A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (32 page)

It needed the shock of the disaster at Edessa
to rouse the West again. For meanwhile in the perspective of western Europe the
Crusader states of Syria had seemed merely to form the left-flank of the
Mediterranean-wide campaign against Islam. The right flank was in Spain, where
there were still tasks for a Christian knight to perform. The progress of the
Cross in Spain had been held up during the second and third decades of the
century, owing to the quarrels between Queen Urraca of Castile and her husband
King Alfonso I of Aragon. But the Queen’s son and heir by her first,
Burgundian, marriage, Alfonso VII brought about a renaissance in Castile. In
1132, six years after his accession, he began a series of campaigns against the
Moslems, which brought him by 1147 to the gates of Cordova, where he was
recognized as suzerain. Already in 1134 he had taken the title of Emperor, to show
that he was overlord of the peninsula and vassal to no man. Meanwhile Alfonso
I, freed by Urraca’s death of Castilian complications, spent his last years
taking the offensive, with varying success, in Murcia; and along the coast
Raymond-Berenger III, Count of Barcelona, pushed his power southward. Alfonso I
died in 1134. His brother, the ex-monk Ramiro, reigned disastrously for three
years; but in 1137 Ramiro’s two-year old daughter, Queen Petronilla, was
married to Raymond-Berenger IV of Barcelona, and Catalonia and Aragon were
united to form a power whose naval strength enabled it to complete the
reconquest of north-eastern Spain. Thus by 1145 things were going well in the
Spanish theatre; but a storm was brewing. The Almoravids, who had dominated Moslem
Spain for the last half-century, had fallen into a hopeless decay. Their place
in Africa had already been taken by the Almohads, a sect of ascetic reformers,
almost Gnostic in its theology and its insistence on a class of adepts, founded
by the Berber prophet Ibn Tumart, and carried on even more aggressively by his
successor Abd al-Mumin. Abd al-Mumin defeated and slew the Almoravid monarch,
Tashfin ibn Ali, near Tlemcen in 1145. In 1146 he completed the conquest of
Morocco and was ready to move into Spain. With such preoccupations the
Christian knights in Spain were insensible to an appeal from the East. On the
other hand, now that the Spanish kingdoms were securely founded, they no longer
offered the same scope as in the previous century to the knights and princes of
France.

Roger II of
Sicily

The centre of the battlefield against Islam was
occupied by King Roger II of Sicily. Roger had united all the Norman dominions
in Italy and assumed the royal title in 1130. He was well aware of the
strategic importance of his kingdom, which was ideally placed to control the
Mediterranean. But, to make that control complete, it was necessary for him to
have a footing on the African coast opposite to Sicily. The quarrels and
rivalries of the Moslem dynasties in northern Africa, intensified by the
declining power of the Almoravids in Morocco and the ineffectual suzerainty of
the Fatimids in Tunisia, together with the dependence of the African cities
upon the import of grain from Sicily, gave Roger his chance. But his first
campaigns, from 1123 to 1128, brought him no profit beyond the acquisition of
the island of Malta. In 1134 by judiciously timed assistance he induced
El-Hasan, lord of Mahdia, to accept him as overlord; and next year he occupied
the island of Jerba in the Gulf of Gabes. Successful raids on Moslem shipping
whetted his appetite, and he began to attack the coastal towns. In June 1143
his troops entered Tripoli, but were forced to retire. Exactly three years
later he recaptured the city, just as an internal revolution was installing an
Almoravid prince as its governor. This time he could not be dislodged; and
Tripoli became the nucleus for a Norman colony in Africa.

King Roger was thus admirably fitted to take
part in the new Crusade. But he was suspect. His behaviour to the Papacy had
never been dutiful and seldom deferential. His presumption in crowning himself
king had been resented by the other potentates of Europe; and Saint Bernard had
commented to Lothair of Germany that ‘whoever makes himself King of Sicily
attacks the Emperor’. Saint Bernard’s disapproval meant the disapproval of
French public opinion. Roger was still more unpopular among the princes in the
East; for he had made it clear that he had never forgiven the kingdom of
Jerusalem for its treatment of his mother Adelaide and his own failure to
secure the succession promised in her marriage-contract, while he claimed
Antioch as sole heir in the male line of his cousin Bohemond. His presence on
the Crusade was not desired; but it was hoped that he would carry on the war
against Islam in his own particular sector.

The Pope’s choice of King Louis of France to
organize the new Crusade was easy to understand; and the King responded eagerly
to the call. When the papal Bull arrived, following close on the news brought
by the Bishop of Jabala, Louis had just issued a summons to his
tenants-in-chief to meet him at Christmas at Bourges. When they were assembled
he told them that he had decided to take the Cross and he begged them to do
likewise. He was sadly disappointed in their answer. The lay nobility showed no
enthusiasm. The chief elder statesman of the realm, Suger, Abbot of
Saint-Denis, voiced his disapproval of the King’s projected absence. Only the
Bishop of Langres spoke up in support of his sovereign.

1146: The
Assembly at Vezelay

Chilled by his vassals’ indifference, Louis
decided to postpone his appeal for three months, and summoned another assembly
to meet him at Easter at Vezelay. In the meantime he wrote to the Pope to tell
him of his own desire to lead a Crusade; and he sent for the one man in France
whose authority was greater than his own, Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Saint
Bernard was now at the height of his reputation. It is difficult now to look
back across the centuries and appreciate the tremendous impact of his
personality on all who knew him. The fire of his eloquence has been quenched in
the written words that survive. As a theologian and a controversialist he now
appears rigid and a little crude and unkind. But from the day in 1115 when, at
the age of twenty-five, he was appointed Abbot of Clairvaux, till his death
nearly forty years later he was the dominant influence in the religious and
political life of western Europe. It was he who gave the Cistercian Order its
impetus; it was he who, almost single-handed, had rescued the Papacy from the
slough of the schism of Anacletus. The fervour and sincerity of his preaching
combined with his courage, his vigour and the blamelessness of his life to
bring victory to any cause that he supported, save only against the embittered
Cathar heretics of Languedoc. He had long been interested in the fate of
eastern Christendom and had himself in 1128 helped in drawing up the rule for
the Order of the Temple. When the Pope and the King begged for his help in
preaching the Crusade, he eagerly complied.

The assembly met at Vezelay on 31 March 1146.
The news that Saint Bernard was going to preach brought visitors from all over
France. As at Clermont, half a century before, the crowd was too great to be fitted
into the Cathedral. Saint Bernard spoke from a platform erected in a field
outside the little town. His words have not been handed down. We only know that
he read out the papal Bull asking for a holy expedition and promising
absolution to all that took part in it, and that he then made use of his
incomparable rhetoric to show the urgency of the papal demand. Very soon his
audience was under his spell. Men began to cry for Crosses — ‘Crosses, give us
Crosses!’ — It was not long before all the stuff that had been prepared to sew
into Crosses was exhausted; and Saint Bernard flung off his own outer garments
to be cut up. At sunset he and his helpers were still stitching as more and
more of the faithful pledged themselves to go on the Crusade.

King Louis was the first to take the Cross; and
his vassals forgot their earlier coolness in their eagerness to follow him.
Amongst them were his brother Robert, Count of Dreux, Alfonso-Jordan, Count of
Toulouse, who had himself been born in the East, William, Count of Nevers,
whose father had led one of the unfortunate expeditions of 1101, Henry, heir to
the County of Champagne, Thierry of Flanders, who had already fought in the
East and whose wife was Queen Melisende’s stepdaughter, the King’s uncle,
Amadeus of Savoy, Archimbald, Lord of Bourbon, the Bishops of Langres, Arras
and Lisieux and many nobles of the second rank. An even greater response came
from humbler people. Saint Bernard was able to write a few days later to the
Pope, saying: ‘You ordered; I obeyed; and the authority of him who gave the
order has made my obedience fruitful. I opened my mouth; I spoke; and at once
the Crusaders have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted.
You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you see widows
whose husbands are still alive.’

1146: Saint
Bernard in Germany

Encouraged by his success Saint Bernard
undertook a tour of Burgundy, Lorraine and Flanders, preaching the Crusade as
he went. When he was in Flanders he received a message from the Archbishop of
Cologne, begging him to come at once to the Rhineland. As in the days of the
First Crusade, the enthusiasm aroused by the news of the movement had been
turned against the Jews. In France the Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable,
eloquently complained that they were not paying a financial contribution
towards the rescue of Christendom. In Germany the resentment took a fiercer
form. A fanatical Cistercian monk called Rudolf was inspiring Jewish massacres
throughout the Rhineland, in Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Spier and Strasburg. The
Archbishops of Cologne and Mainz did what they could to save the victims, and
the latter summoned Bernard to deal with the Cistercian. Bernard hastened from
Flanders and ordered Rudolf back into his monastery. When calm was
re-established, Bernard stayed on in Germany; for it seemed to him that the
Germans too should join in the Crusade.

The Germans hitherto had played an
undistinguished part in the Crusading movement. Their Christian zeal had,
rather, been directed towards the forcible evangelization of the heathen Slavs
on their eastern frontiers. Since the beginning of the century missionary work
and German colonization had been going on in the Slav districts in Pomerania
and Brandenburg; and the German lords regarded this expansion of Christendom as
a more important task than a war against Islam, whose menace was to them remote
and theoretical. They were therefore disinclined to respond to Saint Bernard’s
preaching. Nor was their King, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, greatly though he
admired the Saint, much more eager to listen to him. He had Mediterranean
interests; but they were restricted to Italy, where he had promised the Pope
help against the recalcitrant Romans and against Roger of Sicily, in return for
his much desired imperial coronation. And his position was still insecure in
Germany itself. Despite his victory at Weinsburg in 1140 he still was faced
with the enmity of the supporters of the house of Welf; while the antics of his
Babenberger half-brothers and sisters raised trouble for him along all his
eastern flank. When Saint Bernard, after writing round to secure the
co-operation of the German bishops, met the King at Frankfort-on-the-Main in
the autumn of 1146, Conrad prevaricated; and Bernard would have gone back to
Clairvaux, had the bishops not begged him to continue his preaching. He
therefore turned southward to preach the Crusade at Freiburg, at Basle, at
Schaffhausen and Constance. The tour was immediately successful, even though
the sermons had to be translated by a German interpreter. The humbler people
flocked to take the Cross. The crops in Germany had failed that year, and there
was famine in the land. Starvation breeds a mystic exaltation; and it is
probable that many in Bernard’s audiences thought, like the pilgrims of the
First Crusade, that the journey eastward would bring them to the riches of the
New Jerusalem.

King Conrad agreed to meet Saint Bernard again
at Christmas 1146, when he would be holding a Diet at Spier. Saint Bernard’s sermon
on Christmas Day, once more asking him to take the Cross, failed to move the
King. But two days later Bernard preached again before the Court. Speaking as
though he were Christ Himself he rounded on the King, reminding him of the
benefits that Heaven had showered on him. ‘Man,’ he cried, ‘what ought I to
have done for you that I have not done?’ Conrad was deeply moved and promised
to follow the Saint’s bidding.

1147: Pope
Eugenius in France

Saint Bernard left Germany well pleased with
his work. He travelled through eastern France, supervising the arrangements for
the Crusade and writing to the Cistercian houses all over Europe to bid them
encourage the movement. He was back in Germany in March to assist at a council
at Frankfort, when it was decided to send a Crusade against the heathen Slavs
east of Oldenburg. His presence was intended to show that while he advocated an
Oriental Crusade, he did not desire the Germans to neglect their nearer duties.
This German Crusade, though the Pope allowed the participants to wear the
Cross, was in its outcome a fiasco that did much to retard the conversion of
the Slavs. From Frankfort Bernard hurried to his abbey at Clairvaux, to receive
a visit from the Pope.

Pope Eugenius had spent Christmas 1145 in Rome;
but difficulties with the Romans forced him soon to withdraw again to Viterbo,
while Rome itself passed under the influence of the anti-clerical agitator,
Arnold of Brescia. Eugenius realized that without the help of King Conrad he
could not hope to re-establish himself in the Holy City. In the meantime he
decided to cross the Alps into France, to see King Louis and to superintend the
Crusade. He left Viterbo in January 1147 and reached Lyon on 22 March. As he
journeyed he received news of Saint Bernard’s activities. He was not altogether
pleased. His practical sense had made him envisage a purely French Crusade,
under the lay leadership of the King of France, without the divided command
that had so nearly wrecked the First Crusade. Saint Bernard had turned the movement
into an international enterprise; and the splendour of his conception might
well be outweighed in practice by the rivalry of the kings. Besides, the Pope
could not spare King Conrad, on whose aid he was counting in Italy. He gave the
news of German participation a very chilly reception. But he could not
countermand it.