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is the presence of Queen Eleanor.
As in real life she was the controller of kings, so in literature she became the epitome of desire:
Were the lands all mine
From the Elbe to the Rhine,
I'd think little of their charms
If the Queen of England
Lay in my arms.
After her separation from her unfaithful husband Henry in 1168, Eleanor created under her jurisdiction the famed Courts of Love at Poitiers, where women ruled supreme over men, and where living was for pleasure, of which the highest and purest was lovemaking.11
Whether these were true feudal courts with women acting the role of dukes and barons, hearing legal points of love where men were the defendants, has not been shown by primary source evidence. The tradition of the troubadours was for two jongleurs to argue a point of love in a performance of a musical piece known as a sirventes. Perhaps indeed Eleanor, Marie of Champagne, Isabel of Flanders, Ermengarde of Narbonne and Emma of Anjou took the musical performance a stage further and formalised it into a hearing with themselves on the dais, or perhaps they simply dressed up an existing musical show with parades, jousts and other formal occasions.
But it is known that Eleanor's court was glamorous in the extreme.
To the disgust of the older generation, such as John of Salisbury, the young people with whom Eleanor surrounded herself took wholeheartedly to the fast way of life associated with lovemaking. It was not just the fashionable haircuts and the licentious clothes, it was also the flattery, the politeness, the table manners, the polyphonal singing, the mummery and the mimes of actors, dancers and magicians.
The chronicler Geoffrey of Vigeois complained that whereas the nobles of Limoges and Comborn were once content to go about in sheep and fox skins, in Eleanor's day the humblest would have blushed to be in anything but clothes of rich and precious stuffs, in colours to suit their humour. They snipped the cloth in rings and slashes to show the underlining, and their sleeves trailed like monk's habits.
And as for the women - they went about with trains so long that they looked like snakes.12
The influence of the importation of boatloads of eastern luxuries was reflected in the quantity and types of gifts the ladies expected from their lovers: handkerchiefs, a fillet, a gold or silver wreath, a brooch, a mirror, a purse, a girdle, a tassel, a comb, sleeves, gloves, a ring, a powder box, little dishes, or any small object suitable for the toilet of the lady.13
Yet it was not only Eleanor who focussed the energy of the poets.
Of almost equal importance is her daughter by Louis, Marie Countess of Champagne, born in 1145.
She came to her mother's court at Poitiers, where she established her intellectual influence in unforgettable style.
She had been married at the age of 19 to Henry of Champagne, later to become King of Jerusalem at the conclusion of the Third Crusade.
At the age of 30, Marie was living an independent life in the English Queen's court. Here she met her half brother, then Count of Poitou, later Richard the Lionheart, and he fell in love with her, even though she was many years his senior, and his half sister. It was to her that he wrote his poems during his sad years in captivity.
Under Marie's influence, two monumental literary works were generated: Andreas Capellanus' The Art of Courtly Love, and the Arthurian stories penned by Chretien de Troyes. Both writers acknowledged her direct inspiration of their writing. Chretien says at the outset of his story of Lancelot that the countess - a noble lady worth as many queens as gems are worth pearls - commanded him directly to make the book, and that she had furnished him with the material and treatment of it. He may simply have been flattering his patron, but there is no reason to think otherwise than that it was she who instigated the telling of this ground breaking story.14
Andreas' work seeks to reconcile the Roman thoughts of lovemaking encapsulated in the writings of Ovid with the practice of the Courts of Love. He describes many cases involving problems of love, and suggests solutions to them according to a set of precepts welding Roman and medieval practice.
Chretien introduces to the world the stories of history's most famous lovers, for the first time telling at length of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, in their doomed triangle of passion and betrayal.
He also formulated the story of Percival's Quest for the Holy Grail, the spiritual essence of the highest form of love, and in itself a metaphor for the search for the secrets of the Holy Land.
The effects of the writings of Andreas and Chretien, under the direction of Marie, on the history of the middle ages and of the Crusading movement is immeasurable and immense. The Arthurian tales and their acting out of the precepts of Love, together with their search for earthly perfection through suffering, permeates aristocratic life from that moment on. It was no accident that Richard Lionheart took the reputed sword of Arthur, Excalibur, on the Third Crusade with him.
He was merely enacting the fantasy created for him and all the other nobles of Christendom by his ladies.
The ideology of love making translated itself into the real world of the knights and ladies. From a distance, it seems that the conventions of love and its intimately related practice of chivalry were a polite fiction to cover the brutality of relationships between living men and women. For every act of obeisance, there are a hundred in which the Crusading men proved themselves brutal and uncaring in their treatment of women.
This unpleasant truth should not blind us to the parallel truth - that actual men and women did live their lives according to the conventions, when it was possible.
Thus, a beautiful chanson by a Crusading knight in the service of a lord of Gisors laments the parting from his lady Isabel. It is a poem which talks about everyday reality in terms of the spiritual obsession of the true lover.
He must exchange, he says, the perfect joy of paradise for one whose body is noble and
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