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suggestion that the queen had slept with an infidel boy slave, and even Saladin himself, who was thirteen at the time and not within a week's march of Antioch.19
Nevertheless, even Louis himself at the time clearly believed that there was an unhealthy closeness between Eleanor and Raymond that had developed during their ten day stay. Louis was himself not free of the guilt of this coolness. He and his entourage had by this time hardened into suspicion of the Queen's advice, the king bearing in his mind the ghosts of the countless dead on the slopes of the mountains near Attalia.
Eleanor was shut out of his councils by men such as the monk Odo of Deuil, who camped like a mastiff outside his master's door.20
Eleanor was thus forced, both by frustration and her own inclination, into the party of Raymond.
Was she not entitled, both as queen and as the largest contributor of men and material to the journey, to join in council?
Eleanor compounded the situation by defending Raymond's request long and passionately in public. The king responded by announcing he would leave immediately, and reminding Eleanor that her duty as a wife was to accompany him. She replied that she intended to stay, and that as his fourth cousin, she wanted the marriage annulled on grounds of consanguinity: she may have even flung the ribald insult at Louis that he wasn't worth a bad pear.
One of Eleanor's enemies was the Templar Thierry Galeran, whom she had mocked on account of his sexual dysfunction (he was a eunuch). He advised the king to force her to leave Antioch. 21
Louis' men therefore broke into the Queen's rooms in the middle of the following night, and dragged her off to his apartments.
The disconsolate pair departed under cover of darkness, plans for divorce ripe in both their minds. Louis had written to Suger, whose sage advice was to keep the matter a secret to himself (one presumes the army had not noticed the unusual midnight events!) until the king's return to France, when proceedings might go on in a calmer light.22
The pilgrimage had still a year to run: the royal marriage was over.
1. Chronicles of the Crusades, p.132. William et.al., St Bernard, p.119.
2. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, p.55.
3. Seward, Eleanor of Aquitaine, p.44-5.
4. Ibid.
5. Odo of Deuil,De Profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem V. G. Berry Norton (trans.), New York, 1948, p.65.
6. WoT I p.173.
7. Ibid., p.174.
8. Kelly, Eleanor, p.63; De Profectione, p.109
9. WoT I, p.177.
10. Kelly, p.64.
11. De Profectione, pp.116-8.
12. WoT I, p.178.
13. Kelly, p.67.
14. Seward, p.48.
15. Ibid., p.48-9.
16. WoT I, p.179.
17. Ibid.,180.
18. Ibid., 180-81.
19. Seward, p.50.
20. Kelly, p.76.
21. John of Salisbury, Memoirs of the Papal Court M. Chibnall (trans.), Nelson, London, 1962, p.53.
22. Seward, p.51. John, Memoirs, p.53.
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