Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen Read Online Free

un-walled and unpaved, and many of the ruins of the old Roman city were still standing. Its heart was the walled Ile Saint Louis in the middle of the river Seine, where three centuries before the inhabitants had taken refuge from the Vikings, and which was dominated by the palaces of the king (the cité palace) and of the bishop (where Notre Dame now stands). On the right bank the bridge over the Seine was defended by the Grand Châtelet (great castle) and on the left by the Petit Châtelet (little castle). On the left bank stood the ancient Roman palace of the Thermae (baths), a vast rambling edifice whose massive but crumbling masonry had been patched up over the centuries by Merovingians, Carolingians and Capetians in their turn, like so many of the city’s buildings. On the north bank a growing community of tradesmen, merchants, artisans and money changers had established itself in a semi-rural area covered by vines, orchards, market gardens and even small farms. Paris was far from being the glorious Gothic capital that it became in the following century, and as yet was probably no more impressive than the queen’s own cities of Poitiers and Bordeaux.
    Nevertheless, for so intelligent a woman as Eleanor, Paris and its neighbours must have been extraordinarily stimulating. ‘Paris, queen among cities, moon among stars, so gracious a valley, an island of royal palaces’, wrote Guido of Bezoches in an often quoted passage, ‘and on that island hath philosophy her royal and ancient seat: who alone, with study her sole comrade, holding the eternal citadel of light and immortality, hath set her victorious foot on the withering flower of the fast aging world’. For what has been called the twelfth-century renaissance was at its height. There was not yet a university of Paris, but schools of theology and philosophy had sprung up amid the religious houses of the left bank, attended by students from all over the world (including, at that date, an Englishman called Thomas Becket). Currently they were full of Peter Abelard’s ‘heresies’ about individual judgment; in his letters, Abelard claims that ladies of rank were coming to his lectures. It is likely that the queen knew of his ideas, and she may well have heard him speak. Similar schools existed at Orleans, Chartres and Tours, where there were lectures on Plato and Aristotle, the latter only recently re-discovered by scholars travelling in Moorish Spain. Orleans was a stronghold of humanism. The poetry of antiquity was enjoying a new vogue; men were learning to appreciate Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Martial. The twelfth century was also the classic century of the mediaeval Latin lyric. Moreover the troubadours of southern France were echoed in the north by the trouvères, who wrote in the langue d’oïl, and composed not only love songs but also the epic chansons de geste. As for the visual arts, the invention of the pointed arch was about to launch France on the first and most beautiful wave of Gothic architecture. At the deepest level, there was also a spiritual revolution, expressed in the foundation of new religious orders — Cistercians, Carthusians, Premonstratensians, Fontevrault.
    Although the queen had Latin plays performed before the court and filled it with troubadours and trouvéres, her amusements were on the whole far from cerebral. She introduced Provencal verse and all the elegancies of Aquitaine, including respect for ladies — much to the scandal of churchmen and, no doubt, of northern husbands. The north was equally scandalized by the southern fashions that came with her — the curled beards and short mantles of the men, and the elaborate head-dresses of the ladies.
    Although besotted with his beautiful wife, the young king’s excessive piety could not be repressed. Eleanor’s often frivolous mind can hardly have relished Louis’s monkish behaviour — fasting and other austerities, and taking his place in the choir stalls to sing the office with