Bernard first preached the crusade during a grand Easter week assembly at Vézelay in 1146. The location of this gathering, jointly planned by the papacy and the French monarchy for the expedition’s relaunch, was no accident. Nestled in the Burgundian heartlands of Cluniac and Cistercian monasticism, Vézelay was perfectly placed to host a recruitment rally. Already closely associated with the practice of pilgrimage as one of the starting points for the journey to Santiago de Compostela, it was also home to a magnificent abbey church, dedicated to Mary Magdalene.
The scale of the meeting held at Vézelay was unprecedented. While the 1095 council of Clermont had been a largely ecclesiastical affair, in 1146 the flower of north-western Europe’s nobility came together. King Louis VII was joined by his beautiful, headstrong young wife, Eleanor, heiress to the immensely powerful duchy of Aquitaine. They had wed in 1137, when she was fifteen and Louis was about to ascend the throne (aged seventeen), but the initial warmth of their marriage waned somewhat as the king’s piety deepened. Possessed of a marked lust for life, Eleanor was to accompany Louis on crusade, although the later legend that she rode at the head of an army of Amazons was apocryphal.
The king’s brother, Robert, count of Dreux, likewise was present at Vézelay, as were a host of other Frankish potentates, many of whom had historic links to crusading. These included Count Thierry of Flanders, who probably had already made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the late 1130s, and Count Alphonse-Jordan of Toulouse, son to the crusade leader Raymond and kinsman of Tripoli’s Latin rulers. The crowds of nobles were joined by so large a throng that the assembly had to be held outside the confines of the abbey church. From the vantage point of a hastily constructed wooden platform, Louis and Bernard delivered rousing, impassioned speeches on Easter Sunday. The French king’s clothing was already emblazoned with a cross specially sent to him by the pope, and a witness recalled that, when the abbot finished his stirring oration: ‘Everyone around began shouting for crosses. When [Bernard] had given out, we might even say had sown, the bundle of crosses which he had prepared, he was forced to tear up his clothes and sow them.’ The clamour was apparently so great that the wooden dais collapsed, although luckily no one was injured (this in itself was interpreted as a sign of divine favour).
Vézelay was an enormous success, promoting an infectious sense of enthusiasm and excitement, but even so, for the crusade to reach its full potential the call to arms needed to be broadcast to an even wider audience. With this in mind, Bernard enacted a range of measures. Additional preachers were deputised to spread the word elsewhere in France, while scores of letters extolling the virtues of the crusade were dispatched to other regions, including England, northern Italy and Brittany. In these missives the abbot almost adopted the language of a salesman to promote the crusade. In one the expedition was characterised as a unique opportunity to overcome sin: ‘This age is like no other that has gone before; a new abundance of divine mercy comes down from heaven; blessed are those who are alive in this year pleasing to the Lord, this year of remission…I tell you, the Lord has not done this for any generation before.’ Another letter encouraged Christians ‘not to let the chance pass you by’ to fight for God and thereby earn as ‘wages, the remission of their sins and everlasting glory’.101
Meanwhile, despite being in his mid-fifties and physically frail, Bernard himself embarked on an extended tour of north-eastern France, Flanders and Germany, sparking waves of recruitment wherever he went. In November 1146 the abbot met Conrad III, king of Germany, arguably the most powerful secular ruler in all Latin Christendom. Around fifty years old, he had not yet been crowned by the pope and was thus unable to claim the title of emperor enjoyed by his predecessors, but it seemed only a matter of time before this honour would be conferred. During the First Crusade, Rome and Germany had been embroiled in an acrimonious dispute that checked any hopes of direct imperial involvement in the expedition. But in the mid-twelfth century relations between the two powers were considerably improved. Conrad had shown himself to be a true and valued papal ally, not least against Norman Sicilian aggression in Italy; he had also demonstrated an affinity for the Holy Land, probably visiting the Levant in the 1120s. Nonetheless, Conrad was initially reluctant to take the cross, only too conscious that, in his absence, political rivals such as Welf, duke of Bavaria, might move to seize power. At their first meeting in Frankfurt, the king thus demurred when Bernard suggested that he enlist.
The abbot responded by throwing himself into a vigorous winter preaching campaign, delivering sermons at the likes of Freiburg, Zürich and Basel. His journey was said to have been accompanied by a multitude of miracles–more than two hundred cripples were apparently healed, demons cast out and one individual even raised from the dead. And, although Bernard could not speak German, and had to orate with the aid of an interpreter, his words were still capable of bringing ‘floods of tears’ to his audience. Through November and December, hundreds, if not thousands, committed to the cause. It surely was not coincidental that this journey took the abbot into southern German territory neighbouring Welf of Bavaria’s domain, nor that it culminated in Duke Welf’s own enrolment in the crusade.
Buoyed by this achievement, Bernard rejoined Conrad at Speyer on 24 December. In the course of that Christmas the abbot delivered a public sermon and then, on 27 December, was granted a private audience with the king. The following day, Conrad finally took the cross. Scholars continue to dispute the degree of influence exerted by Bernard at this critical moment, some arguing that he effectively goaded the king into joining against his will, others that Conrad’s decision had long been premeditated. Certainly, contemporaries described how the abbot mixed his ‘customary gentleness’ with dire warnings of an imminent apocalypse to win over the king, but it was probably Welf of Bavaria’s recruitment that proved decisive.
Notwithstanding this debate, Bernard of Clairvaux must still be regarded as the primary force behind the preaching of the Second Crusade. The abbot himself remarked that, through his efforts, the Latin armies had been ‘multiplied beyond number’, and that there was barely one man to every seven women left in the settlements through which he passed. There were, nonetheless, other individuals and influences at work in this period. The notions of memory and familial heritage emphasised in Quantum praedecessores evidently had a marked impact on recruitment. Louis VII had a bloodline connection to the First Crusade–his great-uncle, Hugh of Vermandois, had participated in the expedition. Analysis of others known to have joined the Second Crusade reveals that many had a similar crusading pedigree.102
Because of the nature of medieval textual evidence–which usually took the form of documents written by churchmen–the dominant surviving image of crusading tends to be innately coloured by an ecclesiastical perspective. By and large, scholars wishing to reconstruct the history of this age, of necessity rely upon material written by clerics and monks. And these sources are subject to obvious vagaries of bias and omission. But crusades involved the Church and the laity, so how can the secular outlook of knights and soldiers be gauged? One rewarding avenue is the study of popular songs sung in the vernacular rather than Latin. Such songs almost certainly played a role in bolstering recruitment and morale from the very start of the crusading era, but the first actual lyrics to survive date from the 1140s. One was the Old French song ‘Knights, much is promised’, recited by court singers, or troubadours, in the months following the Vézelay assembly. Its chorus and first verse ran:
Who goes along with King Louis
Will never be afraid of Hell,
His soul will go to paradise,
Where angels of the Lord do dwell.
Edessa is taken, as you know,
And Christians troubled sore and long.
The churches there are empty now,
And masses are no longer sung.
O knights, you should consider this,
You who in arms are so renowned,
And then present your bodies to
One who for you with thorns was crowned.
This rare glimpse of the lay celebration and promotion of crusading chimes with some of the messages inherent in clerical preaching: the promise of spiritual rewards; the suffering of eastern Christendom; fighting in the service and imitation of Christ. But the language was more direct and the nuances differ. Louis VII was identified as the central leader, with no mention made of the pope. The complexities of the indulgence were replaced by a straightforward guarantee of a place in ‘paradise’. And, in a later verse, Zangi was named as the endeavour’s chief enemy. Even as the Church deployed Quantum praedecessores and Abbot Bernard broadcast the call to arms, the laity clearly had the capacity to shape their own vision of the Second Crusade.103
EXPANDING THE IDEAL
The loss of Edessa sparked the Second Crusade and, in 1147, the major armies under Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany set out to fight in the Levant. But the scope of crusading activity in the late 1140s was not limited to the Near East, for in this period Latin troops engaged in similar holy wars in Iberia and the Baltic. To some it seemed as if the entire West had taken up arms in a pan-European crusade. Pope Eugenius III himself wrote in April 1147 that ‘so great a multitude of the faithful from diverse regions is preparing to fight the infidel…that almost the whole of Christendom is being summoned for so great a task’. Two decades later, the Latin chronicler Helmold of Bosau (in the northern Baltic coast region of Germany) appeared to reinforce this view, writing that ‘to the initiators of the expedition it seemed that one part of the army should be sent to the [Holy Land], another to Spain and a third against the Slavs who live next to us’. Some contemporaries thus presented the Second Crusade as a single grand enterprise, shaped and directed by its visionary ‘initiators’, Eugenius and the abbot of Clairvaux. In recent decades, modern historians have drawn upon this notion to suggest that the extraordinary range of crusading endeavour between 1147 and 1149 resulted from conscious, proactive planning on the part of the Roman Church. In this rendering of events the papacy had the power to shape and define crusading and it was the sheer elemental force of the Second Crusade’s preaching–the tailored sophistication of Quantum praedecessores’ message and Bernard’s power to inspire–that prompted the unparalleled extension of crusading activity into new theatres after 1146.
The fighting in Iberia and the Baltic may not have had immediate bearing upon the war for the Holy Land, beyond some redirection of manpower and resources. But the consequences of this interpretation of the Second Crusade are far-reaching and fundamental, because they affect the future scale and nature of Christian holy war. Two questions are imperative. Did the Roman Church really take the vital initiative to expand crusading as part of a premeditated design, or was this development more accidental? And, by extension, was the pope actually in control of the crusading movement by the mid-twelfth century?
The notion that wars waged outside the Levant might be sanctified certainly was not unprecedented and, between 1147 and 1149, other conflict zones were undoubtedly drawn into the ambit of the Second Crusade. Through summer 1147, Saxon and Danish Christians fought as crusaders against their pagan neighbours, known as the Wends, in the Baltic region of north-eastern Europe. The impact of the Second Crusade was even more powerfully felt in Iberia. A fleet of some two hundred vessels, carrying crusaders from England, Flanders and the Rhineland, set sail for the Levant from Dartmouth in May 1147. These ships stopped en route in Portugal, and there assisted its Christian King Afonso Henriques in conquering Muslim-held Lisbon on 24 October. King Alfonso VII of León-Castile championed another Christian offensive, with Genoese aid, which enjoyed crusading status. This culminated in the capture of Almería, in far south-eastern Spain, in October 1147 and of Tortosa, in the north-east, in December 1148.
Christian troops were fighting under the crusading banner on multiple fronts in the late 1140s, but the idea that these disparate strands were woven into a single enterprise as part of an overarching, studied plan is faulty. When the events are scrutinised closely it becomes clear that chance and unstructured organic development were at work. The Baltic arm of the Second Crusade was actually the result of the Church superimposing the notion of crusading on top of a pre-existing conflict. At the Frankfurt assembly in March 1147, a Saxon delegation indicated to Bernard of Clairvaux that they were deeply reluctant to go to the Holy Land. Instead, these warriors were intent upon fighting closer to home against their pagan Wendish neighbours. The abbot realised that the Saxons could not be persuaded to participate in the main Near Eastern expedition, but Bernard was still keen to extend the papacy’s power and influence over eastern European events. He therefore drew the Baltic campaign into the crusading sphere, promising its participants ‘the same spiritual privileges as those who set out for Jerusalem’, and in April 1147 Pope Eugenius issued an encyclical confirming this grant.
The Iberian elements of the Second Crusade also need to be re-evaluated. The crusading contribution of the capture of Lisbon was almost certainly the result of an unplanned decision to stop to fight in Portugal. The campaigns against Almería and Tortosa seem to have been appropriated to the crusading cause. Catalan, southern French and Genoese participants did apparently regard themselves as being engaged in a holy war with some parallels to the First Crusade. But no precise evidence exists of papal involvement in the planning or instigation of these wars and, in all probability, they were conceived and driven by Christian Iberia’s secular rulers. The papal endorsement of these endeavours, which came in April 1148, was almost an afterthought, designed to bring Spain under the crusading umbrella.
Modern scholarship has too readily accepted the idea of the Second Crusade as an expression of the papacy’s ability to expand and direct the crusading movement. In fact, the events of the late 1140s suggest that Eugenius, Bernard and the papal curia were still struggling to harness and control this form of sanctified warfare, even as they sought to assert the primacy of Rome within Latin Christendom.104
THE WORK OF KINGS
The inception of the Second Crusade was especially remarkable in one additional respect. Up to this point, crusading expeditions had been led in the field by prominent noblemen–counts, dukes and princes–drawn from the upper echelons of Latin society, but no western monarch had taken the cross.* The decision of King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany to answer Quantum praedecessores’ call to arms thus set an important precedent, adding an enduring new dimension to crusading. The immediate consequences were marked. Recruitment was buoyed, partly through the power of royal endorsement and example and also because the hierarchical nature of medieval society prompted a chain reaction of enlistment. Crown involvement also enhanced the material resources deployed in the name of the cross, at least to some extent. A recent spate of failed western European harvests meant that even men of Louis’ and Conrad’s stature struggled to meet the full financial demands of so long and committed a campaign. Neither seems to have been able to impose general taxes within their respective realms, and turned instead to levying money from towns and churches, but this proved to be only partially successful and, within weeks of his departure, the French monarch was short of cash.
Royal participation came at a considerable price. In the past, most crusaders had sought to arrange their affairs before departure, but the manifold complexities involved in a king all but abandoning his realm for months, even years, had the potential to greatly extend the range and duration of these preparations. In 1147 regents were appointed to protect the throne and oversee day-to-day government, from law and order to the economy: in France, Abbot Suger of St Denis, a long-term Capetian ally and Louis’ childhood tutor, was chosen; in Germany, Conrad’s ten-year-old son, Henry, was designated as heir and the kingdom entrusted to a leading churchman, Abbot Wibald of Corvey and Stavelot.
The fractious nature of medieval European politics also meant that crown involvement in the crusade deepened and extended the potential for damaging an
tagonism between contingents. Northern–southern French tension alone had come close to stalling the First Crusade. While an ingrained sense of national identity had yet to take hold in either realm, in 1147 troops from France and Germany did travel to the Holy Land in separate hosts headed by their respective monarchs. Long-standing international rivalry and suspicion might easily have undermined the expedition. To begin with, at least, the two powers displayed reassuring signs of cooperation, coordination and communication. Louis met with Conrad’s representatives to discuss preparations, in the presence of Bernard of Clairvaux, at a meeting at Châlons-sur-Marne on 2 February 1147. The French and Germans then held further separate planning assemblies at Étampes and Frankfurt.
The presence of these two kings on crusade likewise threatened to disrupt the delicate diplomatic equilibrium that held sway in mid-twelfth-century Latin Christendom. This issue was of greatest concern in relation to Roger II of Sicily, head of a formidable southern Italian Norman kingdom that was fast becoming one of the Mediterranean’s great powers. In the 1140s the papacy and Byzantium were directly threatened by Roger’s expansionist policies and therefore looked to their mutual ally, Germany, to counter Sicilian aggression. Conrad’s decision to join the crusade threatened to disrupt this web of interdependence, exposing Rome and Constantinople to attack. Matters were complicated further by Louis VII’s relatively amiable relations with King Roger, a fact which unsettled Eugenius III and made the Greeks wary of a Sicilian–French invasion plot. Manuel Comnenus–who had now assumed control of Byzantium–sent envoys to Louis VII and Conrad III in an attempt to pave the way for peaceful collaboration with the crusade, but doubts remained in the emperor’s mind and the pope too was probably reluctant to see Conrad leave Europe.
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