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1177 he came to Navarre to compete in a tournament with his great friend, her brother Sancho. Some chroniclers claimed that Richard returned her love, and wooed her according to the rules of courtly love during the tournament at Pamplona.15.
Eleanor travelled through the harsh winter of December 1190 to Navarre to collect her daughter in law. The Queen, accompanied by a band of Poitevin men who had returned from the Second Crusade forty years before, was greeted with banquets and courtly dances. The tables groaned with meat dishes such as venison, boar's head and kid stuffed with chestnut, and the 25 year old Berengaria danced the farandole and the basse danse - then a new dance - to entertain her new mother.16
Early the next morning, Berengaria rode away from her father and her country, forever.
The Queen journeyed in a wagon, the court ladies in litters, and Berengaria on a palfrey. All the bride's worldly goods were carried on pack mules. The escort consisted of a few knights and squires.
They inched across a snowbound landscape through Toulouse, pausing at Montpellier, crossed the Rhone at Avignon, and then up snow covered passes near Mont Genevre.
In the Alps, their horses were exchanged for mules to cross the highest points, before descending into the warmer Lombardy plains.17
Averaging 30 kilometres a day, they passed quickly down the length of Italy, travelling in relative anonimity, compared to the melodramatic journey Eleanor had made in the opposite direction in 1150.
The Old Queen and her party passed through Italy to the port of Brindisi, and then sailed around the heel of Italy to Sicily.
It is remarkable how completely the Franks had forgotten the seafaring skills of their ancestors. When Eleanor made her short journey, she took her life in her hands in the unseaworthy hulks that passed for European transports of the time. Yet she was the contemporary of people who had built ships that had traversed the world as far as the Arctic Circle and as far west as the Americas. The consummate skills of the Norsemen had been lost in the European heartland, however, and now the ships of the Franks crawled slowly around the coastlines, beaching their vessels each night lest they sink. A journey that would once have taken days now took months, in less comfort and with considerably less safety than in the ships built shortly before the First Crusade.
Exposed to the elements and placing her life in the less than competent hands of the sailors, she reached Sicily in time to play a trump card: a real marriage for Richard.
And through the marriage, an heir of her choosing, in the extremely possible likelihood that Richard would never return from Jerusalem.
Eleanor arrived in April, to receive her daughter Joanna from Richard, and to give Richard his new bride.
This was on the very day that Philip set sail, accompanied for a short distance on his journey by Richard. Philip left out of a mixture of impatience at the long delay, and because it would have been humiliating for him to be confronted at that moment with the woman who was to replace his sister Alys in Richard's bed.
(Berengaria's family was widely admired, although never as flamboyant as the Plantagenets. Like their relatives by marriage, however, their stature was sufficient to attract legendary accounts of their deeds: Roger de Hoveden recounts a curious fable relating to Berengaria's brother, Sancho king of Navarre.18
He says the daughter of "the emperor of Africa" Boyac El Emir Amimoli, having heard common report of Sancho's prowess, fell in love with him to such a degree that she greatly longed to have him as her husband. She told her father she would hang herself if she could not marry Sancho. The father pointed out the impossibility of such a marriage on account of the different religions involved. The daughter replied she was willing to turn Christian if only she might have the king to husband. The father, feeling himself helpless in the face of his daughter's threats and blandishments, agreed reluctantly. Accordingly, he sent messengers to Sancho offering his daughter and promising great wealth and vast territories.
The king set off to meet the emperor, but while on his journey, the pagan died, leaving his infant son as his unfit successor. The kingdom was therefore in turmoil when Sancho arrived. The child offered the hand of his sister on condition that Sancho helped him win his kingdom, or prison. Reluctantly, Sancho agreed. The settling of the new emir on his throne took three years. In the meantime, Alphonso of Castile abetted by the king of Aragon invaded Sancho's territories and seized 42 towns from him).
Eleanor stayed at Messina only four days, long enough to see Richard and Berengaria safely together. But pressing matters called her back to England, so she did not have time to ensure that the marriage was made formal, nor that her son did what was required of him to ensure the continuance of the dynasty.
Rather, Richard was able to make excuses about delaying the marriage. Unfortunately, he explained, due to it being Lent, he was unable to be married in time before Eleanor's departure. The king's excuse may be seen as a legitimate aspect of the hardships of Crusading life. Richard was undergoing a ritual cleansing at the time, having only a short time before stripped himself naked before prelates of the church to confess his sins and offer to do penance. In such a state, it was possibly considered inappropriate for him to marry.
It may have also have had to do with Richard's sexual predilections.
One assumes that Eleanor and Henry, if in a similar position, would have simply ignored ritual requirements, and continue to follow their desires, as they always did. It seems possible that Richard engaged in homosexual practices: he said openly that he had shared Phillip's bed for two years when a young man. Given the Church's official abhorrence of sodomy, Richard's violent mood swings from tenderness and civility to bestial rage may be seen as his compensation for his leaning towards an activity that he found natural, but for which there was almost universal public condemnation of the severest kind. On the other hand, he did sire at least two children by different mothers. Perhaps it was simply the case that he was bisexual. Or it may be that in identifying Richard's character as driven by stifled homosexuality we are imposing twentieth century standards on another era. Most young men of his rank spent much of their lives in the company of other young men, rarely meeting women, or at least not often being in a gathering where anything more intimate than playing at the game of courtly love might be permitted. In such cases, it may have been that many nobles turned to male companionship of a kind, while still valuing their occasional chances at intimacy with women.
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