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had rejected the clerical career of a landless younger son of the nobility because hepreferred a sword in his hand, food in his belly and the rousing music of a chanson de geste in his ears to the bishop’s crosier, fasting and the sound of the litany.
    The first time fortune smiled on him was after the calamity of the sinking of the White Ship at Barfleur in 1120, when Henry I of England lost his bastard sons and his heir. Taking Raymond into his household, he dubbed him knight – at the time adouber meant giving arms, a destrier and armour to the candidate, and ceremonially buckling on his sword belt.
    As a landless knight errant Raymond still had to marry a rich heiress or show prowess in the field that might be rewarded by a fief of his own. His second break came in 1135 with the news that Bohemund, Prince of Antioch, had died leaving no son to succeed him. His vassals, unwilling to lose their privileges by being absorbed directly into the fief of Jerusalem, were seeking urgently to replace Bohemund by an unattached knight of noble lineage who was not too closely related to any royal family.
    Politely described as sage et apercevanz , Raymond was both shrewd and ruthless. He was also courageous and skilled at arms, all of which made him an ideal choice. Knowing that he was not the only contender, and to make sure of arriving first in the field, he divided his entourage into small groups that travelled separately through France and along the Mediterranean littoral mingling with the stream of pilgrims, traders and fortune-hunters flowing from Europe to the East and back.
    Arriving in Antioch disguised as a humble pilgrim or peddler, and with his rivals far behind, he quickly summed up the situation. The original offer had been for him to marry Bohemund’s pragmatic widow, who had been putting out feelers to the Turks in Edessa for an accommodation that would permit her to keep the reins of power in her hands. While initially accepting the widow’s lavish hospitality and letting her suppose he intended marriage, Raymond decided to espouse Bohemund’s more pliant nine-year-old daughter Constance, who was also a cousin of the king of Jerusalem.
    What deal he cut with the patriarch of Antioch is unknown, but prelates in the Latin Kingdom closed their eyes to the moral shortcomings of those strong enough to protect the holy places. The marriage between Raymond and Constance was hastily celebrated in secret, after which the furious discarded widow was banished from the principality, leaving Eleanor’s uncle to rule Antioch for ten years of intermittent strife, during which he spared little thought for the land of his birth.
    With the fall of Edessa, however, it was to Aquitaine he turned – or more precisely to its reservoir of footloose younger sons of the nobility, of whom he had been one. Later to be immortalised in fiction as the cadets de Gascogne in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Alexandre Dumas’ character d’Artagnan, these hotheads with nothing to lose were a permanent source of unrest and brigandage at home, but ideal material for the all-or-nothing adventure of coming to the rescue of the Latin Kingdom established by their own grandfathers. And who better to organise their raising and equipping than Raymond’s niece, the queen of the Franks, 6 who, as countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine was also the overlord to whom many of their families owed allegiance?
    William of Tyre relates that the prince of Antioch sent to the Capetian royal couple costly presents from all over the Levant. Eleanor certainly needed no such inducement; she would have grasped at any excuse to escape the stifling routine of court life in Paris. Whether they influenced Louis is doubtful, for material greed was not one of his failings, but at last he saw a penance big enough to atone for his sins. What better way to redeem his immortal soul than by answering the call to crusade launched by the new Pope Eugenius III, and at