Jerusalem: The Biography

Prince Raymond of Antioch urged Louis to help him to capture Aleppo but Louis was determined to make his pilgrimage to Jerusalem first. The worldly Raymond was Eleanor’s uncle and ‘the handsomest of princes’. After the miserable journey, Eleanor ‘disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband’, according to William of Tyre. Her husband was puppyishly besotted with her, but regarded sex, even in marriage, as indulgent. No wonder Eleanor called him ‘more monk than man’. Yet Eleanor, acutely intelligent, dark-haired, dark-eyed and curvaceous, was the richest heiress in Europe, brought up at the sensual Aquitanian court. Priestly chroniclers claimed that the blood of sin coursed through her veins because her grandfather was William the Troubadour, a promiscuous warrior-poet, while her grandmother on the other side was her grandfather’s mistress, nicknamed La Dangereuse. This came about because the Troubadour had facilitated his access to La Dangereuse by marrying her daughter to his son.

Whether Eleanor and Raymond committed adultery or not, their behaviour was provocative enough to humiliate the husband and launch an international scandal. The King of France solved his marital problem by kidnapping Eleanor and heading off to join the German king who had arrived in Jerusalem. When Louis and Eleanor approached the city, ‘all the clergy and people went out to meet him’ and escort him to the Sepulchre ‘to the accompaniment of hymns and chants’. The French couple stayed along with Conrad in the Temple of Solomon, but Eleanor must have been carefully watched by the French courtiers. She was stranded there for months.

On 24 June 1148, Melisende and her son Baldwin III called a council at Acre that approved the target of the Crusade: Damascus. The city had recently been Jerusalem’s ally, but it was still a sensible target because it would only be a matter of time before it fell to Nur al-Din. On 23 July, the kings of Jerusalem, France and Germany fought their way into the orchards on the west side of Damascus but two days later mysteriously moved camp to the east. Four days after that, the Crusade fell apart and the three kings ignominiously retreated.

Unur, Atabeg of Damascus, may have bribed the Jerusalemite barons, convincing them that the Western Crusaders wanted the prize for themselves. Such duplicitous venality was all too credible but, more likely, the Crusaders simply learned that Nur al-Din, Zangi’s son, was advancing with a relief army. Now Jerusalem wilted under the strain of this disaster. Conrad sailed home; Louis, bathing in ascetic penitence, stayed to celebrate Easter in the Holy City. They could not leave fast enough for Eleanor: the marriage was annulled on their return.^*

⁶

When they had gone, Queen Melisende celebrated her greatest triumph and suffered her greatest humiliation. On 15 July 1149, she and her son reconsecrated their new Church of the Holy Sepulchre, then – and now – the masterpiece and dazzling holy stage-set of Crusader Jerusalem. The architects, finding a cluttered labyrinth of chapels and shrines in the complex built in 1048 and restored in 1119, solved this challenge with astonishing boldness. They roofed over the compound with a soaring rotunda and united all its sites in one magnificent Romanesque building, expanding into the old Holy Garden in the east. They opened up the eastern wall of the Rotunda to add chapels and a huge ambulatory. On the site of Constantine’s Basilica, they placed a large cloister. They kept the 1048 southern entrance, creating a Romanesque façade with two portals (one is now bricked up) topped with sculpted lintels (now in the Rockefeller Museum). The peerless carvings of the staircase leading up to the Chapel of the Hill of Calvary are perhaps the most exquisite of all Crusader art.

Melisende’s son resented her and demanded his full powers. Now twenty years old and acclaimed for his brains and flaxen-haired brawn, Baldwin III was said to be the perfect Frankish king – with a few vices. He was also known as a gambler and seducer of married women. But a northern crisis showed that Jerusalem needed an active warrior-king in the saddle: Zangi’s son, Nur al-Din, defeated the Antiochenes and killed Eleanor’s uncle Raymond.

Baldwin raced northwards in time to save Antioch but when he returned his mother Melisende, now forty-seven, resisted his demand that he be crowned at Easter. The king decided to fight.

MOTHER VERSUS SON: MELISENDE VERSUS BALDWIN III