Authors: Douglas Boyd
But they also attended the lectures of fashionable doctors – Abelard for one – where they rubbed shoulders with students both penniless and rich, the latter including the ambitious son of a successful Norman merchant in London. Tall, gangling, with a mop of unruly hair and a tendency to flush with passion in argument, Thomas Becket was only four years the queen’s senior, but it is unlikely that the colourfully dressed ladies of the queen’s court distracted a man so little interested in women. John of Salisbury, later secretary to Canterbury’s most famous archbishop, reminded his former fellow-student in a letter long afterwards of the euphoria they had shared at that time in Paris. He likened having their youthful minds stretched by the learned discourse of the greatest teachers in Christendom to gazing in wonderment at a Jacob’s ladder of knowledge, up which the angels of enquiry ascended to the heaven of learning.
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Albeit less ecstatic than John of Salisbury about days spent in philosophical debate, Eleanor nevertheless mastered the dialectic and the art of clinching her arguments with neat syllogisms in which both premises and conclusion are statements constructed using only three simple terms, each term appearing twice. For example, all men are mortal; no gods are mortal; therefore no men are gods. It is impossible to assert the premises and deny the conclusion without contradicting oneself.
Abelard’s teaching influenced the subsequent evolution of European education, in which the liberal arts and the emphasis on grammar and the reading of classical authors was replaced by new methods stressing logic, dialectic and the new sciences. In philosophy, there was a decline in Platonism and a growing interest in the methods of Aristotle, translated into Latin because few scholars could read Greek. Latin translations of many philosophical and scientific works of Greek and Arabic origin were illuminating a Europe still emerging from the Dark Ages.
Living in this cultural revolution was exhilarating for an enquiring mind like Eleanor’s. It may seem strange that a fun-loving queen of sixteen summers should attend day-long debates as to whether the Blessed Virgin had mastered the trivium and quadrivium, and whether she would have been free from original sin if she had died before Christ was born. Yet, on the days when the royal gardens were opened to the schoolmen and their students, these and other riddles served Eleanor and the ladies of her court as exercises in lateral thinking. Then as now, an intelligent mind sought food for thought and Paris had the best diet available, but where in the spectrum of
belief
did Eleanor fit?
Louis’ views influenced her not at all, in religion or anything else. In the course of her first marriage, she confronted Suger, Bernard and many other powerful churchmen. Yet she had no especial sympathy for Peter de Bruys or Abelard either, even if the thought of so powerful a man castrated for love of a girl who had been approximately her own age at the time was exciting.
Throughout her life, Eleanor gave generously to religious foundations and solicited their prayers for herself and family, but this was no more than conventional prudence. Warriors like her father dropped dead in their prime, healthy young women like herself died in child-birth, children died for no known reason; the bite of a flea could lead to agonising death. In such uncertain times, it was foolish not to pay one’s respects to the deity one might meet so soon. Of all her children, only the devout Richard Coeur de Lion – the child she most influenced – paid more than lip-service to religion, and John was an atheist. She herself narrowly escaped excommunication on at least one occasion, treating papal legates as lackeys and once calling a pope to heel.
The key to understanding Eleanor is to see her as the true granddaughter of William IX – a pagan, happy to give donations and outwardly respect the Church but lacking the instinct for monotheism. The Romans had not persecuted Christians because of their faith, but because they refused to observe the cult of the emperor. Augustus even exempted the monotheistic Jews from sacrificing to him, but his successors could hardly exempt all Christians from whatever race, since to do so was tantamount to abolishing the imperial cult. What other deities the subject races worshipped in addition was their own business. Intolerance came in only after Constantine made Christianity the state religion in the fourth century, but pagan, tolerant Aquitaine did not change. Bordeaux had no equivalent of the martyrology of Paris and Lyon, for the early Christians had been tolerated there, not persecuted.
Throughout the fifteen years of their marriage, Louis’ queen fell foul of the Church time and again because she saw it as not deserving any more respect than other religions and its bishops as vassals whose duty was to support their overlord with counsel when asked and military support when required – nothing more. While William IX and his son had been able to get away with such an attitude as dukes of faraway Aquitaine, it was to the Frankish establishment deeply offensive in the queen of France, who was supposed to be a model of piety and modesty.
Eleanor had to wait until Christmas 1137 for her first real escape from the claustrophobic life on the Ile de la Cité. Although Louis had been crowned king in Reims Cathedral by Pope Innocent II in 1131 when his brother died, Suger thought it politically a good move to have him formally recrowned and Eleanor officially installed as queen. The place chosen was Bourges in central France, once capital of Charlemagne’s kingdom of Aquitaine and whose archbishop still holds the title ‘Primate of the Aquitains’.
In the Romanesque cathedral
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surmounting the town girdled by its Roman walls with fifty towers and four great gates leading north, south, east and west, the barons of France came to pay homage. There was little space to accommodate their entourages within the walls, so, despite the season, tents and pavilions spread out into the countryside from the Bourg St Sulpice where the market and fair were held. With the lack of quality grazing at that time of year, even to cater for the two or three horses of each of the several thousand knights was a logistical achievement.
Eleanor and her ladies visited the shrine of St Solange, patron of the county of Berry, and offered prayers to the saint who had chosen martyrdom rather than renounce her virginity, after which the queen watched Louis recrowned in the incense-scented gloom of the gilded, painted cathedral, lit by hundreds of flickering candles. After accepting vows of fealty from the battle-hardened barons of his realm, the young king gave each one the kiss of peace upon the lips. Eleanor’s feelings were mixed. Thus far, the novelty of her position was exciting: continually testing her power over her husband, she had won the battle with his formidable mother and distanced him from his father’s advisers and his own teachers. Yet he fell far short of the men she had learned to admire in childhood; though besotted with her, when he was not making all-night vigil on his knees in the palace chapel, he usually slept alone or like a sister beside the queen of France, reputed as far away as Germany for being the paragon of beauty.
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Less than a month after the coronation, in January 1138, her influence over Louis caused him to show blatant disregard for the Church he had so loved. The see of Reims being vacant after the death of Archbishop Reynald, the citizens set up a self-governing commune. Fat Louis would have put down the rebellion to strengthen the position of the future archbishop, their immediate overlord. Instead, Young Louis accepted payment to grant them a charter of rights, thereby weakening the authority of the incoming prelate and indirectly of his own most important vassal, Thibault of Champagne, who had been his father’s palatine count.
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Soon afterwards came news of similar unrest at Poitiers, where the comital palace had been occupied by the townsfolk, who were fortifying city walls fallen into disrepair with hurriedly thrown-up earth ramparts surmounted by palisades. A fuse of civil unrest had been lit and was travelling throughout Poitou.
At Orleans, Louis had been firm but fair. At Reims, he had been prepared to negotiate for money and political advantage. At Poitiers, Eleanor’s influence on him is clear, for his reaction had more in keeping with her father and grandfather than an ex-novice of Notre Dame. Instead of sounding out the threat to his comital power, he ordered Thibault of Champagne to join him in suppressing the rebellion by force of arms.
To put this inexperienced monarch and his dominant young wife in their places, Thibault replied that custom demanded he first consult his vassals, who included Louis’ mother. Angrily, Louis departed precipitately for Poitou with a small force of 200 knights, plus archers and some siege engines. Once there, their numbers were swollen by the nobles of the county, who had good reason to strangle at birth this new social development.
Seeing the forces arrayed against them, the rebels surrendered, but Louis showed a side of his character that would increasingly alarm Suger and his other ecclesiastical mentors. Forcing priests to release the ringleaders from their oath of conspiracy, he announced that their children of both sexes would be taken hostage and dispersed throughout the kingdom as a guarantee of future good behaviour.
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Suger had been celebrating the feast-day of St Denis at the abbey. When the offices ended, he took horse for Poitiers in the hope of calming the situation. Before he even came in sight of the city, distraught citizens were throwing themselves prostrate in his path, begging him to use his influence with the king. In a private meeting between abbot and monarch, Suger counselled clemency as a way of earning future loyalty.
Preparations for the exile were then allowed to go ahead until the square in front of the palace was crowded with weeping parents and children, and the horses, mules and wagons which were to take them away. Only then did Louis announce amid great rejoicing that he had rescinded the order on condition that there was no more talk of rebellion.
Confirming as seneschal William X’s man Guillaume de Mauzé, he then rode with him the length and breadth of the county, appointing new administrators or confirming the existing ones in office, a step that would normally have been taken immediately after the marriage. It was in the course of this feudal exercise that Louis was guilty of his first atrocity. North of La Rochelle, a vassal named Guillaume de Lezay had taken advantage of the civil unrest to occupy the town of Talmond, with its comital hunting establishment of servants, dogs, horses and the rare white gyrfalcons.
Persuaded with difficulty to return the town to the king’s representatives, Lezay retreated into the castle, refusing to surrender except to Louis, with whom he was co-seigneur. Scenting an ambush, Suger and the bishop of Soissons kept the king in the rear of the cortège while the advance guard entered the castle. Wrong-footed by this precedence, Lezay allowed through the gate only ransomable knights. Forcibly disarmed, they shouted a warning to their fellows still outside, whereupon he ordered his knights and men-at-arms to make a sortie and attack.
Driven off by Louis’ escort, they were pursued back to the castle. Before the gate could be closed or portcullis lowered, the king’s men were inside. Giving no quarter, they drove the handful of survivors into the donjon. What happened to Lezay is unknown, but there is no mention of him after that day. Suger, however, records that Louis punished two of the rebel knights by personally cutting off their feet. It was not an unusual sentence, but was rendered the more horrific because the slightly built young king had not the strength to do the job cleanly, and had to hack his way through bone and sinew with repeated blows of his sword.
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Eleanor had remained in Paris, possibly because she was pregnant. Occasionally she did manage to get Louis to do his kingly duty, for at some unrecorded point in the first two years of the marriage she lost a child she was carrying, whether by a fall, an incident on horseback or a simple miscarriage. It was a sad reminder for a vigorous and confident young woman still in her teens that queens too have their sorrows.
Nor was all games and poetry for her and the ladies of her court. The maids-in-waiting were the king’s property, to bestow as a way of
controlling marriage alliances that might otherwise build dangerous power blocks in the kingdom. However, evidence is accumulating that medieval queens played a large part in arranging the marriages of their own daughters and the unattached women of their court. Eleanor’s position of power meant that she could persuade Louis to arrange marriages which ensured knights owing her gratitude for their wives’ dowries when they were consulted in council by their overlords. Her mother-in-law Adelaide de Maurienne had exercised considerable power during Fat Louis’ reign, partly in this way. Given the unrelenting hostility of the Frankish nobility towards Eleanor, however, it would seem that she failed to exploit this powerful weapon, displaying an unwarranted assumption of her own political invulnerability.
It was a similar failing that caused Abelard’s fall. Popular as he was with the ladies of Paris – Héloïse mentioned in a letter
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how they clustered at windows of their houses to watch him pass by – and with the students, high on the rarified intellectual air of Paris and avid for controversy, he continued to provoke the religious establishment. No one felt able to risk putting the great master of rhetoric in his place until Abbot Guillaume de St Thierry begged the most influential figure in western Christendom to leave the peace of Clairvaux Abbey and return briefly to the world whose pleasures and temptations he despised. The conflict of emotions inspired by Abelard’s intellect and teachings is evident in Guillaume’s letter to Bernard: ‘God knows I love this man, but in a case like this no one is my relative, no one my friend.’
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Abbé Bernard was living in what was considered the image of Christ: poverty and near-constant fasting in his cell at the abbey. Yet his otherworldliness did not prevent him from lobbying in the service of God. Condemning the employment of learning and secular philosophy in matters of faith, he wrote to cardinals, bishops and the pope, likening Abelard to the Philistine giant Goliath.
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