The Kingdom in the Sun (24 page)

So runs the legend, as told by Eusebius and others; and, as proof of its veracity, the Saviour's letter, written by his own hand in Syriac on parchment, was long exposed to public veneration in the cathedral of Edessa.
¹
We know now that Christianity did not in fact reach the city before the end of the second century; but by the middle of the twelfth Edessa could boast other, better authenticated claims to sanctity. It was the site of the earliest recorded Christian church building; it witnessed the first translation into a foreign language— Syriac again—of the Greek New Testament; and one of its later kings, Abgar IX,
was,
so far as history can tell, the first royal monarch ever to receive Christian baptism.

In more recent times, again, the County of Edessa was the first to be established of all the crusader states of the Levant. It dated from the year
1098
when Baldwin of Boulogne had left the main army of the First Crusade and struck off to the east to found a principality of his own on the banks of the Euphrates. He had not stayed there long; two years later he had succeeded his brother as King of Jerusalem— where, for a short and painful period towards the end of his life, he was destined to become Roger of Sicily's stepfather.
²
But Edessa had continued as a semi-independent state—under the theoretical suzerainty of Jerusalem—until, after a twenty-five-day siege, it fell, on Christmas Eve
1144,
to an Arab army under Imad ed-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul.

The news of its fall horrified all Christendom. To the peoples of western Europe, who had seen the initial successes of the First Crusade as an obvious sign of divine favour, it called in question all their comfortably-held opinions. After less than half a century Cross had once again given way to Crescent. How had it happened? Was it not a manifestation of the wrath of God? Travellers to the east had for some time been returning with reports of a widespread degeneracy among the Franks of Outremer. Could it be that they were no longer deemed worthy to guard the Holy Places against the Infidel under the banner of their Redeemer?

Among the Crusaders themselves, long familiarity with these

¹
 
Subsequently this letter was to find its way to Constantinople, where it disappeared during the revolution of
1185.
See ch. XVIII.

²
The Normans in the South,
pp. 286-9.

shrines had made possible a more rational approach. To them Edessa had been a vital buffer state, protecting the principalities of Antioch and Tripoli—and through them the Kingdom of Jerusalem itself— from the Danishmends, the Ortoqids and the other warlike Turkish tribes to the north. Luckily these tribes had always been divided against each other, as had the Arab tribes across the eastern mountains ; but Zengi, an ambitious politician as well as a brilliant general, was already beginning to unite them behind him and dreaming only of the day when, as the acknowledged champion of Islam, he would deliver Asia once and for all from the Christian invader.

Whatever the Franks may have thought about their spiritual worth, their military weakness was beyond dispute. The first great wave of crusading enthusiasm, culminating in the jubilant capture of Jerusalem in 1099, was now spent. Immigration from the west had slowed to a trickle; of the pilgrims, many still arrived unarmed according to the ancient tradition, and even for those who came prepared to wield a sword a single summer campaign usually proved more than enough. The only permanent standing army—if such it could be called—was formed by the two military orders of the Hospitallers and the Templars; but they alone could not hope to hold out against a concerted offensive under Zengi. Reinforcements were desperately needed; the Pope must declare a Crusade.

Although Edessa had fallen nearly eight weeks before the death of Pope Lucius, his successor Eugenius III had already been over six months on the throne before he received official notification of the disaster. The special embassy that brought it—together with an urgent appeal for help—found him at Viterbo.
¹
Eugenius's pontificate had not had an auspicious beginning. His election, held in safe Frangipani territory immediately on the death of the unfortunate Lucius, had been smooth enough; but when he had tried to proceed from the Lateran to St Peter's for his consecration the commune

¹
The embassy was led by Hugh, Bishop of Jabala in Syria. According to the historian Otto of Freising who was with the Pope at the time, Hugh also told of a certain John, 'a king and priest who dwells beyond Persia and Armenia in the uttermost east and, with all his people, is a Christian'. A direct descendant of the Magi, he ruled with an emerald sceptre. Thus the legendary Prester John makes his first entrance into recorded history.

had barred his way, and three days later he had fled the city.

The speed of his flight surprised no one; indeed, the only surprising thing about Eugenius was that he should have been elected in the first place. An ex-monk of Clairvaux and disciple of St Bernard, he was a simple character, gentle and retiring—not at all, men thought, the material of which Popes were made. Even Bernard himself, when he heard the news of the election, did not take it well. One might have expected him to be gratified at the raising of the first Cistercian to the Throne of St Peter; instead, obviously nettled at the elevation of one of his 'children' over his head, he made no secret of his disapproval. In a letter addressed collectively to the entire papal Curia, he wrote:

May God forgive you what you have done! . . . You have made the last first, and lo! his last state is more dangerous than the first. . . . What reason or counsel, when the Supreme Pontiff was dead, made you rush upon a mere rustic, lay hands on him in his refuge, wrest from his hands the axe, pick or hoe, and lift him to a throne ?
¹

To Eugenius he was equally outspoken:

Thus does the finger of God raise up the poor out of the dust and lift up the beggar from the dunghill, that he may sit with princes and inherit the throne of glory.
²

It seems an unfortunate choice of metaphor, and it says much for the new Pope's gentleness and patience that he showed no resentment. But Bernard was after all his spiritual father, and besides, Eugenius was no Urban II; he had neither the drive nor the personality to launch a Crusade single-handed. In any case events in Rome made it impossible for him to cross the Alps and, as he put it, to sound the heavenly trumpet of the Gospel in France. In the months to come he was to need his old master as badly as he had ever needed him in his life.

When Pope Eugenius came to consider the princes of the West, he could see only one suitable candidate for the leadership of the new Crusade. Ideally, the honour should have fallen to the western

¹
Letter 237.
                                                  
²
Letter 238.

Emperor, but Conrad—as yet only King of the Romans pending his imperial coronation—was still beset with his own difficulties in Germany. When these were solved, he would be more interested in settling the Italian problem than in oriental adventures. King Stephen of England had had a civil war on his hands for six years already. Roger of Sicily was, for any number of reasons, out of the question. The only possible choice was Louis VII of France.

Louis asked nothing better. He was one of Nature's pilgrims. Though still only twenty-four, he had about him an aura of lugubrious piety which made him look and seem older than his years— and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was already under a crusading vow, having assumed it from his elder brother Philip after the latter's death in a riding accident some years before. Moreover, his soul was in anguish. In
1143,
during a war with Theobald, Count of Champagne, his army had set fire to the little town of Vitry—now Vitry-en-Francois—on the Marne; and its inhabitants, more than a thousand men, women and children, had been burnt alive in the church where they had taken refuge. Louis had watched the conflagration, but had been powerless to prevent it. Ever since, the memory of that day had weighed him down. The responsibility he knew to be his; nothing less than a Crusade, with its promise of a plenary indulgence for all sins, could be sufficient atonement.

At Christmas
1145
Louis informed his assembled tenants-in-chief of his determination to take the Cross, and implored them to follow him. Odo of Deuil reports that 'the King blazed and shone with the zeal of his faith and his contempt for earthly pleasures and temporal glories, so that his person was an example more persuasive than any speech could be'. It was not, however, persuasive enough. His vassals' reaction was disappointing. They had their responsibilities at home to consider. Besides, the reports they had heard about life in Outremer suggested that their dissolute compatriots had probably brought the disaster on themselves. Let them work out their own salvation. That hard-headed churchman Abbot Suger of St Denis, former guardian and tutor to the King, also turned his face firmly against the proposal. But Louis had made up his rnind. If he himself could not fill the hearts and minds of his vassals with crusading fire, he must find someone who could. He wrote to the Pope, accepting his invitation; then, inevitably, he sent for the Abbot of Clairvaux.

To Bernard, who had always taken a lively interest in the affairs of the Holy Land, here was a cause after his own heart; exhausted as he was, broken in health and by now genuinely longing for retirement in the peace of his abbey, he responded to the call with all that extraordinary fervour that had made him, for over a quarter of a century, the dominant spiritual voice in all Christendom. Willingly he agreed to launch the Crusade in France, and to address the assembly that the King had summoned for the following Easter at Vezelay.

At once the magic of his name began to do its work, and as the appointed day approached men and women from every corner of France poured into the little town. Since there were far too many to be packed into the cathedral, a great wooden platform was hastily erected on the hillside. (It stood until
1789,
when it was destroyed by the Revolution.) Here, on Palm Sunday morning,
31
March
1146,
Bernard appeared before the multitude for one of the most fateful speeches of his life. His body, writes Odo, was so frail that it seemed already to be touched by death. At his side was the King, already displaying on his breast the cross which the Pope had sent him in token of his decision. Together the two mounted the platform; and Bernard began to speak.

The text of the exhortation which followed has not come down to us; but with Bernard it was the manner of his delivery rather than the words themselves that made the real impact on his hearers. All we know is that his voice rang out across the meadow 'like a celestial organ', and that as he spoke the crowd, silent at first, began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of these, cut in rough cloth, had been already prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the abbot flung off his own robe and began to tear it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.

The new Crusaders included men and women
¹
from all walks

¹
The legend of a whole female regiment, with Eleanor herself as its titular head, is surprisingly confirmed by the Byzantine chronicler Nicetas Choniates, who reports the appearance in Constantinople of 'a body of women on horseback, dressed and armed like men, completely military in appearance and seemingly braver than Amazons'.

of life—among them many of those vassals whom Louis had failed to rouse from their apathy only three months before. All France, it seemed, had been infused with Bernard's spirit; and it was with pardonable pride that—his earlier resentment against Pope Eugenius now forgotten—he could write to him shortly afterwards: