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St Bernard of Clairvaux, The Low Countries and the Lisbon Letter of the Second Crusade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Jonathan Phillips
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On 24 December 1144 'Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured the Christian city of Edessa. This was the most serious setback suffered by the Frankish settlers in the Levant since their arrival in the region at the end of the eleventh century. In reaction the rulers of Antioch and Jerusalem dispatched envoys to the west appealing for help. The initial efforts of Pope Eugenius in and King Louis VII of France met with little response, but at Easter 1146, at Vézelay, Bernard of Clairvaux led a renewed call to save the Holy Land and the Second Crusade began to gather momentum. As the crusade developed, its aims grew beyond an expedition to the Latin East and it evolved into a wider movement of Christian expansion encom-passing further campaigns against the pagan Wends in the Baltic and the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. One particular group of men participated in two elements of the crusade; namely, the northern Europeans who sailed via the Iberian peninsula to the Holy Land. In thecourse of this journey they achieved the major success of the Second Crusade when they captured the city of Lisbon in October 1147. This article will consider how this aspect of the expedition fitted into the conception of the crusade as a whole and will try to establish when Lisbon became the principal target for the crusaders. St Bernard's preaching tour of the Low Countries emerges as an important, yet hitherto neglected, event.

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Articles
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 485 - 497
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

I would like to thank Dr Susan Edgington, Dr Diana Greenway, Dr Thérèse de Hemptinne, Dr Richard Alston, Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith and Professor Robert Huygens for their advice and assistance in preparing this paper. The research upon which it is based was undertaken with the generous financial support of the British Academy, the Flemish Community in Belgium, the Department of History, University of Southampton, and the Department of History, Royal Holloway College, University of London.

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