God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Whatever the exact course of events, the charge of betrayal levelled at the local baronage became an accepted version of events, souring subsequent relations between Outremer and the west for the next thirty years, if William of Tyre, an expert witness, is to be believed. Quite why there should have been so sudden a change of heart on the part of the Jerusalemite leaders is less easy to imagine. Conrad’s anger and bewilderment cannot have been unique among the westerners, who had relied on local intelligence and advice in terrain well known to many Jerusalemites. Perhaps the stories of bribery covered a semi-official payment of tribute by Unur to the Jerusalem leadership in return for their withdrawal. It is possible that in contacting the Franks, Unur offered the renewal of the lapsed treaty which actually occurred a year later in June 1149. Supporters of Melisende may have deliberately sabotaged the siege, although such callous indifference to casualties sacrificed on the altar of political feuding would have taken cynicism to new heights even for the fractious baronage of Jerusalem. Alternatively, the ambitions of the count of Flanders, married to Baldwin’s much older half-sister, who accompanied him on the expedition, may have angered the Melisende faction, who apparently had hoped to secure Damascus for a partisan of theirs, Guy of Beirut; they may have feared that Baldwin wanted to use Damascus to build up his own party. The closest Muslim account, by Ibn al-Qalanisi, mentions no plot, instead emphasizing the murderously destructive nature of the Latin raid, the martyrdom of two holy men, and the heroic and vigorous defence put up by Unur. It is possible that the stiffening of resistance by religious leaders and mujahidin scotched any plans of appeasement within Damascus, forcing Unur to dash hopes of accommodation he may have built up with the Franks upon which the Christian strategy may have been based. However, Ibn al-Qalanisi attributed the Christian withdrawal to their fear of being trapped between the city and the advancing armies from Aleppo and Mosul. This practical analysis may be closest to the truth. Preservation of armed forces lay behind one prominent strand of strategic thinking in twelfth-century Jerusalem; faced with a choice between a brave but dangerous assault which, even if successful, ran the risk of encirclement by the relief armies, and an ordered withdrawal, retreat may have appeared the sensible path. Only it was not the path of heroes; the miracle of Antioch in 1098 was not to be repeated.

The failure before Damascus destroyed the Second Crusade. On returning to Palestine, plans were hatched to revive the scheme to attack Ascalon, a muster time and place fixed. When Conrad arrived, he waited for eight days; few joined him and he angrily abandoned the enterprise, accusing the locals of deceiving him once more, and made urgent preparations to depart to the west.⁵⁷ He embarked from Acre on 8 September bound for Byzantium and the renewal of his alliance with Manuel. Leader of the largest army to set out in 1147, Conrad had lost most and gained least. His nephew, Frederick of Swabia, returning with his reputation enhanced as Conrad’s active and efficient lieutenant at every stage of the expedition, never lost his commitment to the Holy Land: forty- two years later, as Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, he set out once more to restore it to Christendom. For the rest, Conrad’s brother Otto of Freising may have spoken for many when he argued, in pained explanation of God’s purpose in their experiences, ‘although it was not good for the enlargement of boundaries or for the advantage of bodies, yet it was good for the salvation of souls’.⁵⁸

Louis remained in Outremer until after Easter (3 April) 1149, spending large sums of money he had to borrow to subsidize the defence of the kingdom of Jerusalem. The presence of the French king may have calmed frayed nerves, especially in the continuing feud between Melisende and Baldwin. Finally answering the appeals of Suger for him to return to his kingdom, Louis chartered some Sicilian ships for his journey west, during which one ship was impounded by the Greeks, still at war with Sicily, and even Queen Eleanor was briefly detained by the suspicious Byzantines.⁵⁹ Lacking tangible success, his achievements of leadership modest, even in the eyes of his chaplain, Louis returned to the west after an absence of two years with enhanced international status and closer personal links with many of the great princely houses of France, including Flanders and Champagne, his reputation for piety now boosted by stories of heroism and fortitude. Only the retrospective rumour derived from the gossip about the Antioch scandal tarnished the image. Although attempts in France to launch a new war of the cross in 1150, in part in response to the Antiochene defeat at Inab in June 1149, fizzled out in a tide of indifference and acknowledged impotence, Louis’s affection for the cause of the Holy Land remained a feature of his public pronouncements and diplomacy; more than once he promised to return. Like many others, his visit to the Holy Land lingered in the mind as an inspiration and ideal, however disagreeable the physical reality had been. In later years, he regularly used to swear ‘by the Bethlehem saints’.⁶⁰

Elsewhere in Christendom, reactions coupled shock, sorrow and blame. While participants sought scapegoats in the Greeks or the Jerusalemites or even their own tactical naivety, observers, less charitably, condemned the whole enterprise and its leaders and participants for arrogance, lack of humility, immorality, rapacity and ultimate sterility within the traditional analysis of failure caused by sin. The promoters of the enterprise came in for heavy criticism, Eugenius III admitting that the expedition had inflicted ‘the most severe injury of the Christian name that God’s church has suffered in our time’. The English pope, Hadrian IV, writing to Louis VII a decade later, recalled the criticism of the papacy as the author of the crusade, although, with characteristic tactlessness, he suggested the king had undertaken the Jerusalem journey ‘with little caution’.⁶¹ Glowing with patriotic enthusiasm, Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon sought to gloss a moral point by contrasting the failure of the proud, wealthy kings with the success of humble ‘ordinary rather then powerful men’ on the Lisbon adventure: ‘the greater part of them came from England’. Some in Germany saw behind the disasters the work of the Antichrist. A monk in Wurzburg, witness to anti-Jewish atrocities in 1147, savaged both organizers and recruits: the preachers ‘pseudo- prophets, sons of Belial and witnesses of Antichrist, who seduced the Christians with empty words’, the crusaders mostly novelty-seeking tourists, money-grubbers, debtors, escaped convicts or refugees from harsh landlords.⁶² Vincent of Prague was not alone in blaming the disaster on the presence of women; sex and holy war did not mix.⁶³ While Otto of Freising delicately suggested that he and the other crusaders, through pride and arrogance, had fallen short of the moral standards set by Bernard of Clairvaux, others were less charitable towards the abbot, who felt compelled to issue an extended apologia in his own and Eugenius’s defence in a treatise called De Consideratione (completed between 1149 and 1152). Bernard remained publicly regretful but eager to make amends in a new effort, in 1150 quoting approvingly the tag: ‘I go to Jerusalem to be crucified a second time.’ In De Consideratione he admitted the sins of the crusaders and the mercilessness of Divine Judgement. Defending himself from charges of rashness, he claimed due papal authority but accepted that God’s severity scandalized many. To reassure Eugenius, to whom the work was addressed, he cited the example of the Hebrews punished for their lack of faith to wander in the Wilderness, casting himself and the pope in the role of Moses, performing God’s will, however painful. Thus, Bernard hoped, he and the pope could excuse themselves as agents of God’s purpose, adding, in a flourish of self-righteous flagellation: ‘I would rather that men murmur against us than against God. It would be well for me if He deigns to use me for his shield.’⁶⁴ Bernard’s reputation survived, even if the repute of his expedition did not. King Amalric of Jerusalem used to tell of the night before a battle in Egypt in March 1167, when the long-dead abbot appeared in a dream to chide him for his sins (he was a notorious lecher), which shamed the piece of the True Cross he wore round his neck. Only when Amalric promised to repent did Bernard bless the cross; next day the relic saved the king’s life.⁶⁵

Yet King Amalric could also have talked of the falling-off of trust between east and west in consequence of the Second Crusade. In the words of William of Tyre, tutor to Amalric’s son, ‘fewer people, and those less fervent in spirit, undertook this pilgrimage thereafter… those who do come fear lest they be caught in the same toils and hence make as short a stay as possible’.⁶⁶ The searing disappointment and the rumours of treachery and misbehaviour led some to doubt the very concept of holy war and the justice of fighting and killing Muslims. Others merely mocked what appeared as wasteful, self-indulgent folly. The heady enthusiasm so powerfully and convincingly orchestrated by Bernard in 1146 and 1147 produced dust and ashes, as Otto of Freising had it, a time of weeping. For many thousands it had brought death, glorious, mundane, painful, wretched. ‘So great was the disaster of the army and so inexpressible the misery that those who took part bemoan it with tears to this very day,’ wrote one who knew some of the survivors.⁶⁷ All were united in acknowledgement of the personal human cost, thrown more sharply into relief by the lack of any wider material gain. Most people, complained Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘judge causes from their results’.⁶⁸ Few voices were raised to contradict them; fewer still convinced.

The Third Crusade