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towards the Eastern frontier.
According to Odo of Deuil, an eyewitness, Louis had prepared himself for the departure by visiting a leper colony, a sign of abject humility and submission to the will of the Lord.
Eleanor, with the king's mother Adela, had gone ahead from the royal residence in Paris to St Denis on its outskirts. There the army was to be farewelled by the Pope, Eugenius III, and the formidable Abbot Suger, who was to be viceroy in the absence of the crown.
The king took up the sacred standard of France, the oriflamme, from the altar, and was presented with his pilgrim's wallet by the Pope. Then he withdrew into the monastery for private spiritual preparation.
Eleanor and the Queen Mother were left to their own devices in the crowds outside, until they all but collapsed with the heat and the emotion involved in such a departure. While they endured it all, the king dined inside the monastery with the monks.1
For the journey itself, Eleanor and her ladies were better prepared.
Despite the forbidding of falcons and hounds, rich clothes and troubadours, she managed to make sure her army was a cavalacade of riches as it passed over the eastern boundary of the Frankish lands. The ladies had baths drawn for them each evening, and were entertained by the singing of their troubadours. The great assembly of the army had taken place at Metz on the Rhine: somehow, despite the disapproval of her husband, not to mention Bernard and Suger, Eleanor arranged for vast supplies of baggage to be shipped over the barrier of the Rhine.
And in spite of the burden of clothing, tents, luxury goods and camp followers, the army kept up a brisk pace, day after day covering 30 kilometres or more. No doubt this was partly due to the grumbling, headmasterly figure of Louis, who drove the train from behind, like an over eager shepherd. He was eager to catch up with the army of Conrad, the German emperor, who had started well before him. His discipline was severe on everyone but his wife: miscreants who ravished or stole were deprived of noses and ears, and each day's journey began with a formal religious celebration. Meanwhile, Eleanor continued to enact the role of the Amazon queen, surrounded by an admiring throng of landless young knights, the troubadours whose duty and pleasure it was to sing of the beauty and the charms of their ladies, of whom Eleanor was the chief.
The tableau is bizarre: Louis, the clumsy husband well out of it in the dust at the rear: Eleanor, golden, triumphant, and shining in the comfort of the world's eye at the head of the expedition.
The Goddess of Love seemed to shine her lantern over the vast array, as it proceeded with gaiety through the warm plains bordering the Danube, and on to the great city.
It was at Ratisbon that Eleanor had her first direct encounter with the inhabitants of Constantinople. The current ruler was Manuel Comnenus, and it was to the Danube that he despatched his ambassadors.
Manuel, son of Alexius, shared his father's distrust of the Latins, and had seen his brother John humiliated by Raymond during the takeover of Antioch. The Germans who had preceded the Franks had as usual behaved like a locust army, stripping the countryside of its provender. He had no reason to love Louis or his Queen.
Thus, he treated the crusaders with refined courtesy during their stay, while at the same time letting them become slowly aware that he despised the Franks. His dependants closed the doors of their citadels as the Franks passed, but allowed them to buy provisions - at vastly inflated prices - from baskets let down over the walls.
When they arrived at Constantinople on October 4, the voyagers were forced to camp without the city, at the very end of the Golden Horn, in a site where they could see the splendours of copper dome and marbled palace, the beehive throng of the trading centre of the world, but were only admitted entry in small diplomatic parties.
Gifts of the exotic wonders of the East were brought to Louis and Eleanor, and an invitation for them to meet the emperor at the imperial palace.
According to Louis' chaplain, the emperor was struck with the true simplicity and earnestness of Louis, and so he permitted his fellow ruler and his suite to be lodged in the second palace, the Blachernae.
While Louis busied himself with supplying the insatiable demands of his army, Eleanor was free to undergo a transformation.
According to Kelly:
"It opened her eyes to vast, lofty, undreamed of possibilities for majesty..."2
Here, at the hub of the world, Eleanor had her first taste of delicacies such as caviar, and ate meals in which there was no shortage of sauces made from sugar, pepper and cinnamon. Unfamiliar aids to eating were presented to them, such as wine glasses and forks. Days were filled with banquets, tours of palaces and churches, and hunts in which the coursers were tame leopards. Bazaars were filled with silks, oils, perfumes, carpets and furs from China, India, Arabia, Persia and Russia.3
In all her expeditions, the French Queen was conducted by the empress Irene - actually a warlike German whose original name was Bertha of Sulzbach.
She showed Eleanor the possibilities of eastern life. Not only scientific medicine, plumbing, drainage, central heating, but also cosmetics and exotic clothes such as the turban, which Eleanor may have brought back to France as one of the most significant fashion changes of the epoch. As well, she saw those tall pointed hats and pointed shoes which were to set the fashion for centuries to come.4.
There was simply nothing in northern Europe to equal the palaces which Eleanor experienced. In the Blachernae there were up to three hundred rooms, and more than twenty chapels, all decorated in glittering gold and mosaics, with jewelled chandeliers and magnificent tapestries. Within the immense palace grounds were stocks of animals kept for the hunt.
The chroniclers agree that the chief crusaders were bewildered by the splendour.
Perhaps Eleanor's eyes rested most avidly on the personal splendour of the emperor and his somewhat frumpy empress. She noted that they were surrounded by ranks of courtiers and eunuchs as numberless as the seraphim, flunkeys who did not push to get the scraps from the table, or wipe their noses on their fingers, or dip their fingers in the sauce.
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