When the Crusaders caught their first glimpse of Jerusalem’s white walls, they prostrated themselves on the ground weeping like children and asking forgiveness for their sins. Later, unable to sleep, they kept vigil together throughout the long night. If Eleanor had once looked forward to visiting the Holy City, her spirits were now thoroughly dampened. Winding over the Pilgrim’s Ladder through the mountains high above the Mediterranean, she had stared at the groves of orange trees, the thick flocks of sheep, and at Cyprus, a silver streak on the horizon, but her face appeared hard, as if sculpted in stone. With the passing days, she had foraged her mind for alternatives, and as she saw it, there were several choices: She could arrange an escape and flee back to Raymond in his kingdom above the sea; possibly she might cajole Louis into a more reasonable frame of mind and secure his consent for a divorce without the interference of his hated advisers; at worst she would have to wait until they returned to Paris before appealing her case to Abbot Bernard or the pope. In the end, Louis surely could not hold her against her will, short of resorting to imprisonment, and that would effectively rule out his chances of siring an heir by another wife. Somehow she would find a way to return, if not to Antioch, then to Poitiers, where she would put her Eastern experience to good use by creating a milieu worthy of the duchess of Aquitaine. In the meantime, there had been cypresses and olive groves to contemplate while she attempted to reconcile herself to this temporary delay in her objectives.
At the Jaffa Gate, the regent, Queen Melisende, and her eighteen-year-old son, Baldwin, led the entire population of Jerusalem in welcoming Louis with such a remarkable outpouring of fervor that one would have thought him a messenger of the Lord. Heralded by palms and olive branches, banners and hymns, the impatient Crusaders paraded through gaily decked streets to the Holy Sepulcher, which enclosed the rock of Calvary and the tomb of the Savior. There the king laid upon the holiest of all altars the oriflamme he had brought from Saint-Denis, and then he sank down on his knees as if he had no cares in the world but those of an ordinary pilgrim. Afterward, he and his nobles made a tour of the city’s precious shrines, scattering alms as they went, and finally the royal party was led to its lodgings in the Tower of David. Only then did Louis consent to rest or break his fast.
What part Eleanor played in this pilgrim’s progress we do not know. John of Salisbury reported that during this period the mutual anger between Eleanor and Louis festered and increased but that they hid it as best they could. No doubt on this public and historic occasion both of them masked their private feelings and performed their expected roles as if still the most cordial of husbands and wives. In any case, Eleanor had too much pride to allow herself to be carried into the city in a litter with the curtains drawn. With regal demeanor, she, like the other Crusaders, must have trod the traditional Pilgrim’s Way in her tunic bearing the cross that she had received at Vézelay. In those first days in Jerusalem she was accorded the honor due a queen, but the story of her unceremonious departure from Antioch, too juicy a piece of gossip to be suppressed, certainly influenced her treatment by the Hierosolymitans, and while not actually ignored, she certainly was not made much of, as she had been in Antioch. Any attempts by Louis to prevent her moving freely about the city would have been beneath both their dignities and would have, moreover, angered Eleanor’s vassals, who were already outraged by Louis’s treatment of her. Nevertheless, if not closely guarded, she was placed under discreet surveillance.
During her conversations with Raymond in Antioch, Eleanor had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with the rivalries of the Latin Kingdom. From childhood she had been an uncommonly astute student of political subtleties, and unlike the bewildered Louis, who insisted upon regarding Jerusalem as the place in need of defense, she was quick to grasp that the Holy City stood in no danger at that moment. Furthermore, everything she had personally observed so far had made her distrustful of the Frankish Christians in Palestine.
The Latin Kingdom of the mid twelfth century was a land of intrigue, corruption, and feverish competition. During the half century since the Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, all pretense of being soldiers of Christ had disappeared in a no-holds-barred race for land and gold. Avarice and jealousy had made them suspicious of one another and equally distrustful of newcomers from the West, since immigration inevitably led to further division of spoils.
At this time, Frankish Syria was divided into four principalities: the kingdom of Jerusalem in the south; to its north, the county of Tripoli, which extended along the Mediterranean; still farther north, the principality of Antioch; and finally northeast of Antioch, the county of Edessa, which spread eastward beyond the Euphrates River. Since the announcement of the Second Crusade in 1145, the great lords of each of these areas had hoped that through the assistance of Western sovereigns they might be able to enlarge their own territories at the expense of either their Moslem or their Christian neighbors. Each was anxious about its own affairs, each eager to extend its boundaries, and it is not surprising that each sent messengers and expensive gifts to Louis, trying to enlist his aid for their individual causes. The citizens of Jerusalem, in particular, were anxious to make the most of Louis’s arrival. Mindful of the ties between the house of Capet and the prince of Antioch, they feared, however, that Raymond might persuade the king to mount a campaign against Nureddin in the vicinity of Aleppo or Edessa, and the presence of Queen Eleanor on the Crusade made this all the more likely. Therefore, it was with undisguised relief that they learned of Louis’s acrimonious breach with Raymond and his midnight departure from Antioch. To make certain that Louis continued south without changing his mind along the way, the Hierosolymitan barons had sent Patriarch Fulcher to intercept the king and escort him without delay into the Holy City.
In mid-May, shortly after their arrival, an assembly was convened at Acre, an impressive gathering that included Conrad, who had recently arrived by ship from Constantinople with the remnants of his German contingent, the leading prelates and barons of Jerusalem, and the nobility of Louis’s army. Queen Melisende and other noblewomen were present, but Eleanor was not. She may not have been invited, although in view of her anger at Louis, it would seem more likely that she refused to attend. Also notably absent, although the implications were only dimly perceived by Louis, were representatives from the other three Latin principalities.
Eleanor’s uncle had of course abstained from any further dealings with the Crusaders, and in any case, he could hardly afford to leave his principality for some vague adventure in the south, nor was Count Joscelin of Edessa able to abandon his beleaguered territory. As for Count Raymond of Tripoli, his absence was due to an unfortunate incident that tells us much about the acrimony existing between the Frankish Syrian states. Among the Crusaders to take the cross at Vézelay had been Alphonse-Jourdain, count of Toulouse and Eleanor’s old arch-enemy. With his wife and children he had traveled by sea and arrived at Acre a few days after Conrad. The son of the old Crusader Raymond of Toulouse, Alphonse-Jourdain had been born in the Holy Land, and his arrival at his birthplace caused a good deal of embarrassment to the reigning count of Tripoli, the grandson of his father’s bastard son, Bernard. Should Alphonse-Jourdain claim the county, and apparently he had talked about doing so, his right would be hard to deny. A few days after he stepped ashore, Alphonse-Jourdain died suddenly at Caesarea. Since he had been in excellent health the previous day, there was talk of poison. It is possible that his death was accidental, but if so, no one believed it, and naturally suspicion pointed to Count Raymond of Tripoli. Whatever the truth, Raymond professed great indignation at the charges and angrily boycotted the Crusade. For the canny barons of Jerusalem, the fact that three out of four heads of the Frankish states were missing at Acre was something they took for granted; for Louis, uninformed, pulled this way and that on the swampy soil of Holy Land politics, the situation grew increasingly bewildering.
During the course of the assembly, the necessity of presenting some achievement to Christendom became overriding, and bit by bit, a plan, though foolish, began to take shape. After some token opposition, it was unanimously resolved to attack Damascus. This was, to put it mildly, a decision of immense stupidity, because of all the Moslem states, the kingdom of Damascus alone was eager to maintain friendly relations with the Franks, and like the Westerners, its emir was at odds with Nureddin. To attack Damascus, which asked nothing better than peace, would prove to be the fastest way to throw its rulers into the arms of Nureddin and a political blunder of monumental proportions. But for some time the barons of Jerusalem had been greedily eyeing the fertile lands of the Damascenes, and to the visiting Crusaders, who knew nothing of the local situation and to whom all Moslems looked alike, the idea of rescuing from the infidel a hallowed Christian city like Damascus had an irresistible appeal.
On Saturday, July 24, the Christian army pitched its tents amid the orchards and vegetable gardens on the outskirts of Damascus. These orchards, stretching like “a dense gloomy forest” for more than five miles around the northern and western sides of the city, were crisscrossed by paths wide enough only to allow the gardeners to pass through with their pack animals. Therefore, the emir of Damascus, who at first had refused to take the threat seriously, was surprised to see the army approach from the northwest, because the walls on that side of the city were the most heavily fortified. Despite a constant downpour of arrows, the Christians were able, nevertheless, to move up quickly to the city walls, and by Monday they had successfully occupied the orchard. At this point, the terrified citizens of Damascus began to lose hope; during the weekend some had already fled the city, and now others began to barricade the streets for a last desperate struggle, while the emir was forced to dispatch a messenger to Nureddin with a request for aid and reinforcements.
On Tuesday, however, the besieged Damascenes watched in astonishment as the Crusaders struck camp in what appeared to be a retreat. Actually they were not retreating but shifting from their present winning position in the orchards to the eastern side of the city, a site that, incidentally, lacked food and water. The reason for this decision was not wholly understood even by those who participated in it, and many of the Franks believed that certain Hierosolymitan barons had been bribed by the emir of Damascus to give up the siege. Later, in fact, it would be fairly well ascertained that money did change hands. While murmurs of treachery swept through the army, its leaders began to snarl openly over the division of Damascus once it would be captured. On Wednesday, July 28, Louis, unable to follow the subtle bickering much less surmount it, ordered the retreat. In confusion and fear, the army struck out for Jerusalem with Damascene horsemen in pursuit. Arab historian ibn-al-Qalanisi, an eyewitness to the retreat, describes how the Moslems “showered them with arrows and killed many of their rearguard in this way, and horses and pack animals as well. Innumerable corpses of men and their splendid mounts were found in the bivouacs and along the route of their flight, the bodies stinking so powerfully that the birds almost fell out of the sky.”
The Moslem world could scarcely contain its glee. Since the First Crusade fifty years earlier, they had been obliged to contend with the legend of the invincible knights from the West, but now this image seemed to be effectively smashed. That this ferocious army, heralded as a scourge of Allah, should have abandoned its one and only campaign after four days and retreated ingloriously acted as an anodyne on their spirits. There was, they felt, nothing more to fear from intervention by the Europeans, at least not for a long time to come. In this, they proved correct. The next Western army they would have reason to fear would be led, ironically enough, by “MalikRic,” the lion-hearted son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but in the interim, the Moslems would have recovered Jerusalem.
Although it was abundantly clear that the prestige of the Franks had sunk to a mortifying low, it was by no means certain how this disaster had come about; Syrians and Crusaders hurled recriminations, each blasting the other for the abortive expedition. They had come thousands of miles, the Franks declared, and lost thousands of men to no avail; the Syrians were greedy, ungodly, and—a calculated insult—less courageous than the Moslems. The local Christians, equally eager to assign blame, charged that the Westerners, who lived comfortably in safe Christian lands, had the temerity to accuse them of cowardice; the constant danger of Palestine had made them realize the worth of life, and they had no taste for useless martyrdom. On both sides, some blamed Raymond of Antioch for sabotaging the Damascus siege, claiming that “he prevailed on some of the nobles in the army to manage affairs in such a way that the king was compelled to abandon the project and retire ingloriously.”
What Eleanor thought about the expedition is not hard to imagine. She was accustomed to associating failure with any enterprise undertaken by her husband, and she had little respect for the Syrian Franks, whose jealousy and petty bickering had disillusioned her beyond measure. Still, she must have felt keenly the ignominy of that weary retreat from Damascus, which had signaled the crumbling of the Crusade, her sadness compounded by depression over her own uncertain future.
During the autumn, there was much talk of ships and sailing; even the most hardened knights had become homesick and longed for the cool breezes of the Seine and the Loire. Slowly the crusading army began to melt away: On September 8, Conrad sailed for Constantinople, and Louis’s forces, “impelled by want,” also wished to go home. Somehow, passage money was found for all who wished to leave. Eleanor, too, her chests packed with perfume and damask and other souvenirs of bitterness, fully expected to take ship any day, but eventually she could see that Louis was making no effort to stir. How impatiently she must have chafed at his delays and postponements. For a person who was happiest when she could fling herself into work, the enforced idleness of Jerusalem, the debilitating glare of the noonday sun, the evenings with an unwanted spouse must have caused her enormous frustration. The wounds that she and Louis had inflicted on each other, say the chronicles, did not heal during this time. The weeks dragged; winds rose suddenly off the desert, wrapping the city in a haze of hot parched air laden with fine sand; Christmas came and went; the year became 1149; and still Louis refused to move.
Many times Abbot Suger wrote reproachful letters demanding to know why Louis did not return. The country needed him, he warned; the people were bitterly lamenting their dead relatives, the churches complaining about the dissipation of their treasure, those gold and silver vessels that had been sold for food in Hungary and Asia Minor. Louis’s brother Robert was threatening an armed uprising, contending that the king was unfit for kingship and should join their brother Henry as a monk in the Abbey of Clairvaux. And, briefly, Suger mentioned more personal matters. Shortly after the army had left Antioch in the spring of 1148, Louis had poured out his troubles with Eleanor to the abbot. His letter has been lost, but Suger’s reply remains. Thinly disguised can be seen his annoyance with Louis: “Concerning the Queen, your wife,” wrote Suger, “I suggest you conceal the rancor of your spirit, if there is any, until you have returned to your kingdom, when you may attend to both these and other things.”
Suger’s advice notwithstanding, the rancor had not abated, but had in fact increased. All winter the battle of wills raged, although at times Louis may have appeared to have been impressed with Eleanor’s arguments. Nevertheless, he made his own feelings perfectly clear: There was nothing he would not readily grant her, except what she most desired. Unable to draw much comfort from such discussions, Eleanor grew increasingly resentful and bored, and the continuing presence of Thierry Galeran in the royal party did not help. During the summer while the Crusaders had been occupied in Damascus, she had been left to her own devices in Jerusalem. At first the celestial city had held countless wonders, but over the months it had become a city like any other. By now she had grown accustomed to the arcaded courts and narrow, stepped streets, to the stalls of the Armenian merchants in the bazaars, to the Moslem scribes and the Jews and the black slaves, and to the swaying camel caravans bearing sacks of Indian spices and musk from Tibet. Countless times she had made the pilgrimage along the most famous of all Jerusalem’s streets, the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, to hear Mass in the Holy Sepulcher. “O eternal God, who has willed to declare to us by the mouth of the prophets that in the glorious sepulchre of thine only begotten Son his flesh should not see corruptions....”
Nevertheless, for Eleanor, Jerusalem had become a city of waiting, a spoiled city where even the landmarks finally lost their fascination. She had seen the cell, roofed with one stone, where Solomon had written the book of wisdom; the pine groves on Mount Zion, where tradition said that the Last Supper had taken place; the site of the pool of Bethesda, where Jesus had healed the paralytic. She had climbed the Mount of Olives, its grassy slopes white with asphodel, and toured “the village called Gethsemane and, close by, across the torrent of the Kedron, the Garden where Judas had betrayed Jesus.” For years she had listened to tales about Outremer, heard minstrels croon her grandfather’s songs, and like every pilgrim who entered Jerusalem’s gates, she had expected it to be the most miraculous event of her life. But one could not sustain oneself forever with ruins, no matter how holy. Now, weary and restless, she was ready to go home and set her life in order.
Shifting perspective, it is possible to intuit Louis’s state of mind in Jerusalem. Behind his reluctance to return to France, his confusion and aimless loitering, lay a number of ordinary human emotions. During that troubled winter and spring when his kingdom sat kingless, fear and humiliation warred with a desperate need to salvage some remnant of a life that now resembled a cracking ice floe. Afraid to look back and equally hesitant to set his feet toward the future, he was able to effectively stop the clock in Jerusalem, a place that, admittedly, seemed admirably suited to his monkish nature. One can be sure that much of his time was spent in prayer and religious sightseeing. There is less certainty of the exact nature of his relationship with Eleanor. It may well be that, alone, they heaved recriminations at each other, she berating him for his desertion of Raymond and the indignities that he had imposed on her at Antioch, he abusing her for indiscretions that provoked him into such unchivalrous behavior.
Given Louis’s limitations, he had conducted the Crusade to the best of his ability, however little credit that may be to allot him. It took courage to go home, where unpleasant postmortems were already being conducted in an effort to explain his failures. It was recalled, for example, that early in 1148 the pope had been celebrating Mass when one of his assistants spilled consecrated wine on the carpet before the altar. “Many thinking men were deeply alarmed, for the prevailing belief was that such a thing could never happen in any church unless some serious evil threatened it. And indeed this belief did not err.” Less charitable chroniclers decided to ignore the Crusade, only noting that Louis “was not able to do anything useful, anything worthy of mention, or actually anything worthy of France.” Even Odo de Deuil had abruptly ended his history of the Crusade midway because he had nothing more to say. There was no avoiding the enormously troubling fact that thousands of lives had been lost for nothing; not one foot of ground had been won. Even so, at that time what must have agitated Louis even more than his failure to the Church was the imminent loss of his queen. The issue of divorce was both puzzling and agonizing to Louis, for his marriage truly did seem to be cursed, with only one daughter in a dozen years. To a king who desperately needed a son, this was virtually the same as being childless, and his conscience trembled that he had transgressed God’s laws by living in sin with a third cousin. Nevertheless, Eleanor’s determination to separate constantly warred with his own unremitting desire to keep her, for, as John of Salisbury tells us, “he loved the queen almost beyond reason.” His ego terribly buffeted by military fiasco, he must have sought to restore a semblance of normality in his domestic affairs by going out of his way to regain Eleanor’s affection. As subsequent events will show, he fought for her with more zeal than he had waged any military campaign.
Apart from everything else was the matter of his pride. Should he meet Eleanor’s demands for divorce, if he accepted her theory that consanguinity had irrevocably tainted their marriage, then he must return empty-handed to France, having lost not only a war but his wife and that portion of his kingdom that belonged to her. From whom could he expect moral support? Bernard had declared their relationship within the forbidden degree, and for all Louis knew, Pope Eugenius might very well concur. His only recourse at this time was procrastination in the hope that time might resolve his problems and, perhaps, soften Eleanor’s implacable anger.
Toward the end of April, after the Easter celebrations had been completed. Eleanor and Louis sailed from Acre. With them were less than three hundred persons, all that remained of the mighty Crusade that had set out from Metz nearly two years earlier. Only two vessels were needed to accommodate the entire party and its baggage. That the coolness between the royal couple had continued is evidenced by the fact that Eleanor and her ladies sailed in one ship, Louis with Thierry Galeran and Odo in the other. Not only did Eleanor seem eager to avoid her husband on the voyage, but she also had no desire for the company of men whom she regarded as enemies. Despite her excitement and relief at leaving Palestine, the discomforts and boredom of a long sea trip made it far from an unmitigated pleasure. To add to this, the spring of 1149 was not the safest time to be making a voyage through the eastern Mediterranean, for Sicily and Byzantium were still at war, and squadrons of both powers regularly patrolled those waters. While Eleanor and Louis were passengers aboard Sicilian ships, they may have believed that, as neutrals, they had nothing to fear. Without incident, they passed Cyprus and Rhodes and, by early summer, were rounding the Peloponnese, probably in the vicinity of Cape Malea, when they were suddenly accosted by Manuel Comnenus’s navy. Louis hurriedly ordered the Frankish flag run up on his ship, a tactic that did not succeed in deterring the Greeks, who had orders to capture the royal pair and escort them to Constantinople. “The King was appealed to to return to his Byzantine brother and friend, and force was being brought to bear on him, when the galleys of the king of Sicily came to the rescue.” Before long the Sicilian counterattack proved successful in routing the Greeks, and the king and queen were able to continue on their way toward Sicily, the unpleasant incident forgotten.
Sometime in the following days, however, the two vessels lost sight of each other with adverse winds, perhaps a storm, driving Eleanor’s ship off its course and carrying it as far south as the Barbary Coast. For the next two months nothing was heard of the queen of France or, for that matter, her husband. Of this period we know nothing. Whatever adventures she had, if indeed she spent time with the Berbers of North Africa during her “circuits of land and sea,” her ordeals never found their way into the chronicles. Not until mid-July, more dead than alive, did she wash up at the port of Palermo in eastern Sicily, only to learn that both she and Louis had been given up for dead. Of Louis’s whereabouts, no one was able to enlighten her. Too ill to give proper attention to the implications of that information. she was taken in hand by emissaries of King Roger and given lodgings where she might rest and regain her strength.
Two weeks later Louis’s ship appeared on the shore of Calabria near Brindisi, where his first concern after disembarking seemed to be for his wife. Somewhat surprisingly, he did not rush to Eleanor’s side but settled down in Calabria to wait for her to join him. Writing to Suger some weeks later, he offered Eleanor as one of his excuses for delay. “After we were welcomed, devotedly and reverently, by the men of our most beloved Roger, King of Sicily, and honored magnificently by letters from him as well as messengers, we awaited the arrival of the Queen almost three weeks.” His wife, he goes on to add, “hurried to us with all safety and joy.” Nothing is said. of Eleanor’s misadventures and ill health, which, evidently, he did not think Suger would consider as important as “the very serious illness of the Bishop of Langres, wavering between life and death” and which he offered as a second excuse for his tardiness.
Despite Louis’s reports to Suger about Eleanor’s “joy” in their reunion, nothing had changed, neither his fantasies of reconciliation nor her determination to separate. She had been relieved to hear of his safe arrival in Sicily but not to the extent of entertaining second thoughts about a divorce. In late August, reunited for the moment, they began journeying eastward across the ankle of the Italian boot to Potenza, where they paid a courtesy call on King Roger. It was there at the Sicilian court that Eleanor must have first learned the news about Raymond of Antioch, news that would utterly blast any hope of reconciliation.
From his father Raymond had inherited charm and joviality, but unlike him, he also possessed a tendency toward fits of temporary rage that robbed him of all reason. His maddening encounter with Louis Capet sparked one of these aberrations, which, as it turned out, was far from temporary. Raymond believed, probably correctly, that Louis’s army could have crushed Nureddin, but at the same time, he could hardly have been unaware that his own forces were inadequate for such a task. While Louis had been dawdling beneath the walls of Damascus, Raymond had enjoyed some success in chasing Nureddin’s army out of Antioch, but the Turks returned the following spring. At that point, Raymond, like his neighbor Joscelin of Edessa, might have secured a truce with the Turkish leader. He did not. In an act of sheer bravado, as if to prove that he alone could fight an enemy that the Crusaders had refused to attack, he launched an offensive with only a few hundred knights and a thousand foot soldiers.
At first Nureddin, unable to believe that Raymond would have the effrontery to attack with such a feeble force, thought that this might be the advance guard of a much larger army, but his disbelief quickly turned to amusement when he discovered that Raymond had no reinforcements. Contemporary Christian historians were also at a loss in explaining the prince’s action, which they regarded as clearly suicidal. As William of Tyre pointed out, Raymond carelessly “exposed himself to the wiles of the enemy.”
On June 27, two months after Eleanor’s departure from the Holy Land, Raymond and his army were surrounded at the Fountain of Murad. Evidently Raymond made no attempt to save himself. “Wearied by killing and exhausted in spirit, he was slain by a stroke of the sword.” His death was celebrated as a great victory throughout Moslem Syria. His head and right arm had been cut off and carried to Nureddin, who sent the skull in a silver box to the caliph of Baghdad as proof that Allah’s most formidable enemy was truly dead.
Eleanor’s grief, the horror she felt over Raymond’s demise, her aching certainty that Louis’s refusal to help had cost the prince his life, made her turn on the king in bitter, impotent fury. Whatever deep hostility she had felt during the past eighteen months, disguised or repressed for the sake of royal dignity, could be held in check no longer. Her anger at being dragged from Antioch by armed knights was nothing compared to her fury at Raymond’s needless death and brought the marital discontentment to a head. Now she would have her divorce; nothing could shake her resolve.
Contemporary commentators do not indicate which direction Eleanor and Louis had intended to take after leaving Roger’s court at Potenza, but in view of Suger’s insistent letters asking Louis to make haste and the king’s replies such as might be made by a tardy schoolboy, their intention was probably to sail from Naples to Marseille. If so, these plans were now suddenly discarded and their arrival in Paris postponed still further, for the couple decided to seek the opinion of Pope Eugenius, who, driven from Rome five months earlier, now resided south of Rome in the town of Tusculum. Ultimately, the decision as to the legality of their marriage would rest with the pope, and being close by, they decided to consult him immediately. For both Eleanor and Louis, the decision to visit Eugenius was a gamble, but keeping in mind Louis’s tendency toward procrastination and Eleanor’s impulsiveness, it seems more likely that the queen was the one who pressed for an immediate opinion.
With Eleanor immersed in her personal sorrow, they began the journey north accompanied by an escort provided by Roger. According to one of Louis’s letters, she showed signs of being “seriously ill” shortly after they left Potenza, although Louis must have been aware of the precarious state of her health before they set out. Arriving at Monte Cassino on October 4, Eleanor collapsed, and they were obliged to stop at a Benedictine monastery. It would be presumptuous to attempt to diagnose an illness that occurred some eight hundred years ago, about which there are no medical records, much less a hint of the physical symptoms. But taking into consideration Eleanor’s state of mind at that time, it is possible to make some reasonably educated guesses. There was, to begin with, her growing distress during the year that she and Louis had spent in Jerusalem, the terrible uncertainty over her inability to take command of her own life, and the realization that, for the present at least, she was trapped. Her harrowing months at sea had, of course, weakened her physically, and although Eleanor would prove remarkably healthy during her entire life, she had not fully recovered when she received Louis’s summons to Brindisi. Adding to her unsettled state had come the news of Raymond’s death, and these various elements no doubt coalesced into a mental and physical breakdown.
It is, however, an indication of Eleanor’s extraordinary resilience and her determination to see her future settled that she was able to pull herself together sufficiently to resume the journey three days later. On October 9, they arrived at Tusculum, where Eugenius greeted Louis “with such tenderness and reverence that one would have said he was welcoming an angel of the Lord rather than a mortal man.” Considering that Louis was in disgrace all over Europe at this time, Eugenius behaved with immense understanding. It was not in his character to make needless reproaches, but despite what he may have privately thought of this unprecedented, impromptu visit by a king who had lately bungled the Church’s affairs beyond imagination and a queen come to plead for a divorce, he received them with equanimity. At once it was made clear that the purpose of their visit was not to discuss the Crusade, although undoubtedly the subject arose, but rather to have the pope act in the capacity of a marriage counselor, a role that he had been called upon to undertake in the past.
During that fall of 1149, John of Salisbury was a secretary at the papal court, and in his Historia Pontificalis, written four years later, he describes the two-day visit of the Frankish king and queen from his ringside observation post. John might have warned Eleanor of the reception she would receive from Eugenius, although it is quite unlikely that he would have intruded on her at that moment with anecdotes. Nevertheless, he recalled for his readers a similar visit to the court by a Count Hugh of Apulia. After a thorough investigation of the case, Eugenius denied the requested annulment, and then, to the astonishment of the court, he leaped down from his throne in tears and “in sight of all, great man though he was, lay at the feet of the count so that his mitre rolled in the dust.” From between the count’s feet he urged him to take back his wife and presented him with one of his own rings.
Eugenius, needless to add, was a staunch believer in marriage. If Eleanor was aware of this, it failed to deter her. Nothing in her background had bred any particular reverence for the mighty of the Church, but in her twenties, she must have felt obliged to mask any disrespectful feelings, especially on those occasions when she wanted something. Despite her emotional distress and the obvious fact that she was in no condition to take command of the situation, she understood the importance of gaining Eugenius’s sympathy.
The pontiff, adhering to the best twentieth-century counseling practices, heard each party’s grievances in separate interviews. It is unlikely that Eleanor expressed frankly the real sources of her discontentment with Louis. Contempt is a complicated emotion to fully explain in one session, which is all Eleanor had. Similarly, sexual frustration can be hinted at, but it would not have been a subject that Eleanor, a woman, could describe in any great detail to Eugenius, a man and a celibate man at that. In any case, either of these reasons for discarding a husband would have been interpreted as feminine caprice, and Eleanor knew it. Instead, she concentrated on what she believed the most legitimate of her grievances, that is, the fact that their invalid marriage had displeased God and prevented her from bearing an heir to the throne. In truth, Eleanor cared nothing about consanguinity—freedom, not morality, preoccupied her now—nor at this point did she desire more children by Louis. She simply could think of no better excuse. Always the pragmatist, she counted on this “sin,” a popular one in divorce actions, to impress the pope, and she confidently awaited a favorable verdict.
In his interview, Louis went over similar ground but, of course, from his own viewpoint: the troubles in Antioch, the queen’s coldness and resentment, her penchant for playing at life, his qualms about the illegality of their union. No mention was made of adultery; on the contrary, he gave the unmistakable impression that he desperately wanted to keep his wife, and as very often happens in such cases, the specter of loss looming on the horizon only imbued Eleanor with greater desirability. With piety, sincerity, and probably tears, Louis firmly impressed the pope that “he loved the queen passionately, in an almost childish way.”
From the beginning Eleanor’s chances were blighted, for she had failed to reckon with the biases of a pope who considered himself a conciliator rather than a judge. Since consanguinity seemed to be the issue troubling Eleanor’s conscience. he would be happy to banish that fear from her mind at once. Both orally and in writing, he unhesitatingly confirmed her marriage, and should that not be strong enough, “he commanded under pain of anathema that no word should be spoken against it and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever.” This ruling, which “plainly delighted” Louis, must have plainly horrified Eleanor. But Eugenius did not stop there; during the two-day. visit he harped at them every waking hour, striving, reported John of Salisbury, “by friendly converse to restore love between them.” Obviously, John was not referring to the restoration of Louis’s love. It was Eleanor on whom the pope exerted exceptionally strong pressure, but, taking into account her subsequent actions, it seems equally certain that he made little headway. Although she felt no love, indeed no positive emotion whatsoever for her husband, it was necessary, nonetheless, to smile, to dissemble, then to pretend she had accepted the pope’s reassurances.
On the final evening of their visit, Eugenius administered the coup de grace. If the queen wished to have another child—and it must have been apparent to the old man that physical love had vanished from the marriage—then he would be delighted to arrange that as well. With the satisfaction of a person who has left no stone unturned, he prepared a special bed for the Capets, and decking it with priceless hangings from his own chamber, he personally escorted them to it. In the graphic words of John of Salisbury, “the Pope made them sleep in the same bed.” Short of spending the night with them, Eugenius could not have done a more thorough job. Marriage counselor, sex therapist, well-meaning meddler par excellence, he prepared the stage for this charade, and Eleanor, hoisted on her own petard, had no choice but to perform her assigned role. That night the marriage was reconsummated. If there was ever a man incapable of raping a woman, it was Louis Capet, whose most confident couplings were those specifically endorsed and blessed by abbot or pope. In what state of despair Eleanor submitted will never be known, but technically at least, the act was against her will.
On their departure the next morning, the pope burst into tears. After loading their baggage with gifts, he effusively blessed them and the kingdom of the Franks “which was higher in his esteem than all the kingdoms of the world” and sent them on their way with an escort of cardinals. If Eleanor and Louis had arrived in Tusculum in a state of open antagonism, they left it in a far more unsettled mood. To all appearances, however, they seemed to be on good terms, at least Louis attempted to behave so. Scarcely had they traveled a few miles when a delegation of senators and noblemen from Rome came galloping toward them with the “keys” to the city. Louis, never happier than when being fussed over by a reverent crowd, was in his element. Upon reaching the outskirts of the city, the throngs of cheering Romans grew denser, and the king, followed by “nuns and boys” shouting “blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” was prevailed upon to spend the day touring the city’s shrines and holy places. His marriage mended, his wife restored to him, he may have overlooked the fact that Eleanor moved from shrine to shrine in the manner of a catatonic.
The hosannas over, they slipped quietly out of Rome the next day and began a series of forced marches into northern Italy and up over the Alps through the Jural Alpine pass. Some miles southeast of Paris, at Auxerre, they were met by Abbot Suger in response to a panicky note from the king imploring Suger to meet him secretly so that he might be informed of all plots and “how we must conduct ourselves toward all.” It was a silent, morose group that made its way toward the Île-de-France in the early days of November. The woodlands along the Seine were barren and damp under the autumn sun, but no one felt the chilly breath of approaching winter more deeply than Eleanor. As unsatisfactory as their papal visit had been, there existed no question in her mind that the final word on the divorce had not been spoken in Tusculum. Still, at that point, her future must have looked hopeless indeed.
The damp gray walls of the Cite Palace closed around Eleanor like a metaphorical dungeon from which there is no hope of escape. From the moment of their arrival, and for several months afterward, the Capets were the focus of whispers, rumors, and plots. Any popular rejoicing over their return was drowned by recriminations and angry mumblings of a decidedly seditious nature. There were demands for explanations, questions for which there could be no reasonable answers. The Church harked back to the inscrutable ways of the Almighty by pointing out that God’s judgments never erred and lessons could be learned from even the greatest of calamities. What appeared, for instance, to Abbot Bernard as “evil times” ordained by Heaven, others were not willing to accept so fatalistically, and they looked to the earthly plane for causes. Blame was freely attributed, with Manuel Comnenus, the barons of Jerusalem, Raymond of Antioch. Geoffrey de Rancon, and even the queen herself bearing a share. Criticism fell most heavily, however, on Louis. While still in Palestine, he had quarreled with his brother Robert, who had rushed home after Damascus with plans to depose the king. Like Eleanor, Robert was angered by Louis’s monkish posturings and decided, not without justification, that his brother might be happier at the Abbey of Clairvaux than upon the throne of France. It took all of Abbot Suger’s considerable acumen to suppress the rebellion and preserve the king’s birthright until he made up his mind to come home. Even so, there remained in the realm an atmosphere of sullenness that could not be dispelled by the feeble attempts of a few patriots to defend their sovereign. Surely, some Parisians suggested, ordinary decency, if not national pride, demanded that the Crusade and the king’s safe return be honored in some way. Probably prompted by Suger, a commemorative medal was coined, showing Louis seated in a chariot with the goddess of victory fluttering above. “To the king returning victorious from the Orient the citizens give joyful welcome,” read the inscription. Since this legend, so blatantly inaccurate, may have given rise to derisive mirth in some quarters, a second medal was struck to prove that an actual victory had occurred. The only confrontation with the enemy that might possibly have been interpreted as a victory was the minor incident at the Maeander River in Asia Minor, and therefore the medal read, “Turks killed and in flight on the shore of the Maeander,” a pathetic enough summation of Louis’s deeds and one better forgotten.
For Eleanor, the homecoming was made all the more desolating by the confirmation of a suspicion that she may have felt even while crossing the Alps. To her consternation, she realized that she was pregnant. Nothing could have sealed her future more decisively, for now there would be no divorce, no possibility of going back to Poitiers, nothing to look forward to but gray years stretching into the interminable future with a man she despised, her priest disguised as a king. Louis, elated, behaved as though he had forgotten the marital trauma of the past two years. At last he could present an heir to his people. Even those Franks who had been busy blackening Eleanor’s name with gossip about her alleged depravity in Antioch were obliged to regard the queen with new respect. In hardly anyone’s mind, and certainly not in the king’s, did there arise the possibility that the child might be a girl. Surely a conception so meticulously choreographed by the pope himself could result in nothing but a healthy son.
To those who later recalled that winter, it seemed to be the coldest they had ever known. The Seine froze over, the wine criers disappeared from the streets, and in the bone-bitingly cold chambers of the Cite Palace, where Eleanor extracted what warmth she could from fires and braziers, there was ample time for reflection. Peering out through the slitted apertures that passed for windows, gazing at the winter mists ris- , ing from the Seine, there was nothing to remind her of the sun-sluiced gardens of Antioch. Except for her daughter, Marie, an infant when she left and now five years old, nothing had changed. The short, stout figure of the indispensable Suger still padded through the halls of the palace; Abbot Bernard still issued proclamations from the swamps of Clairvaux; the omnipresent Thierry Galeran still shadowed the king’s every move; Louis, prayerful as ever, visited Vitry-le-Brûlé, where he planted some cedars that he had carried home from the Holy Land. The fabric of the royal couple’s relationship patched together with the flimsiest of thread, they kept to their separate beds, and despite Louis’s solicitude when they met, they had nothing to say to each other. In those winter days when her hands and feet were half-paralyzed with cold and her body swelled under her robes, Eleanor experienced a special kind of anguish. Never before had life seemed so worthless, so devoid of warmth and joy. Even in her darkest moments in Jerusalem, she had deluded herself into believing that Pope Eugenius would confirm the consanguinity, but instead he had prepared a terrible trap into which she had permitted herself to be flung. Now, like a butterfly frozen in a cake of ice, she was thoroughly immobilized. She was twenty-eight, and nothing about life pleased her anymore.
In the early summer of 1150—the exact date has not survived—Eleanor gave birth to a girl, who would be christened Alix. That day a few church bells chimed softly, but there were no public demonstrations to honor the new princess, no bonfires in the squares of the Île-de-France. The queen, that exasperating Poitevin, had failed again. The only demonstrations of joy were those made by Eleanor herself, in the privacy of her chamber with the bed curtains drawn, for she knew that, in failing, she had won.
It is interesting to speculate what might have ensued had Eleanor borne a son. Certainly the history of Europe would have been vastly different, because a male child would have been an heir not only to the Frankish throne but to Eleanor’s dower land of Aquitaine as well, thereby creating a unified realm larger than any that had existed for the Franks since the time of Charlemagne. That had been the picture in Louis the Fat’s mind on the day he learned of Duke William IX’s death, that had been the vision that had sustained Abbot Suger these many years. As both of them understood, however, William’s generous bequest would only be a first step; technically, Eleanor’s dower lands could only be officially incorporated into the Frankish kingdom when she had borne a son and, moreover, when the son succeeded Louis on the throne.
Just as Eleanor’s pregnancy had been a state affair, so now her incompetence in childbed became a national concern, and after she had proved her perversity a second time, the more uneasy members of Louis’s council began to voice fears that the queen might continue to produce princesses, that is, if she ever conceived again. Until this point Eleanor’s struggle for release from the bonds of marriage had been a private one, but after the birth of Alix she saw the emergence of barons who began urging Louis to divorce her. Of course these unwitting allies were utterly unconcerned with the queen’s personal wishes and, in point of fact, regarded her as no better than a cart that had failed to function properly.
Louis, now thirty, looked older than his years. Certainly he no longer resembled the willowy blond youth who had appeared on the banks of the Garonne to claim his bride, and although by medieval standards he could be called neither young nor old, still he had been married fifteen years with nothing to show for it. Until now, fortune had always smiled upon the Capetians; every king since 987 had left a male heir to succeed him, and continuity of the dynasty never lay far from any Capetian’s mind. If luck failed, they were not averse to taking other measures, and it was recalled, as a matter of precedent, that in the late tenth century, Robert the Pious had been forced to set aside two wives in order to assure the succession.
The one person in the kingdom who seemed least troubled by the unexpected appearance of Princess Alix was Abbot Suger. Optimistic, he pointed out that Eleanor and Louis, still young, might anticipate more offspring, hopefully one of them male. More importantly, it was unthinkable to speak of giving up Aquitaine, that rich dower that Louis the Fat had clutched with so much satisfaction on his deathbed. Those who pressed for annulment argued that Eleanor’s duchy, the most turbulent in Europe, had never added any substantial revenue to the crown. In truth, even had Louis been a stronger personality, he lacked the resources to subdue Aquitaine—even future masters with greater assets would be unable to do so—and in the mid twelfth century the Frankish monarchy was not psychologically ready to assimilate such a huge piece of property. Nevertheless. Suger’s will quietly prevailed, and the knotty problem of the succession was shelved for the time being. During the coming months it would be he who held the marriage together, for he alone in the kingdom had the foresight to understand that the real consequences of a divorce would be, not France’s loss of Aquitaine, but in the case of Eleanor’s remarriage the addition of her lands to some other lord, thereby lifting this unknown someone to a position of greater power than that of Louis. Precisely who this someone might be Suger had no way of knowing.
By the end of the summer the Crusade, while not forgotten, had nonetheless begun to fade from people’s minds. What had happened could not be changed and even for Louis, architect of its failure, life had to go on. Upon his return the previous autumn, he had been carefully briefed by Suger on the various shifts in political alignment among his vassals during his absence. The name that arose most frequently in these conversations was Plantagenet, not a real surname but a nickname for the count of Anjou, whose habit was to wear in his helmet a yellow blossom from the broom plant, the planta genesta. Geoffrey Anjou might have been a prototype for the chivalrous medieval prince. Dashing, incredibly good looking, highly educated, he impressed his contemporaries with his charm, courage, and above all, cleverness. Like all the Angevins, Geoffrey was a great believer in self-help, a fact that had no doubt been responsible for the mammoth strides he and his family had made in recent years.
Looking back to the eleventh century, there had been four important feudal empires in France, the most formidable being the house of Blois because of their family ties with the counts of Champagne, who controlled the commercial city of Troyes. Normandy, poor and badly situated, could not have been called a major power, while the house of Anjou, with its command of the rich Loire valley, showed potential, but the Angevins were undisciplined and its counts known to be unstable. Each of these houses, however, presented obstacles to the ascendancy of the Capets, the only ones who could boast of being anointed kings. Then in 1066 the whole power structure suddenly blew to pieces when William, duke of Normandy, successfully conquered England. All at once the Normans, those poor cousins, possessed newfound wealth, and worse in the eyes of the Capetians, they had wangled themselves a crown. In the shuffle, the balance of power shifted drastically, with the already insignificant Angevins shoved farther down the ladder. Certainly by the time Geoffrey was born in 1113, his family counted for relatively little. In fact, Geoffrey’s father, Fulk V, thought so little of his inherited fief that, at the age of forty, he abandoned it to marry Melisende, the heiress of Jerusalem, the title king of Jerusalem holding an infinitely greater appeal for Fulk than that of count of Anjou. From small beginnings, then, he was able to increase his heritage by marrying an heiress, a strategy of proven success that would not be overlooked by his descendants.
The event most critical to the rise in Geoffrey Anjou’s fortunes took place in 1120, when he was only seven years old. At twilight on November 25, Henry I, youngest son of William the Conqueror, king of England and duke of Normandy, prepared to make a routine crossing of the English Channel. With him at Barfleur on the Norman coast were his entire household, including his seventeen-year-old son and heir, William, “a prince so pampered,” wrote Henry of Huntingdon, that he seemed “destined to be food for the fire.” The king embarked before dark, but the younger members of the royal entourage, “those rash youths who were flown with wine,” lingered to carouse on the shore. In any event, they felt no pressing need for haste, since they were sailing on the White Ship, the swiftest and most modern vessel in the royal fleet, and would easily be able to overtake the king. Loath to break up the party, they did not launch their vessel until after nightfall. It was a perfect evening for a crossing, with a gentle breeze and a sea as calm and flat as a pond, and they soon might have caught up with the king had not a drunken helmsman rammed the ship into a rock in the bay. Panic broke out. Attempts to push free with oars and boathooks failed, and the ship rapidly began to fill with water. Throwing a dinghy overboard, Prince William and a few companions abandoned ship, but at the last moment he went back to rescue his illegitimate sister, the countess of Perche. The small boat, “overcharged by the multitude that leapt into her, capsized and sank and buried all indiscriminately in the deep. One rustic alone, floating all night upon a mast, survived until morning to describe the dismal catastrophe.”
The wreck of the White Ship was as enormous a calamity in the twelfth century as the loss of the Titanic in the twentieth, even more so perhaps because it would shake the fortunes of England for the next thirty years. Prince William was Henry’s only legitimate son, but “instead of wearing embroidered robes, he floated naked in the waves, and instead of ascending a lofty throne he found his grave in the bellies of fishes at the bottom of the sea.” Henry had fathered at least twenty bastards, but despite a hasty second marriage, he was never able to produce the needed male heir. Aside from the prince, he had one other legitimate child, his daughter, Matilda, the widow of the German emperor. Determined to pass on the crown to a member of his immediate family, the king recalled Matilda from Germany, and in January 1127 publicly recognized her as his successor and required his barons to swear fealty to her. It was an extraordinary decision, one that drew immediate criticism from all sides, but a few months later, before the shock waves had even begun to subside, he jolted the sensibilities of his barons anew by marrying his daughter to young Geoffrey of Anjou.
These unusual arrangements satisfied no one but the king himself. Most appalled was Matilda, “a young woman of clear understanding and masculine firmness,” who had been dragged home from Germany much against her own inclinations. She was twenty-five, the daughter of a king and the widow of an emperor; Geoffrey was fourteen and the son of a count. But Henry would hear of no objections; he wished her wed to Geoffrey, an alliance of political importance, he said, and he would have his way. From every angle, Henry’s barons found his schemes repugnant. Matilda was a stranger to them, and from what little they knew of her they had formed a patently unfavorable impression. Strikingly handsome but haughty and domineering, she had been sent to Germany at the age of eight, where she had been groomed in a rigid court etiquette alien to Norman tradition, though of course her greatest handicap was her sex. The Normans knew of no precedent for the rule of a woman. As for Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey, the idea was totally distasteful. The Normans believed the Angevins to be barbarians who desecrated churches and ate like beasts. According to a widely accepted tale, their ruling family had descended from demons and were shameless enough to tell this story on themselves. Worse, they laughed about it. In no way did Geoffrey, a beautiful adolescent boy, resemble a demon, but blood would tell, and the Normans feared that Geoffrey would rule for Matilda. The idea of an Angevin on the throne of England was intolerable.
Predictably, the unlikely liaison of Matilda and Geoffrey turned out to be miserable for both of them. There was no denying Geoffrey’s learning and charm, but as Matilda soon discovered, the charm was shallow and his cleverness devoted to the promotion of Geoffrey. He made no secret of the fact that he had married Matilda only to gain control of Normandy—evidently he realized that he would never be accepted as king of England—or that he impatiently awaited the death of her father. Or that he disliked her. She was, he complained, rude, arrogant, and unfeminine, and once, in a temper, he sent her back to England. For these reasons, it took the couple seven years to have their first child, a son who would be known as Henry FitzEmpress, after his mother.
Two years after the birth of his grandson and namesake, King Henry returned from a day of hunting in Normandy and, ravenous, wolfed down a dish of lampreys, “a fish which he was very fond of, though they always disagreed with him and the physicians had often cautioned him against eating them, but he would not listen to their advice.” A few hours later he was dead. Now that the moment had arrived for Matilda to claim her throne, it became clear that Henry had grossly misjudged his people. When his nephew Stephen of Blois heard of the death, he raced across the Channel from France and claimed the throne for himself. That he had been one of those who had pledged allegiance to Matilda was irrelevant, although Stephen did have the grace to excuse his defection by saying that he had vowed homage to the empress under coercion. No excuses were really necessary “All the bishops, earls, and barons who had sworn fealty to the king’s daughter and her heirs gave their adherence to King Stephen, saying that it would be a shame for so many nobles to submit themselves to a woman.” Such a turn of events, as Henry should have known, was inevitable.
Stephen of Blois, like Louis Capet, lacked the necessary qualities for kingship. “He was,” wrote Walter Map, “a man of great renown in the practice of arms, but for the rest almost an incompetent, except that he was rather inclined to evil.” A weak man, soft and indecisive, he began many things but never finished them, and though he reigned for “nineteen long winters,” he left little behind except a chapel at Westminster and the memory of anarchy. Not until 1139 did Matilda invade England, and for the next eight years the country reeled with civil war. Stephen’s claim to the throne was, some thought, as good as Matilda’s, but what rankled the empress most strongly were those Norman barons who had blithely disregarded their oaths of fealty. Not completely devoid of insight into the realities of her situation, she made it clear that she did not want the throne for herself but for her son, Henry; even so, she managed to immediately justify the worst fears of those reluctant to accept her claims. Headstrong, intolerant, unbelievably tactless, she was “always breathing a spirit of unbending haughtiness.” In 1141 her battle almost appeared to be won when she succeeded in taking King Stephen a prisoner, but then she ruined it—and lost any goodwill she might have gained from the English—by keeping Stephen in chains at Bristol Castle. In her efforts to claim her crown, she had no help from her husband, who seemed to regard her actions as none of his business. When once she begged him for help in 1142, he ignored her request for reinforcements and instead sent to England their nine-year-old son as a morale booster for her partisans. It was neither callousness nor political naivete but his intense dislike for his wife that directed Geoffrey’s attitude. Never happier than when parted from Matilda, he took every opportunity to erase her from his mind. Moreover, during these years he was involved in a conflict of his own; in Matilda’s name, he had the satisfaction of waging war against his family’s traditional enemy, Normandy, and by 1144 he would win for himself the title of duke of Normandy. What happened to Matilda, or for that matter England, did not concern him.
In England, the barons were torn between two sovereigns claiming their allegiance, with the result that some threw in their lot with Stephen, then switched to Matilda, and finally went back to Stephen. After seventy years of strong monarchical rule and royal justice, they were now forced to live with the chaos of private wars so familiar on the Continent but almost forgotten in England. “Men said,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mournfully relates, “that Christ and his angels slept.” In the north country, hordes from Scotland and Wales, “that execrable army more atrocious than the whole race of pagans,” marched into the Yorkshire valleys, massacring the villagers and taking away the women, roped together naked, as slaves. In the Isle of Ely, foreign mercenaries held men for ransom, hanging them over bonfires by their feet, casting them in dungeons crawling with snakes. The best description of the universal turmoil during Stephen’s reign is offered by Henry of Huntingdon:
Food being scarce, for there was a dreadful famine throughout England, some of the people disgustingly devoured the flesh of dogs and horses, others appeased their insatiable hunger with the garbage of uncooked herbs and roots. There were seen famous cities deserted and depopulated by the death of the inhabitants of every age and sex, and fields white with the harvest but none to gather it, all having been struck down by the famines. Thus the whole aspect of England presented a scene of calamity and sorrow, misery and oppression.
Out of the disorder eventually grew a great longing for peace, and despite Matilda, eyes slowly began to turn toward the young Henry Plantagenet. The demons from which he had supposedly descended could not have been any worse than those presently ravaging England.
The Plantagenets were certainly not strangers to Eleanor. Nor to Louis, for Geoffrey, a familiar figure at court, had once held the post of seneschal of France. Although the two men had been on fairly good terms, Geoffrey had declined to accompany Louis on the Crusade, despite the fact that his half brother was the boy-king Baldwin of Jerusalem. Geoffrey, always looking to his own interests first, had recently overpowered Normandy and wished to keep a watchful eye on his newly acquired property. In contrast, any possible glory to be won on the battlefields of Palestine paled into insignificance.
Neither was Henry Plantagent a totally unknown quantity to the king and queen. In those hurried days before the departure of the Crusade there had been talk of a betrothal between Henry and the Capet’s infant daughter, Marie. Judging from a letter that Abbot Bernard wrote to Louis about that time, it was Geoffrey who had proposed the marriage, possibly anticipating a day when Aquitaine, or some substantial portion of it, would fall into Plantagenet hands as Marie’s dowry. “I have heard,” wrote Bernard, “that the Count of Anjou is pressing to bind you under oath respecting the proposed marriage between his son and your daughter. This is something not merely inadvisable but also unlawful because, apart from other reasons, it is barred by the impediment of consanguinity. I have learned on trustworthy evidence that the mother of the queen and this boy, the son of the Count of Anjou, are related in the third degree.” Accordingly Bernard warned Louis “to have nothing whatever to do with the matter,” and the idea had been dropped. For whatever reasons, Bernard distrusted both Geoffrey and his son. Once, he had met Henry as a boy and, after studying his face closely, predicted that he would come to a bad end. If Henry had come to Paris with his father during the betrothal negotiations, Eleanor surely would have met him, but even so it is unlikely that much converse passed between the queen and a thirteen-year-old youth who was being inspected as a potential son-in-law. At that particular period she was much too engrossed in preparations for the Crusade to be interested in a barely pubescent boy.
When Louis left France in 1147, Geoffrey’s son had been little more than a child; by the time he returned, the younger Plantagenet had become a person to be reckoned with. Suddenly the king was faced with the startling and dismaying prospect of Normandy, Anjou, and England being united under one ruler, for after 1149 nobody in England cared what King Stephen did; they were concerned with Henry Plantagenet. Never, apparently, had Louis seriously considered the possibility of Geoffrey Anjou’s son becoming king of England. It was unthinkable. In the struggle between Matilda and King Stephen, Louis’s sympathies leaned firmly toward Stephen, who happened to be the younger brother of Count Theobald of Champagne. Despite Louis’s former conflicts with Champagne, the friction had been dissolved some time ago, and Theobald’s son, Henry, who had accompanied him on the Crusade, would eventually marry his daughter, Marie. However, Capetian family ties with Stephen were closer yet because recently Louis’s sister, Constance, had married Stephen’s son, Eustace, who was to someday succeed his father on the throne. These growing interconnections between the Capets and the house of Blois/Champagne automatically ranged Louis against the Plantagenets. Ever since January 1150, when Geoffrey had turned over the duchy of Normandy to his son, it being tradition among the Angevins to invest their heirs with responsibility before their own deaths, Louis had begun to show signs of concern, especially since Henry disdained to pay him customary homage for his fief. This impolite young man, he decided, needed to be taught a lesson.
In the summer of 1150 Louis, joining forces with King Stephen’s son, Eustace, began to position his troops along the Seine near the Norman border. Before hostilities could begin, however, Suger stepped in. The abbot may have been old and ill, but what little energy remained to him he used to thwart another of Louis’s futile wars. On the grounds that the king could not declare war without his barons’ approval, a consent that he knew would never be obtained as long as he had a voice in the matter, the abbot managed to arrange a truce. Louis and his army returned to Paris without encountering Henry Plantagenet, but it was a confrontation postponed rather than canceled. Of all the humiliations that Louis would have to face in his lifetime none would be more personally painful than those dealt to him by the son of Geoffrey Anjou.