Yet a third Order, that of the Teutonic Knights, was founded in the twelfth century, arising like that of the Knights of St. John out of a hospital, but one that had been built by German merchants for crusaders of their own race. At the end of the thirteenth century the Order removed to the southern Baltic, and on these cold inhospitable shores embarked on a crusade against the heathen Lithuanians. It is of interest to students of modern history to note that in the sixteenth century the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became converted to the doctrines of Luther, suppressed his Order, and absorbed the estates into an hereditary fief, the Duchy of Brandenburg. On the ‘Mark’[15] and Duchy of Brandenburg, both founded with entirely military objects, was the future kingdom of Prussia built.
The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187) survived for more than three-quarters of a century. That it had been established with such comparative ease was due not only to the fighting quality of the crusaders, but also to the feuds that divided Turkish rulers of the House of Seljuk. The Turks far outnumbered the Christians, and whenever the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cairo should sink their rivalries, or one Moslem ruler in the East gain supremacy over all others, the days of the small Latin kingdom in Palestine would be numbered. In the meantime the Latins maintained their position with varying fortune, now with the aid of fresh recruits from Europe and Genoese and Venetian sailors, capturing coast towns, now losing land-outposts there were insufficient garrisons to protect.
It was the loss of Edessa that roused Europe to its Second Crusade, this time through the eloquence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who persuaded not only Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor, but also the at first reluctant Emperor Conrad III, to bind the Cross on their arms and go to the succour of Christendom. ‘The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure if he is slain.’
The pictures of the glories of martyrdom and of earthly conquests painted by the famous monk were so vivid that on one occasion he was forced to tear up his own robes to provide sufficient crosses for the eager multitude, but the triumph to which he called so great a part of the populations of France and Germany proved the beckoning hand of death and failure.
Both the King and Emperor reached Palestine—Louis VII even visited Jerusalem—but when they sailed homewards they had accomplished nothing of any lasting value. Edessa remained under Mahometan rule and the Christians had been forced to abandon the siege of Damascus that they had intended as a prelude to a victorious campaign. What was worse was that Louis and Conrad had left the chivalry of their armies in a track of whitening bones where they had retreated, victims not merely of Turkish prowess and numbers but of Christian feuds, Greek treachery, the failure of food supplies, and disease.
The Byzantine Empire owed to the first crusaders large tracts of territory recovered from the Turks in Asia Minor; but, angered by broken promises of homage on the part of Latin rulers, the Greeks repaid this debt in the Second Crusade by acting as spies and secret allies of the Mahometans. On occasions they were even to be found fighting openly side by side with the Turks, yet more merciless than these pagans in their brutal refusal to give food and drink to the stragglers of the Latin armies whom they had so basely betrayed.
The widows and orphans of France and Germany, when their rulers returned reft both of glory and men-at-arms, reviled St. Bernard as a false prophet; but though he responded sternly that the guilt lay not with God but in the worldliness of those who had taken the Cross, he was sorely troubled at the shattering of his own hopes.
‘The Sons of God’, he wrote wearily, ‘have been overthrown in the desert, slain with the sword, or destroyed by famine. We promised good things and behold disorder. The judgements of the Lord are righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him blessed who is not scandalized therein.’
Fall of Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
For some years after the Second Crusade Western Europe turned a deaf ear to entreaties for help from Palestine, and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to decline steadily not only in territory but in its way of life. The ennervating climate, the temptations to an unhealthy luxury that forgot Christian ideals, the almost unavoidable intermarriage of the races of East and West: all these sapped the vitality and efficiency of the crusading settlers; while the establishment of a feudal government at Jerusalem resulted in the usual quarrels amongst tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants. In these feuds the Hospitallers and Templars joined with an avaricious rivalry unworthy of their creed of self-denial.