Elinor was so glad that she had been taught to read and write; not all her contemporaries had been. For younger sons, in particular, these were considered unnecessary skills, unless they were destined for the church. But Lanval and Clara had insisted on all three of their children being civilised, as they saw it, through such arts.
Bertran had once told her that he was a younger son, but his parents had been as enlightened as Elinor’s; they believed that everyone who could learn should be literate and had brought up three sons and four daughters in those beliefs.
At Saint-Jacques Elinor’s education added the skill of composing verse. They began by Iseut showing her the first poem she had written. It was a ‘planh’ or lament for her husband and Elinor felt honoured to read it.
It was very different from anything in the repertoire of Lucatz and his troupe. When the joglars sang of ‘dolor’ they meant the sorrow of unrequited love, which the beloved could turn to ‘joi’ in a moment by a kind look or word. It was nothing like the raw pain of a young widow lamenting that she would never see her true love again.
‘To what melody should it be sung?’ Elinor asked Iseut. ‘I should like to learn it.’
‘It has never been sung,’ said the Lady. ‘It is too personal for public performance. But the tune of any planh would serve. It is the words that matter after all.’
Elinor resolved that she would find the perfect sad melody to fit the lament and would one day sing it to her patron in thanks for her trust in showing it to her.
Iseut gave herself a little shake and moved on to explain other verse forms to her willing pupil.
‘Here is a debate poem I wrote with Azalais,’ she said.
Elinor did not like this one quite so much. The two women had argued back and forth about who could be trusted better, men or women, and it seemed a little dry. But she liked the other tenso Iseut showed her better. It had been written in alternating verses between a woman, Maria de Ventadorn, and a troubadour called Gui D’Uissel.
Maria was married to the Viscount of Ventadorn but it was clear from her poem that she had a deep attraction to Gui.
‘Were they lovers?’ asked Elinor, feeling bold even to use the word.
Iseut looked shocked. ‘Only in their poetry,’ she said. ‘There are many ways in which women and men can express love for each other. It does not always have to be in the flesh.’
‘Have you written any poems with a man?’ asked Elinor.
‘No,’ said Iseut. ‘I am still very inexperienced as a poet, even though I am daring to set myself up as your teacher. And I do not . . . have a special friend in that way.’
She looked so embarrassed that Elinor tried to change the subject. She picked up another poem from the manuscripts on the Lady’s table.
‘Tell me about this poet,’ she said.
‘Ah, that is the Countess of Dia,’ said Iseut. ‘She was married to the Count of Valentinois, but he has been dead these twenty years. She is an old lady now, but in her youth she wrote a tenso with the famous troubadour Raimbaut of Orange.’
‘And what is this one?’
‘It is a love poem,’ said Iseut. ‘Listen: “I’m very happy, for the man I love is so fine. May God with joy richly repay the man who helped us meet.” She sounds happy, doesn’t she?’
‘Look at this verse,’ said Elinor, poring over the parchment and reading the elaborate black writing with some difficulty. ‘She says, “The lady who knows about valour should place her affection in a courteous and worthy knight . . . and she should dare to love him face to face.” It sounds as if she thinks we should all have lovers, even if we have husbands.’
‘Lovers on parchment only, as I said before.’
‘Will you never take another husband, my lady?’ asked Elinor softly.
‘I can’t be sure,’ said Iseut. ‘I was not like these other poets. I had no need for any other love besides my husband’s. We were married such a short time before he left. Perhaps by now I would have tired of him and wanted to write of love to another man – but I don’t think so.’
Who knew what would have happened if Jaufre had come back from the crusade? Iseut’s eyes were very bright. Whatever Elinor read in these poems seemed to lead back to the same dangerous territory.
‘Lord Berenger seems very fond of you,’ she ventured.
Lady Iseut shook aside her melancholy and laughed.
‘Yes, and I am very fond of my little dog, Minou. But I shan’t marry him.’
‘Minou or Lord Berenger?’ Elinor dared to ask and now both women laughed.
While Elinor learned how to be a trobairitz, the world outside the safety of the bastide at Saint-Jacques was moving ever closer to war. The Pope was no less bent on teaching the Count of Toulouse a lesson but he listened to Raimon when he asked if a less unbending legate than the Abbot of Cîteaux could be appointed to deal with him. If he was going to have to surrender, he didn’t want the Abbot dictating the terms.
Innocent heard his embassy and appointed two new Legates just to accept Raimon’s surrender. But it didn’t mean he had given up his idea of a war against the south. If the Count came over to the Pope’s side, Innocent would just have to find another opponent.
The Abbot went to Paris with one of the new Legates, Milo, on 1st May, while all the south and north were bathed in sunshine, to ask Philippe-Auguste to let his son, Louis, lead the crusade. The King refused but promised a large contingent of knights.
And the muster of the army was fixed at last: for June 24th at Lyon.
‘Who will lead the crusade, if not Louis?’ asked Milo, on their way back to Rome.
The Abbot was inscrutable. ‘I’m sure we shall find someone,’ he said. ‘Since our cause is so unassailably just.’
‘He will lead it himself,’ said the Count when rumours reached Toulouse of the King’s decision.
‘Who?’ asked Bertran.
‘The Abbot,’ said Raimon. ‘He wants this even more than the Pope does.’
‘But why?’ asked Bertran. ‘Why does he hate the south so much? It’s not just because he considers the Believers to be heretics, I think.’
‘Let me tell you something about the Pope’s precious Legate, the Abbot of Cîteaux,’ said the Count venomously. ‘He’s a distant kinsman of mine.’
Bertran was astonished.
‘He is descended from the Dukes of Narbonne – oh, only a minor branch, of course. But he means to get the Duchy for himself – you wait and see. The Abbot will lead the crusade – he has always meant to. He will do anything to win the south for the northerners. And then, if he succeeds in stripping me of all my titles, just by chance there will be a candidate on hand for one of them – the Duke of Narbonne!’
Bertran was shocked. ‘You mean he would launch an entire crusade against the Believers just for his own personal gain?’
‘The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see his arse,’ said Raimon, ‘as peasants say in the Midi.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Bertran.
‘Perhaps not a monkey. The man is a wolf,’ said Raimon. ‘He would do anything.’
Iseut had a maid called Garsenda who was not deceived by Elinor. She was a sharp-eyed, sharp-featured girl from Arles who soon spread her gossip among the other servants of the castle.
‘There was no talk of another poet-lady coming till the Lady knew the joglars were going, was there? And then, by coincidence, as soon as they were out of the grounds, the Lady Elinor turns up.’
The other servants acknowledged that was true.
‘And why did the Lady Azalais depart as soon as “Elinor” arrived? Her nose was put out of joint, wasn’t it?’
But Garsenda, although she thought she had unearthed a great secret, had got the wrong end of the stick. She had seen Elinor without her coif and recogn
ised her as Esteve the joglar. But since she had always believed completely in the boy joglar, she now thought that Lady Iseut was harbouring a young lover disguised as a woman.
And she decided to tell her suspicions to Lord Berenger the next time he visited the court. Garsenda thought the information worth money but the Lord just laughed. Then he looked thoughtful and frowned, but he dismissed her without pressing any coins in her hand and the maid was disgruntled.
Iseut and Elinor were quite unaware of the gossip about them that was spreading throughout the bastide. But they heard other news, from the southwest.
‘Raimon of Toulouse is going to submit to the Pope,’ Iseut told Elinor one day after Berenger had been to see her.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ asked Elinor. ‘If he submits, then the Pope will not go ahead with the army and the war.’
‘Berenger doesn’t trust him,’ said Iseut. ‘The Count gave himself up to the Pope’s two new Legates in Valence. He said he was willing to take the Cross himself.’
‘Against the south?’ asked Elinor.
‘Exactly,’ said Iseut. ‘Can you trust a man who would take the Cross against his own people? He might have made things up with the Pope but they’ll find someone else to wage war against.’
‘It won’t come to that, surely?’ said Elinor. ‘Does Berenger think we are in danger here?’
Iseut was silent. ‘He hasn’t said so in so many words. But I think he is worried, yes. He has advised me to be well prepared for a siege, just in case the army comes this way.’
Bertran was one of the sixteen vassals who accompanied the Count back to Saint-Gilles in late June to do the penance devised for him. But they were outnumbered easily by the three archbishops and nineteen bishops who had gathered to watch, along with a vast crowd of locals. One vassal who had refused to go with the Count was his nephew Viscount Trencavel. He was still at odds with his uncle and didn’t want to support him.
It was as good as a play to the people who came from a distance round Saint-Gilles to see the spectacle. This was their lord, barefoot, bareheaded and stripped to the waist, on his knees in front of the three abbey doors. But to his vassals it was a penance just to witness him so humiliated.
The very sculptures on the facade seemed to mock him, showing as they did scenes of all the aspects of Christianity denied by the Believers: the Holy Trinity, the Mass and Christ’s Crucifixion in twenty scenes. These were all beliefs that the heretics refused to believe or participate in. And over and over again depictions of killings – Cain and Abel, Saint Michael and the dragon, Samson and the lion.
But as the Count knelt on the steps and read out the list of his faults, there was no mention of murder. Even though everything the Pope and his Legates had done for nearly a year and a half had been to avenge the murder of Pierre of Castelnau, they had not got the Count to admit to responsibility for the crime.
Indeed he had sworn to Bertran that he had not had anything to do with it and the troubadour believed him. He had been a vassal of the Count of Toulouse’s and of his father before him all his life and, though he had no illusions about what either man was capable of, he did not think the Count likely to have done anything so stupid.
As the Count had told the Pope repeatedly, if he’d wanted to kill his Legate he could have done it in his own court, many times, and if he had wanted to order it he would not have had the act take place so close to Saint-Gilles. It made no sense.
As soon as the Count had finished reading out his list and sworn his obedience to the Pope and his Legates, Milo tied his stole round the Count’s neck and dragged him into the church and towards the altar, whipping him with a bundle of birch twigs as they went. It was a sobering sight, the stripping and beating of such a great man – Duke of Narbonne, Count of Toulouse, Marquis of Provence and overlord of the south.
I can’t bear it, thought Bertran. The other vassals were also suffering. Their allegiance was to their lord, not to a pope hundreds of miles south in Rome. Even if they were not all heretics, they did not respect the rules of the Church more than the man and the titles they had been brought up to revere.
Bertran had brooded over whether to come with the Count to Saint-Gilles; he was worried about being recognised and had known how hard it would be to see the Count dishonoured. And he knew there was worse to come. But he wanted to support his lord. When the beating was over, and Mass had been said, there was such a crush at the church doors that Raimon’s only way out was through the crypt.
Milo liked that solution; it was where Pierre of Castelnau’s tomb was. The Count was pulled half-naked and bleeding to do further penance in front of the body of the man he was supposed to have slain. Pierre was treated already as a martyr and revered as if he were a saint; Count Raimon was a villain in comparison. He crawled to the underground exit from the crypt, where his vassals threw a robe around him and escorted him to his castle. The show was over.
Less than a week later, the northern army mustered at Lyon. It was the Feast of John the Baptist, the city’s patron saint, and there were crowds of people: pilgrims, traders and pickpockets. Nearly twenty thousand knights, wearing yellow silk crosses on their chests, assembled in a field outside the town.
There were men of every sort, from lords, archbishops and bishops to mercenaries and quartermasters. The host stretched for four miles as it marched down the banks of the Rhône, with its barges floating down the river beside it, carrying all the supplies needed for the forty days of fighting and besieging.
And ahead of the warriors a huge siege train of sappers, carpenters and military engineers had been sent to Avignon to await the army. They carried the mangonels and trebuchets that would hurl stones and carrion at the walls of the heretics’ castles.
And who was leading this mighty army? Not the King’s son but a group of fanatical men – the Archbishop of Sens, the Bishops of Autun, Clermont and Nevers and the Duke of Burgundy all rode at the head. But over them all was the Abbot of Cîteaux, who had been appointed by Pope Innocent to lead the crusade, just as the Count had predicted.
The mighty army reached Valence on the 2nd of July and the Count was there to meet them. Before he went to the Abbot’s tent, he said goodbye to his old friend Bertran de Miramont, who had begged him not to do what he was set on doing.
‘It’s the only way,’ he said simply, taking his twelve-year-old son by the hand. ‘I shall take up the Cross, join the army and battle the heretics. It’s the only way to save any of my lands at all.’
‘You really think your lands will be spared?’ asked Bertran. ‘That you will have a Toulouse to be lord of in the end or a title to call your own?’
‘I am sure of nothing,’ said the Count bleakly. ‘But it is my only chance. I am venturing everything on this throw of the dice. Including my son and heir. Are you certain you will not come with me?’
‘No, Sire,’ said Bertran, making a deep bow to his lord, since he expected never to see him again. ‘I cannot take up arms against my own people.’ It was the closest he had ever come to admitting to the Count that he was himself a Believer in what the Pope called heresy.
‘Where will you go?’ asked Raimon.
‘To your nephew in Béziers,’ said Bertran. ‘I must warn him of the size and ferocity of the army. And I must tell him of your decision.’
‘He won’t understand,’ said the Count. ‘He’ll probably think I’m a traitor. But I offered him an alliance some time ago and he washed his hands of me. There is nothing left for me to try.’
He let Bertran kiss his hand and then clasped the troubadour warmly in his arms before waving him on his way.
‘Who will sing of this war in years to come?’ he mused aloud to his little son, before taking him to the Abbot to offer him as a hostage.
‘I give you my most precious jewel,’ he said to the Abbot. ‘Worth more than all my castl
es and lands. This is my only son. Take him as an earnest of my good faith. I have come to join the crusade.’
.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Siege
‘It took more than two hours for the French army to pass,’ wrote Azalais from Tarascon. ‘I have never seen so many people in one place. It was terrifying.’
Iseut was reading her letter to Elinor. But events were moving faster than a messenger could ride and by the time the women heard about the huge forces from the north, the killing had already begun: Tonneins and Casseneuil in the west, where the crusaders burned their first heretics, men and women who refused to convert. In the east the army passed through Beaucaire and Nîmes and arrived at Montpellier without hindrance.
But the women of Saint-Jacques did not know any of this. Elinor was tortured by fear; if the mighty army was going to pass on to Béziers it would be very close to her home town. But if it changed course and decided to go east, their fastness in the mountains would be under threat.
Azalais had watched the army go by from the east bank of the Rhône, as it passed through Beaucaire, so it looked as if Saint-Jacques was safe for the moment. But that meant Sévignan was more at risk. It was dreadful not knowing. Elinor felt she could cope with a force of armed men turning up to besiege Iseut’s castle better than she could bear the long wait for news.
It was hard to live through every day never knowing when a messenger might arrive with something horrible to tell them. Iseut had been through this before, waiting for news from the Fourth Crusade, so she was better able to support the daily burden of running the demesne while ignorant of what was happening elsewhere.
This helped Elinor too. The Lady was an excellent manager. She had flocks of sheep and herds of goats in the higher lands and fig trees and vines down in the valley. Her lands covered fields of wheat and barley and flax for cloth and orchards of plums, cherries, pears and sweet chestnuts.