Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  As Suger had planned, Louis played a principal role in the ceremony: It was he who led the solemn procession of bishops and monks around the cathedral as they sprinkled holy water on the outside walls, he who shouldered the silver reliquary holding the bones of Saint Denis and carried it to the altar, where it was laid to rest in a blaze of spun gold and precious stones. The contrast of his gray penitent robes and rude sandals caused a stir among the crowd. “No one would have taken the king for that scourge of war who had lately destroyed so many towns, burned so many churches, shed so much blood. The spirit of penance shone in his whole aspect.” By afternoon the weather had turned uncomfortably warm, and the number of worshipers jammed into the cathedral had far exceeded its capacity because there was not a single spare inch on which to stand; outside, additional thousands milled about under the open skies.

  Later that day, Eleanor slipped away to a deserted chamber in the abbey, where a private interview had been arranged with Bernard of Clairvaux. It is unclear whether the idea for the meeting had originated with Louis or Bernard or even had been initiated by the queen herself, nor what its real purpose was intended to be. In any case, Eleanor did not lack for words nor did she face the saint with any particular awe. Remembering Bernard’s effect on her father at Parthenay a decade earlier, she undoubtedly looked forward to the talk with some wariness and perhaps more than a touch of rancor. Whatever her feelings that evening, she concealed them by deftly launching into a well-rehearsed declaration. She intended to inform the abbot of her uppermost thoughts—and inform him she did. Her desire was to see the ban of excommunication lifted from the house of Vermandois and her sister’s marriage be recognized. If the abbot would be kind enough to use his considerable influence on Pope Celestine to see these injustices rectified, then the Capets were prepared to make certain concessions in the prickly matter of Champagne and perhaps conclude a bit of old business, the recognition of Peter de la Châtre as archbishop of Bourges.

  Both the content of her speech and the forthright manner in which she presented her ideas amazed and horrified the holy man. He was unaccustomed to bargaining with women and certainly not with one who spoke as boldly as a man and eyed him with shameless curiosity. At the time of this meeting, Bernard was fifty-four. As a youth he had been blond and handsome, but years of deliberate self-abuse had given him ulcers, a digestive system that could barely keep down food, and the appearance of a walking skeleton. “His whole body was meagre and emaciated. His skin itself was of the finest texture, with a slight flush of red on the cheeks. His hair was of a yellow inclining to white; his beard was auburn, sprinkled towards the end of his life with grey.” He preferred filth to cleanliness and wore a hair shirt next to his skin.

  Although legend maintains that he was “hot in burning love,” this did not include the love of women, most assuredly not a woman like Eleanor. While he had adored his mother, nearly all other women he feared, regarding them as snares of Satan. Familiar with sexual desire, he had once, in adolescence, glanced admiringly at a girl and immediately felt such shame that he threw himself into an icy pond, remaining there until he almost froze. His hostility toward the female sex extended to his sister Hombeline, who had chosen to marry and raise a family rather than enter a convent. Once, gorgeously dressed and trailed by a huge retinue of servants, she appeared at the gates of Clairvaux, but Bernard refused to see her. He sent a message with their brother Andrew to declare her no better than a whore, a bait of the devil to lure men to destruction.

  Although Eleanor and Bernard had never met before, he had once beheld her from a distance, probably in 1140 at the Sens debate with Peter Abélard. Illustrious princesses and great lords meant nothing to Bernard, so there must have been something exceptionally magnificent about Eleanor and her ladies-in-waiting to captivate his attention so thoroughly. He must have watched those exquisites for quite a time, because later he had them so well fixed in his mind that he could offer a description to the maiden Sophia “that she may never sully her virginity but attain its reward.” It is ironic that the only surviving physical portrait of Eleanor comes from a man who viewed her as a Babylonian harlot:You see women burdened rather than adorned with ornaments of gold, silver and precious stones, and all the raiment of a court. You see them dragging long trains of most precious material behind them, stirring up clouds of dust as they go.... The ornaments of a queen have no beauty like to the blushes of natural modesty which color the cheeks of a virgin.... Silk, purple and paint have their beauty but they do not make the body beautiful. The comeliness which goes on with clothes comes off with clothes, it belongs to the clothes and not the clothed. Thus do not emulate evil-doers.... Consider it wholly beneath you to borrow your appearance from the furs of animals and the work of worms.

  Bernard remembered the queen as one of “those daughters of Belial who put on airs, walk with heads high and, with mincing steps, got up and adorned like a temple.” Still, on that summer evening at Saint-Denis, he was able to contemplate her with an appraising eye, perhaps he even managed to overlook her appalling costume, but he was hard put to conceal his dismay at her manner. He had expected contriteness, sorrow, even pleas for forgiveness, but unlike her husband, Eleanor did not approach him as a penitent; she did not mention Vitry. Instead, he heard her daring to haggle with God, speaking indelicately of bargains and adultery and influences upon the pope. By the time she had finished, he had localized to his own satisfaction the true identity of the king’s “evil genius.” At this point, claim the chroniclers, Bernard commanded the queen to stop meddling in affairs of state, rebuking her so harshly that Eleanor broke down and meekly excused her behavior by saying she had been embittered by her inability to have children.

  Since there were no witnesses present, the details of this scene are open to question. It is impossible to say whether she was transformed by Bernard’s hypnotic personality. Certainly more august personages than she had fallen at his feet. A more likely explanation was that Eleanor. above all else a pragmatist, quickly reevaluated her position. Although it must have been galling to accept, she understood that Ralph and Petronilla had become an incurably lost cause. Rightly or wrongly, she had done everything within her power to help them, and much that she had reason to regret. Now, casting aside family loyalty, she opted for her own concerns and played the heretofore unsampled role of suppliant by presenting to the miracle maker her curable sorrow, the lack of an heir.

  Bernard knew her history. In his eyes, she had sprung from adulterous grandparents and an ungodly father whose stubbornness had nearly wrecked the Church. The family was a worthless lot, arrogant, self-willed, always seeking worldly thrills and plucking the beards of the clergy when they could not get their ways. Little wonder that the offspring of such people had strayed so far from the paths of righteousness. But now Bernard could not help rejoicing that the “daughter of Belial” wished to return to the fold by aspiring to the pious objective of motherhood. “My child,” he allegedly said to her, “seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the king against the Church and urge upon him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in my turn promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring.” Bernard had disdained to negotiate with a woman, and yet, in the end, Eleanor was able to extract the bargain she most desired.

  Pact completed, the saint and the queen took leave of each other. Behind the abbey, the sun had set. Dusk hid the tall windows. but row upon row of candles could be seen gleaming through the open bronze portals. Through the shadows tonsured monks softly tramped in their black robes. The scent of incense and damp grass fluttered slowly on the crest of the evening breeze as Eleanor, exultant, hurried away to find her husband.

  Within weeks, peace returned to France as Louis handed over Theobald’s war-torn provinces and admitted Peter de la Châtre to the archbishopric of Bourges. The papal bans on the house of Vermandois, never removed, would be ignored in time, however. Four years later, the papacy would recognize the val
idity of Ralph and Petronilla’s marriage, but Bernard quickly declared that they would not enjoy each other for long, and that, moreover, no children of their union would bear worthy fruit. In both respects, his predictions turned out to be fairly accurate. Ralph died in 1151. Their son, Ralph, became a leper and died in his early twenties; their daughters, Isabella and Eleanor, would have four marriages between them but neither proved able to bear children.

  Eleanor, faithful to her word, kept her half of the bargain she had made with Bernard; the abbot of Clairvaux, however, was less successful. The following year Eleanor gave birth, not to the manchild she had ordered but to a daughter, whom she named Marie in honor of the Queen of Heaven.

  In 1145, strife shook many of the European nations: In England, the death of Henry I ten years earlier had sparked a bitter civil war between the king’s chosen successor, his daughter Matilda, and his nephew Stephen, who had seized the throne; France’s neighbor, the Holy Roman Empire, reeled with internal struggles; and in Rome, the anticlerical agitator Arnold of Brescia forced the new pope, Eugenius III, to flee the Holy City and take refuge at Viterbo. In France, however, there was peace. At the Cite Palace, King Louis fasted three days a week and prayed incessantly. Following the havoc of the war, cooler heads undertook to get the young king in hand, and now he allowed himself to be guided in all matters by his advisers, notably Abbot Suger, who had returned to court as chief counselor; Eleanor, who had promised Bernard that she would allow the ship of state to be navigated by male hands, behaved most cooperatively, and that autumn, when anarchy broke out in a section of Aquitaine called Aunis, she stood aside while Louis settled the dispute. The cumbersome days passed slowly, one indistinguishable from another, and although Eleanor now had a child, the care of the infant Princess Marie rested largely in the hands of nurses. The queen found it increasingly hard to live like a nun, and lacking suitable diversions, her boredom intensified. To make matters worse, the foreseeable future held no presentiment of deliverance.

  During the intolerable winter evenings when king and queen sat alone in their apartment, Louis would muse fitfully about the past and future. Memories of the war still burned in his imagination, and although he no longer suffered nightmares, he had never completely recovered from the incident at Vitry. Or, as it was now called, Vitry-le-Brûlé. He had done what he could to help rebuild the burned town, he wore a hair shirt next to his pale skin and fasted until he grew weak, but still the deadly sin haunted him, and he could think of no ordeal severe enough to wipe out his transgressions. Except perhaps one: a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The vision of such a journey had been swimming before his eyes since childhood, when his life had been dedicated to the Church, and many times he had imagined himself tramping the road to Jerusalem, spending Easter in the Holy Sepulcher. To his wife, he now confided another secret: His elder brother, Philip, had dreamed of visiting the tomb of Christ, and when he had been killed, the ten-year-old Louis had made a vow to go on the pilgrimage in his place. Eleanor listened with one ear to the monotonous litany of his guilt, for she had heard it countless times; however, she could well understand his fantasies about distant lands, for she too knew the impulse to escape.

  That year of 1145 they planned to hold Christmas court at Bourges, dispatching well in advance announcements to summon their vassals. As it happened, before Christmas there appeared a divine solution to both of the Capets’ maladies in the form of a papal bull. Ever since the capture of Jerusalem nearly fifty years earlier, the West had fallen into the habit of viewing Outremer as a Christian province. Then in the closing days of 1144, the renowned city of Edessa had been overrun by the Turks. It seemed that Count Joscelin had been absent from his capital, celebrating Christmas on the banks of the Euphrates, a more pleasant section of the country. In fact, lately Joscelin had been spending most of his time in extravagant dissipation on his estate at Turbessel, and consequently he had been able to ignore the activities of a Turk named Zengi. The governor of Aleppo and Mosul, Zengi was a great warrior who, rumor said, had sprung from an Amazon, the Margravine Ida of Austria, who had supposedly been captured during the First Crusade and swept away to a harem. Whatever Zengi’s true heritage, he was shrewd enough to realize that Edessa, the most vulnerable of the Frankish capitals in Syria, represented an opportunity too golden to miss. The careless Joscelin had not thought to supply Edessa with a strong garrison or reserves of food, and for that reason Zengi was able to mount a siege with little difficulty. On December 26, 1144, the Turkish army swarmed into the city and massacred all the Franks, including their archbishop, as well as many of the native Christians. Naturally the reconquest of this important Christian city, so easily retrieved from its Frankish masters, strengthened Zengi’s position; he had no intention of interrupting his good luck by stopping with Edessa. The whole Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem now lay exposed to the infidel, and nobody understood the threat better than Joscelin’s neighbor, Prince Raymond of Antioch.

  Although rumors of disturbances in the Holy Land had been filtering back to Europe throughout much of 1145, not until autumn did there arrive at the exiled papal court in Viterbo an official plea from Queen Melisende of Jerusalem urgently requesting Eugenius to preach a new Crusade. Since his accession in February, the pope had been unable to enter Rome, and he could hardly afford to further jeopardize his shaky position by traveling beyond the Alps to personally direct a movement as had Pope Urban. It was to King Louis that the pope decided to turn for aid. Although he was well aware of Louis’s troubles with the Church, the king’s former waywardness was not, apparently, a consideration. Rather, since Louis was king of the land from which most of the Frankish princes in Outremer had come, he seemed the obvious leader of an expedition that would relieve them. Accordingly, on December 1, 1145, Eugenius dictated a bull urging Louis and all the faithful of the kingdom of France to rescue eastern Christendom from the infidel and promised them remission for their sins, a reminder that there was more to the Crusade than purely military objectives.

  The Capets—both of them—responded eagerly to the call, a development that Eugenius could scarcely have foreseen. In truth, the arrival of the papal bull catapulted Eleanor out of her malaise and suddenly opened up unlimited horizons certain to purge whatever afflictions ailed her. At Christmas court, Eleanor sat impatiently at Louis’s side as he addressed the assembled barons and prelates and revealed “the secret in his heart.” At once she could see that he was going about the announcement in precisely the wrong manner by stressing the idea of penance and awkwardly rambling on about his personal desire to take the cross as an expiation for his sins at Vitry. Even though Bishop Geoffrey of Langres delivered an eloquent sermon exhorting the barons of France and Aquitaine to follow their sovereign’s lead, the Crusade was received with chilly indifference. Eleanor, disappointed but hardly surprised, had already spoken privately with many of her southern chieftains, and she knew that few of them cared about the possible damnation of Louis’s soul. Instead, the proposal for a new Crusade only succeeded in awakening memories of the last one, that disastrous expedition led by Eleanor’s grandfather. Many were of the opinion that it would be foolhardy to emulate their fathers and grandfathers, who had been in such a hurry to reach heaven that they mortgaged their lands and rushed off to be martyred many leagues before they reached Jerusalem. With that, she could not argue.

  But it was not only the southerners who held back; the Franks exhibited little enthusiasm for a Crusade, too. Among those who voiced disapproval was the elder statesman of the realm, Abbot Suger: God, he said, would be best served by the efficient and peaceful administration of the kingdom; if Louis absented himself for a year or more, the country might very well lapse into widespread disorder again. If the king truly wished to fight the enemies of Christ, there were plenty of heretics he could wipe out in France. Beneath Suger’s careful reasoning lay ripples of panic that were not totally irrational. The ebullient mood of the king and queen made him profoundly nervous, a feeling only increas
ed by the information that Eleanor also planned to take the cross. From past experience, he knew that their high spirits often preceded some unfortunate incident; with Louis’s immaturity, there was no telling what folly might befall a crusading army under his leadership. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that he might be killed, leaving the kingdom without a male heir. Most of these misgivings Suger did not voice, but nevertheless he strongly urged the king and queen, if not to abandon their plan, at least to delay and reflect.

  Despite Suger’s open opposition, Eleanor stoutly set about counteracting Louis’s negative appeal. Using her influence as best she could, she moved among her Aquitainian vassals with a fiery tongue, urging them to reconsider, playing upon their pride, chastising the cowardly and encouraging the ambitious. After a number of intimate parleys in the langue d’oc, she was able to change a few minds but clearly not enough for her purposes. If she could rally the lords of Aquitaine to her side, they would outnumber Louis’s French vassals and assure the Crusade as a viable project. Still, as the Christmas court drew to a close, the expedition hung in the balance. It was Suger, hoping to gain time as well as partisans, who suggested that the decision be postponed until March 31, 1146, when a plenary assembly was scheduled to be held at Vézelay. Meanwhile, an appeal had already gone out from Pope Eugenius to the one man in France who might sway a nation into embarking on a holy war: Bernard of Clairvaux. To Suger’s dismay, Bernard readily agreed to preach the Crusade.