The Kingdom in the Sun (27 page)

The Second Crusade had been an ignominious fiasco. Conrad, with such of his Germans as remained after the slaughter at Dorylaeum, had marched on with the French as far as Ephesus, where the army had stopped to celebrate Christmas. There he had fallen gravely ill. Leaving his compatriots to continue the journey without him, he had returned to Constantinople to recover, and there he had stayed as a guest in the imperial palace till March
1148,
when the Emperor had put Greek ships at his disposal to carry him to Palestine. The French, meanwhile, though they had fared rather better than the Germans, had had an agonising passage through Anatolia, during which they in their turn had suffered heavily at Turkish hands. Although it was largely the fault of Louis himself, who had ignored Manuel's warnings to keep to the coast, he persisted in attributing almost every encounter with the enemy to Byzantine carelessness or treachery or both, and rapidly built up an almost psychopathic resentment against the Greeks. At last in despair he, his household and as much of his cavalry as could be accommodated had taken ship from Attalia, leaving the rest of the army and pilgrims to struggle on by land as best they might. It had been late in the spring before the remnant of the great host that had set out so confidently the previous year dragged itself miserably into Antioch.

And that was only the beginning of the trouble. The mighty Zengi was dead, but his mantle had passed to his still greater son Nur ed-Din, whose stronghold at Aleppo had now become the focus of Muslim opposition to the Franks. Aleppo should thus have been the Crusaders' first objective, and within days of his arrival in Antioch Louis found himself under considerable pressure from Prince Raymond to mount an immediate attack on the city. He had refused on the grounds that he must first pray at the Holy Sepulchre; whereat Queen Eleanor, whose affection for her husband had not been increased by the dangers and discomforts of the journey from France and whose relations with Raymond were already suspected of going somewhat beyond those normally recommended for a niece and her uncle, had announced her intention of remaining at Antioch and suing for divorce. She and her husband were distant cousins; the question of consanguinity had been conveniently overlooked at the time of their marriage, but if resurrected could still prove embarrassing—and Eleanor knew it.

Louis, who for all his moroseness was not without spirit in moments of crisis, had ignored his wife's protests and dragged her forcibly off to Jerusalem—though not before he had succeeded in so antagonising Raymond that the latter henceforth refused to play any further part in the Crusade. No one doubted that he had carried off the situation with what dignity he could, but the effect on his reputation, particularly at such a moment, had been unfortunate. He and the tight-lipped Eleanor arrived at the Holy City in May, soon after Conrad; they were welcomed with due ceremony by Queen Melisende and her son Baldwin III, now eighteen; and there they remained until, on 24 June, all the Crusaders were invited to a huge assembly at Acre to discuss their plan of action. It did not take them long to reach a decision: every man and beast available must be immediately mobilised for a concerted attack on Damascus.

Why Damascus was chosen as the first objective we shall never understand. It was now the only important Arab state in all the Levant to continue hostile to Nur ed-Din; as such it could, and should, have been an invaluable ally to the Franks. By attacking it, they drove it against its will into Nur ed-Din's Muslim confederation and, in doing so, made their own destruction sure. They arrived to find the walls of Damascus strong, the defenders determined. On the second day the besieging army, by yet another of those disastrous decisions which characterised the whole Crusade, moved its camp to an area along the eastern section of the walls, devoid alike of shade and water. The Palestinian barons, already at loggerheads over the future of the city when captured, suddenly lost their nerve and began to urge retreat. There were dark rumours of bribery and treason. Louis and Conrad were shocked and disgusted, but soon they too were made to understand the facts of the situation. To continue the siege would mean not only the passing of Damascus into the hands of Nur ed-Din but also, given the universal breakdown of morale, the almost certain annihilation of their whole army. On 28 July, just five days after the opening of the campaign, they ordered withdrawal.

There is no part of the Syrian desert more shattering to the spirit than that dark-grey, featureless expanse of sand and basalt that lies between Damascus and Tiberias. Retreating across it in the height of the Arabian summer, the remorseless sun and scorching desert wind full in their faces, harried incessantly by mounted Arab archers and leaving a stinking trail of dead men and horses in their wake, the Crusaders must have felt despair heavy upon them. This was the end. Their losses, both in material and in human life, had been immense. They had neither the will nor the wherewithal to continue. Worst of all was the shame. Having travelled for the best part of a year, often in conditions of mortal danger, having suffered agonies of thirst, hunger and sickness and the bitterest extremes of heat and cold, this once-glorious army that had purported to enshrine all the ideals of the Christian West had given up the whole thing after just four days' fighting, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. Here was the ultimate of humiliations—which neither they nor their enemies would forget.

But for Conrad personally there had emerged from the shambles of the Second Crusade one remarkable result, as happy as it was unexpected. He had formed a deep regard and affection for Manuel Comnenus. When he had fallen ill at Ephesus the previous Christmas the Emperor and his wife had themselves sailed down from Constantinople, picked him up and brought him safely back to the capital; and for the next two months Manuel, who prided himself on his medical skill, had tended him with his own hands and nursed him back to health. Conrad's first passage through Constantinople with his army had not left him with the pleasantest of memories; he was all the more touched at the consideration that he was now being shown. The Emperor, with his intelligence, his charm and his German wife—a sister of Conrad's own—was a perfect host; when his patient was cured he had seized the opportunity to arrange a magnificent series of horse-races and entertainments in his honour, and had finally sent him on his way to Palestine in a Byzantine squadron, together with two thousand horses, all fully equipped, from the imperial stable. Conrad, not surprisingly, had been sorry to leave, and had promised to visit Manuel again on his homeward journey.

And so, the ill-starred Crusade safely in the past, the two monarchs met again at Thessalonica, and Manuel bore Conrad away for his second winter in Constantinople. Their friendship remained unaffected after the six months' separation, and Christmas was marked by a further union of the two imperial houses when, with the utmost pomp and the usual elaborate festivities, Manuel's niece Theodora was married to Conrad's brother Henry of Austria.
¹
This year, however, there were serious political problems to be discussed, the most pressing of which was Roger of Sicily. The Byzantines were already at war with him; their navy was at that very moment blockading Corfu and their army was prepared to march just as soon as the melting of the snows made it possible to cross the Pindus. Conrad had not yet opened hostilities, but asked nothing better than to do so. Agreement was quickly reached, and in the first days of
1149
the two rulers undertook, by a treaty of formal alliance, to launch a joint attack on the King of Sicily during that year. Only if one of the parties were struck by grave illness or faced with the imminent danger of losing his throne could this commitment be set aside; even then it would not be cancelled but merely postponed. Sensibly in the circumstances, the treaty also enshrined an understanding about the future of Apulia and Calabria after they had been wrested from Roger's grasp. Both Empires had claimed these territories in the past, and both Manuel and Conrad were anxious to avoid a subsequent wrangle in their division of the spoils. The compromise that they reached did them both credit. Both regions would be made over

¹
A slight gloom may have been cast over the proceedings by the horror felt by many Byzantines at the fate of a Greek princess being delivered over to the mercy of Frankish barbarians; Sir Steven Runciman
(History of the Crusades,
vol. II) quotes a poem of condolence addressed to her mother in which she is described as being 'immolated to the beast of the West'.

by Conrad to Byzantium as the belated dowry of his sister-in-law Bertha, now the Empress Irene.

Once future plans had been settled, there was no reason for either of the new allies to linger in Constantinople. In early February they parted—Conrad to Germany and preparations for his new Italian offensive, Manuel back to his army and the siege of Corfu, whence recent reports had not been encouraging. The Sicilian-held citadel rose invulnerable on its high crest in the mountainous north of the island, towering almost perpendicularly above the sea and safely out of range of Byzantine projectiles. The Greeks, wrote Nicetas, seemed to be shooting at the very sky itself, while the defenders could release downpours of arrows and hailstorms of rocks on to those below. (People wondered, he adds rather disarmingly, how the Sicilians had taken possession of it so effortlessly the previous year.) During one of the attacks the Grand Duke Contostephanus was killed and his place taken by Axuch, who had
by
this time arrived with the land army; but the change of leadership had no effect on the progress of the siege.
As
the weeks went by it became clear that Corfu could never be taken
by
storm. The only hope—barring treachery from within—would be to starve out the garrison, who had had a full year in which to provision themselves; and even then the blockade might at any moment be broken by a Sicilian fleet arriving with reinforcements and supplies.

It is a commonplace of warfare that a siege can impose just as great a strain on the morale of the attacking force as on that of the beleaguered garrison. The coming of spring saw the outbreak of serious quarrels between the Greek sailors and their Venetian allies. Axuch did what he could to smooth things over, but failed; and the climax came when the Venetians occupied a neighbouring islet and set fire to a number of Byzantine merchantmen anchored offshore. By some mischance they also managed to gain possession of the imperial flagship, on which they even went so far as to perform an elaborate charade, dressing up an Ethiopian slave in the imperial vestments—Manuel's dark complexion had not gone unnoticed— and staging a mock coronation on the deck, in full view of the Greeks. Whether Manuel was present to witness this monstrous insult against his imperial majesty is not clear; if not, he certainly arrived soon afterwards. He never forgave the Venetians their conduct ; for the moment, however, he needed them. A combination of patience, tact and his celebrated charm soon restored a slightly uneasy harmony; the Venetian ships resumed their allotted stations; and the Emperor assumed direct personal command of the siege. There would be time enough, later, for revenge.

Much as he longed to forget his disastrous Crusade, King Louis— unlike Conrad—found himself in no hurry to leave Outremer. The prospect of Easter in Jerusalem doubtless appealed to his piety; and, like so many travellers before and since, he may have been reluctant to exchange the gentle sunshine of a Palestinian winter for the stormy seas and snowbound roads which lay between himself and his own kingdom. He knew, too, that his marriage to Eleanor was past redemption. Once back in Paris he would have to face all the unpleasantness of a divorce and the political repercussions that could not but follow. On and on he stayed, touring the shrines of the Holy Land and reflecting on the perfidy of the Greeks, and in particular of Manuel Comnenus himself, whom he still held responsible for the calamities of his outward journey. Now he understood. A Christian in name only, the Emperor was in reality the foremost enemy and betrayer of Christendom; a secret ally of the infidel, he had opposed the Crusade from its inception and done everything in his power to ensure its failure. Its first task should have been to eliminate him—as Roger of Sicily was very properly attempting to do.

In the spring of
1149,
Louis set his face reluctantly for home. This time he and Eleanor had resolved to travel
by
sea, but had been unwise enough to entrust themselves to Sicilian transport—dangerous craft in which to brave Byzantine waters. Somewhere in the southern Aegean they encountered a Greek fleet—presumably on its way to or from Corfu—which turned at once to attack. Louis managed to escape by hastily running up the French flag; but one of his escort vessels, containing several followers and nearly all his baggage, was captured by the Greeks and borne off in triumph to Constantinople. Queen Eleanor, whose relations with her husband were now such that she was travelling on a separate vessel, narrowly avoided a similar fate; she was rescued by Sicilian warships just in time.

Finally, on 29 July
1149,
Louis landed in Calabria. There Eleanor joined him, and the pair rode together to Potenza, where Roger was waiting to greet them and where they were to stay as his guests.
¹
The two Kings, meeting for the first time, took to each other at once. In the past, as we have seen, their approaches had been inhibited by the dispute of Roger and Raymond of Poitiers, Eleanor's uncle, over the question of Antioch; but since then a new rivalry had arisen—that of Louis and Raymond over the question of Eleanor—and Louis no longer felt constrained. Neither, for that matter, had his recent maritime adventure softened his feelings towards Byzantium; he and Roger may have discovered, during those August days at Potenza, that they had more in common than either had imagined.