It was exactly fifty years since Peter the Hermit went through France, telling of the indignities offered to the pilgrims, and the sufferings of the faithful. But in fifty years a vast change had come over the West. Knowledge had taken the place of ignorance. No fear, now, that the rude soldiery would ask as every fresh town rose before their eyes, if that was Jerusalem. There was not a village where some old Crusader had not returned to tell of the long march, the frightful sufferings on the way, the obstinacy of the enemy, the death of his friends. From sea to sea, in France at least, the East seemed as well known as the West, for from every province some one had gone forth to become a great man in Palestine. Fulke from Anjou, Godfrey from Lorraine, Raymond from Toulouse, another Raymond from Poitou, Robert from Normandy, another Robert from Flanders, Hugh le Grand from Paris, Stephen from Blois, and fifty others, whose fame was spread far and wide in their native places, so that men knew now what lay before them. They went, if they went at all, to fight, and defend, not to conquer. The city was Christian; but there was plunder and glory to be got by fighting beyond the city.
Bernard proclaimed the Crusade. He preached the necessity of going to the assistance of a kingdom dear to all Christian eyes, tottering to its fall. He called attention to the corruption of morals, which he declared to be worse than any state of things ever known before; he forbore from promising easy conquests and victories where all the blood would be that of the infidel; on the contrary, he told the people that the penances inflicted by God Himself for their sins were the clash of arms, the fatigues and dangers of war, the hard fighting and physical suffering of a campaign under the sun of Syria; and, which is very significant, he appears to have invoked a curse upon all who refused to obey the summons, and follow to the Holy War.
The first Crusaders set off with light and buoyant hearts; they were marching, they thought, to certain conquest; the walls would fall down before them: it was a privilege and a sacred pleasure to have taken the sign of the Cross. The second army started with gloomy forebodings of misery and suffering; they were going on a penitential journey; they were about to encounter perils which they knew to be terrible, an enemy whom they knew to be countless as the sands of their own deserts, not because they wanted to fight, but because Bernard, who could not err, told them that God Himself laid this penance on their shoulders. Every step that brought Peter’s rough and rude army nearer to Constantinople was a step of pleasure: every step that the second army took was an addition to the weariness and boredom of the whole thing. The most penitential of all was the young king, Louis VII. of France, upon whose conscience there lay the terrible crime of having burned the church at Vitry. For in the church, which he had fired himself, were thirteen hundred men, women, and children, who were all burned with it. The king would fain have saved them, but could not, and when he saw their blackened and half-burned bodies, his soul was sick within him for remorse and sorrow. It was a calamity—for which, however, the king was not, perhaps, wholly responsible—worse than that modern burning of the women of Santiago. In Germany they began to expiate their sins by murdering the Jews, a cheap and even profitable way of purifying the troubled conscience, because they plundered as well as murdered them. Bernard, to his infinite credit, stayed the hand of persecution, and showed the people that this was not, hateful as a Jew must always be to a Christian, the way pointed out by Heaven. The preaching of Bernard was seconded by the exhortations of the poets, who united in singing the praises of those who take the Cross, and in denouncing those who refused. “Rise,” says one bard,
“Rise, ye who love with loyal heart;
Awake, nor sleep the hours away:
Now doth the darksome night depart,
And now the lark leads in the day:
Hear how he sings with joyous strain
The morn of peace which God doth give
To those who heed nor scathe nor pain;