Second Crusade

12 Key excerpts on "Second Crusade"

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  Medieval Weapons

  An Illustrated History of Their Impact

  • Robert D. Smith, Kelly DeVries(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  MEDIEVAL WEAPONS 103 A large number of men again “took up the cross,” including two kings, Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France. However, despite this royal participation and the large numbers involved, this Second Crusade could not duplicate the success of the first. In fact, the crusaders had no success whatsoever. As soon as they arrived in the Holy Land, they began to quarrel with the Christians already there whom they blamed for the defeat of Edessa because they had dealt too lightly with the Muslims. In turn, the resident Christians resented these new arrivals, no matter what their rank or status, for trying to take over the strategic leadership of the crusade. The plan of the resident crusaders was to take an army north to Aleppo, a city held by the caliph of the Seljuk Turks, Nur-ad-Din. But Conrad, Louis, and the other new crusaders saw a closer target in Damascus, a city led by a Muslim ally of the cru- saders who was an enemy of Nur-ad-Din. They prevailed, and on 24 June 1148 the Second Crusaders marched on Damascus. However, even before reaching the city, the two kings began to argue over who was to take credit for the victory, which, in fact, never came. For not only did the attack of Damascus fail, but the citizens of the town were so enraged at the disloyalty of the crusaders that they not only removed their own leader, but they also submitted to Nur-ad-Din. After this defeat, Conrad III immediately set out for home. Louis VII stayed on in Jerusalem, but by summer 1149 he also returned to Europe. Following his defeat of the Christians, Nur-ad-Din began to ex- tend his control of the region. Surprisingly, he first chose to bypass the crusader kingdoms and attack Fatamid Egypt, which fell to him in 1168. The Christians were therefore surrounded, but in 1174, be- fore Nur-ad-Din could make his move against them, he died. He was succeeded by one of his military leaders, the man who had been chiefly responsible for the conquest of Egypt, Saladin.

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  A History of the Crusades, Volume 1

  The First Hundred Years

  • Marshall W. Baldwin, Kenneth Meyer Setton, Marshall W. Baldwin, Kenneth Meyer Setton(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  Fifty years after the First Crusade, the Turks were stronger and more unified. The Greeks looked for harm rather than aid from the westerners; and Palestine had changed from a land of opportunity which could be wrested from the Moslems to a loosely knit feudal kingdom as various in interests and alliances as its European prototypes and 3O Crusades 4 бб A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES I without the black-and-white view of Moslem-Christian relations entertained in the west. Thus the ill-informed crusaders were often disappointed and embittered by the confusing and contradictory conditions which they encountered; and they failed to unite under strong leadership or to bring their great coalitions to a successful outcome in the east or Pomerania. The conquests of the Second Crusade were Lisbon, Almeria, Tortosa, Lerida, and Fraga, far removed from the Palestinian theater and the central plans for the crusade. In the east the crusaders actually harmed the Latin states when the Moslems learned how easily their armies could be vanquished; and the friction between French and Germans, French and Greeks, Germans and Syrians, and newly-arrived crusaders and inhabitants of Outremer made cooperation on a grand scale impossible for a long time to come. Like the First Crusade, the Second received its impetus from the east. As early as the summer of 1145 pilgrims and travelers coming home from Jerusalem had spread the sad news of the fall of Edessa in the preceding December, and the Armenian bishops who came shortly afterward to consult pope Eugenius about the possible union of the Roman and Armenian churches must have enlarged the pope's information about affairs in the east. In ad-dition, messengers were sent west to appeal for help.

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  The Crusades: A History

  • Jonathan Riley-Smith(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Few crusaders can be found in the region between 1102 and 1147, but there was enthusiasm for pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the lead being taken by Count Hugh I. One is left with the impression that in much of western Europe crusading became dormant after all the efforts associated with the First Crusade. To many armsbearers that expedition must have seemed a unique chance to engage in a particularly appropriate meritorious activity. Now they turned back to their traditional devotions, to be recalled only in 1146, when Bernard of Clairvaux preached the new crusade as another once-and-for-all opportunity of self-help on one’s passage to heaven: [God] puts himself into a position of necessity, or pretends to be in one, while all the time he wants to help you in your need. He wants to be thought of as the debtor, so that he can award to those fighting for him wages: the remission of their sins and everlasting glory. It is because of this that I have called you a blessed generation, you who have been caught up in a time so rich in remission and are found living in this year so pleasing to the Lord, truly a year of jubilee. The early crusades of the twelfth century Nevertheless, the years between the First Crusade and the so-called Second Crusade were eventful. They witnessed the definitive extension of crusading to the Iberian peninsula, although one of the most important campaigns CRUSADING IN ADOLESCENCE, 1102–87 141 there may not have been a crusade at all. In 1118 Pope Gelasius II formally legitimized a war, to be led by King Alfonso I of Aragon, against Saragossa (Zaragoza). The city, the most important prize to be seized since Toledo, fell on 19 December to a large army which included in its ranks the first crusaders Gaston of Béarn and Centulle of Bigorre, and also Alfonso Jordan, the count of Toulouse, who had been born in Syria, and the viscounts of Carcassonne, Gabarret and Lavedan.

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  Henry the Liberal

  Count of Champagne, 1127-1181

  • Theodore Evergates(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 The Second Crusade, 1146–1151 On 1 December 1145, shortly before Henry turned eighteen, Pope Eugenius III addressed a bull, Quantum praedecessores , to King Louis VII and the great lords of France with a full bill of particulars justifying a crusade to shore up the Latin crusader states after the fall of Edessa and the destruction of its Christian community by Zengi (23 December 1144). 1 The death of Pope Lu-cius II (15 February 1145) and the elevation of Eugenius III three days later delayed the Curia’s response to a looming threat to the very presence of Latins in the Holy Land. 2 But by late spring 1145, after news of Edessa arrived in France, Louis VII decided to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for reasons that are not entirely clear. William of Nangis claims that Louis sought to expi-ate the wanton killing of innocents at Vitry, while the Chronicle of Morigny states that he was moved by the stories of Edessa’s fall and the afflictions of its Christian community as reported by legates sent from Antioch and Jerusa-lem. 3 It may well be that Louis seized the occasion to expunge the memory of several unsavory deeds, including his intemperate oath taken against the elected bishop of Bourges and his meddling in episcopal elections. 4 By late 1145 the royal and papal motives converged with the Cistercians’ call for a holy war, especially by Bernard of Clairvaux and Bishop Geoffroy of Langres. Young Henry of Champagne was soon drawn into a vortex of events that would consume his life for the next three years and ultimately mark him and a generation of young companions for the rest of their lives. The Second Crusade 17 Louis VII and the Cistercians The king celebrated Christmas at Bourges in 1145. After a crown wearing, he announced his plan to go to Jerusalem. Then Bishop Geoffroy gave a fiery speech recounting the destruction of Edessa that elicited a “great lamenta-tion,” according to Odo of Deuil, the king’s chaplain.

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  Western Warfare In The Age Of The Crusades, 1000-1300

  • John France(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Uncertain and often divided leadership was inevitably accompanied by uncertain purpose. Much of the success of the First Crusade was due to the limited but specific objective – Jerusalem. When its leaders were at their most ignorant and hesitant, their army was large enough to overcome by sheer weight of numbers the Sultanate of Nicaea. Very quickly, they took the measure of their enemies and maximized their strength by an adroit diplomacy, winning allies and buying off enemies by pacts of friendship which they were perfectly prepared to break. This diplomatic aspect to their crusade was vital, for although the Middle East was fragmented, many of its component parts were more than a match in military terms for the invaders. What the Muslim powers did not understand was that the invaders posed a threat to their very existence. Once that was understood, the scale and quality of their resistance to new crusades was enormously enhanced.

  The Second Crusade simply had no clear purpose: the occasion of its calling was the fall of Edessa to Zengi, but this had not in itself stirred the West; it was only the incredible activity of St Bernard that created what became a general onslaught upon the non-Catholics who confronted Europe. This vast concept never generated any central control and Louis VII, the only leader to arrive in Jerusalem with an army, had little idea what to do with it. Richard of England, as we have noted, had a crusading strategy – to seize Egypt, the real heart of Saladin’s power – but the religious goal of the expedition (and probably the personal animosity which Richard so obviously generated) proved too strong. But the problems of the Third Crusade were pondered. The union of Syria and Egypt under Saladin had caused the fall of the Latin Kingdom, but the quarrels of his descendants, the Ayyubids, created opportunities which could be exploited. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade made a secret decision to attack Egypt. This was actually carried out by the Fifth Crusade, probably acting in accord with the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council, although it was their decision to attack Damietta rather than Alexandria. Once the city had fallen, the crusade was for long paralysed by failures of command, and it was probably popular demand for action that led to its ultimate failure near Mansourah.11

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  Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000-1300

  • John France(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Uncertain and often divided leadership was inevitably accompanied by uncertain purpose. Much of the success of the First Crusade was due to the limited but specific objective - Jerusalem. When its leaders were at their most ignorant and hesitant, their army was large enough to overcome by sheer weight of numbers the Sultanate of Nicaea. Very quickly, they took the measure of their enemies and maximized their strength by an adroit diplomacy, winning allies and buying off enemies by pacts of friendship which they were perfectly prepared to break. This diplomatic aspect to their crusade was vital, for although the Middle East was fragmented, many of its component parts were more than a match in military terms for the invaders. What the Muslim powers did not understand was that the invaders posed a threat to their very existence. Once that was understood, the scale and quality of their resistance to new crusades was enormously enhanced.

  The Second Crusade simply had no clear purpose: the occasion of its calling was the fall of Edessa to Zengi, but this had not in itself stirred the West; it was only the incredible activity of St Bernard that created what became a general onslaught upon the non-Catholics who confronted Europe. This vast concept never generated any central control and Louis VII, the only leader to arrive in Jerusalem with an army, had little idea what to do with it. Richard of England, as we have noted, had a crusading strategy - to seize Egypt, the real heart of Saladin’s power - but the religious goal of the expedition (and probably the personal animosity which Richard so obviously generated) proved too strong. But the problems of the Third Crusade were pondered. The union of Syria and Egypt under Saladin had caused the fall of the Latin Kingdom, but the quarrels of his descendants, the Ayyubids, created opportunities which could be exploited. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade made a secret decision to attack Egypt. This was actually carried out by the Fifth Crusade, probably acting in accord with the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council, although it was their decision to attack Damietta rather than Alexandria. Once the city had fallen, the crusade was for long paralysed by failures of command, and it was probably popular demand for action that led to its ultimate failure near Mansourah.11

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  Fighting for the Cross

  • Jaroslav Pelikan(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, the Second Crusade got off to a false start. In the regions where the First Crusade had recruited most vigorously monarchy had been at a low ebb, so second-tier leadership by the princes had proved necessary. Thanks largely to good luck this had worked reasonably well; crucially, it had survived the storm and stress over who would rule at Antioch and Jerusalem. But kingship had now revived and the French looked to their king, Louis VII, to take the lead. For this he needed the support of his barons and initially they were lukewarm. For very good reasons they were worried about the destabilizing effect of a great expedition to the East. It was only in the spring of 1146 that their concerns were swept aside as collec-tive enthusiasm caught them in its grip, together with the rest of France and many other regions of Europe. St Bernard and the Second Crusade What transformed the situation was the passionate advocacy of St Bernard, an abbot of the new Cistercian order who has a good claim to be the twelfth century's most influential churchman. To the preaching of the crusade Bernard brought new ideas as well as incredible stamina. Conscripting the Hebrew idea of a jubilee, he portrayed the crusade as a rare opportunity offered by God for Christians to win their salvation by personal effort. This he tied in with a deep devotion towards the Holy Lands shrines and a perception of their acute dependence on western protection. The overwhelming response to Bernard s CRUSADING IN THE EAST, 1095-1291 9 own preaching showed that he was in tune with the thinking of the broad mass of the faithful, but there was no strategic reflection about the best way to harness this zeal so as to recover Edessa from Zengi. Remarkably, the Christian rulers in the Holy Land dont seem to have been consulted at all during the crusade s planning, and it s hard to work out what Louis VII expected to do in the East apart from fulfilling his vow as a pilgrim to worship in Jerusalem.

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  Bullies and Saints

  An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

  • John Dickson(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan

    (Publisher)

  Holy Wars from the 1000s to the 1200s Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. —PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2015

  I

  have already talked about the First Crusade in some detail. Its themes and aims can, to some degree, stand as the model for later Crusades. It also represents a pivot point in the history of Christianity.

  First Crusade (1096–99)

  Before Pope Urban II’s preaching campaign of 1095–96, warfare had an ambiguous status in Christian teaching. It was sometimes viewed as a necessary evil in a fallen world. And sometimes—especially in the early centuries—it was

  wholly rejected as a contradiction of the Gospel demand: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27). I will discuss the backstory to Christian “sacred violence” later. For now, it is perhaps worth noting that historians typically speak about five different Crusades. This is, of course, a matter of convenience, an easy way to organise our thoughts on this subject. People in, say, the year 1203 did not talk about “Heading off to the Fourth Crusade”! Still, it is sometimes helpful to make our thoughts about history neater than the history itself.

  Several armies of European volunteers, amounting to something like one hundred thousand men, heeded the call of Pope Urban II to assist the Christian Byzantine emperor Alexius I against Muslim aggression. They hoped to protect Constantinople and win back Jerusalem for Christ. The campaign was a stunning success, from the Crusaders’ point of view. Even though only ten to fifteen thousand men reached Jerusalem in 1099, they were able to recapture the Holy City in a matter of weeks.

  Part of the First Crusade’s spiritual force, if I can call it that, came from a charismatic monk known as Peter the Hermit. His dishevelled appearance obscured a keen talent for recruitment and the management of soldiers, as well as a fiery preaching style. It is unclear whether he was the pope’s appointee or just a successful independent zealot who supported the cause. He rallied up to thirty thousand men from France and Germany, both peasants and some elites. He personally led them toward the Holy Land, across the Rhineland in central Germany, down the Danube River to the Balkans, across to Constantinople, and then on toward Jerusalem via Syria. “His message was revivalist,” explains Oxford’s Christopher Tyerman, “peppered with visions and atrocity stories.”1 Peter himself was the source of several atrocities. As he marched through the Rhineland, he and his men slaughtered Jewish communities, partly for their supposed responsibility for the death of Christ centuries earlier and partly for their alleged complicity in recent Muslim attacks on Christian sites in Jerusalem (more perversely, it may also have just been fighting practice).2 Anti-Semitism had a long history in Christianity, going back at least as far as the fourth century, but it rarely took the form of Peter’s full-scale pogroms in 1096. There were massacres and/or forced conversions in Mainz, Cologne, Regensburg, and Prague. The majority of armies organised by Pope Urban apparently did not participate in such violent persecutions of Jews. And, curiously, various other

  Christian armies attacked and defeated some of Peter’s men for their indiscriminate violence.3 But Peter remained a major figure in the First Crusade, even preaching a sermon—a pregame pep talk—on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem on the eve of the sacking of the city.4

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  The Crusades: Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

  • Matti Moosa(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  44 As his troops captured the city, the church and 1,300 people who had taken 40 Otto of Freising, Chronica , 71–73. 41 Berry, “The Second Crusade,” 467. For an opposing view see George Fer-zoco, “The Origin of the Second Crusade,” in Gervers, ed., The Second Crusade , 92– 99. 42 Odo of Deuil, De Profectione , 7. 43 Otto of Freising, Chronica , 70; Gleber, 38. 44 Gleber, Papst Eugen III , 39. On Theobald and King Louis of France, see Theodore Evergates, “Louis VII and the Count of Champagne,” in Gervers, ed., The Second Crusade , 109–117. 586 T HE C RUSADES refuge in it were consumed by flames. Louis also felt guilt for having pre-vented Pierre de la Châtre from entering Bourges as its archbishop. 45 At the coronation, Godfrey de la Roche, bishop of Langres, spoke in his episcopal capacity about the devastation of Edessa, the arrogance of the Muslims, and the oppression of the Christians. He admonished those pre-sent to fight for their king to help the Christians. Although many were moved to tears, most held back. The king himself burned with zeal for the cause and had contempt for worldly things, but he did not immediately re-spond to the bishop’s urging (apparently he had not yet received the papal bull). Abbot Suger of St. Denis, the king’s most trusted adviser, thought an expedition to the East was unwise and tried to dissuade him from such an endeavor. 46 It was finally decided to consider the matter again in an assem-bly to be held at Vézelay, Burgundy, on March 31, 1146, and meanwhile to elicit the opinion of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, considered the spiritual prime mover of the Second Crusade. 47 St. Bernard said it was inappropriate for him to give an answer on such a weighty matter, which should be left to the consideration of the pope. King Louis therefore sent an embassy to Rome to discuss the undertaking.

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  Early Modern Europe

  Facts and Fictions

  • Brian Jeffrey Maxson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Another significant problem with the myths about the Crusades is that Latin Christians continued to preach for crusades and crusades in fact continued to happen for centuries after 1291. In the 1400s, for example, Pope Eugenius IV oversaw a crusade featuring over 10,000 people. The crusading army eventually was defeated at Varna. Writers throughout Europe wrote dozens of texts advocating for a new crusade after Constantinople fell to the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Pope Pius II, pope from 1458 to 1464, made a new crusade the central tenet of his papacy. In 1459, he called a Europe-wide council to gain support for the idea and then died as his army and ships assembled to travel to the east—an army he had planned to personally lead. None of these crusades during the late medieval and early modern periods were successful in their goals of retaking Jerusalem or Constantinople, but in practice and conception they varied little from the numbered crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  The concept and application of the term “crusade” continues to be much debated among scholars. If historians expand the purview of the crusades beyond 1291 then it becomes extremely difficult to determine what falls within the study of the crusades versus what falls into the general history of religion, politics, or warfare in late medieval and early modern Europe. Thus, some argue the traditional purview of the crusades up to 1291 can remain a segmented area of study. They claim that, although events aimed at other places or occurring in later centuries certainly carry similarities with earlier events, things like the Latin Kingdoms in the east had ended. Then, only less frequent, smaller armies moved across those areas in later decades. Others disagree and see more similarities than differences between late medieval and early modern crusades. It is a myth that the “crusades” ended in the thirteenth century, but what the crusades were and whether the medieval crusades were distinct from later ones is still a point of scholarly debate.

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  The Cambridge History of War: Volume 2, War and the Medieval World

  • David A. Graff, Anne Curry(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  III. pp. 189–90, 212; GF, pp. 37, 42; RA, pp. 58, 109–10; Second letter of Stephen of Blois to his wife Adela, in Heinrich Hagenmeyer, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100 (Innsbruck, Heinrich, 1902), p. 156. 58 RA, pp. 102–3, 131–2; GF, pp. 82–3, 86, 89–91; Monique Amouroux-Mourad, Le Comté d’Edesse 1098–1150 (Paris, Geuthner, 1988); A. A. Beaumont, ‘Albert of Aachen and the County of Edessa’, in Louis Paetow (ed.), The Crusades and other Historical Essays Presented to D. C. Munro (New York, Books for Libraries, 1928/68), pp. 101–38. 59 Odo, pp. 12–14, 30; Philips, Second Crusade, p. 120. Crusaders and settlers in the East, 1096–1291 279 the surrender of the important Egyptian port of Damietta which they had captured. 60 In 1229 Frederick II negotiated the return of Jerusalem, though with guarantees for Muslim access to the Temple Mount. 61 When St Louis embarked on his crusade he sought an alliance with the Mongols. 62 This proved fruitless, but it indicates the range of diplomacy which was growing from the crusades. Such contacts might seem alien to what is often supposed was the spirit of the crusade – a black-and-white conflict between opposites – but in fact military success was closely caught up with alliances and friendships, and this was clearly realised by many crusader leaders. One of the great changes which came upon crusading was reliance upon sea travel. Frederick Barbarossa’s army was the last to attempt the overland journey. The Seljuq sultanate of Rum posed a substantial obstacle, and the sheer wear and tear of crossing Anatolia eroded armies. Travelling by sea had considerable implications for crusading. The cost discouraged at least the poorer non-combatants, because payment had to be made ‘up-front’, whereas a land journey could be staged and offered opportunities for begging charity from the wealthy and gathering loot. Moreover, numbers had to be precisely known and this may well have made discipline and control easier within contingents.

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  The First Crusade and Idea of Crusading

  • Jonathan Riley-Smith(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  But after his captivity in Cairo he returned to Europe a man transformed by his sufferings, and on Pope Paschal's advice entered the abbey of Cluny. 64 In the course of the summer of 1101 three substantial and well-prepared crusading armies had been separately and ignominiously thrashed by the Turks. On the face of it the most surprising thing about this humiliating episode, the history of which was 'in the way of a tragedy both miserable and splendid', 65 was that it had such little effect on contemporaries. Nearly all the histories of the First Crusade, with their glowing accounts of God's interventions on behalf of his chosen army and their apotheosis of the crusaders, were written after the debacle of 1101, one of them, indeed, by Ekkehard of Aura who had taken part in it. Nor was recruitment affected: the first quarter of the twelfth century was the most intensive period of crusading before 1187, with Bohemond's crusade of 1107-8, the Norwegian crusade of 1107—10 under King Sigurd, and a crusade preached by Pope Calixtus II in c.1120, which seems to have been planned on a large scale and resulted in campaigns in Palestine in 1123-4 and Spain in 1125-6. 66 To these should be added crusades in Spain in 1108,1114,1116 and 1118. This can partly be explained by the fact that in the short run at least the crusade of 1101 harmed no one but those who took part in it. The Christian occupation of Jerusalem and hold on Palestine and Syria was not put in jeopardy; indeed the area under Christian control was to be gradually extended over the next fifty years. But it would be wrong to treat the crusade of 1101 as a non-event. It was viewed positively by contemporaries and was important for the development of their ideas. The Turkish victories, in fact, helped to prove just how astounding a triumph the First Crusade had been, for they underlined a theme already in the propaganda, the portrayal of the Muslim powers as formidable foes.

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