Second Crusade

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Pope Eugenius III called the Second Crusade in 1145 after the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Muslim ruler Zengi the previous year, and Bernard of Clairvaux preached the campaign across France and Germany as an urgent act of Christian duty. It brought Louis VII of France and Conrad III of the Holy Roman Empire into the field together, the first time two reigning kings had led a crusade jointly. The two armies marched separately through Anatolia rather than together, suffering heavy losses to Seljuk raids and difficult terrain before what remained of them regrouped in the Crusader states of Outremer.

A parallel northern expedition, authorized under the same papal call, besieged and captured the Muslim held city of Lisbon in 1147, a rare clear success set against the campaign's eastern failure. In the Levant, the joint siege the two kings mounted against Damascus in July 1148 collapsed within four days when the crusader leadership withdrew to a less defensible position, and the crusade dissolved without recovering Edessa or securing any lasting territory. The defeat before Damascus, coming from an army led by two crowned kings, badly damaged confidence in crusading in the West for a generation afterward.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No historian has produced a reconciled death toll for the Second Crusade. Individual episodes are documented separately, the failed siege of Damascus in July 1148 and the parallel campaigns fought the same year in Iberia and along the Baltic coast, but the losses recorded in each were never combined into a single casualty figure for the crusade as a whole, and this atlas records the toll as unknown rather than adopt an invented total.

What is well established is the scope the campaign claimed for itself. Bernard of Clairvaux preached the eastern expedition as a penitential act of Christian duty owed to the Latin East, but the same papal bull that called it folded the northern siege of Lisbon and campaigns against pagan Wends along the Baltic into the identical theological framework of indulgenced holy war, rather than treating them as separate or lesser undertakings. A crusade fought to relieve one city in the eastern Mediterranean was, by its own organizers' reckoning, simultaneously a war fought in Portugal and along the north German frontier, evidence of how elastic the crusading idea had already become barely fifty years after the First Crusade was first preached.