It is at this point that the most notorious episode of Eleanor’s career occurred, one which was to tarnish her reputation forever. Eleanor’s close relationship with her uncle led to gossip and ultimately the accusation that she had an affair with him. John of Salisbury reported in 1149 that the attention Raymond paid to Eleanor and the fact that they were constantly in conversation together aroused Louis’s suspicions. William of Tyre wrote in 1179 that Raymond hoped to extend his territories with Louis’s assistance and so tried to use Eleanor’s influence with her husband, but when Louis refused to attack Aleppo and recapture Edessa, since he preferred to carry on to Jerusalem, Raymond was furious and seduced Eleanor in revenge.
What is indisputable is that for the rest of her life Eleanor was branded an adulteress because of her behaviour on the Crusade. Gerald of Wales alluded to the rumours, saying that how Eleanor had behaved in Palestine was ‘well enough known’, and Gervase of Canterbury wrote that it was ‘best to remain silent about matters best left unspoken’. Richard of Devizes wrote forty-five years later, in 1192, ‘Many know what I wish none of us knew. This very Queen was at Jerusalem in the time of her first husband – let none speak more thereof, though I know it well. Keep silent.’ Even the troubadour Cercamon may have been referring to this in a song composed during the Crusade when he criticized women who lay with more than one man, saying, ‘Better for her never to have been born than to have committed the fault that will be talked about from here to Poitou.’60 By the 13th century the gossip and rumours became wilder, and in 1260 the Minstrel of Rheims claimed that Eleanor had conducted an affair with Saladin (the Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem who would be the great adversary of Eleanor’s son Richard the Lionheart on the Third Crusade) and planned to elope with him by sea, but failed because Louis intercepted her at the dock.
This marks a moment when Eleanor’s fame and remarkable experiences served to remove her from the realm of fact and make her a literary figure in her own lifetime. It has been speculated that Eleanor was the model for Queen Guinevere in the Arthurian romances that were becoming so popular in the mid- and late 12th century. Though there is no evidence for this, it is intriguing that Chrètien de Troyes’s Lancelot of the late 1170s was the first romance to introduce the knight Lancelot and his adulterous love for Guinevere, and Chrètien’s patroness was Marie of Champagne, Eleanor’s daughter from her marriage to Louis. We have seen that the idea of a knight’s perfect love for an unattainable married lady of higher rank was a standard motif of troubadour poetry from the early 12th century, but even if Eleanor wasn’t the inspiration for the tale there must have been an unmistakeable resonance between the beautiful adulteresses Queen Guinevere and Queen Eleanor.
Whatever part Eleanor’s behaviour played in it, there was a very public rift between Louis and Raymond over the strategy for the Crusade and Louis decided to carry on to Jerusalem. Eleanor refused to go and said that she would keep all her vassals – more than half the crusading army – with her. When Louis insisted that she accompany him, Eleanor for the first time stated explicitly that she felt their marriage was invalid because of consanguinity and should be annulled.61 Louis ended the dispute and avoided any unpleasantness with Raymond by essentially kidnapping Eleanor and taking her to Jerusalem. Is it extraordinary or commonplace that in the 12th century, on a Crusade launched by a saint that took thousands of soldiers thousands of miles, the marital difficulties of a couple should play so prominent a role?
Though the Crusade was beginning to seem an unmitigated disaster, Louis and Eleanor did reach Jerusalem with their forces, and Louis completed his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. They were welcomed by Queen Melisende and King Baldwin III, plus the Emperor Conrad, who had travelled to Jerusalem by sea, and a conference of leaders – pointedly not including Eleanor – was held to determine the best strategy. It is fascinating to consider what Eleanor and Melisende might have said to each other, but we have no record of their meeting. Raymond of Poitiers refused to have anything further to do with the Crusade, so recapturing Edessa was out of the question, and the leaders were divided about the best course of action.
At a council on 24 June 1148 the proposal was put forward to attack Damascus, despite its current alliance with Jerusalem. Baldwin III seems to have instigated this plan and gained the support of Conrad, and Louis VII agreed. This could have been at least partially an attempt by Baldwin III to gain a great military victory and eclipse the power of Melisende, who was still wielding the power of regent even though Baldwin was an adult.62
Things looked slightly better for the Christians in one regard. Zengi had become a hero of the Muslim world through his conquest of Edessa and was the most formidable opponent yet faced by the Christians, but in 1146 he quarrelled with one of his eunuchs and was murdered while he lay in a drunken stupor. Zengi’s ignominious end highlights the limitations of his position: he was a highly capable military leader and politician, but his ambitions were purely worldly and he could not credibly claim to be acting for the greater good. Indeed, this was demonstrated by the willingness of Muslim cities like Damascus to ally themselves with the Christians rather than submit to Zengi. However, what if a ruler arose who was a model of piety as well as military skill? What would happen if a leader appeared who could offer the disparate Muslim territories not only protection, but also a political system based on justice and Islamic ideals? The Christians were about to find out.
Zengi’s inheritance was divided, with his elder son taking the more prestigious city of Mosul, and his second son, Nur ed-Din, taking Aleppo. Being atabeg of Mosul necessarily involved a ruler in the affairs of the caliph of Baghdad and pulled his attention to the east, something that had reduced Zengi’s impact on Syria, but as ruler of Aleppo alone Nur ed-Din did not have this distraction. The rulers of Damascus had no more wish to become subject to Nur ed-Din than they had to Zengi, and thus had remained on very good terms with Jerusalem. It would be catastrophic for Jerusalem if Damascus fell to Nur ed-Din, but the Second Crusade’s attack on the city drove it into his arms.
Louis led his men and their allies from the Crusader States to Damascus, but the expedition was a fiasco from the start. The rulers of Damascus were so alarmed at the prospect of a Christian attack that they begged Nur ed-Din for help, and he was more than happy for an invitation to intervene in Damascene affairs. Before he could arrive, the Crusader army had already retreated in disarray and with considerable loss. So inexplicable was the defeat that rumours circulated that Raymond of Poitiers or the emir of Damascus had bribed the barons of Outremer to retreat.63
After this latest failure the French army broke up and the Crusaders began to return home. Louis and Eleanor visited Pope Eugenius III in Tusculum, and in a bizarre scene that would be more appropriate to a romantic comedy, the pope played agony uncle to the unhappy pair and personally decorated a bed-chamber with hangings from his own apartment to create an appropriate venue for a reconciliation. Though he was prepared to listen to their marital problems, Eugenius firmly ruled out any possibility of annulling their marriage.64
Louis and Eleanor’s domestic farce was of minor importance in the face of European reaction to the failure of the Crusade. To understand the shock and horror at its end, we must remember that the First Crusade was seen as a miracle in which God intervened directly to restore the Holy Land to Christianity. For the Second Crusade to fail in such spectacular fashion required an explanation, and William of Tyre struggled to explain how God could permit such a thing to happen. Henry of Huntingdon had no doubts: the army had failed because God was angry at their fornication and adultery.65
Other chroniclers agreed: God punished sin, and the presence of fornicators and adulterers – and an adulteress? – as leaders of the Crusade, and indeed the presence of women in the army at all, must be the reason for divine displeasure. Further proof of divine retribution came even before Louis and Eleanor had reached Italy, when the adulterer and alleged traitor Raymond of Poitiers was killed in a skirmish
with Nur ed-Din. The emir sent Raymond’s head in a silver box as a gift to the Caliph in Baghdad.66
If Louis and Eleanor had been unhappy before the failed Crusade and Eleanor’s presumed infidelity, the breach between them was now wider than ever despite the pope’s best efforts. Louis’s knowledge that he had failed in his divine mission to relieve the Crusader States increased his piety and penitence, and Eleanor complained that she had married a monk rather than a king. Nevertheless she became pregnant again and gave birth to a daughter, Alice, in 1150. This more than any other factor undermined Eleanor’s position, since she had produced only two daughters in thirteen years of marriage and the Capetians needed a son. During the lifetime of Suger, who had arranged Louis and Eleanor’s union and clung to the hope of integrating Aquitaine into the French kingdom, an annulment was unthinkable, but the abbot died in 1151. Bernard of Clairvaux again publicly questioned the validity of the marriage and it was becoming apparent that the ill-matched couple who had failed to produce an heir were ready to part.67
Louis returned from the Crusade to more than just domestic problems, because Geoffrey Plantagenet had not been idle in the two years of Louis’s absence. The Angevins were now firmly in control of Normandy, and in 1150 Geoffrey passed the title Duke of Normandy to his son Henry.
Henry FitzEmpress, the future Henry II
Despite his initial setbacks, Henry was already known as a vigorous leader (an echo of the teenage successes of his ancestor Fulk Nerra). Indeed he must have been for Geoffrey Plantagenet to hand the duchy of Normandy over to him, as Geoffrey would not have relinquished the duchy he fought so hard to conquer to anyone incapable of ruling it. This was clearly an attempt to make Henry more palatable to the Anglo-Normans as a king of England, and again suggests that rather than ignoring or hindering Matilda’s claim to the English throne, Geoffrey was cooperating in a long-term strategy.
Matilda, too, had stepped back from the futile task of conquering England in favour of Henry, and this transformed the civil war entirely. The Anglo-Norman barons who supported Matilda’s claim no longer had the public relations disaster of a woman and her hated Angevin husband as their candidates; they now had a dynamic young man of Norman stock with a power base in Normandy who could advance their interests.
Matilda, Geoffrey and Henry were aware that it was the heritage of the Normans that remained talismanic, and the prestige of Normandy that was all important. Geoffrey Plantagenet, once he had conquered Normandy, was always styled Duke of Normandy, a title that trumped Count of Anjou. Henry II, despite his Angevin red hair and epic temper, glorified his Norman lineage above all else, commissioning Wace to write the Roman de Rou about Rollo, the founder of the Norman duchy. Yet it was not this rather pedestrian epic that stood the test of time; rather it was the chronicle of the counts of Anjou written at the same time by the monks of Marmoutier that is the more interesting and enduring work. Henry also managed to procure the canonization of Edward the Confessor in 1161 to glorify the English royal line that ruled before the Normans, taking his place in the line of Angevin-instigated canonizations that would reach its zenith in the 14th century.68
Despite Henry’s wide-ranging interests, England remained a Norman kingdom, and within a generation of Henry II there was no visible disruption in Norman rule. A useful marker of this is found in names – Henry II himself had been given a Norman name in anticipation of his succession, and Henry and Eleanor followed this convention with their own sons William (who died young), Henry and Richard. Only with the fourth son did they allow themselves to use the Angevin ‘Geoffrey’. This can be seen in names that remain current today: typical Norman names were Robert, Richard and William, which remain familiar to us. Typical Angevin names were Fulk, Geoffrey and Drogo. I have a particular reason to be grateful that it was Geoffrey (and its variants) among Angevin names that remained in use rather than Fulk (though this is tautological – if Fulk had passed into common use than it would seem as ordinary a name to us as Geoffrey).
The Angevin bid for the English throne was not happening in isolation, and Louis VII was alarmed by the rise of a competitor who might become even more powerful than the Norman dukes. Louis continued the struggle against his neighbours by leading an army against Geoffrey and Henry in August 1151, but he was ill and had to retreat. St Bernard of Clairvaux attempted to mediate and tried to persuade Geoffrey to go to Paris, but Geoffrey refused outright. St Bernard responded to this snub by prophesying that Geoffrey would die within a month. Henry did agree to perform homage for Normandy to the French king and went to Paris, where he first met Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Gerald of Wales wrote much later that Geoffrey had warned Henry against forming any kind of attachment with Eleanor not only because she was the wife of his lord, but also, Gerald says, because Geoffrey himself had slept with her. The incest taboo covered this eventuality and it was unlawful for a man to marry a woman who had slept with his father. William of Newburgh and Walter Map say that Henry and Eleanor had agreed to marry before he left Paris.69 This is all speculation and indicates a wish to backdate Henry and Eleanor’s relationship to their first meeting, but there is no evidence to support the theory. Eleanor would certainly have been interested in meeting the new duke of Normandy and potential king of England, not least because – whatever the nature of their relationship – she had previously met Geoffrey Plantagenet. She must also at this stage have known that she and Louis would separate, but whether she decided immediately to marry Henry is another thing.
It is curious to speculate about the Angevin family relations at this point. Geoffrey was only forty-one in 1151 and might have lived several decades more. Matilda didn’t die until 1167. How might Matilda, Geoffrey and Henry have arranged political matters and Henry’s claim to the throne and the rule of England, Normandy and Anjou, and with what difficulties? This was not to be, as Geoffrey Plantagenet went swimming to cool off on a hot day in September 1151, and after catching a chill he died within days, fulfilling St Bernard’s prophecy. On his deathbed Geoffrey was said to have ordered that his body not be buried unless Henry agreed to give Maine and Anjou to his brother once he became king of England. Henry was not present and was said to be furious when he arrived to be trapped into an oath such as this. He refused to swear the oath for some time, but the spectacle of his father’s rotting corpse finally proved too much, and – weeping with frustration – Henry finally agreed, although he later repudiated his oath.70
The speed with which events moved gave rise to the stories that Henry and Eleanor had previously come to an understanding about marrying as soon as she was free of Louis. Eleanor and Louis set off on a tour of Aquitaine in September 1151 amid rumours that the French would leave the duchy by Christmas, and it did seem to be a valedictory tour for Louis, though it wasn’t until March 1152 that a synod of bishops dissolved the marriage.71 Eleanor was now single and once again the wealthiest heiress in Europe, though probably not the most desirable: her connection to Louis, exclusively female children and reputation for adultery would have been grave disadvantages. Yet this did not deter suitors: as Eleanor rode from Paris to Poitiers she had to avoid two attempts to kidnap her, one by the Angevin rival Theobald of Blois and the other by her future husband’s younger brother Geoffrey. Nevertheless Eleanor escaped, and in May 1152 she and Henry were married quietly at Poitiers. Despite the lack of ceremony, they did commission a stained-glass window showing the two of them, which is still in the cathedral.
Henry as Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, and now de facto ruler of Aquitaine as Eleanor’s husband, controlled vastly more territory than his nominal overlord Louis VII, and he had a very good claim to the throne of England as well. Louis’s worst nightmare had come to pass and in the most insulting way possible, since as the feudal overlord of both Henry and Eleanor he should have been asked for permission before they married. He was very well aware that should Henry finally take the English throne things would be worse yet. Henry lost no time in preparing for an inv
asion of England, showing Louis that his fears were justified. Louis summoned the pair to his court to demand satisfaction for their breach of feudal protocol, but they ignored him.
Louis then used the tactic that Angevin enemies would always use, and which would be so successful for his son Philip Augustus when he fought Henry’s son John: he gathered a coalition of Angevin enemies from all sides and organized an invasion of Normandy. The count of Blois was an obvious ally against an Angevin, but Louis also enlisted Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey, who was still smarting from Henry’s refusal to grant him the lands his father had intended and his failure to capture Eleanor. Henry was forced to postpone his invasion of England to deal with the threat so Louis succeeded in one goal, but Henry – with the seemingly limitless energy that would characterize him until the latter part of his reign – managed to deal with each enemy in turn before they could join forces, and so defeated each one separately. The stage was now set for Henry to become king of England.72
By January 1153 Henry was sufficiently secure to accomplish the invasion of England he had planned for so long. In his absence, Matilda took charge of Normandy and Eleanor ruled Anjou and Aquitaine. This set a pattern that would be repeated in later years, when Matilda and Eleanor would often administer parts of the Angevin Empire or act as regent in the king’s absence. Eleanor would be somewhat obscured in Henry’s early reign, though we should bear in mind that she bore Henry eight children – sufficient proof that her failure to bear many children in her first marriage was entirely due to Louis VII – and would have been pregnant or recently delivered of a child for most of the first twenty years of Henry’s reign, and she amply redressed the balance later.
Henry’s invasion led to the prospect of England being plunged into the anarchy that had characterized Stephen’s struggle with Matilda, which was distasteful to everyone. The Archbishop of Canterbury pressed for the two sides to negotiate. It was at this moment that a death and a birth gave a new complexion to events: Stephen’s son and heir Eustace died suddenly from an illness, and Eleanor gave birth to a son, William.73 Historians always say that Stephen lost the will to fight and agreed to negotiate after Eustace’s death since his line had no future, yet Stephen had another son so it does seem curious that he would suddenly lose hope. The Angevins were definitely in the ascendant and Stephen was old by medieval standards, but his capitulation provides ammunition for those who denigrate the listlessness and lack of purpose of the house of Blois when compared with the indomitability of the Angevins.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 13
