Eleanor of Aquitaine by Marion Meade Read Free Book Online Page A

wish. In the sixth century, according to legend. Queen Radegonde had fled the Merovingian kingdom of the Franks, her brutal and licentious husband Clothaire in hot pursuit, and hidden herself in a newly sown cornfield, clutching her jewels and her two women companions. By God’s mercy, the corn immediately sprang up around them, the tall stalks hiding Radegonde only minutes before Clothaire came riding by. The learned queen was consecrated as a nun and later came to Poitiers, where she established the convent of Sainte-Croix. It was there that she burned with Platonic love for the Italian poet-priest Fortunatus, “the delight of my soul,” and there that she served him exquisite meals on dishes of crystal and silver. From the lives of these women Eleanor, as a small child, developed attitudes and feelings that she was never able wholly to escape: that a woman need not accept the fate men might decree, that she could take her life into her own hands and shape it to suit her heart’s desire.
    Meanwhile, Eleanor’s father seemed to have paid scant attention to his daughter’s development, since he was constantly embroiled ,in troubles so all-consuming that he could think of little else. In his few years as duke, he had acquired the reputation of being a hothead. Always quick to provoke a fight, he had grown increasingly obstinate after the deaths of his wife and son. In 1130, for instance, when the Chair of Peter was being claimed by two popes, he brought down a host of difficulties upon his own head by enthusiastically supporting the antipope, a cardinal who called himself Anacletus II. The fact that an important lord like the duke of Aquitaine would fail to support Innocent II, who occupied the Holy See, was serious enough to aggravate the schism in the Church at that time and bring the renowned Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, sallying from his cloister to deal with this threat to “God’s business.”
    No churchman of the day was more admired than Bernard. Unquestionably the most powerful single individual of the twelfth century, a maker of popes, a chastiser of kings, who listened to his advice and sometimes followed it, he had a gift for oratory that won him the name Doctor Mellifluus, “the honey-sweet doctor,” but his contemporaries claimed that the sight of him was sufficient to persuade audiences even before he opened his lips. In 1115, the twenty-five-year-old Bernard had taken thirteen Cistercian monks and settled in a wooded place in Champagne called Valley of the Wormwood, where, emphasizing poverty and manual labor, they built the Abbey of Clairvaux while sleeping on the ground and existing on coarse barley bread and boiled beech leaves. Not surprisingly, he nurtured a grim disapproval for the black-robed monks of Cluny and deplored the pernicious influence of their gilded cathedrals and stained-glass windows. Regarded as a saint during his lifetime and canonized after his death, Bernard utterly rejected the world in favor of the austerity and silence of the cloister, but, ironically, there was no monk who lived more frequently and for longer periods outside his abbey. When he learned that Duke William of Aquitaine supported the antipope, he hurried to Poitiers for the purpose of reasoning with the duke and bringing him into the camp of Innocent II. Meeting at the Abbey of Montierneuf, the two men discussed the matter for an entire week, after which time the duke, apparently moved by Bernard’s charismatic personality and his formidable powers of persuasion, expressed willingness to break with Anacletus.
    Yet scarcely had Bernard left Poitiers before William resumed his militant partisanship of the antipope. In fact, he raced willy-nilly ahead and turned with even greater fury against the supporters of Innocent: The altar stone on which Bernard had said Mass was smashed, and William personally drove from Poitiers every ecclesiastic who supported Innocent and then proceeded to fill the offices with his own