The Second Crusade: Fall Of A Sacred Dream

In 1147, the two most powerful monarchs in Europe led the largest military expedition Christendom had ever assembled toward the Holy Land. Within eighteen months, their armies had been annihilated in the mountains of Anatolia, their survivors humiliated before the walls of Damascus, and their grand enterprise reduced to a bitter search for scapegoats. The Second Crusade remains one of history's most dramatic examples of how ambition, miscalculation, and human frailty can transform a sacred mission into catastrophe.

This book traces the crusade from its origins in the shocking fall of Edessa to its ignominious collapse, revealing the personalities and decisions that shaped its trajectory. Bernard of Clairvaux, the era's greatest preacher, promised divine victory and then had to explain divine abandonment. King Louis VII marched east seeking penance for a massacre and found instead a scandal involving his queen that would reshape the map of Europe. Conrad III of Germany watched his army destroyed by enemies who refused to fight the kind of war his knights knew how to win.

The story moves from the court intrigues of Jerusalem to the treacherous passes of Asia Minor, from the orchards of Damascus to the bitter recriminations that followed defeat. Byzantine emperors played double games while crusaders blamed everyone but themselves. Muslim commanders discovered that the invaders could be beaten, a lesson their successors would apply with devastating effect. The alliances broken and the enemies created during these months set in motion the events that would culminate, four decades later, in Saladin's reconquest of Jerusalem.

Here is the Second Crusade as it was lived by those who fought, schemed, and died in its service—a story of faith tested by failure and of consequences that echoed across centuries. The men and women who took the cross believed they were doing God's work, yet they returned home to questions that had no comfortable answers. Their story illuminates a turning point not only in the history of the crusades but in the long struggle between civilizations that continues to shape our world.