of the Christian states in the east, before explaining how the fall of Edessa, with its attendant atrocities, threatened ‘the Church of God and all Christianity’. Repeatedly referring to the heroic example of their ancestors, Eugenius appealed directly to ‘those who are on God’s side, and especially the more powerful and the nobles’ to ‘defend the eastern Church’, a cause which would secure ‘your reputation for strength’. To those who undertook ‘so holy and very necessary work’, Eugenius offered the remission of all confessed sins, as instituted by Urban II; the church’s protection for their families and property; immunity from civil law suits begun after they had taken the cross; exemption from payment of interest on loans and debts; and the right to raise money by pledging land or possessions to churches or other Christians (by implication excluding Jewish bankers). To emphasize the redemptive, penitential quality of the enterprise, the pope, formerly of the austere order of Cistercian monks, stipulated sumptuary regulations, discouraging haute couture, colourful or fur-lined garments, gilded arms, hunting dogs and hawks. The loss of Edessa had been punishment for the sins of Christians; those embarking on its restoration must have regard for piety and efficiency not show. Eugenius III was restaking the papal claim to lead secular Christendom after years of schism and political weakness. In contrast to Urban II’s strategy in 1095/6, Eugenius’s bull and its reissue of 1 March 1146 were addressed to a monarch, Louis VII of France. By highlighting the response to Urban’s summons by ‘the most strong and vigorous warriors of the kingdom of the Franks and also those from Italy’, Eugenius may initially have envisaged targeted, local recruitment more reminiscent of Calixtus II’s plans in 1119 than 1096. He undertook no immediate general recruiting tour and, beyond approval and authorization, continued in a remarkably passive role. Leadership and organization were to lie elsewhere.
RESPONSES (I): THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE
The pope was not alone in seeing aid for the Holy Land as a chance to combine a holy cause with the assertion of political status. The decision to issue Quantum praedecessores may have been influenced by knowledge that Louis of France would prove receptive. Louis VII (1137–80) was a young man in a hurry to emancipate himself from the tutelage of his father’s cronies and to redeem his early mistakes as king, not least his uneasy relations with leading ecclesiastics, including Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent II. Still only twenty-five, in 1145 Louis’s power within his kingdom was geographically limited, politically and ideologically heavily dependent on the church. By reputation pious and modest, it has been commented that ‘modern historians have generally thought that he had a good deal to be modest about’.13 In later life he was quoted as observing contentedly that, in comparison with the riches of fellow monarchs, ‘we in France have nothing but bread, wine and gaiety’, an early version of a characteristic, misleading French self-image.14 Such mellow reflection came with age, experience and repeated disappointment after a long career of energetic ineffectiveness. As a young man, the devout Louis acted with impulsive self-confidence, famously when, during a protracted feud with Theobald count of Champagne, he burnt down the church at Vitry in 1143, allegedly with hundreds of people inside. Two Second Crusade veterans who knew Louis suggested he had harboured a ‘secret’ desire to go to Jerusalem, whether as a knight or a pilgrim is not entirely clear.15 As part of the general reconciliation with Champagne and Bernard of Clairvaux in 1144–5, Louis may have toyed with the idea of a penitential pilgrimage. Apart from the Vitry incident, and talk of the unfulfilled Jerusalem vow of Louis’s elder brother Philip (d. 1131), Louis had incurred ecclesiastical censure over his oath to bar the archbishop of Bourges from his diocesan seat: the holding of the Christmas court in 1145 at Bourges itself may have assumed significance in this process of reconciliation.16 The news of Edessa could have focused Louis’s intentions, and it is probable that Eugenius was aware of this when he issued Quantum praedecessores. Before he could have received the papal bull, Louis summoned the bishops and magnates ‘in greater numbers than usual’ to his Christmas crown-wearing at Bourges, where he broached the subject of the eastern enterprise.
The eastern expedition provided Louis with the chance to act as king of the western Franks in a manner not seen since the Carolingians. The three assemblies gathered to discuss the matter, at Bourges (December 1145), Vezelay (March 1146) and Etampes (February 1147), personally and symbolically emphasized his sovereignty by associating princes from across France with a specifically royal policy. In charters of departing crusaders from Rheims in the north to Auch near the Pyrenees, the campaign was recognized as King Louis’s expedition, ‘the royal army’.17 Louis’s former adversary, Theobald of Champagne, subsequently dated charters from the king’s crusade.18 The first west Frankish king to lead a foreign conquest for three centuries, on campaign Louis established lasting relationships with magnates that in later years helped make his court more central in French politics. Immediate political dividends included a royal census, a descriptio generalis, preparatory to the levy of a tax for the expedition that exempted ‘neither sex, nor order nor rank’; not a popular move, but if implemented offering the precedent of the king’s power to tax beyond his own tenants. A more limited, but onerous levy on churches caused painful negotiations and corporate resistance.19 Such extraordinary taxes recognized royal authority on a new level, as did his presence as crusade commander in areas outside his demesne lands. At Verdun and at Metz, where Louis mustered his large army in June 1147, his chaplain noted, ‘although the king found nothing there which belonged to him by right of lordship, he nevertheless found all subject (quasi servos) to him voluntarily.’20 This international adventure conferred on Louis and his dynasty the reality of national rule.
Much of this could only have been guessed at in December 1145. Beside all political calculation lay the king’s personal piety, widely attested throughout his life and especially on crusade. Initially, the magnates at Bourges remained unimpressed, despite an impassioned address on the Edessa crisis by Godfrey de la Roche, the opinionated, forceful and well-connected bishop of Langres, like the pope a former Cistercian abbot. Louis’s chief minister, Abbot Suger of St Denis, openly opposed the proposal, citing the dangers to which the king’s absence would expose France. Journeys to Jerusalem, in arms or not, were dangerous and Louis had no son. The Bourges meeting reached no conclusion beyond possibly appealing for guidance to Bernard abbot of Clairvaux, the bishop of Langres’s former superior, the most influential moral arbiter, political lobbyist and revivalist preacher of the time. The king’s own brother, Henry, only that year had taken his vows at Clairvaux. Bernard transformed the prospects, conduct and nature of the whole project.21
Bernard of Clairvaux’s decision to prosecute the crusade may not have been unexpected. The bishop of Langres was a kinsman and former colleague; the pope a pupil. Some collusion between king and abbot may have occurred before the meeting at Bourges. Some of those Bernard met during a tour of Languedoc in June and July 1145, such as the count of Toulouse, took the cross in 1146. Bernard’s own links with holy war and Outremer were intimate. Although declining to establish Cistercian houses in the east, for years he encouraged the settlement of another new austere French order, the Premonstratensian monks, in the kingdom of Jerusalem, interceding with Queen Melisende on their behalf. Count Hugh of Champagne, donor of the site of Clairvaux, became a Templar, as had one of Bernard’s uncles. Some years earlier Bernard had composed the De Laude novae militiae on the Templars’ behalf and had helped secure recognition for the order. He regularly concerned himself with men journeying to Jerusalem as pilgrims or warriors, although for those with a monastic vocation he regarded the cloister as preferable, persuading one crucesignatus to abandon the crusade for ‘something far better’, ‘that true Jerusalem’, the Cistercian order, and threatening his fellow monks and the order’s lay brethren with excommunication if they attempted to join the expedition east. Bernard was far from immune to the allure of Holy Land relics, receiving a piece of the True Cross from Patriarch William of Jerusalem (1130–45) and, in due course in 1153, being buried with a relic of St Thaddeus sent from Palestine.22 Bernard’s conspicuous spirituality, witnessed in his spare, ascetic almost frail frame, was allied with a tough, masterful clarity of intellect, eloquence and invective, making him an unnervingly effective platform orator as well as an irresistible personal advisor, at once an outstanding forensic debater, academic thinker, religious comforter, political operator and worker of miracles. As the refined intellectual aristocrat and fellow Cistercian Otto of Freising put it, ‘endowed with wisdom and a knowledge of letters, renowned for signs and wonders’, Bernard appeared ‘as a divine oracle’; an ideal recruiting agent for the crusade.23
The early months of 1146 saw intense diplomacy between the French court, Bernard and the papal Curia. Once his initial, possibly formal, reluctance was overcome, Bernard insisted that he would only preach the cross with full papal authorization and legatine power. Throughout his career, legality, due authority and obedience acted as cornerstones of Bernard’s temporal activities; in 1146–7 they provided him with the necessary means to discipline as well as direct recruiting operations. The inexperienced Eugenius, on the other hand, once more an exile from Rome, chose this moment to display the exaggerated fussy legalism of the chronically insecure by threatening
