|
In defence of Eleanor it should be stated loudly and clearly: all the Crusades were bungled.
Her pilgrimage was no worse - nor indeed, any better - than the others. And for much of the time, the fault for particular details should not be laid at her doorstep, but rather, those of her military chiefs and her husband, who was personally brave but displayed all the practical military insight of a child playing at tin soldiers in a nursery.
In the judgment of William of Tyre, the Crusade marked the effective ebb tide of the kingdom. Within less than half a century, Jerusalem itself was lost, forever, and all that the Crusaders had wrought stood on the edge of its final disintegration.
"From this time, the conditions of the Latins in the East became visibly worse...(The Moslems) no longer feared the Christian forces and did not hesitate to attack them with unwonted vigour."6
As for Raymond, he died in a fruitless battle. The failure of the Second Crusade opened the floodgates to the Arab reconquest, and he was amongst the first to fall.
In 1149, Nurredin invaded the princedom. Raymond led his small army to give battle at the Walled Fountain on June 29.
When most of his men fled from the overwhelming odds, Raymond stood to the last and "...was slain by the stroke of a sword in the midst of the slaughter he had wrought."7
Thus he died as only a preux chevalier could, in the tradition of Roland and Arthur, fighting to the last.
The Turks disfigured his corpse, cutting off his head and his right arm.
The remnant of his body was buried in the same church where he had married his princess in order to secure his rights to the kingdom.
1. Aziz, The Palestine of the Crusaders, p.240-2. William was of course long dead by this time: he had died in 1137.
2. Seward, Eleanor, p.53.
3. Kelly, Eleanor, p.91.
4. John of Salisbury, Memoirs, p.60.
5. Roger de Hoveden I, p.250.
6. WoT II, p.196.
7. Ibid., p.198.
|
|