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Christian warriors, He who gave His life for you, today demands yours in return. These are combats worthy of you, combats in which it is glorious to conquer and advantageous to die. Illustrious knights, generous defenders of the Cross, remember the example of your fathers, who conquered Jerusalem, and whose names are inscribed in Heaven. Abandon then the things that perish, to gather unfading palms and conquer a Kingdom that has no end …
Bernard of Clairvaux preaching the Second Crusade in Burgundy. 1146.
Conrad returned to Constantinople a sick man, but later embarked by ship for Palestine. Louis’s army suffered a similar fate to that of the emperor’s when the Turks cut off the army’s main body from its vanguard and once more the Crusaders were routed by the sheer rapidity of the assault, and by the volume of shots delivered from the Turks’ composite bows. Louis spent the night in a tree, surrounded by what was left of his bodyguard. He scraped together the remainder of his forces and marched to Byzantine territory. Louis sailed to Saint Symeon in March 1148, with only his household: his infantry attempted to march to Antioch and over half of them died en route.
At Antioch, Raymond attempted to swing Louis in favour of an attack on Aleppo but Louis rejected the plan and marched to Palestine. The Crusade was instead directed at Damascus. Many historians have suggested that the Crusaders remained secure from the risk of a united and belligerent Muslim Syria until this abortive campaign against Damascus, and that the Damascenes were effectively forced by the Franks’ actions to abandon their policy of non-alignment. There is a degree of truth in this, but Nur al-Din had already shown that he was not averse to short-term coalitions with the Damascenes against the Crusaders, and he now had a marriage connection with the effective ruler of Damascus. Furthermore, Damascus did not actually succumb to the combination of charm and threat that Nur al-Din employed until six years after the Crusade’s defeat.
In fact, the targeting of Damascus, despite the treaties that existed between it and Jerusalem, was not as foolish as hindsight makes it appear. Damascus was the closest, potentially belligerent Turkish-controlled city to Jerusalem. Egypt might have been a better choice – particularly given the Franks later attempts to take it with far weaker forces than they had available in 1148 – but Egypt was quiescent at this point, and the Turks, by virtue of their successes, had made themselves the prime threat to the Franks.
The real blunder was therefore not the choice of objective, but the execution of the plan to take it. The Crusaders arrived in the environs of Damascus on 24 July and immediately found themselves able to invest only a fraction of the long walls and that all the wells outside the city had been filled or poisoned. As they moved through the gardens outside the western wall, they were met by a furious assault from ghazis but continued to advance and were able to use the trees of the orchards to begin building siege towers. For a short time it looked as if the city might fall and a desperate defence ensued at each corner or outcrop of the walls. William of Tyre tells us that:
There were men with lances hiding inside of the walls. When these men saw our men passing by, they would stab them as they passed, through little peepholes in the walls which were cleverly designed for this purpose …
These men were paid for each head that they returned to Damascus with. They slowed the Crusaders whilst the forces that would finish their work assembled.