April Queen (13 page)

With all these recent developments to make the journey easier in twelfth-century terms, Eleanor’s adventurous ladies regarded joining a crusade as a sort of Grand Tour and a welcome break from their duties of châtelaine and the routine of childbearing, thanks to their husbands’ vows of celibacy.

From Viterbo in March 1146 came the letter which was the signal everyone was awaiting. At the end of Lent the great pilgrim church of St Mary Magdalene in Burgundian Vézelay was found too small by far to shelter the crowds who had come to hear Abbé Bernard preach the Christian equivalent of
jihad
. On Easter Day, 31 March, he harangued the common people and assembled lords in the presence of their king and queen, still bound by their Easter vows. In a pulpit erected on the open hillside outside the town, holding aloft the bull bearing Eugenius’ seal, the frail old monk, worn out by years of fasting and self-denial, read out in his quavering voice the call, to answer which conferred automatic remission of sins.

Bernard’s voice cannot have been heard far from the pulpit, but so many volunteers pressed forward that the supply of crosses ran out and the white woollen cassocks of Bernard and his brother Cistercians had to be cut up to make the signs that would keep a crusader safe from harm on earth or be his passport to paradise.

If legend can be believed, Eleanor and her Amazons showed their usefulness for the first time that very day, galloping around the fringes of the crowd on white stallions and tossing distaffs to faint-hearted or prudent knights, as women were to hand white feathers to men in civilian clothes during the First World War – but with the difference that the Amazons were going to share many of the men’s risks.

The bishops of Lisieux and Langres pledged their hosts and the fervour of a gospel congregation erupted when Louis, wearing the
Pope’s cross on his shoulder, prostrated himself, weeping at the feet of his poorest subject, the monk from Clairvaux.

The Frankish barons followed their king’s example, most noble families offering a male adult. Families that had been locked in armed struggle for generations forgot their private causes for the sake of the greater overriding one. Even Thibault of Champagne enlisted his eldest son under the banner of France. With him were the counts of Flanders, Angoulême and Toulouse and Louis’ jealous brother Robert, count of Dreux.

Contagious religious fervour drove many to take the cross that day; others sought fortunes denied them in France. Perhaps the most romantic crusader of all was Eleanor’s vassal from Blaye, the noble troubadour Jaufre Rudel, the object of whose poetic
amor de lonh
, or yearning for an unattainable lady, was the countess of Tripoli. Agonised by longing to be near her, he wrote,
Luenh es lo castels e la tors / o elha jay e sos maritz
… Far distant is the castle tower, wherein she lies with her husband …

For love of this woman he had never seen, he was prepared to risk death in battle or capture by the Saracen, yet never reached the end of his journey. At some point in the long and arduous voyage the lord of Blaye died of dysentery, but was afterwards depicted by fellow poets as expiring more romantically in his mistress’ arms on arrival in Tripoli.

After Louis had ‘taken the cross’, the 24-year-old queen knelt before Bernard and offered herself and her vassals. After her came the countess of Flanders, a half-sister of the king of Jerusalem, and many other noble ladies of Eleanor’s court, plus 300 low-born women volunteers to care for the wounded. From the beginning of this crusade, women were in the forefront and it took the courage of Suger to query openly what a martial expedition destined to end in slaughter could possibly gain from the presence of so many ladies of Eleanor’s court, plus their attendant maidservants, cooks and washerwomen.

Not regarding themselves bound by Bernard’s proscription of luxury for the duration, they intended travelling with servants, furniture
and wardrobes. Thierry or Dietrich Galeran, the Templar eunuch appointed Louis’ treasurer for the crusade because of his connections along the route, warned the king that the enormous additional baggage train this required would be an encumbrance and source of danger in hostile territory. But no one listened to him either.

After Vézelay came anticlimax while the necessary funds were raised. In any case, Eugenius did not wish the French to depart before the German Emperor Conrad III Hohenstaufen had also taken the cross and Conrad was not a man to come running at the call of a pope, certainly not one in exile. Nor had he, a seasoned campaigner, any intention of subordinating himself and his vassals on the field of battle to a tyro like the young king of the Franks.

Eugenius therefore summoned his former master Bernard to leave his retreat and travel to Germany as apostolic envoy. Many who had seen the emaciated future saint preaching at Vézelay thought him already in death’s grasp, yet he mustered all the resources of the daughter houses of Clairvaux to spread the call to arms and himself carried the message to the Low Countries and the cities of the Rhine as far south as the Alps. Odo of Deuil, a monk from the abbey of St Denis, was appointed by Suger as Louis’ chaplain
¹⁴
and charged with compiling the official record of the expedition, according to which Bernard’s inspired preaching was so charismatic that the deaf were made to hear, and the blind to see and the lame to walk again. It was said that so many men responded to his call that only one uncommitted adult male remained for every seven women in the territory he had personally covered.
¹⁵

The German Emperor, however, was neither an ignorant peasant, nor a credulous believer like Louis. Each time the pope’s persistent Cistercian envoy waylaid him, Conrad III used a different excuse for not taking the cross until, a full year after Louis’ Christmas court at Bourges, Bernard celebrated Mass in Speyer on 27 December 1146. Exemplifying the true meaning of
charisma
, when the Holy Spirit is said to enter into a person chosen as the instrument of God’s will, Bernard was once again seized with preacher’s fervour. In the congre-gation was Conrad, who heard himself summoned to stand and account before the altar for the state of his soul and his steward-ship of his lands and possessions.

As at Vézelay, the words and the fire with which they were delivered provoked an outbreak of crusading fever in which the emperor pledged himself and his vassals to the cause. So great was the press of volunteers that Conrad, fearing the frail monk would be crushed to death, wrapped Bernard in his own cloak and carried him from the church.

Preparations political, financial and logistical took several more months on both sides of the Rhine. Barons mortgaged their lands and the common people found in the heavy taxes a topic for complaint to replace the five-year famine they had just endured. While for the equestrian classes departure on crusade was either a penance or an adventure, for the peasants and urban poor accompanying them it was the equivalent of death: they kissed their wives and children goodbye in the expectation of meeting again only in heaven.

The differences of personality between Louis and Eleanor were typified in their preparations. While he visited monasteries and hospitals, begging the prayers of his humblest and therefore most Christ-like subjects for the success of the crusade, she travelled the length and breadth of Aquitaine and Poitou, bullying and cajoling her richest and most powerful vassals to raise more money and men.

One of Suger’s many worries was the possibility that Louis would be killed or die from disease, leaving only Princess Marie to succeed him. To prevent the king’s brother Robert from usurping the crown, Eleanor and Louis considered marrying her to Henry, the fourteen-year-old son of the Count Geoffrey of Anjou, whom Louis had lately confirmed as duke of Normandy. The meeting between Eleanor and Geoffrey to discuss this would afterwards lead to scandal, but Bernard’s voice was heard loud and clear protesting that the mothers of the queen and Henry of Anjou were related in the third degree: Louis was to have nothing to do with the idea. And as for Count Geoffrey, how could so valiant a warrior not take the cross when his half-brother Baldwin was the king of Jerusalem, whose call for help they were answering?

Meantime, the widespread impatience to fight the perceived Muslim menace to Jerusalem found a much easier infidel target nearer home. At the time of the First Crusade, Jews had been victimised in France and killed in cities all over Germany, culminating in the great massacre of Mainz, where on the third day of Sivan according to the Hebrew calendar the entire community of 1,100 men, women and children was massacred in a bloody dress rehearsal for what would happen to the Jews in Jerusalem when the crusaders took the city.

While Eleanor and Louis were making their preparations, an itinerant monk by name of Randulf sanctioned the pillage of Jewish property in Germany and Alsace, using terms that were an incitement to fresh massacres. In condemning him,
¹⁶
pacific Bernard preached against harming the Children of Israel, whether in the Diaspora or the Holy Land. This was not because he loved Jews but taught – echoing St Augustine and Pope Gregory – that they were collectively guilty
of deicide and must be punished but not killed, so that they could continue to exist as witnesses of Christ’s Passion.

Because Easter and therefore Pentecost were late in 1147, Louis decided to postpone departure until the feast of St Denis on 11 June, so that the endeavour might be properly begun under the auspices of the patron saint of France. In Aquitaine, the bees were busy in the olive blossom and the water pastures were green in Poitou when Eleanor ended her recruiting drive and set out on the road north at the same time as the pope was crossing the Alps. Their paths converged inside Suger’s glorious new basilica, where Eugenius blessed the assembled banners that would serve as rallying points for desperate men in the press of battle. He handed a pilgrim’s staff and scrip to Louis, who was clad in a simple tunic devoid of decoration. Then the pope lifted from the altar the oriflamme symbolising the saint’s protection and consecrated it to the holy purpose.

Although Eugenius’ bull proscribed luxuries like fine clothes and cosmetics – along with swearing, gambling, camp followers, concubines, falcons and hounds – so long was the ladies’ baggage train that they and their retainers were sent ahead after the ceremony to ensure that the numerous ox-wagons would not impede the marching foot-soldiers and mounted knights. Abbot Suger’s thoughts on seeing France’s glamorous queen and so many other ladies thus fortuitously leading the crusade against which he had fought in vain are not recorded.

In his hands he held Louis’ crown, entrusted to him as regent for the duration of the crusade or until the king’s death – whichever came first. Despite the continual enormous drain on the finances of state, the abbot of St Denis governed well, showing himself an enlightened, far-sighted and humane ruler, enacting new and fairer systems of taxation and even passing conservation laws to protect the forests under threat. Prefiguring the attempt of that other younger brother – John Lackland – to usurp Richard Coeur de Lion’s throne during his absence on the Third Crusade, a group of nobles did conspire to set on the throne of France Louis’ younger brother, Count Robert of Dreux, when he returned from the Holy Land several months before the king. Invoking the threat of excommunication for this defiance of the protection afforded to every crusader, Suger put down the rebellion before it got started. Undermining his influence on Louis was the greatest disservice Eleanor did to her first husband during their marriage.

The polyglot Frankish host, including Bretons, Poitevins, Gascons, Normans and Burgundians, all speaking their own languages, rendezvoused in the Moselle Valley at Metz, the capital of Lorraine.
If the knights and barons were motivated by a mixture of religious fervour and desire for adventure, many of the poorer crusaders were there simply for food. Dependent on Eleanor for daily handouts, thousands of her subjects had been starving at home and would have signed on for any enterprise that guaranteed food in the belly. Others were robbers, rapists and murderers for whom Abbé Bernard had procured pardon conditional on their taking the cross. To Suger’s objection, he had replied that it was a wondrous demonstration of the love of God that France should be thus rid of its scum and paupers while they in turn would be rewarded with paradise, from which they would otherwise be excluded.
¹⁷

By this time Conrad’s smaller army was far ahead in the Danube Valley. After securing the election of his son Henry as his successor under the guardianship of the archbishop of Mainz, the emperor had not waited for the French to arrive. For one thing, it would have been logistically impossible to feed the combined armies off the land in the same areas at the same time. Even travelling separately, the sanitary problems caused by 100,000 men and women on the move in conditions of zero hygiene defies the modern imagination. In addition there was the excrement of their animals; each knight had at least one destrier or warhorse and two palfreys for general riding – plus the thousands of draught and pack mules and oxen.

Except for the outbreaks of plague, disease was to some extent contained during the feudal period by the immobility of the mass of population, but an army on the move for thousands of miles was a mobile reservoir of infection from which the locals had no immunity, and vice versa. More people died on crusade from diarrhoea than cold steel, and wastage from disease on campaign was a factor taken into account by every successful military leader from Nebuchadnezzar to Napoleon.

Nor were humans the only ones at risk. Daily checking of the horses’ hooves and legs for injury by stone, thorn or a loose nail was routine. Yet several thousand horses kept together for months, however healthy they were at the outset, provided ideal conditions for epidemics. In one campaign Charlemagne lost to disease nine-tenths of the thousands of horses on which his army depended for mobility and combat.
¹⁸
In addition to the diseases to which they were prone at home, there were others, fly-borne, tick-borne and contagious, to which they would be exposed while crossing Europe and in the East – even a form of equine venereal disease, dangerous for mares and almost always fatal for stallions.
¹⁹
None of the many thousand horses that survived to reach the Holy Land ever returned to Europe.