On approaching Jerusalem, in the month of April, 1148, Louis VII. saw coming to meet him King Baldwin III., and the patriarch and the people, singing, “Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” So soon as he had entered the city, his pious wishes were fulfilled by his being taken to pay a solemn visit to all the holy places. At the same time arrived from Constantinople the Emperor Conrad, almost alone and in the guise of a simple pilgrim. All the remnant of the crusaders, French and German, hurried to join them. Impatient to exhibit their power on the theatre of their creed, and to render to the kingdom of Jerusalem some striking service, the two Western sovereigns, and Baldwin, and their principal barons assembled at Ptolemais (St. Jean d’Acre) to determine the direction to be taken by their enterprise. They decided upon the siege of Damascus, the most important and the nearest of the Mussulman princedoms in Syria, and in the early part of June they moved thither with forces incomplete and ill united. Neither the Prince of Antioch nor the Counts of Edessa and Tripolis had been summoned to St. Jean d’Acre; and Queen Eleanor had not appeared. At the first attack, the ardor of the assailants and the brilliant personal prowess of their chiefs, of the Emperor Conrad amongst others, struck surprise and consternation into the besieged, who, foreseeing the necessity of abandoning their city, laid across the streets beams, chains, and heaps of stones, to stop the progress of the conquerors and give themselves time for flying, with their families and their wealth, by the northern and southern gates. But personal interest and secret negotiations before long brought into the Christian camp weakness, together with discord. Many of the barons were already disputing amongst themselves, at the very elbows of the sovereigns, for the future government of Damascus; others were not inaccessible to the rich offers which came to them from the city; and it is maintained that King Baldwin himself suffered himself to be bribed by a sum of two hundred thousand pieces of gold which were sent to him by Modjer-Eddyn, Emir of Damascus, and which turned out to be only pieces of copper, covered with gold leaf. News came that the Emirs of Aleppo and Mossoul were coming, with considerable forces, to the relief of the place. Whatever may have been the cause of retreat, the crusader- sovereigns decided upon it, and, raising the siege, returned to Jerusalem. The Emperor Conrad, in indignation and confusion, set out precipitately to return to Germany. King Louis could not make up his mind thus to quit the Holy Land in disgrace, and without doing anything for its deliverance. He prolonged his stay there for more than a year without anything to show for his time and zeal. His barons and his knights nearly all left him, and, by sea or land, made their way back to France. But the king still lingered. “I am under a bond,” he wrote to Suger, “not to leave the Holy Land, save with glory, and after doing somewhat for the cause of God and the kingdom of France.” At last, after many fruitless entreaties, Suger wrote to him, “Dear king and lord, I must cause thee to hear the voice of thy whole kingdom. Why dost thou fly from us? After having toiled so hard in the East, after having endured so many almost unendurable evils, by what harshness or what cruelty comes it that, now when the barons and grandees of the kingdom have returned, thou persistest in abiding with the barbarians? The disturbers of the kingdom have entered into it again; and thou, who shouldst defend it, remainest in exile as if thou wert a prisoner; thou givest over the lamb to the wolf, thy dominions to the ravishers. We conjure thy majesty, we invoke thy piety, we adjure thy goodness, we summon thee in the name of the fealty we owe thee; tarry not at all, or only a little while, beyond Easter; else thou wilt appear, in the eyes of God, guilty of a breach of that oath which thou didst take at the same time as the crown.” At length Louis made up his mind and embarked at St. Jean d’Acre at the commencement of July, 1149; and he disembarked in the month of October at the port of St. Gilles, at the mouth of the Rhone, whence he wrote to Suger, “We be hastening unto you safe and sound, and we command you not to defer paying us a visit, on a given day and before all our other friends. Many rumors reach us touching our kingdom, and knowing nought for certain, we be desirous to learn from you how we should bear ourselves or hold our peace, in every case. And let none but yourself know what I say to you at this present writing.”
This preference and this confidence were no more than Louis VII. owed to Suger. The Abbot of St. Denis, after having opposed the crusade with a freedom of spirit and a far-sightedness unique, perhaps, in his times, had, during the king’s absence, borne the weight of government with a political tact, a firmness, and a disinterestedness rare in any times. He had upheld the authority of absent royalty, kept down the pretensions of vassals, and established some degree of order wherever his influence could reach; he had provided for the king’s expenses in Palestine by good administration of the domains and revenues of the crown; and, lastly, he had acquired such renown in Europe, that men came from Italy and from England to view the salutary effects of his government, and that the name of Solomon of his age was conferred upon him by strangers his contemporaries. With the exception of great sovereigns, such as Charlemagne or William the Conqueror, only great bishops or learned theologians, and that by their influence in the Church or by their writings, had obtained this European reputation; from the ninth to the twelfth century, Suger was the first man who attained to it by the sole merit of his political conduct, and who offered an example of a minister justly admired, for his ability and wisdom, beyond the circle in which he lived. When he saw that the king’s return drew near, he wrote to him, saying, “You will, I think, have ground to be satisfied with our conduct. We have remitted to the knights of the Temple the money we had resolved to send you. We have, besides, reimbursed the Count of Vermandois the three thousand livres he had lent us for your service. Your land and your people are in the enjoyment, for the present, of a happy peace. You will find your houses and your palaces in good condition through the care we have taken to have them repaired. Behold me now in the decline of age: and I dare to say that the occupations in which I have engaged for the love of God and through attachment to your person have added many to my years. In respect of the queen, your consort, I am of opinion that you should conceal the displeasure she causes you, until, restored to your dominions, you can calmly deliberate upon that and upon other subjects.”
On once more entering his kingdom, Louis, who, at a distance, had sometimes lent a credulous ear to the complaints of the discontented or to the calumnies of Suger’s enemies, did him full justice and was the first to give him the name of Father of the country. The ill success of the crusade and the remembrance of all that France had risked and lost for nothing, made a deep impression upon the public; and they honored Suger for his far-sightedness whilst they blamed St. Bernard for the infatuation which he had fostered and for the disasters which had followed it. St. Bernard accepted their reproaches in a pious spirit: “If,” said he, “there must be murmuring against God or against me, I prefer to see the murmurs of men falling upon me rather than upon the Lord. To me it is a blessed thing that God should deign to use me as a buckler to shield Himself. I shrink not from humiliation, provided that His glory be unassailed.” But at the same time St. Bernard himself was troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety. “We be fallen upon very grievous times,” he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; “the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy. Do not the heathen say, ‘Where is now their God?’ And who can wonder? The children of the Church, those who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the sword or dead of famine. Did we undertake the work rashly? Did we behave ourselves lightly? How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians! Assuredly His judgments be righteous; who doth not know it? But in the present judgment there is so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is not surprised and offended by it.”
The soul of man, no less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a great subject of surprise. King Louis, on his way back to France, had staid some days at Rome; and there, in a conversation with the pope, he had almost promised him a new crusade to repair the disasters of that from which he had found it so difficult to get out. Suger, when he became acquainted with this project, opposed it as he had opposed the former; but, at the same time, as he, in common with all his age, considered the deliverance of the Holy Land to be the bounden duty of Christians, he conceived the idea of dedicating the large fortune and great influence he had acquired to the cause of a new crusade, to be undertaken by himself and at his own expense, without compromising either king or state. He unfolded his views to a meeting of bishops assembled at Chartres; and he went to Tours, and paid a visit to the tomb of St. Martin to implore his protection. Already more than ten thousand pilgrims were in arms at his call, and already he had himself chosen a warrior, of ability and renown, to command them, when he fell ill, and died at the end of four months, in 1152, aged seventy, and “thanking the Almighty,” says his biographer, “for having taken him to Him, not suddenly, but little by little, in order to bring him step by step to the rest needful for the weary man.” It is said that, in his last days and when St. Bernard was exhorting him not to think any more save only of the heavenly Jerusalem, Suger still expressed to him his regret at dying without having succored the city which was so dear to them both.
Almost at the very moment when Suger was dying, a French council, assembled at Beaugency, was annulling on the ground of prohibited consanguinity, and with the tacit consent of the two persons most concerned, the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Some months afterwards, at Whitsuntide in the same year, Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, espoused Eleanor, thus adding to his already great possessions Poitou and Aquitaine, and becoming, in France, a vassal more powerful than the king his suzerain. Twenty months later, in 1154, at the death of King Stephen, Henry Plantagenet became King of England; and thus there was a recurrence, in an aggravated form, of the position which had been filled by William the Conqueror, and which was the first cause of rivalry between France and England and of the consequent struggles of considerably more than a century’s duration.
Little more than a year after Suger, on the 20th of April, 1153, St. Bernard died also. The two great men, of whom one had excited and the other opposed the second crusade, disappeared together from the theatre of the world. The crusade had completely failed. After a lapse of scarce forty years, a third crusade began. When a great idea is firmly fixed in men’s minds with the twofold sanction of duty and feeling, many generations live and die in its service before efforts are exhausted and the end reached or abandoned.
During this forty years’ interval between the end of the second and beginning of the third crusade, the relative positions of West and East, Christian Europe and Mussulman Asia, remained the same outwardly and according to the general aspect of affairs; but in Syria and in Palestine there was a continuance of the struggle between Christendom and Islamry, with various fortunes on either side. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem still stood; and after Godfrey de Bouillon, from 1100 to 1180, there had been a succession of eight kings; some energetic and bold, aspiring to extend their young dominion, others indolent and weak upon a tottering throne. The rivalries and often the defections and treasons of the petty Christian princes and lords who were set up at different points in Palestine and Syria endangered their common cause. Fortunately similar rivalries, dissensions, and treasons prevailed amongst the Mussulman emirs, some of them Turks and others Persians or Arabs, and at one time foes, at another dependants, of the Khalifs of Bagdad or of Egypt. Anarchy and civil war harassed both races and both religions with almost equal impartiality. But, beneath this surface of simultaneous agitation and monotony, great changes were being accomplished or preparing for accomplishment in the West. The principal sovereigns of the preceding generation, Louis VII., King of France, Conrad III., Emperor of Germany, and Henry II., King of England, were dying; and princes more juvenile and more enterprising, or simply less wearied out,—Philip Augustus, Frederick Barbarossa, and Richard Coeur de Lion,—were taking their places. In the East the theatre of policy and events was being enlarged; Egypt was becoming the goal of ambition with the chiefs, Christian or Mussulman, of Eastern Asia; and Damietta, the key of Egypt, was the object of their enterprises, those of Amaury I., the boldest of the kings of Jerusalem, as well as those of the Sultans of Damascus and Aleppo. Noureddin and Saladin (Nour-Eddyn and Sala-Eddyn), Turks by origin, had commenced their fortunes in Syria; but it was in Egypt that they culminated, and, when Saladin became the most illustrious as well as the most powerful of Mussulman sovereigns, it was with the title of Sultan of Egypt and of Syria that he took his place in history.
In the course of the year 1187, Europe suddenly heard tale upon tale about the repeated disasters of the Christians in Asia. On the 1st of May, the two religious and warlike orders which had been founded in the East for the defence of Christendom—the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem and the Templars—lost, at a brush in Galilee, five hundred of their bravest knights. On the 3d and 4th of July, near Tiberias, a Christian army was surrounded by the Saracens, and also, ere long, by the fire which Saladin had ordered to be set to the dry grass which covered the plain. The flames made their way and spread beneath the feet of men and horses. “There,” say the Oriental chroniclers, “the sons of Paradise and the children of fire settled their terrible quarrel. Arrows hurtled in the air like a noisy flight of sparrows, and the blood of warriors dripped upon the ground like rain-water.” “I saw,” adds one of them who was present at the battle, “hill, plain, and valley covered with their dead; I saw their banners stained with dust and blood; I saw their heads laid low, their limbs scattered, their carcasses piled on a heap like stones.” Four days after the battle of Tiberias, on the 8th of July, 1187, Saladin took possession of St. Jean d’Acre, and, on the 4th of September following, of Ascalon. Finally, on the 18th of September, he laid siege to Jerusalem, wherein refuge had been sought by a multitude of Christian families driven from their homes by the ravages of the infidels throughout Palestine; and the Holy City contained at this time, it is said, nearly one hundred thousand Christians. On approaching its walls, Saladin sent for the principal inhabitants, and said to them, “I know as well as you that Jerusalem is the house of God; and I will not have it assaulted if I can get it by peace and love. I will give you thirty thousand byzants of gold if you promise me Jerusalem, and you shall have liberty to go whither you will and do your tillage, to a distance of five miles from the city. And I will have you sup-plied with such plenty of provisions that in no place on earth shall they be so cheap. You shall have a truce from now to Whitsuntide, and when this time comes, if you see that you may have aid, then hold on. But if not, you shall give up the city, and I will have you conveyed in safety to Christian territory, yourselves and your substance.” “We may not yield up to you a city where died our God,” answered the envoys: “and still less may we sell you.” The siege lasted fourteen days. After having repulsed several assaults, the inhabitants saw that effectual resistance was impossible; and the commandant of the place, a knight named Dalian d’Ibelin, an old warrior, who had been at the battle of Tiberias, returned to Saladin, and asked for the conditions back again which had at first been rejected. Saladin, pointing to his own banner already planted upon several parts of the battlements, answered, “It is too late; you surely see that the city is mine.” “Very well, my lord,” replied the knight: “we will ourselves destroy our city, and the mosque of Omar, and the stone of Jacob: and when it is nothing but a heap of ruins, we will sally forth with sword and fire in hand, and not one of us will go to Paradise without having sent ten Mussulmans to hell.” Saladin understood enthusiasm, and respected it; and to have had the destruction of Jerusalem connected with his name would’ have caused him deep displeasure. He therefore consented to the terms of capitulation demanded of him. The fighting men were permitted to retreat to Tyre or Tripolis, the last cities of any importance, besides Antioch, in the power of the Christians; and the simple inhabitants of Jerusalem had their lives preserved, and permission given them to purchase their freedom on certain conditions; but, as many amongst them could not find the means, Malek-Adhel, the sultan’s brother, and Saladin himself paid the ransom of several thousands of captives. All Christians, however, with the exception of Greeks and Syrians, had orders to leave Jerusalem within four days. When the day came, all the gates were closed, except that of David by which the people were to go forth; and Saladin, seated upon a throne, saw the Christians defile before him. First came the patriarch, followed by the clergy, carrying the sacred vessels, and the ornaments of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. After him came Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem, who had remained in the city, whilst her husband, Guy de Lusignan, had been a prisoner at Nablous since the battle of Tiberias. Saladin saluted her respectfully, and spoke to her kindly. He had too great a soul to take pleasure in the humiliation of greatness.
