The rhythm of their feet,
The ineffable low beat
Of the vast throngs pacing slowly,
Floats on the sea of Time
Like a musical low chime
From a far Isle, mystic, holy.
L. MORRIS, Marching.
The First Crusade, with all its errors and shortcomings, may yet be counted as a success so far as the rescuing of Jerusalem from infidel hands was concerned.
The Second Crusade is one of the great failures of history. Yet the movement is associated with the name of one of the most notable characters of his age, the monk Bernard of Clairvaux. Just as in the First Crusade, the uneducated hermit, Peter, had appealed to the popular feeling of Europe, and had stirred up the poor and ignorant to do their best for the cause of God, so St Bernard, himself the son of a noble house, made his appeal first to the wealthy, to the crowned heads of Europe and the flower of their knighthood, and afterwards, by his zeal, his self-denying life, and his religious faith, to all those amongst whom he had earned the reputation of a saint.
During the years in which Bernard, as Abbot of Clairvaux, was devoting his energies to raising the standard of monastic life, affairs in the East had taken a distinct turn for the worse. The Saracens had grown stronger as the Christians grew more slack and careless. Baldwin III., a boy of thirteen, had come to the throne of Jerusalem two years before the first preaching of the Second Crusade, and held the reins of government with a weak and nerveless hand. A year after his accession, the kingdom of Edessa, the first to be established by Western Christendom in the East, had fallen into the clutches of the dreaded Sultan Zeuzhi.
The loss of Edessa sounded a trumpet note of alarm to the West. The hard-won success of the First Crusade was evidently trembling in the balance. Something must be done to establish and settle Christian dominion of the Holy Land upon a much firmer basis.
There were other motives at work as well. France, torn by the constant quarrels between its feudal lords, who only united with one another in order to defy their sovereign, could not be pacified save by some pressing call to arms outside. But the immediate cause that led the young French king Louis to take up the Cross was the feeling aroused throughout the religious world of the West by one desperate deed.
He was attacking the rebel town of Vitry, which cost him so much trouble to quell, that, in revenge, he not only destroyed the city, but set fire to a great church in which over a thousand people had taken refuge. The cries of the victims and the reproaches of his subjects combined to rouse the conscience of the king, who vowed to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a penance for his crime.
It was the Easter of 1146. On the top of the hill that overshadows the town of Vézelay, a wooden tower had been hastily raised, with a high platform in front, on which sat the beautiful proud Queen Eleanor amidst a bevy of her ladies, and the young king with the great cross upon his tunic. Suddenly there appeared in the midst of the gallant throng a thin pale-faced monk, eager and bright-eyed, followed by three bishops of the Church. Presently a vast crowd, stretching far away to the edge of the plain below the hill, was hanging breathlessly upon the words of the famous Abbot of Clairvaux, as, quietly at first, and then with the most eloquent persuasion, be bade them go forth to drive the unbeliever from the Holy Land.
A roar of enthusiasm arose from the multitude before his words were done.
"Crosses! Crosses!" cried the people; and when Bernard had flung to them those which lay in a great heap by his side, he tore up his own long robe to make them more.