crusaders, and Godfrey de Bouillon, less ambitious than Bohemund, or
Raymond of Toulouse, gave his cold consent to wield a sceptre which the
latter chiefs would have clutched with eagerness. He was hardly
invested with the royal mantle before the Saracens menaced his capital.
With much vigour and judgment he exerted himself to follow up the
advantages he had gained, and marching out to meet the enemy before
they had time to besiege him in Jerusalem, he gave them battle at
Ascalon, and defeated them with great loss. He did not, however, live
long to enjoy his new dignity, being seized with a fatal illness when
he had only reigned nine months. To him succeeded his brother, Baldwin
of Edessa. The latter monarch did much to improve the condition of
Jerusalem and to extend its territory, but was not able to make a firm
footing for his successors. For fifty years, in which the history of
Jerusalem is full of interest to the historical student, the crusaders
were exposed to fierce and constant hostilities, often gaining battles
and territory, and as often losing them, but becoming every day weaker
and more divided, while the Saracens became stronger and more united to
harass and root them out. The battles of this period were of the most
chivalrous character, and deeds of heroism were done by the handful of
brave knights that remained in Syria, which have hardly their parallel
in the annals of war. In the course of time, however, the Christians
could not avoid feeling some respect for the courage, and admiration
for the polished manners and advanced civilization of the Saracens, so
much superior to the rudeness and semi-barbarism of Europe at that day.
Difference of faith did not prevent them from forming alliances with
the dark-eyed maidens of the East. One of the first to set the example
of taking a Paynim spouse was King Baldwin himself, and these
connexions in time became, not only frequent, but almost universal,
among such of the knights as had resolved to spend their lives in
Palestine. These Eastern ladies were obliged, however, to submit to the
ceremony of baptism before they could be received to the arms of a
Christian lord. These, and their offspring, naturally looked upon the
Saracens with less hatred than did the zealots who conquered Jerusalem,
and who thought it a sin deserving the wrath of God to spare an
unbeliever. We find, in consequence, that the most obstinate battles
waged during the reigns of the later Kings of Jerusalem were fought by
the new and raw levies who from time to time arrived from Europe, lured
by the hope of glory, or spurred by fanaticism. The latter broke
without scruple the truces established between the original settlers
and the Saracens, and drew down severe retaliation upon many thousands
of their brethren in the faith, whose prudence was stronger than their
zeal, and whose chief desire was to live in peace.
Things remained in this unsatisfactory state till the close of the year
1145, when Edessa, the strong frontier town of the Christian kingdom,
fell into the bauds of the Saracens. The latter were commanded by
Zenghi, a powerful and enterprising monarch, and, after his death, by
his son Nourheddin, as powerful and enterprising as his father. An
unsuccessful attempt was made by the Count of Edessa to regain the
fortress, but Nourheddin, with a large army, came to the rescue, and
after defeating the Count with great slaughter, marched into Edessa and
caused its fortifications to be rased to the ground, that the town
might never more be a bulwark of defence for the kingdom of Jerusalem.
The road to the capital was now open, and consternation seized the
hearts of the Christians. Nourheddin, it was known, was only waiting
for a favourable opportunity to advance upon Jerusalem, and the armies
of the Cross, weakened and divided, were not in a condition to make any
available resistance. The clergy were filled with grief and alarm, and
wrote repeated letters to the Pope and the sovereigns of Europe, urging
the expediency of a new Crusade for the relief of Jerusalem. By far the
greater number of the priests of Palestine were natives of France, and
these naturally looked first to their own country. The solicitations
they sent to Louis the Seventh were urgent and oft repeated, and the
chivalry of France began to talk once more of arming in the defence of
the birthplace of Jesus. The kings of Europe, whose interest it had not
been to take any part in the first Crusade, began to bestir themselves
in this; and a man appeared, eloquent as Peter the Hermit, to arouse
the people as he had done.
We find, however, that the enthusiasm of the second did not equal that
of the first Crusade: in fact, the mania had reached its climax in the
time of Peter the Hermit, and decreased regularly from that period. The
third Crusade was less general than the second, and the fourth than the
third, and so on, until the public enthusiasm was quite extinct, and
Jerusalem returned at last to the dominion of its old masters without a
convulsion in Christendom. Various reasons have been assigned for this;
and one very generally put forward is, that Europe was wearied with
continued struggles, and had become sick of "precipitating itself upon
Asia." M. Guizot, in his admirable lectures upon European civilization,
successfully combats this opinion, and offers one of his own, which is
far more satisfactory. He says, in his eighth lecture, "It has been
often repeated, that Europe was tired of continually invading Asia.
This expression appears to me exceedingly incorrect. It is not possible
that human beings can be wearied with what they have not done--that the
labours of their forefathers can fatigue them. Weariness is a personal,
not an inherited feeling. The men of the thirteenth century were not
fatigued by the Crusades of the twelfth. They were influenced by
another cause. A great change had taken place in ideas, sentiments, and
social conditions. The same desires and the same wants were no longer
felt. The same things were no longer believed. The people refused to
believe what their ancestors were persuaded of."
This is, in fact, the secret of the change; and its truth becomes more
apparent as we advance in the history of the Crusades, and compare the
state of the public mind at the different periods when Godfrey of
Bouillon, Louis VII. and Richard I. were chiefs and leaders of the
movement. The Crusades themselves were the means of operating a great
change in national ideas, and advancing the civilization of Europe. In
the time of Godfrey, the nobles were all-powerful and all-oppressive,
and equally obnoxious to kings and people. During their absence along
with that portion of the community the deepest sunk in ignorance and
superstition, both kings and people fortified themselves against the
renewal of aristocratic tyranny, and in proportion as they became free,
became civilized. It was during this period that in France, the grand
centre of the crusading madness, the communes began to acquire
strength, and the monarch to possess a tangible and not a merely
theoretic authority. Order and comfort began to take root, and, when
the second Crusade was preached, men were in consequence much less
willing to abandon their homes than they had been during the first.
Such pilgrims as had returned from the Holy Land came back with minds
more liberal and expanded than when they set out. They had come in
contact with a people more civilized than themselves; they had seen
something more of the world, and had lost some portion, however small,
of the prejudice and bigotry of ignorance. The institution of chivalry
had also exercised its humanizing influence, and coming bright and
fresh through the ordeal of the Crusades, had softened the character
and improved the hearts of the aristocratic order. The Trouveres and
Troubadours, singing of love and war in strains pleasing to every class
of society, helped to root out the gloomy superstitions which, at the
first Crusade, filled the minds of all those who were able to think.
Men became in consequence less exclusively under the mental thraldom of
the priesthood, and lost much of the credulity which formerly
distinguished them.
The Crusades appear never to have excited so much attention in England
as on the continent of Europe; not because the people were less
fanatical than their neighbours, but because they were occupied in
matters of graver interest. The English were suffering too severely
from the recent successful invasion of their soil, to have much
sympathy to bestow upon the distresses of people so far away as the
Christians of Palestine; and we find that they took no part in the
first Crusade, and very little in the second. Even then those who
engaged in it were chiefly Norman knights and their vassals, and not
the Saxon franklins and population, who no doubt thought, in their
sorrow, as many wise men have thought since, that charity should begin
at home.
Germany was productive of more zeal in the cause, and her raw,
uncivilized hordes continued to issue forth under the banners of the
Cross in numbers apparently undiminished, when the enthusiasm had long
been on the wane in other countries. They were sunk at that time in a
deeper slough of barbarism than the livelier nations around them, and
took, in consequence, a longer period to free themselves from their
prejudices. In fact, the second Crusade drew its chief supplies of men
from that quarter, where alone the expedition can be said to have
retained any portion of popularity.
Such was the state of the mind of Europe when Pope Eugenius, moved by
the reiterated entreaties of the Christians of Syria, commissioned St.
Bernard to preach a new crusade. St. Bernard was a man eminently
qualified for the mission. He was endowed with an eloquence of the
highest order, could move an auditory to tears, or laughter, or fury,
as it pleased him, and had led a life of such rigid and self-denying
virtue, that not even calumny could lift her finger and point it at
him. He had renounced high prospects in the church, and contented
himself with the simple abbacy of Clairvaux, in order that he might
have the leisure he desired, to raise his powerful voice against abuses
wherever he found them. Vice met in him an austere and uncompromising
reprover; no man was too high for his reproach, and none too low for
his sympathy. He was just as well suited for his age as Peter the
Hermit had been for the age preceding. He appealed more to the reason,
his predecessor to the passions; Peter the Hermit collected a mob,
while St. Bernard collected an army. Both were endowed with equal zeal
and perseverance, springing, in the one, from impulse, and in the other
from conviction, and a desire to increase the influence of the church,
that great body of which he was a pillar and an ornament.
One of the first converts he made was in himself a host. Louis VII. was
both superstitious and tyrannical, and, in a fit of remorse for the
infamous slaughter he had authorised at the sacking of Vitry, he made a
vow to undertake the journey to the Holy Land. [The sacking of Vitry
reflects indelible disgrace upon Louis VII. His predecessors had been
long engaged in resistance to the outrageous powers assumed by the
Popes, and Louis continued the same policy. The ecclesiastical chapter
of Bourges, having elected an Archbishop without his consent, he
proclaimed the election to be invalid, and took severe and prompt
measures against the refractory clergy. Thibault, Count de Champagne,
took up arms in defence of the Papal authority, and intrenched himself
in the town of Vitry. Louis was immediately in the field to chastise
the rebel, and he besieged the town with so much vigour, that the Count
was forced to surrender. Upwards of thirteen hundred of the
inhabitants, fully one half of whom were women and children, took
refuge in the church; and, when the gates of the city were opened, and
all resistance had ceased, Louis inhumanly gave orders to set fire to
the church, and a thousand persons perished in the flames.] He was in
this disposition when St. Bernard began to preach, and wanted but
little persuasion to embark in the cause. His example had great
influence upon the nobility, who, impoverished as many of them were by
the sacrifices made by their fathers in the holy wars, were anxious to
repair their ruined fortunes by conquests on a foreign shore. These
took the field with such vassals as they could command, and, in a very
short time, an army was raised amounting to two hundred thousand men.
At Vezelai the monarch received the cross from the hands of St.
Bernard, on a platform elevated in sight of all the people. Several
nobles, three bishops, and his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, were
present at this ceremony, and enrolled themselves under the banners of
the Cross, St. Bernard cutting up his red sacerdotal vestments, and
making crosses of them, to be sewn on the shoulders of the people. An
exhortation from the Pope was read to the multitude, granting remission
of their sins to all who should join the Crusade, and directing that no
man on that holy pilgrimage should encumber himself with heavy baggage
and vain superfluities, and that the nobles should not travel with dogs
or falcons, to lead them from the direct road, as had happened to so
many during the first Crusade.
The command of the army was offered to St. Bernard; but he wisely
refused to accept a station for which his habits had unqualified him.
After consecrating Louis with great solemnity, at St. Denis, as chief
of the expedition, he continued his course through the country,
stirring up the people wherever he went. So high an opinion was
entertained of his sanctity, that he was thought to be animated by the
spirit of prophecy, and to be gifted with the power of working
miracles. Many women, excited by his eloquence, and encouraged by his
predictions, forsook their husbands and children, and, clothing
themselves in male attire, hastened to the war. St. Bernard himself
wrote a letter to the Pope, detailing his success, and stating, that in
several towns there did not remain a single male inhabitant capable of
bearing arms, and that everywhere castles and towns were to be seen
filled with women weeping for their absent husbands. But in spite of
this apparent enthusiasm, the numbers who really took up arms were
inconsiderable, and not to be compared to the swarms of the first
Crusade. A levy of no more than two hundred thousand men, which was the
utmost the number amounted to, could hardly have depopulated a country
like France to the extent mentioned by St. Bernard. His description of
the state of the country appears, therefore, to have been much more
poetical than true.
Suger, the able minister of Louis, endeavoured to dissuade him from
undertaking so long a journey at a time when his own dominions so much
needed his presence. But the king was pricked in his conscience by the
cruelties of Vitry, and was anxious to make the only reparation which
the religion of that day considered sufficient. He was desirous
moreover of testifying to the world, that though he could brave the
temporal power of the church when it encroached upon his prerogatives,
he could render all due obedience to its spiritual decrees whenever it
suited his interest or tallied with his prejudices to so do. Suger,
therefore, implored in vain, and Louis received the pilgrim's staff at
St. Denis, and made all preparations for his pilgrimage.
In the mean time St. Bernard passed into Germany, where similar success
attended his preaching. The renown of his sanctity had gone before him,
and he found everywhere an admiring audience. Thousands of people, who
could not understand a word he said, flocked around him to catch a
glimpse of so holy a man; and the knights enrolled themselves in great
numbers in the service of the Cross, each receiving from his hands the
symbol of the cause. But the people were not led away as in the days of
Gottschalk. We do not find that they rose in such tremendous masses of
two and three hundred thousand men, swarming over the country like a
plague of locusts. Still the enthusiasm was very great. The
extraordinary tales that were told and believed of the miracles worked
by the preacher brought the country people from far and near. Devils
were said to vanish at his sight, and diseases of the most malignant
nature to be cured by his touch. [Philip, Archdeacon of the cathedral
of Liege, wrote a detailed account of all the miracles performed by St.
Bernard during thirty-four days of his mission. They averaged about ten
per day. The disciples of St. Bernard complained bitterly that the
people flocked around their master in such numbers, that they could not
see half the miracles he performed. But they willingly trusted the eyes
of others, as far as faith in the miracles went, and seemed to vie with
each other whose credulity should be greatest.] The Emperor Conrad
caught at last the contagion from his subjects, and declared his
intention to follow the Cross.
The preparations were carried on so vigorously under the orders of
Conrad, that in less than three months he found himself at the head of
an army containing at least one hundred and fifty thousand effective
men, besides a great number of women who followed their husbands and
lovers to the war. One troop of them rode in the attitude and armour of
men: their chief wore gilt spurs and buskins, and thence acquired the
epithet of the golden-footed lady. Conrad was ready to set out long
before the French Monarch, and in the month of June 1147, he arrived
before Constantinople, having passed through Hungary and Bulgaria
without offence to the inhabitants.
Manuel Comnenus, the Greek Emperor, successor not only to the throne,
but to the policy of Alexius, looked with alarm upon the new levies who
had come to eat up his capital and imperil its tranquillity. Too weak
to refuse them a passage through his dominions, too distrustful of them
to make them welcome when they came, and too little assured of the
advantages likely to result to himself from the war, to feign a
friendship which he did not feel, the Greek Emperor gave offence at the
very outset. His subjects, in the pride of superior civilization,
called the Germans barbarians, while the latter, who, if
semi-barbarous, were at least honest and straight-forward, retorted
upon the Greeks by calling them double-faced knaves and traitors.
Disputes continually arose between them, and Conrad, who had preserved
so much good order among his followers during their passage, was unable
to restrain their indignation when they arrived at Constantinople. For
some offence or other which the Greeks had given them, but which is
rather hinted at than stated by the scanty historians of the day, the
Germans broke into the magnificent pleasure garden of the Emperor,
where he had a valuable collection of tame animals, for which the
grounds had been laid out in woods, caverns, groves, and streams, that
each might follow in captivity his natural habits. The enraged Germans,
meriting the name of barbarians that had been bestowed upon them, laid
waste this pleasant retreat, and killed or let loose the valuable
animals it contained. Manuel, who is said to have beheld the
devastation from his palace windows without power or courage to prevent
it, was completely disgusted with his guests, and resolved, like his
predecessor Alexius, to get rid of them on the first opportunity. He
sent a message to Conrad respectfully desiring an interview, but the
German refused to trust himself within the walls of Constantinople. The
Greek Emperor, on his part, thought it compatible neither with his
dignity nor his safety to seek the German, and several days were spent
in insincere negotiations. Manuel at length agreed to furnish the
crusading army with guides to conduct it through Asia Minor; and Conrad
passed over the Hellespont with his forces, the advanced guard being
commanded by himself, and the rear by the warlike Bishop of Freysinghen.
Historians are almost unanimous in their belief that the wily Greek
gave instructions to his guides to lead the army of the German Emperor
into dangers and difficulties. It is certain, that instead of guiding
them through such districts of Asia Minor as afforded water and
provisions, they led them into the wilds of Cappadocia, where neither
was to be procured, and where they were suddenly attacked by the
Sultaun of the Seljukian Turks, at the head of an immense force. The
guides, whose treachery is apparent from this fact alone, fled at the
first sight of the Turkish army, and the Christians were left to wage
unequal warfare with their enemy, entangled and bewildered in desert
wilds. Toiling in their heavy mail, the Germans could make but little
effective resistance to the attacks of the Turkish light horse, who
were down upon them one instant, and out of sight the next. Now in the
front and now in the rear, the agile foe showered his arrows upon them,
enticing them into swamps and hollows, from which they could only
extricate themselves after long struggles and great losses. The
Germans, confounded by this mode of warfare, lost all conception of the
direction they were pursuing, and went back instead of forward.
Suffering at the same time for want of provisions, they fell an easy
prey to their pursuers. Count Bernhard, one of the bravest leaders of
the German expedition, was surrounded, with his whole division, not one
of whom escaped the Turkish arrows. The Emperor himself had nearly
fallen a victim, and was twice severely wounded. So persevering was the
enemy, and so little able were the Germans to make even a show of
resistance, that when Conrad at last reached the city of Nice, he found
that, instead of being at the head of an imposing force of one hundred
thousand foot and seventy thousand horse, he had but fifty or sixty
thousand men, and these in the most worn and wearied condition.
Totally ignorant of the treachery of the Greek Emperor, although he had
been warned to beware of it, Louis VII. proceeded, at the head of his
army, through Worms and Ratisbon, towards Constantinople. At Ratisbon
he was met by a deputation from Manuel, bearing letters so full of
hyperbole and flattery, that Louis is reported to have blushed when
they were read to him by the Bishop of Langres. The object of the
deputation was to obtain from the French King a promise to pass through
the Grecian territories in a peaceable and friendly manner, and to
yield to the Greek Emperor any conquest he might make in Asia Minor.
The first part of the proposition was immediately acceded to, but no
notice was taken of the second and more unreasonable. Louis marched on,
and, passing through Hungary, pitched his tents in the outskirts of
Constantinople.
On his arrival, Manuel sent him a friendly invitation to enter the
city, at the head of a small train. Louis at once accepted it, and was
met by the Emperor at the porch of his palace. The fairest promises
were made; every art that flattery could suggest was resorted to, and
every argument employed, to induce him to yield his future conquests to
the Greek. Louis obstinately refused to pledge himself, and returned to
his army, convinced that the Emperor was a man not to be trusted.
Negotiations were, however, continued for several days, to the great
dissatisfaction of the French army. The news that arrived of a treaty
entered into between Manuel and the Turkish Sultan changed their
dissatisfaction into fury, and the leaders demanded to be led against
Constantinople, swearing that they would raze the treacherous city to
the ground. Louis did not feel inclined to accede to this proposal,
and, breaking up his camp, he crossed over into Asia.
Here he heard, for the first time, of the mishaps of the German
Emperor, whom he found in a woeful plight under the walls of Nice. The
two monarchs united their forces, and marched together along the
sea-coast to Ephesus; but Conrad, jealous, it would appear, of the
superior numbers of the French, and not liking to sink into a vassal,
for the time being, of his rival, withdrew abruptly with the remnant of
his legions, and returned to Constantinople. Manuel was all smiles and
courtesy. He condoled with the German so feelingly upon his losses, and
cursed the stupidity or treachery of the guides with such apparent
heartiness, that Conrad was half inclined to believe in his sincerity.