King of the North Wind

Pepin followed the common practice of the Frankish kings, and at his death he divided his lands between his two sons, Charlemagne (the Great Charles), and Carloman. When Carloman died in 771, his famous brother become sole master of a vast Frankish Empire. Charlemagne reached the apotheosis of his empire-building when Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800, accompanied by the words ‘Most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor’.165 Charlemagne ruled, either directly or indirectly, lands that encompassed modern-day France, the Spanish March, Germany, Flanders, much of Italy and central Europe. It was the largest land mass in Europe held in a single hand since the fall of Rome in the West.

But Charlemagne’s empire did not long survive his death; his descendants did not possess his extraordinary abilities. His only surviving son, Louis the Pious, held his father’s domains, but when he died in 840, the lands were divided among his three sons – Charles the Bald, Louis the German and Lothair I – at the Treaty of Verdun of 843.166 Lothair took a conglomerate of territory (the ‘Middle Kingdom’) including the lands that would become known as ‘Lotharingia’ – Lorraine, Provence, Burgundy and Charlemagne’s territories in Italy. He kept his grandfather’s imperial capital, Aachen, and the title. This ‘Middle Kingdom’, however, would not survive, and its lands were eventually absorbed into the east and the west Frankish kingdoms.

Louis the German took the eastern part of Charlemagne’s empire, lands which would eventually form Germany. Their half-brother Charles the Bald took the west, uniting Aquitaine, Gascony, Septimania, and an area that encompassed most of the rest of modern France. It was from the remains of the western part of the Frankish Empire that Louis would, nearly 300 years later, inherit his kingdom.

The western Frankish Empire, however, began to disintegrate. By the beginning of the tenth century, Aquitaine, Brittany and Flanders, under their ever more powerful dukes and counts, acted independently of the Crown. In 911, Henry’s ancestor Rollo, a Viking raider most probably from Norway, was given all the lands from the River Epte to the sea by a weak King Charles III (the Simple), in return for his homage and conversion to Christianity. These lands would become known as Normandy (land of the Northmen).

When Hugh Capet, a count of Paris, was elected king by the Frankish magnates after the death of the last Carolingian monarch in 987, Louis VII’s house emerged. Hugh Capet gave his name to the dynasty – the Capetians – which would rule France until 1328, when the throne passed to their Valois cousins. Yet Hugh Capet’s and his descendants’ grasp on their lordships was minimal, as even such relatively small counties as Blois and Anjou paid their monarch little heed.167

Louis the Fat had done more than any of his predecessors to increase the power of the French crown, gradually extending their influence outside the region around Paris and the Île de France. But his success was limited, and the territory inherited by his son, Louis VII, was only a tiny area surrounded by over-mighty vassals – the count of Flanders, the count of Champagne, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Brittany, the count of Blois, the count of Anjou and the duke of Normandy.

With his marriage to Eleanor, Louis immediately appropriated the enormous riches of his new wife for the French crown, and called himself duke of Aquitaine. Orderic Vitalis noted that ‘Louis obtained the kingdom of the Franks and the duchy of Aquitaine, which none of his ancestors had held.’168 In theory, through his fabulous marriage, his power was already greater than his father’s.

There was, however, a problem with the marriage; according to the church, it was incestuous, or consanguineous. Eleanor and Louis shared a common ancestor, King Robert II of France, which made them third cousins once removed. Church law would not allow couples to marry if they were related within seven degrees, or if they shared one great-great-great-great-great-grandparent.169

Mutterings about the irregularity of their marriage began almost immediately. Bernard was never an advocate, and wrote to Bishop Stephen of Palestrina to complain about it in 1143, accusing Louis of sanctimoniously haranguing other couples about problematic marriages while his also violated the law.170

But it would seem that in Bordeaux in 1137, although Eleanor may have been aware that she was marrying against church law, Louis was not. And even had Louis the Fat known of the problem as he took advantage of the death of William X of Aquitaine to marry off his son to its wealthy new duchess, Eleanor was far too rich for him to care. Aquitaine was roughly a third of the size of modern France, and its acquisition was irresistible to a king in need of a kingdom.

Louis VII adored his wife – John of Salisbury says he loved her ‘almost beyond reason’ – but Eleanor was unhappy.171 The early years of her marriage to Louis were marred with disappointment, war and heartbreak, marked by a jostling for power with Louis’ formidable mother, Adelaide of Maurienne, his mentor, Abbot Suger, and his powerful advisors.

Louis had spent his early life in the cloisters and had fully imbibed the teaching of the church fathers as to the dangers of sexual desire to the immortal soul. We may assume that their sex life was not particularly fulfilling for Eleanor, and she had limited success in influencing her husband from the privacy of their bedchamber.

Although at the very beginning, Eleanor’s new position by Louis’ side caused her jealous mother-in-law to flounce from court to retire to her estates – she accused Eleanor of spending too much money – and Abbot Suger to devote himself more and more to the rebuilding of Saint-Denis in a magnificent Gothic style, there was little room for her to exercise power; she was soon marginalised. She certainly did not wield the sort of power Adelaide had done as Louis the Fat’s consort, constantly at his side. Louis listened instead to his powerful advisors, particularly Raoul de Vermandois, his cousin and seneschal of France.

Eleanor did not enjoy an easy relationship with Louis’ other close advisors. She loathed some of her husband’s inner circle, particularly Thierry Galeran, who had been an advisor of Louis’ father. John of Salisbury wrote that he was ‘a eunuch whom the queen had always hated and mocked’.172

Louis’ military ineptitude was disappointing to Eleanor. He failed to put down a rebellion in Poitiers, and his campaign in Toulouse to conquer territories she claimed through her paternal grandmother Philippa also ended in failure.

There was another strain on the relationship, one which had unforeseen and dreadful consequences. Eleanor’s sister Petronilla appears to have fallen in love with Count Raoul de Vermandois. Although Raoul was much older than Petronilla, blind in one eye, and already married to the sister of King Stephen, Eleanor pushed hard for a divorce so that he and Petronilla could marry. She had no effective power base, and her sister’s marriage to Raoul would feasibly be a way of clawing out influence for herself with Louis and his inner circle.

Catastrophe followed; Raoul was branded an ‘adulterous tyrant’ by Bernard, and the newly-weds were excommunicated by the pope, who placed France under an interdict. In an age where religion was all-pervasive, a papal interdict meant that no religious rites could be performed – no baptisms, no marriages, no burials. It was a dreadful punishment. The pope described the king as ‘a boy who must be instructed’ in how to behave, and Stephen’s brother, Theobald IV of Blois-Champagne, promptly went to war with Louis over their repudiated sister. This war resulted in a massacre at Vitry, where Louis ordered the burning of the church where 1,300 people had sought sanctuary. All were burned alive and the town became known as Vitry-le-Brûlé – Vitry the Burned.173 In a strange accident of history, the town’s Jews, who had not sought sanctuary in the church, survived, and Louis spared them. For some time after the horrific slaughter, this small town in Champagne hosted a largely Jewish population.

Louis’ delayed horror at his own behaviour led to feelings of enormous guilt and grief. He turned once more to his old mentor, Abbot Suger. On 11 June 1144, Suger’s magnum opus, the marvellous cathedral of Saint-Denis, was complete. At the dedication ceremony, Louis gave away Eleanor’s wedding present, the rock crystal vase, to his old friend. Eleanor may well have taken this as a sign that her marriage was in trouble. Suger, though, was delighted and commissioned an inscription for the base of the vase. It read: ‘As a bride, Eleanor gave this vase to King Louis, the king to me, and Suger to the saints … as a tribute of his great love.’174

But despite war, lost battles and family discord, Eleanor’s greatest problem was her inability to conceive. The marriage was under strain, and the chronicler Robert of Torigni tells us that as early as 1143 ‘a dislike had sprung up’ between Eleanor and Louis.175

The failure to produce an heir was a disaster for any medieval queen. Eleanor’s primary purpose was to bear sons to succeed their father. When Bernard of Clairvaux promised her she would conceive if she helped bring about a peace between Louis, the pope and Theobald of Champagne, a desperate Eleanor agreed. Within a year Bernard’s saintly intercession and the queen’s prayers appeared to have worked – or at least partially – when she gave birth to a daughter, and not the wanted son and heir, in 1145. She was named Marie, possibly in tribute to the Virgin Mary, to whom Bernard and Eleanor had prayed for a child.176

At the first Christmas court after Marie’s birth, Louis, in an uncharacteristically ebullient mood fired by religious fervour and the hope of absolution for the slaughter at Vitry, proposed a crusade. A year earlier, in late December 1144, Christendom had watched in horror as the emir Imad ad-Din Zengi (or Nur-ad-Din, meaning light of the religion), Muslim ruler of Aleppo, seized the crusader state of Edessa, based around the city of Şanlıurfa in southern Turkey. An appalled pope and the Christian kings of western Europe demanded ‘infidel’ blood. Now Louis determined to take back the city for Christendom.

It was Bernard, however, who pushed the initiative as the uncharismatic and weak Louis was unable to fire up his nobility for a crusade. Four months later at Easter, in March 1146, the spiritually irresistible Bernard preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay Abbey, appearing before a massive crowd and crying, ‘Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your repentance.’ Louis, inspired as always by his powerful mentor, vowed to take the cross to protect the Holy Land for Christianity.

Eleanor would accompany him. She was the first queen of France or England to venture on crusade.

Why did Eleanor choose to go? The journey, she knew, would be hazardous. She may well have preferred to stay behind in France. Despite later entirely false claims that Eleanor was thirsty for battle, leading a battalion of bare-breasted women into war, dressed as the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea, it is doubtful that Eleanor wanted to travel thousands of miles from home. It would be hot, uncomfortable and dangerous. But she had no choice. As queen, Eleanor’s primary role was to conceive, and now in her mid-twenties and with only a daughter, she could not afford to be parted from Louis for the two or more years he would be away from France.

William of Newburgh lamented Eleanor’s presence on crusade as providing the opportunity to ‘sin’: ‘The king, whose love for his young wife was a jealous one, thought he should not leave her behind and decided to take her to war. Many other nobles did likewise and brought their wives along. And as the wives could not do without their serving women, a whole host of women found their way into that Christian camp where chastity should have reigned. And this was an occasion for sin in our army.’177 Nevertheless, at the great church of Saint-Denis on 11 June 1147, both Eleanor and Louis received the papal blessing and departed overland for Constantinople.

Their journey would irrevocably change her attitude to her marriage, and fix in the popular imagination for evermore the ‘black legend’ of Eleanor of Aquitaine – the image of the queen of France as incestuous, a nymphomaniac, an adulteress, a ‘jezebel’ and a ‘whore’.178 The legend endures; as late as 2002, a French historian accused Eleanor of being ‘a real bitch who could think about nothing but power and sex.’179

VIII

It took Eleanor, Louis and their army of crusaders four months to reach Constantinople. They arrived on 4 October 1147, where they were welcomed by the emperor, Manuel Komnenos, who offered Eleanor and Louis the use of his hunting lodge, the Philopatium.180 They stayed for a week and a half, sightseeing and attending banquets, and departed on 15 October.

Meanwhile the army of Louis’ crusading partner, Conrad III of Germany, had been devastated by attacks from the Seljuk Turks. The German crusaders were overwhelmed by completely unknown warfare – exceptionally swift horses, whose riders quickly deployed bows and arrows – and unable to retaliate effectively as they were encumbered by their heavy armour, typically consisting of a chain-mail hauberk and helmet.

Louis now joined his army to the remains of Conrad’s, and the pair departed along the coast, bound for Ephesus. They arrived on 20 December, where they were warned by Manuel Komnenos’s ambassadors that a huge force of Turks awaited them, and advised them not to continue.

Conrad, who had suffered injuries in the attacks on his army, chose to accompany the ambassadors back to Constantinople. Louis, however, insisted on pressing on, ‘forewarned in vain’, along the coast of Anatolia.181 He and his army were not lucky. They were relentlessly harassed by the Seljuk Turks, the terrain was hostile, supplies were scarce, and they suffered attack after attack. The first was on Christmas Eve. The most severe was a few days later, on 6 January 1148, while they attempted to cross Mount Cadmus. This was an enormous army of thousands of soldiers and pilgrims, reaching up to six miles in length, snaking its way through the Anatolian mountains.182 Louis brought up the rear with his guard. The baggage train and foot soldiers were in the middle; presumably Eleanor was here, the safest place from attack, together with the unarmed pilgrims and the other women. The cavalry were at the front. One of Eleanor’s vassals, Geoffrey of Rancon, led the army with Louis’ maternal uncle, Count Amadeus II of Maurienne. But the different parts of the army, as a result of poor communication and poor leadership, became separated as Geoffrey and Amadeus continued on without waiting. The Turks then ambushed, and they struck at the most vulnerable part of the crusader army – the baggage train. Hundreds fled, and many hurtled down the cliffs to their deaths; the Turks slaughtered those they caught. Louis and his guard rushed to defend the baggage train, but the Turks murdered Louis’ personal guard, forcing him to scramble up a rock and defend himself.

Louis survived, and the remnants of his army gradually came together again. But he was humiliated, and William of Tyre wrote: ‘That day the glorious reputation of the Franks was lost through a misfortune most fatal and disastrous for the Christians; their valour, up to this time formidable to the nations, was crushed to the earth. Henceforth, it was as a mockery in the eyes of those unclean races to whom it had formerly been a terror.’183

Now, however, Louis realised the imperative for discipline, although those whom the majority believed had led them to disaster – Eleanor’s vassal and Louis’ uncle – went unpunished. Louis would not reprimand his own uncle, but all the Poitevins, including the queen, were tarnished by association, and Odo of Deuil wrote that Geoffrey of Rancon ‘earned our everlasting hatred’.184 The small force of about 130 men brought by the Knights Templar were the most effective part of his army, and now Louis ceded control and allowed them to lead.

Supplies were scarce and the army was starving. It was bitterly cold as they picked their way across the mountains in mid-winter. The army limped on. Battered and demoralised, it took them nearly a month to reach Attalia, where they hoped to replenish their supplies. But the town was poor and there was nothing to buy – no horses, little food, no clothes, and certainly no ships to take them to the Latin Kingdom. Louis and Eleanor decided to set sail for Antioch with a small force, leaving the army to travel by land to meet them. Less than half the army they left behind would make it, and most of the pilgrims starved to death or were murdered by the Turks. Thousands died.185

Finally, on 19 March 1148, Eleanor and Louis arrived at the port of Saint-Simeon at Antioch. Here at the court of Eleanor’s paternal uncle, Prince Raymond, they stayed for nearly two weeks, recuperating and planning.186

Raymond was ruler of Antioch by right of his marriage to Constance, daughter of Bohemund II, a marriage facilitated by Fulk, now king of Jerusalem. Raymond was only a few years older than Eleanor, born in 1115. He welcomed his niece and the French with generosity and hospitality. Antioch must have appeared incredibly exotic to the Franks. Prince Raymond served Middle Eastern dishes, including sugar; hot baths and even soap were available.187 Eleanor and Raymond were delighted to see one another and spent hours talking privately. The chronicler William of Tyre describes him as ‘a lord of noble descent … the handsomest of the princes of the earth, a man of charming affability and conversation’.

Raymond was keen to impress Eleanor and Louis, hoping the arrival of a French crusader army would help him increase his power in northern Syria. William of Tyre speculated on Raymond’s motives: ‘he felt a lively hope that with the assistance of the king and his troops he would be able to subjugate the neighbouring cities, namely Aleppo, Shaizar and several others. Nor would this hope have been futile could he have induced the king and his chief men to undertake the work.’188 The plan was self-serving; but it made sense for both Raymond and the French crusaders. Louis’ original intention was, after all, to take back Edessa, which would be made easier by the capture of Aleppo first.189

Louis, however, may have feared for the poor state of his army, ravaged and depleted by the months it had taken them to cross Anatolia. He refused to fight alongside Raymond. William of Tyre wrote that he had changed his mind about taking Edessa, deciding he did not want to delay his visit to the Holy Land any longer; he ‘ardently desired to go to Jerusalem to fulfil his vows’.190 But Eleanor disagreed. Speed was now important; Suger, acting as regent in the royal couple’s absence, was sending alarming reports of an uprising by Louis’ brother, Robert of Dreux, and begged the king to return.

Eleanor’s intense conversations with Raymond may well have included discussion as to who would inherit Aquitaine. As she and Louis had no male heir, it is imaginable that Raymond put his own claim to Eleanor. Eleanor and Louis, fundamentally disagreeing on the direction of the crusade and possibly on the inheritance of Eleanor’s own duchy, had a vicious fight which ended in Eleanor refusing to accompany Louis to Jerusalem, threatening to withdraw her vassals, and asking for a divorce.

It was Eleanor who first told Louis that their marriage was ‘incestuous’ during their ferocious argument in Antioch. John of Salisbury wrote: ‘[W]hen 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. At this the king was deeply moved; and although he loved the queen almost beyond reason he consented to divorce her if his counsellors and the French nobility would allow it.’191 Eleanor, it seems, knew that there had been some problems when they married, but John suggests that Louis did not, and that Eleanor was the first to tell him.

But the sources go further. She was later accused by some contemporary chroniclers of having an adulterous – and incestuous – affair with her uncle Raymond.

These sources are William of Tyre and John of Salisbury. Both were contemporaries, but both wrote about Antioch many years later – John after a period of fifteen years, and William twenty to thirty years later. William was in France when Eleanor and Louis were in Antioch, but he professed to have followed the crusade closely.192 And although John was with the papal court in Tusculum (Frascati) at the time, he was with the royal pair and their entourage when they stopped at Tusculum on their way back to France, and he must have heard the gossip. John wrote that:

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 … He was as it happened the queen’s uncle, and owed the king loyalty, affection and respect for many reasons. But whilst they remained there … the attentions paid by the prince to the queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous conversation with her, aroused the king’s suspicions. These 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.193

William of Tyre claimed that an embittered Raymond was behind Eleanor’s anger towards Louis:

Raymond had conceived the idea that by [Louis’] aid he might be able to enlarge the principality of Antioch … When Raymond found that he could not induce the king to join him, his attitude changed. Frustrated in his ambitious designs, he began to hate the king’s ways; he openly plotted against him and took means to do him injury. He resolved also to deprive him of his wife, either by force or by 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.194

This is a damning portrait of Eleanor. She is parodied as a ‘foolish’ woman, easily influenced to commit adultery with her uncle. Later writers, taking their cue from William and John, believed that the queen’s behaviour had been, at the very least, ‘scandalous’. Gervase of Canterbury told of ‘discord’, and wrote, tantalisingly, that events happened which one should be silent on.195 Richard of Devizes, although he called Eleanor ‘a woman without compare’, went on to say in the margin that ‘Many know what I would that none of us knew. This same queen, during the time of her first husband, was at Jerusalem [sic, Antioch]. Let no one say any more about it. I too know it well. Keep silent.’196

We will never know if Eleanor slept with her handsome, clever and charismatic uncle. We do know, however, that they enjoyed one another’s company immensely, and that their close relationship in Antioch maddened Louis.

The most compelling evidence of marital discord and Eleanor’s ‘bad behaviour’ comes from the unimpeachable Abbot Suger. Suger had obviously heard of problems between Eleanor and Louis, for he wrote from France to Louis in 1149: ‘Concerning the queen your wife, we venture to congratulate you, if we may upon the extent to which you suppress your anger, if there be anger, until with God’s will you return to your own kingdom and see to these matters and others.’197

Louis, meanwhile, urged on by his advisor and Eleanor’s adversary Thierry Galeran, refused Eleanor a divorce.

Louis may have been ready to agree to it, but Galeran persuaded him that to return to France with a failed crusade and no wife would injure his reputation. And so he slipped away from Raymond’s court in the middle of the night, dragging Eleanor away from Antioch and on to Jerusalem. William of Tyre recorded that Louis’ ‘coming had been attended with glory … and his departure was ignominious’.198