I had been writing the background to a medieval wedding when something about it struck me as familiar. The wedding suggested people, events and a long, bitter war that had been fought twenty-three hundred years earlier near the northwest coast of Anatolia.
Why should the marriage of King John in the year 1200 resemble the epoch-defining Trojan War?
The tale of the Trojan War goes like this: The goddess Aphrodite chose to make Helen the most beautiful of mortal women. Helen attracted many suitors, choosing in time to marry Menelaus, king of Sparta. However, one rejected suitor, Paris, could not accept rejection, plotting to abduct her.
Paris, who happened to be a prince from the city of Troy, came to Sparta on the pretext of visiting Menelaus, who extended his hospitality. With the help of Aphrodite’s divine powers, Paris contrived to send Menelaus out of Sparta on a false pretext. Aphrodite created a storm to extend his absence by blowing his ship across the Mediterranean, to Africa. While his crew struggled to return, Paris seized Helen and carried her off to the island of Kranai. Then they set sail for Troy. The Spartans and their allies gave chase. The resulting war reduced Troy to ruins in ten years.
In the year 1200, King John developed a great passion for another beauty, Isabella of Taillefer, who would soon be another man’s bride. That man was Hughes le Brun, head of the House of Lusignan, a clan hostile to John’s ruling Angevin family.
John’s redoubtable mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, recounts the tale, replete with parallels to the Trojan War: “Isabella of Taillefer is Helen; Hughes le Brun is Menelaus; Sparta with its warrior clan is Lusignan; and Paris, prince of Troy, is my foolish son, John.” As the queen of England, and then as the mother of two kings, Eleanor had been at war against France for almost half a century. She had earned the right to spit with real feeling, “Paris! What a nemesis hangs upon that name.”
Eleanor saw the connections: Hughes le Brun had fed and entertained his betrayer, her son John, as Menelaus had welcomed Paris. John had sent Hughes on a fool’s errand, as Aphrodite had sent Menelaus. The castle of Chinon, where John spent an extended honeymoon with his stolen bride, substituted for the island of Kranai. Worse, Eleanor belatedly recognized that she had unwisely encouraged John to abduct Hughes’ bride. At eighty-one, she bitterly concludes that she herself played the role of Aphrodite in abducting Isabella. And Troy? “God help me, Troy is everything my life’s work built to be possessed and ruled by men now dead!” (Chapter 44). Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Angevin Empire would succumb to enemy forces in the year of her death, 1204.