Over the rolling hills and valleys of Champagne swept the royal army, leaving behind a carpet of ravaged fields and smoking villages, corpses pierced by lances and disemboweled horses lying in frozen raspberry pools. That winter and chilly spring the unthawed earth ran red with blood as village after terrorized village fell before the deaf and blind ardor of Louis’s soldiers. Numbers of those who ordinarily earned their bread as murderers and thieves had flocked to join the king’s troops, for the aroma of plunder proved a powerful lure, and Louis welcomed all who would aid his cause. Cries of fear and hatred rent the lands of Count Theobald, and still the king’s men did not tire of killing and looting. It was, some said, a splendid war.
At the Cite Palace, Eleanor followed the progress of the war with understandable relish. She rejoiced for Louis’s successes, although her satisfaction was moderated by an uneasy feeling that the victories were not quite as glorious as she had expected. For months at a time her husband remained in Champagne, and when they did meet, it did not escape her notice that the war had imposed a strain on his health. He was—there was no disguising the fact—ill and broken. To her consternation, he would awake in the night sobbing or stare into the unperceived distance, hiding his demonic nightmares behind a mask of indifference. It was alarming to contrast the shy, pretty youth he had been at sixteen with the haggard, woebegone man of twenty-two, though Eleanor did her best to reassure him and raise his spirits. The catastrophe at Vitry, she told him, was not his fault; if God had permitted the church to burn, that was God’s business. The war against Theobald was a just one, involving the honor of both their families. Was not Ralph of his own blood, the son of his grandfather’s brother? Was not Petronilla her only sister? But Louis, feeling his soul imperiled, lifted glassy eyes and whimpered that he did not care about victory over Count Theobald. Although he managed to pull himself together and return to Champagne, he continued to suffer agonies of guilt and depression, his every action horrifying and disgusting him. Alone, Eleanor pondered the fate that had tied her to a man she considered contemptible. There was something about his lamentations strongly reminiscent of her father’s agitated mood before he set off for Compostela, memories she preferred to forget. She wanted a husband who, like her grandfather, could fight and kill, who would sing songs and pay compliments. Days should be gay and nights spent in the arms of a passionate lover, not with a trembling man who buried himself in her skirts with a child’s sobs and whose dreams were convulsed by horrifying visions. Nevertheless, she kept her thoughts to herself and tried to quiet his madness, for she lacked the heart to reproach him.
During these woeful months, those who had ignored omens of danger during the initial years of Louis’s reign were no longer able to remain engrossed in their own affairs. Public outcry against the disorders in the realm was such that it became necessary to allocate blame and responsibility for the boy king, no longer a boy. From the stillness of Clairvaux, Abbot Bernard scribbled frenzied letters to discover what had gone wrong. Why did his beloved boy insist upon heaping sin atop sin, perversely laying waste his kingdom until it seemed in danger of cracking? “All this I was able to see,” he wrote to Pope Innocent, “but alas! not able to prevent.”
To Louis, Bernard worded a sharp demand:
From whom but the devil could this advice come under which you are acting, advice which causes burnings upon burnings, slaughter upon slaughter, and the voice of the poor and the groans of captives and the blood of the slain to echo once more in the ears of the Father of orphans and the Judge of widows? ... Those who are urging you to repeat your former wrongdoing against an innocent person [he meant Count Theobald] are seeking in this not your honor but their own convenience, or rather not so much their convenience as the will of the devil; they are trying to use the power of the king to secure the mad purposes which they are not sure of being able to achieve by themselves, and are clearly the enemies of your crown and the disturbers of your realm.
Meanwhile, buoyed by the knowledge that much of Champagne had fallen into Capetian hands, an offer of peace had been tentatively submitted to Count Theobald. The terms were simple: Louis and Eleanor promised to restore his possessions on the condition that he somehow manage to get lifted the sentences of excommunication and interdict on Ralph and Petronilla. Bernard, exhibiting more of the serpent’s adroitness than his customary dovelike simplicity, urged Innocent to remove the bans long enough for Louis to return Theobald’s territory—and then renew it immediately afterward. “Thus artifice would be outwitted by artifice, and peace obtained without the tyrant ... gaining anything.”
Never suspecting that Innocent, nor certainly Bernard, would be capable of such a deception, Louis ingenuously withdrew his troops, at which time Innocent played his hand expertly by offering Ralph the opportunity to give up Petronilla. When the count refused, Innocent promptly reexcommunicated the pair; Louis, hysterical, sped his army back to Champagne, wreaking such destruction that Bernard was forced to further remonstrating. “I can tell you that, provoked by the constant excesses you commit almost daily, I am beginning to regret having stupidly favored your youth more than I should have done, and I am determined that in future to the best of my limited capacity I shall expose the whole truth about you.... I have spoken harshly because I fear an even harsher fate for you.”
On September 24, 1143, Pope Innocent died, and his successor, Celestine II, was sufficiently moved by the disturbances in France to lift the bans of excommunication and interdict against Louis, a measure of clemency that nevertheless brought the king little solace. Nor did tranquility come quickly or easily to France. In early 1144, Suger and Bernard arranged a peace conference at Corbeil, only to watch Louis explode into a fit of blind rage when one of the Frankish barons made a gibe to the effect that Count Ralph led him by the nose. Like a small boy in the grip of a tantrum, he angrily stormed from the parley into the consoling arms of his wife.
The irrepressible high spirits that Eleanor had displayed during the summer when she became queen of France had now been greatly tempered by tragedy, frustration, and an endless procession of small unhappinesses. Her restlessness, the impression she gave of always seeking some new exhilaration, was not so much in evidence, and the delirious melancholy that enveloped her husband inevitably began to rub off on her. As in the first days after her arrival, the Cite Palace had once again assumed the atmosphere of a monastery: no dancing and feasting, no songs of the troubadours. The poets sought more receptive patrons. There was increasing tension between Eleanor and Louis. In public they were polite to each other, but alone in their chambers, it was difficult to maintain even a simple conversation. Taking refuge in impenetrable silences, Louis read his breviary, meditated, and sank deeper into his private hell. Throughout the spring of 1144, he became increasingly remote and either slept alone or shared the royal bed like a sister. Failure weighed heavily on Eleanor, who fixed unseeing eyes on the parchment pages of her books while she brooded over her not-so-secret shame: In seven years of marriage she had not been able to bear a child. After that first pregnancy, she had never conceived again.
Her barrenness was the subject of considerable speculation among the Franks, but Eleanor, starved for sexual satisfaction, needed no prophet to divine the reason for her infertility, and she could not help feeling resentment toward the disconsolate man who caressed his rosary instead of her perfumed and massaged body. Unable to recall the last time he had embraced her, she feared that if his present emotional state continued, the opportunity for conception would not come again. It had been some years since she had counted the days on her fingers and made novenas to Our Lady, or, for that matter, worried about dying in childbirth. At fifteen and sixteen she had menstruated each month without regret, but at twenty-two, she reminded herself that by her age her mother had already borne three children and lay in her tomb at Nieuil-sur-l’Autise. Still, when all was said and done, she suspected that the fault for her empty womb might lie, not with Louis, but within herself. As a queen, her prime duty was to provide the country with an heir to the throne, and the fact that she had not come close to fulfilling this obligation weighted her with humiliation and the faint suspicion that she, like Louis, had somehow offended God. It depressed her to think that the wife of the most miserable varlet could bear a dozen babies, that servingwomen had bastards to drown; even Petronilla, who had plenty of sins for which to atone, had brought forth a son. During that dreary winter, her desire to have children—strong, handsome boys—grew to almost an obsession.
Nevertheless, as it was not her nature to bear discontent tranquilly, she determined to locate an exit from the turmoil encircling the royal family. In June, spirits at the Cite Palace began to slowly levitate as the day approached for the unveiling of Suger’s newly built cathedral at Saint-Denis. Louis’s spiritual advisers, as concerned about his despondency as Eleanor, hoped that the king’s participation in this momentous event might bolster his confidence; in fact, the dedication of the cathedral was to be combined with a second peace conference to mend the conflicts with Champagne.
Saturday, the tenth of June, was a brilliant blue day as Eleanor and Louis began the seven-mile journey to Saint-Denis. They made slow progress because the old Roman road was clogged with scores of cheerful pilgrims—parties of monks, ladies of gentle blood accompanied by their belted knights, whores, thieves, cripples, hymn chanters, and assorted folks from Paris—the whole motley host bound for the abbey to see what miracles had been wrought by Suger’s stonemasons and glaziers. Owing to the slow-moving traffic on the highway, Eleanor gave herself up to the small pleasures afforded along the roadside: the tiered vineyards and ruins of an old Roman temple adorning the slopes of Montmartre, the Martyrologium, a small chapel marking the spot where Saint Denis had been martyred. Eventually, they passed into open countryside, where the road ran between ploughed fields, and then it was not long before they arrived at the stone wall and dry ditch enclosing the little town that had grown up around the abbey. As far as Eleanor could see, the fields were dotted with tents hastily thrown up to shelter the multitudes who had no access to accommodations in the local households.
The arrival of the king and queen drew shouts from the crowd and the hurried appearance of Abbot Suger, who came out to personally escort them to the abbey’s guest quarters. As Louis hurried off to the cathedral, where he spent the night praying and keeping the vigils with the monks of Saint-Denis, Eleanor was left alone with her thoughts and her maids. The next morning, the feast day of Saint Barnabas, she rose at dawn to take her place in the cathedral. Abbot Suger may have exorcised his personal fascination with corrupting secular luxuries, but he could not believe that the splendor of gold and rubies would be displeasing when dedicated to God. The most expensive marble, glass, and gems had been deposited in the hands of master craftsmen from many nations to produce a symphony in stone and glass. Gone was the earthbound Romanesque style with its massive walls and rounded arches, and in its place Suger had pioneered a bold new architecture that flung pointed arches and towering vaults against the Frankish sky. Inside, vast stained-glass windows bathed his Gothic cathedral in pools of light the color of gems. There was not one altar but twenty; above the high altar glowed a magnificent twenty-foot gold cross glittering with diamonds, rubies, and pearls, the result of two years’ work by the goldsmiths of Lorraine. Incense swirled like a gray haze against the altar where the relics of the saint would be placed, and the voices of the congregation surged and mingled with the soaring notes from hundreds of clerics in the choir.
As Suger had planned, Louis played a principal role in the ceremony: It was he who led the solemn procession of bishops and monks around the cathedral as they sprinkled holy water on the outside walls, he who shouldered the silver reliquary holding the bones of Saint Denis and carried it to the altar, where it was laid to rest in a blaze of spun gold and precious stones. The contrast of his gray penitent robes and rude sandals caused a stir among the crowd. “No one would have taken the king for that scourge of war who had lately destroyed so many towns, burned so many churches, shed so much blood. The spirit of penance shone in his whole aspect.” By afternoon the weather had turned uncomfortably warm, and the number of worshipers jammed into the cathedral had far exceeded its capacity because there was not a single spare inch on which to stand; outside, additional thousands milled about under the open skies.
Later that day, Eleanor slipped away to a deserted chamber in the abbey, where a private interview had been arranged with Bernard of Clairvaux. It is unclear whether the idea for the meeting had originated with Louis or Bernard or even had been initiated by the queen herself, nor what its real purpose was intended to be. In any case, Eleanor did not lack for words nor did she face the saint with any particular awe. Remembering Bernard’s effect on her father at Parthenay a decade earlier, she undoubtedly looked forward to the talk with some wariness and perhaps more than a touch of rancor. Whatever her feelings that evening, she concealed them by deftly launching into a well-rehearsed declaration. She intended to inform the abbot of her uppermost thoughts—and inform him she did. Her desire was to see the ban of excommunication lifted from the house of Vermandois and her sister’s marriage be recognized. If the abbot would be kind enough to use his considerable influence on Pope Celestine to see these injustices rectified, then the Capets were prepared to make certain concessions in the prickly matter of Champagne and perhaps conclude a bit of old business, the recognition of Peter de la Châtre as archbishop of Bourges.
Both the content of her speech and the forthright manner in which she presented her ideas amazed and horrified the holy man. He was unaccustomed to bargaining with women and certainly not with one who spoke as boldly as a man and eyed him with shameless curiosity. At the time of this meeting, Bernard was fifty-four. As a youth he had been blond and handsome, but years of deliberate self-abuse had given him ulcers, a digestive system that could barely keep down food, and the appearance of a walking skeleton. “His whole body was meagre and emaciated. His skin itself was of the finest texture, with a slight flush of red on the cheeks. His hair was of a yellow inclining to white; his beard was auburn, sprinkled towards the end of his life with grey.” He preferred filth to cleanliness and wore a hair shirt next to his skin.
Although legend maintains that he was “hot in burning love,” this did not include the love of women, most assuredly not a woman like Eleanor. While he had adored his mother, nearly all other women he feared, regarding them as snares of Satan. Familiar with sexual desire, he had once, in adolescence, glanced admiringly at a girl and immediately felt such shame that he threw himself into an icy pond, remaining there until he almost froze. His hostility toward the female sex extended to his sister Hombeline, who had chosen to marry and raise a family rather than enter a convent. Once, gorgeously dressed and trailed by a huge retinue of servants, she appeared at the gates of Clairvaux, but Bernard refused to see her. He sent a message with their brother Andrew to declare her no better than a whore, a bait of the devil to lure men to destruction.
Although Eleanor and Bernard had never met before, he had once beheld her from a distance, probably in 1140 at the Sens debate with Peter Abélard. Illustrious princesses and great lords meant nothing to Bernard, so there must have been something exceptionally magnificent about Eleanor and her ladies-in-waiting to captivate his attention so thoroughly. He must have watched those exquisites for quite a time, because later he had them so well fixed in his mind that he could offer a description to the maiden Sophia “that she may never sully her virginity but attain its reward.” It is ironic that the only surviving physical portrait of Eleanor comes from a man who viewed her as a Babylonian harlot:
You see women burdened rather than adorned with ornaments of gold, silver and precious stones, and all the raiment of a court. You see them dragging long trains of most precious material behind them, stirring up clouds of dust as they go.... The ornaments of a queen have no beauty like to the blushes of natural modesty which color the cheeks of a virgin.... Silk, purple and paint have their beauty but they do not make the body beautiful. The comeliness which goes on with clothes comes off with clothes, it belongs to the clothes and not the clothed. Thus do not emulate evil-doers.... Consider it wholly beneath you to borrow your appearance from the furs of animals and the work of worms.
Bernard remembered the queen as one of “those daughters of Belial who put on airs, walk with heads high and, with mincing steps, got up and adorned like a temple.” Still, on that summer evening at Saint-Denis, he was able to contemplate her with an appraising eye, perhaps he even managed to overlook her appalling costume, but he was hard put to conceal his dismay at her manner. He had expected contriteness, sorrow, even pleas for forgiveness, but unlike her husband, Eleanor did not approach him as a penitent; she did not mention Vitry. Instead, he heard her daring to haggle with God, speaking indelicately of bargains and adultery and influences upon the pope. By the time she had finished, he had localized to his own satisfaction the true identity of the king’s “evil genius.” At this point, claim the chroniclers, Bernard commanded the queen to stop meddling in affairs of state, rebuking her so harshly that Eleanor broke down and meekly excused her behavior by saying she had been embittered by her inability to have children.
Since there were no witnesses present, the details of this scene are open to question. It is impossible to say whether she was transformed by Bernard’s hypnotic personality. Certainly more august personages than she had fallen at his feet. A more likely explanation was that Eleanor. above all else a pragmatist, quickly reevaluated her position. Although it must have been galling to accept, she understood that Ralph and Petronilla had become an incurably lost cause. Rightly or wrongly, she had done everything within her power to help them, and much that she had reason to regret. Now, casting aside family loyalty, she opted for her own concerns and played the heretofore unsampled role of suppliant by presenting to the miracle maker her curable sorrow, the lack of an heir.
Bernard knew her history. In his eyes, she had sprung from adulterous grandparents and an ungodly father whose stubbornness had nearly wrecked the Church. The family was a worthless lot, arrogant, self-willed, always seeking worldly thrills and plucking the beards of the clergy when they could not get their ways. Little wonder that the offspring of such people had strayed so far from the paths of righteousness. But now Bernard could not help rejoicing that the “daughter of Belial” wished to return to the fold by aspiring to the pious objective of motherhood. “My child,” he allegedly said to her, “seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the king against the Church and urge upon him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in my turn promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring.” Bernard had disdained to negotiate with a woman, and yet, in the end, Eleanor was able to extract the bargain she most desired.
Pact completed, the saint and the queen took leave of each other. Behind the abbey, the sun had set. Dusk hid the tall windows. but row upon row of candles could be seen gleaming through the open bronze portals. Through the shadows tonsured monks softly tramped in their black robes. The scent of incense and damp grass fluttered slowly on the crest of the evening breeze as Eleanor, exultant, hurried away to find her husband.
Within weeks, peace returned to France as Louis handed over Theobald’s war-torn provinces and admitted Peter de la Châtre to the archbishopric of Bourges. The papal bans on the house of Vermandois, never removed, would be ignored in time, however. Four years later, the papacy would recognize the validity of Ralph and Petronilla’s marriage, but Bernard quickly declared that they would not enjoy each other for long, and that, moreover, no children of their union would bear worthy fruit. In both respects, his predictions turned out to be fairly accurate. Ralph died in 1151. Their son, Ralph, became a leper and died in his early twenties; their daughters, Isabella and Eleanor, would have four marriages between them but neither proved able to bear children.
Eleanor, faithful to her word, kept her half of the bargain she had made with Bernard; the abbot of Clairvaux, however, was less successful. The following year Eleanor gave birth, not to the manchild she had ordered but to a daughter, whom she named Marie in honor of the Queen of Heaven.
In 1145, strife shook many of the European nations: In England, the death of Henry I ten years earlier had sparked a bitter civil war between the king’s chosen successor, his daughter Matilda, and his nephew Stephen, who had seized the throne; France’s neighbor, the Holy Roman Empire, reeled with internal struggles; and in Rome, the anticlerical agitator Arnold of Brescia forced the new pope, Eugenius III, to flee the Holy City and take refuge at Viterbo. In France, however, there was peace. At the Cite Palace, King Louis fasted three days a week and prayed incessantly. Following the havoc of the war, cooler heads undertook to get the young king in hand, and now he allowed himself to be guided in all matters by his advisers, notably Abbot Suger, who had returned to court as chief counselor; Eleanor, who had promised Bernard that she would allow the ship of state to be navigated by male hands, behaved most cooperatively, and that autumn, when anarchy broke out in a section of Aquitaine called Aunis, she stood aside while Louis settled the dispute. The cumbersome days passed slowly, one indistinguishable from another, and although Eleanor now had a child, the care of the infant Princess Marie rested largely in the hands of nurses. The queen found it increasingly hard to live like a nun, and lacking suitable diversions, her boredom intensified. To make matters worse, the foreseeable future held no presentiment of deliverance.
During the intolerable winter evenings when king and queen sat alone in their apartment, Louis would muse fitfully about the past and future. Memories of the war still burned in his imagination, and although he no longer suffered nightmares, he had never completely recovered from the incident at Vitry. Or, as it was now called, Vitry-le-Brûlé. He had done what he could to help rebuild the burned town, he wore a hair shirt next to his pale skin and fasted until he grew weak, but still the deadly sin haunted him, and he could think of no ordeal severe enough to wipe out his transgressions. Except perhaps one: a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The vision of such a journey had been swimming before his eyes since childhood, when his life had been dedicated to the Church, and many times he had imagined himself tramping the road to Jerusalem, spending Easter in the Holy Sepulcher. To his wife, he now confided another secret: His elder brother, Philip, had dreamed of visiting the tomb of Christ, and when he had been killed, the ten-year-old Louis had made a vow to go on the pilgrimage in his place. Eleanor listened with one ear to the monotonous litany of his guilt, for she had heard it countless times; however, she could well understand his fantasies about distant lands, for she too knew the impulse to escape.
That year of 1145 they planned to hold Christmas court at Bourges, dispatching well in advance announcements to summon their vassals. As it happened, before Christmas there appeared a divine solution to both of the Capets’ maladies in the form of a papal bull. Ever since the capture of Jerusalem nearly fifty years earlier, the West had fallen into the habit of viewing Outremer as a Christian province. Then in the closing days of 1144, the renowned city of Edessa had been overrun by the Turks. It seemed that Count Joscelin had been absent from his capital, celebrating Christmas on the banks of the Euphrates, a more pleasant section of the country. In fact, lately Joscelin had been spending most of his time in extravagant dissipation on his estate at Turbessel, and consequently he had been able to ignore the activities of a Turk named Zengi. The governor of Aleppo and Mosul, Zengi was a great warrior who, rumor said, had sprung from an Amazon, the Margravine Ida of Austria, who had supposedly been captured during the First Crusade and swept away to a harem. Whatever Zengi’s true heritage, he was shrewd enough to realize that Edessa, the most vulnerable of the Frankish capitals in Syria, represented an opportunity too golden to miss. The careless Joscelin had not thought to supply Edessa with a strong garrison or reserves of food, and for that reason Zengi was able to mount a siege with little difficulty. On December 26, 1144, the Turkish army swarmed into the city and massacred all the Franks, including their archbishop, as well as many of the native Christians. Naturally the reconquest of this important Christian city, so easily retrieved from its Frankish masters, strengthened Zengi’s position; he had no intention of interrupting his good luck by stopping with Edessa. The whole Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem now lay exposed to the infidel, and nobody understood the threat better than Joscelin’s neighbor, Prince Raymond of Antioch.
Although rumors of disturbances in the Holy Land had been filtering back to Europe throughout much of 1145, not until autumn did there arrive at the exiled papal court in Viterbo an official plea from Queen Melisende of Jerusalem urgently requesting Eugenius to preach a new Crusade. Since his accession in February, the pope had been unable to enter Rome, and he could hardly afford to further jeopardize his shaky position by traveling beyond the Alps to personally direct a movement as had Pope Urban. It was to King Louis that the pope decided to turn for aid. Although he was well aware of Louis’s troubles with the Church, the king’s former waywardness was not, apparently, a consideration. Rather, since Louis was king of the land from which most of the Frankish princes in Outremer had come, he seemed the obvious leader of an expedition that would relieve them. Accordingly, on December 1, 1145, Eugenius dictated a bull urging Louis and all the faithful of the kingdom of France to rescue eastern Christendom from the infidel and promised them remission for their sins, a reminder that there was more to the Crusade than purely military objectives.
The Capets—both of them—responded eagerly to the call, a development that Eugenius could scarcely have foreseen. In truth, the arrival of the papal bull catapulted Eleanor out of her malaise and suddenly opened up unlimited horizons certain to purge whatever afflictions ailed her. At Christmas court, Eleanor sat impatiently at Louis’s side as he addressed the assembled barons and prelates and revealed “the secret in his heart.” At once she could see that he was going about the announcement in precisely the wrong manner by stressing the idea of penance and awkwardly rambling on about his personal desire to take the cross as an expiation for his sins at Vitry. Even though Bishop Geoffrey of Langres delivered an eloquent sermon exhorting the barons of France and Aquitaine to follow their sovereign’s lead, the Crusade was received with chilly indifference. Eleanor, disappointed but hardly surprised, had already spoken privately with many of her southern chieftains, and she knew that few of them cared about the possible damnation of Louis’s soul. Instead, the proposal for a new Crusade only succeeded in awakening memories of the last one, that disastrous expedition led by Eleanor’s grandfather. Many were of the opinion that it would be foolhardy to emulate their fathers and grandfathers, who had been in such a hurry to reach heaven that they mortgaged their lands and rushed off to be martyred many leagues before they reached Jerusalem. With that, she could not argue.
But it was not only the southerners who held back; the Franks exhibited little enthusiasm for a Crusade, too. Among those who voiced disapproval was the elder statesman of the realm, Abbot Suger: God, he said, would be best served by the efficient and peaceful administration of the kingdom; if Louis absented himself for a year or more, the country might very well lapse into widespread disorder again. If the king truly wished to fight the enemies of Christ, there were plenty of heretics he could wipe out in France. Beneath Suger’s careful reasoning lay ripples of panic that were not totally irrational. The ebullient mood of the king and queen made him profoundly nervous, a feeling only increased by the information that Eleanor also planned to take the cross. From past experience, he knew that their high spirits often preceded some unfortunate incident; with Louis’s immaturity, there was no telling what folly might befall a crusading army under his leadership. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that he might be killed, leaving the kingdom without a male heir. Most of these misgivings Suger did not voice, but nevertheless he strongly urged the king and queen, if not to abandon their plan, at least to delay and reflect.
Despite Suger’s open opposition, Eleanor stoutly set about counteracting Louis’s negative appeal. Using her influence as best she could, she moved among her Aquitainian vassals with a fiery tongue, urging them to reconsider, playing upon their pride, chastising the cowardly and encouraging the ambitious. After a number of intimate parleys in the langue d’oc, she was able to change a few minds but clearly not enough for her purposes. If she could rally the lords of Aquitaine to her side, they would outnumber Louis’s French vassals and assure the Crusade as a viable project. Still, as the Christmas court drew to a close, the expedition hung in the balance. It was Suger, hoping to gain time as well as partisans, who suggested that the decision be postponed until March 31, 1146, when a plenary assembly was scheduled to be held at Vézelay. Meanwhile, an appeal had already gone out from Pope Eugenius to the one man in France who might sway a nation into embarking on a holy war: Bernard of Clairvaux. To Suger’s dismay, Bernard readily agreed to preach the Crusade.
A weak spring sunshine covered the hills of Burgundy. For months the news that Saint Bernard would preach at Vézelay on Easter Sunday had been radiating to the far corners of the kingdom and beyond. The town bustled with the cheerful noise of a crowd on a holiday, sightseers eager to glimpse the saint and to inspect the new Cathedral of Saint Mary Magdalene, which crowned the city on the hill. As at Clermont a half century earlier, the throngs were too great to be contained under any other roof but heaven. “And since there was no place within the town which could accommodate such a large crowd, a wooden platform was erected outside in a field, so that the abbot could speak from an elevation to the people standing about.” It might have been a fairground, the field rippling with wimples and skullcaps and hoods, the platform blossoming with the colorful robes of the king and queen accompanied by their retinue of counselors and noblemen, bishops and statesmen. At the sight of Bernard mounting the dais, a tense silence descended on the crowd, for the old man, emaciated from his years of fasting, appeared close to death. Nevertheless, once he began to speak, his voice trumpeted forth loud and clear, reverberating through the crowd to tear their hearts and stir their holy rage. As the sound of his voice rang over the hillside, the words seemed, to those gathered there, as music from an angel who had suddenly dropped from the clouds. His words have not been handed down; we know only that he read the papal bull calling for a holy expedition and promising absolution for all who took the cross, but to think that he would not have embellished the papal letter with his incomparable rhetoric is inconceivable. At last, unable to restrain themselves, the people broke into discordant waves of applause and shouts of “To Jerusalem” and then there was silence once more. King Louis was moving forward to speak, but after only a few words he dissolved into the tears that came so easily to him and prostrated himself before the abbot to receive the cross.
Still under Bernard’s spell, Louis’s vassals forgot their earlier coolness in their eagerness to receive a cross from the abbot’s own wasted hands. In every dialect of Gaul, they began to cry out, “Crosses, give us crosses!” and so great was the clamor that the hills and fields and woods seemed to echo back, “Crosses!” Soon Bernard’s supply was exhausted, “and when he had sowed, rather than distributed, the parcel of crosses which he had prepared beforehand, he was forced to tear his own garments and to sow them abroad.” It went on until nightfall. The feudal lords had fallen into orderly ranks, and by the light of cressets and lanterns they waited their turn to approach the man of God. Private feuds forgotten, enemies standing shoulder to shoulder, that Sunday they were all brothers enlisting in the army of Christ. In the file could be seen Count Theobald’s eldest son, Henry; Alphonse-Jourdain, from whom Louis and Eleanor had tried to wrest Toulouse; Louis’s brother Robert, count of Dreux; Thierry, count of Flanders; Archibald of Bourbon; Enguerrand of Coucy; the king’s uncle, Count Amadeus II; the bishops of Langres, Arras, and Lisieux; and many, many others, whose names the chroniclers did not know or lacked the parchment to list.
At some point during the daylong procession, Eleanor knelt before the abbot to receive her cross. By no means was she the only woman to do so; among the noble ladies who took the cross on Easter Sunday, we know the names of Sybille of Flanders. Faydide of Toulouse, Torqueri of Bouillon, and Florine of Burgundy, and there were wives and daughters of other great lords who followed the queen’s example. Later, after the newly blessed cruciati had returned to their homes, stories were told describing Queen Eleanor and her ladies as a troop of armed Amazons. Dressed in cherry red boots and white tunics, with the crimson cross splashed across their breasts, they had galloped on white horses over the hillside at Vézelay brandishing swords and spurring the faint-hearted to heed the call of the Almighty. Or so it was said. From what most people knew of their flamboyant queen, the tale sounded completely in character, and those who had been present at Vézelay did not bother to disillusion them, indeed they themselves may have embroidered a few of the fabulous details. The stories only added to the general excitement and, for that matter, probably stimulated recruiting.
Later, Louis would be severely censured for permitting Eleanor to accompany him. The chroniclers would claim that, mistrusting the queen out of his sight, he had been motivated by burning jealousy. William of Newburgh, writing some fifty years after Vézelay, advances the theory that the king so adored his beautiful wife that he could not bear to be separated from her. A more reasonable explanation is simply that in the spring of 1145 few, except perhaps Abbot Suger, ever thought to question Eleanor’s decision to take the cross. Contrary to what is sometimes believed, there was nothing very unusual about a woman going on Crusade. During the first expedition to the Holy Land, many noble ladies accompanied their lords. Count Alphonse-Jourdain of Toulouse had been born in the East and owed his name to the fact that he had been baptized in the waters of the river Jordan. Even on the so-called People’s Crusade led by Peter the Hermit, the army of the poor was not made up principally of men; there were also a great many women and children. Throughout Eleanor’s childhood, she had grown accustomed to the sight of female pilgrims; in the spring and summer, the roads of Aquitaine had been thronged with travelers bound for Compostela or Rome or Jerusalem, and many of them were women.
But, of course, there was more to her decision. At the very word crusade, intoxicating memories moved in her mind. Despite William the Troubadour’s unfortunate experiences on the road to Jerusalem, he had managed to transcend disaster by writing of it in honeyed rhyme. Creating material for jongleur and minstrel, his odyssey had been transmuted into high adventure, and Eleanor remembered his songs with inexpressible nostalgia. With her grandfather’s Crusade had traveled one of the most famous beauties of her time, the Margravine Ida of Austria, who had raised a contingent of troops and rode at their head. The fact remained that the Margravine had been among those lost during the massacre, but Eleanor no doubt preferred to believe that this admirable woman had somehow escaped. That a similar fate might await women during the Second Crusade seemed absurd. By the middle of the twelfth century, pilgrimages to the Holy Land were no longer novel; in fact, they had become the medieval version of the grand tour, excursions that persons of consequence undertook for their own spiritual and cultural enrichment.
The desire to visit the Holy Land was widespread and deeply implanted in the nature of medieval men and women. To many Christians, the desire to worship Christ in Jerusalem was an overriding emotion that enabled them to endure the dangers of a medieval journey, to face slow death from starvation or sudden death by murder en route, or to risk capture and enslavement by the Moslems. The reasons for taking the cross were as varied as the Crusaders themselves. For some, like Louis, the journey held out the hope of pardon from sin; for others, it was a means of escape from a dreary existence. While Eleanor would seem to fall into the latter category, she was by no means devoid of religious zeal; however, she was most religious when her interests and God’s interests happened to coincide. Bathed in extreme boredom at her drafty castle on the Seine, how she must have leaped at the opportunity to become a Crusader. What incomparable avenues opened to her, what marvels waited Beyond the Sea, where there was no rain or snow, what tales she would bring back to mesmerize her grandchildren on long winter evenings!
Her yearnings for adventure were no more suspect than Louis’s. “To him, taking the cross was a mystical adventure rather than a political move. But after a half century of rule in Jerusalem, he was convinced, as King of France, that the French crown had a messianic role to play and believed that he was following in the footsteps of Charlemagne, who, according to generally accepted tradition, had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.” Popular legend had it that a Christian monarch, perhaps a reincarnation of Charlemagne, would bring about the millenium by taking possession of Jerusalem. In those months after Vézelay, there could be found numerous “prophets” swearing that Louis was the king who would usher in the thousand years of peace preceding the final triumph of Jesus Christ.
Largely overlooked in the excitement was one crucial fact: Louis’s Crusade had arisen from dire political necessity. Not only had Jerusalem’s Queen Melisende sounded the alarm for help, but Prince Raymond of Antioch could also see calamity overtaking him unless reinforcements appeared from the West. Unlike Count Joscelin, he observed the dangers clearly, and it was only natural that he should think of his niece, the queen of the Franks. In September of that year, when Zengi was assassinated by a disgruntled servant, he believed his troubles to be over; to his consternation, however, he soon discovered that Zengi’s son, Nureddin, was no less fierce and warlike than his father, and a religious fanatic to boot. It is certain that Raymond sent his own messengers to the Capetian court, acquainting Louis and Eleanor with the details of the Turkish threat and stressing the gravity of his plight. William of Tyre relates that the prince wooed his relatives in Paris with “noble gifts and treasures of great price in the hope of winning favor.” He might have saved himself the trouble, for Eleanor and Louis needed no added inducements.
The Crusade was scheduled to depart in the spring of 1147, but in the meantime there was much to be done. More was needed than merely the approval of the pope and the promises of princes; such an enterprise would have been doomed without the support of the general populace. There is no question that Eleanor worked tirelessly to assure the success of the operation by contributing to the recruiting of soldiers and the collection of money. After returning from the stirring events at Vézelay, she immediately set off on a personal tour of Aquitaine, proclaiming tournaments to rally knights and petty castellans and renewing special privileges enjoyed by abbeys in exchange for their financial support. At Fontevrault, for instance, she guaranteed the abbey a profit of five hundred sous from a fair held in Poitiers, and similar gifts were made to Montierneuf, La Grace-Dieu, and other religious foundations. Owing to her efforts and, very likely, to her dashing example, a remarkably high proportion of the Crusaders would come from Aquitaine, among them Geoffrey de Rancon, the lord of Taillebourg castle, where she and Louis had spent their wedding night; Saldebreuil of Sanzay, whom she had made her constable; Hugh of Lusignan; and Guy of Thouars. If Bernard of Clairvaux viewed her activity as a form of backsliding from their agreement, he did not voice his objections, for at least her efforts were focused on a pious cause.
While Eleanor carried the call to arms to the southland, the indefatigable Bernard was preaching in Burgundy, Lorraine. Flanders, and finally he embarked on an extensive tour of the Rhineland. That year crops had failed in Germany, and since there was widespread famine, hunger undoubtedly moved many to take the cross in hope of winning food and riches in the East. Their emperor, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, admired Bernard, but his position in Germany remained shaky, and he had little enthusiasm for a foreign war with so many enemies in his own yard. Frail and tremulous, Bernard circled Conrad like an aging bloodhound. Time after time he petitioned the sober emperor, only to meet with polite rebuffs. Finally, at Christmas, he cornered Conrad at Speyer, and speaking as though he were Christ himself, reminded the Holy Roman emperor of all the favors heaven had showered upon him: “O man, what have I not done for thee that I ought to have done?” The next day Conrad took the cross.
Bernard had left Clairvaux in the autumn of 1146, and he would not return until spring of the following year. So spectacular were the results of his labors that he was able to write to Pope Eugenius: “You have ordered and I have obeyed, and your authority has made my obedience fruitful. I have declared and I have spoken, and they [the Crusaders] are multiplied above number. Towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed while their husbands are still alive.”
Enthusiasm for the Crusade could not have been called universal, however, if only because such a vast operation required unusually large sums of money. “For this purpose there was a general exaction levied throughout Gaul: neither sex, rank nor dignity was spared or excused from contributing aid to the king. For which reason his pilgrimage was followed by the imprecations of his subjects.” Despite whisperings and anger, the expedition slowly began to mobilize. There were innumerable decisions to be made: how to arrange transportation for 100,000 persons; how to assure a supply of food for a journey of nearly unimaginable distance; how to find responsible guides to convey them through strange lands. In all these matters the king displayed an uncharacteristic amount of initiative and efficiency.
The winter came, all the more bleak and devastating because so many were dreaming about a land where the sun always shone. Thirty miles south of Paris, snow drifts blanketed the fields of Étampes on February 16, 1147, as Louis’s barons and bishops arrived for a three-day conference to discuss preparations. Icy winds pierced their cloaks, and even inside near the castle’s great hearth the men shivered and the smoke-blackened tapestries billowed along the walls. Notwithstanding the weather, spirits ran exceptionally high. Louis had promised that each would have an equal voice in the planning session, a decision for which Abbot Suger and Eleanor could only feel a measure of relief. On Sunday the sixteenth, the king opened the assembly with a report on his accomplishments to date: He had received favorable responses to his requests to the Germans and Hungarians asking permission to pass through their lands and to trade at their markets. Deputies whom he had sent to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus, and to Roger, the Norman king of Sicily, had evoked a flurry of invitations and promises, which he intended to lay before the council for discussion. This last matter occupied their attention for much of the conference because the question of route—by sea or overland through Constantinople—was of critical importance. Obsequious letters were read from Manuel Comnenus, who, despite Byzantium’s unsettling experiences with Crusaders in the past, nevertheless effusively extended hospitality and support. King Roger sent special envoys offering to transport—for a price—the army by sea.
In the lively discussion that followed, there were those who strongly favored Roger’s plan: A sea voyage would eliminate the difficulties of guiding an army down the Danube and across unknown territory into Asia Minor and, furthermore, would bypass the Greeks, of whose perfidy many Franks were convinced. Other barons preferred the land route, the same one transversed by the First Crusade, and they pointed out that Roger, presently at war with Byzantium, had only made the offer to strengthen his own position. Moreover, everyone knew the Normans were notorious for their wiliness, and many said frankly that Roger meant them no good. By process of open debate,the arguments were presented, the advantages and disadvantages thrashed out, until a majority agreed that the Crusade would travel by land. In the long run, it was safer and cheaper.
Once they had reached agreement on these arrangements, the council took up the question of who would govern the kingdom in Louis’s absence. The choice fell on Abbot Suger and on William, count of Nevers, but the latter declined by suddenly announcing his intention to enter the monastery of Chartreuse. Suger was only slightly more enthusiastic about accepting the regency, “because he considered it a burden rather than an honor.” As the meeting ended, it was decided that the Crusade would depart three months hence. The place of rendevous: Metz.
On June 11, 1147, the bells tolled until the sky above the rooftops of Saint-Denis vibrated with an endless clangor. The cathedral had been draped with flags and gonfalons, and in the blaze of thousands of candles the red crosses on pennants and tunics seemed as if they had caught fire. Pope Eugenius had crossed the Alps to officiate, and it was he who opened the small door before the high altar and, removing the silver chest containing the bones of Saint Denis, offered the precious relic for the king’s kiss. When Eugenius took down the sacred banner of France, the red and gold silk oriflamme, which left the abbey only on extraordinary occasions, and placed its gilded pike in Louis’s hands, the voices of the faithful sounded a triumphant roar. The sight of the crosses shimmering in the candlelight and of the sacred banner against Louis’s black pilgrim’s tunic made victory seem a certainty.
Throughout the long consecration ceremony Eleanor wept, but whether from emotion or fatigue it was hard to say. Standing next to her mother-in-law, who was making a rare public apperance, Eleanor felt faint from the suffocating air and longed for Eugenius to end the proceedings by bestowing on Louis the traditional pilgrim’s wallet and pronouncing the blessing. “The crowds and the king’s wife and his mother, who nearly perished because of their tears and the heat, could not endure the delay; but to wish to depict the grief and wailing which occurred is as foolish as it is impossible.” Earlier that morning, Louis had visited a leper colony outside the gates of Paris and kissed some of its astonished inhabitants after asking their blessing, a stunt that Eleanor without doubt must have regarded as insane if not totally unnecessary. That day she had seen little of her husband, and now she watched his exhausted figure slip from the cathedral in the direction of the monk’s dormitory. That evening, while Louis and his retinue dined in the refectory with the brothers, Eleanor remained in the guest quarters of the abbey and concentrated on the morrow, which she had been awaiting so eagerly. The past year had been a time of hectic activity and almost incessant work of the type she most enjoyed, and even when there had been no more men to enlist or money to solicit, she had not been idle but spent the remaining weeks attending to personal preparations. Appreciative of the hardships that the journey might entail, she wanted to be prepared for every contingency and thus took the precaution of packing all items she might conceivably require. Into chests were folded layer upon layer of clothes so that she might change frequently on the road and present a smart appearance in Constantinople and Antioch. Let no one say that the queen of the Franks had entered the sophisticated cities of the East looking like a rustic. Into the chests also went a suitable collection of jewelry, wimples, slippers, cosmetics, belts, furs to ward off the cold, and veils to prevent sunburn. As insurance against bad weather she brought several tents; for sleeping comfort she carted along pallet beds with good mattresses for herself and her maids; to prevent illness—although she had exceptionally good health—there were carpets to cover the sodden earth. Other boxes held cooking utensils, bowls, goblets, washbasins, soap, napkins, and towels. Altogether, Eleanor’s personal belongings, along with those of the other noblewomen traveling on the expedition, filled a stupefying line of wagons, and some of the more experienced Crusaders found cause for complaint. They grumbled about excess baggage, about the presence of so many women with their chambermaids, and later, when mishaps occurred, they would remember those heavy wagon trains laden with feminine accoutrements.
Crossing Champagne from Saint-Denis to Metz, swaying in the chair-saddle strapped sideways on her palfrey, invisible shackles dropped from Eleanor’s arms. Thanks be to God, there would be countless months before she need return to the humdrum beat of ordinary life. Each day would bring fresh sights, unimaginable wonders to delight the eye and dazzle the senses. Already she could see the glassy green waters of the Danube, the saffron-colored sunsets over the Golden Horn, the rich bazaars and domed churches of Constantinople. In Antioch she would be reunited with her Uncle Raymond, and there would be laughter and singing in the langue d’oc just as in the old days. By spring they would reach the Holy Land in time to celebrate Easter in the very spot where Lord Jesus had walked and the Blessed Virgin had wept. Thanks be to God, she had everything to look forward to.
Secretly Eleanor must have felt grateful that she would not be traveling with Louis, for he had surrounded himself with the most sanctimonious of sycophants: Odo de Deuil, his former secretary, would be acting as chaplain and scribbling notes for a proposed chronicle of the expedition, and Thierry Galeran, a grim-visaged eunuch who had always disliked her, had been chosen as Louis’s personal bodyguard and business adviser. Both men, she knew, would be sharing her husband’s tent. Under the circumstances, she preferred her own entourage, handpicked to suit her taste: knights from Aquitaine, favorite ladies cast along the same lines as herself, troubadours and jongleurs who had flocked to her side despite the Vézelay bull expressly forbidding their presence—all congenial traveling companions who knew how to laugh and sing freely and who made prayers of appropriate length.
Long before they reached Metz, the road became jammed with troops hastening for the mobilization point, and the air was filled with the thump of hoofs, with creaking wagon wheels, and with the excited voices of the crossbearers. There were nearly 100,000 of them, so many that when they had all finally pitched their tents on the banks of the Moselle, it seemed as though some great metropolis had magically erupted from the bowels of the earth overnight. At the sight of the army that she had been instrumental in bringing to life, Eleanor could not have helped but feel proud. Never could she have dreamed that seething ocean of people, horses, tents, and wagons, herds of sheep and cattle. The weather was fair, and an atmosphere of joyful liberation from all restraints of ordinary living pervaded the camp. The meadows, which had rippled with grass a few days earlier, were soon crisscrossed by ruts and whipped into a bed of mud and dung from so many men and animals. The pavilions resounded with laughter and the sound of minstrels playing lays on their viols, and everywhere people sang hymns and marching songs. The arrival of each new company—Poitevins, Normans, Bretons, Toulousains—would be greeted with boisterous cheers as kinsman, old friends, and comrades from past campaigns were reunited. People strolled from tent to tent, feverishly talking and drinking good wine, until the pandemonium drowned out the cries of the birds and the neighs of the chargers and packhorses. In the tents of the victuallers, there were wine, bread and pastries, fruit and fish, roasted birds, cakes and venison; everywhere there was plenty to buy—for those who had the means to pay.
In the dew-soaked dawn of a morning in mid-June, the army began to move at last. As the procession made its way past the walls of Metz, church bells were pealing and crowds of women, children, old men, and beggars came to witness the greatest show they would ever see: They leaned from windows and turrets decked with red banners, they sat on the tops of walls, they lined the road and clustered at crossroads to watch the column pass. At the sight of the queen, they cried out in amazement, exclaiming over her gorgeous robes embroidered with the royal fleur-de-lis and her magnificent riding horse with its silver-trimmed saddle and plaited mane. “Pray for us in Jerusalem, lady!” they called out, and “Holy Cross” and “For Christ Jesus!” They gazed with shining eyes at King Louis, off to Jerusalem on God’s business, and they cheered his distinguished lords, who bore their handsome bodies stiff and upright. Down the road marched the iron men, the enamelhelmeted knights, who bore banners emblazoned with the cross and swords studded with gems and pieces of the True Cross set in the hilts, swords that had been blessed and twice-blessed by priests and bishops. Alongside the knights rode young squires leading destriers and carrying their masters’ shields. And then came the foot soldiers, so many companies of them that they could not even be counted.
As the hours passed, the townsfolk grew weary of staring and cheering. There was so much to see, more than the senses could bear: horses, donkeys, and mules, leaving heaps of warm yellow dung in the road; archers with long bows and quivers slung over their shoulders; technicians who possessed the critical skills for building siege engines and battering walls; carts and wagons piled high with arms, baggage, tents, tools, and field kitchens. Brilliant as peacocks, the noble ladies moved by on horseback and litters, surrounded by their maids and minstrels; some carried falcons on their wrists and could be seen loosing them at birds circling overhead. The earth seemed to tremble with the clatter of hoofs, and still the waves of humanity rushed steadily forward down the road leading to God’s Holy City: tatterdemalion pilgrims plodding on penitent feet, washerwomen, volunteer martyrs, seamstresses, bishops, criminals seeking salvation, beggars and those temporarily unemployed, vagabonds of all descriptions, concubines and free-lance whores, packs of hunting dogs and pet monkeys and hooded birds. Somewhere in that unruly torrent rode Jaufre Rudel, the prince of Blaye, that high-born Provençal troubadour who wrote passionate verse about a mysterious lady he had never seen, his “faraway love.” The carts creaked and the rein chains jangled; gusts of laughter were muffled by the clanking of shields, and from time to time a flute trilled lazily in the early-summer heat.
Looking at the bright blue sky overhead, at the vast column blending into the horizon behind her, Eleanor forgot the dark lanes of the Île-de-France, forgot the infant Marie, even forgot that somewhere in that awesome procession rode her husband. Her past, those twenty-five years washed with sweetness and sorrow, lay behind. Ahead were rivers and mountains and celestial cities.