by Lisa Hilton
The French entered Constantinople on 4 October, and were given a magnificent reception by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus, whose wife Irene had corresponded with Eleanor as the French forces progressed through Hungary. Louis enjoyed a private audience with the Emperor in the breathtaking splendour of the Boukoleon Palace, where he was granted the special privilege of being permitted to sit down, and was taken on a tour of the shrines and relics of the city, including the stone from Christ’s tomb and the lance that pierced His side. Manuel courteously organised a joint celebration of Louis’s personal saint, St Denis, where the Frenchmen marvelled at the singing of the Greek castrati, and treated his guests to a banquet which included frogs, caviare and artichokes (the French showed themselves rather provincial when they sniffed at these rose-strewn delicacies, suspicious of poison). They crossed the Bosphorus in mid-October, and it was as they left Nicaea on the twenty-sixth, ominously during a partial eclipse of the sun, that they learned of the German defeat. This was a devastating blow to morale, and as they crawled the 120 miles to Ephesus, a journey which took a month, the army began to splinter, wearied by changes in the route and dwindling supplies.
Eleanor was involved in one of the most dramatic of the five attacks the French army managed to repel during the next 200-mile stage to the port of Adalia. An examination of how she is portrayed as being responsible for this incident is a good example of the way in which her power has been overestimated and her influence manipulated into legend. In the conventional version of the story8 the French army was travelling across Mount Cadmos at Honaz Daghi, with the Queen’s party riding in the vanguard under the supervision of one of her own Aquitaine men, Geoffrey, Lord of Rançon Ignoring the King’s instructions to make camp on the exposed plain, Geoffrey followed Eleanor’s advice and escorted the women through a pass to what seemed to be a protected valley. The Turks, who were lying in wait for the main body of the French force, allowed Eleanor’s party into the valley as a feint, and when the troops arrived, they fell upon them. Louis acquitted himself bravely, leading a charge of his immediate entourage of knights to safeguard the infantry and the large numbers of non-combatant pilgrims following behind. The attack is explained as one of the fundamental causes of the failure of the crusade, and that failure has its source in Eleanor, who ‘by her undisguised flirtations had spread confusion and dismay and discord in the noblest host that ever went to the East’.9
Neither of the two accounts of Cadmos, Odo de Deuil’s eyewitness description written up a month later, and William of Tyre’s, which postdated events by thirty years, mentions Eleanor at all. The Queen’s position at the head of the van and her influence over Geoffrey de Rançon in his flouting of Louis’s orders is an invention by Richard, a much later writer. Yet even though Eleanor has been acquitted of blame by a scholar writing as long ago as 1950, Richard’s version of events is still widely accepted. What is considered plausible in terms of Eleanor’s legend tells us a good deal about its hold over contemporary perceptions, and about the preoccupations of modern historians, but, as always with Eleanor, one has to look carefully for the truth.
King Louis was courageous and well trained in handling weapons when he had to, but he was no strategist. The army limped on for another twelve days, surviving on horse meat, the desperate rations of the starving soldier. After a month of bickering over ships and supplies in Adalia, he succumbed to pressure from his magnates to press on to the Holy Land, abandoning his infantry. There were simply not enough ships available to carry the troops. In theory the men were to proceed overland to Tarsus under the command of Thierry of Flanders and Archibald of Bourbon, but the officers jumped aboard the first vessel that came into port, leaving the infantrymen to the mercies of the Turks. Thousands were killed and thousands taken as slaves, an outcome which did nothing for Louis’s reputation. ‘Here the King left his people on foot and with his nobles went on board ship,’ recounts William of Tyre pointedly. Not only was Louis stupidly careless of the welfare of those who followed him, but the loss of his infantry was to prove a major handicap in the campaign for Damascus.
Finally, on 19 March 1148, Louis and Eleanor landed at St Symeon, ten miles downriver from the city of Antioch. They were met by a choir singing the ‘Te Deum’ and received by Eleanor’s uncle, Prince Raymond, the ruler of the province. Eleanor’s behaviour in Antioch provoked scandalous charges from four of the principal chroniclers of the crusade and gave rise to ever more elaborate tales of her sexual perfidy in the years to come. John of Salisbury recorded:
The most Christian King of the Franks reached Antioch, after the destruction of his armies in the east, and was nobly entertained there by Prince Raymond, brother of the late William, Count of Poitiers. He was as it happened the Queen’s uncle, and owed the King loyalty, affection and respect for many reasons. But … the attentions paid by the Prince to the Queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous conversation with her, aroused the King’s suspicions. They were greatly strengthened when the Queen wished to remain behind, although the King was preparing to leave, and the Prince made every effort to keep her, if the King would give his consent. And when the King made haste to tear her away, she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related in the fourth and fifth degrees.
William of Tyre confirms that Raymond ‘resolved also to deprive him of his wife, either by force or secret intrigue. The Queen readily assented to this design, for she was a foolish woman. Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.’ Gervase of Canterbury and Richard of Devizes are more cautious, but hint strongly at the same story: that Eleanor was suspected of committing adultery with Raymond. Louis was clearly disturbed by her behaviour and by the possibility of the illegitimacy of their marriage, which she had raised, as he confided in Abbot Suger, who wrote back to advise him to restrain his angry feelings until he had returned to France.
Whether Eleanor ‘technically’ committed adultery is a moot point (though it is worth remembering that to have done so while on the holy mission of crusade would have been a grave sin indeed). What matters is that her behaviour was sufficiently careless for those around her to believe she did. The hints from the chroniclers were undoubtedly affected by their knowledge of the subsequent royal divorce — none of them was writing less than fifteen years after the events they describe — and it may have been that Louis’s huffy removal from Antioch had less to do with Eleanor than with a disagreement over strategy. Raymond was pushing for a concerted attack on Aleppo, the power base of Nur al-Din, but most of the crusaders wished to fulfil their vows by making for Jerusalem. Eleanor appears to have tried to talk Louis round to Raymond’s view, which certainly made more sense from a military perspective, but Louis had two strong reasons to demur: his own sacred vow to lay the Oriflamme of France on the altar of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the more practical consideration that having left his infantry behind at Adalia, he had insufficient foot soldiers to mount an effective siege. Given that Louis’s decision to leave Antioch proved crucial in the failure of the crusade, the adultery story and the fables it spawned are interesting in the context of ‘the anxieties about gender, sexuality and sovereignty that continually surfaced in medieval definitions of queenship’.10
In the thirteenth century Récits d’un Ménéstral de Reims and the fifteenth-century Chronique Normand, it is claimed that Eleanor had an affair with Saladin himself and attempted to elope with him by boat. Both accounts emphasise her wealth, its loss to France in her subsequent divorce and her lack of a son. Saladin, the celebrated Muslim general who took Jerusalem in 1187, would certainly loom large in Eleanor’s life, but these tales are patently fiction. What is important is the subtext: the linking of Eleanor’s subversive sexual desire to failures in kingship and hence to a weakening of the sacred tie between the anointed
king and God which validated — or not — the Christian assumptions of the crusaders. The traditional queenly role of intercessor is here perverted into something dangerous and threatening. Eleanor becomes the symbol of the seductress who can displace nations through her sexual power over the king, as was later the case with her daughter-in-law Isabelle of Angoulême. Ménéstral and Chronique are only two of many accounts that portray Eleanor as lascivious and promiscuous, but, again, they are of less interest in relation to the facts of her life than in the way they manipulate her image to discuss or warn against the combination of sexual and political influence that was the unique prerogative of queens.
Louis got his sight of the Holy City, and then agreed with Emperor Conrad to attack Damascus, where the army assembled on 24 July. Four days later, the crusaders retreated after the city repelled a shambolic attack. The defeat was all the more humiliating in that the army ‘remained intact’.11 Numerous theories were offered to justify this pathetic showing, the most acceptable being that the Christians had been betrayed, for a variety of complicated political reasons, by the barons of Jerusalem. A simpler explanation may be that they were afraid of becoming trapped between the city and the relief force sent out by Nur al-Din from Aleppo. Many commentators blamed the bungled expedition on the presence of women among the crusaders, while clerics, including Bernard of Clairvaux, saw it as a harsh lesson from God.
After Damascus, there could no longer be any doubt that the Second Crusade was a catastrophe. ‘So great was the disaster of the army and so inexpressible the misery that those who took part bemoan it with tears to this very day,’ declared Otto of Freising.12 It had been a fruitless waste of life, and the majority of those who suffered were not great nobles, whose deaths were at least recorded for posterity with a degree of honour, but the nameless thousands who had pushed valiantly towards Jerusalem only to die anonymously in the dust. Nothing was left of the euphoria and nobility of purpose that had galvanised the crowds at Vézélay. Louis and Eleanor remained in the Holy Land until the following Easter, while the King attempted to recover some benefit by raising loans to defend the beleaguered kingdom of Jerusalem, then embarked for France in a fleet of ships hired from Sicily. Not only was Louis concerned about the collapse of his glorious mission and the consequent damage to his own reputation; now, as he returned to his kingdom, he had the state of his marriage to worry about.
John of Salisbury reports that Eleanor had raised the prospect of divorce at Antioch in 1148. Louis was apparently prepared to consider the proposal on the grounds of their consanguinity, but was advised against proceeding as it would be too shameful, on top of the ruinous crusade, if ‘the King was said to have been despoiled of his wife or to have been abandoned by her’.13 Since in 1148 the initiative lay with Eleanor, it has been frequently argued that the couple’s eventual divorce in 1152 was the outcome of a long-term plan of hers; that she ‘fashioned her marital situation to meet her own ends’.14 Eleanor, it is claimed, manipulated her husband’s conscience to gain her freedom. There are good reasons to doubt this theory, the first of which is that when the King explained the situation to the Pope, Eugenius, with whom he and Eleanor had a meeting at Tusculum on their return journey, he forbade them even to consider such a step. Eugenius threatened anathema on anyone who objected to their union and declared that it could not be dissolved on any pretext whatsoever. The Pontiff also offered some more intimate marriage counselling. He ‘made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by kindly converse to restore love between them’.15 Louis accepted the Pope’s judgement enthusiastically as, at this stage, according to John of Salisbury, he was still very much in love with his wife, and the birth of a second daughter, Alix, in 1150 shows that Eleanor had (whether graciously or not) submitted to her duty. It was the gender of this second child, rather than any protracted strategy of Eleanor’s, that pushed Louis towards divorce in 1152. It is important to understand that the desire to present Eleanor as an autonomous heroine has neglected to take into account the legal and customary background of the ending of her first marriage. Eleanor and Louis had now been together for fifteen years, and she had not produced a son.
One of the factors contributing to the lasting success of the Capetian dynasty was the handing down of the crown from father to son from the tenth century until the beginning of the fourteenth. In a culture that did not sanction divorce, the Capetians were skilled at manipulating the canon laws on consanguinity to their own ends, either to remain in marriages the Church considered illegitimate or to dissolve others that had not supplied the requisite male child. Consanguinity was ‘a marvellous excuse for cynics’.16 The miracle capetien, this unbroken line of succession spanning hundreds of years, looks less of a miracle, and the ‘scandal’ of Eleanor’s divorce less scandalous, when it is considered that every French king from Philip I (1060—1108) to Philip II (1180—1223) was divorced at least once. Both Louis’s father and grandfather had had their first marriages dissolved on the basis of the prohibited degrees and had gone on to produce heirs with new wives. After Alix’s birth, Louis was concerned that Eleanor might not give him a boy. Any suggestion that the King and Queen of France separated because of Louis’s concern for his soul is contradicted by the fact that first, he had full papal dispensation to continue the marriage and secondly, when he remarried, he did so to a woman even more closely related to him, Constance of Castile. Eleanor’s second husband was also related to her in the same degree.
The conservative Abbot Suger died in 1151, and it may have been the absence of his restraining influence that finally pushed Louis to move for an annulment. The archbishop of Sens was appointed to lead a council consisting of various barons, clerics and the bishops of Reims, Bordeaux and Rouen, which met at Beaugency in the county of Blois in March 1152. After three days of deliberation, the council predictably decided in favour of the King’s wishes. No adultery claim was produced, and the consanguinity argument was unchallenged by either Eleanor or Louis. Marie and Alix were declared legitimate, since the marriage had been undertaken in good faith, and both parties were permitted to retain their lands intact. Eleanor and Louis had kept Christmas at Limoges after a tour of Eleanor’s territories in the south and they were together at Bordeaux in January 1152, but the next month Louis left Eleanor alone at Poitiers, in anticipation of the council’s ruling.
Eleanor had no means of independently instigating a separation from Louis, but she made it clear that the annulment was agreeable to her. After the crusade, William of Newburgh notes, she was ‘greatly offended with the King’s conduct, even pleading she had married a monk, not a king’. This allusion to Louis’s supposed lack of virility has again been taken at face value, as a rationale for Eleanor’s choice of second husband. The implication is that she was frustrated and needed a ‘real man’. Perhaps she was, and perhaps she did, but all we can know for certain of her motivations relates to her political position as both an immensely powerful landowner and a relatively vulnerable woman rather than to a heroine of chivalry who married for love.
It has been suggested that Eleanor had come to a secret understanding with the man who would become Henry II of England when, in 1151, as Duke of Normandy, he accompanied his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, to Paris to pay homage to Louis: ‘It is said that while she was still married to the King of the Franks, she had aspired to marriage with the Norman Duke … and for this reason she desired and procured a divorce’17 In the summer of 1151, the French were at war with the Angevins in Normandy, and according to this argument, Geoffrey of Anjou, knowing of the clandestine arrangement, made the otherwise surprising decision to cede part of the Vexin to Louis. Leaving aside the fact that any ‘secret understanding’ could only have been reached in Paris when Geoffrey and Henry were there — that is, after they had agreed to the Vexin annexation, the confirmation of which was part of the reason for their trip to the French capital — a look at the situation in No
rmandy at the time shows that there were good tactical reasons for Geoffrey’s concession at this point which had nothing to do with Eleanor.
England was in the last stages of the civil war that would see Henry FitzEmpress crowned as the heir to the Empress Matilda. In 1151, Louis was allied with King Stephen of England against the Angevins, and was campaigning in Upper Normandy with Eustace of England, the husband of his sister Constance. Geoffrey of Anjou was fighting in the south, but was saved from a full assault by the French when Louis fell ill in Paris and was unable to join the army mustered in the Mantois. Louis had already lost Montreuil-Bellay to the Angevins, which had been the primary motivation for his offensive, and the Angevins were keen to reach a truce as they aimed to take the conflict out of Normandy and back to England. The stall in Louis’s alliance with Stephen caused by his illness meant a peace was acceptable to both sides, and Geoffrey and Henry left Paris in the belief that Louis was temporarily mollified and planning to launch a new invasion across the Channel. Geoffrey’s ‘otherwise inexplicable’18 change of heart is thus explained. Further, in 1151, however much Eleanor may have desired a divorce, she was hardly in a position to plot a new marriage unless she knew for certain that the annulment would proceed. Since she was still living with Louis until early the following year, this was prospective, not definite.
Still, Aquitaine was too precious to be left to the mercy of fortune-hunters, and Eleanor does seem to have decided very quickly what she needed to do. After saying her farewells to Louis at Poitiers in February, she appears to have withdrawn to Fontevrault, from where she set off for her own capital once the annulment was announced. On the very first night of her freedom, 21 March 1152, Theobald of Blois attempted to seize her on her southward journey. She escaped by travelling by water to Tours, but when she tried to cross the River Creuse at Port des Piles, she was warned of another ambush, this one set by Henry’s younger brother, the junior Geoffrey of Anjou. She had to rush to the safety of Poitiers by back roads and once she arrived there she lost no time in sending to Henry in Normandy, asking him to come immediately to marry her. The speed of this development does suggest the existence of some kind of understanding between them, as by 18 May Henry was in Poitiers, where he and Eleanor were married discreetly at the cathedral of St Pierre. Misguided extrapolations from the political situation in Normandy do nothing to explain the alliance. A more measured account of Eleanor’s career proposes simply that ‘physical attraction and love of power seem to have drawn Eleanor and Henry together’19 That they met in Paris and that Eleanor kept Henry in mind in the event of achieving her freedom is perhaps the most that can be said of what transpired between February and May.
