Authors: Douglas Boyd
Eleanor and Louis on the Second Crusade
On 26 October an eclipse – taken as a bad omen – obscured the sun as Louis was travelling from Chalcedon, now a suburb of Istanbul on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus by name of Kadiköy, to Nicea. The pagan ruins of Nicomedia – now Izmit – held no interest for him, but Nicaea on the eastern shore of Lake Iznik was where in
AD
451 the fourth ecumenical council of the Christian Church had adopted the Nicene Creed and where the seventh ecumenical council had ruled that icons deserved veneration but not adoration.
While he was pursuing this pilgrimage from the scene of one religious event to another, Conrad and his knights were being harassed daily by the Turks. Lightly armed with slings and short bent-back composite bows designed for use on horseback, the Seljuks were mounted on Asiatic ponies slightly smaller than the German knights’ mounts. Their traditional hit-and-run tactics concentrated on the weaker elements of the columns by harassing the rear, the wounded and the baggage train – relentlessly raiding and disappearing into the landscape. Whenever a posse of German knights attempted a riposte, they found themselves lured into ambush.
In dividing his forces to make sure of reaching the Holy Land first, Conrad took a gamble that he and his armoured knights could fight their way through the heartland of the Turks while the German engineers and other non-combatants required for siege work travelled with most of the infantry along the slower coastal route. This decision led to the first disaster of the crusade. His alibi afterwards was that the guides supplied by Comnenus kept promising that grazing and water were available over the next ridge or in the next valley, but were in fact in league with the Turks and simply leading the Germans to their destruction.
As they progressed further and further along the network of semi-desert camel trails, an experienced military leader like the German Emperor would surely have kept his guides under close guard. But the story is that all the Greeks escaped from camp one dark night, leaving the Germans stranded. Dawn on the day of the eclipse brought the Turks
swarming in force out of the hills, raining slingstones and arrows on the huddled masses of the German contingent. The confused foot-soldiers, stumbling along blind with hunger and thirst, died as William IX’s men had, not far away. Only the mounted knights had a chance against so mobile and determined an enemy that used the landscape as a weapon – not a chance to give battle against this elusive foe, but merely to escape with their lives. By nightfall Conrad’s treasury had been captured and he himself was, like the troubadour duke of Aquitaine fifty years earlier, lucky to escape alive with approximately one in five of his knights.
12
The official story continued with the Greek guides finding their way to Louis’ camp and reporting Conrad’s army safely arrived at Inconium or Konya after destroying large numbers of Turks on the way. Hardly had the Franks rejoiced at this news when the best mounted of the German knights, intent on saving their skins by putting the maximum distance between themselves and the pursuing Turks, rode into camp to give the lie to the Greek story. Among them was Conrad’s nephew Frederik Barbarossa, who begged Louis to send help to his uncle, attempting to rally the remnants of his army. There was an element of they-got-what-was-coming-to-them in the Frankish council of war but Louis, always at his best in adversity, forgave the slights he had suffered from Conrad and dispatched a heavily armed party to the scene of the ambush to guarantee a Christian burial for the tens of thousands of corpses while he pressed on to rendezvous with the German survivors and offer them some safety in numbers.
Railing at what he called ‘the Greek betrayal’, the wounded German Emperor announced his intention of abandoning the crusade and stopping in Constantinople on the way home to tell his brother-in-law Comnenus what he thought of him. Louis tried to talk him out of this plan, for even the much-reduced force of German knights who had survived the massacre would be of crucial importance in the Holy Land. He reminded Conrad that abandoning the crusade automatically invoked the papal interdicts which applied to any crusader returning before his mission had been accomplished.
Whether because of this or for his own reasons, the German Emperor agreed to continue with the French, despite permitting many of his nobles to renounce their vows and go home. It was after the return of these men, who preferred excommunication to continuing the crusade, that rumours of the great disaster crossed the Rhine to disturb Suger at the abbey of St Denis soon after Christmas 1147.
Taking to heart the lessons learned, the French decided to avoid inland areas where the Turks were strongest, which meant heading
westwards to the coast and then following the littoral in what was theoretically still Greek territory, where they would never be at a great distance from the nearest port for communications and provisions. At the beginning of November, they reached the sea and turned south.
Lulled into a false sense of security by the unseasonably mild weather, the army headed south along the coast, where the Greek islands rise like hump-backed whales out of the heat haze over the Aegean Sea. The barons took it in turn to have the honour of leading. As in Europe, Louis brought up the rear. Eleanor and the Amazons could ride on the wagons when they tired of horseback, but the majority of the army was on foot as Louis lengthened the journey. In a state of sustained religious ecstasy, he visited shrines in Pergamon and Smyrna – modern Bergama and Izmir – before continuing south to Ephesus.
To Eleanor the ruined cities were the glory of the past, but Louis had no eye for pagan splendour. He saw Ephesus as the place where the apostles who had known the Saviour personally during His brief ministry had come in person to preach the Gospel to the first Christians. For him the once-mighty city dedicated to many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians had interest only because the ancient flagstones had been trodden by St Paul’s feet when he came there to abominate the goddess’ cult. There, too, Paul’s letters written in captivity at Rome had been read out to his Ephesian converts, to whom St John the Evangelist had also preached. And in the hills not far away was the house where the Virgin Mary was reputed to have ended her days, and which continues to attract tourists by the coachload.
It was ironically the totally opposed natures of the two leaders – Conrad’s arrogance in taking an ill-considered gamble and Louis’ piety that insisted on washing his soul at every font of Christianity along the route – that led inevitably to the failure of the crusade.
Whatever was in the minds of Odo and Thierry Galeran as Louis led them from one religious site to the next, the French barons were increasingly aware that they were two months behind schedule. Many of the knights had been on crusade before, and knew what it meant to be caught by winter on the wrong side of the mountains lying between them and Antioch. However, no one could persuade the king to keep on the move during the Feast of the Nativity. Three whole years after the fall of Edessa, the French army was encamped at an unknown location near the sea in a river valley wide enough to set up a tented township, with wagons unloaded and horses and draught animals sent away to pasture, where they could regain strength for the mountains ahead.
The weather changed abruptly: winter came in with a bang. On Christmas Eve, torrential rain began before Midnight Mass. Next morning while the bishops for the nobles and the priests for the commoners were celebrating the office of Lauds there was a cloudburst with a gale of wind that blew away many tents. Fuelled by heavy rains in the nearby mountains, a flash flood swept away men, animals, tents, wagons, weapons and equipment, washing them in one tangled mess far out to sea.
How many men and women drowned is unknown, but this natural disaster, which could so easily have been avoided by a better choice of camp site, so demoralised the surviving Germans that they decided to return to Constantinople despite all Louis’ pleas. With Conrad hardly able to mount his horse – in addition to his head wound, he was suffering from a severe attack of malaria – the Germans rode away gaunt from the meagre provisions the Franks had been able to spare, leaving Louis’ army to tighten its belts, turn their backs to the winter gales blowing in off the sea and head eastwards, inland along the valley of the Meander – rightly a metaphor for twists and turns – in the direction of the city of Laodicea, a few kilometres from the modern industrial town of Denizli.
If Louis was sustained on the march by the prospect of visiting the church in Laodicea, which was one of the seven to which St John’s Revelation had been addressed, the mass of the army was more interested in the food to be found there. But the cupboard was bare when they arrived, possibly because of a local famine, although the Franks held the Greek governor of the city guilty of collusion with the Turks in virtually denuding the region of all supplies. Wearily they changed direction, turning south-east to the coast, a route that lay across several ranges of uncharted mountains, up and down which they struggled with only intermittent glimpses of the pale winter sun for direction.
On foot or horseback, following the steep and winding mountain trails was hard enough, without the decomposing bodies of massacred Germans they were constantly coming across. If the ladies could take shelter behind the leather curtains of the horse-borne litters, for the wagon-drivers and their beasts and the pack mules, it was hellish. When, despite goads and whips, the exhausted animals could not move their loads up the steep gradients, the only recourse was for every available man literally to ‘put his shoulder to the wheel’. Feet slipping and sliding in the mud, they heaved in unison until the gradient eased. For the unwary or simply exhausted, it was easy to slip right off the trail
and hurtle to their deaths far below. The only incentive to keep going was the certain fate of laggards, for Nur ed-Din’s Turks were watching like vultures. But this slow agony was nothing to what lay in wait.
On an evening when Eleanor’s vassal Geoffroi de Rancon was sharing the leadership of the vanguard with the count of Maurienne, orders were given for camp to be pitched on a flat-topped hill near Mount Cadmos that looked from the distance large enough to accommodate the whole army. Arriving there to find it both inhospitable and exposed, Rancon saw, some way ahead and below him, a green and sheltered valley with pasture and water. Defying his orders, he headed downhill towards it, behind him the royal standard that the army was following.
To what extent Eleanor is personally to blame cannot be ascertained, but since she was not harmed in the débâcle, she must have been riding at the head of the army with the other Poitevins. Odo is frustratingly silent as to whether Geoffroi de Rancon asked her permission for his action and was told by her to ignore his orders.
The certain facts are that, with the vanguard accelerating down-hill towards comfort for the night and the main body of the army still struggling slowly upwards along the winding trails in the deep gorges, unable to see either the plateau ahead of them or the valley beyond, the army became so spread out that it was effectively cut in two. This classic military error presented the opportunity that the lurking Seljuks had been so patiently awaiting.
They erupted from the ravines on all sides, screaming and beating drums and tambourines in the manner that had panicked Conrad’s army. The French knights, sweating from the hard climb, had discarded their helmets and body armour. Fleeing the slingshot and arrows raining down from the sky, they rode right into the main ambush. Boulders, bodies, wagons and animals fell or were thrown from the winding trail, landing on the struggling mass below and carrying more victims to their deaths. If nightfall had not put an end to the slaughter, there might have been no survivors.
The resourceful Odo caught the bridle of a runaway horse and eventually rode into the camp in the valley, where news of the disaster had already sown panic. Scouts sent back to discover what had happened reported mountain trails impassable in the darkness, blocked by piles of bodies. As the hours passed there was no news of the king from the shocked survivors straggling into camp. It was after daybreak when a monk led Louis on a stray mount into the camp where Eleanor and the others waited.
13
His life had been saved in the darkness by his
modest pilgrim’s clothing, which did not single him out as a rich target. On foot with only a small bodyguard, he had spent the night shivering among some stunted trees.
Geoffroi de Rancon’s guilt was Eleanor’s to share. There was talk of hanging from the nearest tree her vassal who had caused the disaster. Instead, he was sent back to France in disgrace. That he escaped with his life had less to do with clemency than the embarrassing presence of the king’s equally guilty uncle at his side throughout. The surviving Amazons who had signed up for Eleanor’s great adventure now blamed her for the fate of their less fortunate kinswomen, killed or taken hostage by the Turks. How Louis and Eleanor sorted the matter out between themselves will never be known because, once again, Odo preserves a diplomatic silence.
Having lost most of the baggage train to Turkish looters, what remained of the French army now faced another enemy: starvation that was staved off only by eating what flesh remained on the bones of mules and horses which had themselves perished of starvation.
14
Late in January 1148 the sorry band straggled out of the mountains north of the Greek seaport of Satalia – the modern Atalya. The ladies had lost most of their clothes and furniture; bishops and knights had lost their mounts and were walking barefoot, gaunt and famished, with their clothes in tatters.
The onward route presented them with another dilemma. The land route along the coast to Antioch – now called Antakya – involved a two-month journey over range after range of arid mountains with neither forage for animals nor supplies for humans. In February weather they would have been a challenge even to fit, well-fed men on fresh mounts. The alternative was to embark the army in small coast-hugging merchant ships. However, there were far too few available to accommodate everyone.