April Queen (19 page)

As the French approached the holy city, the entire population came out to welcome them. This was not an exaggeration by the chroniclers, for when the city was taken in the First Crusade, all its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants had been murdered with the oriental Christians living there, whom the crusaders found difficult to distinguish. In 1148 it was peopled exclusively by Christians of European, mostly Frankish, origin. The Sephardi pilgrim Benjamin of Tudela arrived there in 1170 to find only four Jewish inhabitants, earning a living as dyers near the Tower of David.
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Among the welcoming party waiting to greet Louis with the half-Armenian Queen Melisende and her son the boy-king Baldwin, was Conrad III, now restored to health by Comnenus’ physicians. He had achieved his ambition of being first in Jerusalem, but with only the rump of an army under his command.

Louis refused to be treated as other than a humble pilgrim. On foot and fasting, transported in pious ecstasy, he entered Jerusalem by David’s gate, next to the Citadel, which had been David’s tower, where the biblical king was said to have composed his psalms. From there he was conducted in procession past the Pool of the Patriarchs and along the Street of the Patriarchs to the church of the Holy Sepulchre built over one of many rock-cut tombs, which Constantine’s mother had decided in
AD
326 was where the body of Christ had been taken after the Crucifixion two centuries earlier. She had also claimed the discovery of the True Cross during the construction of her church on
one of the possible sites of Golgotha. That True Cross had been taken entire to Constantinople, although Queen Melisende had also enclosed a fragment of wood said to be from it in her first plea for help addressed to Abbé Bernard.

As the Protestant John Calvin remarked four centuries later, if all the extant fragments were reassembled they would fill a very large ship. His logic was countered by contemporary Catholic theologians, who argued that contact with the blood of Christ had given the wood the quality of being infinitely divisible. For the devout such as Louis, everything was true – as it is for twenty-first-century pilgrims marching in transports of ecstasy along the Via Dolorosa bearing polystyrene crosses on their shoulders.

Within the church, Louis was dazzled by the mixture of Norman and eastern architecture, by the cistern in which the True Cross had been found, by the chapels of the Crown of Thorns, of the Flagellation, of the Division of the Garments. At last, in placing the oriflamme on the altar directly above the Tomb of Christ, he fulfilled his penance and felt his soul lightened of the guilt that had burdened it since Vitry.

Yet the dispute with Eleanor soured his long-anticipated bliss. The royal household was lodged in the Tower of David as guests of the patriarch, but no mention is made of her in these arrangements. Whether she was present and kept out of sight, so that she could not influence her vassals, is unknown. To all intents and purposes, she had become an unperson for the duration of the crusade. It is perhaps coincidental that Suger’s man, the chaplain Odo, seems to have been distanced from Louis at this point.
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Had he lost out to Galeran in pressing the more subtle temporising arguments of the abbot of St Denis against shortsighted Templar high-handedness? The eunuch’s star was in the ascendant in the city where his Order had been founded, and he was to be one of those dispatched ahead of the royal party to prepare for Louis’ return to France, putting his side of the story to the pope en route so that Eleanor never got a fair hearing in Rome.

The late king of the Latin Kingdom, Fulk of Anjou, had formerly been a vassal of Louis’ father. Also the countess of Flanders was a daughter of Fulk, which made her half-sister to young King Baldwin. And many of Louis’ northerners found kin among those who spoke the
langue d’oïl
in Jerusalem. Here the Franks were fêted by the populace in a reversal of the situation at Antioch. The day after his arrival, Louis attended a meeting of Jerusalem’s clerical and lay rulers, at which Conrad III managed to muster an impressive presence of German barons and bishops. Unable to decide what, if anything, could be
accomplished by the small number of crusaders who had actually made it to the Holy Land, that meeting agreed to call a plenary council at the port of Acre, which would take stock of the fortunes of the Latin Kingdom and decide what should be done.

At the council in Acre, noble ladies including Melisende and the countess of Flanders were present, but Eleanor was not among them.
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It is inconceivable that she would have refused to attend and put her case in public for the first time. The sole credible explanation for her absence is that she was under arrest.

After much debate, the Acre council could only manage to agree on one objective: to attack Damascus. There was no dispute with Mu’in al-Din Unar, its emir. On the contrary, he and his people traded peacefully with the Latins and since he was the only Arab leader to have signed a treaty with the Franks, by attacking his city they did themselves a great disservice and stiffened the Muslim resistance to all Christians.
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As the troubadour Guiraut Riquier wrote later:

The Great Mosque of Damascus – built by the Umayyads on the same site as the Byzantine Church of St John, a previous Roman Temple of Jupiter and the original Aramaean sanctuary of Hadad – was only one of many houses of worship to different cults. At the eastern end of the ‘street called straight’ stood the Ananias Chapel, commemorating the blinding and conversion of St Paul. Jews, Christians, Muslims and pagans lived in mutual toleration, not side by side but in their autonomous quarters. The misfortune of the Damascenes was that there was no apparently softer target and the Europeans could not simply go home without doing anything; Nur ed-Din was to capture the city six years later and make it an all-Muslim capital, thanks to the weakening effect of the crusader attack.

On the tenuous argument that Damascus might one day be the link to unite the caliphates of Egypt to the south and Baghdad to the
north-east, it was decided to set 25 May as the day for all Christian knights to assemble at the city of Tiberias, founded by Herod’s son Antipas on the shores of Lake Galilee. From there the long column of the French army, strengthened by indigenous knights and men-at-arms, estimated by the contemporary historian Ibn Al-Qalanisi at 50,000 men plus their horses and draught camels and oxen, marched north via Magdala, birthplace of Mary Magdalene. Past Heptapegon – scene of the miracle of the loaves and fishes – they continued to Capernaum, where Christ had made his base in the house of the fishermen brothers Simon, Peter and Andrew, and St Matthew had been a toll-collector.

Still heading north along the lake shore to the silted-up mouth of the Jordan, they passed the site of Bethsaida, where Peter and Andrew had lived before going into partnership with James and John for the better fishing off Capernaum. Up the Jordan Valley they rode to the ruins of Caesarea Philippi, founded by another son of Herod. From its shrine they took another True Cross which was to guarantee victory and continued over the Anti-Lebanon in the pleasant early summer weather, following the oriflamme of France and the
gonfanon bausent
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of the Templars towards Damascus itself, which they reached on Saturday 24 July 1148.

The chroniclers’ description of their heroic valour is an attempt to gloss over dissension between the various contingents from the very beginning of the siege. The first Christian camp was sited at Manazil al-Askar, a defensible position but with the enormous disadvantage that the Damascenes had destroyed their entire irrigation system on that side of the city and blocked or poisoned the wells when laying waste their orchards, vineyards and fields to deny any sustenance to the invaders.
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If one believes William of Tyre, the decision to relocate to the other side of the city on the following day was the result of certain crusader leaders accepting bribes from the Damascenes to urge this course at the very moment when victory was in their grasp.
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In fact, the move was simply to be nearer a source of water sufficient for over 100,000 men and animals, whose supplies of food were inadequate. The water was defended, but not too strongly, and the crusaders gave thanks to God after driving off the Damascene forces and making their new camp in the devastated orchards just outside the city walls, unaware that they had moved into a carefully laid trap.

Inside Damascus the citizens were erecting barricades in the streets, but on the second day Muslim reinforcements began arriving from the Beka’a Valley. Cowering under a hail of arrows behind hastily erected
barricades of tree trunks, the Frankish army waited for their cavalry to be given the order to attack each sortie from the city, but there was no room for men on horseback to manoeuvre in the broken ground of orchards and gardens near the walls. Each group of mounted Franks bold enough to get close to the city was ambushed, their heads being cut off and carried back inside the walls to earn a reward. To avoid being taken alive, many knights carried a misericord, which was a thin-bladed dagger that could be slipped between the joins of body armour by themselves or a comrade to deliver a
coup de grâce
– literally a ‘stroke of mercy’ to a badly injured knight.

The Damascenes had at least a rudimentary medical service. On campaign, Saladin had a camel-mounted ambulance service, with a camp for the wounded kept separate from his main encampment for sanitary reasons. He had doctors and one specially trained surgeon in Aleppo, who was skilled in setting broken limbs. But on the Christian side, although the Hospitallers had built a 2,000-bed hospital for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, caring for the wounded in battle meant little more than the consolation of the last rites; deep slash or stab wounds often meant death from infection.

On the Monday, Turkish, Kurdish and Arab cavalry began to arrive from the north. When messengers were intercepted bearing news that Nur ed-Din was arriving on the Tuesday with the army of Aleppo and his brother Safadin with the army of Mosul, the crusaders abandoned their tents and retreated to safe territory in disarray, having achieved absolutely nothing for which they had come. Ibn Al-Qalanisi records that this was thought to be a feint, but it was a retreat. As he piously remarked, ‘may God be praised’.
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So ended the Second Crusade, after four inglorious days of ineffectual strife against neutrals who had done no wrong. No one seems to have given another thought to the unchanged situation of Edessa far to the north when Louis discharged his vassals of further crusading obligation. Those who had not succeeded in finding a niche in the Latin Kingdom set off for France, the needy being provided with money for the journey home out of the king’s pocket. However, he resisted the urging from St Denis that his duty lay with his people in Paris: ‘Why do you persist’, Suger wrote, ‘in enduring so many desperate ills after your barons and nobles have returned? For what fault of ours, or plan of your own, do you delay your return?’
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It is not as if all was peace and quiet on the home front. One of the lesser problems confronting the abbot of St Denis was unrest in Aquitaine. Guillaume de Mauzé, the seneschal of Poitou, was
complaining that Ebles de Mauléon and others were refusing to settle their tax bills, inflated by the crusade, and that lawlessness in Bordeaux had resulted in ‘enemies of the king and citizens killing each other’.
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Mauzé was fretting at the leash to get out to the Holy Land before all the action was over, and begged Suger to replace him with someone ‘honest and subtle’.

His replacement turned out to be none other than Geoffroi de Rancon, freshly returned from his disgrace in Turkey. His new appointment, which was a mark of the king’s favour, and the fact that he had been charged with using the revenues of the duchy to pay off the enormous debt Louis had run up with the Order of the Templars, provokes the question whether he really had caused the massacre on Mount Cadmos, or had been merely the alibi for Louis’ bad generalship.

Whatever the reasons for his new appointment, Rancon had no more success in restoring order in the duchy, writing to Suger at St Denis that what Aquitaine needed was a lord who could ‘rebuild damaged homes and restore the walls of fortresses’.
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The most obvious person to do that was in the Holy Land, apparently a prisoner if for no other reason than that Louis’ advisers would not allow her to return to France before him and take refuge on her own lands.
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In the end it was Archbishop Geoffroi who took command of the city and did his best to restore order, begging from the regent–abbot at St Denis the money necessary to repair the breached ramparts.

There is no record of Louis’ reply to Suger’s urging him to return. Months passed. While there is no explicit evidence that Eleanor was under lock and key, what other explanation is there for her staying so long in Outremer after the abduction from Antioch? Whatever the precise form of the ladies’ vows at Vézelay, no one expected them to go into combat; therefore simply by coming to Jerusalem she had gained the right to return home with the blessing of the Church.

Had she been at liberty, it is inconceivable that she would have chosen to stay on in the Holy Land, disgraced and sidelined. The richest woman in Christendom, after a decade and a half learning palace politics on the Ile de France and among the squabbling barons during the crusade and its preparations, would have been perfectly able to charter for herself a ship, had she been at liberty. So one has to conclude that she was under some form of constraint or confinement as Louis’ prisoner.