To some extent, this relative lack of enthusiasm and limited ideological refinement can be explained by mitigating factors. The papacy’s ability to harness and develop crusading was curtailed by a succession of crippling upheavals: the onset of a papal schism between 1124 and 1138 that saw the appointment of a number of alternative anti-popes; and the mounting pressure upon Rome from the rival powers of imperial Germany to the north and the emerging Norman kingdom of Sicily to the south. Some of these problems lingered at the time of the Second Crusade, and the pope was not even able to enter Rome in 1145. Similar convulsions afflicted the secular laity. Germany was racked by internal rivalry, with two dynasties, the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs, challenging for power. England, meanwhile, was unhinged by civil war during the tumultuous reign of King Stephen (1135–54), the son of the First Crusader Stephen of Blois. Under the Capetian dynasty, the French monarchy enjoyed greater stability, but only now was beginning to manifest its authority beyond the heartlands of royal territory centred on Paris.

One feature of crusade ideology may also have served to constrain recruitment. Preachers of the First Crusade may have played upon a sense of spiritual or social obligation to repatriate the Holy Land, but at an essential level the 1095 expedition resonated with Latin Christians because it was presented as an intensely personal devotional enterprise. Thousands took the cross seeking redemption of sin through the pursuit of holy war. Crusading was driven by religious devotion, but a self-serving form of devotion. Given the particularly arduous, dangerous, frightening and expensive nature of armed pilgrimages to the East, participation in a crusade represented an extreme path to salvation. For many, more obvious and immediate penitential activities–prayer, almsgiving, localised pilgrimage–were often preferable. The decades and centuries to come would prove that, in general, only seismic catastrophes married to forceful preaching and active involvement of the upper aristocracy could produce large-scale crusades.

This should not lead us to imagine that there were no crusades between 1101 and 1145. Some members of the Church, and of the laity, undoubtedly made sporadic attempts to replicate or imitate the First Crusade in this period, preaching or participating in ventures that included some, or all, of the features that would eventually become more stable elements in the make-up of a crusade: papal promulgation; the taking of a defined vow and the symbol of the cross; the promise of a spiritual reward (or indulgence) in return for military service. But, at the same time, the fundamental nature of crusading remained relatively fluid and ill defined. Basic questions such as who was empowered to invoke a crusade, what rewards could be offered to participants and against whom this form of sanctified warfare might be waged were left largely unresolved.

Two significant crusades to the Holy Land were launched in the 1120s, but while the Venetian crusade (1122–4) was certainly enacted by Pope Calixtus II, the Damascus expedition of 1129 appears to have been preached in Europe by Hugh of Payns with little or no papal involvement. In this same period, crusades were initiated in geographical regions outside the Levant and against enemies other than Near Eastern Muslims. Long established as a theatre of Muslim–Christian conflict, Iberia soon witnessed campaigns akin to crusades. The leader of a joint Catalan and Pisan offensive against the Balearic Islands (1113–15) bore the sign of the cross on his shoulder, while the pope offered a full remission of sins to all those who died in the 1118 Aragonese attack on Zaragoza. Calixtus II, who had been papal legate to Spain and was thus familiar with Iberian affairs, took a major step towards formalising the role of crusading on the peninsula. He issued a papal letter in April 1123 encouraging recruits to take a vow to fight in Catalonia with ‘the sign of the cross on their clothes’ in return for ‘the same remission of sins that we conceded to the defenders of the eastern Church’.

Non-Muslims were likewise targeted. Bohemond of Taranto’s crusade (1106–8) was waged against Christian Byzantium. In 1135 Pope Innocent II even sought to extend crusade privileges to those fighting against his political enemies, affirming that his allies would be granted ‘the same remission…which Pope Urban decreed at the council of Clermont for all who set out for Jerusalem to free the Christians’.

For all these references to the ‘remission of sins’ awarded to the First Crusaders, the actual formulation of the spiritual rewards being offered remained vague and equivocal. Questions that might trouble theologians and even warriors–Would participation remit all sins or only those confessed? Was martyrdom guaranteed to all those who died on crusade?–had yet to be answered definitively. It was Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and supporter of the Templars, who dealt with one of the thorniest theological consequences of crusading. With the preaching of the First Crusade, the papacy had, in a sense, unwittingly opened Pandora’s Box. The call for a crusading army to manifest God’s divine will on earth might suggest that God actually needed man, and therefore could not be truly omnipotent–a train of thought that obviously had explosive potential. Bernard countered this problem with typical intellectual agility. He argued that God only pretended to be in need as an act of charity, deliberately engineering the threat to the Holy Land so that Christians could have another chance to tap into this new mode of spiritual purification. In one step the abbot defended the idea of crusading and promoted its devotional efficacy. Bernard would play a central role in the promulgation of the Second Crusade, but in the first instance the work of launching the expedition was undertaken by others.⁹⁸

LAUNCHING THE SECOND CRUSADE

In 1145 the Levantine Christian petitions for European aid targeted both ecclesiastical and secular leaders. One recipient of the appeals was Pope Eugenius III, a former Cistercian monk and protégé of Bernard of Clairvaux, who had just ascended to the papal office that February. Eugenius’ situation was not ideal. From the start of his pontificate, the new pope was mired in a long-running dispute with the people of Rome over the secular governance of the city, and he was forced to live in exile. Even as Eugenius laid plans to launch a grand new crusade, he was forced to spend most of 1145 in Viterbo, some fifty miles north of the Lateran Palace.

Emissaries from Outremer also visited Louis VII, the Capetian monarch of France–one of the heartlands of crusade enthusiasm. Now in his mid-twenties, Louis had been crowned in 1137, bringing a lease of youthful vitality to the throne. He has often been described, rather blandly, as pious. In fact, Louis’ early reign had been marked by heated disputes with Rome over French ecclesiastical appointments and a caustic squabble with the count of Champagne. Pope Eugenius’ predecessor actually placed Capetian lands under papal interdict (temporarily excommunicating the entire realm). In 1143, at the height of the conflict with Champagne, Louis’ troops took the brutal step of burning to the ground a church in Vitry containing more than 1,000 people, an atrocity for which the king seems to have shown remorse. By 1145 the young king had been reconciled with the papacy, and his brand of fevered religious devotion possessed a penitential streak. Moved by the news of Edessa’s fate, he embraced enthusiastically the idea of leading an army to relieve the crusader states.

Eugenius III and Louis VII seem to have laid coordinated plans to initiate a crusade, but to begin with these fell flat. The papal curia (administrative court) drafted an encyclical (general letter of proclamation) announcing a new call to arms on 1 December 1145, but this did not reach Louis in time for his Christmas court at Bourges (in central France). When the monarch declared his intention to take the cross and wage war in the Holy Land, the response was muted. Eugenius III reissued his encyclical, in almost identical form, three months later, and its message was broadcast to much greater effect at a second Capetian assembly in Vézelay at Easter 1146. From that moment the spark of crusading passion was reignited and for the next year or more it burned its way across Europe. The pope’s official letter–conventionally known as Quantum praedecessores (the Latin words with which it began)–was essential to this process. Widely circulated throughout the Latin West between 1146 and 1147, recited at numerous public assemblies and mass rallies, it became the template for the preaching of the Second Crusade across Europe. The encyclical set out to fulfil two interlocking objectives: to define official papal thinking on the expedition, in particular specifying who, it was hoped, would participate and what privileges and rewards they would receive; and to stimulate recruitment by establishing the crusade’s causes and appeal.