windows in its thick walls, and a faded fresco on its roof, was
barely lit by the early light of the March morning. All were
assembled for the great decision. Mass had been said. The ornaments
of the place were veiled gloomily, as is the Lenten custom. The
king’s throne was set facing the bench where the bishops and their
assessors sat; but the queen, with her women and her advocates, the
tonsured clerks in her cause, and her barons of Aquitaine, sat apart
on the Gospel side of the nave, she also crowned and robed, she also
expecting the release. Her tall figure, strong and too large in its
rich draperies, suited her heavy, long face, over massive in the
jaw, too steady and uncaring in the level of its high brow. Her
kerchief fitted close, under the golden circle, to her now scanty
hair.
The issue of this suit, which was predetermined, she strongly
desired. She had said in her latest and angriest revolts: “I have
married a monk and not a man!” And this, her thirtieth year, was
for her also a culmination. She would bear the thing no more. For
seven years she had had no child; when the children came they were
daughters. She was not the mother of an heir. And the priests, by
whom Louis VII. was himself so closely bound, offended her. She had
hardly hidden her chance desires in the East, on the Crusade--a
Greek, a noble, a Saracen slave. She had not hidden at all her
contempt and her weariness. But there was more than that. She had now
another choice.
Ten years, twelve years younger than herself, there was a lad
into whose hands had tumbled, like ripe fruits from every side by
converging inheritance, all the west: Brittany and Normandy and the
Maine and Anjou from his father (for he was the Angevin), and from
his mother England itself--for his claim to which crown he would
fight and conquer, she knew. This lad, red-headed, passionately
willed, and to be the master of such great domains, she had fixed
down in her mind for a quarry. He would not fail her--for she would
bring him Aquitaine. He should be lord over all the western seas from
the hills of Cumberland right away to the Biscayans and Navarre. He
was that young Henry of Anjou and Normandy, of Maine: and of England
to be: a glorious young Lord, just past his nineteenth year. All
these things the Queen Eleanor held in her heart that morning, masked
behind her heavy, impassive face.
The loud, confused cries of hundreds talking in groups, of the
lawyer-priests spreading their crackling parchments, and of serving
men passing in and out of the doors, ceased to a sharp order from
the archbishop’s serjeant and the ringing of his pike upon the
stone floor of that church. There were only a few hurried whispers
passing between the clerks of the queen, and these also fell when the
archbishop rose and gravely put his question, whether any one present
desired to come forward on the plea of the king and of the queen that
their marriage, being contracted within the decrees forbidden to
Christian men and women, should be made null and of no effect. But if
such consanguinity were not established, then let them preserve the
sacrament of their marriage in God’s name.
When he had sat him down again, those who stood ready behind the
king--his relatives, and witnesses of his rolls and archives--came
forward one after the other, and each stretched forward his right
hand open, palm downwards, over the relics, taking the oath assigned.
Such and such was the degree of consanguinity between Eleanor of
Aquitaine and Louis VII, of that name, King of the French and Duke
of Aquitaine. Eleanor, upon her throne apart, heard in those proud
royal formulæ titles hardly greater than her own. She had behind her
generation after generation of the great dukes, her fathers, of whom
she came, the sole heiress, summing up in her presence the story of
the Roman south, and Poitiers on its hill, and Bordeaux and Bayonne,
and the vineyards of Angoulême. She would take good care into whose
hands all those hundred miles of countryside should go. She foresaw
the wars.
When the long and formal business of that Court was over (the
depositions inscribed, signed and sealed, the pleas of either party
heard, the documents declared, the relationship established), the
bishops consulted for their verdict, and gave it in corporate
form, so that the great clerics outside their body--the Pope, their
chief, and even great St. Bernard himself (the spiritual master in
Christendom)--said nothing more. They gave their verdict upon the
undoubted text of the Canon Law. They declared this marriage of
fifteen years now null. And their solemn sentence was delivered,
the silence broke again for a moment, and once again the serjeant
of the archbishop, with the pound of his pike upon the stone floor,
commanded silence. The queen took from her head the gold circle of
the woman’s crown and set it down in symbol of the change. She had
another crown before her eyes, and one that should be greater in
Europe for fifty brilliant years than the crown of the Capetian. She
was to be mistress of the Angevin, and to command in her own fashion,
through so many wars, so great a government.
She was free now. She rose, not waiting to see whether the king
should rise first from his throne apart. She withdrew with all her
train, standing high at the head of those high lords, and moving
towards the eastern doors. She went southward, and away to her own
land.
These things were done before Easter, the cold and leafless Easter
of that year. The spring broke, and by Pentecost this woman had
married the Angevin: young Henry of Anjou, of Maine, of Normandy, of
England to be. And his honour also she broke at last.
THE PILGRIMAGE
(_August 23–25, 1179_)
Louis, King of France, the seventh of that name, had no son. Two
wives had borne him four daughters. Their alliance confirmed his
house, but the Capetian foundation was imperiled. It had established
itself by an unshaken chain of circumstance and will, son succeeding
father, and crowned in youth before the father’s eyes. It had been a
process of power hidden in the mind, a thing gradually more and more
conscious for two hundred years, since first Robert the Strong had
come, no one knew whence, into the Court, and obtained his government
in the west; since Hugh had been crowned. It was now grown to full
stature, and knew itself: a thing formed--the kingship of France;
and from that seed, now a tree, was to grow the full kingdom and the
re-establishment of the Gauls. But now the advance was halted, for
Louis, already in middle age, had no son. Four years had passed since
his last marriage.
He was a pious man, full of doubt and intuition. He prayed secretly
to God, and there is record of his prayer, “I beseech Thee, O
God....” For the great times that were to come depended upon its
answer. He prayed secretly to God for a son.
When the time of the queen’s delivery drew near, the king summoned
Hugh, the bishop, and said to him, “Tell no one till I am dead, but I
have dreamed a dream which some survivor should know. I have dreamed
that what shall soon be born stood holding a golden cup full of
blood, and that the nobles of France came around and drank of it in
turn.”
In the night of the 21st of August, the vigil of the Octave of the
Assumption in the year 1165 from the Incarnation of the Lord, the
child was born in a castle to the south. It was a boy, and they
gave him the name of Philip, but for the populace a second name,
“Adeodatus,” the gift of God--so necessary was he to the Crown, and
so strangely had he come in answer to a prayer. Later he was to be
the Augustus, to fight great and glorious battles all his life, to
break the Angevin and the German, and to rule all up to the coasts of
the sea.
Then for years the king watched over the child, and cherished him as
he grew: not so strong in body as he should have been. All turned
upon his life.
When the lad was already in his fourteenth year, the king summoned
a great council in the spring time and said to the great lords and
bishops there assembled, “I will, if it is your will, that my son
be crowned at Rheims, and allegiance sworn to him by all while yet
his father lives, as is the custom of our House, and this on the
Assumption of this very year.” This was the year 1179. For he felt
his age coming upon him, though he was but in his sixtieth year.
Already had he feared paralysis, and known the symptoms of its
coming. His council acclaimed him and his will.
As the Feast of the Assumption drew near, which is also the memory
of Roncesvalles, the 15th of August, Louis, the king, came with all
his Court to the castle of Compiègne, on the edge of the great woods,
there to stay till they should set out on the two days’ march to
Rheims, and the young prince, Philip, was with him.
But just in the days before this journey was due, the prince went out
one morning with his men to hunt the boar in the forest at the gates
of the castle. They gave him a swift horse, perhaps too mettlesome,
and he rode out with his men in the morning, with their hounds and
their horns, till, in the depths of this high wood, they unleashed,
and next found a great boar; and him they pursued, scattering round,
by this narrow path and that, through the thick undergrowth, and
making round by the right and the left to come up with the hounds
at last when they should pull the great boar down. But as his horse
went furiously, and got off too far from the rest, the prince heard
the horns more faintly, and, when he tried to rally to them, took
false turnings, till at last he heard them no more. Then he knew that
he was lost. He had not eaten, and the day was done, and he became
afraid. Before it was dark he checked his tired mount and stood in
doubt, looking all around and seeing nothing in the woods nor hearing
any sound of men. Then he prayed to Our Lady and his Lord St. Denis,
who is the strong protector of the Kings of France, that he might be
saved out of the high wood; and looking round again to his right,
he saw in the gloaming a charcoal burner, rough and forbidding, all
grimy with his trade, and bearing on his shoulder an axe.
The child was frightened at that figure; but he took it for a sign,
and summoning his courage he walked his horse up to the charcoal
burner and accosted him very courteously, and told him that he was
the Son of France lost in the high wood, and in peril, and weak with
long fasting. This story the man believed, and he led the prince by
ways he knew all through the miles of forest in the darkness, till,
by morning, they had come to the castle of Compiègne, and the prince
was delivered safe to his father. But the strain had thrown the boy
into a fever, and it seemed he would die. Thus for the second time
was the line of France in peril, and King Louis near despair.
In such an agony he bethought him of the saints, and what help he
could implore. There was one with whose name all Christendom was
alive--St. Thomas, murdered at Canterbury not ten years before by the
agents of the Angevin, his rival. The archbishop had been his guest,
he had succoured him--through policy and as a lever against the house
which was his greatest feudatory, and almost his master; the house of
Anjou, against which he had warred in vain. There, in England, its
head, Henry, was a great king, his equal. Louis, the king, determined
to pray at that shrine. They could not dissuade him. They told him
it was perilous to put himself unarmed into his enemy’s hand; they
warned him of his failing powers, but his intention stood; and
immediately after the Assumption he set out for the sea. His weakness
hampered him. He was six days on his journey to the coast. He reached
it at Wissant, on the Straits, in the evening of his son’s fourteenth
birthday, the 21st of August. On the morrow, the Octave of the Feast,
he crossed the Narrows and came into Dover Harbour, an inlet of
the hills, and so went ashore, the first King of France to land in
this island. Henry, the king, came down to meet him, and they went
together up to Canterbury to pray at the shrine. There, in the crypt,
at the tomb under the high altar, King Louis prayed for his son’s
recovery and for the strength of the Capetian line.
King Louis had upon his finger a certain stone, the most precious
and (some said) the greatest in the world; it was called the Royal
Jewel, and men knew of it everywhere. All manner of stories were told
of it: how it shone in the dark with a smouldering light, how it was
worth the ransom of a kingdom, how the saint had claimed it in a
vision. But these stories were only tales. The great stone was its
own title. This stone King Louis took off as he knelt at the shrine,
and offered it to be the saint’s for ever. There they hung it, and
later they put a silver angel before it, pointing to it. There the
stone shone before the shrine three hundred years and more, displayed
whenever the rich cover of the shrine was lifted for the pilgrims,
and giving birth to legend upon legend; until, when more than three
hundred years had passed, another King of England--another Henry, the
Tudor--destroyed that shrine. He, in his turn, took that famous stone
and had it set in a ring to wear on his enormous thumb; and after him
his daughter Mary had it set in a collar she wore; but what became of
it after that, or where it is now, I do not know.
So the king gave the stone, and prayed at the shrine of St. Thomas
for his son, who lay between life and death far off in France, the
last of such a line.
Louis, the king, also gave to the monastery of Canterbury sixteen
hundred gallons of wine a year for ever, to be taken from the product
of his own vineyards at Poissy; a poor, thin, northern wine, but he
could give no other, for as yet the southern vineyards were not in
any domain of the Crown. And having done these things, and given
great alms, his pilgrimage was ended, and on the third day, which
was the 25th of August, he set forth back again to the sea coast at
Dover, and on the morrow, the 26th, he crossed, reaching the French
land.
His task was done. In his journey south to his own the blow fell on
him. As he reached Paris all his right side was struck, and he was
paralysed. The boy, however, his son, was saved.
On the day of All Saints, Prince Philip was crowned at Rheims with
great splendour, in the midst of the twelve peers, and so was the
full purpose of his father accomplished. But that father, in his
illness, could not see the crowning, and in a little while he died,
as well and piously as he had lived.
THE TRIUMPH OF SALADIN
(_Battle of Hattin, Saturday, July 4, 1187_)
There is a plain full of grass and reedy at the edges. It is sunk
deep between high, bare limestone hills. It goes level with the
southern edges of that clear lake which is called the Sea of Galilee.
Through this grassy plain to-day the railway to Damascus runs, and
through that plain from the earliest of human years the ancient road
from Damascus has come falling down from the great dark shelves of
the Huran Mountains, standing in a wall thousands of feet high,
eastward above the hot gorge of Jordan; beyond there is the desert
land.
On the sward of this place lay encamped, with their tents, seven
thousand of the Saracen cavalry, a chosen body to whom the
Christians, still holding Palestine, would have given the name of
“knights” or “nobles.” Their leader (or rather their head, through
the favour of his father) was a boy, el-Afdal, some seventeen years
old, the son of Saladin.
For Saladin it was who thus lay in wait to destroy our Christian
hold upon the Holy Places of Our Lord.
It was the very end of April, when the spring of that land is turning
into summer, and already the corn on the fields of the swelling
heights to the west, the corn of the bare uplands of Galilee, was
ripening. The year was the year 583 of the Hegira, when Mahomet’s
mission began--the eleven hundred and eighty-seventh from the
Incarnation of our Lord, from which we Christians reckon.
The presence of this camp was singular.
There had never been--save in the crisis of the Crusades--a single
issue of Moslem against Christian, of the French tongue against
the Arabic, of Europe against Asia. Such issues only show clear in
moments of intensity. But the great French feudatories, who between
them held the Syrian coast and Palestine, those who had been Lords
of the Levant since the First Crusade, three generations before, a
small group, immensely rich, touched already (those who were not
recently immigrant) by the Orient, inextricably related by marriage
and re-marriage--these had between them feuds, alliances, dissolving
groups of affection or ambition which made compromise possible with
the enemy. So had their opponents over against them (the emirs of
great towns, the sheikhs of tribes, the occasional armed leaders of
new hordes) their own ambitions, local aims and reasons. These also
had their perpetual intrigue. These also had been touched by the
West as had the westerners by the East. In the cross-currents of all
that swirl, you would find at moments a group of Frenchmen and Arab
against a group of Arab and Frenchmen, Christian and Moslem against
Moslem and Christian; so it had also been for now four hundred years
on the Marches of Spain, two thousand miles away, on the other front
of the great fight. There also the Cid Campeador had parleyed with
the Moslem lords. The great current of our pouring out against Asia
had such eddies on its banks.
On this side Jordan, over against the Saracen camp of cavalry (with
its white tents marking the as yet unburnt sward), the land that
rose hundreds of feet up to the other limestone hills of the west,
the land of Galilee, had for master a man conspicuous among all the
Europeans of his time.
He was a Capetian, of the French blood royal through the women;
through his father he held directly from the first Crusading advance
and conquest nearly a century before. His title he held from
Tripoli, of which he was the Count. And this square of land between
the lake and the sea was his, through his marriage with a woman who
had brought it to him as her dower, and who reigned in what was also
his capital and chief castle of Tiberias: the old town of Herod,
between the inland water and the first spring of the hills. Now this
man, at that moment, chief Christian though he was, consented to
be, for policy, a man that still parleyed with Saladin, the new and
tremendous leader of all that intended the end of the Christian name.
Raymond of Tripoli had reckoned himself of right, by the statute
of his kinsman (the last adult King of Jerusalem), to be regent
of the whole realm. It was his, not only in his own eyes, but in
those of his peers, to administer from Jerusalem all the feudality
of the Levant. It had been denied him, and denied him abruptly and
recently, by a trick which had put a man incompetent for such office,
a chance husband of the dead king’s daughter, upon the throne. Guy
of Lusignan, an uncertain man of whom posterity has thought perhaps
less than it should, but whom certainly contemporary men despised;
florid, perhaps unsoldierly, certainly of a sort which cannot make
itself obeyed, he had come, through the intrigue of a court and the
will of a very young woman, to be crowned; after her child, the true
heir to the throne, had (perhaps mysteriously) died. The Master of
the Templars, a man French in speech but from Bideford in Devon, a
brave but hasty man, had helped in this, and the degraded Patriarch
of Jerusalem, half Oriental, sunk in a harem, had concurred--why we
do not know.
The Count of Tripoli, Raymond, in great anger had gone off northward
disappointed of the crown, and most of the barons were with him in
the quarrel.
The secession was, in a manner, self-defence. Count Raymond called it
to himself the restoration of order; legitimacy; the first step to
a strong state. But what he did was to make some understanding with
Saladin, which popular tradition and the poets (with their sense for
the heart of things) have handed all down the centuries for treason.
It was not as though Raymond had made up one of those ephemeral
compacts of local truce with the small and changing leaders of
the desert which men would soon forget. The compact--or whatever
it was--was with Saladin. The shadow of Saladin had increased
enormously, rapidly, like the shadow of a great tree at evening, and
in such few years that they seemed (to a man then full grown) like so
many days.
That son of Job, Saladin, the Kurd from the Tigris, had swallowed up
his masters, one after the other, by intrigue, by violence, by that
sort of fatality which drives the conquerors, and which has in it so
intimate a mixture of enthusiasm, hypocrisy, and terrene desire.
The whole business had not covered more than the life of that young
son, el-Afdal, seventeen years old, who lay there encamped beyond
Jordan. When Afdal was a new-born child, Saladin was still a servant.
To-day he was imperial. It was a space of time no longer than the
space between the last two wars of the English (that in South Africa
and the Great War). In that little time Saladin had come to be master
of the whole vast Syrian and Mesopotamian and Desert and Egyptian
spaces which encircled the Christian bastion of the Holy Land.
Saladin was as much a master at Cairo as at Damascus. He was obeyed
from the Gulf of Aleppo to the Persian hills; from the Armenian
boundaries to the Soudan. This immense power was in the hands of
a man whose varied purpose certainly included a fixed desire to
trample down the Christian name, not only to the sea, but (if
that were possible) beyond the sea. Our little European outpost
of The Sepulchre, stronger in blood and faith and tenacity by far
than anything around it, had always for a century been abominably
outnumbered. Now for the first time in a century it found those
numbers all organized under one man, and that man certainly a great
soldier, and everywhere also obeyed and everywhere victorious. He was
about them to the north, to the east, to the south. He was gathering
his armies. The hum of the swarm was heard all over the East.
His parleying with such a force and such a threat--no matter
with what excuse of statecraft--could not be forgiven Raymond of
Tripoli. He called his diplomacy many names to himself. He called
it this, that, and the other. He thought it necessary, perhaps, as
an expedient to the Christian society, which was so threatened. He
argued, perhaps, for delay. He certainly was moved--though he might
have denied it--by wounded pride. He none the less played a part, as
he thought, for Christendom. But he and it were to pay a terrible
price for so much intelligence and so little vision.
This white camp of Saracen cavalry, on the sward to the south of the
lake, was the match that lit the explosion.
We know what proceeded from it; what we cannot to-day explain is
the motive, either upon the one side or upon the other, which led
to the fantastic tourney: it was in part a jest or stage play, in
part a challenge. It is of a time other than ours--we can only half
understand. There are but a few words remaining to guide us.
At any rate there proceeded from el-Afdal and his seven thousand a
request (not a demand) that the Saracen horsemen should ride westward
into Galilee, through Galilee, and return. That they should pass one
day in so riding courteously round through the territory of Galilee.
Raymond of Tripoli returned them a sort of set licence, marked out
curiously like the rules of a game: “That they should not mount until
the sun had risen, and that they should promise to be back over
Jordan before it had set. That they should do no damage or injury;
that they should kill none, nor burn nor pillage.”
What caused the request? Why were these terms accepted and observed?
We cannot tell. The request was made, and in that form granted and
accepted. Whether it was an outward symbol of the truce with Saladin
through this favour to his son, or a permission to ride out and seek
forage, by agreement; for whatever reason, the request was made and
granted as I have said; and the 1st of May, 1187, was fixed for so
singular an adventure. It was the Feast of St. Philip and St. James.
The Count Raymond sent round throughout his wife’s land of Galilee
that on this coming day of the Saracens’ Ride no man should appear in
the fields, lest by accident there should be provocation. He feared
lest, after that hushed, expectant, toppling mood, which the enormous
preparations of Saladin had now imposed upon all the East, there
should suddenly be heard the roar of an explosion. All his subjects
were to be within their farms, or behind the walls of their towns;
all cattle were to be driven within their byres and folds. The seven
thousand infidel lances were to ride round through an empty land, and
so return.