When his troops understood that the war was over for the time being, and that they would never succeed in conquering and plundering Damascus itself, they headed for home well loaded with booty and satisfied for now. Zinki's army melted away. At this time, he came upon his Christian eunuch secretly drinking wine out of his personal goblet. He contented himself with hurling threats about what the punishment would be for such a display of insolence, but decided first to sleep on the matter. The eunuch decided it was better to stick his dagger into him while he slept.

   This too might have looked like a favorable matter for the Christians, for now Zinki's conquests would be divided up among his sons, and that would take time and possibly lead to minor wars among themselves. The second avenging crusade could hardly wish for a more advantageous situation.

   But Allah had something else in mind. Of Zinki's sons, the one who now pulled the ring, the sign of the ruler, from his dead father's hand was Mahmud; he would soon be given the surname Nur ed-Din, the Light of Religion.

   Nur ed-Din soon created a revival movement. But he was careful not to try to take Damascus before the time was ripe, and instead made Aleppo his capital.

   With Nur ed-Din and above all the one who would come after him, Salah ed-Din, the Christian presence in the Holy Land was doomed to destruction. It was now only a matter of time before Jerusalem would fall. But only someone who writes with the wisdom of hindsight and who knows the true sequence of events can tell this story.

When the news of the fall of Odessa spread through Europe, it aroused as much gloom as consternation. If Christendom did not strike back soon and hard, the unbelievers might decide to attack Jerusalem itself; that was the purely military conclusion even men of faith could understand.

   Pope Eugenius III began working at once to promote a second crusade that would secure Christian access to the Holy Sepulchre and all the other destinations for pilgrims.

   He did the only right thing in this awkward situation. He called in Bernard de Clairvaux under the holy banners.

   Bernard de Clairvaux was at this time the most influential man within the spiritual world, and probably the best speaker in the secular world. When it became known that Bernard was going to speak in the cathedral in Vézelay in March 1146, such huge crowds came that it was obvious that the cathedral would not be able to hold them all. Instead a wooden platform was constructed outside the town. Bernard had not been speaking long before the ten thousand or more gathered there began shouting for crosses.

   A great number of cloth crosses had been readied, and Bernard now began to pass them out, first to the king and his vassals— not even the reluctant counts and barons would have been able to resist the wave of enthusiasm and conviction that now swept forward—and then to all the others. Finally Bernard began tearing strips from his own clothes to give new recruits a cross of cloth to wear as a sign that they had now sworn themselves to the Holy War; it also indicated that after a brief campaign they would obtain eternal forgiveness for all their sins.

   Not without some pride Bernard was able to write to the Pope about his efforts:

You gave the order. I obeyed. And the Power that gave the order made my obedience bear fruit. I opened my mouth. I spoke and instantly the number of Crusaders had multiplied beyond counting. Entire villages and towns are now deserted. There is hardly one man for every seven women, and everywhere one sees widows whose husbands are still alive.

   The Christian revival in Europe now spread with the same force as Nur ed-Din's revival spread around Aleppo. Bernard de Clairvaux had to venture out on long journeys and day after day repeat what he had said, first to Burgundy, then to Lorraine and Flanders.

   But since the revival had spread to Germany the usual problems arose, the same as those during the First Crusade. The Archbishop of Cologne had to hurriedly summon Bernard because a Cistercian monk by the name of Peter the Venerable was going around Germany with a message that was Bernard's when it reached the Holy Land but a quite different one when it reached the Jews of Europe.

   As a result of his preaching, pogroms broke out in Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Spies, and Strassburg. The Jews were murdered, in some places down to the very last one.

   On his arrival Bernard quickly imposed a penance on Peter the Venerable to take a vow of silence for a year, to repent, and at once to return to his cloister in Cluny and never again get involved in something he didn't understand.

   After that Bernard had to replicate his whole French tour in Germany, where, despite the fact that he had to work through an interpreter, he won the same reception for the Holy War. But now he also had to make a monumental effort to put a stop to the persecution of the Jews, repeating over and over that "whosoever attacks a Jew to take his life, it will be as though he had struck Jesus Christ Himself."

   With that, the focus of the aroused masses could once again be directed toward what was important, and the Second Crusade became a reality. The German king Konrad made a pact with King Louis VII, and soon an army of countless soldiers plundered its way through Europe on its way to the Holy War. By the time they arrived in Christian Constantinople the French and German armies had created great internal discord, mostly due to quarrels about who had the first right to plunder and who would plunder second. From Constantinople they decided to take different routes toward Jerusalem. Konrad would proceed through the interior of Asia Minor while Louis would take the coastal route, and they would meet up in Antioch. King Konrad of Germany, who had chosen the interior but more dangerous road through Asia Minor in the belief that there would be more to plunder than along the safer coast road, became brutally familiar with what could happen when a heavily armored European army of knights faced the superior light Oriental cavalry. He was attacked by Turkish forces at Dorylaeum and lost ninetenths of his army.

   When the two European armies met at Antioch, the French considerably less decimated than the German, they were received in princely style by the local ruler, Count Raymond. King Baldwin of Jerusalem also joined them, and it was then time for feasting, of course, but later for careful planning.

   The newly arrived warriors in God's army probably had no idea who Zinki was, much less that he was dead, and that now they would face a considerably more dangerous enemy in his son, Nur ed-Din.

   The local Frankish Christians naturally had a clearer sense of the situation. Either they should now go straight to Odessa and retake the city, since it was the fall of Odessa that had triggered the whole crusade, and such a victory would be of great psychological importance, for both sides.