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with treasures.
Baldwin met the new queen at Acre in August 1113, leading a train clad in silk, their steeds garnished in the colours of an emperor.
The streets were paved with costly carpets, and purple banners fluttered from the balconies above the roadways of Acre and the towns along the road to Jerusalem.
Alas, this was no act of chivalry, but a statement of political power on Baldwin's part, and the marriage was no fairytale.
Baldwin sank the golden treasures into purchasing the stones of his new fortresses, and once the gilded glamour wore off it was discovered that the Queen was advanced in years.3
The Patriarch Arnulf contrived a double cross.
He stood condemned for performing the wedding ceremony, which many people regarded as bigamous. Under immense political pressure, he demanded that the king reinstate Arda, and annulled the later marriage. The King, virtually on his death bed, agreed. Arda, however, refused to give up the pleasures of her life in Constantinople, whence she had contrived her retirement.
Adelaide slunk home, shorn of title, wealth and marriage, and ever after the Sicilians were reluctant to aid the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Thus, through his pettiness, selfishness, greed, lack of concern for others, not to mention ungracious behaviour unfitting for any preux chevalier, Baldwin lost two queens, destroyed the credibility of his patriarch, and sacrificed a key international alliance.
But Baldwin never ceases to surprise. He exhibits the lightning strike capability of all humans to surprise by their variability. Thus, the behaviour of Baldwin in 1101 tends to contradict the belief that he along with the other barbarian warriors of the North had no special tenderness towards women as a group.
In the spring of that year he led a raid on a rich Arab caravan that was travelling through Oultrejourdain. He killed most of the men in their tents, and enslaved the women and children, as was the usual custom. Among the captives, however, was the wife of a sheikh. She was on the point of giving birth.
Baldwin released her with a maid servant and two camels and sufficient food and drink for the journey home. She began the journey, and some time later was found by her husband giving birth by the side of the road.
He was so overcome that he hurried after Baldwin to thank him and promised to repay his kindness, in itself a remarkable instance of the feelings of companionship and brotherhood in arms that quickly developed between the knights of Christendom and Allah.
Baldwin's reactions are unrecorded. If he was pleasantly surprised, it was as nothing to the monetary reward he gained. He ransomed back his captives for 50,000 bezants, sufficient to ease the critical financial problems besetting his nascent kingdom, and enable him to continue its defence against overwhelming odds.
So encouraged was he by his easy success in 1101 that he attacked an entire Arab army the following year, assisted only by his personal mesnie of knights. They lasted only so long as it took the much larger military forces of the local Arabs to convince themselves that this was not merely a scouting party they were fighting.
Baldwin took refuge at Ramleh, a nearby fortress. During the night, the Arab whose wife he had treated with such relative courtesy warned him to flee. The gift of charity was repaid: Baldwin fled the fortress on his famous, swift footed battle steed Gazelle. Narrowly evading the Arabs, he took refuge in the mountains, where he disappeared and was given up for dead by his Queen Arda, who watched for him daily from the battlements of Jerusalem.
To her relief, he eventually returned, tattered, travel stained, but triumphant, a king saved by an instinctive act of chivalry towards an enemy woman.4
This, however, should not be interpreted as a harbinger of a more respectful and valuing attitude to women in general by the eastern Franks, but rather as remarkable and uncharacteristic.
The much more elaborate and complex worship of ladies, currently known under the general title of Courtly Love, was to come a generation later from the western Franks at home in Europe.
LOVE SONGS AND LADIES
A twelfth century lady writes of a certain knight who has caused her great distress.
She wants it known, she says, that she has loved him too much - and now he has betrayed her.
How she would like to hold him one night in her naked arms, and see him joyfully use her body as a pillow! For she is more in love with him than the famed Floris and Blanchefleur were with each other. She offers him her heart, her love, her mind, her eyes and her life.
But in return, he must promise to do whatever she may wish.
These are the thoughts of the anonymous countess of Die, one of the few women recorded to have turned her hand to that great literary form of the twelve century, the poetry of the troubadours.
Troubadour thought appears to have grown from a fusion of economic and social circumstance with the music and philosophy of southern Europe at its frontier with the eastern cultures of Spain and Outremer.
In southern France at the start of the twelfth century, the Aquitaine provided a land of wealth and leisure, a relatively luxurious architecture derived from the Romans, a certain scepticism about the authority of the Church. Contact with the Moorish writers of Spain, who were writing about an idealised relationship between a man and a woman, imported a view of love as an ethereal, uplifting passion.
Scholars have debated at length whether the sentiments of troubadour celebration of women was purely a European invention, or whether it was imported to the Aquitaine through contacts with Spain.
By the time of the first Crusade, troubadours from the south of France were already writing rough and frequently obscene lyrics about women. But these resemble the later poems only in basic format. They dwell on the gross physical details of a relationship:
May God grant that I live long enough
To have my hands beneath her cloak...
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