Eleanor of Aquitaine Read Online Free PDF Page B

Luckily, she became pregnant within a few months.
     
    There is a story that, a few days before Eleanor’s birth, a pilgrim approached her parents with the mysterious prophecy “From you will come nothing good”; but this legend grew up afterward, and it is customary to remember prophetic statements once time has already demonstrated the course of events. Unfortunately, few details are available about Eleanor’s entry into the world. She was born either in Poitiers or at the castle of Belin near Bordeaux in the year 1122, but the month and day have not survived. She was named after her mother, “alia-Aenor” meaning “the other Aenor,” but as William and his wife had passionately desired a son, their feelings about her must have been mixed. Since they could not have foreseen that one day this daughter, outshining all the Williams preceding her, would change the history of her time, they felt mildly disappointed. A year or two later Aenor gave birth to a second child, and once more it was a girl, Aelith, but always to be known as Petronilla. Soon afterward she again became pregnant, and this time she finally had the son she had wanted so desperately. With the birth of William Aigret, the duchy was assured of an heir.
    Eleanor was a remarkably robust child, lively, boisterous, and headstrong. From the beginning, she radiated good health and intelligence, as well as a zest for life reminiscent of the old duke’s, but like both her grandfather and Dangereuse, she possessed a certain restlessness, a lack of discipline that made it difficult for her to tolerate restrictions, an impatience that did not allow her to suffer boredom easily. Modesty did not come naturally to her; she seemed to have a knack for drawing attention to herself, a characteristic that went largely unnoticed in a family of spirited exhibitionists. No one took the trouble to put her in her place.
    She could hardly help knowing that she was not ordinary. Her grandfather called himself “Duke of the Entire Monarchy of the Aquitainians,” and her family tree sagged under the titled weight of counts, dukes, and conquerors. The ancestral palace at Poitiers was already many centuries old. In Merovingian times it had served as the seat of justice, and in the tenth century Duke William V remodeled it and began construction of the Great Hall. (Today, after many additions, some of them made by Eleanor herself, her ancestral home still stands in Poitiers and still serves as the Palace of justice.) During the long sunny days of her childhood Eleanor and Petronilla must have romped together in the palace garden. At midday the shadowy passageways inside the castle might be gray and dank, but outside, the sun’s rays beat down vertically from a steel-white sky and bounced off the helmets of the soldiers pacing the ramparts. In the garden she could have crawled beneath the leafy branches of trees drooping heavily with pears, peaches, lemons, pomegranates, and quince, or listened to the grasshoppers sawing harmoniously in the herb beds, where the hot air hung heavily with the smells of horehound, wild myrrh, and coriander.
    In the evenings there would be entertainment in the Great Hall, and it is not difficult to conjure an image of Eleanor mesmerized by jongleur and storyteller. The hall would be decorated with flowers, the floors strewn with fresh green rushes; the ladies in their brightly colored gowns with long sleeves trailing on the ground and mantles fastened at the breast with ornate pins would wear golden bands around their hair or braids plaited with embroidered ribbons. As the air quivered with the clamor of horns and bells, there would come a procession of other-worldly creatures who could not have helped but delight the young Eleanor: acrobats jumping and twisting, marionettes dancing, jugglers tossing balls and silvery knives high into the air. Later would come the storytellers casting spells with their tales of Arthur and Charlemagne and Roland, of