Well, being snowbound did produce some benefits. I was able to finish a key chapter at the siege of Acre. This was when Richard made his worst mistake, needlessly antagonizing the Duke of Austria, who had a personality just as prickly as Richard’s. I tried to warn him—Richard, you do not want to do this! But just as the teenagers in those horror films always insist upon going down alone into the basement, Lionheart forged ahead, paying no heed to me, a woman and a lowly scribe. Based on my experiences with Henry, Richard, and John, I’d say the Angevin males definitely could have benefited from some anger management classes. The trouble, of course, is that no one was willing to say “no” to a king, rather like athletes and rock stars today.
This was one of my chapters that reproduce like amoebae, splitting itself in half. This seems to happen a lot in my books. It looks like Lionheart is going to be a very long novel; I’m sure this comes as a great surprise, right? But so much was happening in this chapter—Richard’s clash with Duke Leopold, a bitter confrontation with the French king, Philippe, some sex, a political crisis resulting in a compromise that infuriated all sides, and a last-minute double-cross. So it really had to be two chapters. Especially since I wanted to take the readers on a tour of Acre with Joanna and Berengaria.
When I read novels about other eras, I love gritty and vivid details that make the time and place seem real for me. So I try to add this sort of descriptive phrasing in my own novels. I want my readers to feel the scorching heat of the Syrian sun. (They had three names for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, calling it Syria, the Holy Land, and Outremer). I want them to breathe in the scent from the soap-makers’ shops and the more pungent smells of horse manure, to marvel with the women at their first sight of a camel and their first taste of an “apple of paradise,” which we more prosaically call bananas. I want readers to share their surprise at the flat roofs and treeless terrain, to feel Philippe’s disgust when he finds a scorpion in his boot. Admittedly, none of this advances the plot line and it helps to explain why my books tend to be Moby-Dick-sized tomes. But it’s fun to write and—I hope—to read.
A friend of mine recently made an interesting observation about Richard’s queen, Berengaria. She thinks that readers today want their women characters to be assertive, charismatic, bold, and beautiful. In other words, women like Eleanor of Aquitaine. I was wondering if you agree with her on this, and if so, will this keep readers from fully embracing Berengaria? She had considerable courage; going on Crusade was not like a Club Med holiday, after all. Her life was at risk more than once, for she faced terrifying storms at sea, an alarming encounter with a Cypriot despot, a deadly disease that almost made her a widow after less than two months of marriage, and the constant dangers of life in a war zone. She would later show her courage again by fighting her brother-in-law John for her dower rights; not surprisingly, John treated her very shabbily, but she refused to back down. Her courage, though, was the quiet kind. She made no scenes, certainly not in public and probably not in private, either. She was not a royal rebel like her formidable mother-in-law. No scandals ever trailed in her wake, and she would never have thought to lead men against rebels in her husband’s absence as her sister-in-law later did.
We know surprisingly little about this young woman who became the queen-consort of the most powerful king in Christendom. Aside from her courage, we know she had a strong sense of duty and she was very pious. We know she came from a close-knit, loving family, the anti-Angevins, if you will. We do not know what she looked like, though if the skeleton discovered in the abbey at Epau is indeed hers, she was five feet in height. Nor do we even know her exact birth year, though Ann Trindade, the most reliable of Berengaria’s two biographers, makes a convincing case that she was born c. 1170. The most quoted comment about her appearance came from the snarky Richard of Devizes, who claimed she was “more prudent than pretty” and speculates that she “may have still been a virgin” when she and Richard sailed from Messina. Only he never laid eyes upon her. The chronicler Ambroise, who probably did, described her as “beautiful, with a bright countenance, the wisest woman, indeed, that one could hope to find anywhere.” The author of The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, who also accompanied Richard on crusade, said that “attracted by her graceful manner and high birth, he (Richard) had desired her very much for a long time, since he was first Count of Poitou.” I rather doubt that she was Richard’s “beloved,” as Ambroise calls her; medieval marriages were matters of state, not the heart, and I suspect that Richard didn’t have a romantic bone in his body.
We do know that she managed to retain her dignity under trying circumstances; her husband’s infidelities were notorious enough to warrant a lecture from the saintly Bishop of Lincoln. We need to remember, though, that medieval women did not expect to find soul-mates in marriage as we do; they were more likely to find their greatest joy in their children, not their husbands. But the fact that her marriage to Richard produced no heirs meant that she’d failed in her primary duty as a queen, for in their world the wife was the one blamed, whether it was her fault or not. Sadly, she probably blamed herself, too, for this is what she would have been taught. Only once, though, are we given a glimpse of the woman behind the queen. According to the friend and biographer of St Hugh of Lincoln, upon learning of Richard’s death, the bishop detoured to Berengaria’s residence at Beaufort en Vallee, where he “calmed the grief” of the “sorrowing and almost broken-hearted widow.” Was she grieving for Richard? For what was or what might have been? For the precarious future she may have envisioned for herself without Richard’s protection? We have no way of knowing. She was a wife for only eight years, a widow for thirty-three, as she never remarried, unusual in itself, and when she was buried in the beautiful abbey she’d founded near Le Mans, she took her heart’s secrets to her grave.
This is all we know of the real Berengaria. I found her to be a sympathetic, even an admirable figure. It has been her fate to be judged and found wanting—for not being able to hold her husband’s interest, for staying in the shadows, above all, for not being another Eleanor of Aquitaine. I think that is very unfair. We need to remember that Richard could act, but she could only react, and her expectations would have been those of a medieval wife and queen. Women in the MA did not have the power that we wish they had, and even Eleanor paid a great price for her refusal to accept the constrictions placed upon her sex by society and the Church. This takes us full circle, then, to my friend’s concern that today’s readers expect their female characters to display an independent spirit and boldness that would have been anachronistic for most of them. I hope she is wrong, would be interested in your thoughts on this subject.
Lastly, I bought Alan Gordon’s latest, The Parisian Prodigal recently. But Alan tells me his publisher has not offered a new contract for any more Fools’ Guild mysteries. This is bad news for his fans, for all who like mysteries, for all who appreciate good writing. To let his publisher know we want more of this clever series, contact St Martin’s Minotaur Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York City, NY 10010, or publicity@stmartins.com.
February 16, 2010