Read Eleanor Of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Amy Kelly
These events had delayed the main body of the crusading armies in Sicily beyond any hope of reaching Palestine before spring. Several contingents of Franks and English, impatient of delay and viewing with alarm the fruitless exhaustion of the resource for which they had pawned their estates, went forward to Syria to fulfill their vows before the gales of winter should break upon the sea; and presently tidings that many of these had already been cut down by heat, fever, famine, dissension among factions, and the onslaught of the paynim, reached the kings, still harbored, late in December, in Messina.
*
Philip of Flanders, arriving in Messina in November on his way to Palestine, had arbitrated the case of Alais and secured the delivery of Richard from his compact. It fell to him, as high vassal of the French crown and kinsinan of the English king both by birth and marriage, to end the quarrels that threatened to dismember the army destined for the recovery of Jerusalem.
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But it was not hidden from the magnates that in this matter the Count of Flanders had been employed as advocate of the Plantagenets; nor was the reason dark why he had been in such a hurry to accomplish his mission. The news circulated before Advent that Queen Eleanor herself, loaded with business, had already crossed the Alps on her way to Sicily; and that she was bringing in her train the Princess of Navarre.
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Philip of Flanders was not merely the envoy of the queen; he was her harbinger and had been of her escort as she labored over the mountain passes and descended to the Lombard plain.
Some months previously Eleanor had established herself in one of the Angevin lookouts on a crossroads in Poitou; but she had not resigned herself to the repose or the aimless luxury which her new found freedom invited, or her age excused. The question of the succession continued to harass her, and the one acceptable solution was to see to it that Richard secured his dynasty with issue of his own. Her plans must extinguish Alais once for all, nullify the claims of all pretenders, and render Richard's naive disposal of his inheritance to Arthur of Brittany and the heirs of Tancred completely null and void. Hers was the straightforward plan of providing her son with a wife worthy of her calling, who should produce an incontestable heir for the Angevin empire. In these matters of policy she had obviously been in close touch with Coeur-de-Lion.
Among the princesses of Europe few were entitled by their birth to look so high; and fewer still were those not disqualified by consanguinity. The lady summoned to the throne of the Plantagenets was Berengaria, daughter of Sancho the Wise, King of Navarre, who was herself a notable exemplar of all the graces of the courts of love, one born to the familiar culture of the south. Her brother was a famous
jouster, a fellow cavalier of Coeur-de-Lion in the lists. Richard is said to have paid court in Pamplona to Berengaria, according to the rules of the
Tractatus
, on the occasion of a tournament that had brought together the best champions on both sides of the Pyrenees.
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Says Devizes, the king (then Count of Poitou) had at that time greatly admired the accomplishments of her mind as well as the attractions of her person. This chronicler adds, of his own observation, that she seemed "more accomplished than beautiful," but he was perhaps influenced by the comments of the Franks and the Burgundians in Messina. Ambrose, who also saw her in Sicily, describes her as "a prudent maid, a gentle lady, virtuous and fair, neither false nor double-tongued."
Not even the queen's age nor the dangers of a wintry journey over the mountain passes daunted her in giving effect to her plans.
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The Alps were after all less formidable than the wilderness of peaks in Paphlagonia. Her escort brought her and the princess through the gorges and then into the not less hostile plain, where the crusading hosts, like locusts swarming, had left not even the leaves upon the trees; and then they skirted regions under interdict; bartered for safe-conduct with little potentates at war with one another; avoided the ambush of those freebooters that lay in wait for travelers whose ransoms were worth while;
32
at Lodi, south of Milan, by accident of travel, she encountered Henry of Hohenstaufen on his way to Rome for his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. What passed between them is not recorded, but the interview must have taxed even the queen's matchless aplomb, for Henry had by no means given his consent to Richard's disposal of his pretensions in Sicily to Tancred. In the course of time, the queen's escort made its way to Pisa, to Naples, and finally to Brindisi.
Richard sent a stout ship under command of a Sicilian admiral to bring the queen's party from Brindisi to Reggio; and he himself crossed the Faro to welcome the travelers with the highest honors; to present to the queen her daughter Joanna who, in the long years since her childhood, had grown strange to her own mother; and to receive from Eleanor's hand the Princess of Navarre.
*
Queen Eleanor, a matchless woman, beautiful and chaste, powerful and modest, meek and eloquent, which is rarely to be met with in a woman, who was sufficiently advanced in years to have two husbands and two sons crowned kings,still indefatigable for every undertaking, whose power was the admiration of her age, came to Pisa… there to await the king's pleasure, together with the King of Navarre's ambassadors and the damsel. Many know what I wish none of us had known. The same queen, in the time of her former husband, went to Jerusalem. Let none speak more thereof; I also know well. Be silent.
Richard of Devizes
This dark passage from the chronicler makes clear at least that the queen's sagacity and authority were recognized by her contemporaries; also that, wherever crusaders forgathered, she was a legend — still, among the Franks and Teutons, the topic of trouveres' ballads and minnesingers' songs. In Messina Devizes had evidently heard again the moldy anecdotes of Antioch, which the Franks in half a century had not ceased to circulate to her disparagement. Her sensational arrival in Sicily on the eve of a new crusade gave the stories fresh pertinence and revived their vogue.
Philip Augustus did not await the arrival of the queen in Messina. He had been appalled by the necessity of squandering the winter in Sicily and by the melting away of his treasure; and he was impatient to get on with the holy war and have done with the Saracens. Although in April the sea was still unsettled, he took advantage of a favoring wind and set sail for Acre on the morning of the very Thursday that Queen Eleanor and Berengaria arrived in Messina. So there was nothing to mar the harmony of the four brief days vouchsafed the Plantagenets on the island. Richard, now in possession of the Sicilian plate and furniture, entertained the royal ladies sumptuously in the quarters he had thrown up for himself outside the city walls. Since Eleanor and Berengaria had been unable to get over the Alps before the beginning of Lent, the marriage of the king and the princess could not be celebrated in Eleanor's presence; and the disquieting state of affairs both in Britain and in Palestine forbade a longer sojourn. It was therefore decided to make a peremptory exception to the ruling about women's going on crusade, and to provide a transport on which Berengaria could travel to the East; and in order that the princess might not be dismayed and scandalized in that company of warriors, she was committed to the custody of the widowed Queen of Sicily. Joanna and Berengaria developed a warm attachment in Messina and subsequently lived for a year or two "as doves in cage."
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In the course of those crowded hours in Sicily, the queen and her clerks reported to the king on the progress of the hungry-falcon statecraft in Britain: on John's efforts to get control of matters in England, of his collusions with Geoffrey of York, and of the clashes these had produced with the chancellor. As for Ely, the queen admitted she was herself dismayed at the whirlwind speed and thoroughness with which he had proceeded to relieve his associates in the administration of all their responsibilities and gather these into his own hands. There was ever so much more sap in the little Norman than even she had suspected. A legatine commission made Ely's intolerable control supreme in every quarter. To get the resulting confusions in hand, it was obviously necessary for Eleanor as regent to confer with the Pope in Rome.
Richard himself set her back on her way to Gaul.
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She was escorted by the Archbishop of Rouen, whose crusader's vows were commuted in Messina, Gilbert de Vascoeil, and other magnates; and with her she carried a sheaf of letters patent and other enabling mandates for the rectification of the government and the control of all disturbers of the Truce of God. She arrived in Rome on Easter Sunday,
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the very day when Hyacmthus Bobo, now a man of eighty, was consecrated as Pope Celestine III.
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She had known Hyacmthus as archdeacon in the difficult days of Becket's intransigency, and she was able to remind him that he had fared well in those times through the favor of Henry Plantagenet.
The queen found Celestine well disposed and had no great difficulty in getting the understandings and the manifestoes she required. The Pope was induced to consent, against the opposition of the suffragans of York, to the election of Geoffrey the Bastard to the See of York, where his orders would put him out of any possibility of reaching for the crown.
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Celestine also conferred a super-legateship on the Archbishop of Rouen that could be brought to light to curb William of Ely in case the energetic little chancellor should get altogether out of hand. With these contrivances, Eleanor, as great Henry would have said, had the regency in her pocket.
The queen stayed only long enough in Rome to arrange with moneylenders for her forward journey.
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She had no time, as on the occasion of her previous visit with Louis Capet in 1148, to make a grand tour of the shrines. It is possible that she was urgently eager to leave Rome in her wake; for it happened by sheer coincidence of travel that she passed through the city at the very moment Henry of Hohenstaufen and Constance, whom William of Sicily had designated as his lawful heirs, arrived at the portals of the Lateran to be consecrated as Emperor and Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, and, thus panoplied, to move into Apulia and Calabria to wrest their heritage from Tancred. From Rome she struck across to Aqua Pendente. Having escaped disastrous encounters with the Hohenstaufen in the holy city, the queen made haste to put the barrier of the Alps behind her. Thence her journey took on a more leisurely character as she followed the advancing spring as far as Bourges. In a little time she had taken up her post of observation in the castle of Rouen.
The wind was high, and lofty were the waves…
Swift as the swallow flieth, so sped the ship with bended mast.
Ambrose
ON THE DAY FOLLOWING ELEANOR'S DEPARTURE from Messina, Richard forwarded the Princess of Navarre and the Queen of Sicily on a large dromon, less swift than a galley, but more commodious for their baggage and attendance, which are described as considerable.
1
With two escort ships under command of the most reliable navigators, the dromon climbed the lofty waves that tossed their whitecaps eastward from the island.
Some days later in Holy Week, the king marshaled his fleet of some hundred and fifty vessels or more and ranged them in the harbor.
2
During the stay in Sicily the boats had been beached, repaired, and dewormed and now tugged at their moorings for the take-off. The ships were of every type — busses, galleys, dromons of many sizes and various speeds — some crowded with men and horses, others laden to their brims with fodder and provisions, and all the equipment for warfare: siege engines, stagings, and the excellent round sling stones for the mangonels,
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which had been selected on the shores of Sicily. At Richard's clarion call, oar and sail strained, and the fleet bounded forward for "God's unhappy country." The king, in the prow of the foremost galley, rallied his host. By day the trumpet of the royal ship, by night its lantern, kept the squadrons more or less together.
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At last Richard pressed his admirals, for news had reached him that the contingents that had gone ahead were by no means enough to deal with the Saracens; and he had only a moderate confidence in what Philip Augustus might undertake overseas in the circumstance.
Though the transit from Messina to Acre usually required about three weeks, Coeur-de-Lion's passage among the Mediterranean islands took twice that time. In spite of horn and lantern, the adverse winds of early spring drove the squadrons of the fleet apart, some to shelter in one harbor, some in another. In rounding up the stragglers, the king drew into Crete and Rhodes and finally came to Cyprus, where he found some of his missing vessels wrecked. It was here, after days of anxious reconnaissance, he found the royal ladies stranded in their dromon where the storms had washed them up, and so spent with peril and distress that they rued ever having left the comfortable shores of Sicily.
Isaac, the Emperor of Cyprus, was of the family of the sublime Comneni
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and, having that ingrained distrust of western crusaders that characterized his imperial house, he had not, according to Richard's mariners, offered the vaunted Greek hospitality to the distressed voyagers shipwrecked on his shores. When Richard learned of this intolerable offense, the repulse of his ships and the exposure of the royal ladies to the terrors of the sea, he did not hesitate. He postponed for the time being his progress toward Acre and went ashore in force to deal with Isaac and his "base rabble of Greeks and Armenians."
The operation of bringing Isaac to his knees consumed two or three weeks, but it was a signal success and very profitable. The pusillanimous Greeks took to the hills; the emperor and his daughter were taken prisoner; the little girl ("on whom her father's life hung") was turned over to Berengana for reeducation; and the booty was so rich that it went far to recoup the exhaustion of treasure in Sicily. The prosperous island was seen moreover to offer a granary for feeding the famished Christians manning the trenches outside the walls of Acre. The danger of inviting the hostility of the imperial Comneni at the moment seemed hardly worth consideration.
In the lovely city of Limassol, after the conquest of the island, it was decided to celebrate the royal marriage and crown the Princess of Navarre.
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Lent was over, bishops and chaplains were of the company, and it was doubtless felt that appropriate ceremonies in the camp at Acre might be difficult and would in any case seem an unwarranted affront to Philip Augustus, whose emotions with regard to Alais had by no means subsided. There was a three-day festival for these events, for which the flowery Cyprian spring and the Bay of Limassol, with the fleet busy refitting itself upon the waters, made a gorgeous setting. The chroniclers do not say what was worn by the Princess of Navarre for her bridal and her coronation; but the
Itinerarium
describes the marvelous figure cut by the bridegroom in that week. His prancing charger, says the chronicler, was of Spanish breed. The king bounded into his saddle, which glittered with gold spangles interspersed with red, while on the hinder part of the trappings two small golden lions affronted each other, poised on their forelegs and reaching forth as if to devour. The king's feet were adorned with golden spurs, and he was clad in a rose-colored cotte, worked with rows of silver crescents that sparkled like the sun. He was girt with a proven sword, its handle gold, its scabbard clasped with silver. On his head he wore a scarlet bonnet wrought by hand with birds and beasts of various shape, sewed in with orphrey work. He carried his staff, and his matchless bearing afforded the highest gratification to all who saw him.
In Cyprus, in time for the nuptials, the first emissary from the Holy Land arrived to greet the King of England and advise him on the course he ought to take for the rescue of the holy places overseas.
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This personage loomed out of Coeur-de-Lion's Poitevin past. He was that Guy of Lusignan who had been banished from the Limousin twenty years before for his attempt to capture Queen Eleanor by ambush as she passed over one of her highways in Poitou. The blood of Earl Patrick of Salisbury, her bodyguard, was on his sword. But Guy was now translated from his condition as outlaw; he was King of Jerusalem.
For more than two generations the Latin Kingdom had been the Promised Land for the disprised cavaliers of western Europe — for exiles, malcontents, dispossessed heirs, the younger sons of younger brothers, for whom the cloister offered no allurement. The history of the four Latin fiefs furnished abundant records of European buccaneers who had redeemed their sunken fortunes in that eastern world of sudden chance and change. In spite of the infusions of western blood, the dynasty of the Latin Kingdom tended persistently to decay. The royal line, bolstered for a few years by Foulques of Anjou, speedily dwindled again after his untimely death. The hazards of warfare, intrigue, heat, Oriental diseases, to which Occidentals were especially prone, bore heavily upon the men, so that great fiefs fell with unnatural incidence into the helpless hands of women.
An ambitious cavalier from the West, brave, personable, the bearer of a good name, by being on hand at the propitious moment, could rescue a countess or a queen from the burdens thrust upon her, and crown himself with fortune and a fame that spread back to Europe. So had Eleanor's footloose uncle, Raymond of Antioch, made himself a peer of the Latin Kingdom; and so had that even more famous adventurer, Renauld of Châtillon. Prudent men, like Henry the Lion of Saxony, Henry the Liberal of Champagne, and Philip of Flanders, having surveyed such prospects, renounced them for their more solid patrimonies at home But for men like Guy, whose tenures were uneasy, the Latin Kingdom was indeed the Promised Land.
The ups and downs of Guy on his way to fame and fortune make in themselves a chronicle of violent adventures tied up with the calamities of the Latin Kingdom. He was a very giant of derring-do, a man of unmeasured energy and of a reckless valor that commended him for the hazardous enterprises on the frontiers of pagandom. Baldwin, the leper King of Jerusalem, had chosen him as a second husband for his sister Sibylle (who was certain to be his heir), not as in all respects an ideal king, but as the best prop offering at the moment to support the royal interests against a powerful party of barons, who had other aspirants in view. The barons, for their part, described Guy with uncompromising words as "softheaded and inadequate" (simplex et insufficient), lacking in judgment, a fool acting on the counsel of other fools.
On the death of Baldwin and the frail little son of Sibylle who briefly succeeded him, Guy, by reason of his marriage, stepped up to the throne of Jerusalem, and the great barons, though he was not their choice, were forced to accept him as their overlord.
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For six years he had discharged his royal obligation with his naked sword, righting on every front wherever he found an enemy. He had spent more than a year as Saladin's prisoner, been paroled on his oath to leave the Levant, and had lived to take up arms once more against the Saracens. With the forces he could muster, he had recklessly undertaken the siege of Acre before the arrival of the fresh hosts of crusaders from the West.
Late in the summer of 1190, some nine months before the advent of Philip Augustus, while Guy was laying siege to Acre, fate took a hand in the destinies of the Latin Kingdom. Queen Sibylle, who was sharing her lord's hardships in the camp before the beleaguered city, sickened and died, and her two young daughters with her, leaving Guy but a figurehead diademed with the crown of Jerusalem. The legal succession fell to Sibylle's younger half sister Isabelle, who was already married to Humphrey de Toron, one of the baronial party opposed to Guy. But Humphrey, who had been born and bred in Syria, was not disposed to risk his fortunes for the tottering crown of Jerusalem. He took surreptitious leave of the baronial assembly that threatened to make him king, fled to Jerusalem, and offered his allegiance to King Guy. This knavery of Humphrey's of course gave Isabelle, as well as the barons, grounds for malice toward him, and they resolved to get rid of him and furnish the heiress with a new husband worthy to be king.
The likeliest cavalier at hand for the vacant role was a relatively new arrival in the field of politics in Syria — Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat. This corsair had swooped down upon the Holy Land from the direction of Byzantium, where his services for a few years in behalf of the Comneni had brought him into a series of uncomfortable dilemmas that finally indicated the wisdom of departure for other fields of knightly enterprise. The marquis was highly connected,
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a seasoned warrior and strategist, schooled in the crafts of state by his experiences in Byzantium. He was furthermore related, through the house of Maurienne, with the Capets; and his elder brother William had been the first husband of Queen Sibylle and father of the child king Baldwin, who had reigned so briefly. When, after the calamitous battle of Hittin in 1187, Saladin had almost completely blockaded the Christians from succor by sea, Conrad, by a bold coup, had succeeded in occupying Tyre, which still held as the last free port of entry for the crusaders on the Mediterranean shore. By lineage and by merit Conrad seemed to the barons cast by destiny for the role of King of Jerusalem.
The large company of English magnates, who, faring ahead of Philip Augustus and Coeur-de-Lion from Sicily, arrived in Syria in the early autumn of 1190, were at once confronted by the barons' proposal to separate Humphrey from Isabelle.
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The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Salisbury, who were of their number, protested stoutly, taking a strong stand upon the canons. But the Bishop of Beauvais, who was a Capet,
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discovered a touch of consanguinity between the principals. To him it seemed a matter of exigency to undo the marriage. Thereupon Isabelle was at once united to the marquis. As for Conrad, he did not raise the question of dissociating himself from either of two former wives abandoned in the backward areas of his rovings.
This coup, with its threat to Guy's crown, had the effect of splitting the Christian hosts dedicated to the rescue of the holy places into two irreconcilable, camps, and obliged newcomers, as they arrived in companies from the West, to assume the colors of one camp or the other. The vanguards of the Franks, Thibault of Blois, the Bishop of Beauvais, and others, lined up with Conrad; so also did Barbarossa's son, the Duke of Burgundy, and the remnants of the emperor's Teutonic knights, and Leopold of Austria. Some magnates, compelled by their dependence upon bounty, favored one side or the other, or both by turns, as the exigencies of their condition required.
Philip Augustus, who arrived in the midst of these events, was now seen by Guy to be gliding, as if moved by the mysterious hand of destiny, into the camps of Conrad; and he was, as if divinely commissioned to direct proceedings, taking charge of operations intended to break the long stalemate before Acre. He even sent messengers to Cyprus with peremptory demands that Coeur-de-Lion leave all secondary campaigns en route, get forward with all his forces, and lend his aid in the final overthrow of Saladin.
When these backgrounds of politics and history had been reviewed by King Richard and King Guy in Cyprus, a common Poitevin descent counted more than the ancient enmities that had sundered them. They easily came to terms. Guy's
de facto
state as King of Jerusalem, his openness, his bravery in the face of odds, made him seem for the moment a valuable ally. The developments in the Latin Kingdom described by Guy brought the two kings very close together and speeded their departure from Cyprus.
*
Great was the joyance and the night was clear.
Ambrose
It was a Saturday evening early in June when the hard-pressed veterans of the assault on Acre, worn with combat, stricken with famine and disease, looked to the west and saw their desperate valor justified. Lifting their eyes, they saw the level sun reflected from a thousand bucklers, the sea white with the foam of oars, and such a flock of painted sails as had not been afloat in eastern waters since Agamemnon drew up to the shores of Troy. The ships of Coeur-de-Lion, laden with men, horses, food, engines, the treasure of Sicily and Cyprus, were banking oars and slackening sail. On the devices of the pennants streaming from the mastheads, the soldiers of Christ read the roster of the great lords coming to their relief; and somewhere in the midst of that incomparable host approached the already fabled champion dedicated from the day of his crowning to the rescue of the holy places. There were no distracting episodes, for the queens, as usual, had been dispatched ahead with their Cyprian handmaiden and were already ashore to witness the coming of the king.