Authors: Jonathan Phillips
In the aftermath of the German retreat Conrad and Louis met and the two armies joined together to begin a more circuitous march around the coast, a frustratingly slow process because of the innumerable inlets and rivers that had to be crossed. Conrad soon decided that his injuries were such that he had to rest and, thanks to the efforts of his sister-in-law, Empress Eirene, he was invited to winter in Constantinople. With most of the German troops gone and with no prospect of Conrad upstaging him, Manuel could afford to be magnanimous and he personally attended to the king and nursed him back to health.
In the meantime, Louis and his troops had turned inland along the Maeander Valley where, in mid-December, they routed a Turkish force that tried to block their fording of the river. By early in the New Year they were in mountainous territory and it was here that disaster struck.
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On January 6, 1148, Geoffrey of Rancon commanded the vanguard as it moved over Mount Cadmus. He led the troops along at a brisk pace and by the end of the day had crossed the summit and started down the far side—well out of sight of the slow-moving baggage train and foot soldiers in the middle of the army; still further behind, the rear guard had not yet broken camp. The Turks shadowed
the crusaders and soon glimpsed their opportunity. As the ponderous wagons and the lightly armed footmen labored over the mountain, the Seljuks pounced. They loosed volley after volley of arrows and bombarded the panic-stricken Christians from above and below: men and animals plummeted to their deaths and the Turks seized huge amounts of booty. Meanwhile, far ahead, the vanguard camped for the night, oblivious to their tragic error. Word of the attack eventually got back to Louis in the rear guard and the king and his household charged out to try to save the day, but by now the Turks were in total control of the situation and many of the royal entourage died. At first glance this seems an amazingly amateurish mistake—the loss of contact between contingents sounds so basic, but on closer examination, a few mitigating factors emerge. The French army probably numbered at least twenty thousand and to move over such awkward terrain was a seriously difficult task. Roads were rudimentary and the baggage train and troops probably extended for six miles. In unfamiliar territory it is perhaps understandable how such a situation could have developed because the mountains constantly broke up any sight lines and it became impossible to hold a proper formation. The vanguard waited in trepidation for their friends to appear. Throughout the night men emerged from the gloom in ones and twos to tell of their escape and to report the death of friends and comrades: a grim list of the missing, presumed dead, was compiled. Louis survived and soon took drastic action to try to ensure that such a catastrophic breakdown in order was never repeated. In an unprecedented move (and one not replicated by any later crusader king) he turned over the running of the entire army to the Knights Templar. This, only a couple of decades after their foundation, was a telling indication of the respect with which the warrior-monks were viewed, as well as a sign of the damage to Louis’s own morale. The crusaders swore to establish fraternity with the Templars and to obey their commands in full. With discipline established the army marched onward and duly reached the southern Turkish coast without further setbacks.
In February 1148 Louis and Eleanor finally arrived at Antioch where Prince Raymond, her uncle, eagerly awaited their presence. The prospect that the
Second Crusade would fight in northern Syria was of real excitement to Raymond because it meant he could tackle the neighboring Muslims of Aleppo; it also opened out the possibility that he could gain sufficient power to shrug off Byzantine overlordship, a situation he loathed. As the crusaders prepared to leave France the prince had sent them gifts to win their favor and now he welcomed his guests with processions and fine entertainments. Raymond was certain that his close ties to the Capetian royal family would aid his cause and there is even a suggestion that he commissioned the epic Old French poem
Chanson des Chétifs
in honor of their visit.
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Yet within weeks the situation had turned very sour indeed. When a formal assembly of Antiochenes and crusaders met to discuss a campaign in the north, the idea was, to Raymond’s complete horror and fury, rejected. The sources suggest that Louis’s wish to make his pilgrimage to the holy sites drew him toward Jerusalem, yet while there may be some truth in this, it does not seem convincing when set against the wider context of the crusade. More pertinently, the deteriorating condition of Edessa, the original target of the expedition, could have contributed to the decision to leave Antioch. In October 1146 the local Armenians had tried to break free from Muslim rule only to be crushed with the utmost ferocity. The walls of the citadel were shattered and many thousands of Christians were killed or sent into slavery. A northern Syrian writer of the late twelfth century offered an almost apocalyptic description of the city: “Edessa was deserted of life: an appalling vision, enveloped in a black cloud, drunk with blood, infected by the cadavers of its sons and daughters! Vampires and other savage beasts were running and coming into the city at night to feed themselves on the flesh of the massacred people.”
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In other words, the city was no longer worth recovering.
The crossing of Asia Minor must have exhausted Louis and his men and the losses of horses and equipment were further serious problems. The presence of Conrad in the kingdom of Jerusalem (he had sailed there after his convalescence, well supplied with money and horses by Manuel) was another pull toward the south. Finally, an unwillingness to help Raymond, whose status as a vassal of the Greeks was known, is also relevant because the French blamed much of their misfortunes in Asia Minor on Byzantine guides and the Greeks’ dealings with the Seljuks. With his strategy in ruins, a furious Prince Raymond became hostile to King Louis and it is from this point on that the infamous cause célèbre of the Second Crusade emerged—the alleged relationship between Queen Eleanor and her uncle.
Our sources for these events are problematic: William of Tyre wrote in the 1170s (although he claimed to have researched the matter closely) and, while the Englishman John of Salisbury met the king and queen on their journey home in mid-1149, he did not compose his
History of the Popes
until 1164. William suggested that Raymond resolved to steal Eleanor from the king in revenge for Louis’s unwillingness to fight in Syria. William stated categorically that “she disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband.”
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John was less certain, but indicated that “the attentions paid by the prince to the queen and his constant, indeed almost continuous, conversation with her aroused the king’s suspicions.”
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This latter issue might be explained by the fact that, unlike Louis, the prince and his niece were both Occitan speakers, the language of their native southern France; to an outsider, a “secret” language could have aroused suspicion. A later comment ascribed to Eleanor that the king was “more monk than man” gives a sexual twist to the situation.
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It is frustratingly difficult to reach a definitive conclusion on the matter: the need to preserve a royal bloodline meant that an affair would have been hugely dangerous, but not, of course, impossible. On the other hand, John of Salisbury and William of Tyre were serious, sober writers, not given to sensationalism for its own sake. The most contemporaneous piece of evidence has been widely ignored by historians and is from a letter sent to the king by Suger, the regent of France, in 1149. The abbot wrote: “Concerning the queen, your wife, we venture to congratulate you, if we may, upon the extent to which you suppress your anger, if there be anger, until with God’s will you return to your own kingdom and see to these matters.”
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While this is not a categorical statement of an affair it is a strong indication that rumors concerning Eleanor’s behavior were in circulation at the time of the crusade and that even back in France, Suger was aware of them, whether true or not. In short, it was widely believed that the queen had deserted her marriage bed.
On June 24, 1148, a general assembly gathered at the town of Palmarea, near Acre. This was the most splendid congregation of rulers and lords in the
history of the crusader kingdom. Two reigning European monarchs, along with members of their families, senior churchmen, and nobles, met with Baldwin III and Melisende and the leading figures in the kingdom of Jerusalem to decide where to attack. Given the tensions between Raymond and Louis a campaign in the north was unlikely. Notwithstanding recent periods of friendship between the Franks and the Damascenes—largely brought on by a mutual fear of Zengi of Aleppo and Mosul, but now ended by the Syrian city’s rapprochement with Zengi’s son and successor Nur ad-Din—the choice of Damascus was almost a foregone conclusion, although the port of Ascalon remained in Muslim hands too. Damascus, however, was one of the great cities of the Islamic world and the chance to take a place of such spiritual and strategic importance had to be grasped.
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The crusader armies marched from Tiberias to Banyas and then over Mount Lebanon to begin the gentle descent toward Damascus. The city lies on a flat plain overlooked by Mount Kasouin to its north and with the small, but vital, River Barada running through it. The most dominant feature of the region (and indeed still surviving outside the modern urban sprawl), was the immense orchards that surrounded most of the city and extended for up to five miles toward the west. The close, densely packed trees were a difficult obstacle for a large army to breach, but in spite of this the Franks decided to go ahead because the fruit and irrigation canals offered immediate supplies of food and drink, and they believed that if they broke through these defenses then morale in the city would collapse.
King Baldwin led his men into the orchards where they were subjected to a strange form of guerrilla warfare quite beyond their military experience.
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Barricades blocked the paths, the mud walls that delineated each plot were pierced by lances thrust out of special peepholes, and arrows peppered the crusaders from the watchtowers that stood over each smallholding. Slowly, the Christians worked their way through the trees and emerged on the plain in front of the city. Once there the German knights used their favored tactics, dismounting from their horses to fight with swords and shields so as to push the Damascenes back to the walls. Conrad was at the front of his troops and so great was his ferocity that he reputedly severed the head, neck, and shoulder of one opponent with a single mighty blow. At this point the crusaders looked as if they were on the verge of a spectacular success, poised to add their own great chapter to the annals of holy warfare. Then, curiously, they moved away from their hard-won position to the west and
marched over to the other side of the city where there were no orchards, water supply, or moat, only, allegedly, a low wall. Later, the crusaders would complain vehemently that they made this move on the advice of the local Franks, but once established in this location, they quickly ran out of food and could not then return to the orchards because of new barricades. Thus, with antagonism between the crusaders and the local lords growing fast, the armies reluctantly began to break camp. The finest collection of warriors in Christendom had been compelled to turn tail after only four days—an unimagined ignominy. They had not even been defeated in battle; it was far more humiliating for them to abandon the attack than to lose some epic military engagement. It seems that accusations that the Franks took bribes from the Damascenes to lift the siege—a common enough practice in Levantine warfare—offered the crusaders their most acceptable explanation for this turn of events. While it had the merit of exculpating the westerners from responsibility for the fiasco, it created a legacy of distrust between Europeans and the Franks that simmered for decades. What the Muslim sources tell us, however, is something slightly different.
In the same way that parts of al-Sulami’s jihad sermon of 1105 resembled crusade preaching, reports of the Damascenes’ spiritual preparations during the siege echo crusader practices prior to military conflicts. As the citizens assembled in the hall and courtyard of the Great Umayyad Mosque, the revered Koran of Caliph Uthman (579–656) was shown to the crowd and the people sprinkled their heads with ashes and prayed for divine aid.
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This veneration of the Koran and the acts of humility recall the scene at Saint-Denis just over a year earlier with Louis and the relics of his own patron saint. Preachers urged the Damascenes to defend their holy city, and infused with jihad fervor, the Muslims were ready for battle. A subsequent engagement on the eastern side of Damascus proved inconclusive, but it showed the crusaders that resistance was hardening; more importantly, it gave time for relief forces to approach. Some reinforcements arrived from the Beqaa valley, and Nur ad-Din himself paused at Homs, ready to march south to Damascus. On this basis, the Christians’ attempt to move the focus of their attack and achieve a quick victory becomes understandable. When the defenses there proved stronger than anticipated it was clear that a retreat was the prudent course of action. At this point it is possible the Damascenes made payments to the Franks (rather than the crusaders) to ensure their departure and therein lay the basis for allegations of duplicity on the part of the local barons.
A furious Conrad soon left for home: in contrast, Louis and Eleanor remained in the Levant for almost a year to visit the holy sites. Given the enormous sense of expectation prior to the campaign, it was inevitable that people sought to apportion blame. We have seen that some opprobrium fell upon the Frankish nobility, but the crusaders were held responsible too. Some of this was general in nature: the contemporary
Chronicle of Morigny
decried the expedition as having achieved “nothing useful or worth repeating;” the poet Marcabru called the leaders “broken failures;” John of Salisbury claimed it had irreparably damaged the Christian faith.
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For the first time, therefore, people seriously questioned the value of crusading, and the events of 1147–48 probably deterred many from taking the cross in future. Bernard of Clairvaux came in for severe criticism and he was forced to give sermons and write a treatise to explain what had happened. His answer was to point to the sins of man in general and to remind people of the mysterious ways of the Lord. Eugenius too felt a backlash from people because the number of letters issued by his chancery saw a huge decline—an indication that people were less inclined to turn to the papacy for confirmation or recognition of their rights; in other words, the standing of the curia had dropped because the crusade had failed.
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