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Chapter 24:
The Winter Queen
An eloquent silence settles over the remainder of the Queen's stay in the Holy Land.
No doubt the year she spent in Jerusalem had its interests. All the usual visits to holy sites, the encounters with exotic cultures, the wealth of market life. But the ashes of defeat would have lain bitter in her mouth. Dragged in the king's train to Jerusalem, she had been reminded of her station in the most forceful way.
The only relatively direct suggestion as to what the sojourn must have been like is a legendary account. This has it that Eleanor followed Louis into the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre at its consecration on July 15, 1148, which seems a reasonable assumption.
Suddenly, says the story, the procession stopped. To the horror of everyone, an apparition seemed to spring from the very walls of the building. This terrifying figure was a living ghost, a zombie, fleshless, hollow cheeked, with flashing eyes and resounding voice. Dressed in a hair shirt banded to the body in gyves of steel, an iron band crushing his head, the madman screamed insults at Eleanor, threatening her because of her criminal intercourse with Raymond and her betrayal with Saracen emirs. The account has it that the queen raised a trembling hand to a livid forehead. The king of France half plucked his sword from its sheath, while the royal bodyguard of knights swayed towards the fiend, irresolute. This hesitation was caused by the apparition's intermingled words of love: he called the queen "my daughter", and the king "my cousin." All was revealed. The wild man was in fact Eleanor's father, William, who had become a voluntary recluse in the basilica, and who had been hunted from his cave within th temple by the news of the failure of the crusade. Having chastised his daughter, the hermit then ran off into the mists of legend, to seek his death in the sun baked deserts of Spain.1
Such speculation has no historical basis: it is at best merely suggestive of the emotional state of the royal couple during this long, dark period. It is vaguely possible that the royal entourage was confronted by a hermit of the type who could have lurked within the labyrinthine enclosure of the Sepulchre. Such raving soothsayers appear to have been not uncommon in this age.
Whether the account is entirely imaginary or based on some incident, the Queen was to overcome her present parlous state. Throughout a life of many defeats, Eleanor always exhibited the patience of a lioness stalking its prey, much more so than any of her husbands or her children. She knew her strengths and her weaknesses more with each year, and she was prepared to wait a year, a decade, a lifetime if need be in order to strike at the right moment.
Eleanor was left behind while Louis departed from Jerusalem with the army of Outremer to attack the city of Damascus. She was thus spared the rigours of a pointless and fruitless military venture which has few parallels in military history for sheer ineptitude.
The whole purpose of the Crusade had been to retake Edessa. Instead, Queen Melisende persuaded Louis and the Emperor, who had preceded him to Jerusalem, to attack the Syrian city of Damascus, the allies of her former husband.
The mighty army of the Franks destroyed itself outside the walls of Damascus by choosing to attack that great city via a vast entanglement of orchards worthy of a magic thorny forest in the tales of Arthur's knights.
In the Easter of the following year, the couple and their suites celebrated the most important feast in the Christian calendar together in Jerusalem. Shortly afterwards, they went down to the port of Acre where, significantly, they took ship separately on two galleasses, the two masted, oared ships that lurched uncomfortably across the central sea.
The Crusade was over, but not the drama and adventure that Eleanor seemed to attract simply by existing.
As the ships passed the Peloponnese in the Aegean Sea, Eleanor's ship was attacked by a ship belonging to the Byzantine emperor Manuel. The Emperor was now at war with Roger of Sicily, one of whose ships Louis had just then boarded, in a most bizarre fateful twist. Louis escaped capture by having the Greek flag run up on this ship, but his own ship with all his baggage, and Eleanor's ship with all the women aboard, were carried off by the Greeks. The Sicilians - were they allies or enemies of the French at this point? - then gave hot pursuit, rescuing the queen and the king's effects. But the sea carried the queen and the king apart, so that for two months they wandered separately through the Greek Islands.
Most bizarre of all, perhaps, was that the abstinent king Louis was sick for the loss of his queen, and she was bearing his child in her womb.
Presumably, the child had been conceived during a time of reconciliation in Jerusalem,
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