She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (21 page)

Heaven, it seemed, was listening to the saintly abbot, if not quite as carefully as were the crowned heads of Europe. In 1145, the year after the great and the good had gathered at Saint-Denis, Eleanor at long last gave birth for the first time. The baby was strong and healthy, and perfect in every way except for its sex: it was not the longed-for boy, but a girl, named Marie in thanks to the Virgin for this blessing bestowed and in hope of better to come.

Meanwhile, Abbot Bernard could have no cause for complaint about Eleanor’s side of their deal. By the end of 1145 Louis was not only penitent, and reconciled with the Church in France and in Rome, but committed to a greater goal even than peace itself: he planned to wage a holy war, to defend Christendom against
the infidel. That summer, news had reached France that the city of Edessa had fallen to Muslim forces commanded by the emir of Aleppo, Imad ad-Din Zengi. For the Latin states of the Levant, founded half a century earlier in the wake of the victorious First Crusade, the loss of Edessa represented both a spiritual affront – the city housed the graves of the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus as well as thousands of Christian inhabitants – and a profound strategic threat.

Louis did not hesitate. At Christmas 1145, with his court gathered around him at Bourges for the annual royal ceremony of crown-wearing, he declared his intention to embark on a crusade. In the same month, the new pope, Eugenius III – the first Cistercian to be elected to the Holy See, and himself a disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux – published a bull urging the faithful to come to the aid of Edessa and confirming the remission of sins for all who joined the campaign. Three months later, the crusade was formally launched amid extraordinary scenes at Vézelay in northern Burgundy.

Many roads led to Vézelay: lying between Paris and the great mother-houses of the Cluniac and Cistercian orders, it was one of the chief staging-posts for pilgrims travelling south to Santiago de Compostela. And it was itself a place of pilgrimage, its newly rebuilt hill-top abbey dedicated to St Mary Magdalene, the patron of penitents, whose bones, contemporaries believed, rested there in a gilded shrine. Little wonder that it seemed the perfect place for a king to begin a journey that was, in part at least, one of pilgrimage and expiation.

But even Vézelay, its church freshly extended to cope with the thronging crowds it regularly had to accommodate, had never seen anything like the gathering of Easter Sunday 1146. So many people had packed into the town that the church had to be abandoned altogether, and a makeshift stage hastily constructed on the hillside beyond. There Louis sat in state, wearing stitched to the shoulder of his mantle a crusader’s cross sent especially by Pope Eugenius, who had been unable to leave Italy because of the
dangerous uncertainty of Roman politics. In his place, however, the pope had despatched the frail but luminously charismatic figure of Abbot Bernard. Amid a reverent hush, the great man spoke fervently, with indomitable energy and urgent rhetoric, exhorting the Christians of the west to help their fellows in the east.

Then it was Louis’s turn to address his subjects, telling them of his ‘great devotion to this war’, before kneeling in tears at the abbot’s feet to take the cross for all to see. Behind him pressed the magnates of France, including Henri, heir to the king’s old enemy Thibaud of Champagne, along with so many others that the heap of fabric crosses Bernard had brought with him to confer upon would-be crusaders was quickly exhausted, and the abbot was forced to improvise replenishments by tearing strips from his own white robe as the crowd clamoured to reach him.

It was a profoundly stirring spectacle, unprecedented in substance as well as style. The First Crusade had been a speculative, self-consciously pioneering expedition, its lordly leaders venturing into the unknown to seek new spheres of influence as well as eternal salvation. But its triumph in the face of towering odds – capturing the holy city of Jerusalem, and establishing Christian states there and further north at Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa – meant that expectations, and the stakes that went with them, were now far higher. Never before had a crowned king undertaken to lead a crusade in person – a military campaign that would take him thousands of miles away from the lands it was his sacred duty to rule, and would keep him away for a matter of years rather than months, even supposing that he returned at all. He would spend untold sums, prised from the pockets of his subjects left behind. He would face the manifold dangers of landscape, climate, disease and a terrifying enemy. And he would do it all, it emerged, with his wife by his side.

Eleanor too had sat, dressed in a crusader’s robe, on the platform at Vézelay, had knelt before Abbot Bernard to receive the cross and had pledged her vassals of Aquitaine to join the campaign. She too received the blessing of Pope Eugenius himself at
Saint-Denis on 11 June 1147, during an elaborately staged send-off for the crusaders where the queen, almost fainting on a suffocatingly hot day, watched her husband take possession of the oriflamme, a banner of fire-red silk on a golden lance that hung above the abbey’s altar until the king should have need of it to lead his troops in battle. And she too joined the French army when it assembled at Metz in the far east of France to embark on the long journey across Europe to rendezvous with the crusading forces of the German king, Conrad III, in Asia Minor.

The presence of the French queen and her attendants alongside the soldiers and the wagons full of arms was itself an indication of the confidence with which the expedition set out. Eleanor travelled in style, despite Eugenius’s instruction to his crusaders to deport themselves with sober simplicity. (His papal bull forbade them to bring hawks and hounds, to employ minstrels, or to wear ‘multi-coloured clothes or minivers or gilded and silver arms’.) But no silken pillow or upholstered saddle could disguise the fact that this was a journey beside which Matilda’s wintry crossing of the Alps thirty years earlier paled into insignificance.

From Metz the French army, with the queen’s elegant entourage in its midst, travelled a hundred miles north-east to Worms, where ships were waiting to ferry them all – nobles, ladies, bishops, troops, horses, arms and baggage – across the Rhine. They moved at speed, covering between ten and twenty miles a day as they pressed on another two hundred miles eastward to the Bavarian city of Regensburg, at the northernmost bend in the Danube, where a German fleet had assembled to carry them downriver through the lands of the king of Hungary. When they reached Bulgaria they left their boats, instead turning southwards by road – and, despite being sporadically held up by the frustrating unwieldiness of their four-horse baggage-carts, they were still making good time as they entered the territories of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Komnenos. By 4 October, they had reached Constantinople, capital of the eastern Empire and the greatest Christian city in the world.

Relations between the Christians of west and east were far from easy, and the arrival of the French king at the head of his army, less than a month after the German king had passed by at the head of his, was hardly welcome to the emperor. Indeed, having expressed diplomatic joy at news of the crusaders’ plans a year earlier, Manuel had now concluded that the security of his empire was better served by agreeing a twelve-year truce with the Turks. But he was eager to see the French leave his capital as peacefully as they had come, and the royal couple were received with grace and extraordinary magnificence into this most brilliant of cities. Eleanor was entertained by the Empress Eirene, formerly Bertha of Sulzbach, a Bavarian noblewoman turned Byzantine consort whose pious disdain for the elaborate clothes and painted faces of court fashion contrasted sharply with the gilded intricacy of the imperial palaces and churches in which the two women met. We have no way of knowing whether queen and empress found common ground; there was, at least, a suggestion that one of Eleanor’s ladies should consider taking a Greek husband. Either way, her stay was brief. Manuel made rapid arrangements for the French to cross the Bosphorus in Byzantine ships, and soon they were once again on the move, this time tracing a path around the coast of Asia Minor.

But they were about to learn that grand plans and a sense of entitlement could not guarantee the success of a military expedition on this wildly ambitious scale so far from home. The first unwelcome surprise had been the sheer expense of keeping such a vast contingent in the field, and Louis had been writing home to Abbot Suger in Paris with instructions to send more money (instructions that were far easier, of course, to despatch than to fulfil) ever since they had reached Hungary.

Now, it began to be clear that much worse was to come. Any illusion that divine sanction would guarantee the crusaders’ victory, irrespective of unfamiliar terrain and hostile climate, evaporated in an instant when news arrived of the humiliating retreat of the German king’s forces, who had taken a more direct but much more dangerous route across the Anatolian plateau. In that empty,
arid landscape, the German crusaders had run desperately short of food and water. Starving and incapacitated by thirst, they found themselves harried on all sides by Turkish raids. The Seljuk archers moved fast, their horses fresh and strong, and let fly dense volleys of arrows with deadly accuracy before melting back into the barren hills. Under this remorseless assault, the wretched remains of Conrad’s once proud army turned tail and struggled back to the Byzantine city of Nicaea in the far north-west of Anatolia, carrying their shaken and wounded king with them.

In the circumstances, their rendezvous with the French in November 1147 was a far cry from the moment of triumph that either Louis or Conrad had anticipated. The combined forces of the crusade – the Germans nursing their wounds and the French discomfited by their allies’ plight – made their way down the coastal road, struggling through fords and over mountains, to spend an unhappy Christmas at Ephesus. Conrad and his men then limped back to Constantinople, where Manuel had offered the services of his imperial doctors to nurse the injured king back to health, while Louis and his cavalcade headed onward, despite heavy falls of rain and snow.

But on the steep slopes of Mount Cadmus, the French army became dangerously overstretched. The vanguard – which included Eleanor and her ladies, and was commanded by Geoffroi de Rancon, a nobleman from the queen’s county of Poitou – made the ascent with unexpected ease, and decided, without consultation, to press on to pitch camp on the plain below. In doing so, they left the forces behind them stranded on the mountainside. The footsoldiers and baggage train, who were expecting to meet them at the summit, found no one there, while the king and his bodyguard, bringing up the rear, had not yet even begun the climb. And while the baggage train hesitated, strung out on narrow rocky paths edged by fearful drops, the Turks seized their moment.

The whine of an arrow in flight was the first sign of the slaughter to come. As the Seljuks closed in, firing from all sides, terror and panic spread among the French ranks. There was nowhere to
turn: death rained from the sky in a hail of Turkish steel, while men and horses stumbled and fell, their bodies breaking on the rocks below. Messengers fled to tell the king of the unfolding massacre, and Louis and his knights rode as hard as they could to the rescue. But they could not strike a decisive blow against an enemy that was hidden on the hillside all around them. All they could do – at the cost of many more lives – was to shepherd what remained of the baggage train to the safety of camp.

Recriminations began at once. Eleanor’s vassal Geoffroi de Rancon was blamed for his impulsive leadership of the van, and was dismissed, to return home to Poitou. But Louis’s command of his army had been exposed, in this first major military encounter, as complacent at best, and at worst deeply flawed. It was a bruised, reduced and dispirited company that struggled onward to the port of Adalia to take ship for the Christian principality of Antioch.

We know nothing of Eleanor’s experience of these alarming events. But the very fact that there is so little mention of the queen in the principal sources for this part of the crusade (which include an eyewitness account by the king’s chaplain, Odo of Deuil) nevertheless suggests some plausible, if limited, conclusions. Eleanor, it seems, was physically strong. It was an arduous journey, and, whatever the privileged conditions in which the queen travelled, they could not have been enough to shield her completely from the privations of life with an army that had lost much of its equipment in raids and skirmishes, and was running disastrously short of provisions. Yet there is no suggestion of urgent concern about the wellbeing of the queen and her ladies, nor any proposal that they – like the wounded king of Germany – should turn back to take refuge under the protection of the Byzantine emperor at Constantinople. By the same token, it also seems reasonable to conclude that she was undaunted by the dangers she faced. And, certainly, her behaviour once she reached the haven of Antioch was anything but fearful.

It rapidly became clear, once the exhausted French contingent had landed at Antioch’s port of St Simeon on the eastern Mediterranean
shore, that the crusade had wrought no greater transformation on the royal couple’s marriage than it had on the king’s abilities as a general. Eleanor and Louis, it appears, had spent little time together since leaving France. The queen seems to have been kept away from the king’s pavilion by considerations of propriety and safety, and, in all likelihood, by Louis’s determination to undertake the holy work of a crusader in the chaste condition of a pilgrim. But, after months as a camp follower, in Antioch Eleanor found herself once again a queen at the centre of a court – and one that offered attractions of beguiling familiarity.

The ruler of Antioch was Eleanor’s uncle, Ramon of Poitiers, her father’s younger brother, who had acquired his principality along with the hand in marriage of its ten-year-old heiress in 1136. Ramon was ‘the handsomest of the princes of the earth’, according to the later chronicler William of Tyre – urbane and charming, and the most attentive and generous of hosts. That generosity could not, however, be mistaken for disinterested kindness. Antioch was caught between the twin threats of Muslim and Byzantine expansionism, and the crusaders’ arrival seemed to offer Ramon the chance to strengthen his own hand in relation to those two looming predators. His plan was to persuade Louis to help him capture the great Muslim-held trading city of Aleppo in northern Syria, just beyond the eastern border of his principality – and he enlisted his niece, Eleanor, as an ally in his diplomatic offensive.