanor for her own personal reasons, Louis wrote to the pope of his burning desire to lead an army to Jerusalem. To his great joy, the reply promised in return remission of the sin of Vitry.

Exiled to the papal estate of Viterbo in Tuscany by the presence of an anti-pope in Rome and fighting heresy and schism on both sides of the Alps, Eugenius III was a former pupil of Bernard of Clairvaux. He saw in the kindling of a pan-European ardour for another crusade the possibility of uniting his divided Church with himself as undisputed patriarch. Naturally he enlisted the support of Abbé Bernard, to whom Louis had confided his ambition. Lacking Suger’s political sense, Bernard – until then the advocate of universal peace – endorsed the papal blessing on this martial enterprise and the die was cast.

The long delay before decision was translated into action was partly due to the need to raise finance by taxes and tithes, but there were also diplomatic démarches to be accomplished. So appalling had been the vandalism and looting on the people’s crusade led by Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless just before the First Crusade that the king of Hungary had afterwards demanded hostages from Godefroi de Bouillon – including his own brother, wife and children – before allowing the French army to transit his country in 1097. Louis therefore wrote to his fellow monarchs in Germany and Hungary requesting safe conducts for the French army to cross their territory on its holy mission.

Further east, Constantinople was the vital jumping-off point where the gap between Europe and Asia narrows to 800 yards in the strait of the Bosporus.
¹⁰
From there came a reply from the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus, promising his Christian brother the king of the Franks all necessary support and encouragement.

The Capetian Christmas court was held that year in Bourges, where Louis was innocently counting on the precedent of the First Crusade, for which the main support had come from a France on the crest of an economic revival after three generations’ population growth. Its forest lands were being cleared for cultivation, frontiers pushed forward, markets organised and trading routes from its Mediterranean ports developing as Muslim dominance of the Mediterranean was challenged by armed Italian merchantmen. At the time, England was still adjusting itself to the Norman occupation, Christian Spain
was preoccupied with pushing the Moors back into North Africa and Germany had been divided by internal strife, which had enabled Pope Urban II to assume a more active role than his predecessors.

Exactly why European prosperity should have been channelled into a series of holy wars against distant Muslims is something about which historians differ. Part of the answer lay in the eternal greed for land and loot, which the insecure monarchs of continental Europe preferred to deflect towards the lands of the infidel. Partly, the answer lay in the strength of religious feeling among illiterate and ignorant men. To peasants who could never otherwise leave the fields in which they had laboured since birth, the idea of travel to the Holy Land was like a ray of sunlight in the fog-bound claustrophobia of serfdom. For most knights and barons who could rarely afford to be away from their fiefs for long, the two- or three-year expedition, during which their property and families were protected by the Peace of God, was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. To warriors whose consciences were burdened with guilt for the lives they had taken, remission of sins was another reward. Nor did debts need to be repaid until after the crusade, no interest on borrowed money accruing throughout its duration.

When Urban II preached both the Peace and Truce of God and simultaneously war in the shape of what was to be the First Crusade, his words at the Council of Clermont in 1095 did not seem paradoxical: the holy places were at risk from the Turks; it was therefore the duty of all Christian knights to protect them. His argument was more rhetoric than logic, ignoring the fact that many of the sites were sacred also to Muslims and Jews, and that successive Islamic dynasties controlling the Holy Land had taxed but tolerated Christian and Jewish pilgrimage through the centuries.

However, when Louis argued at the Christmas court of 1145 in Bourges for what would become known as the Second Crusade, the ignorant optimism of the first crusaders had been tempered by hard experience. His barons, assembled to renew their oaths of fealty, were not enthusiastic about sharing his penance by accompanying him to the Holy Land at their own expense.

There were many among them whose grandfathers had set out like Eleanor’s, dreaming of gold and glory. If the lucky few had reached the Holy Land and grabbed a personal fief on what had been Muslim soil, many had earned only enough ground to cover their corpses and 70,000 lay still unburied in Cappadocian wadis a long way short of Jerusalem’s walls. Of the survivors, most returned to France ruined by an enterprise
they had expected to enrich them. Small wonder, then, that Louis’ exhortations fell largely on deaf ears.

Eleanor, however, did not present the idea of a new crusade as a penance. In the rousing idiom of their own language, she sold it to her vassals as high adventure, for which it was well worth liquid-ating assets equal to four or five times their annual income.
¹¹
Among the first to rally to her was the loyal Geoffroi de Rancon, together with two notoriously violent brothers, Hugues VII de Lusignan and Guy de Thouars. Though Louis was cheered by their more enthusiastic response, he was surprised when Eleanor announced the price tag attached to the revenues and reserves of manpower in her domains vital for financing and manning the expedition.

Nothing could shake her firm intention of coming along on the crusade with him and bringing with her a company of adventurous ladies, self-styled Amazons whose participation she justified by saying that their determination to reach Jerusalem would shame the laggards, should the men’s enthusiasm flag on the long and arduous journey. As precedents, she cited the tradition of married couples going on pilgrimage together – many thousands of couples traversed Aquitaine every year en route to Compostela. Some women had also accompanied the First Crusade, among them the extraordinary Margravine Ida of Austria who was captured by the Turks and reputedly ended her days in a harem.

In an inspired flight of poetic fantasy, Eleanor likened herself to Penthesilea, the legendary queen who led her fellow Amazons into battle at the siege of Troy. Since Louis intended taking a vow of chastity for the duration of the crusade, it seemed to the chronicler William of Newburgh, writing the
History of English Affairs
¹²
in the peace of his Augustinian priory fifty years later, that the king’s personal reason for giving in to Eleanor’s plan of accompanying him was a gnawing fear of what she might get up to sexually and politically at home during his absence.

Then, as now, business found its niches; by the middle of the twelfth century the constant flow of travellers on the routes to the Holy Land had caused facilities to spring up that had not existed for the First Crusade. These included money-changers at the frontiers, wayside hostels and markets where horses and draught animals could be replaced and provisions purchased for man and beast. There were route maps of the type used by the Romans, useless for giving an idea of the geography of a whole country but adequate for finding one’s way from point to point along a set route.

The Brothers of the Militia of the Temple, originally charged by the patriarch of Jerusalem with protecting all Christian pilgrims, had been placed by Pope Innocent II in direct obedience to the papacy. Thus freed from allegiance to local magnates and princes of the Church, the Templars were setting up a chain of castles, estates and treasure houses along the principal pilgrimage routes in fulfilment of their brief. This enabled them to transport valuables safely and issue letters of credit encashable by travellers both en route and in the Holy Land itself. It was the shrewd business acumen of the masters of the Order – whose severe Rule was paradoxically drawn up by unworldly Abbé Bernard after the Council of Troyes in 1128
¹³
– that would bring about the Templars’ ruin. But that lay long in the future.