Second Crusade

“ Piety and a thirst for glory impelled Louis to take the lead in this The second crusade. fresh expedition to the Holy Land, despite the opposition of Suger, and the hesitation of the pope, Bernard of Clairvaux and the barons. The alliance with the German king Conrad III. only enhanced the difficulties of an enterprise already made hazardous by the misunderstandings between Greeks and Latins. The Crusade ended in the double disaster of military defeat and martial dishonour (1147–1149) ”

“ RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES FAILURE OF THE CRUSADES The crusades, judged by what they set out to accomplish, must be accounted an inglorious failure. After two hundred years of conflict, after a vast expenditure of wealth and human lives, the Holy Land remained in Moslem hands. It is true that the First Crusade did help, by the conquest of Syria, to check the advance of the Turks toward Constantinople. But even this benefit was more than undone by the weakening of the Roman Empire in the East as a result of the Fourth Crusade. ”

“ East. On one side, Germany, still without an emperor, though with three pretenders to the empire, could spare no warriors for the Holy Land. England was a prey to a civil war, in which the barons wore a white cross as their badge of union against the king, and in which priests exhorted them to the fight, pointing to heaven as the reward of their bravery and their rebellion. This strange crusade precluded all thoughts of one beyond the seas. France was the only kingdom from which the prayers of the Christians of Palestine were not repulsed ”

“ The greatest advantage the crusades could have bestowed upon the peasants, was the momentary cessation of brigandage, and the peace which reigned in the country, all the time the wars against the Saracens were being carried on.
It is probable that serfs in Europe were not better treated, according to the legislation and customs of the West, than they were in the Holy Land, according to the Assizes of Jerusalem. There is no doubt that peasants taken from the glebe for the crusade became free men; but most of them perished by misery or by the swords of the Mussulmans. ”

“ The precarious empire which had been founded in 1204 drained away all the vigorous adventurers of the West for its support for many years to come, and the Holy Land was starved to feed a land less holy, but equally greedy of men. [45] No basis for the Crusades was ever to be found in the Latin empire of the East; and Innocent, after vainly hoping for the new Crusade which was to emerge from Constantinople, was by 1208 compelled to return to the old idea of a Crusade proceeding simply and immediately from the West to the East. ”

“ Vessels and fleets for the transport of the Crusaders were equipped in all the ports of the Baltic, the ocean, and the Mediterranean; and yet, at the very same time, a crusade was being preached against the inhabitants of Prussia, who still remained in the darkness of idolatry. Poland, Saxony, Norway, and Livonia armed their warriors to overthrow the idols of paganism on the banks of the Oder and the Vistula, whilst the other nations of the West were preparing to make war against the Saracens in the plains of Judæa and Syria. ”

“ The age of the crusades covers the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For two hundred years, to use the vigorous language of the Greek princess Anna Comnena, who witnessed the first crusade, “Europe was loosened from its foundations and hurled against Asia.” As an Alpine glacier presses down into the valley, only to melt away at the summer line, yet with renewed snows repeals the fatal experiment from year to year, so seven times Western Christendom replenished its mighty armaments, to see them destroyed at the border-land of Oriental conquest. ”

“ We have seen in former holy wars, multitudes of Crusaders a prey to the most cruel scourges; the bravest of the warriors often despaired of the cause of the pilgrims, and deserted the banners of the cross; and many times the excess of their misery drew from them imprecations and blasphemies. We must here remark that the soldiers and companions of Louis IX. supported their evils with more patience and resignation. Not one knight thought of deserting the banners of the crusade, and not a seditious or sacrilegious complaint was heard in the army ”

“ Strange destiny of the warriors of this crusade, who had quitted the West to conquer the city and lands of Jesus Christ, and whom fortune had conducted into places filled with the remembrances of the gods of Homer and the glory of profane antiquity!
The Crusaders were not allowed to felicitate themselves long upon their conquests. Possessors of an empire much more difficult to be preserved than invaded, they had not the ability to master fortune, who soon took from them all that victory had bestowed. ”

“ If it be allowed that no wars are more sanguinary than religious wars, there are certainly none in which it is more difficult for a conqueror to extend or preserve his conquests. This is a very important observation, if we would appreciate the results of this crusade.
On all occasions where bravery alone was required, nothing can be comparable to the exploits of the Crusaders. ”

“ This sixth crusade was more abundant in intrigues and scandalous quarrels than in military exploits; the Christians never united all their efforts against the infidels; no spirit of order presided over their enterprises; the Crusaders, who [300] only held their mission of their zeal, set out at the time their will or their fancy selected; some returned to Europe without having faced a Saracen in fight; others abandoned the colours of the cross, after a victory or a defeat; and fresh Crusaders were constantly summoned to defend the conquests or repair the faults of those that had preceded them. ”

“ The former was the driving force which made the First Crusade successful, where later Crusades, without its stimulus, for the most part failed; the latter was the one staunch ally which alone enabled Baldwin I. and Baldwin II. to create the kingdom of Jerusalem. So far as the Crusades led to permanent material results in the East, they did so in virtue of these two forces. Unregulated enthusiasm might of itself have achieved little or nothing; enthusiasm caught and guided by the astute Norman, and the no less astute Venetian or Genoese, could not but achieve tangible results. ”

“ So the First Crusade, with its motive of religious zeal, is in some degree distinguishable from those which followed when knighthood was in different flower. If not the Crusades themselves, at least the Chansons of the trouvères who sang of them, follow a change corresponding with the changing taste of chivalry: they begin with serious matters, and are occupied with the great enterprise; then they become adventurous in theme, romantic, till at last even romantic love is infelicitously grafted upon the religious rage that won Jerusalem. ”

“ Within fifty years after the conquest the feudal machinery was in ruin, and the strategic points, one after another, passed into the hands of the strongest force of the age, the force which was incarnate imagination.
The fortresses built by the monks were the ramparts of Christendom, and among the remains which have survived the past, perhaps none are more impressive than the huge castles of the crusaders in the gorges of the Syrian mountains ”

“ From the end of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century, between the crusade of Philip Augustus and that of St. Louis, it is usual to count three crusades, over which we will not linger. Two of these crusades—one, from 1195 to 1198, under Henry VI., Emperor of Germany, and the other, from 1216 to 1240, under the Emperor Frederick II. and Andrew II., King of Hungary—are unconnected with France, and almost exclusively German, or, in origin and range, confined to Eastern Europe. They led, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, to wars, negotiations, and manifold complications ”

“ Others again find in the princes of Europe the authors of the ruin of the Crusades; they too had preferred their own national or dynastic interests to the cause of a common Christianity. They had indeed, as has been already noticed, done even more; they had used the name of Crusade, from the days of Henry VI. onwards, as a cover and an excuse for secular ambitions of their own; and in this way they had certainly helped, in very large measure, to discourage the old religious zeal for the Holy War. Other writers, again, blame the commercial cupidity of the Italian towns ”

“ Whatever may be said of the Great Crusade, it will at least be allowed by all men, and for all time, that had the princes and soldiers of other nations done as your majesty and your followers have done, the holy city would have fallen into our hands within a month of our putting foot upon the soil. ”

“ A force which quickly overcame all opposing obstacles. They were so much interested, and so absorbed in the ever increasing success of the Crusade, that the happy months and years flew swiftly by. Their devotion to each other, was a potent charm which begat in the hearts of a legion of admiring followers, an intense loyalty to them, and to the banner of the Crusade, which had led them to so many victories in the cause of humanity. ”

“ Although the West had counted in this crusade more than five hundred thousand of her warriors departing for Palestine or Egypt, great armies were rarely assembled on the banks of the Nile or the Jordan. As the Crusaders were never gathered together in great bodies, they were not subjected to famine, or the other scourges that had so fearfully thinned the ranks of the early defenders of the cross ”

“ The true statement is that the Fourth Crusade was only an incident (not in itself decisive) in a world-movement which doomed the Eastern Empire to extinction—namely, the eastward movement of western Europe which began in the 11th century with the rise of the Normans and the First Crusade. Henceforward the Empire was a middle state, pressed between expanding forces on the east and on the west, and its ultimate disappearance was inevitable. ”

“ These perished cursing the ambition and errors which had turned the Christian army aside from the true object of the crusade; whilst those who remained faithful to their standards, deplored the tragical death of their companions, saying among themselves: “The mercy of the Lord has remained with us; evil be to them who stray from the way of the Lord.”
The knights and barons regretted in secret that they had not been able to obtain the approbation of the pope, but were persuaded that, by means of victories, they should justify their conduct in the eyes of the Holy See ”

“ Not until 1918, when it fell to a mixed force of French, British, and Indian troops, did Jerusalem slip once more from the Moslem grasp....
One more crusade remains to be noted, an expedition to Tunis by this same Louis IX, who died of fever there.
§11
The essential interest of the crusades for the historian of mankind lies in the wave of emotion, of unifying feeling, that animated the first. Thereafter these expeditions became more and more an established process, and less and less vital events. The First Crusade was an occurrence like the discovery of America ”

“ Thus, Crusade followed Crusade for more than one hundred and fifty years, until nine armies, comprising more than three millions of men, laid their bodies down to decay and their bones to whiten on the plains and hill-sides of the East.
Among all the enterprises, none were more wild and wicked than those which are called the "Crusades of the children." Emissaries from Rome went throughout Western Europe, preaching and declaring that God would only give the Holy Land into the hands of innocent children. ”

“ The Western Emperor was at open war with the Pope who preached the crusade. The kings of Spain had their own crusade to wage. The kings of England and France were of all men in their kingdoms the least likely to join in the enterprise.The crusades a Latin movement. The kingdoms of the North were as yet hardly stirred by the voice of Urban. ”

“ In such a state of things, a great event like that of a crusade was likely to turn men’s minds from dangerous novelties, and make them rally round the sanctuary. The sovereign pontiff could not avoid seeing in a holy war the double advantage of defending Jerusalem against the enterprises of the Saracens, and the Church and himself against the attacks of heretics and innovators. ”

“ The inclination to enrich themselves by victory had, particularly, no longer any bounds when the Crusaders had once beheld Constantinople; ambition took the place in their hearts of every generous sentiment, and left nothing of that enthusiasm which had been the moving principle of other crusades. No prodigy, no miraculous apparition came to second or stimulate the valour of knights to whom it was quite sufficient to point out the wealth of Greece. In preceding crusades, the bishops and ecclesiastics promised the combatants indulgences of the Church and eternal life ”

“ The last Crusade had, after all, been under papal control: if Richard I. had directed the Third Crusade, and the policy of the Hohenstaufen and the Venetians had directed the Fourth, it was a papal legate who had steered the Fifth to its ultimate fate. The Crusade of Frederick II. in 1228–1229 finds its analogy in the projected Crusade of Henry VI.; it is essentially lay. It is unique in the annals of the Crusades. ”

“ THE SEVENTH CRUSADE. 67. On neither side probably was the truce strictly kept, and the injuries done to pilgrims on their way from Acre to Jerusalem were alleged as a sufficient reason for sending out the expedition headed by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of the English Henry III, and afterward King of the Romans. This expedition may be regarded as the seventh in the list of crusades, and deserves notice as having been brought to an end, like that of Frederick, by a treaty, in 1240. ”