Duke William IX had always been an ardent lover of women. His vehemently sensual nature matured early, and he indulged his appetites with a lusty, pagan delight. It made little difference to him whether the woman was harlot or virgin, peasant or noble maiden. When William IX was fifteen, his father died, and the domain passed into his hands. If his barons believed that the amiable young man would be easy to manipulate, they soon discovered their mistake, because he quickly established himself as a lord worthy of respect. For all the lad’s notoriety as a Don Juan, he was intelligent, sensitive, and possessed of a genius for writing poetry that was not to blossom for another fifteen years.
In 1088, when William was sixteen, he married the daughter of his northern neighbor, Fulk, count of Anjou, a man so disagreeable that he won the nickname “The Contrary.” Fulk’s daughter Ermengarde, beautiful and highly educated, appeared to be precisely the type of woman that William wanted, and not until after the wedding did he realize that she had inherited a streak of her father’s sour disposition. Ermengarde, he discovered, had good periods and bad periods, her moods swinging drastically between vivacity and the most alarming sullenness, although it was possible that William’s great weakness for chasing women contributed to her fits of bad temper. Moreover, she revealed a tendency to nag, a trait that thoroughly annoyed the carefree William, and the marriage got off to a bad start. After a quarrel, Ermengarde would retire to a convenient cloister, where she would sever all communication with the outside world, her husband included. But after a period of solitary retreat, she would suddenly reappear at court, magnificently dressed and smothered in jewels, behaving with a merriment that enchanted the courtiers and belied the fact that she had ever shown a sulky face. Her schizophrenic behavior soon proved too much for William, and since she had failed to conceive, he probably felt justified in sending her back to Anjou. The marriage was dissolved in 1091, and a year later Ermengarde married the duke of Brittany.
William took his time about remarrying. Not until 1094 did he hastily journey south of the Pyrenees to Aragon, where King Sancho Ramirez had just been killed in battle, leaving his twenty-year-old queen, Philippa, a widow. Serious-minded, politically astute, she was not only a formidable woman but a great heiress, and this accounted for the fact that William was not the only suitor to cross the Pyrenees in pursuit of her hand. The daughter of Count William IV of Toulouse, the county of France adjoining Aquitaine on the southeast, Philippa was one of those emancipated southern women whom circumstances threw up every so often. Her father had married twice and sired two sons, neither of whom lived. Without a male to succeed him, Count William IV realized, of course, that he would leave no heir save his daughter, a greatly disturbing fact because, even though Toulousain custom permitted women to inherit, it was considered better that they inherit a minor fief rather than the entire county itself. When Philippa was twelve, William IV sent her to Aragon to be the wife of Sancho Ramirez, a destiny of sufficient brilliance that he hoped she would have no cause for complaint. Like all the Spanish Christian kingdoms, Aragon had a sizable Moorish population, and owing to the cultural exchange between Christians and Moors, especially in architecture and poetry, the Arabized court at Aragon had attained a degree of oriental luxury foreign to European courts.
Two years after he had disposed of his daughter, Count William IV, discouraged and frustrated, suddenly resolved the crucial matter of succession by a most unusual step: He announced that he was departing for the Holy Land. In his absence—although it is perfectly clear that the count had no intention of returning—he appointed his brother, Raymond, count of Saint-Gilles, to rule in his stead. Within five years William was dead and his brother had assumed the title, despite the fact that Raymond’s claim to Toulouse was highly disputable. Nevertheless, in law, as in all things, might became right. Raymond was a fifty-year-old male on the scene, the reins of power already in his hands; his niece but a nineteen-year-old female living beyond the Pyrenees.
Philippa, seething, could expect no help from her husband, since at that time he was fully occupied in a bitter campaign of reconquest against the Berber Moors, who had slowly managed to gain control of most of the Spanish peninsula. When Sancho Ramirez was killed by an arrow at the siege of Huesca, she determined to remarry as quickly as possible with the object of allying herself to a man who would help her regain her patrimony. It is not surprising that her choice fell upon Duke William of Aquitaine, a handsome man who knew how to woo a woman and who could offer a position worthy of her station in life. More important, however, William assured her that at the earliest opportunity she would get back Toulouse. He would see to it. Not that he had any intention of invading her native land; on the contrary, he greatly preferred occupations more pleasurable than war, although he always fought fearlessly when conflict could not be avoided. But momentous events beginning to take shape would enable him to make good his promise at a much earlier date than he or Philippa ever dreamed.
Since Mohammed’s death in the seventh century, the banner of Islam had flown over Jerusalem. That the biblical holy places should fall into Moslem hands failed to disturb western Europe, for the Arabs, sharing Christian veneration for these places, welcomed and protected pilgrims. But in the eleventh century the barbarous Seljuk Turks, desert men mounted on camels and swift small horses, swept over the rock-strewn valleys of Jerusalem and the sepulcher of Christ; pilgrims lucky enough to return told hair-raising tales of their treatment at the hands of Islam’s newest and fiercest champions, who viewed Christians as likely candidates for capture and enslavement. All of Christendom stood mute and horrified, and yet the idea of undertaking an expedition to drive out the Moslems from the Holy Land occurred to no one. Twenty-five years passed before the Christian nations decided that the scandal had become intolerable.
On a hazy day in November 1095, in a field outside the town of Clermont in the Auvergne, a tall white-robed figure slowly mounted a platform, its gold canopy billowing slightly in the misty air. Below him on the dry brown grass clustered cardinals, bishops, and black-clad monks, and behind them the cloaked laymen, pilgrims who had walked hundreds of miles over mountain and meadow, barons and knights on their richly caparisoned bays and Arabian steeds, here and there a noble dame accompanied by her maid. The vaporous breaths of men and animals rose and mingled with the odor of sour human sweat. Among the restless throng waiting to hear the words of Pope Urban II at this gathering, thereafter to be known as the Council of Clermont, was Duke William IX. He watched as the pope stood for a moment between two shimmering crosses and then moved close to the edge of the platform, his slow, level words bringing an instant hush to the crowd.
“O race of Franks, race beyond the mountains! We wish you to know what a serious matter has led us to your country, for it is the imminent peril threatening you and all the faithful that has brought us thither!
“From the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople a grievous report has gone forth and has been brought repeatedly to our ears.... A race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God, has violently invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part they have killed by cruel tortures.
“They have either destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of their own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their own uncleanness.”
Muffled cries and whispers went up from the assembly as the slow, deep voice of Urban continued to describe how the invaders befouled the altars with filth from their bodies, how they circumcised Christians and poured the blood into the baptismal fonts, how they stabled their horses in the churches. The Turks were so degenerate that they ate meat on Fridays and coupled together like loathesome beasts. He called upon the girdled knights, arrogant with pride, to come to the defense of Christ. Fiercely chastizing them for their petty feuds, their habit of murdering and devouring one another in civil wars, he exhorted them to abandon their dissensions and make war against the infidel. “Enter upon the road of the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the wicked race and subject it to yourselves!”
As the holy man spoke, they listened patiently, and then a shout rose from the sea of faces—Deus lo volt!—until the entire throng was standing, weeping, screaming a mighty roar from one throat, “God wills it!” Silencing them with uplifted arms, the pope answered, “God has drawn this cry from you. Let it be your battle cry; when you go against the enemy let this shout be raised—‘God wills it!’ ”
Thus were kindled the fires of the First Crusade, igniting a flame that would burn for three centuries.
As night began to fall, the excited crowd melted away through the twilight, following the sound of bells summoning them to vespers. Around fires blazing in the meadow many vowed to exchange their goods for shield and lance and set out for the Holy Land with the sign of the cross on their breasts. There they would mount a thousand crosses on the walls of Jerusalem, and then they would be washed clean of their sins. Duke William IX was not among those who spoke in this manner. Sometime later during Urban’s stay in Clermont William personally expressed sympathy for the pope’s Crusade, but he did not commit himself. Instead he invited the pope to visit his court, and, in view of the duke’s prestige and rank, Urban spent Christmas of 1095 in Limoges and the following January arrived in Poitiers, where William arranged a splendid reception in his honor. During their many meetings over the course of the next month, Urban must have sensed that, despite William’s promises of support, something was amiss; while the subject of their discussions is unknown, William may have hinted of a plan beginning to form in his mind. Since the day in November when Urban spoke at Clermont, one of the first and greatest lords to respond had been Philippa’s uncle, Count Raymond of Toulouse. Not only had Raymond been stirred to take the cross, but he was quickly emerging as the main organizer of the Crusade. With Raymond away, William thought, what better opportunity to advance his wife’s claim to the county of Toulouse? If he mentioned this line of reasoning to Urban, he must have met with thorough disapproval, for the pope had promised that the lands and family of any Crusader would be safeguarded in his absence, that any act of aggression would be regarded as a mortal sin and the perpetrator’s soul damned forever.
For the moment William did nothing. In the fall of 1096, Count Raymond rode out from Toulouse at the head of an army numbering 100,000 crossbearers and including his young wife, Elvira, and an infant son, who would die on the journey. For Raymond, it was the beginning of a new life, because he had taken an oath never to return. Aging, blind in one eye, seeking a proper ending for his years, he would remain in Outremer, the land across the sea, and establish a new dynasty. Relinquishing his claim to the countship, he nevertheless stubbornly refused to return the domain to a woman; instead he left in charge his eldest son, Bertrand.
Still William took no immediate action. Not until the spring of 1098 did he and Philippa march into her homeland, taking the city of Toulouse without a blow being struck or a life lost. Neither she nor William regarded the act as aggression—they were merely asserting a claim that they believed just and right—but others objected strenuously, and certain ecclesiastics hastened to Rome in an effort to persuade Urban that the duke should be excommunicated. The matter mushroomed to such heights that the bishop of Poitiers was forced to hurry to the papal court, where he interceded for his duke. On that occasion William escaped censure—later he would not be so fortunate—but his relations with the Church were never to be cordial again.
The year following her return to Toulouse, Philippa gave birth to a son, who would later be called William the Toulousain after the city of his birth and who would become the father of Eleanor of Aquitaine. In that same year that William X was born, news began drifting back to Europe of the capture of Jerusalem by the crusading army. The Holy Land had been regained; Count Raymond and Duke Godfrey and the other great princes were said to be living in palaces encrusted with gold and jewels, wearing sables and silky gossamer robes and lolling on Damascene couches, where Sudanese slaves served them chilled wine. So far, few of the Crusaders had returned, but the tales of glory preceding them were widely believed. Meanwhile, the twenty-seven-year-old William, undisputed master of an enviable fief, was having second thoughts about the Crusade. Although not a particularly devout man, neither was he devoid of religious feeling. Still, his suddenly kindled desire to see the Holy Land had little to do with either religion or, as was the case with some enthusiastic Crusaders, plunder; rather William burned with a feverish desire to see something of the world. The Crusade was the great adventure of his generation, and he had missed it, a mistake he resolved to remedy by organizing an army of his own. In raising funds, he preferred to avoid imposing oppressive taxation on his people and instead attempted to mortgage his domain, a not uncommon step in those crusading times, although usually done on a smaller scale. His first feeler went out to William Rufus, king of England, an offer readily acceptable to the son of William the Conqueror because he believed that the duke would never be able to redeem the pledge. Before the transaction could be closed, however, Rufus was killed in a hunting accident. William’s next move must have outraged Philippa, who was happily settled—forever, she believed—in her palace at Toulouse. Her husband turned to Count Raymond’s son Bertrand, the man Philippa had displaced, and offered to mortgage her lands. They would, William recklessly promised, give up all rights to Toulouse in exchange for a sum that, even though considerable, Bertrand eagerly agreed to raise. Within a few months, Philippa found herself hustled back to Poitiers, where she was to rule in William’s absence, and William himself departed down the dusty white road toward the Rhine with an army of sixty thousand soldiers and pilgrims.
His expedition turned out to be anything but romantic. On September 5, 1101, near the town of Heraclea in Asia Minor, the Turks swept down and annihilated his entire army. William, standing on a nearby hill and weeping bitterly, watched his forces slaughtered before he fled with a few survivors. Behind he left only corpses and rusting armor. Ordericus Vitalis would write that when William returned from the Crusade in 1102, “He sang before the princes and the great assemblies of Christians of the miseries of his captivity among the Saracens, using rhymed verse jovially modulated.” The chronicler was mistaken, for William had never been captured. After Heraclea, he sought asylum at the splendidly exotic court of Antioch. Bohemund I, prince of Antioch, was being held captive by the Moslems, but his nephew Tancred, acting as regent, gave William a warm reception and the opportunity to recover from his shocking defeat amid an atmosphere of luxury and pleasure. It was there that William familiarized himself with the Moorish songs then popular in Syria, and there is little doubt that his visit to Antioch helped to shape the poetry he would soon begin to write. In September 1102, William visited Jerusalem, where further campaigns against the Moslems were being planned by King Baldwin, but he declined to participate. War, never terribly appealing to him, certainly held no lure at this point.
At home again, his restlessness presumably purged during his eighteen months abroad, William settled down to write what would become known as the first troubadour poetry, his love poems, and those of the men and women he inspired, bringing to perfection the type of lyric that has continued in Western culture down to the present time. His poetic vision did not, however, spring full-blown from a vacuum. Although some of the influences remain a matter of conjecture, they would logically include the Latin verse of the clerics, an oriental influence from his encounters with Moors and Saracens, the cadences of Church music, and the native popular songs of wandering goliards, many of them unfrocked priests and runaway students who sang of love in Latin rhymes. Nor were the ethereal themes of courtly love, l’amour courtois, full-fledged in William’s lyrics. Although he delighted in the beauty of women and sang the praises of love, no secularized Virgin Marys appear in his cansos. The duke’s view of women is wholly and undisguisedly carnal, the outcome of the lover’s quest physical rather than platonic. The significant departure in his sensuous poems was the egalitarian idea that a man could not demand a woman’s love; she must freely consent to bestow it. The duke was a down-to-earth man whose passionate pursuit of a lady ended happily with “my hands beneath her cloak.”
Over the course of the next thirteen years William’s court became the center of European culture, and not the least of its attractions was the joyous song maker himself. During those years, too, the duke’s family grew rapidly. Although Philippa’s dream of ruling Toulouse was temporarily shattered, she dutifully fulfilled the requirements of medieval womanhood by producing, after young William, five daughters and then, a last child, another son. She seems to have successfully ignored her husband’s amorous exploits, which were common knowledge, since he did not hesitate to celebrate them in verse. So widespread became the scandals that they found their way into the contemporary chronicles. William of Malmesbury related with relish that the duke erected “near the castle of Niort, certain buildings after the form of a little monastery, and used to talk idly about placing therein an abbey of prostitutes, naming several of the most abandoned courtesans, one as abbess, another as prioress; and declaring that he would fill up the rest of the offices in like manner.”
This tale sounds very much like one of William’s sly digs toward Philippa, because over the years, and to the duke’s undisguised dismay, his wife had grown devoutly religious. She had become a convert to the teachings of a Breton reformer, Robert d‘Arbrissel, who preached, among other heresies, the superiority of women. In 1099, d’Arbrissel and his followers settled at Fontevrault in the forest near the border of Anjou and built an abbey dedicated to the Virgin Mary. His abbey, however, was unique, because Fontevrault housed both monks and nuns—under the rule of an abbess. Robert d‘Arbrissel believed that women were better administrators than men on account of their organizational experience gained in raising families and managing households, a view of feminine supremacy bound to attract Philippa. Her passionate devotion to d’Arbrissel and his ideas annoyed William, who, despite his obession with women, was not quite prepared to concede their supremacy. He objected to the great amount of time that his wife gave to Fontevrault and to the influence that d’Arbrissel and other ecclesiastics wielded over her, but his frank boredom with her as a wife was compounded by the fact that, now in his early forties, he had reached the dangerous age when men are apt to indulge in foolishness.
By this time, the Church heartily disapproved of William, both his affairs with women and the worldliness of his court, and he found himself constantly at odds with them over many matters. In 1114, the bishop of Poitiers had threatened to excommunicate William over an alleged infringement of the Church’s tax privileges. William, furious, had stormed into the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre with sword drawn just as the prelate was about to pronounce the anathema. Flinging himself upon Bishop Peter and seizing him by the neck, he shouted, “I will kill you if you do not absolve me!” The startled bishop pretended to comply with absolution, but when at last William released him, he calmly finished reading out the excommunication. Then he thrust forward his neck and said meekly, “Strike, then. Go ahead, strike.” Hesitating for a moment, the duke sheathed his sword and replied with one of the tart remarks for which he was famous. “Oh, no.” he retorted. “I don’t love you enough to send you to paradise.”
The following year William’s quarrels with the Church escalated after an incident that astonished even the blasé Aquitainians. Under the pretext of keeping Poitou obedient, he had fallen into the habit of making extensive journeys around the county; Philippa, once again in control of Toulouse, rarely accompanied him. On one of these trips he made the acquaintance of a viscountess with the provocative name of Dangereuse, the wife of Viscount Aimery of Châtellerault. This most immoderate lady formed an exuberant attachment for William who, to understate the matter, reciprocated. Later that year while Philippa was in Toulouse, William cemented his relationship with the beautiful viscountess by setting off at a gallop along the Clain River road to Châtellerault, where, the story goes, he snatched the faintly protesting lady from her bedchamber and carried her back to Poitiers.
It is unlikely that the eager viscountess protested vehemently, if at all, for she seemed quite prepared to abandon husband and children for the dashing duke. At home, William installed her in his new keep, known as the Maubergeonne Tower, which he had recently added to the ducal palace, and before long the amused Poitevins were calling his mistress La Maubergeonne. There was no question of hiding Dangereuse, nor did the lovers apparently practice discretion. Therefore, when Philippa returned from Toulouse and discovered a rival living in her own palace, her patience was sorely tried. Eyes blazing, she appealed first to her friends at court, then to the Church. With little trouble she was able to persuade the papal legate. Giraud, to speak to her husband about his imprudent behavior. But William replied jokingly to the legate, who happened to be as bald as an egg, “Curls will grow on your pate before I shall part with the viscountess.” Although William’s sentence of excommunication was renewed, he failed to take the matter seriously and, to Philippa’s disgust, had a portrait of Dangereuse painted on his shield.
By 1116, Philippa could no longer tolerate the situation. She had wept bitterly over her husband’s affair with the elegant viscountess, a woman younger and prettier than herself. For years she had been obliged to put up with his infidelities, with songs and poems of his sexual conquests, with his blithely pawning her heritage to Bertrand so that he could play the crusading hero at her expense. She had borne him seven children and managed his lands with admirable efficiency, and now, in repayment, he had mortified her by bringing a strumpet into her palace. Her heart full of rancor, gathering the remains of her shredded pride, Philippa withdrew from a situation at once ridiculous and demeaning by retreating to the Abbey of Fontevrault. William did not attempt to stop her.
Since Fontevrault’s beginnings some twenty years earlier, this remarkable religious institution had become a popular mecca for aristocratic women. If its abbesses were widows plucked from the nobility, they were no less high-born than the women who came there as novices or those who merely sought a restful retreat after an active career as wife and mother. Among the women living there when Philippa arrived was, ironically, William’s first wife, Ermengarde, who vacillated between the secular and the religious throughout her life. A benefactress of the Abbey of Clairvaux, she also built the monastery of Buzay near Nantes and would end her life as a nun. She and Philippa, it is said, became close friends. But despite Philippa’s great dedication to the abbey and to the ideal of feminine superiority on which it was based, she was able to find little contentment living there as a rejected wife. Full of resentment and anger, she could not accept the fact that William had treated her shamefully by tossing her aside for a concubine. She soon disappeared from history, the records stating only that she died on November 28, 1118, whether from illness or wretchedness there is no way of knowing.
Little is known, too, about the viscountess of Chatellerault, except for the obvious inference: She was a woman who did as she pleased and who cared little for public opinion. At the time of her “abduction,” Dangereuse had been married for about seven years and had borne three children: Aenor, Hugh, and Ralph. While her husband could not have been pleased about being openly cuckolded, nonetheless the fact remained that the incorrigible William was his liege lord, and had Viscount Aimery objected strongly—for even in Aquitaine wife stealing was a fauxpas—there was really little that he could do to alter the situation. As time passed, it became clear to all that La Maubergeonne had come to stay, and her presence at court became more or less taken for granted.
Although Dangereuse could never become the official duchess of Aquitaine, she determined that her relationship with William be recognized in some manner. After several years, she proposed the ingenious scheme of marrying his eldest son, William, to her daughter, Aenor; if she could not be duchess, then her daughter would hold that title in her stead. And it is a tribute to her perseverance that the duke finally agreed. The marriage did not take place without opposition, however, one of the main objectors being young William himself. When Dangereuse first arrived at court, he was barely sixteen, a strapping lad who towered over his father. He had a prodigious appetite—it was later claimed that he ate enough for eight men—and already showed signs of a stubborn, quarrelsome nature. Although he had inherited his father’s charming manner, the resemblance between father and son ended there. One chronicler contended that the boy, provoked beyond endurance by the injury that his father’s liaison had done to his mother, revolted in a seven-year struggle that ended only with his capture by the duke. While the records flatly contradict this theory, nonetheless it must be concluded that young William did not adapt to the changes in his family life without great difficulty. Although the idea of marrying the daughter of his father’s mistress may have been distasteful to him, the will of La Maubergeonne finally prevailed, and the marriage took place in 1121.
In contrast to her colorful mother, Aenor appears to have been a rather timid person who lacked the smallest semblance of forcefulness. Puppetlike, she moved through life doing the things expected of her and leaving behind no trace of an interesting or even distinct personality. Presumably her mousy character had been influenced by the unorthodox events of her early life: her abandonment as a child when her mother suddenly disappeared one day as well as the resulting stigma of being the daughter of a notorious adulteress. Perhaps Dangereuse believed that she was making up for Aenor’s early deprivation by arranging a brilliant marriage, for undeniably the position into which she finagled Aenor was highly desirable; but on the other hand, there is no evidence that it brought the girl happiness. No more than fourteen and possibly younger, Aenor moved into the Poitevin court under her mother’s watchful eye and set about the difficult task of trying to please a husband who must have regarded her with something less than enthusiasm. Careful to give no offense, she soon realized that her main obligation, the route by which she might gain favor, was to provide her awesome father-in-law with grandchildren. Luckily, she became pregnant within a few months.
There is a story that, a few days before Eleanor’s birth, a pilgrim approached her parents with the mysterious prophecy “From you will come nothing good”; but this legend grew up afterward, and it is customary to remember prophetic statements once time has already demonstrated the course of events. Unfortunately, few details are available about Eleanor’s entry into the world. She was born either in Poitiers or at the castle of Belin near Bordeaux in the year 1122, but the month and day have not survived. She was named after her mother, “alia-Aenor” meaning “the other Aenor,” but as William and his wife had passionately desired a son, their feelings about her must have been mixed. Since they could not have foreseen that one day this daughter, outshining all the Williams preceding her, would change the history of her time, they felt mildly disappointed. A year or two later Aenor gave birth to a second child, and once more it was a girl, Aelith, but always to be known as Petronilla. Soon afterward she again became pregnant, and this time she finally had the son she had wanted so desperately. With the birth of William Aigret, the duchy was assured of an heir.
Eleanor was a remarkably robust child, lively, boisterous, and headstrong. From the beginning, she radiated good health and intelligence, as well as a zest for life reminiscent of the old duke’s, but like both her grandfather and Dangereuse, she possessed a certain restlessness, a lack of discipline that made it difficult for her to tolerate restrictions, an impatience that did not allow her to suffer boredom easily. Modesty did not come naturally to her; she seemed to have a knack for drawing attention to herself, a characteristic that went largely unnoticed in a family of spirited exhibitionists. No one took the trouble to put her in her place.
She could hardly help knowing that she was not ordinary. Her grandfather called himself “Duke of the Entire Monarchy of the Aquitainians,” and her family tree sagged under the titled weight of counts, dukes, and conquerors. The ancestral palace at Poitiers was already many centuries old. In Merovingian times it had served as the seat of justice, and in the tenth century Duke William V remodeled it and began construction of the Great Hall. (Today, after many additions, some of them made by Eleanor herself, her ancestral home still stands in Poitiers and still serves as the Palace of justice.) During the long sunny days of her childhood Eleanor and Petronilla must have romped together in the palace garden. At midday the shadowy passageways inside the castle might be gray and dank, but outside, the sun’s rays beat down vertically from a steel-white sky and bounced off the helmets of the soldiers pacing the ramparts. In the garden she could have crawled beneath the leafy branches of trees drooping heavily with pears, peaches, lemons, pomegranates, and quince, or listened to the grasshoppers sawing harmoniously in the herb beds, where the hot air hung heavily with the smells of horehound, wild myrrh, and coriander.
In the evenings there would be entertainment in the Great Hall, and it is not difficult to conjure an image of Eleanor mesmerized by jongleur and storyteller. The hall would be decorated with flowers, the floors strewn with fresh green rushes; the ladies in their brightly colored gowns with long sleeves trailing on the ground and mantles fastened at the breast with ornate pins would wear golden bands around their hair or braids plaited with embroidered ribbons. As the air quivered with the clamor of horns and bells, there would come a procession of other-worldly creatures who could not have helped but delight the young Eleanor: acrobats jumping and twisting, marionettes dancing, jugglers tossing balls and silvery knives high into the air. Later would come the storytellers casting spells with their tales of Arthur and Charlemagne and Roland, of fair Helen and weeping Dido, of Julius Ceasar, who was so brave that he crossed the sea without invoking the name of Christ. Far into the night past matins the candles sputtered hot wax and the fire in the great hearth cast amber shadows on the jongleurs, who sang the Troubadour’s verses about noble ladies graciously consenting to give their love to “gentle men.” No lovesick maidens were these women but vigorous, sensual beings who freely gave and took pleasure.
Eleanor was never happier than when sitting in the Great Hall, but of course the verses were not always intelligible to her. One of her grandfather’s most popular poems, a ribald tale that later formed the basis for one of Boccaccio’s Decameron stories, told of a young man’s amorous adventures while walking through the Auvergne disguised as a pilgrim. The narrator, whom one can imagine to have been William himself, stops at a castle where he meets Dame Ann and Lady Eleanor, two sisters whose husbands happen to be away. Slyly pretending to be mute, he speaks gibberish to the sisters, who decide to offer him a meal while they carefully look him over and decide if he might be shamming. After they have fed him, they further test the young man’s dumbness, for if he is truly mute, “what we do will ne’er be told by him.” Stripping their guest naked, they bring out a ferocious red cat with long whiskers and cruel claws, which they drag along his back. “With the anguish I turn pale,” moans the narrator, but despite the dozens of wounds on his back he manages to remain silent.
“Sister,” says the delighted Dame Ann, “he’s mute indeed. I think we may prepare ourselves for sport and play.” After preparing a hot bath for their guest, Ann and Eleanor are ready for serious business. Describing a typical male fantasy, the narrator tells us that he and the randy sisters go to bed for eight days, an experience that leaves him somewhat the worse for wear:
How much I tupped them you shall hear:
A hundred eighty-eight times or near,
So that I almost stripped my gear
And broke my equipment;
I could never list the ills I got—
Too big a shipment.
Presiding over the merriment at the ducal palace was the old troubadour himself, who no longer roamed the countryside acting out his erotic fantasies, or if he did, the chroniclers did not consider his wenching scandalous enough to record. Then in his fifties, he was forced by old age to settle down and worry about the state of his soul. After Philippa’s death, his estrangement from the Church had begun, evidently, to weigh heavily enough that he made concessions in order to have the ban of excommunication lifted. In 1119, he had joined King Alfonso I of Aragon in a Crusade against the Almoravide Moors, but whether he undertook this campaign out of religious zeal or for more mundane reasons is debatable. A likely explanation is that his long-discarded first wife, Ermengarde, seemed determined to make trouble for him. At Fontevrault she had grown intimate with Philippa, and it is safe to assume that the conversations between the two cast-off ex-wives frequently focused, in the most uncomplimentary way, on the man they had in common and on his new mistress. Full of sympathy for Philippa’s situation, Ermengarde took upon herself the task of avenging her unhappy friend. Philippa’s death brought her storming down from the north of Poitou with the remarkable demand that she be reinstated as duchess of Aquitaine. After twenty-eight years of separation, it seems unlikely that Ermengarde actually wished to resume living with William. Clearly, however, she wished to harass the duke, as well as the viscountess of Châtellerault. In October 1119, she made an unannounced appearance at a council being held by Pope Calixtus II at Reims, petitioning the pope to personally excommunicate William and oust Dangereuse so that she, Ermengarde, might resume her rightful place. Although the pope declined to accommodate her, the reappearance of this alarming specter must have made William nervous, and at that juncture Moorish Spain must have seemed an infinitely more desirable place than Aquitaine, where there was always the possibility of an encounter with the rampaging Ermengarde.
In those last years William determined to change his ways. Convinced that he must submit to God’s will, he regretfully vowed to abandon his love of debauchery. “My friends were Joy and Chivalry,” he wrote, “but I from both must parted be.” His flame burning at medium-low, he seemed indifferent to currents of political unrest trickling throughout his domains. The year of Eleanor’s birth, he lost Toulouse to twenty-year-old Alphonse-Jourdain, the youngest son of the Crusader Raymond of Saint-Gilles. This time he felt too weary to further pursue his dead wife’s bothersome inheritance. As the year 1126 began, William’s vitality began to ebb, and after an illness, he died on February 10.
The main lines of Eleanor’s character were established in those early years when her grandfather’s court was the center of western European culture. With his death, both the domain and the literary salon that he had created passed to Eleanor’s twenty-seven-year-old father, who, lacking literary gifts of his own, had nonetheless studied music and possessed sufficient appreciation of the arts to continue drawing talented poets to the Poitevin court. If William IX had considered women—writing about them, courting and seducing them—to be his main vocation in life, he still took seriously his executive duties as duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou. In comparison, his son William X was a weak man with a complex character that prevented him from paying strict attention to matters of importance. Like other sons of famous men, William lived all his life with memories of a brilliantly gifted father against whom he had never been able to compete. He himself was a giant in physical stature, which in the twelfth century meant that he was over six feet tall, and all accounts indicate that he possessed the grace and charm characteristic of the family. But he had failed to inherit the Troubadour’s intelligence, his political acumen, and sound judgment, an unfortunate deficiency because during his reign Aquitaine no longer enjoyed the unchallenged political supremacy of previous years. The main characteristics known about William are his quick temper, his penchant for picking quarrels, and his stubbornness; he tended to make snap decisions and, once having made up his mind, adhered to his chosen course regardless of the consequences. In any case it was, ironically, this very ineffectualness in dealing with ordinary stresses of life that was to have such fateful consequences in shaping his eldest daughter’s destiny.
Before Eleanor was seven, she had attained a degree of sophistication appropriate to her rank. Unlike most of her contemporaries, male and especially female, she was carefully educated. In this, her family can be counted as unusual, because generally speaking, it was thought better that women remain unlettered. Rather they should know how to spin and sew, embroider and sing, look straight ahead with unaffected quietness, and behave with neither prudery nor overfamiliarity. In these particular areas Eleanor showed little aptitude. On the other hand, she was an excellent student who had a quick intelligence and the type of mind that delighted in acquiring knowledge. At an early age she was taught to read and write, probably by the resident chaplain, who would have shown her how to hold a wax tablet on her right knee and copy with an ivory stylus the alphabet from the Disticha Catonis, the common beginner’s reader. She would also have received instruction in the rudiments of counting, first using her fingers as an abacus and then, for higher sums, seedpods strung along a stick. She must have studied Latin literature and perhaps a little astronomy, at least enough to name the constellations.
Eleanor’s mother, and undoubtedly her grandmother as well, played a significant role in her general upbringing. Following the educational system of the nobility, Aenor would have been responsible for not only Eleanor and Petronilla but also the daughters of other noble families sent to her for instruction in manners and housewifery, just as their brothers came to William for education in knighthood. The palace on the Clain undoubtedly swarmed with maidens who, under Aenor’s tutelage, received instruction in embroidery and weaving, in the management of a baronial household, in singing, playing simple accompaniments on the harp, and speaking politely to their elders. Girls of the twelfth century learned to ride well and to become adept at falconry. Other skills including games of chess, checkers, and back-gammon were considered important too.
As a child, Eleanor grew especially fond of her Uncle Raymond, although the big handsome boy, only eight years her senior, seemed more like a brother than an uncle. Philippa’s last-born, brought forth in Toulouse that very same year that William had left her for Dangereuse, was tall, blond, and powerfully built. Landless from birth, now motherless and fatherless, he appeared indifferent to his dismal heritage. As a portionless younger son, he rightfully should have been destined for the Church, a vocation he dismissed as lacking in the proper splendor. Accomplishments such as reading and writing he disdained to learn, but he knew all the troubadours’ songs and made himself respected at the palace for his immense strength. Because he could bend an iron bar, the awed children called him Hercules. Then Eleanor saw her special uncle no more. He had gone away, she learned, across a mist-shrouded channel to seek his fortune in a chilly land where the untamed natives clad themselves in wolfskins, although the king of the English had taken a liking to the boy and treated him as kindly as if he had been his own dead son. But she would never forget the laughing boy with his sensitive spirit and mighty body.
While the ancestral palace at Poitiers was home, Eleanor gradually became acquainted with the rest of her father’s sunlit realm, where life was by turns impetuous and languid. Weeks and sometimes months of each year were spent on ducal progresses throughout the land, and on these migrations the family, leading a life appropriate to its exalted rank, would be surrounded by a suite large enough to people a small town: minstrels, notaries and scribes, chaplains and clerks, cooks, falconers, and scores of humbler servants. While still a small child, Eleanor had seen the grape harvest in Cognac and she had breathed the fishy breezes at Talmont, where the tiny village crowned a rocky headland and the church, teetering on the edge of the Gironde cliff, had a nave that fell into the sea. She knew a place near Poitiers on the far bank of the Clain where there was a hermit’s cell carved with snakes; she knew that on a certain road near Maillezais her Aunt Agnes presided over an abbey and that at Blaye there was a forge where the armorers repaired her father’s traveling gear. She came to recognize castles and keeps, knowing which castellans gave lavish banquets and patronized the finest jongleurs and which chatelaines had been immortalized in the troubadours’ cansos. From the uplands of the Limousin to the port of Niort in the marshy, mosquito-ridden west, from the forests of Poitou to the foothills of the Pyrenees, she was beginning to put down a taproot in her homeland.
Very often one of these leisurely chevauchées ended at the tiled fountains and semitropical gardens of the Ombrière Palace in Bordeaux. This powerful fortress squatted at the southeast corner of the old Roman wall that girdled the city, and from its buttressed walls and stout rectangular keep Eleanor could gaze down at the silken sails rocking gently on the waters of the Garonne. Here at the Ombrière, William received his vassals, great and small, signed petitions, and heard the feuds and disputes that largely accounted for much of his administrative business. On these trips, and at the court in Poitiers, Eleanor learned a great deal about politics, although this certainly was not William’s intention, nor did he take any special pains to rear her for a position of authority. Rather, she absorbed politics by a process of osmosis, just as she soaked up the literature created by Cercamon. Marcabru, and other troubadours at her father’s court, and she grew up believing that affairs of state were a province not necessarily restricted to men. Scarcely a day passed that she did not hear her father inveighing against turbulent vassals who resisted his authority at the slightest opportunity. At that time, William’s grand duchy was quickly being transformed into a shaky house of cards, and even though culturally it stood as the foremost land in Europe, politically and economically it was falling behind the north. Such omens of danger did not concern Eleanor, who saw only the importance of her father’s position and, reflected, her own. Aware, of course, that her brother, William Aigret, took precedence, she still had, as the eldest child, a part to play in the day-to-day affairs of government. Her name first appeared in the records in July 1129, when she, along with her brother and parents, witnessed a charter deeding certain privileges to the Abbey of Montierneuf, her grandfather’s burial place. A quill pen was used to make crosses after each name, except that of William Aigret whose tiny baby fingers were dipped lightly in ink and the imprint pressed upon the parchment. In March of the following year, the signatures of parents and two children appeared on another charter granting the brothers of the Church of Saint-Hilaire the right to cut firewood from the forest of Mouliere.
When Eleanor was eight, however, the quartet of signatures abruptly ceased. Tragedy swept the ducal family; within a span of a few months, both Aenor and William Aigret were dead in Talmont, leaving Eleanor the prospective heir of her father’s domains. The death of Aenor did more than remove the warmth of a mother’s affection; it also took away a stabilizing influence in Eleanor’s life. She had always been defiant and independent, a child who took direction reluctantly. Her restless temperament, her vanities and self-centeredness, her bold flirtatious manner combined with a certain tomboyishness, kept her grandmother and ladies-in-waiting in a state of apprehension. One can imagine that there were those who said she needed a good whipping and others who ascribed, but not in Dangereuse’s hearing, Eleanor’s willfulness to bad blood, but the fact remained that more and more the girl was left to her own devices. That she began to develop into a strong-minded young woman thoroughly determined to behave as she pleased is not surprising, because the women she most admired had been cast from similar molds. Innumerable times she had listened to the history of her family: the story of her paternal grandmother riding into Toulouse to mount the throne that an accident of sex had denied her; from her maternal grandmother’s lips she had repeatedly heard the now-inflated romantic tale of how Dangereuse had fled the castle of Châtellerault, riding into the forest of Mouliere with arms clasped around her lover’s waist, defying Church, lawful spouses, and public opinion to remain proudly at her lord’s side.
And if these ladies were not sufficiently heroic, there was Radegonde, one of the patron saints of Poitiers. Since Eleanor had been a small child, she had ridden down the hill to the southernmost gate of the city where Radegonde had founded a convent almost six centuries earlier, and there in the dark crypt containing the saint’s coffin, she would place beside the tomb a tiny waxen heart and a lighted candle as she made her wish. In the sixth century, according to legend. Queen Radegonde had fled the Merovingian kingdom of the Franks, her brutal and licentious husband Clothaire in hot pursuit, and hidden herself in a newly sown cornfield, clutching her jewels and her two women companions. By God’s mercy, the corn immediately sprang up around them, the tall stalks hiding Radegonde only minutes before Clothaire came riding by. The learned queen was consecrated as a nun and later came to Poitiers, where she established the convent of Sainte-Croix. It was there that she burned with Platonic love for the Italian poet-priest Fortunatus, “the delight of my soul,” and there that she served him exquisite meals on dishes of crystal and silver. From the lives of these women Eleanor, as a small child, developed attitudes and feelings that she was never able wholly to escape: that a woman need not accept the fate men might decree, that she could take her life into her own hands and shape it to suit her heart’s desire.
Meanwhile, Eleanor’s father seemed to have paid scant attention to his daughter’s development, since he was constantly embroiled ,in troubles so all-consuming that he could think of little else. In his few years as duke, he had acquired the reputation of being a hothead. Always quick to provoke a fight, he had grown increasingly obstinate after the deaths of his wife and son. In 1130, for instance, when the Chair of Peter was being claimed by two popes, he brought down a host of difficulties upon his own head by enthusiastically supporting the antipope, a cardinal who called himself Anacletus II. The fact that an important lord like the duke of Aquitaine would fail to support Innocent II, who occupied the Holy See, was serious enough to aggravate the schism in the Church at that time and bring the renowned Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, sallying from his cloister to deal with this threat to “God’s business.”
No churchman of the day was more admired than Bernard. Unquestionably the most powerful single individual of the twelfth century, a maker of popes, a chastiser of kings, who listened to his advice and sometimes followed it, he had a gift for oratory that won him the name Doctor Mellifluus,“the honey-sweet doctor,” but his contemporaries claimed that the sight of him was sufficient to persuade audiences even before he opened his lips. In 1115, the twenty-five-year-old Bernard had taken thirteen Cistercian monks and settled in a wooded place in Champagne called Valley of the Wormwood, where, emphasizing poverty and manual labor, they built the Abbey of Clairvaux while sleeping on the ground and existing on coarse barley bread and boiled beech leaves. Not surprisingly, he nurtured a grim disapproval for the black-robed monks of Cluny and deplored the pernicious influence of their gilded cathedrals and stained-glass windows. Regarded as a saint during his lifetime and canonized after his death, Bernard utterly rejected the world in favor of the austerity and silence of the cloister, but, ironically, there was no monk who lived more frequently and for longer periods outside his abbey. When he learned that Duke William of Aquitaine supported the antipope, he hurried to Poitiers for the purpose of reasoning with the duke and bringing him into the camp of Innocent II. Meeting at the Abbey of Montierneuf, the two men discussed the matter for an entire week, after which time the duke, apparently moved by Bernard’s charismatic personality and his formidable powers of persuasion, expressed willingness to break with Anacletus.
Yet scarcely had Bernard left Poitiers before William resumed his militant partisanship of the antipope. In fact, he raced willy-nilly ahead and turned with even greater fury against the supporters of Innocent: The altar stone on which Bernard had said Mass was smashed, and William personally drove from Poitiers every ecclesiastic who supported Innocent and then proceeded to fill the offices with his own appointees. These actions inevitably led to his excommunication.
When Eleanor was thirteen, her father again clashed with the Church, and in that year of 1135 people said that God’s patience with her father had ended and that he had reached down to rescue the duke from damnation. At the time this momentous incident took place, William was away from home at his chateau in Parthenay, but God, through his emissary Bernard, found him just the same. News of a miracle travels on ghostly wings of air, and before her father returned to Poitiers, Eleanor must have already heard the incredible story being whispered among her high-born ladies and spoken of openly in kitchen and stable. Once more Bernard had come all the way from Champagne to seek out the intractable duke, but when he arrived at the château. William refused to see him. At last cooler heads prevailed, and then he had listened, full of truculence, as the holy man urged him to abandon the evil Anacletus and return to God. As it took a hard man to withstand the uncompromising eloquence of Bernard of Clairvaux, William gradually began to weaken and grudgingly promised that he would acknowledge Innocent. He would not, however, reinstate the expelled bishops; as a knight he could not, for he had sworn never to permit them in his domain again. Bernard sighed and stared at the duke in his deplorably fine and precious raiment, his huge muscular body radiating good health. Once, some fifteen years earlier, he had thundered, “Wine and white bread benefit the body, not the soul. The soul is not fattened out of frying pans.” If William was content to leave his soul malnourished, Bernard would find other means of fattening it.
The next morning the square outside the château was packed with people from leagues around; the lamest peasant had risen from his pallet to crowd into the Church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre, where the worshipers all but mobbed the saint before he said Mass. Hardly anyone in the town was absent, including the excommunicated William, who, unable to step foot over the threshold, skulked outside on the porch, pacing fretfully to and fro as he watched Bernard at the altar. After the pax, still holding the Host upon the paten, Bernard turned around and caught sight of William in the doorway. With a sudden burst of inspiration, he slowly began to make his way down the aisle, the Host held triumphantly before him, his gaze never departing from the figure of the duke. If William could not come to God, then he would bring God to William. He called out to the duke, “We have petitioned you and you have spurned us. In the recent council, the servants of God at your footstool you have treated with contempt.” Trampling each other to inch close behind Bernard, the townspeople saw their prince staring at Bernard in amazement.
Thrusting the Host toward William, Bernard challenged: “Lo, here has come forth to you the Virgin’s son, the head and lord of that Church that you persecute. Your judge is present, in whose name every knee in heaven, on earth, below the earth is bowed. Do you spurn him? Do you treat him with the contempt with which you treat his servants?”
William, pale and silent, began to sway like a tree trunk, and then his whole body stiffened, and he fell face downward at the holy man’s feet. When the duke’s chevaliers ran to lift him up, he collapsed again. Afterward people could not remember all the things said by the holy man, but some swore that the duke had groaned like an epileptic and foamed at the mouth. They had been there and had seen it with their own eyes.
Bernard prodded the body at his feet, commanding William to rise. “The bishop of Poitiers whom you drove from his church is here. Go and make peace with him. Pledge yourself to him in the kiss of peace and restore him to his see. Then make satisfaction to God; render to him glory for your contempt.”
Slowly William struggled to his feet and staggered toward the hated bishop to give him the kiss of peace. When he returned to Poitiers a few days later, Eleanor could see a change in him, for his heart and mind had truly been seared at Parthenay, and it took some time before he recovered. Later that year he founded, as an act of reparation, a Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Saintes. He no longer growled curses upon his enemies, at least not within people’s hearing, and his face seemed sunk in melancholy lines for no apparent reason. Thinking seriously about the future for the first time since Aenor’s death, he reminded himself that it was long past time when he should have remarried, not that he had ever intended to do otherwise, but, easily distracted, he had shoved the problem aside to reconsider it at some later date. Although he had two illegitimate sons, William and Joscelin, he now resolved to beget a male child to inherit his duchy. Furthermore, he turned his attention to his daughters, who had reached marriageable age. While he berated himself for foolishly neglecting their future, there was good reason why he had avoided thinking about this business of succession and the dire consequences that would result should he die without male issue.
The law was far from fixed on the subject. Even though Eleanor might legally inherit, at the same time it was believed that a woman could not properly fulfill the obligations of a vassal. For one thing, she could not undertake military service and therefore might have to step aside when the forty-days-a-year soldiering had to be rendered. For this reason, feudal domains were kept, whenever possible, in the hands of men, and William understood that there were many in his own land who would take advantage of the situation. Had not his mother been evicted from the countesship of Toulouse by her uncle, Raymond of Saint-Gilles? Had not he himself a younger brother who, by ironic happenstance, was also named Raymond? Although he knew that the lad was far away in Outremer, where he had schemed his way into the lordship of the rich fief of Antioch, still it was wise to take no chances.
In 1136, in an effort to straighten out his life, William announced to Eleanor and Petronilla that soon they would have a stepmother. For some time he had been eyeing a young woman who pleased him, but unfortunately Emma, the daughter of Viscount Aymar of Limoges, was already married to Bardon of Cognac. Now, by good fortune, Emma had become a widow, and before Bardon had scarcely been laid to rest, William arranged for their betrothal. Throughout Aquitaine it was said that William had become a changed man, but if the Lord had humbled and softened the arrogant duke, he had not seen fit to give him common sense; he had selected a bride from the Limousin, where the nobility had been periodically at odds with the dukes of Aquitaine for a century or more.
The news of William’s betrothal brought immediate repercussions. In the Limousin, secret councils were hastily summoned among the counts of Angoulême, the viscounts of Limoges, the lords of Lusignan, and others with cause for concern. These testy vassals had chafed under the Aquitainian yoke for generations. If Emma, a possible coheiress of Limoges, bore a son—and even if she did not—it would mean an increase in William’s power over them. Clearly something must be done. For some weeks the plotting and scheming continued, and the end of it was that Count William of Angoulême volunteered to carry off the young woman and marry her himself, a decision in which Emma was not consulted. When news of Emma’s abduction and marriage reached the duke, he publicly uttered no word of complaint; in fact he reacted with such good grace that suspicions were immediately aroused, and the Limousin girded itself for a blood bath. Months passed without retribution, but still there was no doubt among the Limousin chieftains as to how the matter would end. William was a man of uncertain temper, and sooner or later he would wreak vengeance.
In the meantime, William’s discouragement deepened, and he longed to escape the disorders of his realm. In the summer of 1136, he received word that his northern neighbor, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, was planning an invasion of Normandy; the duke of Aquitaine, among others, was invited to aid in this ambitious enterprise. On many occasions Eleanor had heard her father speak of Geoffrey Plantagenet, although not always in complimentary terms. Geoffrey, she knew, was extraordinarily good looking. Geoffrey le Bel, people called him, “Geoffrey the Handsome.” Energetic and dashing, he had a certain flair that lesser lords tried to emulate, although probably no one else could have gotten away with wearing in his cap a sprig of planta genesta, the common broom plant. Geoffrey had married well, and even though he detested his cold, haughty wife, Matilda was nonetheless the daughter of King Henry of England, and it was through her that he was able to claim Normandy. Lately William had grown to admire the stylish Geoffrey, so that when the invitation arrived, he immediately accepted, perhaps hoping that a shift of scenery in the company of the buoyant count would act as a tonic to his flagging spirits. There followed a time of enthusiastic activity as the grindstones hummed along the edges of steel swords and the forge in the smithy blazed to shape new shields and hammer out stirrups, spears, and maces. In September the new arms were ready, and William’s troops rode forth on their great chargers.
To Eleanor’s surprise, however, her father returned unexpectedly only a few weeks later, the campaign having been temporarily abandoned when Geoffrey received a foot wound. After William’s return to Poitiers, he seemed more melancholy than ever. He would sit before the leaping fire in the Great Hall staring fitfully into the flames and leaving the wine in his goblet untouched. When he spoke, it was, as often as not, of nightmares, terrible anguished dreams filled with scattered cries, disjointed ravings, the air torn from earth to heaven by shrill, heart-rending screams. Once as immune to the inhumanity of war as any, now William felt hounded by memories of the devastation in which he had recently participated, and for the first time in his life he lost his appetite for combat, an alarming development for a medieval prince with a host of enemies.
At the beginning of that winter of 1137, he decided to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela, in the westernmost corner of Spain. Once and for all he would cleanse his soul and seek the Lord’s guidance in sorting out his tangled life; when he returned, he would begin anew with a nubile young maiden—whom, he could not say—but she would bear him a castleful of sons. Nor would he forget his daughters, for whom he planned to arrange brilliant matches. For a change his eyes shone, and he seemed his old self. There was no question of taking Eleanor and Petronilla with him, but on the other hand he worried about leaving them behind, unprotected, in Poitiers. Owing to the unrest in his land and particularly to his recent experience with the kidnaping of Emma, he felt it wisest to take precautions lest his daughters be snatched from him as well.
At the back of his mind may have lurked another anxiety: Eleanor, exceptionally beautiful at fifteen, had matured into a saucy, hot-blooded damsel, and perhaps he feared that, unproperly chaperoned, she might grant excessive courtesies to some ardent knight. All contemporary accounts of Eleanor, even when she had grown old, emphasized a radiant loveliness that went far beyond the ordinary, but unfortunately there is not a single word about what she looked like. If she conformed to twelfth-century Europe’s ideal standards of feminine beauty, which rarely varied from one romance to the next, she must have been blond, with gray or blue eyes set wide apart. Her nose would have been straight, her skin white, and she would certainly have had a long slender neck, firm breasts, and perfect teeth. Apart from the physical, there is substantial evidence pointing to the fact that she was no shy, helpless maiden; she comported herself freely, laughing and flirting with the adoring young men of the court, taking charge of any gathering with sophisticated self-possession. She was the rose of the world, and she knew it, having already been told so many times in song and verse. Witty and full of irreverent high spirits, she had a streak of mischievousness that she shared with her sister, who was her inseparable companion. In spite of the fact that noble young ladies were not encouraged to behave impertinently, the two girls liked to amuse themselves by comically aping the speech and mannerisms of pompous dignitaries. In a court where minstrel and mummer were ceded positions of importance, these talents were more admired than censured.
Whatever William’s reasons, he decided to avoid trouble by taking Eleanor and Petronilla with him as far as Bordeaux, where he would deposit them in the custody of that city’s archbishop, a stern but kindly man and one of the few loyal vassals remaining to William. Throughout Aquitaine, the nobility’s first reaction to news of his forthcoming pilgrimage was skepticism. A quarrelsome man like the duke, they said loudly, could only be seeking Saint James’s help in revenging himself on his enemies. And since he had many, the land reverberated faintly with tremors of anxiety.
Early in the spring, the warm sun began to thaw the farmland and melt away the debris of winter. Rains swelled the rivers and streams, and although the rutted roads oozed with brown mud, William left for Bordeaux before Lent with a few servingmen and his daughters. A week later, having settled the damsels in the Ombrière Palace and promising to return soon wearing a cockleshell badge, the sign of a successful pilgrimage, he donned a gray cloak of rough sackcloth and a pilgrim’s hat. Clutching his walking stick, he set out on foot down the road toward Gascony with only a few knights and servants. In many ways the pilgrimage would be an arduous one, but still he looked forward to the journey and to reaching Compostela in time to celebrate Easter. In his baggage he carried the Codex Calixtus, a newly written guidebook for Compostela-bound pilgrims, a handy manual advising that the Gascons were hospitable, that the Basques demanded excessive tolls, and other helpful information. Along the way William fell in with other pilgrims, and the hours passed in gossip, news, and the singing of psalms. The weather was fine and warm as he began the gradual green climb into the foothills of the Pyrenees, trudging beside pastures where fat cows slouched, up the twisting and turning slopes of valleys, through the misty pass at Roncesvalles where Roland fell, past the country of the Navarrese into Pamplona. A week passed and a second and then a month or more.
On the evening of April 8. 1137, William and his weary band broke march beside an inviting stream in eager anticipation of bathing and drinking after many footsore leagues on the highway. When the duke ordered water and fish to be drawn from the stream, his men warned that the waters in that region were said to be dangerous. William, a lover of good food and wine, scoffed. He was, as usual, ravenous.
The next morning, which was Good Friday, there were gray shadows around his eyes, and his hair was drenched with sweat. Frightened, his men begged him to stop and rest, but William insisted upon rejoining the throngs on the road to Santiago, only five or six miles distant. Hour after hour, he stumbled slowly along, faintly singing, his hands folded over his chest in prayer, until he was capable of walking no farther. His men laid him by the side of the road and watched his huge body disintegrate with terrifying swiftness. Later they would say that it had been the foul water or the tainted fish, but in truth they were far from certain what had made their master sicken. Soon it was apparent, even to William, that nothing could be done; he would not recover. On the near edge of death, the maladroit duke showed more political judgment than he ever had during life. Lips swollen and dry, he whispered in halting words his last will and testament:
To his beloved daughter Eleanor, his sole heir, he bequeathed his fief, a rich and now violent legacy.
To his overlord, the king of France, he bestowed both his domains and his daughter, in the hope that the worthy Louis would guard both treasures until he had found the new duchess a suitable husband to rule over the land of love. In the meantime, the king had the right to enjoy the use of Eleanor’s lands.
He insisted that his death be kept a closely guarded secret until these matters reached the ears of Louis VI, extracting promises that his men would cover the mountain leagues across the Pyrenees with all possible haste and stop at Bordeaux only long enough to notify the archbishop. The stray ends tidied at last, the plums in his keeping safely distributed to the best of his ability, William fell silent.
His men, weeping aloud, carried their dying master to the vaulted cavern of Compostela’s great cathedral, where he expired “most piously” after receiving Holy Communion. There, beneath the botafumeiro, the awesome silver censer swinging in smoky arcs from its ceiling pulley, the last Duke William of Aquitaine was laid to rest at the foot of the high altar, by the side of the Galilean fisherman whom Christ turned into a fisher of men.