77811536. Louis VII , King of France
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.
Louis VII, King of France, took the long route by land, by the west coast of Asia Minor, and had lost the majority of his troops when he reached the Holy Land in 1148. He joined Conrad III, who had come by sea from Constantinople, and Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, and after some deliberations they decided to attack Damascus. This was impolitic, as Damascus was the only ally they had to help stop Nereddin, and at the end of four days, July 28, 1148, the siege was an absolute failure, and the Second Crusade collapsed. Louis VII returned by sea to France in the spring of 1149. Louis VII was born about 1121 and died 1180. He succeeded his father in 1137, and in the same year he married Eleanor, heiress of William II, Duke of Aquitiane. In 1152 he had his marriage with Eleanor annulled, and in the same year she married Henry II, King of England. In 1154 he married Constance, daughter of the King of Castile. Five years after the death of Constance, on the 4th of October, 1160, Louis VII married Adela, daughter of Theobald III, Count of Blois and Champagne, and by this third wife he had an heir:
[Kin of Mellcene Thurman Smith]
© 1995-2001, Saul M. Montes-Bradley