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Rh emperor as the condition of being permitted to pass through his territory; but in reality they showed him no fealty whatever, but behaved as foreign princes colonising a land that they had won by the sword. This was the political position. The ecclesiastical was not more satisfactory. They were now in the region of the Eastern Church; yet they owned allegiance to the pope, whose supremacy that Church did not recognise and who had denounced it as heretical. In the eyes of the patriarch of Constantinople the Crusaders were both schismatics and heretics. Their subsequent conduct did not lead the Greek Church to view them with favour; for they abandoned themselves to the pleasures and luxuries of Oriental life. A Latin patriarchate was founded at Jerusalem, with Dagobert, a haughty, ambitious prelate, as its first occupant, having four archbishoprics and a number of bishoprics under him.

The kingdom of Jerusalem lasted for nearly a century; but during much of this time it was in a state of degeneration and decay. The descendants of the Crusaders, called Pulleni, were for the most part a weak and worthless race, rendered effete by luxury and self-indulgence. Damascus was still unconquered. In the year 1146 Edessa was recaptured by the Saracens. Then Europe was alarmed, and a second Crusade was projected and inspired by a much greater man than any of the originators of the first—Bernard of Clairvaux, the reformer of monasticism and restorer of the papacy to its power and dignity. The earlier Crusade had not seen any sovereign at its head. But this new movement was led by both Louis, king of France, and the German emperor, Conrad It proved to be a dismal failure. The Greeks were now more than timorous and suspicious: they actually opposed the defenders of Christendom. There is good reason to believe that the Emperor Manuel, a warrior of gigantic personal prowess, entered into secret communications with the sultan and treacherously misled the Crusaders. Be that as it may, the siege of Damascus failed, and the princes returned home having effected nothing.