The summer promised to be torrid. In Paris the stones of the Cité Palace were white and burning in the great heat of the day, and the air hung heavy and dead. As there had been no rain recently, the odeur de merde in the streets was never absent from anyone’s nostrils, and black masses of flies clung indiscriminately to refuse and human alike. To escape these discomforts, Louis VI had moved a few leagues north of the city, to the suburbs where he owned a hunting lodge. More accurately, he had been transported on a litter, because his corpulence made it virtually impossible for Louis to move himself. There at Béthizy in the waning days of May he lay immobile on a royal couch, a mound of sweating, panting flesh. If not for the sin of gluttony, which he wore like a badge, he might have been known as Louis the Great or even Louis the Practical. As it was, his people had dubbed him, with appropriate candor, Louis le Gros. Louis the Fat had not always been obese, but in recent years he could no longer mount a horse or a woman, nor could he lift his enormous bulk out of bed. He could only eat and worry.
Louis was not, however, the only apprehensive person at Béthizy. Gathered anxiously around his couch were Abbot Suger, his lifelong confidant and chief minister, and a number of barons, bishops, and priests, the latter having been summoned by Suger should an emergency suddenly arise. The king was suffering from a “flux of the bowels,” an attack of the same dysentery that had struck him down two years earlier. He had recovered from the first siege, but this time his condition appeared grave. During those sultry days the smell in his room was foul and suffocating and, although medicines had been prescribed for the diarrhea and the basin near his cot was frequently emptied, his ministers choked when they approached their sovereign. For all his great fat and disease-devoured body, Louis’s head remained clear, and he fretted incessantly over matters he could no longer control.
God had blessed him with six sons but, in his infinite wisdom, had seen fit to remove the eldest just as he was approaching maturity. As a child, Philip had been Louis’s favorite, but with the passage of time Louis had to confess that the boy brought him little joy. When the heir to the throne was barely pubescent, Louis had him anointed, and the vassals of all France bent the knee in allegiance, but afterward the boy no longer listened to his father. The high standards that Louis set for him, those that he himself followed, were disdained, and scoldings had little effect. The boy, says Walter Map, “strayed from the paths of conduct traveled by his father and, by his overweening pride and tyrannical arrogance, made himself a burden to all.” Philip’s adolescent behavior problems, excusable in an ordinary boy but alarming in a youth destined for the Frankish throne, were abruptly solved one day in October 1131, when he and a group of companions were riding along the Seine in the market section of Paris known as the Greve. Suddenly a black pig darted out of a dung heap along the quay and tripped Philip’s running horse, causing it to fall and catapult the heir over its head. The fall “so dreadfully fractured his limbs that he died on the day following” without regaining consciousness.
Louis VI’s second son was cast from an entirely different mold. Mild and sweet-tempered, Louis Capet the Young had been bred for the Church, a calling that seemed made to measure for his placid nature. His life had been spent in the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, immured among the monks, and even though Philip’s death briefly returned him to his father for anointing, even though he had recently received instruction befitting a knight, the musty perfume of the cloister still clung to him. His piety and humility, which no one could fail to see, did not overplease his father, who feared these qualities might be mistaken for weakness and who hoped that by the time he matured, he would develop the strengths required for kingship. Aware of the priests hovering in his antechamber, ready to administer the last rites, Louis understood only too well that his son might be denied the precious years he desperately needed.
It was in this agitated frame of mind that Louis the Fat received the couriers of the late Duke William of Aquitaine and learned that his most bullheaded vassal lay dead at Compostela since Easter. If the news of William’s last will and testament did not cause a spontaneous remission of the dysentery, at least it revived the ailing king. Scarcely able to conceal his joy over this unexpected bit of good fortune, he nevertheless preserved his customary grandeur of manner by asking the Aquitainians to retire while he discussed the matter with his council. Alone with his advisers, Suger tells us, Louis burst into exclamations of ecstasy; he literally stammered with delight. Had he not spent twenty-nine years attempting to extend the boundaries of his uninspiring domain? Set against the acreage of his own paltry kingdom—a strip of land mainly confined to the Île-de-France, Orléans, and part of Berry—the young duchess’s fief was a formidable one. Who better than he could realize the significance of William’s golden bequest? It would bring the richest fief in Europe under the crown and extend Frankish influence beyond Louis’s wildest daydreams; in fact, the addition of Aquitaine to any domain would automatically lift it to prominence among nations. This munificent prize, dropped into his palsied hands like a plump chicken into a watery broth, was not to be allowed a means of escape. Duke William had implored Louis to find his daughter a husband. Who more suitable than his son and heir, Louis? Rarely did the personal and the political coincide so neatly.
Louis the Fat lost no time. Within hours, plans were under way to secure Aquitaine to the crown, and the resourceful Abbot Suger was designated as principal organizer of the wedding arrangements. The bishop of Chartres was dispatched on a secret mission to Bordeaux, where he would ostensibly pay his respects to the duchess but, in reality, make certain of Eleanor’s safety. According to the southern emissaries, the heiress was under heavy guard at the Ombrière Palace, but Louis wished to take no risks. If reports were to be believed, Aquitaine swarmed with anarchists who would not hesitate to filch their liege lady from her rightful destiny. With all the dangers menacing the roads, Louis could not expect Eleanor to travel alone to the heart of France; instead, it was necessary to make a special expedition to bring her back. Nor was it enough to simply fetch her. It had to be accomplished in a style befitting this unprecedented occasion, with a pageantry gorgeous enough to impress the frivolous Aquitainians.
On June 18, 1137, a mighty cortege threaded its way over the hills of the Parisian suburbs in the direction of Orléans. Under the blue and gold banners of the fleur-de-lis they marched, two by two, first the heralds and standard-bearers, then the commanders: Count Theobald of Champagne and Count Ralph of Vermandois, who was the king’s cousin and seneschal of France. The two counts, bitter rivals who had been persuaded to bury their hostilities for the occasion, were accompanied by the man unofficially in charge, Abbot Suger. They were followed by the chivalry of France, but in addition to the noblest barons and knights in the land there was a sizable body of squires, infantry, and cavalry. Next came a train of pack animals carrying portable kitchens, tents, provisions, sacks of silver deniers, and presents for the bride. To call this procession of five hundred or more a nuptial escort would not be accurate. It was a veritable army that moved down the highroad, carefully keeping within the king’s lands. In the midst of the column rode the young prince, his eyes tired and bewildered under their pale blond lashes. Ringing in his ears were his father’s fervent words: “My most dear son, may the powerful hand of almighty God, by whose grace kings are enabled to reign, protect thee and thine. Because if I had the misfortune to lose thee and those I send to accompany thee, I should care neither for myself nor for my kingdom.”
Louis the Fat’s precious son was sixteen. Uprooted Unceremoniously from his devotions, he had been washed, combed, and set on a steed facing south. It was not a matter of his questioning his destiny, because he had known for some years that his vocation would not lie in the Church after all and that he would be obliged to marry. But deep within his eyes dwelt fear. Events had moved too swiftly, and he had yet to accustom himself to the curious idea that he would have to sleep with a girl. Had the choice been his, he would have lived his entire life as chastely as the angels in heaven. Women, to him, were needed to preserve the species and provide food and drink, but at the same time they were also the gateway to the devil, in short, necessary but perilous objects. When his forthcoming marriage was spoken of, he smiled with regal good grace, but if the conversation turned coarse, he blushed and lowered his eyes. None of the Franks had seen Eleanor, but they seemed to know everything about his bride-elect: She was fair and white and pink, she had a mouth as soft as an apple blossom and she was also that rarity, a literate woman in an illiterate age. None of this information reassured Louis. Before their departure, his commonsensical father had taken him aside, lecturing him on how to behave: He must conduct himself with dignity and uphold the prestige of the monarchy; he must not arouse hostility by billeting his men in the homes of vassals or plundering their fields for supplies; he must offend no one, especially once he entered Aquitaine. But Louis the Fat had provided no sexual enlightenment.
As the column marched slowly south in the insufferable heat, its reception among the peasants and burghers was not always cordial. To the indignation of more than one town, the king had financed this expedition by a special levy, and the poor grumbled over the additional and, in their opinion, oppressive, tax so that the prince could be married in style. It was no use saying that the marriage could have been executed at far less expense or that the king could have emptied the royal purse. Nevertheless, there were many who roundly cursed the cortege as it passed.
By the time they crossed the Loire near Orléans, the heat was intense, the dust stung the riders’ eyes and parched throats. To escape the glaring sky, they began resting between sunrise and sunset and instead traveling by night; perhaps for this reason they entered Eleanor’s domain without fanfare. On July 1, they arrived in Limoges, just in time for the festival of Saint Martial, the patron of that province, and pitched camp along the banks of the Vienne below the walled town. A great crowd had assembled for the annual feast, among them Count Alphonse-Jourdain of Toulouse, and it was here that the duchess’s friends and enemies learned, to their amazement, of Duke William’s death and Eleanor’s imminent marriage to the heir of France. Obviously, it would have been impossible to conceal the presence of such a sizable army indefinitely but, still, Abbot Suger felt uneasy. Already riders had sped away from Limoges to spread the news, and while Suger thought it unlikely that any of Eleanor’s lawless vassals would be rash enough to cause trouble with the army only a week’s ride from Bordeaux, nevertheless he immediately set about creating a reservoir of good will. Shrewdly, he arranged for young Louis to make a triumphal procession into the city to worship at the shrine of Saint Martial, and he also urged the great lords of the Limousin to attend the wedding.
On the morning of Sunday, July 11, the Capetian cavalcade arrived on the east bank of the Garonne. Had Eleanor climbed to the roof of the Ombrière’s keep at earliest dawn when the air was still cool, she could have watched the troop emerge from the misty hills of Larmont and pitch their richly colored tents in the meadow along the river bank. By noon the field had been transformed into a small-town carnival, the indistinct voices and laughter of knights and the oaths of varlets wafting in tantalizing puffs across the water. Since there was no bridge, small boats plied back and forth throughout the day, ferrying the most important lords into the city, where they were lodged in the ducal palace or in the homes of distinguished burghers. Eleanor’s guardian, Archbishop Geoffrey du Lauroux, had crossed the river himself to welcome Prince Louis and escort him to the archiepiscopal residence. It was on this day, or perhaps the next, that Eleanor met her betrothed for the first time.
Having been exposed to a variety of persons, ideas, and events from earliest childhood, she had developed strong opinions on most subjects; similarly her ideas on the male sex were quite decided: There was no doubt of it, her prince was not a bold cavalier. Still, he did not lack appeal. Louis, scarcely a year older than she, was said to be a virgin. He seemed gentle and courteous, and his tall, slender, blond looks were attractive enough; but clearly he was not a fighter: His overdelicate mouth and sweet, simple smile almost made him look weak-minded. Eleanor surely was not in love with him, indeed it would have been odd if she had felt such an emotion for a husband cast her way by political circumstance. Nevertheless, she would have known boys whose whispered words had made her heart pound and the blood rush into her face and, by contrast, she knew that Louis did not arouse those sensations in her. On closer inspection, he was as pretty as a girl, and yet, whatever else he lacked in the way of masculinity, he did possess a touching sort of charm.
Her reservations about the marriage, which of course were not of the slightest interest to anyone, ran far deeper than the personal qualities of Prince Louis. She had never expected to marry anyone but a high lord, in fact she demanded it as her right. In some respects, Louis satisfied these requirements, but at the same time, she must have believed that he ranked beneath her. A wider and deeper geographical barrier than the blue stream of the Loire stood between France and Aquitaine. To be sure, the Capets were anointed kings, but compared to the rich, cultured dukes of Aquitaine, they were an upstart dynasty who had come to the throne only one hundred and fifty years earlier, when the last descendant of Charlemagne died. The two lands were different worlds, peopled by different races. Between the Teutonized Celts of the north and the southern Celts, steeped in heady memories of the Romans. Goths, and Saracens, there was little community of blood, even less of speech, thought, and temper. For that reason, tensions developed between the French contingent and their southern hosts, each camp viewing the other with a certain amount of polite condescension, if not barely suppressed disdain. Owing to the delirious heat and possibly to the fact that a language barrier existed between those who spoke the langue d‘oc and the langue d’oil, tempers flared.
In the days before the wedding, Eleanor rarely saw Louis alone, but as feast followed feast, she had ample opportunity to observe his reactions to her exuberant countrymen and their bold, daringly clad ladies who sang and jested and drank with merciless enthusiasm. Louis may have been reminded of the popular bon mot, “The Franks to battle, the Provencaux to table,” a remark that seemed amply borne out by the tedious froth of the nuptial festivities.
Day after interminable day passed in feasting. The trestle tables in the Ombrière’s great hall were packed with lords and ladies whose names added up to a roll call of southern chivalry: Thouars, Lusignan, Auvergne. Perigord, Armagnac, Chateauroux, Ventadour, Parthenay, in addition to many more from the petty nobility; there were at least a thousand guests. The banqueting would begin early in the morning and last until midafternoon. “Scarcely the tongue of Cicero could do justice to the munificence of the multiform expenditures that had been made, nor could the pen of Seneca fully describe the variety of meats and rare delicacies that were there.” Such epicurean dishes as might have delighted the palate of Nero were passed among the white-clothed tables in unending succession: Swans decorated with ribbons and green leaves, ducks, geese, cranes, and peppered peacocks, basted roasts of pork hot from the turnspit; from the sea, mullet, sole, lobsters fried in half an egg, oysters, sperlings; sauces spiced with the bouquet of garlic, cumin, sage, and dittany; figs, candied fruits, rice cooked with milk of almond and powdered cinnamon, tarts and junkets. Course after course, washed down with the gifts of Bacchus, came and went until the men had loosened their belts and the ladies in anticipation of their siestas began to drowse and the water in the washing basins grew gray and oily from the dipping of so many greasy hands.
The Aquitainians could not do without entertainment, and there could be heard the sweet rhythms of tambourine and flute, rebec and lute, and throughout it all, the songs of the troubadours. It is probable that this great event drew Cercamon and Marcabru, the troubadour favorites of Duke William X, and perhaps they sang the planhs composed in lament for their patron. “Saint James,” mourned Cercamon, “remember you that knight for whom I kneel and prayers have said.” But surely sadness did not prevail for long, and there were songs of love and sex and springtime on the green. Perhaps Marcabru, that musicman who claimed that no woman had ever loved him, was there with his sweet misogynistic melodies lashing out against the chicanery of unfaithful married women, his “flaming whores,” “Lady Goodand-excited,” “those cunts [who] are nymphos in bed.” The bawdy songs that set the southerners to clapping and laughing only succeeded in shocking the French, particularly the churchmen. “The French clerks looked upon profane and frivolous songs with contempt and condemnation, and would no more have thought of indulging in such pastimes than of consigning those futilities to precious parchment fit to serve for the transcription of lives of saints.”
Certainly Louis was not a lad to disgrace himself before distinguished company, but there was no doubt that he, too, looked overwhelmed and uncomfortable. Plainly he did not have the vaguest idea of how to go about enjoying himself. Eleanor may have been amused as well as disconcerted to discover his lack of sophistication, and it must have confirmed some of her private prejudices about the land that would soon be her home. Bashfulness was not one of her weaknesses. Self-possessed, vivacious, she took charge of the proceedings with an undisputed authority garnered from years of basking in the spotlight. She had learned the art of dispensing hospitality at the courts of men famed for their largesse, and now, an ardent believer in enjoyment, her own as well as others’, she presided over the high table with ease and patience, seemingly oblivious of the guests craning their heads to stare. She performed her role with style, by sending tidbits of succulent game to her viscounts with the request that they do her honor by tasting them, directing the pages to refill with claret the goblets of the ladies, asking her important barons what music they would prefer to hear. With Louis at her side, hour after hour she remained at the high table, accepting her vassals’ salutations and congratulations, returning compliment with compliment.
There were whispers from the tables as many a guest, staring at Louis, murmured that he almost looked like a monk. If these remarks reached Eleanor’s ears, she would have been the first to admit that her betrothed seemed as mild as a lamb. At times during the course of the festivities his grave, vulnerable eyes rested on her with a strange expression of wonderment and puppylike adoration, and Eleanor for her part was an astute enough observer of human beings to comprehend that here was a man susceptible to feminine manipulation. To her, this must have seemed fortunate because she had every intention of remodeling him to suit her specifications. As a first priority, she would make a man of him, perhaps not a warrior like her father and grandfather, for that might be too tall an order, but a man just the same, one who would scorn “a cow’s death” abed. And later there would be time enough for other fantasies, because her head swam thickly with ideas to add luster to her name and the house of her forebears.
On Sunday, July 25, Eleanor and Louis rode through the cobbled streets of Bordeaux, past housefronts draped with banners and garlands, to the Cathedral of Saint André. Amid the ringing of bells, the heralding of trumpets and the shouting of her people come to do their duchess honor and have themselves a holiday, they entered the smoky dimness of the church to be married by her guardian, Archbishop Geoffrey. After the ceremony they solemnly bent their heads before him to receive the golden diadems that formally recognized the couple as duke and duchess of Aquitaine.
Despite the warm welcome Louis had received in Bordeaux, Abbot Suger felt far from tranquil. Some of Eleanor’s important vassals, in particular the count of Angoulême, who had heisted Duke William’s fiancée, had failed to attend the marriage celebration, and now the abbot’s agents reported that other hostile barons were planning to stir up mischief. Thus, while the royal couple still knelt before the altar at Saint André, the Frankish camp across the Garonne was being hastily dismantled. Tents struck, pack animals loaded, the army stood in readiness by the road that led north to Poitiers. In the langorous heat of midafternoon, as her drunken guests were toasting her long life and the townspeople feasting on the roast meat distributed by the palace kitchens, Eleanor threw off her stifling scarlet robes and quietly crossed the river with her sister and a few members of her personal household. Before the sunlight had faded from the sky, the cavalcade had put a league or two between themselves and Bordeaux, but the scent of danger permeated the column. Abbot Suger, increasingly anxious, kept alert for an ambush, and while he avoided those roads that led past well-known hostile castles and the journey proceeded without incident, his apprehension did not contribute to lightheartedness. For the first few nights Eleanor slept, as always, with Petronilla. It was not until they had passed Saintes and arrived at Taillebourg, the rugged fortress owned by the loyal Geoffrey de Rancon, that they stopped to rest and enjoy the civilized hospitality of that great lord; it was there that Louis and Eleanor shared the same bed for the first time. That this event took place without any notable trauma seems apparent from the fact that afterward they seemed on more intimate terms than ever, despite whatever misgivings each may have had about the realities of conjugal life.
After adding military reinforcements to the cortege, they pressed on and reached Poitiers on August 1. Before they had even arrived at the city gate, news of their approach spread through the town, and the Poitevins streamed into the squares and roads to roar a raucous welcome to their lady. It was a fearfully weary and disheveled royal party that drew up into the cool courtyard at the ducal palace, thankful for surcease from the remorseless heat of the road. Suger and other older members of the party verged on collapse, but with the energy of an enthusiastic fifteen-year-old, Eleanor immediately set about organizing a proper welcome for her illustrious guests. Back in the Maubergeonne Tower, the place she felt most at home, she opened the ducal chests and showered her new husband with costly gifts. Troubadours were summoned, and the signal for resumption of the feasting given out. Plans were made for the following Sunday, when Louis would be crowned count of Poitou, a solemn occasion that Suger wished to have rival in splendor the coronations of the Frankish kings at Reims.
The days slipped by all too swiftly for Eleanor, who now began to understand that her carefree childhood had ended the day her father died. The momentous events of the past two months had left no time for reflection and scarcely a moment for mourning. But in the Maubergeonne Tower, memories of her great stubborn father must have descended on her in painful waves of nostalgia and, judging from her activities, she seems to have been determined to make the most of her last days in Poitiers. In Paris, she would be virtually a nobody, only the wife of the heir to the throne. According to Louis, whose knowledge of worldly amusements had been severely limited by his life at Saint-Denis, the king and queen did not appreciate singing and dancing; to Eleanor they could only have sounded like a dreary lot.
With no father or mother, no advisers except possibly her grandmother, Eleanor was obliged to rely on her own values and inclinations as far as behavior was concerned; in the days remaining she can be seen attempting to teach her socially backward husband that life was meant to be sucked and savored, and sometimes devoured whole. Accordingly, she organized a masculine entertainment for Louis and his knights, a hunting and fishing excursion, and she dispatched them to the seaside village of Talmont, where her father had kept a richly stocked game preserve. In a holiday mood, the men set off for the ocean, forgetting the suspicious Suger’s last-minute warning about one William of Lezay, a laggard castellan who had refused to render homage to the prince and who, moreover, had appropriated both the late Duke William’s castle as well as his prized white gyrfalcons from the ducal hunting ground. This sulky baron and his almost ludicrous antics troubled them so little that, en route to Talmont, the party complacently removed their chain mail and swords, sending the bulky arms on ahead with the baggage train. To their astonishment, the first knights to enter the ducal castle at Talmont were taken prisoner by Lezay, who had been hoping to bag the prince himself and hold his royal person for ransom. Within minutes, Louis experienced his first taste of hand-to-hand combat as a sword was thrust into his hand and he fought for his life. As the fracas ended, Lezay’s men were all butchered, save for a few who escaped to the sea through an underground passage. Hearing about it later, Eleanor was both horrified and passionately pleased.
This incident, trivial enough in itself, reveals the direction in which Louis’s character and his relationship with his wife were soon to develop, because there is no question that his derring-do, less than ordinary by standards of the day, was received with high admiration by Eleanor. Thus, the shy, hesitant husband recognized a means of winning his lady’s respect; the wife fortified her lord’s valor with ego-inflating praise. From that time forward, she would coax, suggest, cheer, and dangle before his meek eyes the carrot of her beauty and affection in order to transform him into a fearless warrior. Given the circumstances of feudal life, her efforts were far from misguided.
During that week when Eleanor and Louis took one another’s measure in the purple Poitevin nights, a courier was burning up the road between the Île-de-France and Poitiers. On August 1, the same day that the bridal party had arrived in Eleanor’s ancestral city, Louis the Fat lay dying in Paris, “excessive fevers of summer” combining with dysentery to close his days upon the earth. He preferred to die in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, but the prelates in attendance gently dissuaded him: His weight and the gravity of his condition militated against his being moved at the last hour. Resigning himself, the old king directed that a carpet be laid upon the floor and strewn with ashes in the shape of a cross. Like a helpless infant who cannot yet sit or roll over, he was lowered by the hands of others onto the cross, where he stretched out his arms and relinquished his newly expanded kingdom to a monkish youth and a maiden he had never seen.
On a day in late August, the young queen of France arrived in the capital of that land that John of Salisbury would call “of all nations the sweetest and most civilized,” an evocative picture with which Eleanor would never wholly agree. Dismounting, she stepped down onto a mossy stump beside an olive tree and ascended a flight of broad stone stairs leading to the Cite Palace. Knights had been known to ride their horses up the stairway and into the hall, but this was not encouraged. Crowded on the western tip of its island in the middle of the Seine, the decaying tower, which the dynasty’s founder, Hugh Capet, had inherited from the Merovingian kings, could charitably be described as cramped and drafty. In marked contrast to the Maubergeonne Tower, or even to the Ombrière Palace, the Capetian royal residence appeared uncomfortably primitive, a heap of stone that gave one the eerie feeling of living in a quarry. Little light filtered through the narrow slits that passed for windows, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that the new queen could catch a glimpse of the river below or an evening star above.
Compounding her dismay over her new home were almost instantaneous conflicts with her mother-in-law, the Dowager Queen Adelaide. At the outset, the queen mother displayed distinct animosity toward Eleanor, indeed she may have disliked her before they met, perhaps basing her preconceptions on another southerner, Constance of Provence, who had married Hugh Capet’s son Robert. Although Constance had lived a century earlier, tales of her allegedly immodest dress and language still continued to circulate among the sober Franks. In Adelaide’s opinion, Eleanor was a good deal worse, and as a result the queen could not take a step without the dowager’s icy disapproval: She must wear modest gowns and must cultivate demureness so as not to give offense: if she continued to entertain lavishly, the royal treasury would be depleted in no time; if she would only spend more hours at her prayers and at improving her use of the langue d’oil, she would have no time to think of singing and painting her face. Nothing Eleanor did was right. Adelaide’s nagging reflected the fact that, contrary to her expectations, her influence over her son had fallen into blatant eclipse. Not only had Eleanor taken over management of the household, but she had no compunctions about telling Louis what to do. To Adelaide’s dismay, her pious boy did not object to the secular frivolities without which Eleanor could not live, nor to the good-sized entourage of morally flabby Poitevins, who not only took up space in the already crowded palace but who insisted upon behaving as if they were still in the south. For the first time within memory, the hall of the palace rang with loud laughter and the songs of minstrel and jongleur, Eleanor having had the foresight to import several music makers as part of her baggage.
Before many weeks had passed, friction arose between mother and son, but despite Adelaide’s bitter complaints to Abbot Suger, the southern high life was well enough entrenched to withstand her displeasure. Clearly the Cite Palace could not contain two women as mutually antagonistic as Adelaide and Eleanor. As a result, the old queen retired to her dower estate near Compiègne, where a few months later, in a mood so precipitate that it seemed an act of spite, she married a minor nobleman, Matthew of Montmorency.
As autumn advanced into winter, the days grew darker and shorter, and since at times night fell not long after four o’clock in the afternoon, sensible Parisians went to bed early. For Eleanor, shivering in the unaccustomed cold, there was of course the temptation to huddle beside a charcoal brazier and indulge her passion for reading, but instead she seems to have occupied herself with plans to make life at the Cité Palace more agreeable. Orders were given for remodeling her dilapidated apartments: The window openings were enlarged and fitted with shutters, construction began on a fireplace and chimney to replace the brazier. She took infinite trouble to reorganize the management of the palace, which, in her opinion, could only be called slovenly, unsanitary, and remarkably primitive. Tablecloths and napkins—common amenities in the south—were introduced, and pages were instructed to wash their hands before serving. She dismissed the cantor at the palace’s chapel of Saint Nicholas, replacing him with one who could conduct a decent choir. In short, she behaved as do most young brides who are whisked to new homes in strange towns; she tried to make it her own.
Apart from the many stresses to which a new wife is subject, the life of a queen in France during the middle of the twelfth century was not always glamorous; it could be and often was fearfully dull. God’s good time ticked slowly when daily activities consisted mainly of prescribed female duties of the type Eleanor had always disdained. If a queen had a faculty for ennui, she could exist more or less contentedly, hawking in fair weather, sitting indoors with her ladies in foul weather, and playing chess and blindman’s buff, telling stories and guessing riddles, the sort of activities we now associate with the nursery. Neither by temperament nor experience was Eleanor equipped to play such a restricted role. Much of her behavior that was considered unorthodox by the Parisians did not result from acute ignorance of their customs; rather, it was enormously difficult for her to adjust to life in the north, and thus soon after she had settled at the Cité Palace the unhappy exile began to dream of the day when she might return to her homeland.
Initially, Eleanor had harbored hopes of transforming Louis into a gallant knight, but as time went on, she must have realized that such a metamorphosis would not take place easily, if at all. In his personal routine, Louis seemed little changed by his marriage and succession to the throne. During those first months, he resumed his monastic studies at the Church of Notre Dame and, unlike most monarchs, dressed and behaved with such unassuming simplicity that one would not have supposed him King of France. Odo de Deuil, Louis’s secretary and, later, chaplain, paints a touching picture of a young man “whose entire life is a model of virtue, for when a mere boy he began to reign, worldly glory did not cause him sensual delight.” He could not conceive of a greater delight than decorating his chapels, assisting at the Mass, and intoning at the reading desk. Louis VII preferred the life of a monk, and any of his subjects who wished a firsthand glimpse had only to enter Notre Dame, where they could see him singing in the choir or reading the canticles. Each day, from prime through matins, he kept the vigils and on Fridays fasted on bread and water, his scrupulous devotion to the Church, unshared by Eleanor, creating perennial difficulties between them. One of Louis’s more tiresome habits was prayer. If he was not on his knees among the black and white columns of Notre Dame, he was praying in the royal bedchamber, and it is not difficult to imagine the winter nights when Eleanor shivered under the fur coverlet, eyes open, watching her husband kneel on the cold stone floor in the light of a gutted candle, with his head bowed and his lips moving fervently. In sex Louis was extremely, almost ascetically, abstemious; nevertheless, there is reason to believe that he did occasionally perform his duties because at some time during the first or second year of their union Eleanor became pregnant. She must have miscarried, however, or else the child was stillborn.
Theoretically free to do as she pleased, Eleanor dressed as she liked and spent lavishly on banquets and entertainment without her husband’s interference. In practice, however, Louis’s lack of polish and his failure to participate in the spirit of the merrymaking cramped her style. When he did attend the gay doings in the Great Hall, the guests would find themselves in the presence of a silent, awkward youth whose uncertain expression plainly indicated that he longed to escape as soon as possible. However, the new queen’s earliest fêtes for the Parisian nobility were blighted not only by Louis’s shyness but by the backward Parisians themselves, for it was painfully clear that at Paris people did not approach life with the same flair and grace as did the Aquitainians. More often than not the men were loutish and stingy, the women prudes who dressed with abominable taste.
In one respect, it is surprising that Eleanor experienced such profound boredom in her new city. As a person of education and exceptional intelligence, she might have found much to excite her imagination in the richly intellectual climate flourishing there. Paris in the 1130s was a city of nearly 200,000 persons squeezed into an area that could comfortably accommodate perhaps one-third that number. The marrow of “the city of light and immortality” was the Île-de-France, that almond-shaped island cradled in the arms of the Seine and dominated by the royal enclave at one end and the citadel of the archbishop at the other. Despite Eleanor’s constant comparisons with the semitropical luxuriance of the south, the city had much to recommend it. At the western tip of the island was a royal garden with wooden trellises and acanthus-bordered walks; there grew a jumble of roses, lilies, mandrakes, and dozens of other blooms; beds of leeks, pumpkins, and watercress; plots of mint, rue, absinthe, and the soporific poppy. The queen could sit under a pear of Saint-Regulus tree and gaze down the broad brimming stream at willows and horse towpaths lining the banks and at the water mills squatting under the bridge arches. Low in the water, barges bearing wheat, hides, wine, and salt plied the stream, and the air rang with the cries of the boatmen and the rumble of the mill wheels. From her garden wall Eleanor could watch, 100 yards away on the Left Bank, the well-trodden field called Pré-aux-clercs, where unruly students danced and held tournaments.
When she ventured out from the royal enclave, she found herself in a noisy, reeking world of crooked streets darkened by the upper stories of houses, which leaned precariously forward. Due to poor drainage the lanes ran deep with mud and the contents of chamber pots and washbasins pitched from upper windows. Almost drowning out the pealing bells and majestic tones of the Gregorian chants from the Romanesque bouquet of churches came the constant clatter of street cries: the menders of furs, the candlemakers, the vegetable and fruit merchants, the wine crieurs who walked through the streets carrying a bowl that could be sampled and shouting, “So-and-so has just opened a cask of this wine. He who wants to buy some of it will find it on the Rue _” And everywhere on the twisting, turning streets were sold things to eat: waffles, small cakes, wafers, and, carried about by the talemeliers in baskets covered with white cloths, the favorite pasties, turnovers filled with chopped ham, chicken, eel, soft cheese, and egg.
The city swarmed with students from every nation in Europe: John of Salisbury; nineteen-year-old Thomas Becket, clinging to his vow of chastity; and the sons of well-born fathers who had flocked there to plunge into philosophy, theology, medicine, or feudal law and, perhaps equally important, to taste the heady delights of the flesh and the tavern. On the quays along the Seine they slogged behind the skirts of learned doctors who discoursed on Plato and Aristotle as well as writings of the church fathers. Along the Petit Pont, the upper stories of the little buildings housed brilliant teachers, such as Adam de Petit Pont, and in order to hear their lectures students eagerly crowded into the tiny rooms and if necessary sat on the rickety stairs. In this intellectual’s paradise one could dip into the central controversy of medieval thought: the importance of the universal versus the particular. Were universals—the Church, humanity, divinity—more important than the particulars—churchmen, individuals, persons of the Trinity? Must one be able to comprehend the universals before one could understand the particular? Should one incline toward the Realists, who believed in universals, or the Nominalists, who upheld the importance of the particulars? In Paris, one could believe as one pleased, unless of course one happened to stray too far in the direction of heresy.
Among the remarkable array of scholars assembled only a short walk from the palace of the Capets was one who stood head and shoulders above the others. Peter Abélard blazed with a glory that caused women to stare at him from their windows and men like John of Salisbury “to sit at his feet drinking in every word that fell from his lips.” His fame rested mainly on his illustrious mind but partly on his skill in the art of seduction, for some twenty years earlier he had been taken as tutor into the home of the lovely Héloïse. Books were opened, but more words of love than lessons were heard. After the birth of an illegitimate son and a subsequent marriage, Héloïse’s uncle had Abélard castrated, and finally the lovers separated, each taking monastic vows. Abélard’s troubles were common knowledge and in Historia Calamitatum he himself had written about his emasculation as well as other persecutions. By the time Eleanor arrived in Paris, the unhappy Abélard had reached his midfifties, but his sharp mind and quick tongue continued to question ideas long taken for granted. Believing that only reason and intelligence can resolve inconsistencies in matters of faith—by doubting we are led to inquire; by inquiry we perceive the truth—he presumed to understand and explain the mystery of the Trinity. To apply the hot light of reason to all things in heaven and earth was an original, if not to say dangerous, notion and one that even then was propelling him toward fresh calamities. In an open debate at Sens in May 1140, his so-called blasphemous views on the Trinity would be challenged and condemned by Bernard of Clairvaux.
A man like Peter Abélard. deprived of his manhood for love of a lady, would have appealed to a romantic like Eleanor, but the ideas he espoused would also have been examined with some care; at least she would not have rejected them out of hand the way her conservative husband did. It seems inconceivable that she would not have sampled the wisdom of the ages being imparted freely on bridge and street corner, especially since the intellectual life was not barred to females, and Abélard himself boasted that noble ladies thronged his lectures. If the queen believed it beneath her royal dignity to betake herself to one of the crammed rooms on the Petit Pont, she had more suitable opportunities to hear the masters. In warm weather, the royal garden threw open its gates to the schools, and there, from a front-row seat under a pear tree, she surely could have imbibed the rudiments of dialectic and the structure of the syllogism. Indeed, in later years, she would give ample demonstration that she had mastered the fine points of intellectual swordsmanship. Still, as a woman, especially as a queen, Eleanor could never truly enter into the sweetly tumultuous life of the scholar: she could only flit through its tantalizing atmosphere, alighting now and then to inhale its perfume. Nor did her temperament at that time allow for sustained interest in any subject requiring discipline.
Most people’s lives are shaped by what they remember of childhood, and Eleanor was no different. Accustomed to the extravagant green vistas of the south, those gardens full of acid sunlight and the mellow crooning of nightingales, she was not entranced by Paris. She saw only its squalor, heard only its noise. Although she had her sister for company, she was lonely and utterly bored; she missed the sound of the langue d’oc and the easygoing humor of the southerners. Even Louis was perceptive enough to notice her gloom, and since he felt solicitous of his wife’s happiness, he did not object when she spent frivolously on costly silks and jewels.
Along with the throne, Louis inherited Abbot Suger from his father. The royal counselor hoped for the best from the young king whom he had known and loved since infancy and whose education he had personally directed at Saint-Denis. He would always remain, for Suger, “a child, in the flower of his age and of great sweetness of temper, the hope of the good and the terror of the wicked.” The queen Suger liked a great deal less, although he was forced to admit that she was “nobilissima puella,” a most nobly born girl, which, strictly speaking, is more a statement of fact than an expression of opinion. If any man could have herded Louis and Eleanor along the narrow path of responsibility, it was the tiny prelate whom fortune had lifted from the poor rural peasantry to be chief minister of kings, head of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, and notable author. While still a boy, Suger had met Louis the Fat at the school for novices at Saint-Denis, where they both were students. It might be thought that the son of a peasant would have little in common with the great figures of the aristocracy, but Suger, no ordinary priest, was undeniably a man of enormous culture. “He had such a great knowledge of history that no matter what prince or king of the Franks one mentioned, he immediately and without hesitation would hasten to recount his deeds.” Endowed with a prodigious memory, the abbot knew the Scriptures virtually by heart and could reply succinctly to any question put to him, and he could also recite from memory the “heathen” verses of Horatio. Ovid, Juvenal, and Terence.
By temperament, he was unsuited for a life of austerity and for many years had indulged his love of luxury with soft woolen shirts, dainty coverlets, and warm furs. In recent years, however, he had been severely criticized by Bernard of Clairvaux: “From early time yours was a noble abbey of royal dignity.... Without any deception or delay it rendered to Caesar his dues, but not with equal enthusiasm what was due to God.... They say the cloister of the monastery was often crowded with soldiers, that business was done there, that it echoed to the sound of men wrangling, and that sometimes women were to be found there. In all this hubbub how could anyone have attended to heavenly, divine, and spiritual things?”
How indeed. As a result, Suger had given up his fine horses and splendid livery and exchanged his spacious home for a tiny barren cell. However, in his most current project, the restoration of Saint-Denis, he continued to indulge his love of beautiful objects by embellishing the new church with gorgeous stained glass and precious ornaments. After 1140, he devoted his entire time to Saint-Denis; this did not reflect any lessening of his interest in affairs of state but rather his fall from favor with the young king, or, more precisely, with the young queen. Eleanor rejected the notion that her husband should be closely supervised like a schoolboy instead of relying on his own judgment. And if Louis needed advice about Aquitaine, he had only to ask his wife, for, after all, who had more practical knowledge than she? After the departure of Suger and his balancing stability, the young couple were left to their own devices.
As is often the case with weak men who wish to prove their masculinity, Louis felt compelled to meet each affront to his royal authority with a display of ferocity bordering on the brutal, but much of this stemmed indirectly from a desire to impress his wife. Constantly, he looked over his shoulder to gauge her reaction, a habit that must have simultaneously pleased and annoyed her. He would never understand her, but from the first, he had adored her in the way an inexperienced boy worships a gay, confident girl; with passionate admiration he responded to her charm, to a cleverness that he himself lacked, and he indulged her extravagantly. If she was headstrong and demanding—and unquestionably she was—he excused it as perfectly normal behavior for one of her richly endowed nature. There was, of course, another side to the story: Eleanor was anxious to control everything she regarded as hers, that is, her person, about which she was hysterically vain; her life; and her lands, which she felt, quite rightly, she knew more about than Louis or any of his royal ministers. As she repeatedly pointed out to Louis, the Aquitainians, for all their splendid qualities, were a pigheaded people who would only extend their respect to a firm ruler.
Before the death of Eleanor’s father, the political situation in Aquitaine had been unsatisfactory, and by now it had grown steadily worse.
For that matter, trouble had been brewing in Louis’s own domains, and only a few days after his succession he had been obliged to put down a rebellion in the town of Orleans. Some sixty years earlier there had begun the growth of the communal movement whereby a few towns, in a reaction against feudal exploitation, tried to obtain a measure of self-government by establishing collective seigneuries that would recognize their economic and political interests. In some cases, Louis the Fat had encouraged communes, because he saw them as a device to curb the power of both his barons and the Church. When, however, the proposed commune occurred on the king’s land, as was the case with Orleans, it was a different story, and when the Orleans bourgeois bitterly complained about outrageous taxes and demanded a charter of rights, he refused. Within days of his death, the burghers suffered a convenient memory loss and proclaimed themselves a commune. The young king, fresh from his baptism of fire in the Talmont, marched against the town and promptly executed the conspirators who had sought to foster insurrection; then, evidently reluctant to be known as a tyrant, he abruptly reversed his position and granted most of the demanded reforms. In the future, this trait of indecision would mark most of his political actions.
The rebellion in Orléans proved to be anything but an isolated case, and a similar mutiny soon occurred in Eleanor’s domains—as it happened, in her own capital city of Poitiers. In late 1137, after having had a few months to digest the changes in their political fortunes as a result of William X’s death, the Poitevins exhibited reluctance to put themselves into the hands of a foreign king merely because their land happened to be part of his wife’s real estate. Accordingly, they repudiated Louis’s authority and boldly announced themselves a free city, a serious blow to the prestige of both Eleanor and her husband. Angry and humiliated, Louis hastily threw together an army, short on knights but well equipped with siege machines, and marched on the rebellious town. Since the surprised Poitevins had barely had time to organize their defense, the king was able to easily capture the city without a single casualty on either side. In victory, however, he was unable to handle the uprising in a diplomatic or even sensible manner, or rather he dealt with the rebels in a manner that he believed would meet with Eleanor’s approval.
His demands were positively ruthless: Instead of simply disbanding the commune and letting it go at that, he vindictively insisted that the sons and daughters of leading citizens be offered as hostages and sent away into exile in France. On an appointed day, the burghers were to bring their children, with baggage, to the main square before the ducal palace. The howls of the horrified Poitevins carried far beyond the boundaries of Aquitaine all the way to the Abbey of Saint-Denis, where Suger, a more impartial judge, was summoned to Poitiers to reason with his flower child. After a long talk with Louis, Suger appeared in person to the burghers and stilled their lamentations; Louis, in seclusion, had changed his mind and would allow their heirs to go free.
In Paris, Eleanor observed this incident with irritation. Mistaking brutality for strength, she longed for Louis to assert himself so that she might feel, if not love, then respect for him. His weakness overwhelmed her. Obviously, he could not be counted on to handle a simple revolt with any sense of proportion; and then, like a clumsy child, he needed to be rescued by Suger. Furthermore, resentful of Suger’s interference in a matter that she felt did not concern him, she determined that his advice would not be sought in the future.
Although Eleanor did not accompany Louis to Poitiers, she made several trips back to the south during the early years of her marriage, the first of which may have been in September 1138, when she attended the festival of Notre Dame at Puy. Generally, she was accompanied by her husband, as well as her sister, who remained her closest friend and confidante. Undoubtedly, she found her relationship with Petronilla comforting, because life in Paris was even more alien than she had ever imagined. While she had not expected marriage to bring her the lover of her dreams, presumably she had hoped to find a degree of emotional and sexual satisfaction. If she had possessed these, she might have borne the shock of her new life, but as it turned out, circumstances had not brought her loving, and therefore she determined to drink deeply of living. To her, this meant excitement and novelty. There had been, of course, special occasions, as on that first Christmas of their marriage when Louis had taken her to Bourges to be crowned queen, but these temporary diversions could not replace the pleasure she had anticipated as the wife of a great lord. She knew that her happiness had been left behind in Poitiers. Was the rest of her life to be spent permanently sealed on that dreary island, condemned to live with a submissive man who feared to look at her body and felt loath to touch her even in the dark?
Considering the fact that Louis failed to attract her physically and that she had small respect for him as a man, they were, oddly enough, compatible in less personal areas. Eleanor prided herself on taking a role in the regulation of affairs in Aquitaine, and as we shall see subsequently, she also felt herself competent to advise him in matters pertaining to the kingdom of France. Nevertheless, in this latter ambition she would prove notably unsuccessful, because during the first ten years of her reign, the documents reveal her to have been virtually powerless. Unlike previous French queens, including Queen Adelaide, who shared in executive and policy-making decisions with Louis the Fat, Eleanor’s name rarely appears on her husband’s charters nor is there any record of her presence in the royal curia. Beginning with Eleanor, the Capetian queens of France ceased to be working sovereigns, a curious coincidence, for Eleanor would prove to be one of the most politically astute women of the medieval era. A great deal of the credit for this break in tradition can be attributed to the domination of Abbot Suger, who regarded both Louis and Eleanor as insufficiently mature to govern wisely. While Suger may have relegated the queen to an official backseat, he could not prevent her from wielding a wifely influence over her husband. That many of Louis’s actions, whether or not on her advice it is impossible to gauge, appeared to be ill considered did not seem to trouble her, nor did his destructiveness impinge strongly upon Suger either. When, for instance, Louis finally got around to punishing William of Lezay by personally hacking off his hands, no one felt concern about the fate of an obscure baron who had stolen a few birds in faraway Talmont.
By 1141, however, a number of Louis’s vassals began to suspect that there was more than met the eye to the boy king, so pious, so kind, so timid. For some time now Eleanor had been preoccupied with the idea of invading the county of Toulouse, which, in her opinion, belonged to her through her grandmother Philippa. That the domain should remain in the usurping hands of Alphonse-Jourdain riled her, and she repeatedly suggested to her husband that this wrong be remedied. To be sure, Alphonse-Jourdain had ruled Toulouse for some twenty years, and even Eleanor’s father, who had signed his charters “William the Toulousain,” had never seriously considered reclaiming his mother’s patrimony. But for the queen, Toulouse had the appeal of an irresistible cause.
Swept along by Eleanor’s enthusiasm, Louis readily understood that the acquisition of Toulouse would enhance Frankish national prestige, not to mention his own personal reputation. In the opening months of 1141, the two of them spent many excited hours mapping out their adventure. Like inexperienced children titillated by a new game but having no knowledge of the rules, they blundered along without any sense of direction and disdained to ask for advice. To some of Louis’s vassals, among them the powerful Count Theobald of Champagne, the proposed expedition against Toulouse appeared to be a senseless and even unjust project, and they declined to support their overlord. Theobald had neglected to assist in the military action against the Poitiers commune, and when the time for departure arrived on June 24, he again failed to appear in person, nor did he trouble to send a contingent of troops. Louis, furious at the count, was forced to leave without him, but this second defection would not be easily forgiven.
Louis had absolutely no sense of military intuition, and Eleanor, who accompanied him as far south as Poitiers, had little to contribute in this area. As a result the army was haphazardly organized and ineptly led. Only a small amount of siege equipment had been brought along, because Louis and Eleanor apparently counted on taking the city by surprise, a tactic based more on wishful thinking than on any particular strategy. Perhaps Eleanor cherished illusions that Louis, like her grandparents, would capture Toulouse without a blow struck.
Alphonse-Jourdain, of course, had no intention of handing over his fief to the young duchess and her husband; warned of the Franks’ approach long before they reached his ramparts, he had organized a thorough defense and sat waiting for them like a tomcat about to gobble up a puny mouse. Louis, reluctant to sacrifice his army on the altar of Eleanor’s ambition, met the challenge by beating a hasty retreat, fleeing north into Angoulême and then rejoining his wife in Poitiers. Eleanor’s private feelings about Louis’s fiasco can be imagined; the qualities that she counted supreme in a man were valor, readiness for military adventure, knightly honor, and physical prowess. Everything else was merely garnish, as though a man had to be transformed into a killer before he could be loved or respected. Still, perhaps from pity, she must have managed to conceal much of her disappointment, because it was at this time that she opened the treasures of the dukes of Aquitaine and presented him with a magnificent crystal vase ornamented with pearls and precious stones.
The victory she had so ardently desired was forfeit; nevertheless, she decided to linger in Poitou for the remainder of the summer. She would make a holiday of it, and with Louis, Petronilla, and others in her retinue, she embarked on a chevauchée over the trails she remembered so nostalgically from her childhood: They visited the monastery of Nieuil-sur-l’Autise, where her mother was buried; granted favors to her Aunt Agnes’s convent; and spent a few days by the sea in Talmont. Although she counted it a pleasant summer, the holiday was shadowed by failure.
When they returned to Paris in the autumn, Louis’s mood alternated between depression and frenetic exuberance. Whatever the reason—lingering humiliation over Toulouse, possibly a desire to raise his prestige in Eleanor’s eyes—he seemed determined to cast off the last vestiges of discretion. That year the archbishopric of Bourges fell vacant, and Louis, for reasons that baffled his barons, took it into his head to appoint his own candidate, a man named Carduc, who happened to be one of his chancellors. Technically, he did not actually insist on Carduc but extended the see freedom of choice, while at the same time vetoing the one suitable candidate, Peter de la Chatre. Since Carduc was singularly unfitted for office, the canons of Bourges ignored Louis’s interference and proceeded to elect Peter. He was duly consecrated by Pope Innocent II and sent to Bourges to assume his duties when, to his chagrin, he discovered the city gates bolted against him.
When Innocent learned of this outrage, his suspicions were immediately aroused, and he jumped to conclusions that probably fell close to the truth. It seemed obvious to him that Louis, a mere schoolboy, an innocent who had never strayed from the path of duty to the Church, could not be responsible. The culprit must be another, and it took him no time at all to locate her. The pontiff well remembered Eleanor’s family: the stubborn duke who had failed to support him and who had exiled from Poitou all ecclesiastics loyal to Innocent, filling the sees with his own candidates. Was this not clearly a case of “like father, like daughter”? The extent to which Eleanor involved herself in this matter is not clear, but it seems reasonable to assume that she did not discourage Louis from his dangerous course. Bitterly offended when he heard of the pope’s condescending remark that Louis was only a child and should be taught manners, the king responded by maneuvering himself into the most awkward corner possible. In melodramatic defiance, he placed his hands upon sacred relics and took a public oath that so long as he lived Peter de la Chatre should never set foot in Bourges.
Across the Alps, Innocent hurtled his thunderbolts of excommunication and interdict, casting the young king into outer darkness. Not only was Louis excluded from all sacraments, but in any town or castle where he dwelled no bells could ring, no church services be performed, nor marriages, confessions, baptisms, or burials. In a century when heaven and hell were real and men and women worried about their souls, excommunication was a serious business. For Louis, a man with an exceptional passion for the hallowed harmony of the cloister, it was an unimaginable blow, and yet he plunged ahead furiously, his obstinacy hardening as the months passed. His anger flared even higher when it came to his attention that Peter de la Châtre was being sheltered in Champagne by a sympathetic Count Theobald.
Louis and Eleanor made a mental list of their enemies; Theobald headed the roster.
At the spinsterly age of nineteen, Eleanor’s sister remained unmarried. This unusual state of affairs was the subject of considerable comment, for Petronilla, an attractive girl, owned dower property in Burgundy and simply by virtue of her relationship to the king and queen would have made an acceptable wife. But eligible lords who came courting found their attentions politely refused; the queen’s sister had long been casting her eyes elsewhere. Five years earlier, at Eleanor’s wedding, she had first made the acquaintance of Count Ralph of Vermandois, the king’s elderly relative and seneschal of France. Ralph was over fifty, but he bore his years lightly; the fact that he was old enough to be Petronilla’s father was not exactly the trouble, however. He was a married man, and moreover, his wife, Leonora, happened to be the niece of Count Theobald.
In the summer of 1141, while Eleanor and Louis were dawdling in Poitou, their retinue included Petronilla and Ralph. Although the couple’s attraction to each other was scarcely news to the more observant in the royal household, on that trip it was impossible for outsiders not to notice what was happening. Petronilla had long been a source of concern for Eleanor, who, as the elder, felt responsible for her. Like Eleanor, Petronilla possessed a strong sex drive and few inhibitions; Ralph had the reputation of being a seducer of women, and according to John of Salisbury, “he was always dominated by lust.” It is safe to assume that the two were hardly conducting a platonic love affair, which meant the ever-present threat of illegitimacy and scandal. While Eleanor may have wished that Petronilla had chosen a more suitable cavalier, she also understood that her sister loved the count and would have no other as a husband. Under the circumstances, a means had to be found for them to marry, and to Eleanor, with her customary simplicity of purpose, the solution seemed clear: Ralph must secure a divorce.
Late that year the matter was quietly and swiftly remedied. Louis located three friendly bishops, one of them Ralph’s brother, who annulled the marriage on the ground of consanguinity and immediately united Ralph to the Lady Petronilla. When the incredulous count of Champagne was notified that he must come and collect his discarded niece and her children, he protested vigorously. For decades Ralph and
Theobald had been sworn enemies, and this latest personal injury could not help but tax the limits of Theobald’s patience. With detailed care and a calculated desire for revenge, he prepared a case against Ralph and wasted no time in dispatching it to Pope Innocent: The count of Vermandois, he explained, had failed to secure papal consent for the annulment; for that matter, the annulment had been handled in a most irregular fashion and clearly was illegal; and Louis had once again interfered in matters that fell under eccesiastical rather than secular jurisdiction.
Innocent’s response was icily meticulous. In June of 1142, a Church council assembled at Lagny-sur-Marne in Champagne, at which time the papal legate, Cardinal Yves, reaffirmed the validity of Ralph’s first marriage and excommunicated Ralph and Petronilla, as well as the three complaisant bishops who had stretched the law in their favor.
A more secure man than Louis might have paused to examine the impossibility of the situation. But neither Louis nor Eleanor was in any mood to exercise caution. They blamed Theobald for their troubles; twice the remiss count had dodged his responsibilities as a vassal, and furthermore, he had actually dared to provoke Louis by harboring Peter de la Châtre. Their prestige at stake, the Capets refused to submit meekly to Rome nor did they intend to set a precedent that would imperil their authority in ruling their subjects. If they capitulated to the pope’s ruling, Ralph would be forced to return to Leonora, and Petronilla, most likely pregnant by then, would bear a bastard; as it was, the excommunications had cast an ignominious stain on the house of Vermandois and, indirectly, on the honor of the Capets. Both Eleanor and Louis were emphatic on one point: On no account would they compromise.
Even though Louis’s first flush of anger had diminished somewhat, he still boiled with indignation and an unswerving determination to prove himself a forceful monarch. Resolved to defy the pope and to humble Theobald, he had Eleanor’s full approval in taking a step that pivoted a cold war into a hot one. In January 1143, he personally led an army into Champagne and laid siege to the little town of Vitry-sur-Marne. From his encampment on the La Fourche hills above the town Louis watched his troops pour down the slope and advance on a castle belonging to Theobald. The charge was answered by a volley of arrows fired from the summits of the castle’s wooden towers, but within a short period of time it became apparent that its resistance would be easily crushed. Louis’s archers catapulted fiery arrows over the walls, and soon the castle crackled in flames.
The townspeople of Vitry, paralyzed at suddenly finding themselves in the midst of a war, came out of their houses and stared in bewilderment at the wild-eyed soldiers swarming through their quiet lanes and brandishing swords and torches. The men and women stopped work and gathered up their children. Although a few villagers took up knives and makeshift cudgels, most had no weapons with which to beat off the king’s soldiers. Beyond the control of their officers, the troops tossed torches into the doorways of wooden houses and onto thatched roofs, and soon the fire spread through the whole town. Terror-stricken, eyes smarting from smoke, the burghers of Vitry surged down the streets leading to their cathedral, the traditional place of refuge where non-combatants might find sanctuary. There, where none could lay a finger on them, they carried the sick, the elderly, the infants. Presumably it was a large church because eventually the entire population, thirteen hundred persons, it is said, managed to squeeze inside.
From the hill above Vitry, Louis saw a double wall of flame suddenly shoot up from the church in a shower of sparks. Caught by the wind, the flames began to snap and lick the walls until the cathedral was enveloped by a thousand crimson tongues. Above the noise of the flames arose cries that carried clearly to Louis’s vantage point: The curses turned to piercing screams as the trapped began to trample one another, trying to beat down the barred doors. But no one emerged through the gateway of flames, for in a few minutes the timbers of the roof collapsed, burying those who a few hours earlier had been absentmindedly stirring pots of soup or sitting at their looms.
A cloud of thick black smoke rose into the blood-red sky above the roofs of Vitry until the town was nearly engulfed, but still Louis could hear the animal howls and smell the human flesh burning to a cindered crisp. The ghastly shrieks blinded him with tears, and when his aidesde-camp came to make their reports, they found a strange and terrible sight. Louis stood immobile, his face blanched and his teeth chattering. His eyes had no expression in them. When they spoke to him, he appeared not to hear, and finally, alarmed, they led him into his field tent and made him lie down.
At twilight, the acrid smoke had spread out over the valley, and the breeze carried the stench of burnt flesh up the hillside to the doorway of Louis’s tent. Soldiers sitting around the campfires could still see a few coppery embers glowing through the smoke. But the king did not emerge from his tent, not that night nor the next day nor the one after that. He lay motionless on his cot, refusing to eat or drink or speak. When he closed his eyes, time stood still, and he heard the hissing and singing of the flames and screams hideous enough to cleave the sky. Waves of rose-colored light filled his vision until the whole world had shriveled to the size of a great fiery ball of flame.