Eleanor Of Aquitaine (8 page)

In all these refining experiences the queen was certainly impressed not merely by the artistic splendors of Byzantium, from church, palace, and hippodrome to brocade and reliquary, but especially by the court ritual, the high ceremoniousness of all procedures, the ineffable punctilio of all functionaries, and the flawless discipline of menials. Vulgarity came not near the purple tent of majesty; even the mighty prostrated themselves before the royal presence; satraps awaited the imperial nod before seating themselves within the eyesweep of the emperor. The mass movements of whole choruses of slaves, their salaams and genuflections, the fine precision of their oncomings and withdrawals, had all the perfection of a ritual. It was superb, and the effect of it was to enhance incalculably the sublimity of majesty. It was a shame for the queen to think of the chill and dilapidation of her Merovingian tower in Paris, the disorderly simplicity of the royal menage, the careless freedom of vassals in the royal presence, the disgusting familiarity of servants, the distressing
laissez faire
of authority. Louis (Abbé Bernard's, "watchful sparrow,"), whose entourage did not permit him to forget in the midst of all this splendor the penitential character of his pilgrimage, did little to increase the prestige of the Capets in Byzantium. He edified the clergy by his tireless pursuit of relics, his fastings, and his alms. But he made no regalian display to offset the pride of the Comneni, nor to arrest their condescensions.

The higher orders of the Franks might willingly have taken more time to explore the glories of Manuel's capital; but they had already, in order to embrace their saint's fete, lingered well into October, while Jerusalem still cried out for succor. The Frankish rabble outside the walls was consuming the royal treasure alarmingly, and Louis was eager to be off lest the November snows should overtake his army in the mountain passes of Asia Minor that still separated him from the Holy Land. Before embarking on the Bosporus he prepared a letter to Abbé Suger setting forth in sanguine terms the progress of the crusade; reporting his momentary uneasiness about the Emperor Conrad's departure ahead of him and about Manuel's curious truce with the Turks; giving good news of his health; and begging his regent to dispatch abundant supplies of tax money for his needs, since the accounts for expenses were not balancing in accordance with estimates.

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While Louis, in the brilliant weather of October, was skirting the peninsula of Asia Minor and passing by the famous ecclesiastical cities of Chalcedon and Nicaea, both so full of interest to his bishops, the Holy Roman Emperor was pressing forward into Cappadocia. Conrad was in a hurry to fulfill the vows that Abbé Bernard had wrung from him in Speyer against his better judgment, and to be home again to resume his interrupted warfare with the Pope. He had shaken the dust of Byzantium from his feet because Manuel Porphyrogenitus, who was not only his ally but his brother-in-law as well, had not accorded him a dignity equal to his own, and had even, so far as Asia was concerned, insisted that Conrad was his vassal. In order to proceed as directly as possible to the scene of operations with the Saracens, the Holy Roman Emperor had chosen, under counsel of the guides supplied to him by Manuel, the ancient caravan route from Byzantium to Tarsus, Aleppo, and Edessa, the general route centuries later of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. It had always been the thoroughfare of conquest, the same over which Tancred and Bohemund had passed triumphantly; in some one of its wadies bleached the bones of Guillaume the troubadour's seventy thousand Provenfaux. It had always been a trying route for military maneuvers of a grand sort, because of the difficulty of providing sufficient food and water for large companies of men and beasts.

As the Greek guides brought the Germans farther into the camel trails, they assured the high command that abundant supplies lay beyond the next desolate ridge, the next day's march. Put under heavy pressure at last to produce food and water in place of promises, these dragomans absconded in the night, "before prime," and made their way back toward Byzantium, leaving the Germans greatly perplexed without a Moses in the wilderness. While consternation spread and the barons took counsel whether to press on or to retreat, and saw their men and beasts too famished for either course, the Turks, with whom Manuel had lately made his truce, swarmed out of the hills from all directions. Lightly armed and crouched on their tough little ponies, they advanced in whirlwinds, yelping like dogs and making an infernal din with tomtoms and tambourines, showering the Germans with slings and arrows, and then wheeling to covert before the heavy arms of the West could be brought to bear upon them. Conrad's foot soldiers, already reduced by thirst and famine, fell into a panic before this sudden onset, scattered, fled, fell into ambush, were lost in the desolate terrain, died of exhaustion, drought, and fear. The royal treasure was captured and Conrad, like the troubadour Count of Poitou before him, narrowly escaped, "with a few of his own," a little company of armored knights, who turned back, greatly shaken, toward the Bosporus.

It was while Louis and his host were pressing on, engaged incidentally in that improvement of the mind that rewards the thoughtful traveler in ancient sites, that the dragomans who had abandoned Conrad under cover of darkness arrived in the king's camps. These capable liars reported with an artful semblance of enthusiasm that Conrad had arrived safely in Iconium, having hacked to pieces en route an incredible host of Turks. The Frankish high command was in the course of considering how to take advantage of this cheerful news when a handful of Conrad's knights bore in with ghastly tidings. Then came the emperor's nephew Barbarossa all distraught. He begged Louis to proceed to a rendezvous with the stricken emperor. The circumstances put the Frankish barons in a position to recall the unseemly haste of Conrad in getting into Asia; but Louis waived all malice and bent his whole mind to the succor of his ally. He sent a corps out into the desert to rescue survivors and bury the dead, and he himself pressed forward to comfort the emperor. He found Conrad utterly depressed and very cynical about his Greek allies. The emperor vowed he would go home, and by way of Byzantium, so as to have a colloquy with Manuel, his brother-in-law. He was eager to proceed to Speyer. But the papal interdicts that fell upon crusaders returning from unaccomplished pilgrimage made it humiliating to the emperor to return to Europe. Louis offered his brother-in-arms a liberal bounty to make up for the lost German treasure and did what he could to restore his confidence in Manuel; and at last Conrad was persuaded to travel with the remnant of his army in company with the Franks to Antioch. However, many German barons, who had lost to the Turks the wherewithal they had garnered for their pilgrimage, now renounced their vows and turned back to Europe. It was probably by the agency of these nobles that so much disquieting news regarding the progress of the crusade reached AbbéSuger and Abbé Bernard in the course of the autumn.

The joint councils of the Germans and the Franks now definitely renounced the route through Cappadocia which had proved so disastrous to Conrad, and determined to cling to the littoral where they could remain in the territory of their Greek allies and near ports of issue. The route was, to be sure, much longer and more mountainous, both disadvantages as the season of ram and snow approached; but it was safer and, without being planned to that end, offered incidental opportunity of visiting the ancient apostolic cities of the coast with their uniquely precious shrines.

The crusaders turned westward toward Demetna. In the brilliant October and November days they skirted the archipelago where the isles of Greece rose Venus like from the foam of the Aegean. In Pergamos and Smyrna they trod the footsteps of the apostles. In Ephesus they saw where, "Messire sainz Johann l'evangelistes," had preached the redemption of mankind, and Saint Paul had scourged out of the temples and the colonnades the hoary pagan rites of Diana.

The army moved under a regime democratic to the point of casualness. The great barons turn by turn forged ahead with the van; the Amazons with their baggage moved well guarded in the midst; and Louis, with a cohort of elect knights and his sanhedrm, brought up the rear. There were fatigues and hardships, of course, but these were mainly felt by the rank and file. When the queen and her ladies were weary of
chevauchée
, they were borne in litters for a time, or rode in wains, and at night their painted beds were laid in pavilions where the air was free and open.

By Christmas the pilgrims had reached the valley of a stream which issued directly to the sea. The Nativity of 1147 marked the third anniversary of the fall of Edessa; the crusaders were now seven months out from Metz and two months behind their schedule But Louis was tempted by the beauty of the site to linger for the fete. The army encamped on the slopes of the river, making of their tents a streeted city gay with banners, and disposed their heavy gear on the level meadows along the shore. Horses were scattered to pasture and the foot soldiers stretched their legs in a sweet repose. The day before Christmas a little cloud drifted over the encampment bearing a flurry of rain. The next morning, while the clerks were singing lauds, a violent wind arose that overset most of the tents and swept them away in a downpour. The river, fed suddenly from the mountains, flooded all the lower ground In a wild effort to rescue their gear, men and their horses were borne away by the current, crushed upon rocks, or swallowed by the waves. Animals, engines, equipment were carried to the sea. Otto of Freismg set down in his chronicle a melancholy line. "The aspect of our tents, which the day before had been so gay, offered a desolating spectacle, showing how great is the divine power, how transitory the delights of men." This episode, crowning their former miseries and losses, utterly discouraged the Teutons, who turned back with the new year to Byzantium, Conrad ill with tertian fever and chagrin, his barons lean with the meager bounty of the Franks.

By this time the Franks as well had had enough of the Levantine riviera. The belated rainy season had broken with wintry gales upon those shores. Closing their ranks upon their losses, they determined to strike inland along the valley of the Maeander to the apostolic city of Laodicea, perched among the Phrygian mountains, and thus avoid the flood swollen rivers and shorten the distance, as the crow flies, to Antioch, where all were now impatient to arrive. "The way had by this time grown so rough," Odo remarks, "that now the knights' helmets brushed the sky, now their steeds footed the floor of hell," They made the ascent in three difficult stages, only to find Laodicea fallen upon evil days. They were surprised to discover that the Greek governor, in obvious collusion with the Turks, had alienated all supplies likely to prove useful; and this obliged the high command to take hasty counsels on some plan of getting down again from the roof of Asia Minor to the more hospitable coast. They lacked guides, and the lofty mountain ranges strewn higgledy piggledy in the land made navigation by dead reckoning more difficult than on the littoral. Since no plan seemed superior, they took their bearings from the sun and bore southward toward summer and the sea. Here and there in the course of reconnoitering, they came upon the bodies of Germans lately slain, hapless remnants from Conrad's debacle in the wilderness.

In January they were still floundering among mountain passes too narrow and steep for their sumpter trains, difficult even for the cavalry, in a desolate region offering little invitation to encampment. On a day, the queen's vassal, Geoffrey de Rancon, a Poitevin noble, and the king's uncle, the Count of Maurienne, were directing the van. They had orders to set up their tents for the night on a bare tableland looming ahead that seemed to offer sufficient area. This elevation the leaders reached long before sundown. But the place, viewed at close range, seemed inhospitable, barren, and exposed. Beyond, as the crest was passed, spread an alluring valley with promise of shelter, water, pasturage. In this situation Geoffrey de Rancon presumed upon his mandate from the high command. He unfixed the royal standard from the bleak tableland which he had been ordered to occupy, and proceeded with the forward contingent of the army into the pleasant valley that lay beyond. The official chronicler does not implicate the queen in this treasonous breach of discipline, but the French subsequently blamed her for the result. Since she appears not to have suffered in the melee that ensued, she and her Poitevins were probably in the van, whose leaders would hardly have altered the royal command without her consent.

Geoffrey's ill-starred maneuver left a wide gap between the van and the rear, of which the rear, whose vision was obscured by the mountains, was unaware. Louis in the meantime labored at his post, prodding the last baggage wains up the ascent and urging his cavalry to pass through the abysmal gorges before the fall of night. Arrived within view of the tableland, he was amazed to see no sign of the encampment. While scouts investigated this strange circumstance, there burst from the ravines on every hand between the rear and van a swarm of Turks. Crouched on their tough little ponies, they advanced as before in whirlwinds, yelping like dogs and making an infernal din with tomtoms and tambourines, repeating the tactics that had thrown Conrad's army into panic and flight.

Bewildered by the disappearance of the van and confused by the falling dark, the Franks were driven into a rout. The day had been unseasonably warm, and the Frankish knights had laid aside the encumbrance of their armor for the difficult ascent. Like Conrad's Teutons, they fled to shelter from the Turkish hail of arrows, and, like the Teutons, fell thus into Turkish ambush. Baggage wains, horses and riders, with loosened boulders, tumbled into the gorges of the mountain pass. The sun went down wildly on carnage and outcry. At last the blessed dark concealed the remnant of the Franks dispersed in thicket and ravine. Under cover of the night Louis took refuge in a tree, from which, according to the chronicle, he laid about valiantly with his sword and slew an incredible number of Turks. His little company stood guard about his arboreal retreat, and in the obscurity, in his inconspicuous pilgrim's garb, he passed unrecognized.