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With the ingenuity which is characteristic of those suffering misery and adversity, they had recourse to desperate devices. In all the sections of the city which faced our camps they heaped up huge, tall beams, for they could only hope that while our men were working to tear down these barriers they might be able to flee in the opposite direction with their wives and children.
William of Tyre, Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestaru.
Turcomen began to arrive in Damascus through the Aleppo and Baghdad gates, which had not been blockaded. They assembled on 25 July and made a dawn attack. They were held at a distance by the Crusaders’ crossbowmen, but took the field again the next day. The orchards forced a dispersed battle on the two sides but the Turcoman troopers and infantry archers were supported by mangonels mounted on the city wall that destroyed the Crusaders’ barricades with naft.
The Crusaders attempted to retire and lost many of their horses in their retreat, and then in desperation decided to move their entire attack against the south-eastern wall of the city. They knew that Nur al-Din and his brother were already marching from Aleppo and Mosul and would arrive within days. The planned assault never took place, however, as the army’s morale was broken, and instead a retreat began.
Worse was to come. Louis and Conrad left Outremer with their troops in 1149 and Baldwin had lost the esteem of his vassals and now had neither the men nor the required prestige to ride to Antioch’s aid when Raymond’s army was virtually annihilated by Nur al-Din on 29 June at the Battle of Inab.
Raymond had managed to force Nur al-Din to raise a siege of the fortress of Inab, but had then been surrounded in his camp. The next morning Raymond charged the Turkish ring but arrows rained down from all sides and a Kurd, Shirkuh, of the same Ayyubid clan as the soldier who had saved Zangi’s life, took Raymond’s head. It was sent, like that of Raymond’s father in-law, to the caliph in a silver box.
Joscelin was the next prince to suffer at Nur al-Din’s hands as the north of Syria slipped away from Crusader control. He was captured while raiding Muslim lands and was blinded and imprisoned until his death ten years later.
Baldwin managed to secure the city of Antioch, and Joscelin’s widow sold all her possessions beyond Antioch to the Byzantine Emperor, as Muslim raiding had made her position untenable. Baldwin arranged the evacuation of Latins from the region. Baldwin only had about 500 troops to cover this column of non-combatants as they marched from Tel Bashir to Antioch. Nur al-Din’s troopers harassed the column almost at will and repeatedly cut off those marching at its rear. Baldwin, however, managed the task with exemplary skill and with his baggage train looking like a porcupine, such was the volume of arrows sticking out of it, he arrived safely in Antioch with the refugees.
Only one success can be claimed by the Second Crusade, and it had nothing to do with kings or emperors leading men to the Holy Sepulchre. On their way to the Holy Land Flemish, Norman, English, Scottish, and some German Crusaders, stopped off in Portugal. They tarried there, and helped the Portuguese in the capture of Lisbon in 1147.