“Never, so long as I live,” said the king, “shall Peter de la Chatre (the pope’s candidate) enter the city of Bourges.”  The chapter of Bourges, thinking as the pope thought, elected Peter de la Chatre; and Theobald ii., Count of Champagne, took sides for the archbishop elect.  Mind your own business,” said the king to him; “your dominions are large enough to occupy you; and leave me to govern my own as I have a mind.”  Theobald persisted in backing the elect of pope and chapter.  The pope excommunicated the king.  The king declared war against the Count of Champagne; and went and besieged Vitry.  Nearly all the town was built of wood, and the besiegers set fire to it.  The besieged fled for refuge to a church, in which they were invested; and the fire reached the church, which was entirely consumed, together with the thirteen hundred inhabitants, men, women, and children, who had retreated thither.  This disaster made a great stir.  St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux and the leading ecclesiastical authority of the age, took the part of Count Theobald.  King Louis felt a lively sorrow, and sincere repentance.  Soon afterwards it became known in the West that the affairs of the Christians were going ill in the East; that the town of Edessa had been re-taken by the Turks, and all its inhabitants massacred.  The kingdom of Jerusalem, too, was in danger.  Great was the emotion in Europe; and the cry of the crusade was heard once more.  Louis the Young, to appease his troubled conscience, and to get reconciled with the pope, to say nothing of sympathy for the national movement, assembled the grandees, laic and ecclesiastical, of the kingdom, to deliberate upon the matter.

Deliberation was more prolonged, more frequently repeated, and more indecisive than it had been at the time of the first crusade.  Three grand assemblies met, the first in 1145, at Bourges; the second in 1146, at Vezelai, in Nivernais; and the third in 1147, at Etampes; all three being called to investigate the expediency of a new crusade, and of the king’s participation in the enterprise.  Not only was the question seriously discussed, but extremely diverse opinions were expressed, both amongst the rank and file of these assemblies, and amongst their most illustrious members.  There were two men whose talents and fame made them conspicuous above all; Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, the intimate and able adviser of the wise king, Louis the Fat, and St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, the most eloquent, most influential, and most piously disinterested amongst the Christians of his age.  Though both were ecclesiastics, these two great men were, touching the second crusade, of opposite opinions.  “Let none suppose,” says Suger’s biographer and confidant, William, monk of St. Denis, “that it was at his instance or by his counsel that the king undertook the voyage to the Holy Land.  Although the success of it was other than had been expected, this prince was