RESULTS OF THE FIRST CRUSADE

A1s if obeying the impetus it had received, the new state continued the spirit of conquest under Godfrey’s first two successors--Baldwin I (1100-1118) and Baldwin II of Bourg (1118-1131). But after these two reigns decadence began in discord. The atabegs who ruled at Mosul and Damascus took Edessa and massacred its people in 1144. There needed nothing less than this bloody disaster, which left Palestine exposed, to drive Europe to the renewal of crusade.

2The First Crusade was very different from the seven others. It kindled all Europe, profoundly stirred the masses, both people and peers, and was the symptom of a great upheaval of sentiments and ideals. Those of the two following centuries had not the same motive. They were almost all conducted by kings who had kept aloof from the first; and even if faith were never absent, politics was often superior.

3The Second Crusade felt still a vivid reflection of the spirit of devotion that animated the First; but it was no longer the work of the people but of princes--the emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France, who took the cross in spite of the prudent counsels of his minister, Abbé Suger. This Crusade was preached in France and Germany by St. Bernard; but already the zeal was somewhat chilled. A general tax levied on the whole kingdom of France, and on every class--nobles, priests, or peasants--roused much protest; at Sens the people killed the abbé of St. Pierre le Vif, ruler of part of their city, because of an impost he had wished to collect. “The king,” said a contemporary, “started on his way in the midst of curses.” St. Bernard had been offered the command of the expedition, but remembering Peter the Hermit, he refused.[e]

4This Peter the Hermit, who for all his meek and lowly manner had unhinged all Europe and led a huge rabble to the slaughter in Asia Minor, had received an address of thanks in Jerusalem when the city had been taken; and then retiring to his native France had built a monastery at Huy on the Maas, where he lived quietly and died obscurely in 1115, recking nothing of the series of bloody wars that were to follow as the aftermath of his perfervid oratory and fanatic frenzy.[a]