“She,” says William of Tyre, “was a very inconsiderate woman, caring little for royal dignity or conjugal fidelity; she took great pleasure in the court of Antioch, where she also conferred much pleasure, even upon Mussulmans, whom, as some chronicles say, she did not repulse; and, when the king, her husband, spoke to her of approaching departure, she emphatically refused, and, to justify her opposition, she declared that they could no longer live together, as there was, she asserted, a prohibited degree of consanguinity between them.”  Louis, “who loved her with an almost excessive love,” says William of Nangis, was at the same time angered and grieved.  He was austere in morals, easily jealous, and religiously scrupulous, and for a moment he was on the point of separating from his wife; but the counsels of his chief barons dissuaded him, and, thereupon, taking a sudden resolution, he set out from Antioch secretly, by night, carrying off the queen almost by force.  “They both hid their wrath as much as possible,” says the chronicler; “but at heart they had ever this outrage.”  We shall see, before long, what were the consequences.  No history can offer so striking an example of the importance of well-assorted unions amongst the highest as well as the lowest, and of the prolonged woes which may be brought upon a nation by the domestic evils of royalty.

On approaching Jerusalem, in the month of April, 1148, Louis VII. saw coming to meet him King Baldwin iii., and the patriarch and the people, singing, “Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” So soon as he had entered the city, his pious wishes were fulfilled by his being taken to pay a solemn visit to all the holy places.  At the same time arrived from Constantinople the Emperor Conrad, almost alone and in the guise of a simple pilgrim.  All the remnant of the crusaders, French and German, hurried to join them.  Impatient to exhibit their power on the theatre of their creed, and to render to the kingdom of Jerusalem some striking service, the two Western sovereigns, and Baldwin, and their principal barons assembled at Ptolemais (St. Jean d’Acre) to determine the direction to be taken by their enterprise.  They decided upon the siege of Damascus, the most important and the nearest of the Mussulman princedoms in Syria, and in the early part of June they moved thither with forces incomplete and ill united.  Neither the Prince of Antioch nor the Counts of Edessa and Tripolis had been summoned to St. Jean d’Acre; and Queen Eleanor had not appeared.  At the first attack, the ardor of the assailants and the brilliant personal prowess of their chiefs, of the Emperor Conrad amongst others, struck surprise and consternation into the besieged, who, foreseeing the necessity of abandoning their city, laid across the streets beams, chains, and heaps of stones, to stop the progress of the conquerors and give themselves time for flying, with their families and their wealth, by the northern and southern gates.