When Pope Eugenius came to consider the princes of the West, he could see only one suitable candidate for the leadership of the new Crusade. Ideally, the honour should have fallen to the western
1 Letter 237. 2 Letter 238.
Emperor, but Conrad—as yet only King of the Romans pending his imperial coronation—was still beset with his own difficulties in Germany. When these were solved, he would be more interested in settling the Italian problem than in oriental adventures. King Stephen of England had had a civil war on his hands for six years already. Roger of Sicily was, for any number of reasons, out of the question. The only possible choice was Louis VII of France.
Louis asked nothing better. He was one of Nature's pilgrims. Though still only twenty-four, he had about him an aura of lugubrious piety which made him look and seem older than his years— and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was already under a crusading vow, having assumed it from his elder brother Philip after the latter's death in a riding accident some years before. Moreover, his soul was in anguish. In 1143, during a war with Theobald, Count of Champagne, his army had set fire to the little town of Vitry—now Vitry-en-Francois—on the Marne; and its inhabitants, more than a thousand men, women and children, had been burnt alive in the church where they had taken refuge. Louis had watched the conflagration, but had been powerless to prevent it. Ever since, the memory of that day had weighed him down. The responsibility he knew to be his; nothing less than a Crusade, with its promise of a plenary indulgence for all sins, could be sufficient atonement.
At Christmas 1145 Louis informed his assembled tenants-in-chief of his determination to take the Cross, and implored them to follow him. Odo of Deuil reports that 'the King blazed and shone with the zeal of his faith and his contempt for earthly pleasures and temporal glories, so that his person was an example more persuasive than any speech could be'. It was not, however, persuasive enough. His vassals' reaction was disappointing. They had their responsibilities at home to consider. Besides, the reports they had heard about life in Outremer suggested that their dissolute compatriots had probably brought the disaster on themselves. Let them work out their own salvation. That hard-headed churchman Abbot Suger of St Denis, former guardian and tutor to the King, also turned his face firmly against the proposal. But Louis had made up his rnind. If he himself could not fill the hearts and minds of his vassals with crusading fire, he must find someone who could. He wrote to the Pope, accepting his invitation; then, inevitably, he sent for the Abbot of Clairvaux.
To Bernard, who had always taken a lively interest in the affairs of the Holy Land, here was a cause after his own heart; exhausted as he was, broken in health and by now genuinely longing for retirement in the peace of his abbey, he responded to the call with all that extraordinary fervour that had made him, for over a quarter of a century, the dominant spiritual voice in all Christendom. Willingly he agreed to launch the Crusade in France, and to address the assembly that the King had summoned for the following Easter at Vezelay.
At once the magic of his name began to do its work, and as the appointed day approached men and women from every corner of France poured into the little town. Since there were far too many to be packed into the cathedral, a great wooden platform was hastily erected on the hillside. (It stood until 1789, when it was destroyed by the Revolution.) Here, on Palm Sunday morning, 31 March 1146, Bernard appeared before the multitude for one of the most fateful speeches of his life. His body, writes Odo, was so frail that it seemed already to be touched by death. At his side was the King, already displaying on his breast the cross which the Pope had sent him in token of his decision. Together the two mounted the platform; and Bernard began to speak.
The text of the exhortation which followed has not come down to us; but with Bernard it was the manner of his delivery rather than the words themselves that made the real impact on his hearers. All we know is that his voice rang out across the meadow 'like a celestial organ', and that as he spoke the crowd, silent at first, began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of these, cut in rough cloth, had been already prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the abbot flung off his own robe and began to tear it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.
The new Crusaders included men and women1 from all walks
1 The legend of a whole female regiment, with Eleanor herself as its titular head, is surprisingly confirmed by the Byzantine chronicler Nicetas Choniates, who reports the appearance in Constantinople of 'a body of women on horseback, dressed and armed like men, completely military in appearance and seemingly braver than Amazons'.
of life—among them many of those vassals whom Louis had failed to rouse from their apathy only three months before. All France, it seemed, had been infused with Bernard's spirit; and it was with pardonable pride that—his earlier resentment against Pope Eugenius now forgotten—he could write to him shortly afterwards:
You have commanded, and I have obeyed ... I have declared and spoken; and now they [the Crusaders] are multiplied, beyond number. Cities and castles are deserted, and seven women together may scarcely find one man to lay hold on, so many widows are there whose husbands are still living.
It was indeed a remarkable achievement. No one else in Europe could have done it. And yet, as events were soon to tell, it were better had it not been done.
His success at Vezelay acted on St Bernard like a tonic. No longer did he contemplate a return to Clairvaux. Instead he swept through Burgundy, Lorraine and Flanders to Germany, preaching the Crusade to packed churches wherever he went. His line of approach, always direct, was at times alarmingly so. In a letter to the German churchmen he wrote:
If the Lord has called little worms like yourselves to the defence of His heritage, do not conclude that His arm has grown shorter or that His hand has lost its power. . . . What is it, if not a most perfect and direct invention of the Almighty, that he should admit murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurors and other criminals for his service and for their salvation ?
By autumn Germany too was aflame; and even Conrad, who had at first predictably refused to have any part in the Crusade, repented1 after a Christmas castigation from Bernard and agreed to take the Cross.
Pope Eugenius received this last news with some alarm. Not for
1 It may be that Conrad's change of heart was accelerated by a miraculous occurrence two days previously when Bernard, entering the cathedral of Speyer on Christmas Day, had prostrated himself three times to the statue of the Virgin, which had promptly returned his greeting.
the first time, the Abbot of Clairvaux had exceeded his brief. His instructions had been to preach the Crusade in France; no one had said anything about Germany. The Germans and the French were bound to squabble—they always did—and their inevitable jockey-ings for position might easily lead to the foundering of the whole enterprise. Besides, the Pope needed Conrad in Italy; how else was he ever to re-establish himself in Rome ? But it was too late to change things now. The vows had been taken. Eugenius could hardly start discouraging would-be Crusaders before the movement was even on its way.
In France, meanwhile, Louis VII had flung himself into preparations and had already written to enlist the sympathies of Manuel Comnenus and Roger of Sicily. To Manuel, fond as he was of individual westerners and the western way of life, the prospect of another full-scale incursion of his Empire by undisciplined Frankish armies was disagreeable in the extreme. He knew the problems that the First Crusade had caused his grandfather fifty years before—the descent on Constantinople by hordes of Latin thugs and barbarians, all of them out for what they could get and expecting to be lodged, fed and often even clothed by the Byzantines at no cost to themselves; the swaggering arrogance of their leaders, refusing to do the Emperor homage for their eastern conquests, which all too often had merely substituted one hostile neighbour for another. Admittedly
the Danishmend Turks were giving him a lot of trouble just now; it was even conceivable that the new wave of Crusaders might prove better behaved than their predecessors and even turn out to be a long-term blessing; but he doubted it. His reply to Louis was as lukewarm as it could be made without offence. He would provide food and supplies for the Crusading armies, but everything would have to be paid for. And all the leaders would be asked once again to swear their fealty to him as they passed through his Empire.
Writing to the King of Sicily, Louis found himself in a slightly embarrassing position. He himself had formally recognised Roger in 1140 and had no quarrel with him; but he was fully aware that the two Emperors did not share his benevolence. Nor did the Christian rulers in the East. Not only had Roger already made formal claim to Antioch, even trying to lay hands on its present prince, Raymond of Poitiers, who—to complicate matters further—was the uncle of young Queen Eleanor of France; there was also the unfortunate fact that, by the terms of his mother's marriage with King Baldwin, the Crown of Jerusalem in default of a direct heir should have passed to him. In the event, this contract was later declared null and void; and Baldwin, once he had spent all Adelaide's money, had shipped her unceremoniously back to Palermo. It was an insult that her son had never forgiven, and relations between Sicily and the Crusader states had remained bad. Louis knew that Roger would never be welcome in Outremer and doubted whether he would even consent to go— except as a conqueror.
On the other hand, Roger was now the acknowledged master of the Mediterranean—a position he had further strengthened during the summer of 1146 when, by the capture of the Libyan city of Tripoli, he had effectively sliced the Middle Sea in two. No longer could any ship hope to sail from one end of it to the other without his consent. If, then, the Second Crusade were to succeed, it was essential that the King of Sicily should remain well-disposed; but it was hoped that he would not embarrass everyone by insisting on active personal participation. On the first point Louis was soon reassured. Roger not only declared himself sympathetic to the Crusade; he offered to provide transportation, supplies and, in addition, a considerable force of fighting men to swell the Crusader ranks. On the second, however, his reply was less satisfactory; in the event of this offer being accepted, he himself or one of his sons would willingly lead a Sicilian army to Palestine.
Like most of the King's diplomatic communications, this reply was deeply disingenuous. Roger was just as opposed to the Second Crusade as his father had been to the First. Many of the most distinguished and influential of his subjects were Muslims, whom he understood and whose language he spoke; he liked them, one suspects, a good deal more than the French or the Germans. Furthermore, as we have seen, he had always hated the Frankish states of the Levant. Tolerance was the corner-stone of his kingdom; why should he now support a movement that preached the exact opposite, in a way that would be bound to arouse resentment among an important section of his own people ?
In reality, he can have had no intention of taking the Cross; not, at least, any further than Antioch. To him the Crusade meant two things only—a means of distracting the two Empires from an attack on Sicily and an opportunity of extending his own influence in the East. But both these objectives would be furthered if he could secure the friendship or support of the King of France, and for this a policy of benevolent neutrality towards the Crusade would not be enough. The situation called for at least some degree of controlled enthusiasm, shown in a line of action that could at any moment be turned from its original aim and redirected against the states of Outremer— or even, if need be, against Constantinople itself.
However, when Roger's envoys formally advanced his proposals to a preliminary conference of the Crusaders held at Etampes early in 1147, King Louis politely declined. His ally Conrad was in any case resolved to take the overland route; even had he not been, the Sicilian offer was impractical. Roger's navy, huge as it was, would not have been adequate to carry the whole crusading force. To have accepted it would have meant dividing the army, putting half of it at the mercy of a notoriously untrustworthy monarch who had already attempted to kidnap the Queen's own uncle on a similar voyage, and leaving the other half to negotiate the long passage through Anatolia—the most perilous part of the whole expedition. They were understandable fears, which might well have been justified in the event; and though Louis's rejection of Sicilian help led to Roger's complete withdrawal from all active participation in the Crusade, his decision was probably a wise one.
St Bernard's uncomplimentary letter to the German clergy quoted earlier in this chapter had been, perhaps, more prophetic than he knew. Largely because of the promise of plenary absolution which accompanied all successful crusading journeys, the crusader armies tended to be even more disreputable than most others in the Middle Ages; and the German host that set off, about twenty thousand strong, from Ratisbon at the end of May 1147 seems to have contained more than its fair share of undesirables, ranging from the occasional religious maniac to the usual collection of footloose ne'er-do-wells and fugitives from justice. Hardly had they entered Byzantine territory than they began pillaging the countryside, raping, ravaging and even murdering as the mood took them. Often the leaders themselves set a poor example to those that followed behind; at Adrianople—now Edirne—Conrad's nephew and second-in-command, the young Duke Frederick of Swabia (better known to history by his subsequent nickname of Barbarossa) burnt down a monastery in reprisal for an attack by local brigands, and slaughtered the perfectly innocent monks. Fighting became ever more frequent between the Crusaders and the Byzantine military escort which Manuel had sent out to keep an eye on them, and when in mid-September the army at last drew up outside the walls of Constantinople—Conrad having indignantly refused the Emperor's request to avoid the capital altogether by crossing directly over the Hellespont into Asia—relations between German and Greek could hardly have been worse.
Even before the populations along the route had recovered from the shock, the French army in its turn appeared on the western horizon. It was a rather smaller force than that of the Germans, and on the whole more seemly. Discipline was better, and the presence of many distinguished ladies—including Queen Eleanor herself— accompanying their husbands doubtless exercised a further moderating influence. Yet even their progress was not altogether smooth. The Balkan peasantry by now showed itself frankly hostile—not surprisingly in view of what it had suffered from the Germans scarcely a month before—and asked ridiculous prices for what little food it had left to sell. Mistrust soon became mutual, and led to sharp practices on both sides. Thus, long before they reached Constantinople, the French had begun to feel considerable resentment against Germans and Greeks alike; and when they finally arrived on 4 October they were scandalised to hear that the Emperor Manuel had chosen that moment to conclude a truce with the Turkish enemy.
Although Louis could not have been expected to appreciate the fact, it was a sensible precaution for Manuel to take. The presence of the French and German armies at the very gates of his capital constituted a far more serious immediate danger than the Turks in Asia. The Emperor knew that in both camps there were extreme elements pressing for a combined western attack on Constantinople; and indeed only a few days later St Bernard's cousin Godfrey, Bishop of Langres, with all 'the un-Christian intolerance of a monk of Clairvaux',1 was formally to propose such a course to the King. Only by deliberately spreading reports of a huge Turkish army massing in Anatolia and implying that if the Franks did not make haste to pass through the hostile territory they might never manage to do so at all did Manuel succeed in saving the situation. Meanwhile he flattered Louis—and kept him occupied—with his usual constant round of banquets and lavish entertainments, while arranging passage for the King and his army over into Asia at the earliest possible moment.
As he bade farewell to his unwelcome guests and watched the ferryboats, laden to the gunwales with men and animals, shuttling across the Bosphorus, the Emperor foresaw better th
an anyone the dangers that awaited the Franks on the second stage of their journey. He himself had only recently returned from an Anatolian campaign; though his stories of the gathering Turkish hordes had been exaggerated, he had now seen the Crusaders for himself and he must have known that their shambling forces, already as lacking in morale as in discipline, would stand little chance of survival if suddenly attacked by the Seljuk cavalry. He had provided them with provisions and guides; he had warned them about the scarcity of water; and he had advised them not to take the direct route through the hinterland but to keep to the coast, which was still under Byzantine control. He could do no more. If, after all these precautions, the Crusaders still persisted in getting themselves slaughtered, they would have only themselves to blame. He, for his part, would be sorry—but not, perhaps, inconsolable.
It cannot have been more than a few days after bidding them farewell that Manuel received two reports, from two very different
1 Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. II, p. 268. The bishop had formerly been prior of Clairvaux—a fact which led him, according to John of Salisbury, to claim special authority on the grounds that Bernard had committed the King to his counsel. His pomposity was, however, regularly punctured by Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux, worldliest of prelates, who maintained that he was just like the wine of Cyprus—sweet to the taste but lethal unless diluted with water. (Historia Pontificalis, ch. xxiv.)
quarters. The first, brought by swift messengers from Asia Minor, informed him that the German army had been taken by surprise by the Turks near Dorylaeum and massacred. Conrad himself had escaped, and had returned to join the French at Nicaea, but nine-tenths of his men now lay dead among the wreckage of their camp.
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