Because of the nature of medieval textual evidence–which usually took the form of documents written by churchmen–the dominant surviving image of crusading tends to be innately coloured by an ecclesiastical perspective. By and large, scholars wishing to reconstruct the history of this age, of necessity rely upon material written by clerics and monks. And these sources are subject to obvious vagaries of bias and omission. But crusades involved the Church and the laity, so how can the secular outlook of knights and soldiers be gauged? One rewarding avenue is the study of popular songs sung in the vernacular rather than Latin. Such songs almost certainly played a role in bolstering recruitment and morale from the very start of the crusading era, but the first actual lyrics to survive date from the 1140s. One was the Old French song ‘Knights, much is promised’, recited by court singers, or troubadours, in the months following the Vézelay assembly. Its chorus and first verse ran:

Who goes along with King Louis

Will never be afraid of Hell,

His soul will go to paradise,

Where angels of the Lord do dwell.

Edessa is taken, as you know,

And Christians troubled sore and long.

The churches there are empty now,

And masses are no longer sung.

O knights, you should consider this,

You who in arms are so renowned,

And then present your bodies to

One who for you with thorns was crowned.

This rare glimpse of the lay celebration and promotion of crusading chimes with some of the messages inherent in clerical preaching: the promise of spiritual rewards; the suffering of eastern Christendom; fighting in the service and imitation of Christ. But the language was more direct and the nuances differ. Louis VII was identified as the central leader, with no mention made of the pope. The complexities of the indulgence were replaced by a straightforward guarantee of a place in ‘paradise’. And, in a later verse, Zangi was named as the endeavour’s chief enemy. Even as the Church deployed Quantum praedecessores and Abbot Bernard broadcast the call to arms, the laity clearly had the capacity to shape their own vision of the Second Crusade.¹⁰³

EXPANDING THE IDEAL

The loss of Edessa sparked the Second Crusade and, in 1147, the major armies under Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany set out to fight in the Levant. But the scope of crusading activity in the late 1140s was not limited to the Near East, for in this period Latin troops engaged in similar holy wars in Iberia and the Baltic. To some it seemed as if the entire West had taken up arms in a pan-European crusade. Pope Eugenius III himself wrote in April 1147 that ‘so great a multitude of the faithful from diverse regions is preparing to fight the infidel…that almost the whole of Christendom is being summoned for so great a task’. Two decades later, the Latin chronicler Helmold of Bosau (in the northern Baltic coast region of Germany) appeared to reinforce this view, writing that ‘to the initiators of the expedition it seemed that one part of the army should be sent to the [Holy Land], another to Spain and a third against the Slavs who live next to us’. Some contemporaries thus presented the Second Crusade as a single grand enterprise, shaped and directed by its visionary ‘initiators’, Eugenius and the abbot of Clairvaux. In recent decades, modern historians have drawn upon this notion to suggest that the extraordinary range of crusading endeavour between 1147 and 1149 resulted from conscious, proactive planning on the part of the Roman Church. In this rendering of events the papacy had the power to shape and define crusading and it was the sheer elemental force of the Second Crusade’s preaching–the tailored sophistication of Quantum praedecessores’ message and Bernard’s power to inspire–that prompted the unparalleled extension of crusading activity into new theatres after 1146.

The fighting in Iberia and the Baltic may not have had immediate bearing upon the war for the Holy Land, beyond some redirection of manpower and resources. But the consequences of this interpretation of the Second Crusade are far-reaching and fundamental, because they affect the future scale and nature of Christian holy war. Two questions are imperative. Did the Roman Church really take the vital initiative to expand crusading as part of a premeditated design, or was this development more accidental? And, by extension, was the pope actually in control of the crusading movement by the mid-twelfth century?

The notion that wars waged outside the Levant might be sanctified certainly was not unprecedented and, between 1147 and 1149, other conflict zones were undoubtedly drawn into the ambit of the Second Crusade. Through summer 1147, Saxon and Danish Christians fought as crusaders against their pagan neighbours, known as the Wends, in the Baltic region of north-eastern Europe. The impact of the Second Crusade was even more powerfully felt in Iberia. A fleet of some two hundred vessels, carrying crusaders from England, Flanders and the Rhineland, set sail for the Levant from Dartmouth in May 1147. These ships stopped en route in Portugal, and there assisted its Christian King Afonso Henriques in conquering Muslim-held Lisbon on 24 October. King Alfonso VII of León-Castile championed another Christian offensive, with Genoese aid, which enjoyed crusading status. This culminated in the capture of Almería, in far south-eastern Spain, in October 1147 and of Tortosa, in the north-east, in December 1148.

Christian troops were fighting under the crusading banner on multiple fronts in the late 1140s, but the idea that these disparate strands were woven into a single enterprise as part of an overarching, studied plan is faulty. When the events are scrutinised closely it becomes clear that chance and unstructured organic development were at work. The Baltic arm of the Second Crusade was actually the result of the Church superimposing the notion of crusading on top of a pre-existing conflict. At the Frankfurt assembly in March 1147, a Saxon delegation indicated to Bernard of Clairvaux that they were deeply reluctant to go to the Holy Land. Instead, these warriors were intent upon fighting closer to home against their pagan Wendish neighbours. The abbot realised that the Saxons could not be persuaded to participate in the main Near Eastern expedition, but Bernard was still keen to extend the papacy’s power and influence over eastern European events. He therefore drew the Baltic campaign into the crusading sphere, promising its participants ‘the same spiritual privileges as those who set out for Jerusalem’, and in April 1147 Pope Eugenius issued an encyclical confirming this grant.

The Iberian elements of the Second Crusade also need to be re-evaluated. The crusading contribution of the capture of Lisbon was almost certainly the result of an unplanned decision to stop to fight in Portugal. The campaigns against Almería and Tortosa seem to have been appropriated to the crusading cause. Catalan, southern French and Genoese participants did apparently regard themselves as being engaged in a holy war with some parallels to the First Crusade. But no precise evidence exists of papal involvement in the planning or instigation of these wars and, in all probability, they were conceived and driven by Christian Iberia’s secular rulers. The papal endorsement of these endeavours, which came in April 1148, was almost an afterthought, designed to bring Spain under the crusading umbrella.

Modern scholarship has too readily accepted the idea of the Second Crusade as an expression of the papacy’s ability to expand and direct the crusading movement. In fact, the events of the late 1140s suggest that Eugenius, Bernard and the papal curia were still struggling to harness and control this form of sanctified warfare, even as they sought to assert the primacy of Rome within Latin Christendom.¹⁰⁴