glory be unassailed.” But at the same time St. Bernard himself was troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety. “We be fallen upon very grievous times,” he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; “the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy. Do not the heathen say, ‘Where is now their God?’ And who can wonder? The children of the Church, those who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the sword or dead of famine. Did we undertake the work rashly? Did we behave ourselves lightly? How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians! Assuredly His judgments be righteous; who doth not know it? But in the present judgment there is so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is not surprised and offended by it.”
The soul of man, no less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a great subject of surprise. King Louis, on his way back to France, had staid some days at Rome; and there, in a conversation with the pope, he had almost promised him a new crusade to repair the disasters of that from which he had found it so difficult to get out. Suger, when he became acquainted with this project, opposed it as he had opposed the former; but, at the same time, as he, in common with all his age, considered the deliverance of the Holy Land to be the bounden duty of Christians, he conceived the idea of dedicating the large fortune and great influence he had acquired to the cause of a new crusade, to be undertaken by himself and at his own expense, without compromising either king or state. He unfolded his views to a meeting of bishops assembled at Chartres; and he went to Tours, and paid a visit to the tomb of St. Martin to implore his protection. Already more than ten thousand pilgrims were in arms at his call, and already he had himself chosen a warrior, of ability and renown, to command them, when he fell ill, and died at the end of four months, in 1152, aged seventy, and “thanking the Almighty,” says his biographer, “for having taken him to Him, not suddenly, but little by little, in order to bring him step by step to the rest needful for the weary man.” It is said that, in his last days and when St. Bernard was exhorting him not to think any more save only of the heavenly Jerusalem, Suger still expressed to him his regret at dying without having succored the city which was so dear to them both.
Almost at the very moment when Suger was dying, a French council, assembled at Beaugency, was annulling on the ground of prohibited consanguinity, and with the tacit consent of the two persons most concerned, the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Some months afterwards, at Whitsuntide in the same year, Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, espoused Eleanor, thus adding to his already great possessions Poitou and Aquitaine, and becoming, in France, a vassal more powerful than the king his suzerain. Twenty months later, in 1154, at the death of King Stephen, Henry Plantagenet became King of England; and thus there was a recurrence, in an aggravated form, of the position which had been filled by William the Conqueror, and which was the first cause of rivalry between France and England and of the consequent struggles of considerably more than a century’s duration.
Little more than a year after Suger, on the 20th of April, 1153, St. Bernard died also. The two great men, of whom one had excited and the other opposed the second crusade, disappeared together from the theatre of the world. The crusade had completely failed. After a lapse of scarce forty years, a third crusade began. When a great idea is firmly fixed in men’s minds with the twofold sanction of duty and feeling, many generations live and die in its service before efforts are exhausted and the end reached or abandoned.
During this forty years’ interval between the end of the second and beginning of the third crusade, the relative positions of West and East, Christian Europe and Mussulman Asia, remained the same outwardly and according to the general aspect of affairs; but in Syria and in Palestine there was a continuance of the struggle between Christendom and Islamry, with various fortunes on either side. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem still stood; and after Godfrey de Bouillon, from 1100 to 1180, there had been a succession of eight kings; some energetic and bold, aspiring to extend their young dominion, others indolent and weak upon a tottering throne. The rivalries and often the defections and treasons of the petty Christian princes and lords who were set up at different points in Palestine and Syria endangered their common cause. Fortunately similar rivalries, dissensions, and treasons prevailed amongst the Mussulman emirs, some of them Turks and others Persians or Arabs, and at one time foes, at another dependants, of the Khalifs of Bagdad or of Egypt. Anarchy and civil war harassed both races and both religions with almost equal impartiality. But, beneath this surface of simultaneous agitation and monotony, great changes were being accomplished or preparing for accomplishment in the West. The principal sovereigns of the preceding generation, Louis VII., King of France, Conrad III., Emperor of Germany, and Henry II., King of England, were dying; and princes more juvenile and more enterprising, or simply less wearied out—Philip Augustus, Frederick Barbarossa, and Richard Coeur de Lion—were taking their places. In the East the theatre of policy and events was being enlarged; Egypt was becoming the goal of ambition with the chiefs, Christian or Mussulman, of Eastern Asia; and Damietta, the key of Egypt, was the object of their enterprises, those of Amaury I., the boldest of the kings of Jerusalem, as well as those of the Sultans of Damascus and Aleppo. Noureddin and Saladin (Nour-Eddyn and Sala-Eddyn), Turks by origin, had commenced their fortunes in Syria; but it was in Egypt that they culminated, and, when Saladin became the most illustrious as well as the most powerful of Mussulman sovereigns, it was with the title of Sultan of Egypt and of Syria that he took his place in history.
In the course of the year 1187, Europe suddenly heard tale upon tale about the repeated disasters of the Christians in Asia. On the 1st of May, the two religious and warlike orders which had been founded in the East for the defence of Christendom—the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem and the Templars—lost, at a brush in Galilee, five hundred of their bravest knights. On the 3d and 4th of July, near Tiberias, a Christian army was surrounded by the Saracens, and also, ere long, by the fire which Saladin had ordered to be set to the dry grass which covered the plain. The flames made their way and spread beneath the feet of men and horses. “There,” say the Oriental chroniclers, “the sons of Paradise and the children of fire settled their terrible quarrel. Arrows hurtled in the air like a noisy flight of sparrows, and the blood of warriors dripped upon the ground like rain-water.” “I saw,” adds one of them who was present at the battle, “hill, plain, and valley covered with their dead; I saw their banners stained with dust and blood; I saw their heads laid low, their limbs scattered, their carcasses piled on a heap like stones.” Four days after the battle of Tiberias, on the 8th of July, 1187, Saladin took possession of St. Jean d’Acre, and, on the 4th of September following, of Ascalon. Finally, on the 18th of September, he laid siege to Jerusalem, wherein refuge had been sought by a multitude of Christian families driven from their homes by the ravages of the infidels throughout Palestine; and the Holy City contained at this time, it is said, nearly one hundred thousand Christians. On approaching its walls, Saladin sent for the principal inhabitants, and said to them, “I know as well as you that Jerusalem is the house of God; and I will not have it assaulted if I can get it by peace and love. I will give you thirty thousand byzants of gold if you promise me Jerusalem, and you shall have liberty to go whither you will and do your tillage, to a distance of five miles from the city. And I will have you sup-plied with such plenty of provisions that in no place on earth shall they be so cheap. You shall have a truce from now to Whitsuntide, and when this time comes, if you see that you may have aid, then hold on. But if not, you shall give up the city, and I will have you conveyed in safety to Christian territory, yourselves and your substance.” “We may not yield up to you a city where died our God,” answered the envoys: “and still less may we sell you.” The siege lasted fourteen days. After having repulsed several assaults, the inhabitants saw that effectual resistance was impossible; and the commandant of the place, a knight named Dalian d’Ibelin, an old warrior, who had been at the battle of Tiberias, returned to Saladin, and asked for the conditions back again which had at first been rejected. Saladin, pointing to his own banner already planted upon several parts of the battlements, answered, “It is too late; you surely see that the city is mine.” “Very well, my lord,” replied the knight: “we will ourselves destroy our city, and the mosque of Omar, and the stone of Jacob: and when it is nothing but a heap of ruins, we will sally forth with sword and fire in hand, and