The Second Crusade and the Siege of Damascus

I. The Crusader States after 1099

The success of the First Crusade left four Latin states along the eastern Mediterranean, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the first decades of the twelfth century they expanded steadily. Baldwin I and Baldwin II of Jerusalem, with the help of Italian fleets, captured the coastal cities of Arsuf, Caesarea, Acre, Beirut, Sidon and, in 1124, Tyre. Only Ascalon remained in Fatimid hands. Antioch pushed east towards Aleppo, and Edessa extended across the Euphrates into upper Mesopotamia.

The states remained short of manpower. Their armies relied on the knights who held fiefs, on mercenaries, on the military orders founded in this period, and on the steady stream of pilgrims and crusaders who came each spring and autumn. The defeat of the army of Antioch at the Field of Blood in 1119, in which Prince Roger was killed, showed how vulnerable they were. The establishment of the Templars and the militarisation of the Hospitallers, which the site describes in its page on the Crusader States and the Military Orders, were responses to this weakness.

The Muslim rulers of Syria were still divided. Damascus, ruled after 1104 by the Burid dynasty founded by the atabeg Tughtekin, often preferred to make truces with Jerusalem rather than submit to the more powerful lords of Aleppo and Mosul. In 1140 Damascus and Jerusalem actually concluded an alliance against the rising power of Zengi. This alliance was the background to the decisions of 1148.

II. Zengi and the Fall of Edessa

Imad al-Din Zengi was a Turkish commander appointed atabeg of Mosul by the Seljuk sultan in 1127. In 1128 he took Aleppo, and over the following years he built a powerful state in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. His chief ambition was to take Damascus, and his campaigns against the Franks were often secondary to this aim. But in the autumn of 1144, when Count Joscelin II of Edessa had left his capital with most of his army to campaign on the Euphrates, Zengi struck.

The siege of Edessa began on 28 November 1144. The city was defended by its Armenian and Syrian inhabitants, led by the Latin archbishop Hugh and the Armenian and Jacobite bishops. Zengi's engineers mined the walls, and on 24 December a section collapsed. The Muslim army broke in. Many of the inhabitants were killed in the crush at the citadel gate, where Archbishop Hugh died. The Latin population was killed or enslaved, but Zengi spared the native Christians and ordered the rebuilding of the city. The Syrian chronicler known as the Anonymous Chronicle of 1234 and the Syriac writer Michael the Syrian describe the fall from the point of view of the local Christians.

The fall of Edessa was celebrated in the Muslim world as a great victory, and the caliph gave Zengi honorific titles. Zengi himself was murdered by a slave in 1146. His lands were divided between his sons, and Aleppo passed to the younger, Nur al-Din, who would prove an even more formidable opponent. In late 1146 Joscelin briefly reoccupied Edessa with the help of the Armenians, but Nur al-Din retook it, and this time the native population suffered terribly. Edessa was never recovered.

III. Quantum Praedecessores

News of the fall reached the west in 1145. Embassies from Antioch and Jerusalem, and an Armenian delegation, came to the papal court. On 1 December 1145 Pope Eugenius III, a Cistercian monk and former pupil of Bernard of Clairvaux, issued the bull Quantum praedecessores, addressed to King Louis VII of France and the French nobility. It was reissued with small changes in March 1146.

The bull is the first surviving general crusade appeal, and it became a model for later ones. It recalled the deeds of the First Crusade, which it attributed to the preaching of Urban II, and called on the French to defend what their ancestors had won. It promised the remission of sins to those who went, placed their families and property under the protection of the church, freed them from paying interest on their debts while they were away, and allowed them to mortgage their lands without the consent of their lords. It also urged crusaders not to wear rich clothing or bring hawks and hounds, but to go in sober dress and with good arms.

Louis VII had already announced his intention to go to the east at his Christmas court at Bourges in 1144 or 1145, apparently partly in penance for the burning of the church at Vitry in a war with the count of Champagne, in which many people had died. His barons were at first unenthusiastic. It was the preaching of Bernard that transformed the situation.

IV. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Preaching at Vézelay

Bernard, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, was the most influential churchman of his age. He had written the rule for the Templars and a treatise in their praise, In Praise of the New Knighthood, in which he argued that a knight who killed an evildoer committed not homicide but what he called malicide, the killing of evil. Eugenius commissioned him to preach the crusade.

On 31 March 1146, Palm Sunday, Bernard preached at Vézelay in Burgundy before Louis VII, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and a great crowd. The text of the sermon does not survive, but its effect was overwhelming. So many took the cross that the supply of cloth crosses ran out and Bernard is said to have torn up his own habit to make more. He wrote to the pope that cities and castles were emptied, and that one could scarcely find one man for seven women.

Bernard then wrote letters to be read in England, Germany, Bohemia and Italy. In them he presented the crusade as an opportunity offered by God to sinners. God, he said, did not need their help, but he gave them a chance to win salvation. The letters speak of a good bargain, in which the soldier who took the cross could gain forgiveness at a low price. This commercial language reflects the penitential thinking of the time but sits uneasily with the teaching of Paul that salvation is a free gift (Ephesians 2:8-9; Romans 6:23).

V. Radulf and the Jews of the Rhineland

As in 1096, the preaching of the crusade was accompanied by attacks on Jews. A Cistercian monk called Radulf, preaching without authority in the Rhineland in 1146, urged that the Jews be killed as enemies of Christ. There were killings at Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Würzburg and elsewhere. The Jewish chronicler Ephraim of Bonn, who was a boy at the time, recorded the events in his Sefer Zekhirah, the Book of Remembrance.

Bernard intervened decisively. He wrote letters forbidding attacks on the Jews, quoting Psalm 59:11, Do not kill them, so that my people may not forget, a text that had been used by Augustine to argue that the Jews should be preserved as witnesses to the Scriptures. He travelled to the Rhineland, confronted Radulf at Mainz and ordered him back to his monastery. Ephraim of Bonn praised Bernard warmly and said that without him none of the Jews would have survived. The massacres were far smaller than those of 1096, though the Jews of the Rhineland were again forced to seek refuge in castles and to pay for protection. The site's page on the Rhineland Massacres of 1096 describes the earlier events.

VI. Conrad III Takes the Cross

Eugenius had not intended the German king to join the crusade, since he needed Conrad's support against the commune of Rome. But Bernard, preaching at Speyer at Christmas 1146, addressed Conrad directly and, in a dramatic scene, asked him what he would answer at the judgement for all the good God had given him. Conrad, deeply moved, took the cross, together with his nephew Frederick of Swabia, the future emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

The Saxon nobles, who were more interested in fighting their pagan Slav neighbours, asked to be allowed to campaign in the north instead, and Bernard and Eugenius agreed. The result was the Wendish Crusade of 1147, in which Bernard declared that the pagans should be either converted or wiped out. At the same time, crusaders from England, Flanders and the Rhineland sailing to the east were persuaded to help the king of Portugal take Lisbon, and Eugenius authorised a crusade in Spain. The Second Crusade thus became a war on three fronts, against the Muslims of the east and of Iberia and the pagans of the Baltic. Some historians have seen in this a deliberate plan for a general war against the enemies of Christendom, others an improvised response to local opportunities.

VII. The Capture of Lisbon

The northern fleet, some 160 to 200 ships, sailed from Dartmouth in May 1147. When it reached Porto, the bishop of the city, acting for King Afonso Henriques of Portugal, persuaded the crusaders to help besiege Lisbon, which was held by the Almoravids' former subjects under local Muslim rule. An eyewitness account, the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, probably written by an Anglo-Norman priest called Raol, describes the negotiations, the siege and the capitulation.

The siege lasted from late June to 24 October 1147. The defenders surrendered on terms that guaranteed their lives, but the crusaders, especially the Flemings and Rhinelanders, broke the terms and plundered the city. The Mozarabic bishop of Lisbon, a Christian who had lived under Muslim rule, was killed. The siege of Lisbon was the only clear success of the Second Crusade. The site's page on the Reconquista places it in the longer history of the Iberian wars.

VIII. The German March through Anatolia

Conrad's army set out from Regensburg in May 1147 and followed the route of the First Crusade through Hungary and the Balkans. It was large and disorderly, and there were clashes with Byzantine troops. The emperor Manuel I Komnenos, who was married to Conrad's sister-in-law, was anxious to move the Germans across the Bosphorus as quickly as possible, especially since the Normans of Sicily were attacking Byzantine Greece at the same time.

Conrad refused to wait for the French and set out from Nicaea towards Iconium in October 1147. The army ran short of food and water, and on 25 October near Dorylaeum it was attacked by the Seljuks and largely destroyed. Conrad returned to Nicaea with the survivors and joined the French. He fell ill at Ephesus and returned to Constantinople, where Manuel nursed him and then sent him by sea to Acre in the spring of 1148.

IX. The French March and Attalia

Louis VII followed a few weeks behind Conrad. His army, which included Queen Eleanor and many noble women, was better disciplined, and its chaplain Odo of Deuil wrote an account of the journey, De profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem, that is bitterly hostile to the Greeks. After crossing into Anatolia the French went along the coast to avoid the route that had destroyed the Germans.

In January 1148, crossing Mount Cadmus, the vanguard under Geoffrey of Rancon moved too far ahead and the main body was ambushed by the Turks. Louis himself escaped only by climbing a rock and defending himself. The army reached the Byzantine port of Attalia, but there were not enough ships for everyone. Louis sailed with the knights to Antioch, leaving the foot soldiers and pilgrims to make their way overland. Most of them died or were captured, and some are said to have converted to Islam after being treated with kindness by the Turks, who gave them food when the Greeks would not.

X. Antioch and the Assembly at Acre

At Antioch Louis was welcomed by Prince Raymond, Eleanor's uncle, who urged him to attack Aleppo, the centre of Nur al-Din's power. This was a sound strategy, but Louis was determined to fulfil his vow by going to Jerusalem. A quarrel with Eleanor, who supported her uncle, led to rumours of an affair, and Louis left Antioch abruptly, taking the queen by force. The marriage was annulled in 1152, and Eleanor married Henry of Anjou, the future Henry II of England.

On 24 June 1148 an assembly met at Palmarea near Acre. It included Conrad, Louis, the young King Baldwin III of Jerusalem and his mother Queen Melisende, the patriarch and the masters of the Temple and the Hospital. The assembly decided to attack Damascus. The decision has often been condemned, since Damascus had been an ally of Jerusalem against Zengi. But Damascus was the nearest great Muslim city, it was a rich prize, and its ruler Unur had recently been drawing closer to Nur al-Din. Some historians, notably Martin Hoch, have argued that the decision was not unreasonable in the circumstances.

XI. The Siege of Damascus

The army, perhaps 50,000 strong, reached Damascus on 24 July 1148. It approached from the west, where the city was protected by orchards surrounded by mud walls and crossed by narrow lanes and irrigation channels. After hard fighting, in which the Damascene militia and Turkish troops ambushed the crusaders from behind the walls, the army cleared the orchards and reached the river Barada below the city walls. The elderly Malikite jurist al-Findalawi and the ascetic Abd al-Rahman al-Halhuli were killed fighting on foot, and became celebrated martyrs.

Unur appealed for help to Saif al-Din of Mosul and Nur al-Din of Aleppo. Then, on 27 July, the crusaders moved their camp to the plain on the east side of the city, where the walls were said to be weaker. But there was no water or cover on the east, and the move allowed the defenders to reoccupy the orchards. With relieving armies approaching and the Franks quarrelling over who should hold the city when it fell, the leaders decided to withdraw on 28 July. The retreat was harassed by Turkish horse archers, and the losses were heavy.

XII. Recriminations

The failure at Damascus was a humiliation. Contemporaries looked for someone to blame. William of Tyre, writing a generation later, said that he had asked many people about it and that some blamed the barons of Jerusalem, who were said to have been bribed by Unur, while others blamed the count of Flanders, who had demanded the city for himself. The German writer Otto of Freising, Conrad's half-brother, admitted that the crusade had been a failure but suggested that it had been good for the souls of those who died. John of Salisbury said that the crusade had failed because of the sins of the crusaders.

Bernard of Clairvaux was deeply shaken. In the second book of his treatise On Consideration, addressed to Eugenius, he wrote that the judgements of God were just but inscrutable, and compared the failure to the death of the Israelites in the wilderness, who had been led out of Egypt by Moses but did not enter the promised land because of their sins (Hebrews 3:16-19). He insisted that he had preached at the pope's command and that God had confirmed his preaching with miracles. A Würzburg annalist, by contrast, wrote that the crusade had been inspired by false prophets, sons of Belial and witnesses of antichrist.

Conrad left for Constantinople in September 1148, where he made an alliance with Manuel against Roger of Sicily. Louis stayed in the Holy Land until the spring of 1149, visiting the holy places. On his way home his ship was nearly captured by the Byzantines, and he became an advocate of a crusade against Constantinople, which was discussed in 1150 but came to nothing.

XIII. Consequences in the East

The Second Crusade changed little in the east. In 1149 Nur al-Din defeated and killed Raymond of Antioch at Inab. In 1153 Baldwin III took Ascalon, the last Fatimid stronghold on the coast. In 1154 Nur al-Din took Damascus with the support of its inhabitants, uniting Muslim Syria for the first time since 1099. His propaganda, which presented the war against the Franks as a jihad and promoted the sanctity of Jerusalem, prepared the way for Saladin. The fact that the crusaders had attacked their only Muslim ally contributed to this unity.

The failure also discouraged crusading in the west for a generation. Despite repeated appeals from the east, no great expedition was organised until the loss of Jerusalem in 1187 provoked the Third Crusade.

XIV. The Theology of Failure

The Second Crusade forced Christians to ask why an enterprise that they believed to be the will of God had failed. Their answers almost always located the cause in the sins of the crusaders, not in the idea of the crusade itself. The language of penance, which had made crusading attractive, also provided an explanation for defeat.

The Greek Scriptures offer a different perspective. Jesus refused the offer of the kingdoms of the world (Matthew 4:8-10) and told his followers that they would be hated and persecuted, not that they would conquer territory (John 15:18-20). James warned that wars and fights arise from the cravings of the flesh (James 4:1-2). Bernard's claim that killing an unbeliever could be a service to God recalls the words of Jesus in John 16:2, that the hour was coming when everyone who killed his disciples would imagine that he had rendered a sacred service to God. Bernard applied no such caution to his own preaching.

XV. Assessment

The Second Crusade was the first crusade led by kings and the first to be fought on several fronts. It was preached by the most respected churchman of the age, and it enjoyed wide support. Yet in the east it achieved nothing, and it was marked by the destruction of two great armies in Anatolia, the abandonment of the poor at Attalia and the futile siege of Damascus. Its only lasting achievements were in Portugal and on the Baltic, where the Wendish Crusade began a long process of conquest.

Bernard's intervention to protect the Jews was a genuine act of courage, and it set an important precedent. But the ideas he expressed in praise of the Templars, that killing could be a merit and dying in battle a gain, helped to entrench the theology of holy war in the Latin church for centuries.

XVI. Paying for the Crusade

Crusading was expensive, and the Second Crusade saw new methods of raising money. Louis VII imposed a general levy on his kingdom, the first such tax in French history, which fell heavily on the churches and the towns. Abbeys such as Fleury and Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire complained that they had been forced to sell their treasures. Individual crusaders sold or mortgaged their lands, often to monasteries, which had the cash to buy them. The charters recording these transactions show families gathering resources over months and sometimes years.

The wealth of the Jews also became a target. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, wrote to Louis VII in 1146 urging that the Jews should not be killed but that their property should be taken to finance the crusade. He argued that they had enriched themselves by fraud and by receiving stolen church goods, and that it was fitting that their wealth should be used against the Saracens. The letter combines a refusal of bloodshed with a deep hostility, and it illustrates how the crusade intensified the economic pressure on Jewish communities. The privilege in Quantum praedecessores freeing crusaders from interest on their debts was also directed in practice against Jewish lenders.

The demands made on the poor and on the church provoked resentment. Some chroniclers saw the failure of the crusade as a punishment for the oppression that had financed it. The experience helped to shape later crusade taxation, such as the Saladin Tithe of 1188, which the site's page on the Third Crusade describes.

XVII. Women on the Crusade

The presence of Queen Eleanor and a number of noblewomen on the French expedition attracted criticism, both at the time and later. Odo of Deuil, who was writing for the king, says little about the queen, but later writers blamed the women for the size of the baggage train and for luxury. The story that Eleanor and her ladies rode dressed as Amazons appears only in much later sources and is probably a legend.

Women had taken part in the First Crusade, and they continued to do so throughout the crusading period, as pilgrims, as wives of crusaders, as servants and occasionally as fighters. Countess Sophia of Holland, Countess Ida of Austria and other noblewomen made the journey east in the twelfth century. The papacy, however, increasingly discouraged the participation of non-combatants, and Quantum praedecessores urged sobriety in dress and equipment. The quarrel between Louis and Eleanor at Antioch became one of the best-known episodes of the crusade, but historians now see it as a political dispute over strategy as much as a personal one.

XVIII. Melisende and the Politics of Jerusalem

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was itself divided at the time of the crusade. King Fulk had died in 1143, leaving his widow Melisende, the daughter of Baldwin II, as co-ruler with their son Baldwin III, then thirteen years old. Melisende was a capable ruler who patronised churches and monasteries, and the Melisende Psalter, made for her in Jerusalem, survives as a masterpiece of crusader art combining western, Byzantine and Armenian styles.

By 1148 Baldwin was eighteen and anxious to rule in his own right, and tensions between mother and son affected the councils of the kingdom. The decision to attack Damascus may have owed something to the young king's wish to win glory. The tension broke into open conflict in 1152, when Baldwin besieged his mother in the Tower of David and forced her to give up power, though she continued to exercise influence until her death in 1161. The internal politics of the crusader states, often overlooked by the western chroniclers, could be decisive in their fortunes.

XIX. The View from Damascus

The siege of Damascus is described in detail by Ibn al-Qalanisi, a senior official of the city who lived through it. His Damascus Chronicle records the approach of the Franks, the fighting in the orchards, the death of al-Findalawi, the arrival of reinforcements and the sudden withdrawal. He attributes the deliverance of the city to God, who answered the prayers of the people when the Quran of Uthman was displayed in the great mosque and the population prayed in the courtyard.

The memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian nobleman who knew both the Franks and the court of Damascus, give a vivid picture of relations between Muslims and Franks in this period. Usama describes Templars who allowed him to pray in a small mosque in the al-Aqsa compound and protected him from a newly arrived Frank who tried to turn him towards the east. He contrasts the settled Franks, who had adapted to the customs of the east, with the newcomers, who were more hostile. The Second Crusade was an influx of such newcomers, and the settled Franks may well have been more cautious than their guests about attacking an old ally.

Ibn al-Qalanisi's account also shows how the crusade strengthened the movement for jihad. Preachers in Damascus emphasised the sanctity of Jerusalem and the duty of all Muslims to resist the Franks. Within six years the city had accepted the rule of Nur al-Din, who made this ideology central to his rule.

XX. Nur al-Din and the Counter-Crusade

Nur al-Din, son of Zengi, ruled Aleppo from 1146 and Damascus from 1154 until his death in 1174. He was a pious Sunni ruler who founded madrasas, hospitals and Sufi lodges and was remembered by Muslim writers as a model of justice. He commissioned a magnificent wooden pulpit for the al-Aqsa mosque, to be installed when Jerusalem was recovered. The pulpit was eventually placed there by Saladin in 1187 and stood until it was destroyed in a fire in 1969.

The propaganda of Nur al-Din's court, promoted by preachers and poets, presented the war against the Franks as a religious duty and Jerusalem as a holy city to be liberated. Works in praise of Jerusalem, known as the Fada'il al-Quds, multiplied. In this way the crusades produced a mirror image of themselves in the Muslim world, a holy war for the recovery of a holy city. The Second Crusade, by uniting the Muslims of Syria against the Franks, accelerated this process.

XXI. The Sources and Their Silences

The Second Crusade is less well documented than the First. Odo of Deuil's account stops at Antioch, and there is no western eyewitness narrative of the siege of Damascus. The fullest western account is that of William of Tyre, written in the 1170s and 1180s, who depended on the memories of others. The German chronicler Otto of Freising, who took part, chose not to describe the crusade in detail, saying that since it had not turned out well it was better left to others. The letters of Bernard, Conrad and Louis, and the annals of German and French monasteries, fill some of the gaps.

The silences are themselves significant. Contemporaries found the failure painful to describe, and many preferred to dwell on the success at Lisbon or to explain the defeat in moral terms. Modern historians have had to reconstruct the military events from fragmentary evidence, and their interpretations of the decision to attack Damascus continue to differ. What is not in doubt is that the human cost was very great, especially for the poor and the foot soldiers abandoned in Anatolia.

XXII. Manuel Komnenos and the Byzantine View

The Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, who ruled from 1143 to 1180, was in a difficult position in 1147. He was attempting to restore Byzantine influence in Anatolia and Syria, and in 1145 he had forced Raymond of Antioch to come to Constantinople and acknowledge his overlordship. He did not wish to see a western army destabilise the region or seize lands that he claimed. At the same time he could not refuse passage to two Christian kings, one of whom was his kinsman by marriage.

Manuel's solution was to supply the crusaders while hurrying them through his lands, and to require the leaders to swear oaths similar to those of 1097. Louis VII, unlike Conrad, swore. Manuel also concluded a truce with the Seljuk sultan of Iconium, Mas'ud, which the westerners regarded as treachery. The Byzantine historians John Kinnamos and Niketas Choniates, writing later in the century, describe the crusaders as unruly and arrogant, and Kinnamos records the damage done by the Germans around Constantinople. Choniates, by contrast, criticises the Greeks for cheating the crusaders with false coin and adulterated flour.

At the very moment the crusaders were in Byzantine territory, Roger II of Sicily seized Corfu and raided Corinth and Thebes, carrying off silk workers to Palermo. Manuel had to deal with this attack while managing the crusade. The western suspicion of Byzantium deepened after 1148, and the idea of a crusade against Constantinople, discussed by Louis VII, Roger II and Bernard in 1150, anticipated the events of 1204, which the site describes in its page on the Fourth Crusade.

XXIII. The Second Crusade in Memory

The Second Crusade was remembered very differently in different places. In Portugal the capture of Lisbon became part of the national story, and a cemetery for the crusaders who died there was venerated. In Germany the crusade against the Wends was soon forgotten, overshadowed by the later Baltic crusades. In France the failure in the east tarnished the reputation of Louis VII and of Bernard, whose prestige never quite recovered.

In the Jewish communities the Book of Remembrance of Ephraim of Bonn preserved the names of victims and the memory of Bernard's intervention. Among the Muslims of Syria the deliverance of Damascus was remembered as a sign of divine favour. For the crusader states the episode was a warning that help from the west could be unreliable and even counterproductive, and that their survival depended above all on their own resources and on the divisions of their neighbours.

XXIV. Chronology

In 1127 Zengi became atabeg of Mosul and in 1128 he took Aleppo. In 1140 Damascus and Jerusalem allied against him. On 24 December 1144 Edessa fell. On 1 December 1145 Eugenius III issued Quantum praedecessores, reissued on 1 March 1146. On 31 March 1146 Bernard preached at Vézelay. In 1146 Radulf's preaching led to attacks on Jews in the Rhineland, and Zengi was murdered. At Christmas 1146 Conrad III took the cross at Speyer. In the spring of 1147 the Wendish Crusade was authorised.

In May 1147 the northern fleet sailed from Dartmouth and Conrad left Regensburg. On 25 October 1147 the Germans were defeated near Dorylaeum, and on 24 October Lisbon surrendered. In January 1148 the French were ambushed at Mount Cadmus. In March 1148 Louis reached Antioch. On 24 June 1148 the assembly at Palmarea decided to attack Damascus. From 24 to 28 July 1148 the crusaders besieged Damascus. In 1149 Louis returned to France and Raymond of Antioch was killed at Inab. In 1153 Ascalon fell to Baldwin III, and in 1154 Nur al-Din took Damascus.

XXV. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.