Young Eleanor’s new husband, Louis, was a pious man who had been expected to enter the church, as was common for second sons, who did not stand to inherit. Even though he was supposedly gentle, devout, and very unworldly, he fell madly in love with his sophisticated, fun-loving wife and granted her every wish, including remodeling the Cite Palace in Paris to suit her love of beauty and domestic finery. Her power over him even extended to getting him to fight wars for her. In 1141, Louis became involved in a war with Count Theobald of Champagne, using the excuse of helping Raoul I count of Ver-mandois to divorce his wife and marry Petronilla, Eleanor’s sister. The fact that Petronilla was 18 and Raoul was in his late fifties did not seem to disturb either party, and if all the machinations and warfare went according to plan, Louis would also regain the county of Toulouse for France. The war lasted for two years (1142-44) and greatly angered the pope. The burning of the church in the town of Vitry, where more than 1,300 people died in the flames, earned Eleanor a scolding by Bernard (later Saint Bernard) of Clairvaux. Bernard was a very persuasive and intelligent man with a sharp tongue, but confronted by Eleanor’s clever excuse (that she had encouraged her husband to go to war because she was frustrated they had not yet managed to conceive) he became much more kind to her and offered to pray for her to have a child in exchange for her influencing the king to back down from warfare and agree to the church’s wishes. It took only a few weeks for peace to return to France, and in April 1145, Eleanor had a daughter named Marie.
Louis felt very guilty about the massacre at Vitry, and, as pious young men often did, he decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone for his sins. The pope seized upon this opportunity and asked Louis to rescue the Frankish kingdoms in the Middle East—and so on Christmas Day in 1145, Louis announced he was going on crusade.
World History
