Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/329

 The Crusades : Heresy and the Mendicant Orders 241 II. THE SECOND AND LATER CRUSADES ; RESULTS 388. The Second Crusade. Fifty years after the preaching of the First Crusade the fall of Edessa (1144), an important out- post of the Christians in the East, led to a second expedition. This was forwarded by the great theologian St. Bernard, who went about using his unrivaled eloquence to induce volunteers to join the Crusade. The king of France readily con- sented to take the cross, but the emperor, Con- rad III, appears to have yielded only after St. Bernard had preached before him and given a vivid picture of the ter- rors to be revealed on TOMB OF A CRUSADER The churches of England, France, and Ger- many contain numerous figures in stone and brass of crusading knights, reposing in full armor with shield and sword on their tombs the Judgment Day. St. Bernard himself, the chief promoter of the expedition, gives a most unflattering description of the "soldiers of Christ." "In that countless multi- tude you will find few except the utterly wicked and impious, the sacrilegious, homicides, and perjurers, whose departure is a double gain. Europe rejoices to lose them and Palestine to gain them ; they are useful in both ways, in their absence from here and their presence there." It is unnecessary to describe the movements and fate of these crusaders ; suffice it to say that, from a military standpoint, the so-called Second Crusade was a miserable failure. 389. The Third Crusade. In the year 1187, forty years later, Jerusalem was recaptured by Saladin, the most heroic and dis- tinguished of all the Mohammedan rulers of that period. The loss of the Holy City led to the most famous of all the military expedi- tions to the Holy Land, in which Emperor Frederick Barbarossa ( 356), Richard the Lion-Hearted of England ( 374), and his