Eleanor Of Aquitaine (24 page)

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Eleanor's proceedings from the time she resumed her residence in Poitou indicate a resolution to cut herself away from feudal kings and to establish a Poitevm domain subject to a distinctively Poitevm regime. Though continuing now and then to cooperate with Henry outside her provinces in the interests of her other sons, she at once took measures to establish her own heir in Poitou and Aquitaine under such auspices as ratified the coronation of princes royal in the realms of kings; and to restore throughout her provinces the ancient glories of the native dukes and counts. She invoked every feudal sanction to draw her rival vassals together, to allay their internecine strife, to focus their common allegiance in the ducal centers. Leading out Richard, the stripling figurehead of the new regime, she went on royal progresses from the Loire to the foothills of the Pyrenees, receiving the homage of her vassals in Niort, Limoges, Bayonne, presenting her heir with a pomp all but forgotten in the far corners of her duchy, associating him with acts of grace, undoing right and left the oppressive works of Henry's seneschals. Exiled barons came home and were restored to their dignities. The church was refreshed by her leniency and the plenteousness of her largess. She hastened to renew in her towns the agreeable customs of the native dukes, and wherever she went, old fetes and fairs revived and there was concourse of the people.

The recognition of Richard as Eleanor's inviolable heir was accomplished with as much traditional ceremony as marked the anointing of the heirs of France and England during the lifetime of their sires. Aquitaine had its own venerable ceremonial for the induction of its dukes, distinguished by such pageantry as delighted the provinces of the duchess This ritual centered on an ancient legend of the Limousin which related that a noble virgin Valerie had, in the very dawn of the Christian dispensation, and in the city of Limoges, spilled her blood for the sake of her faith But the tradition had lapsed for a generation and Eleanor was obliged to recreate its pomp and rekindle the imagination of her vassals Limoges had never regarded the city of Poitiers as its spiritual fountainhead, and this bit of local history had the important value in the south country of maintaining the superior antiquity of Limoges as a center of Christian diffusion in Gaul.
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Furthermore, the city had suffered especially under the oppressions of Henry, and it was a matter of concern to divert the homagers of the Limousin from those bitter memories.

A miraculous occurrence assisted the duchess' plans. It chanced that, just at the opportune moment, the monks of Saint Martial dredged up from the ancient archives of their y, where it had apparently lain hidden for generations from foraging clerks, a new and circumstantial life of Saint Valerie that greatly stirred the pious ardors of the Limousin. Eleanor and her ecclesiastical advisers made brilliant use of this discovery to revive old time custom. A great procession escorted Richard to the church of Saint Etienne, where he contracted a symbolic marriage with Saint Valerie, whose ring was put upon his finger, thus signifying allegorically his indissoluble bond with the provinces and vassals of his Aquitamian forebears. Henceforth neither Westminster y nor the cathedral of Reims were to be more authentic scaring places; and the bishop, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, held his privileged rank as officiant. While in the city the duke and the duchess presided at the laying of the cornerstone for the church of Saint Augustine. Richard had already been invested in Poitiers with his title as Abbé of Saint Hilaire, the most venerable dignity, apart from that of the bishopric in that ancient city, and something comparable to King Louis's dignity as Abbé of Notre Dame.

We gather rosebuds from the sharp thorns amid which they bloom

Andreas,
De Amore

WHEN THE COUNTESS OF POITOU settled down to rule her own heritage, she took her residence in Poitiers, which offered a wide eye-sweep on the world of still operative kings. In the recent Plantagenet building program her ancestral city, the seat and necropolis of her forebears, had been magnificently enlarged and rebuilt, and it stood at her coming thoroughly renewed, a gleaming exemplar of urban elegance.
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The site rose superbly amidst encircling rivers. Its narrow Merovingian area had lately been extended to include with new and ampler walls parishes that had previously straggled over its outer slopes; ancient quarters had been cleared of immemorial decay; new churches and collegials had sprung up; the cathedral of Saint Pierre was enriched; markets and shops of tradesmen and artisans bore witness to renewed life among the
bourgeoisie;
bridges fanned out to suburbs and monastic establishments lying beyond the streams that moated the city. Brimming with sunshine, the valleys ebbed far away below — hamlet and croft, mill and vineyard — to a haze as blue as the vintage.

In the center of the restored capital rose the elegant tower that Guillaume le Troubadour had built for the pleasure of the Countess of Châtellerault. To this builders had lately made additions, and on these one is tempted to discern the stamp of Eleanor, for they were domestic chambers unlike those in Henry's cheerless strongholds, affording space and privacy for women who made an art, not a circumstance, of being queens. These chambers clustered about a noble hall for the plenary ducal court. This vast room, meet for unsurpassable fetes, still stands, with one of its lovely arcaded walls intact as in Eleanor's day, a hall whose windows once gave out upon a pleasance with vistas of river valley and sea blue ridges bearing planes, poplars, and umbrella pines. Here was no disordered bivouac like the bleak castles of sheer Angevin contrivance in Normandy and Anjou, strewn with the straw bedding of feudal soldiery; no depot for the forage of
routiers;
no drafty harborage with unglazed mullions and flapping hangings lighted with the slant beams of flares and murky with wind-driven smoke; no armory for shield and helmet, trophies of the chase, the litter of hounds and falcons. Here was a proper setting for majesty, refined in its way like the decorous palaces of Byzantium, a woman's place in the sun, a fit stage for the social arts, a foil for beauty, a comfortable house in which to "fix one's buttoned staff and stay." Most of the Plantagenet building was secular, but from the windows of the renovated palace one might have looked out upon the rising walls of that jewel box of a church, Notre-Dame-la-Grande. It may still be seen. An Oriental quality has been remarked in it. It is not large, but ornate as a reliquary; its facade, threefold, like an open triptych, is crowded with a confusion of "sculptured episodes in stone.

When Eleanor came in about 1170 to take full possession of her newly restored city of Poitiers and to install her favorite son there as ruling count and duke in her own patrimony, she was no mere game piece as were most feudal women, to be moved like a queen in chess. She had learned her role as
domina
in Paris, Byzantium, Antioch, London, and Rouen, and knew her value in the feudal world. She was prepared of her own unguided wisdom to reject the imperfect destinies to which she had been, as it were, assigned. In this, her third important role in history, she was the pawn of neither prince nor prelate, the victim of no dynastic scheme. She came as her own mistress, the most sophisticated of women, equipped with plans to establish her own assize, to inaugurate a regime dedicated neither to Mars nor to the Pope, nor to any king, but to Minerva, Venus, and the Virgin. She was resolved to escape from secondary roles, to assert her independent sovereignty in her own citadel, to dispense her own justice, her own patronage, and when at leisure, to survey, like the Empress of Byzantium, a vast decorum in her precincts.

It is easy to see that the problems of disunion and anarchy that engaged Eleanor in the governance of her dominions were such as to tax the energies of the most vigilant and experienced overlord; yet they were by no means her only responsibility. In the intervals of her administrative journeyings to rectify Capetian and Angevin misrule in the far corners of her provinces, she was obliged to give a certain supervision to the ducal household in Poitiers. This household, by a feudal process of accretion, had become a nursery and academy of prospective kings and queens, dukes and princesses. It was the irony of fate that gave into Eleanor's keeping the pawns of the rival dynastic schemes of the Capets and the Plantagenets, the children of the two royal husbands from whom she was estranged. Certainly neither Louis Capet nor Henry Plantagenet would in cool deliberation have sought out Eleanor as the guardian and mentor of their dynastic hopes. It so befell, however, that the very woman most unlikely to have been recommended for the responsibility was entrusted with the education and safekeeping of most of the children of mark west of the Rhine and north of the Pyrenees. In her Poitevin palace at various times were Marguerite, the elder daughter of Louis Capet's second marriage, who was the seventeen-year-old wife of young Henry Plantagenet, heir of England and Normandy; and Alais, the younger sister of Marguerite, affianced at Montmirail to Richard Plantagenet; Constance, Countess of Brittany, betrothed to Geoffrey; Alix, the child heiress of Maurienne, pledged in infancy to John. There were besides the queen's own daughters, Eleanor, the future Queen of Castile, and Joanna, the future Queen of Sicily; also from time to time the queen's sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey. The young Plantagenets of the group — they were all under twenty — mingled with their Poitevin cousins of Faye and Châtellerault, with their relatives of Flanders and Champagne, in the foyer of their common ancestors, Guillaume le Grand and Guillaume le Troubadour. And since the queen's household included as many as sixty ladies upon occasion, it may be presumed that the revival of the ducal court brought to Poitiers the negotiable heirs and heiresses of the great fiefs of the south.

The queen's court was astir at all times with the passage of guests and travelers; but the height of the social season was the spring, the post-Lenten period from Pentecost to the feast of Saint John in June, at which date truces frequently ended and barons mustered their vassals for war. It was the season par excellence for tournament and pilgrimage, and chatelaines made the most of the affluence of
preux chevaliers
occasioned by these events and by the challenge of the
nouvel saison
so very sweet and flowery in the south of France, for their annual fetes and assemblies. Since no vassal might bestow his heir in marriage without the consent of his overlord, the Easter court served, for one thing, as a fair for the negotiable marriage prizes, young knights and squires and demoiselles. The assemblies of the barons, which coincided in the south with ancient popular fetes in Maytime praise of Venus, offered apt occasions for the vernal entertainments of the chatelaines.

The heirs of Poitou and Aquitaine who came to the queen's high place for their vassals' homage, their squires' training, and their courtiers' service, were truculent youths, boisterous young men from the baronial strongholds of the south without the Norman or Frankish sense of nationality, bred on feuds and violence, some of them with rich fiefs and proud lineage, but with little solidarity and no business but local warfare and daredevil escapade. The custom of lateral rather than vertical inheritance of fiefs in vogue in some parts of Poitou and Aquitaine — the system by which lands passed through a whole generation before descending to the next generation
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— produced a vast number of landless but expectant younger men, foot-loose, unemployed, ambitious, yet dependent upon the reluctant bounty of uncles and brothers, or their own violent exploits. These wild young men were a deep anxiety not only to the heads of their houses, but to the Kings of France and England and to the Pope in Rome. They were the stuff of which rebellion and schism are made. For two generations the church had done what it could with the problem of their unemployment, marching hordes out of Europe on crusade and rounding other hordes into the cloister.

It was with this spirited world of princes and princesses, of apprentice knights and chatelaines, at once the school and the court of young Richard, that the duchess, busy as she was with the multifarious business of a feudal suzerain, had to deal in her palace in Poitiers. It must be remembered that for nearly forty years the ducal court had been in abeyance as a center of social influence in Poitou and Aquitaine. It was necessary for the duchess to reassemble the exiled remnants of the Poitevin entourage and subdue to civility a generation that had lacked the disciplines of a somewhat fixed and authentic court. The duchess really needed some dependable deputy in her royal household. The pious King of the Franks, who had valuable hostages in that court in the persons of his two younger daughters, must have felt the urgency of some provision for orthodoxy in Poitiers quite as much as the harried queen. It was therefore an inspiration to hit upon the Countess of Champagne as the
maitresse d'école
for the royal academy in Poitiers.

Marie, Countess of Champagne,
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was the elder daughter of Louis Capet and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and herself a person of first consequence. She was that disappointing female child born to the Capets in 1145, heaven's ambiguous answer to the supplications of Eleanor and Abbé Bernard for a royal heir. Whether, when she journeyed down from Troyes or Paris to assume her place in the court of Poitiers, she confronted her mother as a dear familiar child or as an apparition from a previous existence cannot with certainty be said. For long years, in default of male heirs, she had been the hope of the Capet dynasty, and hence the cynosure of courtly eyes. Henry Plantagenet had once sought union with her before marrying her mother, but Abbé Bernard had forbidden that alliance as consanguineous.
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Following the divorce of the king and queen, her parents, she had been left at the age of six or so in the court of France. One may guess that, under the supervision of Louis and the two excellent stepmothers who had succeeded Eleanor in Paris, her education had been of the very best and strictly orthodox. Louis had bestowed Marie, after careful reflection, at what was, in the twelfth century, the spinsterly age of nineteen, upon one of his most powerful vassals, Henry the Liberal of Champagne, a
preux chevalier
nearly twice her age and a brother of his own Queen Adele. At the time of Marie's ascendancy in the court of Poitiers, she was just under thirty, the mother of a son who was later to be the King of Jerusalem, and of a daughter whose pretty name was Scholastique. No woman of the
beau monde
had more prestige; none was more correct. Marie shed the aura of Paris and Troyes upon the renaissance in Poitiers.

The condition which the Countess of Champagne found in the court of the queen her mother must have been very disquieting to one fresh from the courts of the Capets and more or less unfamiliar with Plantagenet heartiness and informality. She must have seen that the demoiselles, the undubbed squires, and the superfluous clerks would have to be engaged in something profitable. Indeed, to leave that young world unemployed was to invite disaster and confusion. However, the character of the milieu which Mane appears to have set up in Poitiers suggests a genuine sympathy between the queen and her daughter who had so long been sundered by the bleak fortuities of life. Old relationships were knit up. Something native blossomed in the countess, who shone with a special luster in her mother's court. The young Count of Poitou learned to love particularly his half sister Mane and forever to regard the Poitiers of her dispensation as the world's citadel of valor, the seat of courtesy, and the fountainhead of poetic inspiration. Long after, in his darkest hours, it was to her good graces he appealed. The countess, having carte blanche to proceed with the very necessary business of getting control of her academy, must have striven first for order. Since the miscellaneous and high spirited young persons in her charge had not learned order from the liturgy nor yet from hagiography, the countess bethought her, like many an astute pedagogue, to deduce her principles from something more germane to their interests. She did not precisely invent her regime; rather she appropriated it from the abundant resources at her hand.

The liberal court of Eleanor had again drawn a company of those gifted persons who thrive by talent or by art Poets,
conteurs
purveying romance, ecclesiastics with Latin literature at their tongues' end and mere clerks with smatterings of Ovid learned from quotation books, chroniclers engaged upon the sober epic of the Plantagenets, came to their haven in Poitiers. The queen and the countess, with their native poetic tradition, were the natural patrons of the troubadours. It will be seen that the Countess Mane's resources were rich and abundant, but not so formalized as to afford the disciplines for a royal academy nor give substance to a social ritual. The great hall was ready for her grand assize; the expectant court already thronged to gape at its suggestive splendors. But neither the pious ritual of the French court, nor the disorderly bustlings of Henry's chancelleries, nor the thrifty regime of Matilda Empress in Rouen, nor even the somewhat slumberous decorum of Troyes, offered any valid precedents for the great court of Poitiers with its burgeoning young world and its boundless possibilities. The countess had to improvise; and it is one of the miraculous conjunctions of destiny that she possessed in high degree not only the rich patron's resource, but also the chatelaine's supreme talent for contrivance. The means, the time, the place, the occasion — all were hers singularly in the feudal world women confident of prestige and the authority it brings, possessing royal wealth to execute, possessed also the freedom to devise their own milieu.