But pearless Louis was buying no tickets to Splitsville. His prestige was already snake-belly low and he wasn’t about to lose any more face. He managed things so Raymond was kept busy with the Crusade and hoped Eleanor’s niecely passion would blow over. It didn’t, but Eleanor wasn’t the one to sit and wait while Unc dallied with battle plans. If he could dally, so could she, and her dally-mate was a dilly.
The sub-lover she brought into the game was none other than a Moslem lad who would one day be known throughout Islam as Saladin the Great. The young bopper was barely in his teens, only a smidgeon more than half Ellie’s age. But Arab boys make the scene early, and in her late memoirs Eleanor rated the youth at the top of her list of mattress mates.
History doesn’t say why the blueblood Moslem lad was in Christian Byzantium. The best guess is that he was a budding James Bond. He was there incognito, but events prove that he blabbed his identity to Eleanor. Many a secret slips out between the sheets.
And many a deal is made. In this case, the deal was for Eleanor to hand over her jewels to Saladin in return for his helping her escape from Louis. She planned to fly the coop and hitch up with Raymond in Antioch at some future date. Saladin was to smuggle her from Byzantium to Tyre where he would supply a galley on which she would sail away. She would turn over her jewels to him when they reached Tyre.
All went as planned until the final step when the dream of Tyre was punctured by the arrival of King Louis and the plan fell flat. He got there just as Eleanor was about to pay off young Saladin and sail away. Louis managed to save the gems and toss Saladin into the briny, where the plucky boy barely managed to swim to safety. Eleanor clanked back to Byzantium in chains.
Like many a hubby before and after him, Louis decided to meet his domestic problems by jogging off to war. Only this poor king had no choice but to take his troublesome Queen along with him. He set out with a force to attack Damascus, his faithless spouse held prisoner in the van of the army of the Crusaders. Deprived of his mare, and in any case not considering the stakes worth the ride to Damascus, Raymond of Antioch scratched himself and his army from the race.
Now, from the lip in the Damascus marketplace, Louis’ Crusaders were getting close. Saladin had returned to Damascus to pass out the word of their approach on to Nureddin, the Emir, in whose court Saladin’s uncle was a prominent noble. Servants from the court were also spreading the gossip about Eleanor around the marketplace. Here young Saladin was a hero and the rumor was that Louis was coming after his scalp for trying to help Eleanor skip. But admiration was streaked with yellow at the oncoming wrath Saladin had brought down on the city.
They shouldn’t have been so bugged. I could have told them that. I had foreknowledge. For instance, I knew that the siege of Damascus would flop and that the Cruaders would cop out at the precise instant when success lay within their grasp. I didn’t know why they’d be hung up; their flubbing would remain one of the big question marks in history. But I knew that the Saracens, to their own surprise, would come up roses.
I also knew what the crystal ball held for Eleanor of Aquitaine. I knew she would eventually shed Louis VII of France and marry Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and claimant to the English throne. I knew her Provencal armies would enable Henry to grab the throne and that then she would bug him until he waged war against her former spouse. Then Hank would do her dirt with a chick known as “the fair Rosamond” and Eleanor would protect her marital interests by having Rosie the rival rubbed out. And I knew that some years later Eleanor would hop back to Islam to spread some tears over her ex-lover, the mighty Saladina, in order to persuade him to release her captive son, King Richard the Lion-Hearted of England, who had been taken prisoner while leading the Third Crusade.
Between her two sojourns in Islam, Eleanor would pull off a real switcherino in her attitude towards sex and such. From a royal swinger of swingers she would be transformed into one of the most bluenosed bluebloods in history. And she would impose upon future generations the strictures of “courtly love.”
“Courtly love”--amor purus—-took off on the basis of two cockamamie contradictions. The first was that “true love” always finked out in marriage; the second held that unwed lovers could only maintain “true love” if it was “pure.” Balling was out. Sex was categorized as “false love.” “True love” might include necking, petting, kanoodling and even naked flesh-to-flesh bundling, but if a couple went the limit, their love was no longer “true.”
“Thou shalt not have an unauthorized orgasm!” was the first commandment of “courtly love”-—and no orgasm was ever authorized. The code recommended that wives have lovers and husbands mistresses, even countenanced coitus interruptus, but the first coming was always tagged sin. The chivalrous gent was always supposed to stop before he popped--which is the sort of thing that could give chivalry a bad name.
Still, chivalry was the cornerstone of “courtly love.” And when Eleanor set up her “Court of Love” at Poitiers in her later years, it spelled out the rules for chivalry in detail. These rules were masochistic and strongly feminist.
The “Court of Love” tried knights and ladies who goofed on “courtly love.” Presided over by Eleanor, trials considered such trivia as a lady’s right to refuse posies from her sweetie because they made, her sneeze, or such more important points as whether a knight had the right to chicken out on a duel with his lady love’s jealous hubby because the gent was a jousting master whilst he was strictly a piker with a pike. The “Court” passed more “laws” than it enforced, and each one was more anti-Eros than the one before. It was as if Eleanor was doing vicarious penance for her bed-bouncing during the Second Crusade when she was still young enough to enjoy sex personally.
The approach of that Second Crusade now was laying jitters on the Damascus marketplace. The Damascans knew that strategically their burg was the crotch where the two legs of the caliphates of Egypt and Baghdad met. Damascus was vulnerable, and if the Crusaders took it, the feat would be a buster splitting the entire Moslem world. If they flubbed, Damascus could become the rallying point from which two Moslem armies might join and counterattack the Crusaders. The battle that loomed would be a lulu with no quarter asked and none given.
It was the major concern of the gossiping groups when a procession heading towards the Emir’s palace halted in the marketplace and royal guards shunted the commoners off to the sides of the square. Like the others, I stood passively as servants detached themselves from the main group and descended on the food stalls to select delicacies for the palace table. I was still standing there, watching, when the servants, laden with foodstuffs, began straggling back to the procession.
“Laggard! Why do you dally?”
I found myself staring up at a large, bearded guardsman. I looked around and then back up at him. There could be no doubt that he was addressing me.
Now he glowered and shouted again. “Make haste to rejoin your fellows, eunuch, or delay and you shall know my wrath!” His hand wrapped itself around the hilt of the curved sword at his waist and he pulled it halfway out of its scabbard in a threatening manner.
The gesture precluded argument. I hurried over to the tail end of the procession which was starting to leave the marketplace and fell into line there. That was when I noticed that those assembled there were all wearing the exact same clothing as my own stolen garb—white turban, V-cut blouse and pantaloons, maroon sash. It wasn’t long before I deduced that this was the livery of the eunuchs attached to the royal palace.