Almost at the very moment when Suger was dying, a French council, assembled at Beaugency, was annulling on the ground of prohibited consanguinity, and with the tacit consent of the two persons most concerned, the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Some months afterwards, at Whitsuntide in the same year, Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, espoused Eleanor, thus adding to his already great possessions Poitou and Aquitaine, and becoming, in France, a vassal more powerful than the king his suzerain.  Twenty months later, in 1154, at the death of King Stephen, Henry Plantagenet became King of England; and thus there was a recurrence, in an aggravated form, of the position which had been filled by William the Conqueror, and which was the first cause of rivalry between France and England and of the consequent struggles of considerably more than a century’s duration.

Little more than a year after Suger, on the 20th of April, 1153, St. Bernard died also.  The two great men, of whom one had excited and the other opposed the second crusade, disappeared together from the theatre of the world.  The crusade had completely failed.  After a lapse of scarce forty years, a third crusade began.  When a great idea is firmly fixed in men’s minds with the twofold sanction of duty and feeling, many generations live and die in its service before efforts are exhausted and the end reached or abandoned.

During this forty years’ interval between the end of the second and beginning of the third crusade, the relative positions of West and East, Christian Europe and Mussulman Asia, remained the same outwardly and according to the general aspect of affairs; but in Syria and in Palestine there was a continuance of the struggle between Christendom and Islamry, with various fortunes on either side.  The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem still stood; and after Godfrey de Bouillon, from 1100 to 1180, there had been a succession of eight kings; some energetic and bold, aspiring to extend their young dominion, others indolent and weak upon a tottering throne.  The rivalries and often the defections and treasons of the petty Christian princes and lords who were set up at different points in Palestine and Syria endangered their common cause.  Fortunately similar rivalries, dissensions, and treasons prevailed amongst the Mussulman emirs, some of them Turks and others Persians or Arabs, and at one time foes, at another dependants, of the Khalifs of Bagdad or of Egypt.  Anarchy and civil war harassed both races and both religions with almost equal impartiality.  But, beneath this surface of simultaneous agitation and monotony, great changes were being accomplished or preparing for accomplishment in the West.  The principal sovereigns of the preceding generation, Louis VII., King of France, Conrad iii., Emperor of Germany, and Henry ii., King of England, were dying; and princes more juvenile and more enterprising,