Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  In those last years William determined to change his ways. Convinced that he must submit to God’s will, he regretfully vowed to abandon his love of debauchery. “My friends were Joy and Chivalry,” he wrote, “but I from both must parted be.” His flame burning at medium-low, he seemed indifferent to currents of political unrest trickling throughout his domains. The year of Eleanor’s birth, he lost Toulouse to twenty-year-old Alphonse-Jourdain, the youngest son of the Crusader Raymond of Saint-Gilles. This time he felt too weary to further pursue his dead wife’s bothersome inheritance. As the year 1126 began, William’s vitality began to ebb, and after an illness, he died on February 10.

  The main lines of Eleanor’s character were established in those early years when her grandfather’s court was the center of western European culture. With his death, both the domain and the literary salon that he had created passed to Eleanor’s twenty-seven-year-old father, who, lacking literary gifts of his own, had nonetheless studied music and possessed sufficient appreciation of the arts to continue drawing talented poets to the Poitevin court. If William IX had considered women—writing about them, courting and seducing them—to be his main vocation in life, he still took seriously his executive duties as duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou. In comparison, his son William X was a weak man with a complex character that prevented him from paying strict attention to matters of importance. Like other sons of famous men, William lived all his life with memories of a brilliantly gifted father against whom he had never been able to compete. He himself was a giant in physical stature, which in the twelfth century meant that he was over six feet tall, and all accounts indicate that he possessed the grace and charm characteristic of the family. But he had failed to inherit the Troubadour’s intelligence, his political acumen, and sound judgment, an unfortunate deficiency because during his reign Aquitaine no longer enjoyed the unchallenged political supremacy of previous years. The main characteristics known about William are his quick temper, his penchant for picking quarrels, and his stubbornness; he tended to make snap decisions and, once having made up his mind, adhered to his chosen course regardless of the consequences. In any case it was, ironically, this very ineffectualness in dealing with ordinary stresses of life that was to have such fateful consequences in shaping his eldest daughter’s destiny.

  Before Eleanor was seven, she had attained a degree of sophistication appropriate to her rank. Unlike most of her contemporaries, male and especially female, she was carefully educated. In this, her family can be counted as unusual, because generally speaking, it was thought better that women remain unlettered. Rather they should know how to spin and sew, embroider and sing, look straight ahead with unaffected quietness, and behave with neither prudery nor overfamiliarity. In these particular areas Eleanor showed little aptitude. On the other hand, she was an excellent student who had a quick intelligence and the type of mind that delighted in acquiring knowledge. At an early age she was taught to read and write, probably by the resident chaplain, who would have shown her how to hold a wax tablet on her right knee and copy with an ivory stylus the alphabet from the Disticha Catonis, the common beginner’s reader. She would also have received instruction in the rudiments of counting, first using her fingers as an abacus and then, for higher sums, seedpods strung along a stick. She must have studied Latin literature and perhaps a little astronomy, at least enough to name the constellations.

  Eleanor’s mother, and undoubtedly her grandmother as well, played a significant role in her general upbringing. Following the educational system of the nobility, Aenor would have been responsible for not only Eleanor and Petronilla but also the daughters of other noble families sent to her for instruction in manners and housewifery, just as their brothers came to William for education in knighthood. The palace on the Clain undoubtedly swarmed with maidens who, under Aenor’s tutelage, received instruction in embroidery and weaving, in the management of a baronial household, in singing, playing simple accompaniments on the harp, and speaking politely to their elders. Girls of the twelfth century learned to ride well and to become adept at falconry. Other skills including games of chess, checkers, and back-gammon were considered important too.

  As a child, Eleanor grew especially fond of her Uncle Raymond, although the big handsome boy, only eight years her senior, seemed more like a brother than an uncle. Philippa’s last-born, brought forth in Toulouse that very same year that William had left her for Dangereuse, was tall, blond, and powerfully built. Landless from birth, now motherless and fatherless, he appeared indifferent to his dismal heritage. As a portionless younger son, he rightfully should have been destined for the Church, a vocation he dismissed as lacking in the proper splendor. Accomplishments such as reading and writing he disdained to learn, but he knew all the troubadours’ songs and made himself respected at the palace for his immense strength. Because he could bend an iron bar, the awed children called him Hercules. Then Eleanor saw her special uncle no more. He had gone away, she learned, across a mist-shrouded channel to seek his fortune in a chilly land where the untamed natives clad themselves in wolfskins, although the king of the English had taken a liking to the boy and treated him as kindly as if he had been his own dead son. But she would never forget the laughing boy with his sensitive spirit and mighty body.

  While the ancestral palace at Poitiers was home, Eleanor gradually became acquainted with the rest of her father’s sunlit realm, where life was by turns impetuous and languid. Weeks and sometimes months of each year were spent on ducal progresses throughout the land, and on these migrations the family, leading a life appropriate to its exalted rank, would be surrounded by a suite large enough to people a small town: minstrels, notaries and scribes, chaplains and clerks, cooks, falconers, and scores of humbler servants. While still a small child, Eleanor had seen the grape harvest in Cognac and she had breathed the fishy breezes at Talmont, where the tiny village crowned a rocky headland and the church, teetering on the edge of the Gironde cliff, had a nave that fell into the sea. She knew a place near Poitiers on the far bank of the Clain where there was a hermit’s cell carved with snakes; she knew that on a certain road near Maillezais her Aunt Agnes presided over an abbey and that at Blaye there was a forge where the armorers repaired her father’s traveling gear. She came to recognize castles and keeps, knowing which castellans gave lavish banquets and patronized the finest jongleurs and which chatelaines had been immortalized in the troubadours’ cansos. From the uplands of the Limousin to the port of Niort in the marshy, mosquito-ridden west, from the forests of Poitou to the foothills of the Pyrenees, she was beginning to put down a taproot in her homeland.

  Very often one of these leisurely chevauchées ended at the tiled fountains and semitropical gardens of the Ombrière Palace in Bordeaux. This powerful fortress squatted at the southeast corner of the old Roman wall that girdled the city, and from its buttressed walls and stout rectangular keep Eleanor could gaze down at the silken sails rocking gently on the waters of the Garonne. Here at the Ombrière, William received his vassals, great and small, signed petitions, and heard the feuds and disputes that largely accounted for much of his administrative business. On these trips, and at the court in Poitiers, Eleanor learned a great deal about politics, although this certainly was not William’s intention, nor did he take any special pains to rear her for a position of authority. Rather, she absorbed politics by a process of osmosis, just as she soaked up the literature created by Cercamon. Marcabru, and other troubadours at her father’s court, and she grew up believing that affairs of state were a province not necessarily restricted to men. Scarcely a day passed that she did not hear her father inveighing against turbulent vassals who resisted his authority at the slightest opportunity. At that time, William’s grand duchy was quickly being transformed into a shaky house of cards, and even though culturally it stood as the foremost land in Europe, politically and economically it was falling behind the north. Such omens of danger did not concern Eleanor, who saw only the importance of her father’s pos
ition and, reflected, her own. Aware, of course, that her brother, William Aigret, took precedence, she still had, as the eldest child, a part to play in the day-to-day affairs of government. Her name first appeared in the records in July 1129, when she, along with her brother and parents, witnessed a charter deeding certain privileges to the Abbey of Montierneuf, her grandfather’s burial place. A quill pen was used to make crosses after each name, except that of William Aigret whose tiny baby fingers were dipped lightly in ink and the imprint pressed upon the parchment. In March of the following year, the signatures of parents and two children appeared on another charter granting the brothers of the Church of Saint-Hilaire the right to cut firewood from the forest of Mouliere.

  When Eleanor was eight, however, the quartet of signatures abruptly ceased. Tragedy swept the ducal family; within a span of a few months, both Aenor and William Aigret were dead in Talmont, leaving Eleanor the prospective heir of her father’s domains. The death of Aenor did more than remove the warmth of a mother’s affection; it also took away a stabilizing influence in Eleanor’s life. She had always been defiant and independent, a child who took direction reluctantly. Her restless temperament, her vanities and self-centeredness, her bold flirtatious manner combined with a certain tomboyishness, kept her grandmother and ladies-in-waiting in a state of apprehension. One can imagine that there were those who said she needed a good whipping and others who ascribed, but not in Dangereuse’s hearing, Eleanor’s willfulness to bad blood, but the fact remained that more and more the girl was left to her own devices. That she began to develop into a strong-minded young woman thoroughly determined to behave as she pleased is not surprising, because the women she most admired had been cast from similar molds. Innumerable times she had listened to the history of her family: the story of her paternal grandmother riding into Toulouse to mount the throne that an accident of sex had denied her; from her maternal grandmother’s lips she had repeatedly heard the now-inflated romantic tale of how Dangereuse had fled the castle of Châtellerault, riding into the forest of Mouliere with arms clasped around her lover’s waist, defying Church, lawful spouses, and public opinion to remain proudly at her lord’s side.

  And if these ladies were not sufficiently heroic, there was Radegonde, one of the patron saints of Poitiers. Since Eleanor had been a small child, she had ridden down the hill to the southernmost gate of the city where Radegonde had founded a convent almost six centuries earlier, and there in the dark crypt containing the saint’s coffin, she would place beside the tomb a tiny waxen heart and a lighted candle as she made her wish. In the sixth century, according to legend. Queen Radegonde had fled the Merovingian kingdom of the Franks, her brutal and licentious husband Clothaire in hot pursuit, and hidden herself in a newly sown cornfield, clutching her jewels and her two women companions. By God’s mercy, the corn immediately sprang up around them, the tall stalks hiding Radegonde only minutes before Clothaire came riding by. The learned queen was consecrated as a nun and later came to Poitiers, where she established the convent of Sainte-Croix. It was there that she burned with Platonic love for the Italian poet-priest Fortunatus, “the delight of my soul,” and there that she served him exquisite meals on dishes of crystal and silver. From the lives of these women Eleanor, as a small child, developed attitudes and feelings that she was never able wholly to escape: that a woman need not accept the fate men might decree, that she could take her life into her own hands and shape it to suit her heart’s desire.

  Meanwhile, Eleanor’s father seemed to have paid scant attention to his daughter’s development, since he was constantly embroiled ,in troubles so all-consuming that he could think of little else. In his few years as duke, he had acquired the reputation of being a hothead. Always quick to provoke a fight, he had grown increasingly obstinate after the deaths of his wife and son. In 1130, for instance, when the Chair of Peter was being claimed by two popes, he brought down a host of difficulties upon his own head by enthusiastically supporting the antipope, a cardinal who called himself Anacletus II. The fact that an important lord like the duke of Aquitaine would fail to support Innocent II, who occupied the Holy See, was serious enough to aggravate the schism in the Church at that time and bring the renowned Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, sallying from his cloister to deal with this threat to “God’s business.”

  No churchman of the day was more admired than Bernard. Unquestionably the most powerful single individual of the twelfth century, a maker of popes, a chastiser of kings, who listened to his advice and sometimes followed it, he had a gift for oratory that won him the name Doctor Mellifluus,“the honey-sweet doctor,” but his contemporaries claimed that the sight of him was sufficient to persuade audiences even before he opened his lips. In 1115, the twenty-five-year-old Bernard had taken thirteen Cistercian monks and settled in a wooded place in Champagne called Valley of the Wormwood, where, emphasizing poverty and manual labor, they built the Abbey of Clairvaux while sleeping on the ground and existing on coarse barley bread and boiled beech leaves. Not surprisingly, he nurtured a grim disapproval for the black-robed monks of Cluny and deplored the pernicious influence of their gilded cathedrals and stained-glass windows. Regarded as a saint during his lifetime and canonized after his death, Bernard utterly rejected the world in favor of the austerity and silence of the cloister, but, ironically, there was no monk who lived more frequently and for longer periods outside his abbey. When he learned that Duke William of Aquitaine supported the antipope, he hurried to Poitiers for the purpose of reasoning with the duke and bringing him into the camp of Innocent II. Meeting at the Abbey of Montierneuf, the two men discussed the matter for an entire week, after which time the duke, apparently moved by Bernard’s charismatic personality and his formidable powers of persuasion, expressed willingness to break with Anacletus.

  Yet scarcely had Bernard left Poitiers before William resumed his militant partisanship of the antipope. In fact, he raced willy-nilly ahead and turned with even greater fury against the supporters of Innocent: The altar stone on which Bernard had said Mass was smashed, and William personally drove from Poitiers every ecclesiastic who supported Innocent and then proceeded to fill the offices with his own appointees. These actions inevitably led to his excommunication.

  When Eleanor was thirteen, her father again clashed with the Church, and in that year of 1135 people said that God’s patience with her father had ended and that he had reached down to rescue the duke from damnation. At the time this momentous incident took place, William was away from home at his chateau in Parthenay, but God, through his emissary Bernard, found him just the same. News of a miracle travels on ghostly wings of air, and before her father returned to Poitiers, Eleanor must have already heard the incredible story being whispered among her high-born ladies and spoken of openly in kitchen and stable. Once more Bernard had come all the way from Champagne to seek out the intractable duke, but when he arrived at the château. William refused to see him. At last cooler heads prevailed, and then he had listened, full of truculence, as the holy man urged him to abandon the evil Anacletus and return to God. As it took a hard man to withstand the uncompromising eloquence of Bernard of Clairvaux, William gradually began to weaken and grudgingly promised that he would acknowledge Innocent. He would not, however, reinstate the expelled bishops; as a knight he could not, for he had sworn never to permit them in his domain again. Bernard sighed and stared at the duke in his deplorably fine and precious raiment, his huge muscular body radiating good health. Once, some fifteen years earlier, he had thundered, “Wine and white bread benefit the body, not the soul. The soul is not fattened out of frying pans.” If William was content to leave his soul malnourished, Bernard would find other means of fattening it.

  The next morning the square outside the château was packed with people from leagues around; the lamest peasant had risen from his pallet to crowd into the Church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Couldre, where the worshipers all but mobbed the saint before he said Mass. Hardly anyone in the town was absent, including the exc
ommunicated William, who, unable to step foot over the threshold, skulked outside on the porch, pacing fretfully to and fro as he watched Bernard at the altar. After the pax, still holding the Host upon the paten, Bernard turned around and caught sight of William in the doorway. With a sudden burst of inspiration, he slowly began to make his way down the aisle, the Host held triumphantly before him, his gaze never departing from the figure of the duke. If William could not come to God, then he would bring God to William. He called out to the duke, “We have petitioned you and you have spurned us. In the recent council, the servants of God at your footstool you have treated with contempt.” Trampling each other to inch close behind Bernard, the townspeople saw their prince staring at Bernard in amazement.