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Conclusion:
Marching Towards Bethelehem
There is a statue in the chapel of the Greyfriars at Nancy, reputedly representing Anne of Lorraine and her husband Hugh I, Count of Vaudemont.
The stone sculpture is a late example of the romanesque style: typically elongated, spare in its decoration, and emitting an aura of defiant strength that promises to outlast the mere fads of epochs and eras.
This is a statue designed to face eternity, unblinkingly.
Anne stands proudly beside her husband, for whom she waited beyond all hope of waiting.
Hugh had set off with King Louis on the ill fated Second Crusade in 1147.
He was lost during that disaster, and there was no hope for him.
But, as in the Russian song, Anne waited for him when all had given up waiting, waited when his friends no longer waited, waited when his mother and father no longer waited, waited when their children no longer waited, waited and refused to drink to his memory when the cup of rememberance was passed around.
And then she waited no longer: 16 years later, Hugh came home. His self portrait shows him weather beaten and lined, heavily bearded, his long hair plaited over his shoulders, his face burned with foreign suns, his clothes tattered, he himself no longer young, but supporting himself on his short pilgrim's staff, the only sign of his former wealth a golden cross on his breast. His left arm is around his wife's shoulder, for support.
She is a woman of determined middle age, who has lived a generation in a dangerous land without her husband, ignoring family pressure to remarry. Her hair, plaited too, hangs from beneath her coif to her waist, and we can be sure it is now streaked with grey. Anne's long jawed face is set and determined, and her left hand reaches to embrace and protect her husband.1
Together, they are looking down the road travelled, a road that has cost them hardship and loneliness, and their lives together. But it is a road that they have each survived, in their own way.
And so we leave them, the crusading women and their men.
Queens in palanquins; noble ladies and their children on horseback; stout merchants with an eye to the main chance; peasant women carrying babies and sacks of provisions on their own backs; prostitutes and thieves in tattered finery; nuns telling their beads; even women in chain mail on battle steeds.
We watch them all, in rain, dust, snow, in scorching heat and bent against the biting wind.
Our grandmothers, marching towards Bethlehem.
1.Pernoud, In the Steps of the Crusaders, plate 69.
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