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
Whether or not Louis believed that Eleanor had committed adultery, there were evidently some in his entourage ready to accuse the queen. It is probable that she and Raymond spoke together in the language of the southern Aquitaine, the langue d’oc (oc meaning ‘yes’) or Provençal. It probably sounded similar to modern Italian, and was unfathomable to most northerners, who spoke the completely different dialect of langue d’oȉl. Although Eleanor spoke