Half a century earlier, Pope Urban II had initiated the First Crusade with his sermon at Clermont, but because no exact record of this speech survives, attempts to reconstruct his ideas and intentions involve a degree of speculation. In contrast, while the genesis of the Second Crusade cannot be traced to a single grand address, extant copies of Quantum praedecessores do allow us to explore the thinking behind the expedition and the manner in which it was promoted with far greater precision.

One striking fact is immediately apparent from Eugenius’ encyclical–the memory of the First Crusade was central to his vision of this new campaign. Seeking both to legitimate and to empower his own call to arms, the Pope made repeated references to the 1095 expedition. Eugenius stated that he was inspired to summon the Second Crusade by the example of ‘our predecessor of happy memory, Pope Urban’ and made it clear that the spiritual rewards now on offer were exactly the same as ‘those instituted by our aforesaid predecessor’. Some of the ideas employed by Urban at Clermont were likewise echoed. Eugenius took care to emphasise repeatedly that he had a divine mandate, ‘the authority given us by God’, to initiate this holy war. He also depicted the crusade as a just response to Muslim aggression: affirming that Edessa had been ‘taken by the enemies of the cross of Christ’ describing how clerics had been killed and saintly relics ‘trampled under the infidels’ feet’. These events were said to pose a ‘great danger [to] all Christianity’.

At the same time, the themes of recollection and past precedent were redeployed in Quantum praedecessores in a manner that was both innovative and extraordinarily effective. The Pope declared that Christians should be moved to take the cross by the memory of their forebears who had sacrificed ‘their own blood’ to liberate Jerusalem ‘from the filth of the pagans’. ‘Those things acquired by the efforts of your fathers [should be] vigorously defended by you’, he exhorted, for, if not, ‘the bravery of the fathers will have proved to be diminished in the sons.’ This potent imagery harnessed the collective memory of the First Crusade and sought to tap into notions of honour and familial obligation.

While explicitly projecting this new campaign as a recreation of the First Crusade, Eugenius’ encyclical actually adjusted or developed many of Urban II’s ideas. Enlisting the right type of crusaders (namely, those capable of fighting) in sufficient numbers had been an obvious problem from the start. The 1095 expedition was presented as a form of pilgrimage, but because this penitential practice was traditionally voluntary and open to all, the papacy found it difficult to restrict the number of non-combatant recruits–from women and children to monks and paupers. Crusades in the early twelfth century, meanwhile, had struggled to attract mass recruitment. By the 1140s there was an evident tension between the popular, ecstatic element of crusading and the increasing push towards prescribed definition and papal control. The Church would wrestle with this conundrum for decades to come, seeking to contain and direct enthusiasm without extinguishing fervour. Quantum praedecessores made a rather half-hearted attempt to address this issue, counselling that ‘those who are on God’s side and especially the more powerful and the nobles’ should join the crusade, but the difficulty of balancing selectivity and mass appeal remained largely unresolved.

Eugenius also made significant refinements to the array of protections and privileges offered to those taking the cross. His encyclical proclaimed that, in a crusader’s absence, the Church would protect ‘their wives and children, goods and possessions’, while legal suits regarding a crusader’s property were banned ‘until there is absolute certain knowledge of their return or death’. Likewise, interest on debts owed by a crusader was cancelled.

The area of greatest advance came with regard to the crusade indulgence. Where Urban II’s 1095 formulation had lacked clarity, Quantum praedecessores provided specificity, affirming that the pope would ‘grant remission of and absolution from sins’ to participants, explaining that ‘whosoever devoutly begins and completes so holy a journey or dies on it will obtain absolution from all his sins of which he has made confession with a contrite and humble heart’. Eugenius was not proposing a blanket guarantee of salvation, but he was delivering an assurance that the spiritual benefit of crusading could still be enjoyed even without death.

Through its precise formulation and broad dissemination, Quantum praedecessores shaped the Second Crusade, helping to ensure a greater degree of uniformity in preaching and going some considerable way to cement the notion that a legitimate crusade must be promulgated by the pope. The document is perhaps of even more elemental importance to crusade history because of its afterlife. The medieval papal curia was, by its nature, an institution that treasured retrospection. When wishing to formulate a decision or frame a pronouncement, Roman officials always looked to precedent. In this context, Quantum praedecessores became the benchmark for crusading, presenting an official memory of what Pope Urban II had supposedly preached in 1095 and enshrining certain ideas about the nature of the First Crusade itself. Into the second half of the twelfth century and beyond, the encyclical served to define the scope, identity and practice of crusading because future popes used the document as an exemplar. Many drew upon its style, format and substance; some simply reissued it unaltered.

For all this, Eugenius’ encyclical was surprisingly unclear on one key issue: the precise goal of the Second Crusade. Edessa’s fate was highlighted, but no explicit demand was made that the city be recaptured, and Zangi was not named as an enemy. Instead, the crusaders were exhorted ‘to defend…the eastern Church’ and free ‘the many thousands of our captive brothers’ currently in Muslim hands. This lack of specificity was probably the result of uncertainty about a strategically realistic goal in 1145 and 1146, but it exposed the expedition to future disputes over direction and focus.⁹⁹

This shortcoming in Quantum praedecessores’ formulation also was reflective of a more profound problem in the relationship between crusading and the crusader states. The two were, in fact, tragically ill matched. Crusades were essentially spiritually self-serving, devotional expeditions of finite duration, led by individuals with their own ambitions, agendas or aims (not least to complete a pilgrimage to the Holy Places). But to survive, the Frankish settlements in the East actually needed stable, obedient military reinforcements, willing to carry out the will of Outremer’s rulers.

A SAINT SPEAKS–BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX AND THE SECOND CRUSADE

Pope Eugenius III’s encyclical Quantum praedecessores proclaimed the Second Crusade. The text of this letter, deliberately designed as a preaching tool that could be readily translated from Latin into the common vernacular tongues of the medieval West, stood at the core of the crusade message disseminated in 1146 and 1147. Yet, unable even to control central Italy, the pope was in no real position to launch an extended preaching campaign north of the Alps. He therefore turned to Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux.

Bernard was the most potent and influential preacher of the Second Crusade. Above all other churchmen, he must be credited for disseminating and popularising the message contained in Quantum praedecessores. Born in Burgundy around 1090, at the age of twenty-three he joined a community of Benedictine monks recently formed at Cîteaux and enjoyed a mercurial rise to prominence. After just two years he was instructed to establish a new Cistercian monastery (that is, one following the principles established at Cîteaux) at Clairvaux and his fame soon spread across the Latin West. Renowned as an orator and avid correspondent, exchanging frequent letters with many of the great political and ecclesiastical figures of his age, Bernard emerged as one of the most illustrious figures of the twelfth century.