Eleanor of Aquitaine Read online

  At home again, his restlessness presumably purged during his eighteen months abroad, William settled down to write what would become known as the first troubadour poetry, his love poems, and those of the men and women he inspired, bringing to perfection the type of lyric that has continued in Western culture down to the present time. His poetic vision did not, however, spring full-blown from a vacuum. Although some of the influences remain a matter of conjecture, they would logically include the Latin verse of the clerics, an oriental influence from his encounters with Moors and Saracens, the cadences of Church music, and the native popular songs of wandering goliards, many of them unfrocked priests and runaway students who sang of love in Latin rhymes. Nor were the ethereal themes of courtly love, l’amour courtois, full-fledged in William’s lyrics. Although he delighted in the beauty of women and sang the praises of love, no secularized Virgin Marys appear in his cansos. The duke’s view of women is wholly and undisguisedly carnal, the outcome of the lover’s quest physical rather than platonic. The significant departure in his sensuous poems was the egalitarian idea that a man could not demand a woman’s love; she must freely consent to bestow it. The duke was a down-to-earth man whose passionate pursuit of a lady ended happily with “my hands beneath her cloak.”

  Over the course of the next thirteen years William’s court became the center of European culture, and not the least of its attractions was the joyous song maker himself. During those years, too, the duke’s family grew rapidly. Although Philippa’s dream of ruling Toulouse was temporarily shattered, she dutifully fulfilled the requirements of medieval womanhood by producing, after young William, five daughters and then, a last child, another son. She seems to have successfully ignored her husband’s amorous exploits, which were common knowledge, since he did not hesitate to celebrate them in verse. So widespread became the scandals that they found their way into the contemporary chronicles. William of Malmesbury related with relish that the duke erected “near the castle of Niort, certain buildings after the form of a little monastery, and used to talk idly about placing therein an abbey of prostitutes, naming several of the most abandoned courtesans, one as abbess, another as prioress; and declaring that he would fill up the rest of the offices in like manner.”

  This tale sounds very much like one of William’s sly digs toward Philippa, because over the years, and to the duke’s undisguised dismay, his wife had grown devoutly religious. She had become a convert to the teachings of a Breton reformer, Robert d‘Arbrissel, who preached, among other heresies, the superiority of women. In 1099, d’Arbrissel and his followers settled at Fontevrault in the forest near the border of Anjou and built an abbey dedicated to the Virgin Mary. His abbey, however, was unique, because Fontevrault housed both monks and nuns—under the rule of an abbess. Robert d‘Arbrissel believed that women were better administrators than men on account of their organizational experience gained in raising families and managing households, a view of feminine supremacy bound to attract Philippa. Her passionate devotion to d’Arbrissel and his ideas annoyed William, who, despite his obession with women, was not quite prepared to concede their supremacy. He objected to the great amount of time that his wife gave to Fontevrault and to the influence that d’Arbrissel and other ecclesiastics wielded over her, but his frank boredom with her as a wife was compounded by the fact that, now in his early forties, he had reached the dangerous age when men are apt to indulge in foolishness.

  By this time, the Church heartily disapproved of William, both his affairs with women and the worldliness of his court, and he found himself constantly at odds with them over many matters. In 1114, the bishop of Poitiers had threatened to excommunicate William over an alleged infringement of the Church’s tax privileges. William, furious, had stormed into the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre with sword drawn just as the prelate was about to pronounce the anathema. Flinging himself upon Bishop Peter and seizing him by the neck, he shouted, “I will kill you if you do not absolve me!” The startled bishop pretended to comply with absolution, but when at last William released him, he calmly finished reading out the excommunication. Then he thrust forward his neck and said meekly, “Strike, then. Go ahead, strike.” Hesitating for a moment, the duke sheathed his sword and replied with one of the tart remarks for which he was famous. “Oh, no.” he retorted. “I don’t love you enough to send you to paradise.”

  The following year William’s quarrels with the Church escalated after an incident that astonished even the blasé Aquitainians. Under the pretext of keeping Poitou obedient, he had fallen into the habit of making extensive journeys around the county; Philippa, once again in control of Toulouse, rarely accompanied him. On one of these trips he made the acquaintance of a viscountess with the provocative name of Dangereuse, the wife of Viscount Aimery of Châtellerault. This most immoderate lady formed an exuberant attachment for William who, to understate the matter, reciprocated. Later that year while Philippa was in Toulouse, William cemented his relationship with the beautiful viscountess by setting off at a gallop along the Clain River road to Châtellerault, where, the story goes, he snatched the faintly protesting lady from her bedchamber and carried her back to Poitiers.

  It is unlikely that the eager viscountess protested vehemently, if at all, for she seemed quite prepared to abandon husband and children for the dashing duke. At home, William installed her in his new keep, known as the Maubergeonne Tower, which he had recently added to the ducal palace, and before long the amused Poitevins were calling his mistress La Maubergeonne. There was no question of hiding Dangereuse, nor did the lovers apparently practice discretion. Therefore, when Philippa returned from Toulouse and discovered a rival living in her own palace, her patience was sorely tried. Eyes blazing, she appealed first to her friends at court, then to the Church. With little trouble she was able to persuade the papal legate. Giraud, to speak to her husband about his imprudent behavior. But William replied jokingly to the legate, who happened to be as bald as an egg, “Curls will grow on your pate before I shall part with the viscountess.” Although William’s sentence of excommunication was renewed, he failed to take the matter seriously and, to Philippa’s disgust, had a portrait of Dangereuse painted on his shield.

  By 1116, Philippa could no longer tolerate the situation. She had wept bitterly over her husband’s affair with the elegant viscountess, a woman younger and prettier than herself. For years she had been obliged to put up with his infidelities, with songs and poems of his sexual conquests, with his blithely pawning her heritage to Bertrand so that he could play the crusading hero at her expense. She had borne him seven children and managed his lands with admirable efficiency, and now, in repayment, he had mortified her by bringing a strumpet into her palace. Her heart full of rancor, gathering the remains of her shredded pride, Philippa withdrew from a situation at once ridiculous and demeaning by retreating to the Abbey of Fontevrault. William did not attempt to stop her.

  Since Fontevrault’s beginnings some twenty years earlier, this remarkable religious institution had become a popular mecca for aristocratic women. If its abbesses were widows plucked from the nobility, they were no less high-born than the women who came there as novices or those who merely sought a restful retreat after an active career as wife and mother. Among the women living there when Philippa arrived was, ironically, William’s first wife, Ermengarde, who vacillated between the secular and the religious throughout her life. A benefactress of the Abbey of Clairvaux, she also built the monastery of Buzay near Nantes and would end her life as a nun. She and Philippa, it is said, became close friends. But despite Philippa’s great dedication to the abbey and to the ideal of feminine superiority on which it was based, she was able to find little contentment living there as a rejected wife. Full of resentment and anger, she could not accept the fact that William had treated her shamefully by tossing her aside for a concubine. She soon disappeared from history, the records stating only that she died on November 28, 1118, whether from illness or wretchedness there is no way of knowing.
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  Little is known, too, about the viscountess of Chatellerault, except for the obvious inference: She was a woman who did as she pleased and who cared little for public opinion. At the time of her “abduction,” Dangereuse had been married for about seven years and had borne three children: Aenor, Hugh, and Ralph. While her husband could not have been pleased about being openly cuckolded, nonetheless the fact remained that the incorrigible William was his liege lord, and had Viscount Aimery objected strongly—for even in Aquitaine wife stealing was a fauxpas—there was really little that he could do to alter the situation. As time passed, it became clear to all that La Maubergeonne had come to stay, and her presence at court became more or less taken for granted.

  Although Dangereuse could never become the official duchess of Aquitaine, she determined that her relationship with William be recognized in some manner. After several years, she proposed the ingenious scheme of marrying his eldest son, William, to her daughter, Aenor; if she could not be duchess, then her daughter would hold that title in her stead. And it is a tribute to her perseverance that the duke finally agreed. The marriage did not take place without opposition, however, one of the main objectors being young William himself. When Dangereuse first arrived at court, he was barely sixteen, a strapping lad who towered over his father. He had a prodigious appetite—it was later claimed that he ate enough for eight men—and already showed signs of a stubborn, quarrelsome nature. Although he had inherited his father’s charming manner, the resemblance between father and son ended there. One chronicler contended that the boy, provoked beyond endurance by the injury that his father’s liaison had done to his mother, revolted in a seven-year struggle that ended only with his capture by the duke. While the records flatly contradict this theory, nonetheless it must be concluded that young William did not adapt to the changes in his family life without great difficulty. Although the idea of marrying the daughter of his father’s mistress may have been distasteful to him, the will of La Maubergeonne finally prevailed, and the marriage took place in 1121.

  In contrast to her colorful mother, Aenor appears to have been a rather timid person who lacked the smallest semblance of forcefulness. Puppetlike, she moved through life doing the things expected of her and leaving behind no trace of an interesting or even distinct personality. Presumably her mousy character had been influenced by the unorthodox events of her early life: her abandonment as a child when her mother suddenly disappeared one day as well as the resulting stigma of being the daughter of a notorious adulteress. Perhaps Dangereuse believed that she was making up for Aenor’s early deprivation by arranging a brilliant marriage, for undeniably the position into which she finagled Aenor was highly desirable; but on the other hand, there is no evidence that it brought the girl happiness. No more than fourteen and possibly younger, Aenor moved into the Poitevin court under her mother’s watchful eye and set about the difficult task of trying to please a husband who must have regarded her with something less than enthusiasm. Careful to give no offense, she soon realized that her main obligation, the route by which she might gain favor, was to provide her awesome father-in-law with grandchildren. Luckily, she became pregnant within a few months.

  There is a story that, a few days before Eleanor’s birth, a pilgrim approached her parents with the mysterious prophecy “From you will come nothing good”; but this legend grew up afterward, and it is customary to remember prophetic statements once time has already demonstrated the course of events. Unfortunately, few details are available about Eleanor’s entry into the world. She was born either in Poitiers or at the castle of Belin near Bordeaux in the year 1122, but the month and day have not survived. She was named after her mother, “alia-Aenor” meaning “the other Aenor,” but as William and his wife had passionately desired a son, their feelings about her must have been mixed. Since they could not have foreseen that one day this daughter, outshining all the Williams preceding her, would change the history of her time, they felt mildly disappointed. A year or two later Aenor gave birth to a second child, and once more it was a girl, Aelith, but always to be known as Petronilla. Soon afterward she again became pregnant, and this time she finally had the son she had wanted so desperately. With the birth of William Aigret, the duchy was assured of an heir.

  Eleanor was a remarkably robust child, lively, boisterous, and headstrong. From the beginning, she radiated good health and intelligence, as well as a zest for life reminiscent of the old duke’s, but like both her grandfather and Dangereuse, she possessed a certain restlessness, a lack of discipline that made it difficult for her to tolerate restrictions, an impatience that did not allow her to suffer boredom easily. Modesty did not come naturally to her; she seemed to have a knack for drawing attention to herself, a characteristic that went largely unnoticed in a family of spirited exhibitionists. No one took the trouble to put her in her place.

  She could hardly help knowing that she was not ordinary. Her grandfather called himself “Duke of the Entire Monarchy of the Aquitainians,” and her family tree sagged under the titled weight of counts, dukes, and conquerors. The ancestral palace at Poitiers was already many centuries old. In Merovingian times it had served as the seat of justice, and in the tenth century Duke William V remodeled it and began construction of the Great Hall. (Today, after many additions, some of them made by Eleanor herself, her ancestral home still stands in Poitiers and still serves as the Palace of justice.) During the long sunny days of her childhood Eleanor and Petronilla must have romped together in the palace garden. At midday the shadowy passageways inside the castle might be gray and dank, but outside, the sun’s rays beat down vertically from a steel-white sky and bounced off the helmets of the soldiers pacing the ramparts. In the garden she could have crawled beneath the leafy branches of trees drooping heavily with pears, peaches, lemons, pomegranates, and quince, or listened to the grasshoppers sawing harmoniously in the herb beds, where the hot air hung heavily with the smells of horehound, wild myrrh, and coriander.

  In the evenings there would be entertainment in the Great Hall, and it is not difficult to conjure an image of Eleanor mesmerized by jongleur and storyteller. The hall would be decorated with flowers, the floors strewn with fresh green rushes; the ladies in their brightly colored gowns with long sleeves trailing on the ground and mantles fastened at the breast with ornate pins would wear golden bands around their hair or braids plaited with embroidered ribbons. As the air quivered with the clamor of horns and bells, there would come a procession of other-worldly creatures who could not have helped but delight the young Eleanor: acrobats jumping and twisting, marionettes dancing, jugglers tossing balls and silvery knives high into the air. Later would come the storytellers casting spells with their tales of Arthur and Charlemagne and Roland, of fair Helen and weeping Dido, of Julius Ceasar, who was so brave that he crossed the sea without invoking the name of Christ. Far into the night past matins the candles sputtered hot wax and the fire in the great hearth cast amber shadows on the jongleurs, who sang the Troubadour’s verses about noble ladies graciously consenting to give their love to “gentle men.” No lovesick maidens were these women but vigorous, sensual beings who freely gave and took pleasure.

  Eleanor was never happier than when sitting in the Great Hall, but of course the verses were not always intelligible to her. One of her grandfather’s most popular poems, a ribald tale that later formed the basis for one of Boccaccio’s Decameron stories, told of a young man’s amorous adventures while walking through the Auvergne disguised as a pilgrim. The narrator, whom one can imagine to have been William himself, stops at a castle where he meets Dame Ann and Lady Eleanor, two sisters whose husbands happen to be away. Slyly pretending to be mute, he speaks gibberish to the sisters, who decide to offer him a meal while they carefully look him over and decide if he might be shamming. After they have fed him, they further test the young man’s dumbness, for if he is truly mute, “what we do will ne’er be told by him.” Stripping their guest naked, they bring out a ferocious red cat with long
whiskers and cruel claws, which they drag along his back. “With the anguish I turn pale,” moans the narrator, but despite the dozens of wounds on his back he manages to remain silent.

  “Sister,” says the delighted Dame Ann, “he’s mute indeed. I think we may prepare ourselves for sport and play.” After preparing a hot bath for their guest, Ann and Eleanor are ready for serious business. Describing a typical male fantasy, the narrator tells us that he and the randy sisters go to bed for eight days, an experience that leaves him somewhat the worse for wear: How much I tupped them you shall hear:

  A hundred eighty-eight times or near,

  So that I almost stripped my gear

  And broke my equipment;

  I could never list the ills I got—

  Too big a shipment.

  Presiding over the merriment at the ducal palace was the old troubadour himself, who no longer roamed the countryside acting out his erotic fantasies, or if he did, the chroniclers did not consider his wenching scandalous enough to record. Then in his fifties, he was forced by old age to settle down and worry about the state of his soul. After Philippa’s death, his estrangement from the Church had begun, evidently, to weigh heavily enough that he made concessions in order to have the ban of excommunication lifted. In 1119, he had joined King Alfonso I of Aragon in a Crusade against the Almoravide Moors, but whether he undertook this campaign out of religious zeal or for more mundane reasons is debatable. A likely explanation is that his long-discarded first wife, Ermengarde, seemed determined to make trouble for him. At Fontevrault she had grown intimate with Philippa, and it is safe to assume that the conversations between the two cast-off ex-wives frequently focused, in the most uncomplimentary way, on the man they had in common and on his new mistress. Full of sympathy for Philippa’s situation, Ermengarde took upon herself the task of avenging her unhappy friend. Philippa’s death brought her storming down from the north of Poitou with the remarkable demand that she be reinstated as duchess of Aquitaine. After twenty-eight years of separation, it seems unlikely that Ermengarde actually wished to resume living with William. Clearly, however, she wished to harass the duke, as well as the viscountess of Châtellerault. In October 1119, she made an unannounced appearance at a council being held by Pope Calixtus II at Reims, petitioning the pope to personally excommunicate William and oust Dangereuse so that she, Ermengarde, might resume her rightful place. Although the pope declined to accommodate her, the reappearance of this alarming specter must have made William nervous, and at that juncture Moorish Spain must have seemed an infinitely more desirable place than Aquitaine, where there was always the possibility of an encounter with the rampaging Ermengarde.