Who dare in peril still to live;
Who, night or day, no rest may take,
And bear the Cross for Christ’s own sake.”
The Crusade consisted wholly of Germans and French. The former went first, headed by Conrad, King of the Romans, who left his son Henry in charge of his dominions. They got through the Greek emperor’s dominions with some difficulty, being unruly and little amenable to discipline, but were at last safely conveyed across the straits to Asia Minor, where they waited the arrival of King Louis.
In France an enormous army had been collected, by help of the old cry of “Dieu le veut,” the magic of which had not yet died out; there must have been men, not very old, who remembered the preaching of Peter, and the frantic cries with which the Cross was demanded after one of his fiery harangues. Bernard wrote to the pope, with monkish exaggeration, that “the villages and the castles are deserted, and one sees none but widows and orphans whose husbands and fathers are yet living.” Most of them, alas! were to remain widows and orphans indeed, for the husbands and fathers were never destined to return. And, as in the First Crusade, many of those who joined ruined themselves in procuring the arms and money necessary for their outfit. The Church, as before, kindly came to their assistance by buying the lands of them at a nominal value.
The gravest mistake was that made at the very outset when the barons were permitted to take with them their wives. Queen Eleanor, who afterwards married our Henry II., went with her husband, accompanied by a great number of ladies, and the presence of large numbers of women in the camp caused grave disorder, and subsequently great peril, both to the French and German armies.
It was in the early winter of 1147 that the Crusaders crossed the Hellespont. Without waiting for the French, the Germans, divided into two bodies, had pushed on. They reckoned on the friendship of the Greeks, but they were grievously disappointed. Extravagant prices were demanded for the most inferior food; lime was put into the bread, which killed many; the Turcopoles hovered about and cut off the supplies; but, in spite of these obstacles, a portion of the army, under the Bishop of Freisingen, managed to reach Syria. As for the larger part, under Conrad, they were guided as far as Dorylæum, where the first Crusaders had so hard a battle. Here the guides ran away, and the Turks fell upon them. The army consisted of seventy thousand horse, and a vast multitude of foot soldiers, of women, and of children. About seven thousand horse escaped with King Conrad. All the rest were slaughtered. No greater calamity had ever happened to the Christian arms. Conrad got back to Nicæa, where Louis, who had just arrived, was encamped. The French resolved to take the way by the sea-shore. We need not follow through all the perils of their march. They fought their way to Ephesus; thence, crossing the Mæander, they came to a place called Satalia, at the western extremity of Cilicia; and here Louis left them, and went by sea to Antioch. The plague broke out among the troops: the Greeks refused them any help, which they got from the very Turks whom they came to fight, and finally, out of the hundreds of thousands who had left the West a year before, a few thousands only struggled into Syria. Of the women who went with them, their wives and mistresses, not one got to Palestine, save only Queen Eleanor and her suite.
Raymond of Antioch was the cousin of Eleanor. He welcomed Louis and his queen to his little court, and immediately began to cast about for some way of making their visit to Palestine serviceable to himself. It was the way of all these Syrian knights and barons. Every man looked to himself and to his own interests; no man cared about the general interest. Jocelyn of Edessa, who was not yet put into prison, Pons of Tripoli, Raymond of Antioch, all hoped to catch the great kings of the West on their way to Jerusalem, and to turn the Crusade into such channels as might advance their own interests.
Suspecting nothing, Louis made a lengthened stay at Antioch, waiting for the remains of his great army. Raymond, thinking the best means of getting at the king was through his consort, employed every means in his power to amuse Eleanor. She, who had no kind of sympathy with the piety or remorse of her royal husband, preferred the feastings and amusements of Antioch to anything else, and would gladly have protracted them. But her own conduct and the levity of her manners caused grievous scandal, and effectually prevented her from having any influence over the king, who, when pressed to help Raymond, coldly replied that, before anything else, he must visit the holy places. Raymond, who had succeeded in pleasing the queen, if he had not won her heart, by way of revenge, persuaded Eleanor to announce her intention of getting divorced from the king on the ground of consanguinity, while Raymond declared that he would keep her, by force, if necessary, at his court. Louis took council of his followers, and by their advice, carried off his queen by night, and made the best of his way to Tripoli, where he was met by an emissary of Queen Milicent, who was afraid he would be drawn into some enterprise by the count, urging him to come straight on to Jerusalem.
In June, 1148, a great council of the assembled kings and chiefs was held at Acre. At this meeting were present King Baldwin, Queen Milicent, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the barons of the kingdom, and the Grand Masters of the two great orders of the Temple and St. John, on behalf of the Christian kingdom; while the Crusaders were represented by Kings Conrad and Louis, Otto Bishop of Freisingen, brother of Conrad, Frederick (afterwards Barbarossa), his nephew, the Marquis of Montferrat, Cardinal Guy of Florence, Count Thierry of Flanders, and many other noble lords. Only it was remarked, by those who were anxious for the future, that the Counts of Tripoli, Edessa, and Antioch were not present, while it was ominous that Eleanor of France did not take her seat with the other ladies who were present at the council.