Authors: Jonathan Phillips
On Easter Sunday 1146 the cream of the French nobility assembled at Vézelay to hear a sermon by Abbot Bernard. Arguably, this was his most mesmeric performance ever and such was the power of his oratory that crowds, inflamed by the wish to help the Holy Land, surged forward and begged to take the cross. So immense was the demand, one source reported, that the abbot was forced to tear crosses from his own clothing because all the prepared insignia were used up.
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A contemporary list of the senior nobles at Vézelay shows that almost all of them had First Crusade ancestors—a fact that vividly illustrates the resonance of Eugenius’s call for sons to continue the work of their fathers.
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In the months after Vézelay, Bernard continued to recruit in France. In his own, surely ironic, words, he told Eugenius: “As for the rest, you have ordered and I have obeyed and your authority has made my obedience fruitful. ‘I have declared and I have spoken, and they are multiplied above number’: towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man amongst seven women, so many women are there widowed while their husbands are still alive.”
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The point was made, however: many thousands had taken the cross.
The abbot also sent letters across Europe and dispatched preachers to spread the word: this was the most organized attempt to secure support for a crusade to date. The churches and market squares of the West echoed to the stirring words of Eugenius’s
Quantum praedecessores
and, to complement it, Bernard’s own distinctive appeal for action. Centuries later, the power of his words is still evident in his letters—simply reading them out loud shows this even more:
Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of abundant salvation. The earth is shaken because the Lord of Heaven is losing His land, the land in which He appeared to men. . . . For our sins, the enemy of the Cross has begun to lift his sacrilegious head there, to devastate with the sword that blessed land, that land of promise. . . . What are you doing, you mighty men of valour? What are you doing, you servants of the Cross?
I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this, blessed to be alive in this year of jubilee, this year of God’s choice. The blessing is spread throughout the whole world, and all the world is flocking to receive this badge of immortality . . . But now, 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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Bernard was sharp enough to appreciate that he could exploit the emerging economic strength of towns and tradesmen, and he appealed to them in terms they would understand: “But those of you who are merchants, men quick to seek a bargain, let me point out the advantages of this great opportunity. Do not miss them. Take 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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In the autumn he set out on a grueling seven-month tour to preach in the Low Countries and Germany. His tasks were threefold: to recruit more crusaders, to deal with a threat to the Jews, and to enlist the king of Germany himself. In all three cases, he emerged triumphant—a conclusion that only served to reinforce his conviction that God favored the crusade. Again and again, Bernard’s unparalleled oratorical skills evoked profound religious feelings in his audience. As he progressed through Flanders and into the Rhineland huge crowds flocked to hear him and reports of miracles were widespread. It has been calculated that 235 cripples were healed, 172 blind people recovered their sight, as well as cures for the deaf and dumb, demoniacs, and others; there was even one raising of a person from the dead.
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At times the atmosphere became so fevered that the crowds threatened to crush him; on several occasions, like a modern movie star, he was trapped in his overnight accommodation and had to flee through a back exit. Notwithstanding this delirium the abbot convinced thousands more people to take the cross.
As with the First Crusade, however, the call to fight God’s enemies was regarded by some as an excuse to turn upon the Jews. A renegade Cistercian preacher named Radulf (close to the Hebrew word
radof
, meaning “to persecute”) inflamed audiences in the Rhineland with his anti-Semitic language and incited outbreaks of violence against communities in Cologne, Worms, Mainz, and Speyer. Bernard was furious because Radulf had broken
biblical injunctions against killing the Jews. The abbot had worked hard to control the preaching precisely to ensure that everyone stayed, in modern parlance, on message. He wrote to Radulf and commanded him to stop, but when this failed Bernard went to see him in person and ordered him back to his monastery in disgrace. Compared to the killing spree of the First Crusade, the events of 1
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were reined in far more quickly and were on a much lesser scale—a small consolation to the Jews themselves.
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The recruitment of King Conrad III of Germany was of prime importance to the scale and scope of the Second Crusade. The German contribution to the First Crusade had been constrained by the conflict between empire and papacy, but with that resolved it was logical that the most powerful secular monarch in Europe should act in partnership with the Church and head Christ’s army. Conrad himself had been to the Holy Land to serve the Christian cause in 1124–25 and he was a highly experienced warrior. At first, however, he seemed reluctant to take part in the crusade: his lands—which stretched from the Danish border to Poland, across Bavaria and into Italy, as far south as the Papal States—were in turmoil. At least five major conflicts were aflame and it would have been reckless of him to leave home. He enlisted Bernard’s help to quell the troubles and with the spellbinding presence of the abbot in play, “the serenity of peace suddenly shone forth again.”
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Around Christmas 1146 news arrived at the royal court that Duke Welf of Bavaria, the king’s main rival, had taken the cross. This ensured that he would not be remaining in the West to foment trouble in Conrad’s absence—now the king could act. Bernard’s hagiographer described a dramatic scene in Speyer Cathedral when the abbot was seized with the Holy Spirit during Mass. He turned to Conrad, reminded the king of the Last Judgment, and asked how he would respond to the question of Christ: “O man, what have I not done for you that I ought to have?” Bernard described Conrad’s exalted standing, his physical strength, and his vigorous soul; in other words, he made the case that he had a Christian duty to act in the Lord’s cause. The king burst into tears and cried out: “Now I recognise clearly that this is a gift of divine grace, nor now shall I be found to be ungrateful. . . . I am ready to serve Him!” A swell of noise filled the cathedral as the audience sounded their acclaim. Bernard turned to the altar and picked up a cloth cross, approached the king, and pinned it on him; the most powerful secular ruler in Europe had become a crusader—another advance in the history of medieval holy war.
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As a piece of hagiography this
account may have overemphasized the abbot’s role because Conrad knew full well that Bernard would ask him to take the cross, and to turn him down in front of such a huge congregation would have been unthinkable. In reality, he had already decided to join the crusade. Thus, Conrad and Louis were both committed to following in the footsteps of the First Crusaders: optimism ran high across Christian Europe.
Around this time we can discern a bold change in the aims of the crusade. This was not part of some preconceived master plan, but was a blend of the opportunism of secular and religious rulers within the broader climate of holy war. It transformed the Second Crusade from a bid to recapture Edessa into a hugely ambitious attempt to expand Christendom on three fronts: the Holy Land, Iberia, and the Baltic. The first manifestation of this was in the late autumn of 1146 when Eugenius wrote to the Italian trading port of Genoa to urge its citizens to take part in the campaign. Their response would not take them to the Levant, however, but to Spain, and it produced one of the few real successes of the crusade.
Back in 1095–96, as the excitement of the First Crusade gripped Europe, many Spanish knights aspired to take the cross for the Holy Land to secure remission of all their sins.
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Their own region had a complex history of holy war that dated back to the conquest of the peninsula by Islamic forces during the eighth century; by the late eleventh century a series of small Christian kingdoms had recovered the northernmost regions. They lived in reasonable harmony with their Muslim neighbors, on some occasions working with one local Muslim lord against another and, at other times, demanding what amounted to protection money to keep the peace. Under the influence of the Reform Papacy, spiritual rewards began to be offered to those who died fighting to reconquer Christian lands. In 1085 King Alfonso VI of Castile and León captured Toledo to mark an important step forward, but men such as Rodrigo Díaz (immortalized as El Cid by Charlton Heston in the 1961 movie) carved out careers as hired hands, fighting for whoever paid them. It was only in his last major commission, the defeat of the Almoravids of Valencia, that El Cid (meaning “the leader”) acquired the
heroic status inflated by Christian writers early in the following century and then embraced by modern politicians such as General Franco. Urban II’s launch of the First Crusade gave an added sharpness to Christian–Muslim relations in the peninsula. Yet the pope had to work hard to prevent a hemorrhage of warriors away from the area and he wrote: “it is no virtue to rescue Christians from Saracens in one place, only to expose them to the tyranny and oppression of the Saracens in another.”
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The symbols and ideology of crusading to the Holy Land soon seeped into Spain and men from Iberia fought at home and in the East. Gradually, the two theaters of war were brought into parity and it is certain that by 1123 the remission of all sins was offered to crusaders in both the Levant and Spain. As recruitment for the Second Crusade gathered momentum the Genoese struck agreements with Count Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona and King Alfonso VII of Castile and León to attack the southern Spanish city of Almería in 1147 and the more northerly settlement of Tortosa in 1148.
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These parties had all fought the Spanish Muslims for decades, advancing their territorial holdings and securing commercial privileges, but this time they chose to bring their campaign under the formal umbrella of papal approval and to secure the full array of spiritual rewards on offer.
It was not just Iberia that saw increased interest in the crusading cause around this time; for example, as Bernard drew toward the end of his travels he addressed an assembly of German nobles at Frankfurt in March 1147.
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While many expressed enthusiasm for the expedition, a number ventured a new and radical idea—a concept that would mark a further extension to the range of crusading warfare. To the east of Germany lay lands occupied by pagan tribes known generically as the Wends, peoples who worshipped a panoply of gods and held meetings at sacred groves and springs. In line with the basic idea of attacking the enemies of the faithful, the north German nobles refused to set out for the Holy Land “because they had as neighbours certain tribes given over to the filthiness of idolatry” and wanted to fight their pagan neighbors instead.
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Conflict between Christians and pagans had simmered for centuries. The Christians had made slow progress through a combination of conquest and conversion but there was constant tension between these two means of advance because sometimes the nobles’ support for the churchmen was overridden by their desire for land, an approach that could provoke savage reprisals on the defenseless clerics. Bernard of Clairvaux, however, possibly
swept along by the tide of confidence created by his preaching, agreed that the Wends were suitable targets for the crusade. In his most controversial statement of all he said: “At the council at . . . Frankfurt, the might of the Christians was armed against them [the pagans] and that for the complete wiping out or, at any rate, the conversion of these peoples, they [the Germans] have put on the Cross, the sign of our salvation; and we, by virtue of our authority, promised them the same spiritual privileges as those enjoy who set out for Jerusalem.”
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Theologians and historians alike have been troubled and perplexed by this apparently obvious breach of the biblical injunction against forced conversion: no clear explanation is apparent. One possibility is that some of the pagans were apostates—they had reneged on their conversion; therefore, as heretics they could be killed. Alternatively, the abbot could have learned that many previous campaigns in the north had ended when the pagans paid off the attackers and underwent some token form of conversion, a process that did little to advance the Christian cause.
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It is possible that this edict was an attempt to ensure that a more permanent solution was reached. Eugenius gave his agreement to the idea (not that he had much choice by that time) and issued the papal bull
Divina dispensatione
in April 1147 in which he referred to the wars in Iberia, the Holy Land, and the Baltic as part of a single enterprise. Thus, the grand scale of the Second Crusade was made clear and, as several contemporaries noted, Christendom sought to extend its frontiers.
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As the main German and French armies prepared to march across southern Europe and Asia Minor, one particular group set out for the Holy Land by sea.
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Southern England, Normandy, Flanders, and the lower Rhineland (around Cologne) had long-standing ties from trade and regional politics; when the crusade appeal spread into these areas it was logical to sail, rather than to travel to the East by land.
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In fact, a few northern European contingents had sailed to the Levant at the time of the First Crusade, so such a practice was not unheard of. In the autumn of 1146 a crisscross of communications must have passed over the English Channel and along the northern European coastline making the arrangements to coordinate the expedition. In the end a fleet of around 180 ships assembled in the port of Dartmouth
ready to make the journey to Jerusalem. No especially famous figure led this force: a nephew of Godfrey of Bouillon, Count Arnold of Aerschot, was the most prominent of the Rhinelanders; Christian of Gistel, a castellan, led the Flemings, and Hervey of Glanvill the Anglo-Normans. Tensions between the various armies of the First Crusade had shown how destructive bickering between contingents could be, and to try to ensure reasonably good terms between the troops they made a sworn association: