April Queen (14 page)
Authors: Douglas Boyd
Logistical considerations were not the only reasons for Conrad III’s early departure. Whether he had indeed been outmanoeuvred by Bernard and tricked into volunteering, or whether he had had his own agenda all along is unclear, but the main reason for his relatively speedy departure was a firm determination to arrive first in Byzantium and make his own terms with its emperor, the equally wily Manuel Comnenus, before pressing on to the Holy Land.
Conrad rightly suspected the barons and ruler of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem of blatant self-interest and wanted to see for himself what the situation was before the arrival of innocent and emotional Louis could cloud the issues. At this stage there was no agreement on the specific aim of the crusade, let alone how the French and Germans might operate under joint command. With Jerusalem in Christian hands and not immediately menaced, to secure the Latin Kingdom long term required a far-reaching campaign directed by a leader more gifted in strategy than Louis, who trusted God to govern his actions and surrounded himself with clerical advisers like Odo. Conrad III might have proved himself such a leader of men, but disaster en route would deprive him of four-fifths of his army before he could show his mettle.
Its progress limited to the speed of an ox-cart, Louis’ contingent wound its way eastward across central Europe, making twelve or fifteen miles on a good day with regular rests for man and beast. For the wagons of the supply train, the roads were horrendous, having been laid by the Romans and plundered for building materials during eight centuries or more.
On the First Crusade, Godefroi de Bouillon had sent ahead of the main column a regiment of pioneers whose duty was to widen roads through forested areas and strengthen bridges where fords were lacking. Even so, the First Crusade had taken eighty-nine days to reach Constantinople, of which only fifty-nine were spent on the march. If half of the rest days were Sundays, the others were necessary to reorganise and regroup a column so long that the rear-guard passed three days after the leaders.
By now what had seemed in advance to the ladies an exciting taste of freedom had turned into discomfort and sickness for many. The few luxuries they had enjoyed at home were unavailable and increasingly they took to dressing as men, as being more convenient for long days in the saddle. For feminine hygiene there was little privacy.
Even to call the contingent an army is misleading, for it lacked any integrated command structure, was fraught with rivalry and composed for the major part of peasants without any formal military training.
Louis left his squabbling barons to take turns in leading the way, with himself bringing up the rear. Beginning each day with Mass celebrated by Odo, he saw himself as the Good Shepherd, bringing compassion and generosity to the needy while dealing harshly with pillage – and rape, inevitable among the rabble with camp followers forbidden by the papal bull.
The punishments by mutilation and death he personally meted out were not only for the sake of keeping order and from the sensible desire not to alienate too far the people through whose lands they travelled, but also because he believed the failure of the First Crusade had been divine punishment for the misbehaviour of the rabble led by Eleanor’s godless grandfather. It was an argument that Abbé Bernard was to dust off for reuse when the Second Crusade failed so dismally.
Odo had commenced his preparations by consulting an account of the First Crusade in the library at St Denis.
20
For the benefit of future pilgrims following the same route, his own diary anticipates Baedeker in describing scenery but also giving useful directions:
Three-day stages separate the prosperous cities of Metz, Worms, Würzburg, Ratisbon and Passau from one another. From the last-named city it takes five days to Wiener-Neustadt and thence one more day to the Hungarian border.…
The cities of Nish, Sofia, Philippopolis and Adrianople are four days’ apart. From Adrianople is five days to Constantinople. Close on right and left, mountains hem in the fertile and pleasant plain.
21
Apart from a few hints,
22
the diary maintains a diplomatic silence about the activities of Eleanor, barred from Louis’ celibate tent by Thierry Galeran, the eunuch who considered it his duty to keep away from the impressionable young monarch all time-wasters and opportunists, including his strong-willed queen.
This left her free to make a virtue out of the necessity that dictated travelling in linguistic groupings to avoid friction and conflict. Revelling in the company of her fellow countrymen after eight years cooped up in the stifling court on the Ile de la Cité, she spent the warm summer days on the plains of Hungary and the banks of the Danube flirting and being flattered in her own language by her young gallants in what passed for normal behaviour in Aquitaine but was considered scandalously intimate by the Franks. Her enemies of both sexes in the royal entourage watched and bided their time as she passed the balmy
evenings entertaining the other finely dressed noble ladies with the music and wit of her favourite troubadours, brought along regardless of the papal interdiction.
While the mass of the army slept under canvas or the stars and devout Louis offered prayers in his spartan quarters policed by Odo and Thierry Galeran, the ladies retired to comfortable, if chaste, beds in elegant pavilions and tents. On waking each morning encamped among her own vassals and the spirited, emotionally and territorially unattached younger sons of her nobility out for adventure and romance, Eleanor must have felt that she had come back to life in the glorious southern sun after a long sleep beneath gloomy northern skies.
Disapproval or discretion stopped Odo from commenting on how she and the other Amazons dressed and behaved in daytime while on the march but Nicetas Acominatus, the Byzantine statesmen and historian, reported that there were indeed in the Frankish train some women dressed as men, armed with lances and riding astride, of whom the most richly apparelled was known as the lady of the golden boot.
23
Even in the context of a huge crusading army, the April Queen stood out a mile.
But the idyll of summer days and nights on the road in convivial company was not to last.
Luxury in Constantinople, Massacre on Mount Cadmos
O
nce on Byzantine territory the reality was harsher. To buy provisions for themselves and fodder for the animals, Eleanor’s household servants were obliged to exchange their silver and gold coins for copper ones bearing Comnenus’ likeness. Odo describes their reaction:
After entering Greek territory [Bulgaria], we loaded up with supplies in the poverty-stricken town of Branicevo because the territory ahead was uninhabited. There were so many boats there, which the Germans had brought, that our men crossed the river and bought supplies from a Hungarian fortress not far away.
We had to exchange five
denarii
for one
stamina
and a mark for twelve
solidi
. Thus did the Greeks perjure themselves at the very entrance to their country for the Emperor’s representatives had sworn on his behalf that they would allow us to trade in their markets at a fair rate of exchange.
1
Manuel Comnenus’ reply to Louis’ first letter of intention had been, in Odo’s words ‘sweeter than honeycomb’. At Bavarian Regensburg, then known as Ratisbon, the French court had been given eloquent promises by emissaries of the imperial court in Constantinople. Eleanor had received friendly letters from Comnenus’ wife, the Empress Irene, a Bavarian noblewoman whose sister was married to Conrad. What was a Greek promise worth? the Franks now asked.
We crossed this deserted region and entered the most beautiful and fertile country that stretches all the way to Constantinople. Elsewhere they had sold supplies correctly and found us peaceful. The Greeks, however, shut themselves in their cities and castles, letting merchandise down to us by ropes. The supplies thus received being insufficient for our needs, the pilgrims therefore satisfied their needs by plundering and looting, since they could not bear to go short in the midst of plenty. It seemed to some that the Germans were to blame for the situation, because they had looted everything and burned several unwalled suburbs.
2
So who was to blame? The ‘wily Greeks’ or the excesses of Conrad’s contingent? The duke of Philippopolis – modern Plovdiv, Bulgaria – had had to intervene after a drunken brawl between armed Germans and local people resulted in slaughter of the unarmed Greeks and the burning of everything outside the city walls. On another occasion an advance party of French knights, charged with arranging supplies for the main body, collided with Conrad’s rearguard in a market. The Germans carried off at sword-point everything for sale. The outnumbered Franks took up their weapons and bloodshed ensued.
So the hostility of the locals was the fault of the Germans. Or was it? At Adrianople – modern Edirne, Turkey – even Louis’ innocence was dented on learning that Comnenus had just signed a twelve-year truce with the Turks, during which they could do anything not directly in conflict with Byzantium’s interests. Comnenus’ army was thus freed to play a watching role while the two European contingents were on Byzantine soil. In addition, the great Zengi had been murdered by a palace eunuch caught stealing his wine. His son and successor, Nur ed-Din was so pious that the rules for his troops resembled those of Pope Eugenius III for the crusaders: no luxury garments, no alcohol and no ‘tambourine, flute or other objects displeasing to God’.
3
Nur ed-Din was also a warrior out to prove himself before he was usurped.
In council, Louis was reminded that Eleanor’s grandfather had considered destroying Constantinople as more of an obstacle than an ally to the First Crusade. It was a project that the rulers of the Latin Kingdom had also considered many times. The devout bishop of Langres, an appointee of Louis who was the Franks’ best strategist, drew up a plan to lay siege to the Christian capital on the Bosporus after poisoning the water supply. To sustain such a siege would have necessitated the cooperation of the German contingent, who were supposed to be waiting for their French allies to catch up on the European banks of the Bosporus. But Comnenus was one jump ahead: the third piece of bad news for Louis was that Conrad III had already crossed into Asia with his whole army and was heading towards Cappadocia and distant Jerusalem. Recalling Abbé Bernard’s advice to let nothing distract him from reaching the holy city, Louis decided to press on regardless.
To French and German alike, suspicion of the Greeks came easily. Seen from Constantinople, the situation was very different. Straddling the crossroads between Europe and Asia, it was beset by enemies on all sides, including the Normans pressing in from Sicily and Albania. The son of a Hungarian princess, Comnenus understood very well European territorial ambitions in the Levant. As a Christian owing no allegiance to Rome, he regarded more pragmatically than Louis the possible loss of Jerusalem to Turkish or Arab Muslims. He also had no love for crusader princes like Raymond of Antioch, whose city should have been handed over to Constantinople as part-payment for Byzantine support during the First Crusade after its recapture from the Turks.
Since the Seljuk nomads from central Asia who controlled the formerly Greek territory of what is now Asiatic Turkey would break the fragile truce the moment it was to their advantage to do so, the last thing Comnenus needed was to have on the loose within his frontiers two very large European armies whose leaders might combine forces to plunder his capital as a way of financing the most difficult and costly part of the crusade, which lay ahead.
4
He had therefore separated the French and German forces neatly by exploiting Conrad’s desire to arrive first in the Holy Land and providing every facility for the Germans to leave Constantinople early while at the same time delaying the French with the problems of apparently inadequate supplies.
By the time Eleanor reached Constantinople on 4 October 1147, she had been on the road for three months since leaving Metz. The sophisticated Byzantines looking down from the city walls saw the French army as an exhausted and travel-stained rabble that took several days to assemble. To the mass of the travellers, the golden domes of the
legendary city behind its double wall of fortifications, some dating back to Septimus Severus’ rebuilding of the city in
AD
196, was cause for thanksgiving. Was this not the city of Constantine the Great, who had imposed Christianity on the whole Roman Empire?
Known simply as ‘the city’,
5
Byzantium had twice outgrown its extensive fortifications like a snake sloughing off old skin. Those fortifications and the favourable site had enabled it to resist sieges by the Persians and Avars, the Arabs more than once, by the Bulgars and Russians – and more recently by the nomadic Pechenegs. The setting was beautiful, with the Golden Horn dividing the main city from Galata, where the Italian traders from Venice, Pisa and Amalfi lived in their own fortified quarters with the other foreign residents. With a population estimated at 400,000 – nearly ten times that of Paris – the sheer size of Constantinople made it a source of wonder even to the commonest crusader, who would never be allowed to set foot within the gates.