The Glory of the Crusades (15 page)

Edessa was the first of the Crusader States and, after only forty years, the first to fall back into Muslim hands. The fall of Edessa was a serious blow to the Christian strategic situation in Outrémer since it guarded the approach to Antioch.

Zengi’s success at Edessa emboldened him. He set his sights on Jerusalem, but before he could act he was killed in 1146 by his favorite Frankish slave who murdered him after Zengi engaged in a night of heavy drinking. Zengi’s empire was divided between his sons, Sayf al-Din, who received Mosul, and Nur al-Din, who received Aleppo. The dream of a united Muslim kingdom waging
jihad
would have to wait a little longer. Although he did not accomplish his major goal, Zengi did significantly alter the political and military landscape in Outrémer. His success at Edessa “had a profound effect on Christians and Muslims alike. The Christian aura of invincibility was shattered. A new generation of Muslims who had thought of the Crusader States as permanent entities now began to think again.”
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The loss of Edessa demanded a Christian response. No new Crusade had been called in a generation, but now the warriors of Christendom were asked once more to risk their lives to recover what had been lost.

Calling the Second Crusade

News of the fall of Edessa sent shockwaves throughout Christendom. An entire generation had been raised since the First Crusade and most in Europe to take for granted the continued existence of the Crusader States. Now, just as Bl. Urban II had sprung to action fifty years before, the successor of St. Peter once more rose to the occasion to motivate Catholic warriors to embrace the cross at the service of the Church.

Bernardo Paganelli was the first Cistercian monk to be elected pope, taking the name Eugenius III (r. 1145–1153). Bl. Eugenius III knew the events at Edessa required papal exhortation of another major expedition to the East, and so he issued the bull
Quantum Praedecessores
on December 1, 1145. Addressed to King Louis VII of France, Eugenius III’s short document set the stage for the Second Crusade as well as provided an official listing of the privileges granted to Crusaders. Eugenius exhorted the warriors of France, and later those throughout Christendom, to take the cross in order to return Edessa to the patrimony of Christ. As at Clermont fifty years before, Eugenius III used his papal authority to grant the spiritual incentive of the indulgence for those who undertook the journey:

By the authority of omnipotent God and that of Blessed Peter the prince of the apostles conceded to us by God, we grant remission of and absolution from sins . . . in such a way that whosoever devoutly begins and completes so holy a journey or dies on it will obtain absolution from all his sins of which he has made confession with a contrite and humble heart.
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Half a century before, Urban had utilized the French people’s intense devotion to Jerusalem in motivating warriors to go on the First Crusade. Now, because Jerusalem was in Christian hands, Pope Eugenius III had to find a new method of motivation. His exhortation for the warriors of France to take the cross centered on recalling the brave and noble deeds of the ancestors of his audience as well as an appeal to their sense of honor as Christian knights. The deeds of the First Crusaders were well known throughout Christendom and remembered in art, architecture, song, and stories. Eugenius utilized this memory to evoke a sense of family honor in the listeners of his day and to encourage knights to defend what their ancestors had liberated half a century before:

It will be seen as a great token of nobility and uprightness if those things acquired by the efforts of your fathers are vigorously defended by you, their good sons. But if, God forbid, it comes to pass differently, then the bravery of the fathers will have proved to be diminished in the sons.
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Eugenius’s bull had a lasting impact on the Crusading movement and was possibly the most widely circulated papal document in medieval Europe.
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Nonetheless,
Quantum Praedecessores
could not, on its own, motivate warriors to risk certain death thousands of miles from home. Following Urban II’s strategy, Eugenius also commissioned preachers to travel throughout Christendom in order to make the contents of
Quantum Praedecessores
known so that the Second Crusade could become a reality.

Preaching the Second Crusade

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was the third son of seven children born to a noble family near Dijon in the Burgundy region of France. He was “passionate, full of inner fire” and totally devoted to the Catholic Faith. He had a special reverence for the Blessed Mother that had been inculcated by his own mother.
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Bernard was endowed with the gift of preaching which, at the insistence of Pope Eugenius, he used to maximum effect for the Second Crusade. Theophilus Reynauld’s sixteenth-century book
The Gallic Bee
referred to Bernard as the “mellifluous” or “honey-sweet” Doctor of the Church, a name that has stuck through the centuries.
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Pope Pius XII used this moniker as the title for his encyclical on St. Bernard in 1953 on the 800th anniversary of his death. Bernard’s preaching was like “the fragrant aroma of an incense burning in a heart on fire with the Holy Spirit,” which flowed from his in-depth study of the Faith, through which, like “a diligent bee, he has extracted the sweet essence from Scripture and the Fathers and refined it in loving meditation.”
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St. Bernard undertook his papal-directed preaching tour seriously and, despite his ill health, ventured across Christendom for nine months through the spring and winter of 1146 and into 1147, preaching numerous sermons and traveling several hundred miles. He recognized that the “business of God” was necessary and he endeavored to raise the warriors required to restore Christian lands in the East.
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Bernard preached the Crusade in France, Flanders, and throughout the German Empire. To those regions he could not visit he sent letters urging the faithful to take the cross to fight in a worthy cause: “[N]ow, O mighty soldiers, O men of war, you have a cause for which you can fight without danger to your souls: a cause in which to conquer is glorious and for which to die is gain.”
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As with the First Crusade, it was the spiritual benefit of the indulgence that motivated participants, and it was this aspect that Bernard emphasized:

I call blessed the generation that can seize the opportunity of such rich indulgence as this, blessed to be alive in this year of jubilee, this year of God’s choice. Take up the sign of the Cross and you will find indulgence for all the sins which you humbly confess. The cost is small, the reward is great.
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Radulf and the Jews

Bernard was certainly the most well-known preacher of the Second Crusade, but he was not the only one. Other preachers, some approved and others not, traveled throughout Christendom to dispense exhortations, some of which deviated from the official message and instead promoted persecution and harassment of the Jews. Bernard heard of such preaching and made it known that the Jews were not to be harmed: “We have heard with joy that zeal for God burns in you, but wisdom must not be lacking from this zeal. The Jews are not to be persecuted, nor killed, nor even forced to flee.”
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A fellow French Cistercian monk named Radulf failed to heed the words of Bernard. Traveling to the Rhineland, Radulf incited anti-Semitic fervor in the same cities of Count Emich’s pogroms during the time of the First Crusade.
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Radulf’s message against the Jews was the same as the one used by Emich a generation previously: why risk life to travel far from home when enemies of Christ were near at hand? Although Radulf’s preaching led to outbreaks of violence against certain German Jewish communities, such pogroms were “isolated incidents . . . not systematic slaughter.”
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Bernard was greatly upset when news of his fellow Cistercian’s preaching reached him. He expressed his holy anger at Radulf when he wrote, “I find three things most reprehensible in him: unauthorized preaching, contempt for episcopal authority, and incitation to murder.”
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Bernard was so disgusted that he traveled to Mainz in November 1146, confronted and rebuked Radulf, and ordered him to return to his monastery.

Conrad III and the Germans

Bernard’s preaching tour and written exhortations were a resounding success as warriors took the cross in great numbers, equaling and perhaps rivaling the total forces of the First Crusade. In some ways, Bernard’s preaching mission was made easy due to the vivid memory of the First Crusade present in twelfth-century Christendom. Knights and nobles spent their evenings regaled with tales of heroics from the First Crusade in the
chansons
of the troubadours. The warriors of Christendom who heard St. Bernard were honor-bound men who recognized the Second Crusade as an opportunity to measure themselves against the “honor, valor, [and] nobility” of their ancestors who participated in the First Crusade.
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The most powerful ruler in Christendom, however, was not interested in going on Crusade. There was a plethora of political issues to deal with in imperial territory and, even if there hadn’t been, an exhausting, risky journey to the east was not looked upon favorably by the fifty-four year old monarch.

Conrad III was not opposed to the Crusade or the Crusading movement; he had previously taken the cross in 1124 and made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land before his coronation as king of the Germans. Indeed, he was the only major monarch of Christendom to go to Jerusalem twice. The problem was that political unrest in his lands, motivated by those angry at his accession to the throne, weighed heavily on his heart and he sincerely believed it was not prudent for him to go to Jerusalem again.

St. Bernard had already preached the Crusade to King Louis VII of France, who responded and was busy making preparations to depart. Now it was time for Conrad to follow suit. The “Honey-Sweet” Doctor arrived at the king’s Christmas Court in Speyer in December 1146 and met privately with Conrad. History does not record what was said between the powerful king and the humble preacher, but it does record the actions of both men the next day.

After celebrating Mass in the cathedral, St. Bernard turned toward Conrad and personally and publicly called him to take the cross. Conrad responded, “Now I recognize clearly that this is a gift of divine grace, nor now shall I be found to be ungrateful . . . I am ready to serve him!”
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Bernard went to the altar, retrieved a prepared cloth cross, and pinned it on the king.

The interaction made for great theater, which medieval people highly enjoyed, but more than likely the king had agreed to take the cross the day before during his private meeting with Bernard. Conrad’s embrace of the cross motivated other leading nobles and clergy to do the same, including his half-brothers Duke Henry of Bavaria and Otto of Freising, and his nephew, Duke Frederick of Swabia—the future holy Roman emperor known as Frederick Barbarossa. Now that the king and his leading nobles had taken the cross, preparations were undertaken to ready the massive German army for its march to the east.

The Road to Constantinople

Since French preparations were already well underway, it was decided a meeting of the allies should be held to discuss the logistics involved in transporting the two hosts to the Holy Land. King Louis VII, St. Bernard, and several French nobles met on February 2, 1147 with German ambassadors. They agreed that the armies would follow in the footsteps of their ancestors from the First Crusade and take the land route to Constantinople and onward to northern Syria.

The Germans made efficient preparations. Within six months (the French took fifteen months) Conrad was ready, and in May 1147 he departed Nuremburg with an army of 30,000 to 35,000 soldiers plus noncombatants.

They had a fairly uneventful trek through Eastern Europe until they reached Byzantine territory,
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where they suffered harassment by imperial troops. Regardless, the Germans eventually reached Constantinople in September.

The Byzantines viewed the Germans as “greedy and fickle barbarians and heretical.”
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Like Alexius I before him, Emperor Manuel was fearful, suspicious, and anxious about them and believed their true objective was to conquer Constantinople. In order to mitigate the risk of such an operation, Manuel entered into an alliance with the Turks and may have even supplied them with information on the numbers and route of the Western armies. He also encouraged the Turks to attack the French Crusade forces on their way to Antioch.
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The task of journeying to the Holy Land and liberating Edessa was already a difficult one; it was made far more so by the treachery of the Byzantines. “At most, Manuel helped only when and how it suited him; at worst, he ensured, if only passively, that the odds were stacked against the Westerners.”
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Retracing the Steps of the First Crusade

The Byzantine navy transported the German army across the Bosporus, and it made its way to Nicaea. Conrad’s force left Nicaea on October 15, but only ten days out it became clear the army was consuming too much food and marching too slowly, partly due to constant Turkish harassment. In late October, the army was badly mauled by the Turks near Dorylaeum, the site of victory for the First Crusaders fifty years before. The army had been encamped near Dorylaeum when Conrad allowed the cavalry to leave the main body to search for water. This proved a tactical blunder with severe consequences. The rapid mounted Turkish archers set upon the undefended infantry and slaughtered many. Although the cavalry returned and beat back the Muslim force, the damage had already been inflicted. The killing was so great that veterans, years after the battle, were said to weep at the memory of that day.