To Jerusalem

The crusading army moved at a brisk pace over central Europe toward the Rhine, often covering ten to twenty miles each day. Through wooded country, past a wealth of streams, springs, and meadows, the host sprawled out along the road as far as the eye could see and sometimes spilled over into the adjoining fields. Rolling along like an awkward thousand-legged dinosaur, it brought to a standstill the normal activities of the towns in its path and caused civilian travelers to relinquish their places on the highway until the Crusaders had moved by.

During those last days of June 1147, it was easy to forget the religious nature of their mission. Gawking like sightseers on a conducted tour, admiring castles and clucking extravagantly over each toy village, the cruciati swore the woods to be a lusher shade of jade than they had ever seen before, the ploughed fields moister and blacker. After a week or so, however, they became acclimated to the scenery. One mountain, after all, was not so different from another, the towns all began to look alike, and gradually they stopped staring and admiring. The indistinguishable summer days began to melt together, with the first week passing like a dream in which time has lost its ordinary meaning. In all this excitement, Eleanor did not remain untouched. Surrounded by the ladies and knights of her native land, she perhaps felt this sense of disassociation more strongly than others. Immediately, there sprang up between her and the Aquitainians an easy camaraderie that must have recalled her childhood. Days would pass when she would speak nothing but her native dialect, which is to say there were long stretches when she did not see Louis and probably rarely thought of him. Hearing the easy laughter and familiar drawling voices, she was certainly transported back in time to the warm afternoons when she rode through Poitou on one of her father’s chevauchées. If now she laughed and flirted, conducted herself more like a giddy young girl than a twenty-five-year-old queen, presumably that was because she did not feel obliged to behave otherwise. After the restless years in Paris, a summer of happy, if temporary, distraction was much to her taste.

Her aimless days adhered, nevertheless, to a strict pattern. Each morning she awoke before dawn to hear the camp bustling to life around her, the tents being dismantled, the carts harnessed. By the time the first embers of day began to heat the sky, she had dressed, attended to her devotions, and joined the bleary-eyed throngs on the road. Not until late afternoon would the call to halt sound. Then, as the soldiers began to set up the camp for the night, fires would be lit, dusty robes changed, and for Eleanor and the other high-born ladies, baths drawn. Later, when the wind was soft, the darkness would resonate with sounds of music and laughter as Eleanor and her household gathered in torch-lit tents or outside around a fire. All types of performers, including the forbidden troubadours, provided a veritable host of festivities and merriment for the entertainment of the nobility. This is not to suggest that hilarity prevailed throughout the entire camp; indeed, it was limited almost entirely to the contingent from Aquitaine, a fact that did not fail to attract the notice of the more devout Franks, who muttered that the Crusade was quickly degenerating into a pleasure party.

On the previous Crusade, women following the cross had lived as men and endured the same conditions, neither asking for special privileges nor receiving any. This time, obviously, it was to be different. Clearly the ladies were suffering no hardships; on the contrary, they appeared to regard the expedition as a movable feast to be adjourned during the day and resumed immediately upon halting for the night. Inevitably, tongues began to wag, with scandalmongers grumbling that the loose atmosphere would only lead to demoralization and vice. Per-force, when any sexual activity came to light, when a peasant soldier crept into the woods with a chambermaid, the episode was immediately attributed to the southern influence.

All in all, it was not surprising that the gossip soon spread to include the queen herself, since it was widely known that her entourage spent their evenings debating about love and playing games of chivalry with the troubadours. Her critics in later life insinuated that she did not lead an entirely blameless life from the outset of the Crusade, but it is difficult to gauge the extent of her indiscretion if, indeed, there was any at this stage. In all likelihood, her natural exuberance had reasserted itself, and she was merely enjoying herself to the utmost. Anxious to be the center of attention, disliking any authority save her own, she would have blandly ignored suggestions that she behave more circumspectly. However much her husband must have disapproved of the revels, he did not interfere, for Louis certainly could not afford to antagonize the southerners, who made up an important sector of his army, and, in addition, his attention was now occupied by matters more pressing than the queen’s amusements.

By Louis’s reckoning, it would take nearly three months of unbroken marching before they completed the first stage of their journey at Constantinople, where they would stop for a brief rest and confer with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus. Before embarking from Metz, Louis had laid down rules of conduct for the army, but by the time they reached the city of Worms on June 29, it was abundantly clear that his orders were not being observed. Odo de Deuil, chronicling the Crusade, wrote in disgust that it would be a waste of time to list the rules, for they went unheeded. But undoubtedly one of the prohibitions stated that towns through which they passed must not be plundered for food. At Worms, where a flotilla of small craft had been assembled to ferry the army across the Rhine, there occurred the first of a series of untoward incidents that underscored Louis’s deficiencies as a military commander and his inability to maintain discipline. As it happened, the army had scarcely crossed over to their encampment on the German side of the river when a quarrel broke out in the marketplace near the landing quay. As the pilgrims quickly discovered, food supplies were scarce, and the money changers charged exorbitant rates; many realized that only a wealthy person was going to reach Jerusalem without starving. When a boat laden with provisions landed at the dock, it was mobbed by a band of hungry Crusaders, who threw its crew overboard and proceeded to help themselves to the cargo. This unruly act brought immediate reprisals from the city’s merchants, who sprang into the fray with oars and knives, wounding several Crusaders and killing one of them.

Louis, lost in a faraway reverie, always resentful of time taken away from his prayers, seemed perplexed about how to handle the situation. Finally, almost nonchalantly, he referred the matter to his counselor Thierry Galeran, who, in turn, suggested sending the bishop of Arras to negotiate with the aggrieved citizens of Worms, who refused to sell any more food to the Crusaders; eventually, after some difficulty, the bishop persuaded the merchants to resume commerce. Louis’s initial mismanagement of the food supplies, no small failure, was making it increasingly clear to the rank and file of his army that a hasty retreat, the rescue of the Holy Land notwithstanding, was their best hope of extricating themselves from a wretched situation. If the shepherd could barely feed his flock in friendly territory, what would happen when they reached the lands of the Turks? Accordingly, the cynical, the disgusted, thought it wise to abandon the Crusade while still relatively close to home.

In the brilliant days of early July, Eleanor paid scant heed to the defection of a few malcontents. Nevertheless, well acquainted as she was with Louis’s shortcomings, she might well have felt forebodings as to her husband’s adequacy as a commander. In any case, if intimations of future disaster disturbed her at this time, there was little that she could do. Long ago she had been barred from the policy-making sphere, chastised by the great Bernard himself for meddling, and in recent weeks it had been a relief to distance herself, both from the Frankish high command and from her husband, who cloistered himself with his favorite attendants. Resigning herself to secondhand news of Louis’s actions from Geoffrey de Rancon and other southern nobles, she was willing, evidently, to accept an anonymous role, so much so that chronicler Odo does not mention her presence among the Crusaders until some weeks later.

From Worms the route lay overland through south German territories to Ratisbon, on the Danube. Waiting there, surrounded by a suite of fawning courtiers, were two ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor. This preview of Byzantium could not help but make an impression on the Franks, although the impression was not necessarily positive. Manuel’s envoys addressed Louis in such obsequious terms that he blushed, while others attending the interview were hard put to smother their smiles. The bishop of Langres, his patience exhausted by the listing of Louis’s virtues, finally cried out, “Brothers, do not repeat ‘glory,’ ‘majesty,’ ‘wisdom’ and ’piety’ so often in reference to the king. He knows himself and we know him well. Just indicate your wishes more briefly and fully.” Coming to the point at last, the Greeks presented two demands that in effect asked only for guarantees that Louis came in friendship. The first, that he should not take any of their cities, was readily granted. But the second—a request to return to Manuel any city or castle, captured from the Turks, that had formerly belonged to Byzantium—was considered unreasonable and deferred until the two sovereigns could discuss the matter personally.

Manuel Comnenus, despite his gross flatteries, was unhappy and resentful. Since “Byzantine perfidy” was a political byword among the Franks, it will be useful at this point to examine the man more closely. A half century earlier, the Greek historian Anna Comnena had watched the arrival of the first Crusaders with dismay and awe, counting them as innumerable as the leaves on the trees and the stars in the skies. To the thirteen-year-old girl it seemed that the “whole of the West, with all the barbarians that live between the farther side of the Adriatic and the Pillars of Hercules, had migrated in a body, and were marching into Asia through intervening Europe, making the journey with all their household.” Now all her nephew Manuel could see was the return of that very same cloud of locusts that had swarmed into the realm in 1096. In some perverse replay of history, the Crusaders were once again set to march across Byzantine territory, installing themselves on the outskirts of his imperial city and demanding help to make a war on territory that, until captured by the Turks, had belonged to Byzantium for centuries. At the same time, he suspected that the Crusaders, in a maddening display of illogic, would make no attempt to understand the political situation in the Mideast, would refuse to listen to advice, and would ignore the fact that driving the Turks out of Asia Minor concerned Byzantium as much as it did themselves. His grandfather Alexius Comnenus had been in no mood to serve the Crusaders; Manuel, busy with his own wars, his own political problems, felt exactly the same.

Unable to prevent the Crusade, his best and perhaps only hope was to somehow use the armies of the West to further his own interests and policies. In 1147, he had been emperor for only four years. Not yet thirty, a young man renowned for his brilliance (he had studied medicine), he had never expected to reach the throne for the simple reason that he had three older brothers. However, within the space of a few years, death had removed two of them, and when his father, John, was shot in a hunting accident, the dying emperor deliberately passed over an older son and set the crown on Manuel’s head. Now, whether or not he was fully conscious of the fact, he was presiding over an empire in the process of disintegration. After fifty years and more of campaigns, only the coastal districts were free from Turkish invasions. Almost annually, raiding parties would sweep over his Asiatic provinces, causing the inhabitants of those frontier lands to abandon their villages and flee to the cities.

The connecting principle running through Manuel’s policies was the need to play off the various Moslem princes against each other and isolate each of them in turn. The Crusade, once promulgated, had thrown askew his diplomatic maneuvers, for it was bringing together the Moslems in an inflamed united front against Christendom. Since Manuel stood on the brink of war with a Christian power, King Roger of Sicily, he could not possibly conduct major expeditions on two fronts at once. For this reason, in the spring of 1147, he concluded a twelve-year truce with his mortal enemies, the Turks. As double-crossing as this would appear to Louis when he learned of it, Manuel had little choice, for any alternative would have placed his empire in grave risk. In the short term, it was in his interest to speed the Crusaders into Asia Minor as quickly as possible in the hopes that by feeding them into the mouths of the Turks, both groups might devour each other.

Not yet privy to the intricacies of Byzantine policy, which would always remain beyond their grasp, Louis and his Crusaders were blithely proceeding south through Hungary toward the Greek border. By this time Eleanor had received the first of several letters from Empress Irene, stating how joyfully she was looking forward to the visit. Odo, having nothing of military importance to record, was reduced to describing the Hungarian countryside: “It abounds in good things which grow of their own accord and would be suitable for other things if the region had cultivators. It is neither as flat-lying as a plain nor rugged with mountains, but is located among hills which are suitable for vines and grains, and it is watered by the very clearest springs and streams.” While Odo noted agricultural trivia in his diary, Louis, too, seemed free of cares for the time being. Since Hungary offered plenty of food, there had been no problems. In a mood of self-congratulation, he wrote to Abbot Suger that “the Lord is aiding us at every turn,” and “the princes of the lands meet us with rejoicing and receive us with pleasure and gladly take care of our wants and devoutly show us honor.”

At the end of August, the Crusaders crossed the border into the Byzantine Empire, and for all Louis’s fine talk, they immediately began to encounter trouble, although at first they were not quite sure whom to blame for their problems. Odo noted that wrongs began to arise for the first time and, moreover, to be noticed by highborn and lowborn alike. “For the other countries, which sold us supplies properly, found us entirely peaceful. The Greeks, however, closed their cities and fortresses and offered their wares by letting them down on ropes.” Even allowing for Odo’s hysterically anti-Greek bias, as well as his convenient memory loss about the food riot at Worms, it is clear that the Greeks felt little affection for the Crusaders. It was at this point that Eleanor must have made the enormously upsetting discovery that the Crusade might not turn out to be the grand adventure she had envisioned. She knew that the meager, overpriced rations that the Greeks lowered over their walls were not enough to feed the army, nor could she blame Louis for failing to punish those who fed themselves by plundering. Rather than blame the Greeks, whom she was prepared to like because she planned to enjoy herself once she reached the pleasure palaces of Constantinople, it was easier to assign blame to Conrad’s Germans, who had passed that way a few weeks earlier. Occasionally the two armies met, that is to say, the Frankish vanguard met stragglers from the German army, the result invariably being killing and brawling. As for the Greeks, the normally astute Eleanor seems to have made no attempt at this time to analyze the curiously hostile behavior of a Christian country that had extended a warm official welcome. Instead, in some bewilderment, she surveyed the mounting disorder and may have rationalized along the same lines as did Odo when he said, “The Germans disturbed everything as they proceeded and the Greeks therefore fled our peaceful king who followed thereafter.” Since everyone loathed the Germans, she could hardly blame the Greeks for similar feelings.

The only Greeks to receive them with a modicum of enthusiasm were the clergy, who emerged from their barricaded cities carrying “icons and other Greek paraphernalia” and showed Louis the reverence due a king. As Eleanor must have known, however, after the Frankish priests celebrated Mass on local altars, the Greeks would purify them with propitiary offerings and ablutions, as if they had been defiled. The Greek churches were opulently decorated with paintings and marble, and even though both Greeks and Franks were Catholics, there was such a vast difference in ritual between the two churches that the Franks could not help but regard the Greeks as heathens. “Because of this,” explained Odo, “they were judged not to be Christians and the Franks considered killing them of no importance.” In other words, the situation had come to this: Louis proved unequal to the task of preventing excesses, and eventually he stopped trying.

It was September now. As the summer waned, so did the party mood that had sustained Eleanor for the past months. Her troubadours had packed away their lutes, her Amazon ladies from Aquitaine no longer seemed interested in nightly chatter about the delights of love; for everyone the atmosphere had suddenly turned somber. They had only to look about them to notice that the land, once beautiful and rich, had become a charnel house with rotting bodies of dead Germans contaminating the landscape like casually discarded garbage. Apparently, as long as the German soldiers had remained in orderly formation on the road, they were safe: those, however, who had stopped to refresh themselves at the taverns and had wandered off drunk were unceremoniously hacked to death. “Since the bodies were not buried,” wrote Odo, “all things were polluted, so that to the Franks who came later, less harm arose from the armed Greeks than from the dead Germans.” Eleanor and her companions wrapped their veils across their faces and grimly rode on. The crusading ballads of her swashbuckling grandfather had not prepared her for the sickening stench of corpses.

On October 3, Constantinople lay only one day’s march ahead. At a meeting of the Frankish high command that night, Louis’s advisers counseled him to forget about Manuel as an ally and, instead, lay siege to the imperial city. Recalling Bernard’s warning to attend to holy business, Louis rejected the idea, and the following day, a Sunday, he appeared at the gates of the city to find himself the object of a mighty welcoming committee. Parading out to meet the Crusaders were nobles and wealthy men, clerics and laypersons, all humbly urging him to hasten to the basileus, whose greatest desire was to meet the sublime king of the Franks. No doubt the size and excessive geniality of the welcoming party had been greatly enhanced by reports from Manuel’s spies that just the previous day the Franks had been talking of ransacking his capital. Accompanied by a small group of intimates, including Odo de Deuil but excluding Eleanor, Louis was conducted to the Boukoleon Palace, where a smiling and affable Manuel waited for him on the portico and planted, restrainedly, the kiss of peace upon his brow.

Eight hundred years earlier a Roman emperor had moved his government to this triangular site jutting out into the Bosporus, the dark blue waters of the Marmara Sea on one side and the Golden Horn on the other, and named the city after himself: Constantinopolis, the city of Constantine. While Rome had sunk into decay, Constantine’s capital—“glory of the Greeks, rich in renown and richer still in possessions”—had grown into the wealthiest city in the known world. Even though, by the time of Eleanor’s visit, much of the empire’s territory had fallen to the Turks and Arabs, its economic ascendancy was still unrivaled, with two-thirds of the world’s wealth enclosed within the walls of Constantinople alone.

Like the humblest foot soldier, the queen of France stood outside the walls of the fabled city, gaping in amazement. A double curtain wall girdled a metropolis so large that her eyes could not comprehend it in one glance. In the harbor, the largest in the world, bobbed the masts of hundreds upon hundreds of vessels. Inside the walls, the city’s squares tinkled with splashing fountains, the abundant sweet water piped into the city by aqueducts that had been cut through the walls and stored in immense underground reservoirs, some of which still exist today. More than four thousand buildings—palaces, churches, convents, tall stone houses decorated with paintings of flowers and birds—lined the spotless thoroughfares upon which the Byzantines, unlike the Franks, would not have dared urinate. These sights, however, were not seen by the majority of the Crusaders, since Manuel had not the slightest intention of permitting what he considered an undisciplined mob of savages to enter his gates. They were ordered to make camp outside the walls, among the orchards and vegetable gardens. Even Eleanor and Louis were lodged outside the walls, in the Philopation, Manuel’s hunting lodge near the Golden Horn, which had been hastily refurbished after its recent occupancy by the ill-mannered Germans.

This did not mean that the royal couple were ignored during their thirteen-day state visit. Far from it; Manuel personally escorted Louis on a tour of the various shrines, especially to Constantine’s Great Palace, in whose chapel resided (so the Greeks claimed) such revered holy relics as the Holy Lance, the Holy Cross, the Crown of Thorns, a nail from the Crucifixion, and the stone from Christ’s tomb. In the city’s basilica of Santa Sophia, immense enough that two or three ordinary churches could have fitted under its golden dome, there were so many candles that its interior looked as bright as the outdoors, its walls and pillars glittered with mosaics of precious stones, and its eunuch choir emitted heavenly sounds. Touring the Blachernae Palace. Manuel’s official residence, was such an overwhelming experience that Odo de Deuil found himself virtually speechless: “Its exterior is of almost matchless beauty, but its interior surpasses anything that I can say about it. Throughout it is decorated elaborately with gold and a great variety of colors, and the floor is marble, paved with cunning workmanship.”

Constantinople enchanted Eleanor, as it had countless previous Crusaders, and helped to ameliorate her earlier, unfavorable impression of the Greeks. Its wonders may have compensated for other things that disturbed her, no doubt one of these being the empress of Byzantium.

Only a series of fortunate accidents had lifted Empress Irene, nee Bertha of Sulzbach, from the backwater of Bavaria to the mighty throne of Byzantium, and now she struggled to perform her assigned duty as consort of the basileus without allowing justifiable insecurities to overwhelm her. The daughter of a German count, she happened to have had a sister who married the Holy Roman emperor, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, a union that conferred considerably more status than she would normally have had. In 1142, Conrad forged an alliance with John Comnenus (then the emperor of Byzantium) against their mutual enemy of Sicily; to seal the friendship he bestowed his sister-in-law on John’s youngest son, Manuel. Even though the likelihood of Manuel reaching the throne seemed remote, marriage into the Comnenus family was more than Bertha had ever dreamed of. Her fortunes transformed overnight, she had been taken to the Greek court for an intensive program of grooming, and the obliteration of her Germanness had been completed with the change of her name to Irene.

When Eleanor met her in the fall of 1147, Irene had been married less than two years and had yet to produce an heir; in fact during her thirteen years as empress she would prove capable of bearing only one child and that one a daughter. Living in the lavish grandeur of the Blachernae, garlanded by ropes of pearls from the East and surrounded by slaves and eunuchs, Irene appeared to Eleanor as the possessor of a glamorous destiny, one that the queen could see herself easily fulfilling. Under Irene’s flamboyant exterior, however, hid a trembling young woman, still as much Bertha as Irene. The Crusade, to which in her homesickness she had initially responded with high anticipation, was turning out to be not only an ordeal but the most painful kind of embarrassment. In early summer, before the German segment of the Crusade had reached Constantinople, they had been preceded by reports of looting, burning, and killing; her husband had been obliged to dispatch an army to “escort” Conrad and his troops through Greece so that damage to people and property might be held to a minimum. Upon Conrad’s arrival in the imperial city, the heretofore friendly relations between her husband and brother-in-law took an abrupt turn for the worse.

Anxious to rid himself of an unwelcome guest, Manuel suggested that since Conrad appeared to be in a hurry to reach Jerusalem, he might prefer to cross the Hellespont immediately and thus avoid a tedious delay in Constantinople. Conrad, incensed at what he considered Manuel’s lack of hospitality, refused, and he was finally escorted to the suburban palace of Philopation, which, in the course of a few days, his army managed to pillage so effectively that both the palace and its surrounding park were no longer inhabitable. It became necessary to move the German emperor across the Golden Horn to the palace of Picridium. Adding to Irene’s mortification, German soldiers seemed intent on committing as many atrocities as possible against city residents, scarcely a day passing without a major skirmish between Conrad’s men and Greek troops. When her husband asked Conrad for redress, the emperor shrugged off the violence as unimportant and then angrily threatened to return the next year and sack Manuel’s capital.

It was only by the greatest exercise of her diplomatic talents that Irene was able to pacify the two men, and outwardly at least, amity was restored. To her enormous relief, Conrad set off toward the end of September, helpfully sped on his way across the Straits of Saint George by Manuel’s navy. Her poignant recollections of her native land somewhat diminished by that time, Irene retired to her quarters, but she could not avoid the general consternation, not to mention condemnation, among the Greeks over the barbaric behavior of her countrymen, and to a large degree, she had come to share their opinion. Now, only a week later, she was called upon to grapple once again with the role of cordial hostess to another army of Crusaders, this one, unlike the German contingent, containing a queen who would expect even more personal entertainment than the coarse-grained soldiers. Conscientiously she organized sightseeing jaunts, shopping expeditions, and banquets that “afforded pleasure to ear, mouth and eye with pomp as marvelous, viands as delicate, and pastimes as pleasant as the guests were illustrious.” Daily she spooned out doses of novelty: slaves whose only function was to anticipate Eleanor’s wishes; visits to Santa Sophia to see a statue of the Virgin ceaselessly dripping tears from its eyes and a casket containing the three Magis’ gifts to the Christ child; a trip to the tower of the Golden Gate, where Eleanor could gaze down upon caravans whose laden camels brought sandalwood, brass, and exotic silks from the East. In short, Irene carried out her duties with meticulous formality but without any note of warmth.

From the start Eleanor had genuinely mystified the empress and the other glittering females in her entourage. What puzzled them most was why any woman would wish to travel to Jerusalem when even the relatively short trip from Constantinople to Antioch was considered treacherous for a woman. Apart from the very real possibility of being massacred en route by the Turks, there were the discomforts of dusty roads, scarce water, and general lack of amenities, which would cause any true noblewoman to recoil. When the Greek women learned that Eleanor disdained a canopied litter and usually rode on horseback like a man, it only reinforced their suspicions that the Franks, Christian though they might call themselves, were truly a primitive people. In the end, they could only conclude archly that the queen had joined the Crusade because she did not trust Louis out of her sight.

Their patronization extended to yet another area. Despite Eleanor’s self-image as western Europe’s foremost fashionplate, the critical Greek women compared her attire to their own sartorial splendor and found her dowdy, if not outlandish. This they took for granted, not expecting elegance from the queen of an underdeveloped kingdom such as the Franks’, and it was hardly likely that their superiority did not rankle Eleanor. That those controversial trunks packed with her best finery should count for less than nothing was, however, only one of the many shocks that awaited her in Constantinople. She must have been surprised to learn how little respect the Greeks had for Crusaders, and she could not fail to see their flagrant boredom, how they listened with weary smiles to the plans Louis laid before them. The Byzantines had a poor opinion of the intellectual level of the Franks, for that matter of all Latin peoples, thinking them naive and superstitious, but at the same time Manuel feared them and was willing to go to any length to humor them. Thus, he wooed them with lavish gifts, believing as did his grandfather Alexius that the Crusaders were motivated solely by greed and ambition, but also believing that any favors he did for them would not be returned, any promises extracted would be broken without a second thought. Although Eleanor had been dazzled by Byzantine luxury—this was how kings and queens should live—at times she must have felt their gorgeous pageantry a bit excessive, if only because the Greeks seemed intent on making the Latins feel inferior.

Eleanor could hardly have failed to contrast Louis with the basileus. The two men were about the same age and physical stature, but there the resemblance ended: Manuel appeared resplendent in his purple robes, Louis colorless in the sad cloth of his Crusader’s tunic; Manuel was suave, alert, overflowing with charm, Louis solemn and awkward. No medieval sovereign had a more acute sense of his own limitless power than Manuel Comnenus, and to Eleanor, it must have been a rude jolt to notice how no courtier dared, approach the basileus except with bowed head and bended knee, while anyone could, and did, amble up to converse with the unprepossessing Louis. All his life he would prove woefully lacking in sophistication and majesty, but as he aged, these so-called defects of his character would grow more beguiling to his contemporaries. Nevertheless, in Constantinople, it is not too difficult to understand why his wife did not appreciate his simple traits, and those thirteen days—so uplifting, so humiliating—would mark the beginning of Eleanor’s extreme disenchantment with the king.

All the while, the political situation with Manuel remained heavy with ambiguity. For the time being, thoughts of attacking Constantinople had been abandoned—they needed Manuel too much—but how far they could trust him was unclear. Furthermore, it was emphatically obvious to all that they were quickly wearing out their welcome. Some of the rowdier pilgrims had burned houses, cut down olive trees, and generally acted like drunken fools. Odo tells us that “the king frequently punished offenders by cutting off their ears, hands and feet, yet he could not check the folly of the whole group. Indeed one of two things was necessary, either to kill many thousands at one time or to put up with their numerous evil deeds.” One day a Fleming soldier barged into the Greek money changers’ stalls and went berserk, shouting Havo! Havo! seizing handfuls of gold and inspiring other Crusaders in the vicinity to do likewise. “The noise and confusion increased, the stalls came falling down, the gold was trampled on and seized.” Although Louis hung the Fleming in full view of the city, he also felt obliged to make restitution to the money changers, most of whom demanded greater sums than they had actually lost. Incidents like this one helped to deplete Louis’s treasury, which was badly in need of succor anyway, as his letters to Suger requesting additional funds attest. Everthing considered, it was thought best to move on.

On October 16, Eleanor left Constantinople with a sense of relief. The city, for all its spendor, had brought her nothing but disquieting and exasperating thoughts, and she relinquished her perfumed chamber in the Philopation to take up residence in a tent once more. Even though their departure had been announced, Louis characteristically dawdled outside the city walls. Five days were spent on the near side of the Bosporus, the queen and her ladies whiling away their time hawking, the noblemen fulminating against Manuel. There was nothing to do but gossip and threaten. Nobody enjoyed the delay, least of all Manuel, who continued to harass Louis in the hope that it would speed him along. He badgered the king with provocative requests: to turn over any captured towns or castles to the Byzantines, to give up one of Eleanor’s ladies as a bride for his nephew, and so on, but he received no acknowledgment. Finally Manuel, an intrepid schemer, suggested that the army cross the Straits of Saint George to the far coast of Asia Minor, where it might be more comfortable. Louis’s delay, however, was not based on pure capriciousness; he was waiting for a small contingent of late-arriving Crusaders who had taken an Italian route under the command of his uncles, the count of Maurienne and the marquis of Montferrat. Nevertheless, on October 21, he moved the army to the coast of Asia Minor, where they lingered another five days. What Louis hoped to gain by waiting for a small detachment of men is not clear, but it turned out to be a grave error in judgment, for during the delay the Franks, in an orgy of high spirits, ate most of the food that had been set aside for the journey to Antioch.

With each passing day, Louis’s actions could not but have added to Eleanor’s anxieties. On October 26, the order to break camp was finally given, but at the last moment, for inexplicable reasons of his own, Louis suddenly decided to return to Constantinople for a last-minute conference with Manuel. As the army set off across the plains without him, the sky darkened with an eclipse, a phenomenon that the superstitious medieval person invariably regarded as a menacing omen. For most of the day, the sun was shaped like a half loaf of bread. No one doubted what this meant: “It was feared that the king, who above all others shone with faith, glowed with charity, and attained celestial heights because of this hope, had been deprived of some part of his light by the treachery of the Greeks.” What appeared to Louis’s everworshipful admirer, Odo, as celestial grandeur of soul only meant to Eleanor that the king’s slow wit had led him into some fresh disaster. Later in the day, however, he caught up with the army, safe and full of elation at the good news he had just heard from Manuel: Conrad and his Germans had fought a victorious battle against the Turks.

In fact, Manuel had lied. Unknown to the basileus, there had been a battle that very day in the region of Dorylaeum, but nine-tenths of Conrad’s army had been annihilated. “The victorious Turks, laden with spoils and enriched by countless treasure, with horses and arms even to superabundance, retired to their own fortresses. There they eagerly awaited the coming of the king of France.”

The king of France, along with his queen, was skirting the peninsula of Asia Minor in the late October sunshine in a mood of heady, if short-lived optimism. The weather was still mild and fine, just mellow and brisk enough to make one feel like traveling, and they dined on good bread and wine and illusions. Manuel had sent them a bon voyage gift of victuals, but as Eleanor must have known, the provisions would not last a week. Although Manuel sent them neither enough food for a long journey nor the guides he had promised, nevertheless, at that moment, the queen may have forgotten his windy words and been having kind thoughts about the emperor. Buoyed up by the news of Conrad’s victory, these disappointments did not seem so significant after all. Divine intervention had, evidently, come to their aid at last. The Turks, after their rout by Conrad, would not be in a mood to trouble them. Traveling through a part of Asia Minor rich in biblical and Crusader history, they neared the venerable Christian city of Nicaea, which had fallen into the hands of the Turks in 1080 and whose capture had been the previous crusading army’s first great victory. While camping near the Nicene lake, reviewing the heroic deeds of their grandparents, they were startled by the arrival of surprising visitors, the guides that Manuel had provided for Conrad. How the Greeks satisfactorily explained their sudden abandonment of Conrad and their return to Constantinople is not clear, but they did more or less confirm Manuel’s reports of victory, for different reasons. In essence, the highly seductive news they gave Louis was that yes, Conrad had defeated a Turkish army and yes, God be praised, there had been an outstanding massacre. It was, of course, precisely what Louis wanted to hear.

The next day, or perhaps the day following, the first blow of reality fell when the advance guard reported a curious sight ahead—Germans headed in their direction, Germans who in no way resembled victors. They straggled into Louis’s camp, thirsty, starved, bloody, and dazed with terror. Their comrades dead, they were the lucky few, several hundred out of ten thousand, who had survived, and it took little imagination to envision the scenes they described. For Eleanor, these amounted to echoes of what she recalled of her grandfather’s experiences: ambush, thousands slain, the escape of a traumatized few. In addition to the massacre of his men, the Holy Roman emperor had lost the entire contents of his camp, his horses, arms, and gold. Already the booty was finding its way to bazaars throughout the Moslem East and would eventually be sold as far away as Persia.

Eleanor, like everyone else, was totally unprepared for the German disaster, and not unnaturally her mind must have raced ahead to wonder whether she would come to a similar grisly end. Louis, nevertheless, urged his army forward, “grieved with stupefaction and stupefied with grief,” in hopes of aiding other survivors and finding the remnants of German headquarters. On November 2 or 3, he encountered a nearly incapacitated Conrad, rheumy-eyed and nursing a serious head wound. The two kings consulted together in an effort to analyze what had happened and what they should do next. There were plenty of theories to explain the massacre: Some said it was the treachery of the Greek guides, who had sneaked off after they had betrayed Conrad to the Turks; some said it was the Holy Roman emperor’s own fault for taking a short cut to reach Antioch more quickly; others said it was God, punishing a holy army that thought more about wine and luxurious meals than providing themselves with arms and equipment. Most likely Conrad was right when he told Louis and his nobles: “Know that I am not therefore angry at God but at myself; for God is just but I and my people are foolish.” Hearing these words, Louis began to cry and invited Conrad to share his tent.

According to Conrad, there were two possible routes to northern Syria: a wide road, which could be traversed in eight days but offered little access to food, or the indirect coastal road, which he believed to be better supplied. “Although you do not fear the power of any people” he advised Louis, “yet you likewise do not have arrows which can subdue hunger.”

Winter was beginning as they set out along the seacoast, threading their way down stony canyons and through gorges made by mountain torrents. Whether or not she would live to see the spring is a question Eleanor must have asked herself more than once, especially in view of Louis’s continuing blunders. Once he and a group of companions left the main body of Crusaders to search for a shortcut. For three days the king remained among the missing, wandering in bewilderment over mountain crags until he became hopelessly lost. Eventually he came across mountain dwellers—“rustics,” Odo calls them, “the companions of wild beasts”—who escorted the king, looking very small and tired, back to his army. With each passing day, his losses began to mount. Pack animals died, as did the dogs and falcons who had been carried for so many months by their loving mistresses. The Greek forest dwellers became rich overnight as hungry Crusaders parted with gold and silver pieces, enameled helms and shields, costly cloaks and gowns. As the year drew to a close, there was little in which Eleanor could take comfort, since it seems likely that many of her Amazon trunks had been emptied to purchase food. More worrisome to her was the incredible disintegration of the army, Louis having given up issuing even the most elemental orders. As a result, each battalion did as it pleased, with no particular order of march being maintained and men failing to obey their officers. As far as Eleanor could observe, the group had ceased to deserve the name of an army—it was a mob roaming through the wilderness, desperately in need of a Moses to lead them. When they stopped for Christmas at Ephesus, an increasingly ill Conrad decided to board a ship bound for Constantinople. “Perchance,” wrote William of Tyre, “he found the arrogance of the Franks unendurable.” A far more likely assumption is that he found Louis’s mismanagement of the army intolerable.

On Christmas Eve, in the fertile valley of Decervion near Ephesus, they pitched their tents on the mossy banks of the river Maeander. Horses were put out to graze in the luxuriant grass, water jars filled from the river, fires lit for cooking. As black-robed monks gathered under the trees to begin Mass, a detachment of Turks, howling and shouting like demons, suddenly appeared on the opposite bank. This was the first time that Louis’s Crusaders had met the enemy, and hot to avenge the Germans, they seized the nearest horses and weapons, forded the river, and raced to meet the Turkish horsemen. Perhaps astonished by the ferocity of the Franks, the Turks broke and fled for the hills, the Crusaders in exultant pursuit.

This initially successful confrontation filled the army with extravagant false confidence. They had killed many Turks and, even better, seized an enemy camp that was well-stocked with gold. “Filled with joy over the victory and the rich spoils which they had seized, the Christians passed a quiet night and, at dawn, prepared to resume the march.” At daybreak, however, they awoke to find that the Levantine winter had arrived in full force. Darkened skies loosed torrential rains and sheets of sleet, the river began to overflow, and in the distance they could see mountain tops whitening with snow. Along with the downpour, which would hammer them steadily for the next four days, violent winds ripped through the camp, overturning the gay pavilions of their tent city, which had seemed so festive the previous day, and the rising waters of the Maeander began to flood the banks. Men, horses, and equipment were crushed on the rocks and drowned. The year 1147 ended bleakly, but it would have been far more dismal if the Crusaders could have seen what the new year held.

It had now been nearly seven months since they had left Metz. According to their schedule, they should be nearing Jerusalem, and Eleanor must have pondered uneasily upon the reasons why they still were floundering in the wilds of Asia Minor. Since June, Louis had been considerably less than zealous about his duties as commander. He had closeted himself with his confidants, Thierry Galeran and Odo de Deuil; written letters to Abbot Suger pleading for money; visited shrines; and prayed interminably. Under the guise of democracy, he had divided responsibility for leadership among his barons, each night designating a different commander for the next day in a kind of round-robin chain of command. As a result, everyone—and no one—was in charge, a policy that must have added to Eleanor’s contempt for him. Up until this point, Louis’s inadequacy had never actually imperiled the army, but now, with one misstep, anything could go wrong. As the army left the seacoast and began to push its way inland, it must have been pathetically obvious to Eleanor that Louis scarcely knew where he was, let alone how to proceed. In November, he had followed Conrad’s advice, only to realize that the coastal route was devoid of the food he needed and the weather might decimate his army. Now he determined to seek the safety of Eleanor’s uncle at Antioch by proceeding as the crow flies—that is, straight over the Phrygian mountains. That this was the direction being taken by Conrad when his Teutons had been massacred was a fact he carefully evaded, no doubt believing that he had no other choice.

Leaving the valley of the Maeander, they climbed to higher ground, winding up into the foothills of the Phrygian mountains toward the apostolic city of Laodicea, where Louis planned to rest and replenish his supplies. Harassed at every step by the Turks, who assaulted boldly and retreated skillfully and easily, they arrived at Laodicea on January 3, 1148, to find the city virtually deserted. The Greek inhabitants had fled, taking with them all the edibles they could carry. For over a week the Crusaders lingered at Laodicea in a mood of cockiness, for they had driven off the Turks several times by now. The route to their most immediate destination, Adalia (the modern Antalya), on the same seacoast from whence they had recently come, wound over high desolate mountains and through the rugged pass at Mount Cadmos. Lacking native guides, having in fact no clear idea of direction, they were compelled to take their bearings from the sun and hope that God would see fit to shepherd them over the mountains. At the best of times it was a treacherous journey, but for a starving, undisciplined army who had to contend with winter storms and Turks stealthily nipping at their heels, it had all the makings of a nightmare.

Toward the middle of January, under the watchful eye of the enemy, the column slowly began moving up the mountain through a landscape as still as death. The hillsides were scattered with the skeletons of entire horses; with skulls, legs, rib cages of men, many picked clean by vultures but others still covered with rotting clothes and flesh. The corpses sprawled grotesquely where they had fallen, on their knees or faces, some on their backs with eyeless sockets staring up at the sky. For Conrad’s ill-fated Germans, the Crusade had terminated here.

On the day set for the crossing of Mount Cadmos, Louis took charge of the column’s rear, which included the unarmed pilgrims and the baggage. Commanding the vanguard was one of Eleanor’s vassals, her old friend Geoffrey de Rancon, in whose castle she and Louis had spent their wedding night. It would be said later that Eleanor was marching with Geoffrey at the head of the column, a highly unlikely and dangerous position for an important personage such as the queen of France. Nevertheless, she must have been riding closer to the front of the line than the back. At noon, Geoffrey, unencumbered by baggage, reached the mountain’s windy summit, where he was supposed to make camp for the night. Disregarding his orders, he decided to advance a bit farther, for he felt that the march had been too short that day. Scouts whom he had sent ahead assured him that there was a more wholesome spot for the camp on a nearby plateau, and after consulting with Louis’s uncle the count of Maurienne, de Rancon ordered the column to move on. Geoffrey’s disobedience, if such a word can be applied to an action so normal in Louis’s disorganized army, alarmed no one, least of all the queen. When in the past had anyone, from the highest nobleman to the common foot soldier, paid attention to Louis’s edicts, especially this one, since the king had clearly misjudged the amount of time needed to cross the mountain? Little did the queen know that the seeds of carelessness that Louis had allowed to be sown during the past eight months were now about to bear fatal fruit.

By midafternoon, the rear of the column, believing, in happy ignorance, that they had almost reached the end of the day’s march, began carelessly to lag behind. Soon the army was divided, some having already crossed the summit, others still loitering along the ridge, their progress impeded by falling rocks. The Turks, who had been keeping a close watch from a distance, immediately recognized the situation for what it was, and now they quickly moved in to press their advantage. Swarming over the mountain with howls of “Allah akbar” (“God is great”), thrusting and slashing as if with scythes among wheat, they fell upon the panicked Christians, soldiers as well as unarmed pilgrims. As the rocky paths grew slippery with blood, humans, horses, and baggage hurtled over the precipices into the canyon below. Although there was no avenue of escape, for the Turks had seized the top of the mountain, those who tried to flee were pursued and butchered, “overwhelmed among the thick-pressing enemy as if they were drowned in the sea.” William of Tyre wrote that “our people were hindered by the narrow defiles, and their horses were exhausted by the enormous amount of baggage,” baggage that, as everyone believed, must have belonged to the women.

Amid the clash of battle, the king escaped notice, for in his soldier’s tunic he looked like everyone else, his disdain for the trappings of royalty inadvertently saving his life. His royal bodyguard exterminated in a mess of smashed skulls and severed limbs, “he nimbly and bravely scaled a rock by making use of some tree roots which God had provided for his safety” and, his back to the mountainside, defended himself until his assailants moved on. “No aid came from heaven, except that night fell.”

Meanwhile, Eleanor and the others in the vanguard were unaware of the skirmish. As the afternoon wore on, however, Geoffrey de Rancon began to grow apprehensive and at dusk he sent a party of knights back to investigate. Not until nearly midnight did the search party chance to come across their king, bloody and exhausted, stumbling on foot over the mountain with a few companions.

There was to be no sleep that night. From one end of the camp to the other could be heard the sound of voices, weeping, mourning, shrieking grief. “With tremulous voice and tearful sighs,” women went out to search the mountain road for sons and husbands, servants sought their masters. During the night the stragglers drifted in, those who had escaped death “rather by chance than their own wisdom” after hiding among the bushes and rocks until nightfall.

Beside herself with anxiety during that agonizing evening, Eleanor’s first reactions at the sight of her husband must have been shock and relief—shock at the immensity of the disaster, relief at the knowledge that she and Louis had escaped. At that point, however, she had no assurance that they were out of danger, indeed the facts greatly pointed to the opposite conclusion, for in the morning she could see the Turks spread over the mountainside, waiting. They were gabbling in loud voices, plucking hair from their heads, and throwing it on the ground. These exaggerated gestures, she learned, meant that they would not be dislodged from their posts.

Once the first horror had subsided, the angry survivors began to cast about for someone on whom to affix the blame. The man they chose as scapegoat, interestingly enough, was Geoffrey de Rancon; he and the king’s uncle had disobeyed orders and therefore should be hung, suggestions that Louis ignored. By many of the Franks, Eleanor, too, was cast in the role of leper. It was, they said, her luggage that had prevented the rear guard from overcoming the Turkish attack, her friend Geoffrey de Rancon who had disobeyed orders, her Aquitainians who had been traveling in the vanguard and thus had escaped the brunt of the massacre. That these charges were exaggerated is obvious; that the real reason for the catastrophe was, not Geoffrey’s disobedience, but Louis’s maladroit leadership the Franks were not willing to acknowledge. From this time on, however, resentment against the queen began to mount, and although none declared that she deserved hanging, even her women friends treated her coldly. It is against this omnipresent feeling that she had contributed to the fiasco that consequent events must be seen.

Now that the worst had happened, Louis began to behave with perfect correctness as a commander. Marshaling what remained of his forces, he ordered them to maintain an order of march, obey their officers, and stand their ground in combat until given orders to withdraw. In this way, then, they began the tortuous descent down the mountain, the Turks aware of their weakness and harassing them every foot of the way. They had little food and no water. Those sufficiently parched with thirst bled horses or asses and drank the blood, for meals they grilled dead horses, both their own and those left behind by the Turks. “With this food,” we learn from Odo, “and bread baked in the ashes of campfires, even the wealthy were satisfied.”

The Crusaders who emerged from the mountains on January 20 could hardly have been called an army. Many of their horses and mules had died or been eaten. Swords and equipment had been thrown away or long since sold for food. Their baggage had enriched the Turks, and what had not been captured lay at the bottom of ravines. They had raw blistered hands, cracked lips, and their filthy clothes hung in tatters. Many, including a number of bishops, had no shoes. The condition of Queen Eleanor was not recorded by Odo, but it is certain that she was in no better shape than anyone else. If they had naively harbored illusions about having finally reached a safe haven, they were quickly disabused, for the next five weeks in the Greek city of Adalia were to be as agonizing as any they had theretofore experienced. Once a delightful seaside town boasting fertile fields and orchards, Adalia was now a beleaguered city unable to cultivate its fields for fear of Turkish attacks and dependent upon food brought in by ship. What provisions the townspeople did possess they were willing to share for only the most exorbitant prices.

The unutterably traumatic events of the last two months had tempered Eleanor’s bold spirit; her nerves were strained to the snapping point. Coming down the mountain, fearful that the next minute would bring a hailstorm of arrows, she had concentrated on only one thing: survival. Now it appeared that she had hoped for too much as misfortune piled on misfortune. The chilling information from the Greeks at Adalia was that Antioch, the gateway to the Holy Land, still lay a forty days’ march over mountainous, Turk-infested terrain. By sea the trip took merely three days, but even supposing ships could be found on that deserted coast in midwinter, there was no money to pay the fare of four silver marks for each person.

Sleeting rain and snow accompanied by lightning and thunder lashed the few tiny tents remaining; sickness and starvation swept the camp; horses died for lack of fodder. During that first week in Adalia, the camp rumbled with dissension. Louis made his views explicit: Since they could not transport the whole group by sea, they clearly had no choice but to resume marching overland. His disgruntled barons were equally adamant about wishing to put to sea, even if it meant leaving thousands behind. “Let us,” the king insisted, “follow the route of our fathers whose incomparable valor endowed them with renown on earth and glory in heaven.” His head full of visions of crusading triumphs, he talked about “martyrs” and “valor,” but to his barons. and knights, the words conveyed only a bizarre kind of death wish that they had no desire to share, and they told him so. There is no evidence of Eleanor’s reaction to all this, but with the refuge of her uncle’s court only three days away, she must have been anxious to exit by any available escape hatch. If Louis wished to pursue some mad dream of martyrdom, she would leave him to his destiny, but under no circumstances would she accompany him. It is not difficult to conjecture that she was among those who, after violent debate, “forced” (the word is Odo’s) the pliable king to a saner point of view.

The decision was made in the nick of time because, with each passing week, the odds increased against leaving Adalia alive. The beginnings of plague had broken out in the camp, and the size of the burial ground needed to be enlarged daily. Not until the end of February, however, did there arrive both the ordered vessels and a favorable wind. Those Crusaders who still had money and horses, or a noble name, hastened aboard the hastily convened convoy, while the rest were left to manage as best they could. Many would perish of disease OT starvation outside the walls of Adalia, many would be killed or captured, and over three thousand, converted to the Moslem faith in exchange for bread, would vanish without a ripple into the lands of the Turks.

Finally there rang out the familiar cries of the master mariners, “Unfurl the sails for God’s sake.” In a short time, the wind filled the sails and bore Eleanor and Louis, barely on speaking terms by this time, out of sight of land. The journey, the Greeks had promised, would take three days, but they had not allowed for the unpredictability of the weather. Battered by winter storms, the convoy was carried farther from the coast of Asia Minor but no nearer Syria, and when Eleanor lay down at night, she did not know whether the morning would find her at the bottom of the sea.

Three weeks later, on March 19, 1148, the king and queen of France, ragged and seasick, sailed into the port of Saint Simeon near Antioch.

Eleanor spent only ten days in Antioch, but those days would affect the history of western Europe for the next three hundred years. Nonetheless, on that first day when she stepped, pale and exhausted in health, into the arms of Prince Raymond, no such far-reaching consequences could have been predicted. In Syria, the winter rains had ended. It was spring, and the hillsides were covered with red and blue anemones. Unlike the haughty Manuel Comnenus, Raymond had not waited in his palace for the arrival of the Crusaders but had hastened the ten miles down the Orontes River to the port, with almost the whole population of the city in his wake. To the chanting of the Te Deum and the cheers of the throng, he had escorted them up to his terraced city on the slopes of Mount Silpius. After the privations of the winter, Antioch must have seemed like an hallucination to Eleanor. It was more like a vast garden than a city, with green pastureland, orchards, granaries, and ancient Roman baths enclosed within its walls. Fourteen hundred years of history were layered here. Once it was the third most important city in the Roman Empire, Julius Caesar had sat in its amphitheater, Herod had paved its streets with marble, Diocletian had built its cisterns. Through its groves of parasol pines and its hanging gardens had trooped the Arabs of Harun al-Rashid, purple-mantled Byzantine emperors, the Turks, and finally the Christians. Ancient, wise, civilized, it immediately reminded Eleanor of Bordeaux and Poitiers and brought back a flood of nostalgia for her native land. But more than the physical beauty of the place made her feel that she had come home: The official language of the city was the langue d’oc, the knights and priests in Raymond’s service were Poitevins, and several of them she had known as neighbors during her childhood. Best of all, however, there was the magnificent Raymond himself.

Like all the men of her family, the prince was handsome and virile, a hearty adventurer who combined the traits of prowess and beauty that Eleanor admired so highly in a man and that of course she had failed to find in her husband. A true son of the Troubadour, Raymond had, like his father, considerable charm—charisma we would call it now—as well as a wry sense of humor, which often colored his actions: Indeed, his life story would have made an ideal theme for one of William’s poems. Thirteen years earlier, while a knight at the English court, he had been tapped by King Fulk of Jerusalem as a husband for Princess Constance, the eight-year-old heiress of Antioch. There were, nevertheless, a number of obstacles to the marriage, the most serious being Constance’s mother. Acting as regent, Alice had been ruling the principality and had no intention of giving up her power. Furthermore, she seems to have disliked her daughter and planned to marry her to Manuel Comnenus, an alliance whose political implications thoroughly horrified the Frankish barons of Syria. Therefore it was with the utmost secrecy that Raymond had journeyed to the Holy Land disguised as a peddler. Once there, he dealt with Alice by asking her to marry him, a not inappropriate match, since Raymond was twenty-one and Alice not yet thirty. Flattered, she was silly enough to allow Raymond entrance to the city, going so far, in fact, as to welcome him with an excess of emotion. While preparing for the wedding, she received the news that Raymond had just married her daughter, making himself the undisputed ruler of Antioch.

Now thirty-four, the youngest son of William IX was in his prime; he was, however, also fighting for his life. Instrumental in setting the Crusade in motion, he had hoped that his good fortune at having a niece who was queen of France would ultimately rescue his kingdom from the Turks. More than hoped, he had assumed that his close relationship with the Frankish royal house would hold the key to survival. That he was perched on the edge of a volcano he must have been acutely aware, and in fact, a year later his severed head would be adorning a gate in Baghdad. If the size and strength of the life preserver now being offered was unquestionably puny, nevertheless he still regarded it as sufficient for his purposes. The crusading army that disembarked at Saint Simeon was only a shadow of its bulk at Metz, but even so, many of those slain or abandoned along the way had been pilgrims or infantry, and Louis’s host remained the most formidable Christian force to appear in the Holy Land in half a century. The news of its coming had succeeded in terrifying the Moslem world to the extent “that now they not only mistrusted their own strength but even despaired of life itself,” a response that Raymond wished to take advantage of. First, however, with traditional Aquitainian hospitality, he spared no expense in making his guests feel welcome.

For the next few days the Franks were treated to a dizzying round of banquets and hunting parties. Installed in Raymond’s palace with its running tap water, glass windows, and perfumed candles, Eleanor was able to discard her stinking rags and bathe with the luxurious soap for which Antioch was famous. Her uncle furnished her with a new wardrobe of silken gowns so exquisitely woven by the silk makers of Antioch that only the highest ecclesiastics in France could afford them. At the fêtes, Eleanor shared a place of honor with Raymond. The entertainment—the troubadours, minstrels, and Saracen dancers—was all very gay, very ribald, very characteristic of her grandfather’s court at Poitiers. At table, they drank Persian wines cooled with snow from Lebanon mountains and Mount Hermon and dined on the specialties of the land: sugar, oranges, figs, dates, quinces, and melons. Syria was famous for its white bread and apples of paradise, which we know as bananas, as well as for artichokes, asparagus, truffles, and lettuce, the latter being considered a choice dish. All of this acted as an aphrodisiac on Eleanor’s sensibilities, and her natural appetite for pleasure quickly revived. Now that the journey over the mountains was receding into an anguishing memory, she threw herself almost tumultuously into living. Her affection for her uncle, and his for her, was widely noted, and though their intimacy seems natural under the circumstances, it was not received with any special favor by the Franks, who regarded his attentions to their queen as excessive. Eleanor’s exuberance did not escape comment from the increasingly hostile Franks, who continued to blame the incident at Mount Cadmos on her luggage and who undoubtedly read into the racy conversations in the langued’oc, which they could not fully understand, more than was actually there.

If Raymond made an inordinate fuss over the queen, he did not forget the others. “Raymond showed the king every attention on his arrival,” reported William of Tyre. “He likewise displayed a similar care for the nobles and chief men in the royal retinue and gave them many proofs of his great liberality. In short, he outdid all in showing honor to each one according to his rank and handled everything with the greatest Magnificence.”

But it was Eleanor with whom he spent his time. After a twenty-year separation, they had much of a personal nature to discuss, but their conversations must certainly have focused on politics, that is, Raymond’s precarious position with the Turks. Aware of his niece’s intelligence, he would have explained that Nureddin had established himself along the Christian frontier from Edessa to Hama and had spent the last six months methodically snatching, one by one, the Frankish fortresses east of the Orontes River. As for Count Joscelin, whose laxness had caused Edessa to fall into Turkish hands four years earlier, he could barely hold his own. If the Turks were to attack Antioch in force, Raymond would be lost. But now, with the arrival of the Crusaders, he could easily take the offensive and strike at the heart of Nureddin’s power by taking his city of Aleppo. He might also reclaim his lost provinces along the Orontes, but most importantly, he could recapture Edessa, whose fall had given rise to the Crusade.

To Eleanor, his plan seemed eminently reasonable. Should the Turks succeed in overrunning northern Syria and capturing Antioch, the entire Holy Land would be threatened, and nothing would then prevent them from sweeping down to Jerusalem. Obviously the security of the Holy City would best be established by driving back the Turks in the north. If the merits of Raymond’s plan were obvious to Eleanor, they were not so to Louis. To her amazement, the king refused to hear of the scheme. He said, incredibly, that his Crusader vow obliged him to visit Jerusalem before he undertook any campaign, and he had no intention of fighting anyone until he had first worshiped Jesus Christ at the Holy Sepulcher. His reasoning seemed so childish, not to say irresponsible, that Eleanor may not have believed him at first. The recapture of Edessa had been the whole purpose of the Crusade. Had he dragged thousands of people on a three-thousand-mile journey merely to pray? The idea was too bizarre to be credible. Since he was behaving irrationally, she curbed her fury and humored him like a child, counting on Raymond to bring him back to reality.

The days that followed were full of conflict. At a full meeting of the Crusader barons, Raymond formally outlined his tactics—and Louis disdainfully rejected them. When the king realized that Eleanor supported her uncle, it only strengthened his resolve to have nothing to do with Raymond’s plan. His decision, he declared stubbornly, was irrevocable, and in this his barons supported him. Raymond was not only baffled at this turn of events but enraged. “When Raymond found that he could not induce the king to join him, his attitude changed. Frustrated in his ambitious designs, he began to hate the king’s ways; he openly plotted against him and took means to do him injury.”

Raymond’s nets had been cast carefully, but they caught only the wind. Despite the beauty of Antioch, despite Raymond’s gifts, Louis felt offended, as did the rest of the Franks, by what they found there. The principality did not appear in danger, indeed its people lived a life of pleasure in mosaic-tiled houses and splendid gardens with fountains and marble-tiled pools; even the common people lived more ostentatiously than any king of France. Raymond himself, far from defending the Holy Sepulcher, wore soft slippers and loose gowns like some oriental potentate. For that matter, Louis could barely distinguish the Saracens from the Frankish Syrians, who imitated the Moslems by wearing flowing garments, beards, and turbans and who, to his horror, had even intermarried with the natives. To add to his consternation, their offspring, the Pullani, had been invited to the banquets he had attended, and failing to understand that many Moslems lived on perfectly amicable terms with the Christians, Louis deplored having to dine with his enemies. Most shocking to him, however, was the sight of mosques in Antioch; even the Christian churches, which had been decorated by Saracen artists, looked like mosques.

He was not alone in his hostility toward Raymond. The ancient enmity between the Franks and Aquitainians had been building to a crescendo ever since Mount Cadmos, and now all the Franks could read into Raymond’s battle plans was that more territory would be added to the domains of a southerner. At this point, they were in no mood to add prestige to the house of Poitou. As to what the Crusaders from Aquitaine thought about all this, the record unfortunately provides no clue. Their Crusader vows, apparently, bound them to abide by the decisions of their commander.

One would get the impression from these happenings that logic played little part in their outcome. The situation was even more absurd, for underneath the welter of all the bickering and political maneuvering hid the real reason for Louis’s inexplicable decision: the familiar emotion of jealousy. Put at its simplest, the king suspected that Eleanor had taken the prince as her lover.

The contradictions of Eleanor’s marital life that had been curled like a worm in the center of her slumbering sensuality now erupted into full view. Circumstances had given her a throne, but since it had brought her nothing but unhappiness, she counted it worthless; marriage had brought her a king for a husband, but this king more nearly resembled a monk. While Louis had been a faithful husband, the reason for his fidelity was, ironically, that he had utterly no interest in sex. As if all this were not enough, he was incurably dull, and while she could never truly have loved a dull man, she certainly could have lived with one. What she could not live with was a fool, and since the beginning of the Crusade, Louis’s stupidity, his cataclysmic insecurities, had been writ clear for all to see.

It would have been natural for a woman of Eleanor’s position in the twelfth century to have had these negative feelings about her husband. Other queens had been desperately unhappy in their marriages, but they had accepted the situation, either because the prestige made them so much better off than other women or perhaps from the feeling that husbands were lords and masters, free to treat wives as they wished. If a queen suffered, she did so in private. If her marriage ended, it was her lord’s decision, and she retreated in silent humiliation to her father’s castle or into a convent. But this was not Eleanor’s temperament.

Toward the end of March, the queen confronted her husband with a demand for divorce. She would go no farther with his Crusade. Not only was she washing her hands of the holy expedition, she also avowed her intention, one undoubtedly encouraged by Raymond, to relinquish both the crown of France and its king. In the future, she would remain in Antioch and resume her title of duchess of Aquitaine. Her words, evidently, caught Louis unprepared, for although the signs had been everywhere for him to read, he had never anticipated such a declaration. Undoubtedly he recalled her “constant, almost continuous conversations” with Raymond, and now her decision to stay in Antioch only strengthened his suspicions about their relationship. Inhibited and ill equipped to satisfy a woman sexually, he nonetheless did not find the role of cuckold appealing. He was hurt, bewildered, and somewhat angry, but he still loved her and needed her. How Louis initially reacted to Eleanor’s declaration of independence was described by John of Salisbury, who may have heard it from Louis himself the following year. The king, John reported cryptically, “made haste to tear her away.” Tear her away from whom? From Raymond, who, conceivably, might have been present at the meeting? Or did Louis demand merely that she leave the prince’s palace immediately?

In the final analysis, a queen throws away a crown for much the same reason that any woman ends her marriage, that is, when she reaches that point where her life with the man has become unendurable. To deny Eleanor’s strong emotions about Louis’s deficiencies as a husband would be to do her less than justice. And yet her stated reason for wanting a divorce sounds almost impersonal. Undoubtedly this reason had been carefully planned in advance, because it was the only one that might have carried any weight with the king. So when Louis objected to leaving her behind, “she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related into the fourth and fifth degrees.”

Nothing she could have said was more certain to alarm the king. As she surely would have pointed out, there had been rumors about the illegality of their marriage for many years. Five years earlier, Abbot Bernard had written a letter to the bishop of Palestrina in which he flatly stated so, and the late bishop of Laon had also taken the trouble to calculate the degrees of their kinship. Louis could not deny that two centuries earlier Adelaide, the sister of Duke William IV of Aquitaine, had married Hugh Capet, from whom the kings of France were descended. It was not certain, of course, whether the bishop of Laon’s reckoning was correct, but Eleanor herself believed, or so she said, that their having only one child and no sons during eleven years proved conclusively God’s displeasure with their union.

However “deeply moved” Louis must have felt, however loath to give up a prized possession, he finally agreed to the divorce on one condition : “if his counselors and the French nobility would allow it.” With characteristic indecisiveness, he neatly removed the matter from his own area of responsibility and thrust it upon others. It might be argued that a royal divorce was, after all, a state concern and should be decided in committee, but a stronger man would not have dealt with such a personal matter in this haphazard way. With what frustration Eleanor must have heard his reply can be imagined without too much trouble.

Events now began to move rapidly. Hurrying back to his quarters, Louis unburdened his distress to his intimates. Odo de Deuil was certainly among those who learned of the royal quarrel, and as the king’s chronicler, companion, and confessor he must have been familiar with the minutest details of the affair. But Odo, no scandalmonger, decided that it would be politic to end his chronicle with the departure from Adalia. The other person of whom Louis asked advice was his secretary, Thierry Galeran. He was, it will be remembered, the eunuch whom Eleanor detested, and at Antioch she had mocked him among her friends, doubtless pointing out the amusing implications of her monkish husband spending his time with a eunuch. As these things have a way of doing, her imitations of Galeran, so entertaining to her friends, got back to the eunuch, and now he did not pass up the opportunity for revenge. “He boldly persuaded the king not to suffer her to dally longer at Antioch because ‘guilt under kinship’s guise could lie concealed’ and because it would be a lasting shame to the kingdom of the Franks if, in addition to all the other disasters, it was reported that the king had been deserted by his wife, or robbed of her.”

Whether Galeran presented these arguments because he hated the queen—certainly he had reason—or because he genuinely believed her unfaithful is a question Eleanor’s contemporaries were unable to decide. One thing is certain, however: At this point Eleanor and her uncle supplied the chief topic of gossip among the Crusaders.

The claim of Eleanor’s detractors that she had an affair with Raymond is based on very shaky foundations, among them the account of William of Tyre, who wrote thirty years after the Crusade. The archbishop would say maliciously of Eleanor: “Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.”

The anonymous chronicle by the Minstrel of Reims, written in the thirteenth century, calls Eleanor “a very evil woman.” More historical fiction than fact, the minstrel has Eleanor about to elope with Saladin, when Louis, alerted by a serving maid, throws on his clothes and rushes off to stop her just as she is about to set sail in one of the Saracen ruler’s galleys. “And there he found the queen, who was standing with one foot upon the galley. And he taketh her by the hand and leadeth her back to her chamber.” When Louis asks the queen why she is running away, the author of the chronicle puts the following words into Eleanor’s mouth: “In God’s name, because of your own naughtiness! For ye are not worth one rotten pear! And I have heard so much good of Saladin that I love him better than you; and know ye of a truth that henceforth shall ye have no joy of keeping me!”

Such sentiments could not have been uttered by Eleanor, since in 1148 Saladin was still a child of twelve or thirteen, but they doubtless convey a faithful enough representation of Eleanor’s feelings toward Louis at that time.

The exact relationship between Eleanor and her uncle will never be known exactly, but this much seems virtually certain. She adored him because he typified the masculine splendor she had worshiped in her mighty grandfather and father, and there may also have been a physical resemblance among the three men. Deprived of her father at an early age, she would have responded eagerly and affectionately to a relative who so nearly resembled him, especially one whom she had regarded as almost an older brother during her childhood. Had Raymond not been her uncle, there is reason to believe that she would have slept with him, because she longed for physical passion, and later it will be seen that her preference in men would entirely be limited to his type. In her time, sexual relations between an uncle and niece would have been regarded . as incestuous, and incest was not stylish, even in liberal Aquitaine. She could no more have slept with Raymond than with her father or, if he had lived, her brother. The possibility of an affair becomes even more preposterous when Raymond’s character is taken into account. In an age when male debauchery was taken for granted, Raymond was reputed to be a faithful husband to his twenty-one-year-old wife. No puritan, he was nonetheless known to be moderate in his habits; he did not eat or drink to excess, nor did he romance women. Considering that he had shown little interest in amorous exploits so far, it seems hard to believe that he would now attempt to seduce his own niece.

However improbable the gossip in Antioch, the fact that it was widely repeated and considered apt was indicative. What happened next only confirmed, however, the rumors. On March 28, Louis quietly began mobilizing his forces for departure. Sometime after midnight, when the city lay in darkness save for the fires on the watchtowers, the army began moving out through the Saint Paul Gate, an evacuation carried out with as much secrecy as was possible for a force of several thousand persons. At the last moment, in a sort of commando operation, the queen was snatched from Raymond’s palace. The chronicles provide little illumination as to Eleanor’s reaction except that “she was torn away and forced to leave for Jerusalem with her husband.” That she would not have accompanied Louis voluntarily is clear and probably accounts for the fact that she was seized after dark. After what kind of struggle and in what state of rage she was forcibly conducted from Antioch we can only imagine. But here was tangible proof to the Franks that their captive queen had done something shockingly indiscreet. How Raymond may have figured in the secret exodus and abduction is non-recoverable. We only know that he was unable to prevent Eleanor’s undignified departure.

Louis’s arrival in Syria “had been attended with pomp and glory, but fortune is fickle and his departure was ignominious,” an observation that might well serve as an epitaph for the entire Crusade. By sunup, the queen was being hustled along the road to Tripoli under tight security, the hated crown still firmly atop her head.