Eleanor of Aquitaine Read Free

like devils in a painting.”
    If the men appeared devilish to Prior Geoffrey, the women inspired even greater horror and caused Aquitaine’s sober neighbors to murmur that the whole of the duchy was no better than a huge brothel. While feudal times were not the best in which to be born female, still the position occupied by the women of Aquitaine was, everything considered, remarkably high. Perhaps because the power of the Church was relatively weak there, its customary puritanism and fierce misogyny had less influence, so that women came to expect, and receive, a place of prominence in society. Under the laws of the land they could inherit property in their own right, and some, on occasion, exercised great power as landowners. At their disposal were the means of elegance, and they took advantage of opulent fashions, cosmetics, and oriental perfumes to enhance their persons. Undoubtedly, their painted cheeks and charcoal-rimmed eyes, combined with their free and easy independence, supplied a basis for the charge that moral disorder was rife in Aquitaine. Unlike their counterparts in the northern countries, the women refused to be segregated among themselves or secluded in convents and, if discovered with a lover, they were neither shut up nor killed. While adultery in women was not actually condoned, it was not severely condemned either. In sex, sex roles, and religion, there was to be found a greater degree of tolerance in Aquitaine, a greater respect for the individual.
    As the twelfth century began, a phenomenon akin to a new religion began to grow in Aquitaine, one that sprang naturally from their leisurely civilization and the flourishing position of women in their culture. The new century saw the arrival of the troubadours and, with them, the advent of love as a serious, all-consuming occupation. The poets of the southland wrote not for gain but for pleasure, not in cultured Latin but in the mellifluous vernacular of the langue d’oc, not for men but primarily for the women of the great castles and manors. Windy chansons de geste, with their lofty deeds and blood-and-guts machismo, awoke no echoes of glory in the hearts of these elegant baronesses and countesses, already semidivinized. They longed to while away their evenings with songs of love in which women were cherished, adored, and romantically seduced. Under their eager patronage, there flowered a new school of poetry that touched on subjects never before covered by verse; one day the sweet new lyrical style of the troubadours emerging from the salons of these bluestockings born before their time would culminate in Petrarch and Dante.
    That such a radically different type of poetry should suddenly bud and then take firm root in the popular imagination of all classes was not at all accidental. For the very first troubadour was no low-born minstrel wandering the dusty Poitevin roads in search of a meal but the most powerful lord in the land.

A Child in the Land of Love
     
    Duke William IX had always been an ardent lover of women. His vehemently sensual nature matured early, and he indulged his appetites with a lusty, pagan delight. It made little difference to him whether the woman was harlot or virgin, peasant or noble maiden. When William IX was fifteen, his father died, and the domain passed into his hands. If his barons believed that the amiable young man would be easy to manipulate, they soon discovered their mistake, because he quickly established himself as a lord worthy of respect. For all the lad’s notoriety as a Don Juan, he was intelligent, sensitive, and possessed of a genius for writing poetry that was not to blossom for another fifteen years.
    In 1088, when William was sixteen, he married the daughter of his northern neighbor, Fulk, count of Anjou, a man so disagreeable that he won the nickname “The Contrary.” Fulk’s daughter Ermengarde, beautiful and highly educated, appeared to be precisely the type of woman that William wanted, and not