Eleanor Of Aquitaine (9 page)

Late in the night Odo of Duilio, having captured an errant mount, made his way through scrub and underbrush toward the flare of campfires in the distant valley where the queen's vassals were encamped. But other outriders had already thrown this vanguard into a panic. Her scouts returning toward the summit of the tableland had stumbled upon heaps of dead. What horror had befallen? Where were the lords of Dreux and Courtenay, of Flanders and Champagne? Where was the king? The night gave neither sight nor sound. As the hours wore on, stragglers came in to the Poitevin camp torn with thorns, bruised, wounded, fainting with thirst, unable to speak for weakness and anguish. Toward prime a monk led the dazed King of the Franks into the queen's camp on a stray horse that majesty had never owned. When the roster was taken at daybreak, the survivors wrote off many an armored knight and hundreds of men-at-arms that Abbé Bernard had signed with the cross at Vézelay.

This fortuitous tragedy in the mountains of Paphlagonia so far from the Holy Land cost Eleanor much prestige and marked the final eclipse of the Amazons. Her vassal Geoffrey, on whom fell the brunt of public censure, was in a desperate plight. There was a widespread demand that he be swung from a gibbet there in the wilderness. However, the awkward fact that the king's uncle, the Count of Maurienne, had shared his treason served to save his life.
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Eleanor suffered the rebuke of her high vassal's dismissal from the pilgrimage, and Geoffrey made his way home to Poitou without getting sight of the glories of Jerusalem. Just what passed between the queen and the king must have been known to Odo of Duilio, but he passes over the royal interview with a silence more eloquent than words.

The army, decimated by the loss of the Teutons, the flood of the river the massacre in Paphlagonia, again closed its ranks and took its reckonings for the Greek port of Satalia (modern Adalia). Here the pilgrims had hope, through the agency of their Greek allies, to repair their equipage, woefully reduced by their misfortunes and the wear and tear of the long journey from Metz. Cold, rain, and famine now assailed the hosts beleaguered in the mountains. Late in January they emerged, mostly on foot, famished and tattered, on the southern coast of Asia Minor. In those desolate and wintry peaks that lay behind, they had been obliged to eat the horses and mules that died of starvation.

Satalia proved a sordid town. Here, however, the Franks were detained above a month by the strategic dilemma now confronting them. According to the best geographical information available, the land route to Antioch was a forty days' journey over a wilderness of mountains. Since even bishops at this stage lacked shoes, the prospect of a February march over that itinerary filled them with dismay. By sea, assuming enough boats procurable, Antioch was reported but a few days distant; but the Greek price for passage, four marks of silver for every man, was out of the reach of any save the barons and the higher orders of the clergy. Though every day's sojourn in Satalia, owing to the prices for commodities, was ruinous, the rank and file lacked the sums and the equipment essential to proceed by either route.

In these days of dire distress Louis shone conspicuously. He sought to share the miseries of his foot soldiers and desired to lead them in person, all bedraggled as they were and impoverished even beyond the reach of his bounty, into the Holy Land. He was driven only under the compulsion of those whose advice he had agreed to take, to leave them behind and to embark with his nobles and his bishops and the remnant of the women in the few seaworthy vessels obtainable. Two seasoned veterans, Thierry, Count of Flanders, and Archimbaud de Bourbon, remained behind in Satalia to wrestle with the problem of forwarding the infantry. These leaders, having made an ineffectual attempt to penetrate the land route, returned to Satalia and, convinced that they could accomplish nothing by lingering, also took ship and followed in the wake of the king.

According to the chaplain, some seven thousand or more foot soldiers were thus left stranded between the inner and the outer walls of Satalia, where they were restrained from pillage for their necessities by Greeks from within and Turks from without. At length a plague broke out among them. Since the menace of the infidel Turks seemed less to the prisoners than that of their Christian allies, they fled from their charnel into the open. Here the infidels, attacking those whom the plague had spared, were mercifully overwhelmed by their wretched condition, opened an alliance with them against the common enemy, the Greeks, and procured for them an alms. It thus befell that the Frankish infantry, the remnant of that rabble Abbé Bernard had gathered in the provinces of Gaul for the rescue of Jerusalem and the redemption of their own souls, was received charitably, under the walls of Satalia, into the bosom of Islam, and so lost to the history of Christendom.

IT WAS PROBABLY FROM SATALIA that Raymond of Antioch learned with immense relief of the fortunes and whereabouts of the Franks, including his niece the queen, about whose fate everything had conspired to make him very anxious. He had the most personal reasons to doubt that the Emperor Manuel would lend his protection unfeignedly to a host destined for the relief of Antioch and Edessa. He had learned with grave concern of Conrad's losses in Cappadocia, and he knew that the Turks that had inflicted them were still at large in pursuit of crusaders in the mountains of Phrygia and Paphlagonia. He was worried about the quality of the galleys and the mariners supplied by the Greeks for the transport of the pilgrims.

When the sails of the Franks were sighted at last upon the sea, Raymond did not, like Manuel, hold himself aloof in his palaces. The Prince of Antioch went down ten miles from his city to the port of Saint Simeon to lift the broken and bedraggled Franks from the little vessels in which they had been herded for three weeks and set them upon the shores of Syria to the music of instruments and the hymning of choirs. The warmth of the welcome was like nothing the pilgrims had experienced since crossing the Rhine. Processions with banners and escorts, lay and clerical, brought them with a tumult of music and cheers up the valley of the Orontes. The hill slopes were purple and scarlet with anemones, those lilies of the field. The sun stood high after the, "latter rains." The barren deflies of Asia Minor lay like a map of nightmare behind them.

For two generations the Franks had thrilled to the story of the first crusade and visioned the heroic figures of Godfrey, Tancred, and Bohemund scaling the battlements of Antioch. To the travel-worn remnant of the Franks, after all their unutterable fatigues and losses, the city with its ramparts, with the flood of the Orontes at its feet and the bulwark of Mount Silpius at its back, spread in a celestial vision bespeaking shelter, repose, succor, plenty, a triumphant hope. To the queen after the weariness of the journey from Metz that now stretched back illimitably in her memory, and especially after the stage from Laodicea under the lamentable eyes of the Franks, her uncle's city had the comforting aspect of home. According to their rank, Raymond disposed the pilgrims in his villas and palaces.

Soon after the arrival of the Franks, Odo the Chaplain wrote to his master in Paris :

O my father Suger, the king has reached Antioch only at the end of immense danger. We now know that he can take care of himself and meet reverses with firmness and courage. He thinks only of the misfortunes of others and he has done his utmost to relieve them, for he knows that a king exists only to procure the common welfare. He is in good health… and keeps up his religious observances. He has never gone against the enemy without having received the Sacrament, and at his return he recites vespers and compline. God is the Alpha and Omega of his enterprise.

The situation of Antioch had made it, by reason of its hinterland and its waterways, a chief commercial center of the world from ancient times.
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The city lay just where the stream of north and south traffic from Asia Minor and Egypt was crossed by one of the most practicable caravan routes from the vast interior of Asia to the western sea. Tide after tide of civilization had washed over its site and left characteristic deposits on the soil. The famous cities of antiquity that had succeeded each other had been convulsed with earthquake and ravaged by fire and conquest, yet always on the ruins of their ancient grandeurs new life had sprung, appropriating to itself the vestiges of an immemorial past. In the twelfth century Antioch was an indecipherable palimpsest recording, layer on layer, the passage of empire — Hellenic, Roman, Persian, Sassanian, Byzantine. Through it for unnumbered centuries had streamed the arts and industries of the Tigris and the Euphrates and the remoter East. In its days of utmost grandeur the city had climbed from the wide plateau by the river up the slope of Mount Silpius, and thus lay exposed magnificently to view, a maze, terrace on terrace, of domes and colonnades, stadia and minarets, embosoming garden and harem, the whole framed by the many-towered wall that, climbing the Mount and striding across its heights, girdled the miles of streets. From the palaces where Raymond lodged the baronage of France, they looked eastward upon the fertile river valley; southward to that gap between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon through which the caravans crossed from Alexandria and Trebizond; northward toward mountain ranges and the blue lake of Antioch. From the towers of the prince's citadel upon the Mount, the royal guests looked down on the curves of a rocky coast embracing the dye-blue sea. The sweetness of sojourn there, like a lotus eater's dream, was an anodyne for the sorrows the pilgrims had endured and a magic to drench away those valorous plans for crusade and martyrdom with which they had departed from Saint Denis.

In the spring of 1147 Raymond of Antioch was in his early thirties and such a man as the queen could recognize proudly as one of her race and blood. He was, like the other members of her ducal house, tall, handsome, and well knit; in war brave as a lion; in feats of skill and endurance unsurpassed. For strength he was a very Hercules. It was said he could drive his war horse under an arch, grasp the ring of its keystone, and with the strength of his thighs alone, prevent his beast from moving forward. He delighted not only in the hunt, but in games of draughts and dice. Unlearned himself, the prince sought the company of learned men and gladly heard heroic tales and chronicles of history. He observed the Christian rites and attended mass willingly, but liked to have his chapel splendid as a bishop's. Raymond displayed not only the Poitevm physical traits and their tastes for gaiety and splendor, but he shared their yeasty temperament. Though an intensely practical man and no romancer, he often acted instinctively; like his father and his grandfather, he occasionally fell into sudden rages that for a time bereft him of his reason; in negotiations he recked little of breaches of good faith if some advantage could be gained thereby; in crises he was hampered by no narrow view of consistency. William of Tyre, who gives us these facts, takes pains to add that the prince was abstemious in his habits — no glutton, no winebibber, no
débauché

Since Raymond of Antioch had been deeply responsible for the second crusade, he naturally had definite military plans to offer to the French high command. When they came in contact with him in his capital, the background of the affair leading to the crusade became much clearer. It now appeared that Joscelin, Count of Edessa, for whose rescue all Europe had stirred at Vézelay, had more than a little merited the catastrophe which had been visited upon him by the infidel. The Capets, whose relative he was, were amazed to hear him described in Antioch as an unsavory knight, an indolent and avaricious lord, a trafficker with paynim, unworthy of the hard-won heritage of Baldwin of Boulogne. Having pretty thoroughly mulcted his Armenian burghers and failed for above a year to pay his garrison, he had quitted his post of duty in Edessa at a critical time for a salubrious country seat on the Euphrates; and the Moslems, taking advantage of his absence, had compounded with the spiritless defenders of the place, breached the walls, and gone in on Christmas day with only the semblance of a siege. The crux of the matter as it now appeared was that the ineffectual Joscelin had thus laid open the frontiers of Raymond's principality, and the latter was inexpressibly relieved that his nephew, the King of France, and his old compatriots from Poitou and the Limousin in the vassalage of his niece, the queen, had at last arrived to repair the situation and elevate the house of Poitou to that preeminence it might now easily acquire in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The prince's plan of campaign for the crusaders was clear, convincing, well coordinated. According to it, the Franks, uniting with the barons of Antioch and its fiefs, abetted by certain Knights Templars and whatever forces could be recruited in Tripoli and Jerusalem, would go against Islam in the east and north, rescue Edessa, and repair the bulwarks of Antioch against the danger of invasion. Raymond with his practical sense felt confident that plans so favorable to the house of Poitou could not fail to engage the Capetian monarch with whom that house was now united.

But in spite of Raymond's reasonable conjectures, the plan thus succinctly disclosed proved very surprising to Louis Capet and his barons from the Ile de France, from Flanders, and from Burgundy. It was of course the fall of Edessa that had roused Europe to crusade. But Louis had not taken down the oriflamme from the altars of Saint Denis nor had the barons put their fiefs in gage at Vézelay with any idea of elevating and securing the house of Poitou. The barons almost immediately detected a taint of self-interest in the plans of Raymond, and being already out of sorts with Poitevins, they fell at once into a state of suspicion and alarm. The prince's representations betrayed ambitions out of accord with the high ideals of Abbé Bernard and bade fair to drag the crusade, undertaken with such lofty purposes at Vézelay, into the semblance of a common secular war of conquest. Thierry of Flanders, having learned that Edessa, if rescued, and Aleppo and Caesarea, if taken, would merely be absorbed among the fiefs of Antioch, had no zest for the enterprise, since it would obviously secure no settlement for his sons Henry and Theodoric, who had accompanied him and his countess overseas, and who, as own cousins of the King of Jerusalem, had a right to expect some reward for their labors.

Louis realized that it was not by the practical business of repairing Edessa that he should wipe away the guilt that lay on his soul for the burning of Vitry. Not for this had Eugenius blessed the banners of France. Furthermore, it was observed that the Poitevins who, by the accident of traveling in the van on that fatal day in Paphlagonia, had suffered considerably less than the Franks from their joint disaster, were privy to Raymond's counsels. There were among them many of his compatriots, the comrades of his youth, men of the noble houses of Lusignan, Thouars, Melle, Châtellerault, bound to him by ancient ties of kinship and affection. These vassals of the queen's were so comparatively well lodged and so feted in Antioch that they somewhat lost sight of the fact that it was to the French king and his nobles that Pope Eugenius had committed the direction of the holy war. When all angles of the situation had been considered, the Franks decided to take counsel of the barons of Jerusalem, beyond the Poitevin influences of Antioch, before committing themselves to action. However, they did not for the moment utterly discourage Raymond, for they had it in mind to await in his city the arrival of the infantry they had left behind in Satalia.

The queen, upon her arrival in the prince's capital, was weary after the three-weeks' confinement in the foul little sailing bark from Satalia and vexed by the melancholy allusions of her fellow passengers to that horrible February night in Asia Minor. She was moreover certainly tired of movement, of mountain scenery, of ruined apostolic cities, of stinking boats and drafty tents, of snow and rain, roast mutton, sour cheese, and reveille. She was infinitely relieved to find in the palace of the Prince of Antioch shelter from the censure of the Franks, from the surveillance of the king's chaplain with his recording eye, and from the aggrieved stares of those remnants of the Amazons who had lost too many relatives near Laodicea to be any longer boon traveling companions. But when in the delicious sunshine of the East her native vitality returned, she showed herself to her relatives and the expatriates from her provinces a loyal Poitevin and a radiant Queen of France. She was of so much consequence in Antioch that Louis, who continued, in spite of all his trials, to cherish her with an unreasoning love, appears to have felt almost repaid for the hardship and expense of bringing her out three thousand miles from Paris.

A sympathy at once sprang up between the Prince of Antioch and his niece the queen. Raymond's clear Poitevin eye at once divined that the fortunes of Antioch rested not with Louis, his diminished forces and his monkish counselors, but with Eleanor and her Provengaux. The queen and the prince, who had now to compensate for their ten years' separation, conversed long hours together in their native dialect, whose racy idiom was perhaps not quite intelligible to the Franks. After having caught up with each other on the vital history of that decade, so full of incident to them both, it is probable that they found themselves in accord not only on the proper objectives of the crusade, but also on the character of the idealists who had come from the West for the rescue of Jerusalem. Since these visionaries from Gaul lacked a clear-cut policy, the Poitevin genius aspired to maneuver them one by one into action on behalf of Antioch. This strategy was tried. Raymond ransacked his bazaars and his princely treasure for the spoils of the East; he called ceremoniously upon the most noble of the Frankish barons where they lodged in his villas and palaces, and plied them with strange and splendid gifts.
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He was a liberal and a persuasive man, and he employed all the seductions of his riches and his eloquence to prevail upon his guests. At his expense they tasted wines cooled with mountain snows, the fruits and spices of the Orient; they were enriched with jewels, amulets, and the most precious relics of the Holy Land. But these costly overtures evoked from the Franks no evidence of gratitude of a strictly practical quality.

While Louis awaited the arrival of his infantry and considered what course of action would most commend itself to heaven as a propitiation for his sins, he visited the shrines of Antioch, that cradle of evangelists. As he got about Raymond's capital, the conviction grew upon him that to preserve the integrity of Antioch was not his primal mission. He had the traveler's common experience of finding the famous city other than he had dreamed it. He had expected to find the city of Luke and Peter, Barnabas and Paul, crying from its desecrated shrines for the puissant vindication of Christendom. As a result of earthquake, conquest, and fire, Antioch was indeed a rich archaeological heap, but not altogether composed, as he had figured it, of ruined Christian altars. Superficially, it had the aspect of a thriving caravansary. At its very core was not the basilica of Saint Paul but a forum presided over by an image of Apollo, where the caravans poured in, where the wares of three continents were sifted for transport and exchange, where turbaned Saracen merchants without hindrance weighed the paynim moneys of Baghdad and Isfahan against the coinage of Venice, Pisa, Alexandria, Bordeaux. There was a babel of language, an easy commingling of races, a bewildering strangeness of costume. Raymond had not even banished the ancient Greek and Roman gods from Antioch. In fact, the Christian civilization seemed to flourish only in certain razed areas of its lingering pagan and Saracenic past. If Apollo and Diana had taken a fancy to lend their fanes to Saint Paul and the Virgin for a time, they had not forsworn their dedicated sites. With an air of knowing that gods have forever, they still peered out from many a fountainhead and from oddments quaintly revamped in church and palace walls. If their pagan whim tolerated Christian basilicas in the precincts of their ancient temples, it permitted mosque, harem, and mihrab equally. Minarets bloomed thickly among the cypresses, and the call of the muezzin fell musically upon the dawn and evening air.