April Queen (9 page)

Born like Abelard into an equestrian family, Bernard was twenty-one when he decided upon the religious vocation in 1111, and saw in the practice of parents presenting oblates to the Church the main cause of lack of commitment in many religious. His own choice of order was the little-known foundation of Cîteaux, set up by Robert de Molesme some years before in order to return to the original teachings of St Benedict. So harsh was the Cistercian Rule under the ascetic English abbot and future saint Stephen Harding that the community was dying out for lack of recruits until Bernard arrived with thirty friends and such a fire of
true belief burning in his soul that within three years he was charged with establishing a daughter house at Clairvaux.

His popular image in an age when great preachers had followings like those of modern media stars was of a man so withdrawn from the world as to be already on the threshold of heaven. Yet he never hesitated to criticise wrongdoers, both religious and lay, and lobbied tirelessly for causes in which he believed, from the disputed election of the bishop of York or the German Emperor’s support of the anti-pope Anacletus II against Innocent II.

There is in Bernard’s letters a wealth of good sense and a richness of poetry, playful punning and a pleasure in the precision and conciseness of Latin that challenge the translator.
¹⁵
The energy he put into them is best expressed in his own words:

Every writer knows the feeling.

Regretting his time spent otherwise than in contemplation and governing his monastery and its daughter houses, Bernard deprecated himself for being ‘a sort of modern chimera, neither cleric nor layman. I have kept the habit of a monk but have long ago abandoned the life.’
¹⁷
Emerging from Clairvaux at St Thierry’s behest and racked by the ill-health that dogged him – not helped by a punishingly poor diet, repeated all-night vigils and a workload that exhausted two secretaries – Bernard spent Lent of 1140 in the schools of Paris, by sheer revivalist charisma weaning many young minds away from Abelard’s teaching.
¹⁸

Although maintaining that he prepared nothing for these public appearances, but relied on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the future saint of Clairvaux was a far shrewder person than his popular image suggested. His tactics worked brilliantly to drive Abelard into a corner, where he appealed for an examination of his alleged heresies by a competent consistory.

Paris being in the see of Sens, it was there that he must be judged. The throng of pilgrims, curious to see the relics and the latest progress of William of Sens’ cathedral, would anyway have been dense even without Bernard’s announcement that he would sit with the doctors
judging the case. After Mass in the cathedral on the feast of Pentecost, he offered prayers for an unnamed unbeliever – which Abelard never professed to be. That evening there was a meeting between the two adversaries before witnesses.

On the following day, the cathedral was crowded. It is safe to assume that neither Eleanor nor Becket would have missed such a contest of giants. In the presence of the bishop of Chartres as papal legate, no fewer than ten bishops in their regalia sat on one side of the choir, supported by uncounted abbots in all their pomp and finery. In their midst, dressed his simple monk’s robe, sat the misleadingly frail figure of Abbé Bernard.

Bernard was extremely emaciated. The mass of the population who were hungry most of their lives were impressed by the idea of voluntary starvation by someone to whom food was available. Also, fasting helped depress sexual urges and increased the frequency of visions in those disposed to them. In addition, many religious believed, like the early Church Father Tertullian, that an emaciated body would more easily pass through the portals of paradise.
¹⁹

Representing the temporal power in the opposite stalls, Louis sat with his barons led by Thibault of Champagne and the count of Nevers. Between them, facing the altar and with his back to the crowded nave, stood the solitary figure of Abelard, marshalling his powers of rhetoric for the performance of his life.

However, Bernard would not give the devil an even break. Instead of allowing himself to be drawn into a verbal slugging match, he read out one offending passage after another from Abelard’s books without giving their author a moment to defend himself. The congregation, come to witness the debate of the century, began to whisper that the case must have been already judged by the bishops in camera – which is exactly what Bernard had arranged the previous evening in the chapter house.

Seeing from the faces of the prelates and the nobility that he was condemned, Abelard anticipated his judges’ decision by announcing that he refused to be reprimanded like a disobedient clerk and would appeal to Rome. Mustering his supporters – those in holy orders would later be punished – he strode out of the cathedral to the astonishment of all except Bernard. As far as he was concerned, the Holy Spirit had driven the instrument of the devil from the sanctuary.

The findings of the Council of Sens were confirmed by Pope Innocent II, primed in advance by Bernard. Broken in spirit and physically ailing, Abelard retired to the Benedictine abbey of Cluny
founded two centuries before in southern Burgundy by Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine. There he spent his last months, dying in the habit of a Cluniac monk at the priory of St Marcel on 21 April 1142. He was survived for twenty-two years by the passionate lover who had once written to him, ‘I should rather be your whore than the wife of the Emperor Augustus’, but was later reduced to asking his advice for her nuns following the Rule intended by St Benedict for monks, which laid down the wearing of woollen drawers. These, she complained, were unsuitable for women by virtue of the ‘monthly purging of their superfluous humours’.
²⁰
Abelard’s remains, first buried at her convent of the Paraclete, now lie side by side with hers in the Parisian celebrity cemetery of Père Lachaise.

It was at Sens that Eleanor and Bernard first crossed paths for, unlike Suger, the abbot of Clairvaux eschewed the company of temporal rulers. Yet neither abbot would have approved the next move she was planning. In December of the same year, she and Louis travelled to Orleans, where they met a delegation from Poitou including Geoffroi de Rancon and his namesake, the self-exiled archbishop of Bordeaux,
²¹
together with the seneschal Guillaume de Mauzé.

In the customary mixture of feudal administration, while Louis was discussing the choice of a new bishop for Poitiers, Eleanor’s aunt the abbess of Saintes was seeking confirmation of the abbey’s exclusive franchise for currency exchange in the diocese. Although Louis signed the charter as duke, Eleanor placed her signature cross on the document to make the point that she was still very much the duchess. Many of his charters issued during the marriage bear a formula such as ‘with the consent of Queen Eleanor, duchess of the Aquitains’.
²²
Her position was not as secondary as might appear from charters.

The main business at Orleans was the advance planning of a campaign in support of her claim to the breakaway duchy of Toulouse through her grandmother Philippa, the discarded second wife of William IX. At Easter 1141, with the rest of the realm temporarily at peace, a Frankish army led by Louis marched south against Toulouse, its numbers smaller than he had hoped because the influential Thibault of Champagne again refused his support. Correctly, he argued that the king had no business taking arms against a vassal who had given him no offence, whatever the queen’s interests.

Instead of awaiting the arrival of his Aquitain allies, Louis attempted to take the city by surprise – and failed. Attempting a siege, for which he was poorly equipped, he failed a second time. What arrangement he reached with Count Alphonse Jourdan is unknown, but must
have included reparations. Perhaps as salve for Louis’ wounded ego, Eleanor came to meet him in Poitiers. Whatever her political failings, perseverance was not a quality she lacked. The question of Toulouse, which remained an obsession with her throughout both marriages and long afterwards, was eventually to cost her the life of a daughter more than half a century later.

E
leanor's whole worldview differed from that of Louis and his Frankish court. In the north, suspicion was the normal reaction to new ideas or strange people; in Aquitaine there was a love of novelty and that pagan
convivença
which she never lost, having been brought up in a society enriched by foreigners including Moors and Jews – who came not only to trade fine glassware, jewels, damascene metalwork, exotic textiles and spices from the East but also stayed to settle on the western flank of a vine-covered hill just outside the walls of Bordeaux, still known as
le mont judaïque
.

Merchants from the Port of the Moon are recorded living not only in Christian Spain but also in Toledo, while in Montpellier at the eastern end of the Pyrenees rabbis and imams taught alongside the doctors of the Christian law, to the horror of Simon de Montfort's Frankish bishops just after Eleanor's death. Traders from Bordeaux and Bayonne adventuring into Moorish Spain in time of peace and knights who departed on impromptu crusade all contributed to the melting pot of Aquitaine. So too did the tens of thousands of pilgrims traversing the duchy each year, called in Occitan
romieus
because the original
pilgrimage had been a visit to the tombs in Rome of Peter, Paul and other martyrs, although the most popular destination now was Santiago de Compostela, where William X lay buried.

The artefacts these travellers brought back with them ranged from whittled pieces of cork bark for stopping their water gourds to musical instruments like the Arabic
al-yud
, which became ‘lute'. Innovative ideas they brought back included the concept of harmony that enabled European music to develop, medicine, astronomy, algebra,
¹
and architectural concepts made possible by Hindu–Arabic numerals. The most enduring evidence of the Moorish influence in Eleanor's Aquitaine can be seen in the architecture of the many Romanesque churches and other twelfth-century buildings.

European society had until recently been divided into the three estates of those who fought, those who prayed and those who laboured. The peasants were considered by the Church to be just above the level of the beasts they tended, since God had created Man between himself and the animals, with the potential to resemble whichever he was closer to. Between fifteen and thirty peasant families were required to provide the means for one unpretentious knightly household to be freed from the need to work and equipped to provide military service to the overlord who had enfeoffed it.

The fourth element in the social equation was the centralised monarchy, constantly being challenged by vassals in the continental feudal structure. Increasingly important in Eleanor's lifetime was the fifth element, composed of free craftsmen and merchants in the towns and cities carving out a social niche for themselves and demanding increasing political independence for providing services without which urban civilisation could not develop.

The eventual triumph of monarchy over the Church and magnate government, and the successful interpolation of the bourgeoisie in the social structure, can be said to mark the end of the medieval period. Yet in the twelfth century the Church played a stabilising role in evolving European society through two episcopal initiatives that limited the senseless strife which had inhibited progress for centuries.

The Peace of God
²
was a measure to protect ecclesiastical property and the persons of clerics, pilgrims, merchants, women and peasants. Cattle and domestic animals excepting warhorses were also protected, together with agricultural machinery,
³
because its destruction led to misery and starvation among the peasantry. In Eleanor's Gascony, fishermen too were protected.
⁴

The Truce of God
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prohibited warfare theoretically from Wednesday evening to Monday morning in every week and also during the great vigils and feasts of the Blessed Virgin, the Apostles and a few other saints, plus the seasons of Advent and Lent. March, named for the god of war, thus became a time of truce, although this may have had more to do with the poor nutritional quality of early grass for armies dependent on large numbers of horses than with respect for the Truce.
⁶

Infringements against Peace or Truce were sanctioned by penances, interdict and excommunication. The crushing strength of the English monarchy after the Norman Conquest made these measures largely unnecessary north of the English Channel, but in Eleanor's France the Church had the power to make government easier for an overlord who established a
modus vivendi
with his bishops. It can be argued that the attitude of her family to the bishops of Aquitaine was a major reason why the irreligious duchy was virtually ungovernable, outside the major towns like Bordeaux and Bayonne, where the Church did have authority.