April Queen (17 page)

Even if there had been sufficient shipping, the Byzantine captains demanded a fare of four silver marks per passenger for the 400-mile sea passage during the period of winter storms and with the constant risk of piracy. While the bishops and barons and most knights had such funds remaining, there was no money – nor were there enough ships – to transport the common soldiery. Yet staying put was also prohibitively expensive, for at the end of winter there was little surplus food or fodder. In obedience to the age-old law of supply and demand, the inhabitants of Satalia inflated the price of all foodstuffs to their unbidden guests sky-high.

Indecisive and unwarlike, Louis was not without courage. Instead of saving himself, he determined to continue on foot with his
common soldiers, sharing their hardships all the way to still distant Jerusalem. His advisers would have none of this Christian humility from a monarch without heir whose brother, returned prematurely to France, had just made a bid to usurp him in his absence. So they forced him to embark in one of the more seaworthy ships. The small convoy set sail for the haven of Antioch, bearing the king and Eleanor with those ladies who had survived the nightmare in the mountains. Left ashore were the count of Flanders and Archimbaud de Bourbon, whose job it was to rally the demoralised infantry and the wounded in a desperate endeavour to break through by the land route.

When this inevitably failed, they returned to Satalia and, in the belief that they would accomplish nothing in that godforsaken place, abandoned their troops and took ship for Antioch themselves. Approximately 7,000 rank-and-file – less than 10 per cent of those who had set out from Metz eight months before – remained trapped in the narrow space between the inner and outer walls of Satalia. Desperate and starving, they were understandably forbidden entrance to the city, yet stayed there for fear of the Turks in the hills and surrounding countryside. In the stench and hunger of their unsheltered encampment where they lived in their own filth, dysentery was rife.

Their nightmare was resolved by an outbreak of plague that drove the able-bodied to leave Satalia and negotiate an armistice with the Turks, who offered the choice between a painful death and embracing Islam to benefit from the hospitality that the Prophet enjoined for believers in need. Who could blame those starving peasants from Aquitaine, Brittany and Champagne for abandoning the faith that had brought them nothing but suffering, hardship and misery?

S
hipwreck was such a common occurrence as to prompt many questions for Greek and Roman students of ethics. Eleanor would have been familiar with them from her time in the schools: ‘In a tempest, the captain says the ship must be lightened to give a chance of survival. Which do you throw overboard, an old slave who has served you well but no longer has any monetary value or your expensive new horse?’ It was a dilemma that would have made any twelfth-century knight think twice before doing the right thing.

With a fair wind in summer, it might have been a pleasant week’s voyage to Antioch’s crusader port of St Simeon – now Simangad – but Eleanor and her ladies embarked on that small convoy of frail Byzantine merchantmen knew the risks they ran by putting to sea before the end of winter. Before the advent of the magnetic compass,
¹
it was necessary to hug the coastline and navigate by sight and soundings from one landmark to the next, which increased the risk of being driven onto a lee shore where no headland was available for shelter from a storm.

The ‘round ships’ in which they were embarked were uncomfortable in any conditions above a light breeze. With dual lateen sails, short-keeled and wide-beamed to give the maximum cargo space for their length, they rolled abominably when tacking against the wind. In storm conditions cooking fires had to be doused, leaving only stale bread and cold food until the next calm. With adverse winds repeatedly blowing Louis’ small convoy off course and separating the vessels, and the individual captains being obliged to head seaward to ride out the tempests, the voyage lasted for three uncomfortable and frightening weeks, during which Prince Raymond waited for news in Antioch.

Since the demise of the Roman imperial postal system – by which a letter from Britain carried by relays of riders changing horses at twenty-kilometre intervals could reach Rome in less than a week – news travelled unreliably. Yet, despite the hardships and dangers of travel, there were always merchants avid to make their fortune providing ‘their ship came home’ and pilgrims both civil and military who undertook the long and arduous journey from Europe to the Holy Land. In return for hospitality en route, they carried letters and verbal messages and told travellers’ tales to entertain their hosts.

Through such intrepid travellers Raymond of Antioch had been able to track Eleanor’s progress. Although in the intervening three years since taking Edessa the Turks had made no move except to refortify the city, he knew that they were only biding their time. His spirits must have lifted when Louis was making good progress across Europe, only to plunge with the news of Conrad’s disastrous defeat and plummet still further on hearing of the Christmas flood and the massacre at Mount Cadmos. The loss of all the rank-and-file soldiery would not have concerned him, for what he wanted was a corps of trained and well-mounted knights to help him retake Edessa, using local labour to do all the heavy siege-work, digging saps and constructing siege-towers and catapults under the instructions of the engineers.

After ten years in the shifting sands of the Levant, Eleanor’s uncle cannot have been surprised to hear that Conrad III had spent the winter in Constantinople. The story of the treacherous Greek guides who had delivered him into a Turkish trap would be used for home consumption to explain the German defeat. However, he and his brother-in-law Comnenus were on such good terms now there was no German army on Byzantine territory that he was nursed back to health by the staff of the Pantokrator monastery, which was both the mausoleum of the imperial family and a hospital staffed by trained doctors on a scale undreamed of in the West.
²

When at last the first sails of the separated ships were sighted on the horizon, Raymond rode the ten miles from his palace in Antioch down to the port of St Simeon. Eleanor was still in disgrace, but her greatest strength lay in being able to put aside past failure as firmly as her spirit overcame present adversity. Stepping ashore at St Simeon on 19 March 1148, her morale must have soared at the warmth of Raymond’s welcome. Not since crossing the Rhine had the French been truly welcome anywhere, yet here it was not Louis and his Frankish nobles who counted, but Eleanor the queen.

She had every justification for thinking her nightmare over as musicians and choirs led the way to the church by the harbour where thanks were given for their safe arrival, after which the royal pilgrims rode up the Orontes Valley to spend the night on dry land safe behind the walls of Raymond’s city, where their host allotted accommodation in palaces and villas according to rank.

The conscientious Odo wrote that night to Suger, ascribing Louis’ safe arrival in the Holy Land to divine providence:

Crusaders motivated like Louis by genuine belief were careful to keep to the letter of religious observance in order to die in a state of grace that would guarantee an immediate place in heaven.

On the morning after their arrival, clad in clean clothes and with their hunger sated for the first time in months, the survivors looked southward to the valley between Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon used by the camel trains from Alexandria. To the north, the same trail led onwards to fabled Trebizond across the fertile Amik plain, whose fields were green between the olive and lemon groves, where the trees were heavy with fruit ripening for local consumption and trade. Westward shimmered the sea they had crossed. Inland, the flanks of Mount Silpius were ablaze with wild flowers brought to life by the winter rains.
⁴

Raymond’s decaying city and restored palace were not Constantinople, but this was comfort and plenty after the dangers and semi-starvation of the overland journey and the weeks of mainly uncooked food at sea. Founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals in 300
BC
, Antioch was the richest port serving the Latin Kingdom by virtue
of being the most logical Mediterranean terminus for caravan routes from Persia and further east. Because it also commanded the north-to-south land route across what is now north-west Syria, and customs dues were payable on every camel-load of costly spices, dyes, silk and porcelain passing through or terminating there for shipment to Europe, the geographical position alone made Raymond extremely wealthy. Lebanese cedar was shipped to Egypt in return for fine cotton, subsequently shipped with spices and silk on Italian vessels back to Europe. It was to facilitate this trade that the
lingua franca
– a bastard pidgin of Frankish, Italian and Arabic – had become the common tongue of the Levant.

Graced with villas and shady colonnaded gardens, temples, theatres, aqueducts and public baths on the terraces above the Orontes, and surrounded by a high wall that climbed the slopes of Mont Silpius, Antioch had been the capital of the province of Syria and third largest city of the empire, after Rome and Alexandria. More importantly to Louis, St Paul had made it his base for several years between
AD
47 and 55, and it was there that the term ‘Christian’ had first been used to describe the followers of Christ. Because its original church had been founded by the apostles Peter and Paul, Antioch’s bishop ranked just below the patriarchs of Jerusalem, Rome and Alexandria in the international hierarchy of the Church.

The city Eleanor saw was rich in mosaics and frescoes and vestiges of classical Greek architecture still standing or reused in the crusader buildings. To stand on the ramparts above the Orontes was to breathe the same air as those heroes Godefroi de Bouillon, Tancred and Bohemund, the first crusader overlord of Antioch. Borne on the wind were echoes of
chansons de geste
celebrating their fearless leaping from the scaling ladders onto the battlements to wrest the city from the infidel.

Who can blame Louis’ neglected queen if her spirit was moved on finding herself not just in safety and comfort, but regal luxury, after the nightmare of climbing endlessly up and down bleak mountains, enduring rain, hail and snow? She would not have been human if, after all those weeks and months of disgrace and rejection, she had failed to react to her new standing as niece of an oriental despot who literally owned everything the eye could see. Tall, handsome, courtly and of proven courage in the hunt and at war, Raymond embodied all she found wanting in Louis. In listing all the moral shortcomings of Antioch’s prince – his deviousness, inconsistency and lack of principles – William of Tyre adds that he was no glutton or drunkard or womaniser.
⁵
But he was a charmer, and only ten years older than his niece.

Eleanor’s pleasure in her reception did not pass unobserved by her enemies. She was not alone in blossoming under the blandishments of her host: many of her vassals were lodged in villas and palaces belonging to their own kin, who were Raymond’s vassals. Whether or not the Frankish and Flemish barons and knights really were treated as second-class visitors, they felt that this was the case and became increasingly paranoid about the closeness between Eleanor’s followers and the natives of Antioch with whom they conversed in Occitan.

In putting his case to Louis’ council, Raymond faced an uphill fight because Count Joscelin’s relationship with the house of Capet made Louis reluctant to believe his indolence and corruption had caused the loss of Edessa. Raymond’s plan to retake Edessa and conquer Aleppo and Caesarea
⁶
with an army of Frankish knights, plus the barons of Antioch and some Knights Templar and freelances recruited in Tripoli and Jerusalem, fell on deaf ears. Thierry of Flanders was one who might have responded – but only to install as the new overlord of Edessa one of his sons, Henry or Theodoric who, with their mother, had accompanied him on the crusade in the hope of securing fiefs for themselves.

Louis’ Franks and Flemings had not mortgaged their possessions to enrich still further a Toulousain relative of their disgraced queen. To their hostile counsel was added the clerics’ argument that Louis was on crusade to redeem his endangered soul, while Raymond’s plan was not holy crusade but a secular military adventure, in which the king should take no part, for had not Bernard of Clairvaux said to let nothing distract him from going to Jerusalem?

Wrongly, it was decided to leave things in Edessa as they were for the moment and move on to Jerusalem, there to take counsel among the leaders of the Latin Kingdom who might be expected to give a less biased oversight. Since the decision was not immediately conveyed to Raymond because they intended to carry on enjoying his hospitality until the remainder of the contingent caught up with them from Satalia, he continued bestowing costly presents on all his guests in eastern fashion.
⁷
He took them hunting beyond the lake of Antioch and generously let them loose his falcons upon the game birds in the marshes along the Orontes.