We speak of First, Second, and Third Crusades, but more exactly the Crusades were one continuous process. Scarcely a year passed in which new bands did not come to the Holy Land. Crusades seem to have been dignified by numbers when they followed some crushing defeat or disaster, as loss of Edessa in 1144, the Second Crusade, and the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, causing the Third Crusade, and they were led by Kings and Emperors. The years 1143-44 are in many ways the turning point in the history of the Latin East. In 1143 began the reign of the first native king. In 1143, John Comnemus and Fulk, King of Jerusalem, had just died, and Zengi, seeing his way clear, was able to throw himself on the great Christian outpost, Edessa, and finally entered on Christmas Day, 1144. Two years later Zengi died and was succeeded by his son Nureddin, and an attempt to recover Edessa was successfully repelled in November, 1146. Not only so, but the Franks, in the spring of 1147, were unwise enough to allow the hope of gaining two small towns to induce them to break the vital alliance with Damascus. Thus, in itself, the position of affairs in the Holy Land in 1147 were certainly ominous; aid from the west seemed a necessity. Early in 1145 news had come from Antioch to Eugenius III of the fall of Edessa, and at the end of the year he had sent an encyclical to France--the natural soil, as we have seen, of crusading zeal. The response was instantaneous: Louis VII of France himself, who bore on his conscience the burden of an unpunished massacre by his troops at Vitry in 1142, took the crusading vow on Christmas Day, 1145. St. Bernard, the crusading preacher, was persuaded by the Pope to become the preacher of the new movement. To the crusading King of France, St. Bernard added the King of Germany when, in Christmas week of 1146, he induced Conrad III to take the vow by his sermon in the Cathedral of Spires. Thus was begun the Second Crusade, under auspices still more favorable than those which attended the First Crusade, seeing that Kings now took the place of Knights.
© 2001, Saul M. Montes-Bradley. All Rights Reserved