THE WORK OF KINGS

The inception of the Second Crusade was especially remarkable in one additional respect. Up to this point, crusading expeditions had been led in the field by prominent noblemen–counts, dukes and princes–drawn from the upper echelons of Latin society, but no western monarch had taken the cross.* The decision of King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany to answer Quantum praedecessores’ call to arms thus set an important precedent, adding an enduring new dimension to crusading. The immediate consequences were marked. Recruitment was buoyed, partly through the power of royal endorsement and example and also because the hierarchical nature of medieval society prompted a chain reaction of enlistment. Crown involvement also enhanced the material resources deployed in the name of the cross, at least to some extent. A recent spate of failed western European harvests meant that even men of Louis’ and Conrad’s stature struggled to meet the full financial demands of so long and committed a campaign. Neither seems to have been able to impose general taxes within their respective realms, and turned instead to levying money from towns and churches, but this proved to be only partially successful and, within weeks of his departure, the French monarch was short of cash.

Royal participation came at a considerable price. In the past, most crusaders had sought to arrange their affairs before departure, but the manifold complexities involved in a king all but abandoning his realm for months, even years, had the potential to greatly extend the range and duration of these preparations. In 1147 regents were appointed to protect the throne and oversee day-to-day government, from law and order to the economy: in France, Abbot Suger of St Denis, a long-term Capetian ally and Louis’ childhood tutor, was chosen; in Germany, Conrad’s ten-year-old son, Henry, was designated as heir and the kingdom entrusted to a leading churchman, Abbot Wibald of Corvey and Stavelot.

The fractious nature of medieval European politics also meant that crown involvement in the crusade deepened and extended the potential for damaging antagonism between contingents. Northern–southern French tension alone had come close to stalling the First Crusade. While an ingrained sense of national identity had yet to take hold in either realm, in 1147 troops from France and Germany did travel to the Holy Land in separate hosts headed by their respective monarchs. Long-standing international rivalry and suspicion might easily have undermined the expedition. To begin with, at least, the two powers displayed reassuring signs of cooperation, coordination and communication. Louis met with Conrad’s representatives to discuss preparations, in the presence of Bernard of Clairvaux, at a meeting at Châlons-sur-Marne on 2 February 1147. The French and Germans then held further separate planning assemblies at Étampes and Frankfurt.

The presence of these two kings on crusade likewise threatened to disrupt the delicate diplomatic equilibrium that held sway in mid-twelfth-century Latin Christendom. This issue was of greatest concern in relation to Roger II of Sicily, head of a formidable southern Italian Norman kingdom that was fast becoming one of the Mediterranean’s great powers. In the 1140s the papacy and Byzantium were directly threatened by Roger’s expansionist policies and therefore looked to their mutual ally, Germany, to counter Sicilian aggression. Conrad’s decision to join the crusade threatened to disrupt this web of interdependence, exposing Rome and Constantinople to attack. Matters were complicated further by Louis VII’s relatively amiable relations with King Roger, a fact which unsettled Eugenius III and made the Greeks wary of a Sicilian–French invasion plot. Manuel Comnenus–who had now assumed control of Byzantium–sent envoys to Louis VII and Conrad III in an attempt to pave the way for peaceful collaboration with the crusade, but doubts remained in the emperor’s mind and the pope too was probably reluctant to see Conrad leave Europe.

Royal diplomacy also had a practical impact upon the route taken by the expedition. Given the state of western naval technology in the 1140s, transporting the entire crusade to the Levant by ship may have been impractical. Nonetheless, Roger II offered to carry French troops eastwards, but in the end this was refused because of the tension between Sicily and Byzantium. As with the First Crusade, the vast bulk of the 1147 expedition set out to follow the land route to the Near East, past Constantinople and across Asia Minor. This was to have grave consequences.

One further question remained: how would two of Latin Christendom’s most powerful leaders interact with the rulers of the crusader states? Would Louis and Conrad allow themselves to be directed by a prince of Antioch, a count of Edessa, or even a king of Jerusalem? Or would the French and German monarchs pursue their own independent, and potentially conflicting, ambitions and agendas?

Notable as they were, the immediate to short-term effects of Louis’ and Conrad’s involvement in the 1146 to 1149 expedition paled in comparison to the wider historical significance of the union between crusading and medieval kingship. Both would be transformed by this intimate, often unsettling relationship over the decades and centuries to come. Outremer and western Christendom came to expect Europe’s sovereigns to champion the crusading cause, but future expeditions involving Latin monarchs were subject to the same possibilities and problems–afforded wealth, resources and manpower; yet hamstrung by disunity and hampered by a lack of shared goals. Crusades involving kings proved to be ponderous, even unreactive to the needs of the Near East, and were always capable of destabilising European politics. At the same time, the ideal of holy war began to influence the practice of kingship across the Latin West. Commitment to the crusading cause became an essential duty for Christian rulers, a pious obligation that served to confirm their martial qualities, but one that also had to be managed alongside the business of government.¹⁰⁵

ON THE ROAD TO THE HOLY LAND

Now enjoying a greater degree of security in Rome, Pope Eugenius III came to Paris at Easter 1147 to oversee the final preparations for the Second Crusade. That April a group of around one hundred Templar knights also joined the French crusading army. On 11 June 1147 the pope, alongside his mentor Abbot Bernard, presided over a heavily stage-managed public ceremony, held at the grand royal Church of St Denis, a few miles north of Paris, at which Louis made a dramatic, ritualised departure for the Holy Land. This gathering encapsulated the new royal dimension of crusading, but also provides an authentic insight into the young king’s own burgeoning sense of personal piety. En route to the meeting at St Denis, Louis decided that he had to make an ‘impromptu’ two-hour tour of the local leper colony as a demonstration of his subservience to God, leaving both his glamorous wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the pope literally waiting at the altar. The queen was said to have been ‘almost fainting from emotion and the heat’.

When Louis finally arrived at St Denis, hushed crowds of nobles, packed into the aisles, watched in awe as ‘he humbly prostrated himself on the ground and adored his patron saint, Denis’. The pope presented the king with his pilgrim staff and scrip (satchel), and Louis then raised the ancient Oriflame, believed to have been Charlemagne’s battle-standard, the very symbol of French monarchy. In one moment, this impassioned performance sent out a succession of powerful interlocking messages: crusading was a genuine act of Christian devotion; Louis was a truly regal king; and the Roman Church stood at the centre of the crusading movement.¹⁰⁶