Authors: Lisa Hilton
The romantic nonsense that trails Eleanor’s image is greatly inspired
by her experiences on crusade. In December 1144, the Christian colony of Edessa had fallen to Imad al-Din Zengi, the Turkish ruler of Mosul and Aleppo. Along with the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the county of Tripoli, Edessa made up the kingdom of Outremer, established after the First Crusade between 1099 and 1109. The recently elected Pope, Eugenius III, issued a bull in response, calling on Christendom to defend the Holy Land against a newly militant Islam. The bull, ‘Quantum Praedecessores’, was actually addressed to Louis, but even before he could have received it the King declared at his Christmas court at Bourges that he intended to ‘take the Cross’. He received a rather lukewarm reception, but by Easter the next year France was alive with crusading fervour. This was largely due to the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was closely connected with Outremer and who worked authoritatively with the Pope to achieve maximum recruitment for the expedition. The bull was reissued in March, and Louis called an assembly of magnates at Vézélay to hear Bernard preach. It was a deeply emotional, if carefully stage-managed occasion, with Louis sitting next to Bernard, displaying the fabric cross which symbolised his pledge and Eleanor coming forward to kneel and promise the allegiance of her vassals. Bernard then set off on a whirlwind tour to call the faithful to defend Jerusalem, and he was so successful that ‘towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed whilst their husbands are alive’.
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Evangelical zeal aside, the Church was offering an attractive package to crusaders: the remission of all confessed sins, immunity from civil lawsuits incurred after taking the Cross, exemption from interest on loans and the right to raise money by pledging land to churches or other Christians (a benefit that provided a cloak for a good deal of usury). These advantages, combined with Eleanor’s charm and energy in persuading her liegemen to join, encouraged some of the greatest lords of southern France to take part in the Second Crusade, along with a number of aristocratic women. As well as the Queen of France herself, the countesses of Toulouse and Flanders, Mamille of Roucy, Florine of Burgundy and Torqueri of Bouillon accompanied their husbands. There were also at least 300 women who offered to travel as nurses, plus the ladies’ attendants. The women and their baggage were later criticised as a frivolous distraction from the holy purpose of the crusade, not to mention a practical encumbrance, but as Eleanor sets off from Metz on 11 June 1147 on a silver-saddled horse, her flowing robe embroidered with the lilies of France, she is, for once,
certainly captured as the epitome of the troubadour heroine: noble, pious, romantic and brave.
The crusade was a disaster for Christian Europe and for Eleanor’s reputation. In many ways, reaching the Holy Land at all was a momentous achievement, given the enormous scale of the operation in terms of numbers, geographical span and cost, but a combination of ‘bad timing, poor strategy, flawed diplomacy [and] catastrophic logistics’
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made success unlikely even before the French army arrived at Constantinople. They were preceded by the other main part of the crusader force, the German army led by the Emperor Conrad. As they travelled onward, the German contingent was attacked by Turkish forces near Dorylaeum, and suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of their mounted archers, so swift and lethal they were known as ‘winged death’.
The French entered Constantinople on 4 October, and were given a magnificent reception by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus, whose wife Irene had corresponded with Eleanor as the French forces progressed through Hungary. Louis enjoyed a private audience with the Emperor in the breathtaking splendour of the Boukoleon Palace, where he was granted the special privilege of being permitted to sit down, and was taken on a tour of the shrines and relics of the city, including the stone from Christ’s tomb and the lance that pierced His side. Manuel courteously organised a joint celebration of Louis’s personal saint, St Denis, where the Frenchmen marvelled at the singing of the Greek castrati, and treated his guests to a banquet which included frogs, caviare and artichokes (the French showed themselves rather provincial when they sniffed at these rose-strewn delicacies, suspicious of poison). They crossed the Bosphorus in mid-October, and it was as they left Nicaea on the twenty-sixth, ominously during a partial eclipse of the sun, that they learned of the German defeat. This was a devastating blow to morale, and as they crawled the 120 miles to Ephesus, a journey which took a month, the army began to splinter, wearied by changes in the route and dwindling supplies.
Eleanor was involved in one of the most dramatic of the five attacks the French army managed to repel during the next 200-mile stage to the port of Adalia. An examination of how she is portrayed as being responsible for this incident is a good example of the way in which her power has been overestimated and her influence manipulated into legend. In the conventional version of the story
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the French army was travelling across Mount Cadmos at Honaz Daghi, with the Queen’s party riding in the vanguard under the supervision of one of her own Aquitaine men,
Geoffrey, Lord of Rançon Ignoring the King’s instructions to make camp on the exposed plain, Geoffrey followed Eleanor’s advice and escorted the women through a pass to what seemed to be a protected valley. The Turks, who were lying in wait for the main body of the French force, allowed Eleanor’s party into the valley as a feint, and when the troops arrived, they fell upon them. Louis acquitted himself bravely, leading a charge of his immediate entourage of knights to safeguard the infantry and the large numbers of non-combatant pilgrims following behind. The attack is explained as one of the fundamental causes of the failure of the crusade, and that failure has its source in Eleanor, who ‘by her undisguised flirtations had spread confusion and dismay and discord in the noblest host that ever went to the East’.
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Neither of the two accounts of Cadmos, Odo de Deuil’s eyewitness description written up a month later, and William of Tyre’s, which postdated events by thirty years, mentions Eleanor at all. The Queen’s position at the head of the van and her influence over Geoffrey de Rançon in his flouting of Louis’s orders is an invention by Richard, a much later writer. Yet even though Eleanor has been acquitted of blame by a scholar writing as long ago as 1950, Richard’s version of events is still widely accepted. What is considered plausible in terms of Eleanor’s legend tells us a good deal about its hold over contemporary perceptions, and about the preoccupations of modern historians, but, as always with Eleanor, one has to look carefully for the truth.
King Louis was courageous and well trained in handling weapons when he had to, but he was no strategist. The army limped on for another twelve days, surviving on horse meat, the desperate rations of the starving soldier. After a month of bickering over ships and supplies in Adalia, he succumbed to pressure from his magnates to press on to the Holy Land, abandoning his infantry. There were simply not enough ships available to carry the troops. In theory the men were to proceed overland to Tarsus under the command of Thierry of Flanders and Archibald of Bourbon, but the officers jumped aboard the first vessel that came into port, leaving the infantrymen to the mercies of the Turks. Thousands were killed and thousands taken as slaves, an outcome which did nothing for Louis’s reputation. ‘Here the King left his people on foot and with his nobles went on board ship,’ recounts William of Tyre pointedly. Not only was Louis stupidly careless of the welfare of those who followed him, but the loss of his infantry was to prove a major handicap in the campaign for Damascus.
Finally, on 19 March 1148, Louis and Eleanor landed at St Symeon, ten miles downriver from the city of Antioch. They were met by a choir singing the
‘Te Deum’
and received by Eleanor’s uncle, Prince Raymond, the ruler of the province. Eleanor’s behaviour in Antioch provoked scandalous charges from four of the principal chroniclers of the crusade and gave rise to ever more elaborate tales of her sexual perfidy in the years to come. John of Salisbury recorded:
The most Christian King of the Franks reached Antioch, after the destruction of his armies in the east, and was nobly entertained there by Prince Raymond, brother of the late William, Count of Poitiers. He was as it happened the Queen’s uncle, and owed the King loyalty, affection and respect for many reasons. But … the attentions paid by the Prince to the Queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous conversation with her, aroused the King’s suspicions. They were greatly strengthened when the Queen wished to remain behind, although the King was preparing to leave, and the Prince made every effort to keep her, if the King would give his consent. And when the King made haste to tear her away, she mentioned their kinship, saying it was not lawful for them to remain together as man and wife, since they were related in the fourth and fifth degrees.
William of Tyre confirms that Raymond ‘resolved also to deprive him of his wife, either by force or secret intrigue. The Queen readily assented to this design, for she was a foolish woman. Her conduct before and after this time showed her to be, as we have said, far from circumspect. Contrary to her royal dignity, she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.’ Gervase of Canterbury and Richard of Devizes are more cautious, but hint strongly at the same story: that Eleanor was suspected of committing adultery with Raymond. Louis was clearly disturbed by her behaviour and by the possibility of the illegitimacy of their marriage, which she had raised, as he confided in Abbot Suger, who wrote back to advise him to restrain his angry feelings until he had returned to France.
Whether Eleanor ‘technically’ committed adultery is a moot point (though it is worth remembering that to have done so while on the holy mission of crusade would have been a grave sin indeed). What matters is that her behaviour was sufficiently careless for those around her to believe she did. The hints from the chroniclers were undoubtedly affected by their knowledge of the subsequent royal divorce — none of them was writing less than fifteen years after the events they describe — and it may
have been that Louis’s huffy removal from Antioch had less to do with Eleanor than with a disagreement over strategy. Raymond was pushing for a concerted attack on Aleppo, the power base of Nur al-Din, but most of the crusaders wished to fulfil their vows by making for Jerusalem. Eleanor appears to have tried to talk Louis round to Raymond’s view, which certainly made more sense from a military perspective, but Louis had two strong reasons to demur: his own sacred vow to lay the Oriflamme of France on the altar of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the more practical consideration that having left his infantry behind at Adalia, he had insufficient foot soldiers to mount an effective siege. Given that Louis’s decision to leave Antioch proved crucial in the failure of the crusade, the adultery story and the fables it spawned are interesting in the context of ‘the anxieties about gender, sexuality and sovereignty that continually surfaced in medieval definitions of queenship’.
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In the thirteenth century
Récits d’un Ménéstral de Reims
and the fifteenth-century
Chronique Normand
, it is claimed that Eleanor had an affair with Saladin himself and attempted to elope with him by boat. Both accounts emphasise her wealth, its loss to France in her subsequent divorce and her lack of a son. Saladin, the celebrated Muslim general who took Jerusalem in 1187, would certainly loom large in Eleanor’s life, but these tales are patently fiction. What is important is the subtext: the linking of Eleanor’s subversive sexual desire to failures in kingship and hence to a weakening of the sacred tie between the anointed king and God which validated — or not — the Christian assumptions of the crusaders. The traditional queenly role of intercessor is here perverted into something dangerous and threatening. Eleanor becomes the symbol of the seductress who can displace nations through her sexual power over the king, as was later the case with her daughter-in-law Isabelle of Angoulême.
Ménéstral
and
Chronique
are only two of many accounts that portray Eleanor as lascivious and promiscuous, but, again, they are of less interest in relation to the facts of her life than in the way they manipulate her image to discuss or warn against the combination of sexual and political influence that was the unique prerogative of queens.
Louis got his sight of the Holy City, and then agreed with Emperor Conrad to attack Damascus, where the army assembled on 24 July. Four days later, the crusaders retreated after the city repelled a shambolic attack. The defeat was all the more humiliating in that the army ‘remained intact’.
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Numerous theories were offered to justify this pathetic showing, the most acceptable being that the Christians had been betrayed, for a
variety of complicated political reasons, by the barons of Jerusalem. A simpler explanation may be that they were afraid of becoming trapped between the city and the relief force sent out by Nur al-Din from Aleppo. Many commentators blamed the bungled expedition on the presence of women among the crusaders, while clerics, including Bernard of Clairvaux, saw it as a harsh lesson from God.
After Damascus, there could no longer be any doubt that the Second Crusade was a catastrophe. ‘So great was the disaster of the army and so inexpressible the misery that those who took part bemoan it with tears to this very day,’ declared Otto of Freising.
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It had been a fruitless waste of life, and the majority of those who suffered were not great nobles, whose deaths were at least recorded for posterity with a degree of honour, but the nameless thousands who had pushed valiantly towards Jerusalem only to die anonymously in the dust. Nothing was left of the euphoria and nobility of purpose that had galvanised the crowds at Vézélay. Louis and Eleanor remained in the Holy Land until the following Easter, while the King attempted to recover some benefit by raising loans to defend the beleaguered kingdom of Jerusalem, then embarked for France in a fleet of ships hired from Sicily. Not only was Louis concerned about the collapse of his glorious mission and the consequent damage to his own reputation; now, as he returned to his kingdom, he had the state of his marriage to worry about.