Holy Warriors (17 page)

The holy city was not, however, their first target—instead it was Lisbon, at the time in Muslim hands. King Afonso Henriques of Portugal (1128–85) knew of the planned crusade and he probably made some informal contacts with the northern Europeans. A reference in the contemporary eyewitness account known as
The Conquest of Lisbon (De expugnatione Lyxbonensi)
spoke of Afonso “knowing of our coming.” It seems too much of a coincidence that the fleet decided to set out so far in advance of the main land armies; they would have arrived in the Levant a whole season ahead of Louis and Conrad and then used up vital resources just waiting around. Their departure in the spring of 1147 allowed them to engage in another arena of holy war and to secure valuable booty as well. While there is no
surviving papal bull for this campaign, the participants were already signed with the cross and a case for the spiritual value of their actions could be constructed with ease.
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From Afonso’s perspective, this was not an opportunity to miss: he had only just started to use the title “rex” and to capture Lisbon would both enhance his credentials as a holy warrior and extend his lands. The bishop of Oporto greeted the crusader fleet when it arrived in northern Spain and he tried to convince them of the worth of what they were doing. He outlined the destruction wrought by the Muslims and to convey his point he used the extraordinarily brutal image of a butchered woman:

The offer of the freedom to sack the city for three days after it was captured proved a further incentive and the crusaders duly agreed to stay and help Afonso. Thus a blend of secular and spiritual motives was firmly in play. Lisbon lies on the banks of the River Tagus a few miles in from the Atlantic: its castle still stands on top of one of the city’s many hills and in the mid-twelfth century the fortress walls extended down to the shoreline to embrace the heart of the settlement. From the besiegers’ viewpoint this proved to be a model campaign. Unlike, for example, the terrible hardships endured at Antioch by the First Crusaders, the land around Lisbon was extraordinarily rich in fish and fruit.
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The discovery of the city’s main storehouses, which lay outside the walls, was an even greater bonus because it deprived the defenders of supplies. The Christians were also advantaged by the political situation in Islamic Iberia and North Africa.
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The peninsula was ruled by the Almoravid dynasty, but by the mid-twelfth century their popularity had waned and the ultrapious, hard-line Almohads began to
sweep aside their coreligionists, whom they viewed as weak and corrupt. In other words, just as the First Crusaders profited from dissent in the Muslim Near East, so the Lisbon crusaders benefited from a power struggle at the western edge of the Islamic world. In consequence there was no hope of a relief force for the defenders of Lisbon, another considerable help to the crusaders.

The siege was not, however, an entirely straightforward affair. The natural strength of the city’s defenses and the determined resistance of its inhabitants proved desperately hard to wear down. For much of the summer, the Christians made limited headway; they tried to construct huge siege towers—one was over thirty meters high, but the enemy set fire to it. The Anglo-Norman contingent made catapults and arranged a series of shifts to keep up a relentless barrage of stones and missiles, but again little progress was apparent. Eventually, however, the lack of food and outside help began to wear the Muslims down. Peace negotiations were opened although they quickly descended into Muslim diatribes against the divinity of Christ and allegations of the crusaders’ greed.
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Once more the assault was renewed: to the east of the city the Flemish-Rhineland contingent dug an elaborate series of multigalleried tunnels but even though this brought down a section of the wall, the defenders managed to barricade it quickly enough to prevent entry. The Anglo-Normans dragged up another siege tower and Raol, the eyewitness author of
The Conquest of Lisbon
, brandished a piece of the most talismanic relic of all, the True Cross, as he gave an impassioned final oration designed to inspire the crusaders to victory. He reminded the men of the sacrifices that they had made and promised them success. Raol made it clear that he would be in the thick of the battle himself, trusting in divine blessing to protect him from danger. The crusaders wept with emotion and fell to their knees to venerate the relic. With these spiritual preparations completed, the onslaught began.
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Slowly they heaved the tower toward the enemy. The Muslims tried everything possible to break, crush, or ignite the structure but it was too well protected by skins and padding. Inexorably it closed in on the walls—with the drawbridge just over a meter away from the battlements the defenders’ nerve broke. Starving and desperate, they could see there was no point in further resistance and so they sued for peace: a negotiated surrender was infinitely preferable to the likely horrors of an uncontrolled sack.

With the fall of Lisbon, King Afonso had taken possession of a prized target
in the reconquest, although the city of Coimbra remained the capital of Portugal for several more centuries. Most of Lisbon’s inhabitants were treated well enough to stay in situ because, as we saw in the Latin East, if they were killed or exiled, then the resultant ghost town was of little use to the conquerors. The crusaders received their promised booty and settled down to wait for the winter to pass. Once it was safe to venture to sea again—probably in late February—they set sail for the Levant to fulfill their vows and to pray at the Holy Sepulchre.

Back in France and Germany the crusaders readied themselves to depart. They needed to mortgage and sell land to finance their journeys and such was the demand for precious metals that some churches were forced to melt down relics and religious vessels to supply the crusaders. Groups of warriors began to assemble and we can often see more than one family representative ready to go: it is striking how many sets of brothers took part in the Second Crusade, as well as a few fathers and sons too—once again, the old cliché of crusaders being landless younger sons is proved groundless.
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In the weeks before the crusade set out, the anticipation and excitement were fueled by several major public events. Eugenius had journeyed to Paris and his presence added a special gloss to the spiritual preparations. He presided over a series of ceremonies that probably included a sermon by Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny on the importance of the Holy Sepulchre, and the dedication of a series of fourteen windows in the abbey of Saint-Denis to commemorate the achievements of the First Crusaders. Two of these roundels survive in a museum in the United States; the other twelve were destroyed during the French Revolution, but fortunately engravings of them remain. Some depict the great pre-crusading heroes of Christian history, Charlemagne and Constantine; others show a trio of kings being given the martyr’s crown; the majority tell of the battles, sieges, and triumphs of the First Crusade. In sum they formed a series of inspirational scenes designed to imbue the crusaders of 1147–48 with the values of their magnificent predecessors.
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Saint-Denis was also the location for an emotional farewell to King Louis himself on June 11, 1147.
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The crowds present witnessed a brilliantly
choreographed event designed to display Louis’s piety to maximum effect and to secure divine favor. As Louis journeyed to the abbey he stopped at a leprosarium and, with only two companions, entered. The patronage of lepers, who were kept separate from society by reason of their terrifying disease, was a deliberate echo of Christ’s care for those similarly afflicted. At Saint-Denis itself, the sense of expectation was tremendous. Excited crowds waited for a glimpse of their crusading king, although the extreme heat caused his mother to faint. Louis paused in front of everyone and asked to be given the oriflamme, the vermilion banner mounted on a golden lance that was equated with Charlemagne’s standard. Then he entered the abbey: the congregation within the cool, shadowy church fell silent. At the altar stood Abbot Suger, Abbot Bernard, and Pope Eugenius himself—a gathering of Europe’s elite churchmen—and in front of them lay a golden-plated casket that contained the remains of Saint Denis, the patron saint of the Capetian dynasty and the protector of France. Louis fell to the ground and prostrated himself in front of the altar. Eugenius and Suger carefully opened a small door on the casket and tenderly pulled out the silver reliquary holding the relics to allow the king to venerate the saint more closely and to be inspired in his holy task. After this Suger presented Louis with the oriflamme and Eugenius gave him a wallet, the traditional symbol of a pilgrim, and a reminder that a penitential journey remained a central part of crusading ideology. The pope blessed the king before Louis and his companions went to dine in the monks’ refectory to emphasize their change in status from earthly knights to holy warriors.

Conrad of Germany set out ahead of Louis and marched swiftly through Hungary toward the northern edge of the Byzantine Empire. In theory, his reception there should have been good because his sister-in-law had recently married Emperor Manuel Comnenus, but the woeful discipline of his army (perhaps some 35,000 in number) caused serious friction with the locals and provoked a series of skirmishes. In contrast to the First Crusade, the Greeks had not invited the westerners into their lands and they feared crusader aggression.
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It was a natural disaster that brought most trouble
for the Germans, though. By early September they had reached Choerobacchi, just to the west of Constantinople, where they camped on a wide flood-plain. Heavy rainfall overnight caused a flash flood to cascade down from the mountains, and a torrent of water ripped through the Germans’ camp, carrying away huge amounts of equipment and drowning men and horses alike—a disturbing signal of divine disapproval.
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The Germans then arrived outside Constantinople. The Greeks wished to move their visitors along as fast as possible in order to prevent a linkup with the French crusaders, and, through the usual carrot-and-stick routine—an offer of transportation over the Bosporus and the provision of markets—they managed to induce the Germans to cross into Asia Minor. The Bosporus may be only 550 meters wide at one point but, given the Greeks’ control of shipping, it was a genuinely formidable barrier and after Conrad had moved, the “queen of cities,” as the Greeks described their capital, was safe from one western army at least.

Once in Asia Minor, Conrad was supposed to wait for Louis but, as he admitted later, he became impatient to attack the Turks and chose to advance. The Germans split their forces into two: a group of pilgrims were to take a slower, and nominally safer, route around the coast of Asia Minor, while the king and the bulk of the knights and foot soldiers planned to forge directly toward northern Syria. Accounts differ but it seems that the cumulative effects of a hopelessly overoptimistic rate of march, which in turn led to a shortfall of supplies, coupled with possible treachery from their Greek guides and fierce harassment by the Seljuk Turks, culminated in a crushing defeat. Footmen were slaughtered in their thousands, and although Conrad himself was wounded, most of the better-armored knights survived and began to retreat.
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Within a few days they encountered the first of the French crusaders. Their colleagues were astounded: the Greeks had claimed that the Germans were surging victoriously toward northern Syria, and when the truth emerged it was taken as clear evidence of Byzantine duplicity. Louis’s and Manuel’s relationship had been troubled from the start.
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Manuel’s recent wars with the principality of Antioch, presently ruled by Queen Eleanor’s uncle, Raymond, plus his recent decision to sign a twelve-year truce with the Seljuk sultan of Iconium, were perceived as indications of hostility to his fellow Christians. Prior to the crusade’s departure the emperor had written to Louis and asked him to swear fealty and return lands formerly held by the
Byzantine Empire; in other words, to repeat the oaths of the First Crusaders. The French king declined, but as he drew nearer to Constantinople, Manuel’s demands for fealty, from the French nobles at least, grew more insistent. This was driven by the actions of a third party—the Sicilians: the Byzantines’ old enemy and, by coincidence, fraternal allies of the king of France. At this most delicate of moments King Roger II of Sicily sent a powerful fleet to invade the Peloponnese Peninsula, to ravage the city of Corinth, and then to smash Athens. Manuel was terrified that the French would join forces with the Sicilians and threaten Constantinople itself. To counter this Louis was subjected to the full splendor of Byzantine diplomacy: he enjoyed escorted visits to countless glittering churches, he was entertained with sumptuous banquets, and given audiences with the emperor. John Kinnamos, a Byzantine writer, noted that when the two rulers met in front of a grand assembly, Manuel was placed on a throne and Louis on a much lower stool: an unmistakable hierarchy. Still the French resisted Manuel’s calls for fealty—in fact, a vociferous minority in the crusader army even wanted to attack Constantinople and it was only the Greeks’ familiar combination of incentives and bullying—poor supplies outside the city and the promise of ample markets across the Bosporus—that induced the French to move.
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