When Eleanor of Aquitaine was Queen of Louis VII. of France, being beautiful, a fine musician and songstress, and expert in the songs and recitations of the troubadours, she was so carried away by the eloquence of the monk Bernard when preaching for the crusade that she vowed to join her husband and go to the Holy Land. Her youth, beauty, and gaiety made the King do anything. She made her court ladies array themselves like Amazons, and act as her bodyguard. They joined in the exercises eagerly as in any frolic, and sent their distaffs as presents to the knights and nobles who had not courage to go from home. The freaks of these ladies led to many mishaps and disasters in the field; and instead of obeying orders, the Queen and her Amazons insisted on encamping in a lovely, romantic valley, which deranged all the wisest plans, and led to the loss of seven thousand of the flower of French chivalry. She then began to flirt with her uncle, a handsome old beau, whom she met for the first time at Antioch, and her vagaries caused disgust to Louis, who left her in a huff. When she entered Jerusalem, the burning object of every Crusader’s dreams, she was in such a fit of temper that she saw nothing interesting, and then began a lasting quarrel between her and the King. While Louis was besieging Damascus she had to be kept in personal restraint at Jerusalem, and even started another flirtation with a handsome young Saracen. After great disasters and vexations, the King and Queen left Constantinople, and reached France in 1148. She never ceased to mock the King for his dowdy habits during the next four years while they lived together. In 1150 the young Prince Henry of England, aged seventeen, first saw the Queen, and she was fascinated by him, and took measures to marry him after securing a divorce from Louis. The celerity of her marriage to Henry in 1152, after obtaining her divorce, astonished all Europe, she being thirty-two and Henry twenty.
ST. BERNARD AFTER THE EVENT OF HIS CRUSADE.
The influence of St. Bernard in rousing the Second Crusade was due to the reputation he had acquired above all his rivals and contemporaries, who knew that he had refused all ecclesiastical dignities, and yet was the oracle of Europe, and the founder of one hundred and sixty convents. He was warned, however, by the example of Peter the Hermit, and declined any military command. After the calamitous event of his great undertaking, the Abbot of Clairvaux was loudly accused as a false prophet, the author of the public and private mourning; his enemies exulted, his friends blushed, and his apology was slow and unsatisfactory. He justified his obedience to the Pope, expatiated on the mysterious ways of Providence, imputed the misfortunes of the pilgrims to their own sins, and modestly insinuated that his own part of the mission had been approved by signs and wonders.
A PILGRIM PRINCE BRINGING RELICS FROM THE HOLY LAND (A.D. 1172).
Henry, Duke of Saxony, married Matilda, then a girl of twelve, eldest daughter of Henry II. of England, in 1168, and four years after the Duke resolved to visit the Holy Land, not as a fighting Crusader, but only as a pilgrim, so that his feet might stand and his knees bend where once the feet of the Saviour had stood. He took costly presents, and while approaching Jerusalem the clergy came forth to welcome him, chanting hymns and songs of joy. He made magnificent offerings at the Holy Sepulchre, and left money to keep three lamps perpetually burning before the holy shrine. Henry visited all the sacred places, was fêted by King Baldwin, and then by the Turkish Sultan. The Sultan, after presenting Henry with a gorgeous cloak, ordered eighteen hundred war-steeds to be brought out that the guest might choose the best, and it was then decorated with silver bits and jewelled saddles. He was also offered a lion and two leopards, as well as six camels loaded with gifts. The Emperor at Constantinople was equally liberal, and gave manuscripts of the Holy Gospels and many relics of saints and martyrs. When Henry reached his home in Brunswick and displayed his treasures before his duchess and their subjects, he found in his collection the following gems: a tooth of St. John the Baptist; a great toe of St. Mark; the arms of St. Innocent and St. Theodore; a scrap of the dresses of the Virgin Mary, of St. Stephen the protomartyr, St. Laurence, and Mary Magdalene; some of the wood of the cross; a few splinters from the crown of thorns; a piece of the column to which our Lord was bound when scourged; a part of the table used at the Last Supper; and many other rarities. The wood of the cross was enshrined in a large silver crucifix decorated with fifty-one pearls, thirty-nine corals, and ninety-six other jewels. These spoils were distributed among the different churches in Brunswick and the monastery of Hildesheim, and received with immense satisfaction and pride.
THE POPE WRITING UP ANOTHER CRUSADE (A.D. 1187).
In 1187 Pope Gregory VIII. sent a letter to the faithful, reciting that “whereas we doubt not that the disasters of the land of Jerusalem which have lately happened through the irruption of the Saracens have been caused by the sins of the whole people of Christendom, therefore we have enacted that all persons shall for the next five years on every sixth day of the week fast on Lenten fare, and wherever Mass is performed it shall be chanted at the ninth hour, also on the fourth day of the week; and on Saturday all persons without distinction who are in good health shall abstain from eating flesh. We and our brethren do also forbid to ourselves and to our households the use of flesh on the second day of the week as well, unless it shall so happen that illness, or some great calamity, or other evident cause shall seem to prevent the same, trusting that by so doing God will pardon us and leave His blessing behind Him.” The princes of the earth, on receiving these mandates and exhortations of the Supreme Pontiff, exerted themselves with all their might for the liberation of the land of Jerusalem, and accordingly the Emperor, the archbishops, bishops, dukes, earls, and barons of the empire assumed the sign of the cross.
THE EMPEROR’S HYPOCRITICAL CRUSADERSHIP (A.D. 1189).
Frederick I. (Barbarossa), Emperor of Germany, was said to have joined Henry II. of England and Philip of France in a crusade from mere worldly ambition rather than any sincere devotion. An Arabian chronicler, Ibn Gouzi, thus describes his visit to Jerusalem before leaving the East: “The Emperor was ruddy and bald. His sight was weak. If he had been a slave, he would not have been worth two hundred drachmas. His discourse showed that he did not believe his Christian religion. When he spoke of it, it was to sneer at it. Having cast his eyes on the inscription in letters of gold which Saladin has placed above the venerated chapel, which said, ‘Saladin purged the Holy City from those who worshipped many gods,’ he had it explained to him; and then asking why the windows had gratings, he was told it was to keep out the birds. He answered, ‘Yes, you have driven away the sparrows, but instead of them you have let in hogs,’ meaning the Christians. When the Emir, enforcing the Sultan’s order to avoid what might displease Frederick, rebuked the Mussulmans for uttering on the minarets the passages in the Koran against the Christians, Frederick, hearing of it, told him, ‘You have done wrong. Why for my sake omit your duty, your law, or your religion? By heaven, if you come with me to my states——’” At this point the chronicler’s account was mutilated, and the rest is unknown.