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the same time executing his dead elder brother’s promise to carry the oriflamme – the golden banner of St Denis, patron saint of the Franks – to Jerusalem and there to deal such a blow to the Saracen hordes as to secure the holy city for ever from the infidel? 7
    Chevaliers, cher vus purpensetz
    Vus qui d’armes estes preisetz
    A celui vos cors presentetz
    Qui pur vos fut en cruiz dressetz.
    [O Knights, when you bethink you / what your prowess at arms can do, / offer your bodies to Him who / was nailed to the cross for you.]
    While Christian France was deploring the tragedy and whipping up crusading fever, Zengi had been forced to return to Edessa when a plot was discovered for Armenian supporters of Count Joscelin to massacre the Turkish garrison. After they had been killed, he moved into the city 300 Jewish families, on whose loyalty he could rely. 8
    To his credit, Abbot Suger was both sceptical of the crusade’s chance of military success 9 and aware that the credulous and mysticalnature which would have been so appropriate for Louis’ intended career in the priesthood made his monarch, so ill equipped for statecraft, even worse fitted for warfare. Against the perspic-acious advice of Suger and his other counsellors that the problems of government required his presence in France, but encouraged by Eleanor for her own personal reasons, Louis wrote to the pope of his burning desire to lead an army to Jerusalem. To his great joy, the reply promised in return remission of the sin of Vitry.
    Exiled to the papal estate of Viterbo in Tuscany by the presence of an anti-pope in Rome and fighting heresy and schism on both sides of the Alps, Eugenius III was a former pupil of Bernard of Clairvaux. He saw in the kindling of a pan-European ardour for another crusade the possibility of uniting his divided Church with himself as undisputed patriarch. Naturally he enlisted the support of Abbé Bernard, to whom Louis had confided his ambition. Lacking Suger’s political sense, Bernard – until then the advocate of universal peace – endorsed the papal blessing on this martial enterprise and the die was cast.
    The long delay before decision was translated into action was partly due to the need to raise finance by taxes and tithes, but there were also diplomatic démarches to be accomplished. So appalling had been the vandalism and looting on the people’s crusade led by Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless just before the First Crusade that the king of Hungary had afterwards demanded hostages from Godefroi de Bouillon – including his own brother, wife and children – before allowing the French army to transit his country in 1097. Louis therefore wrote to his fellow monarchs in Germany and Hungary requesting safe conducts for the French army to cross their territory on its holy mission.
    Further east, Constantinople was the vital jumping-off point where the gap between Europe and Asia narrows to 800 yards in the strait of the Bosporus. 10 From there came a reply from the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus, promising his Christian brother the king of the Franks all necessary support and encouragement.
    The Capetian Christmas court was held that year in Bourges, where Louis was innocently counting on the precedent of the First Crusade, for which the main support had come from a France on the crest of an economic revival after three generations’ population growth. Its forest lands were being cleared for cultivation, frontiers pushed forward, markets organised and trading routes from its Mediterranean ports developing as Muslim dominance of the Mediterranean was challenged by armed Italian merchantmen. At the time, England was still adjusting itself to the Norman occupation, Christian Spainwas preoccupied with pushing the Moors back into North Africa and Germany had been divided by internal strife, which had enabled Pope Urban II to assume a more active role than his predecessors.
    Exactly why European prosperity should