The project did not end with the capture of Jerusalem. In the decades that followed, the same coordinating claim was issued again and again, and men from multiple polities continued to answer.
When Edessa fell to Zengi in 1144, the first of the crusader states to be extinguished, Eugenius III called a new expedition. The papal bull Quantum praedecessores explicitly linked the new summons to the example of the First Crusade and offered the same spiritual privileges. At Vézelay on 31 March 1146, Bernard of Clairvaux preached before a crowd so large that a platform had to be erected on a hillside outside the town. Louis VII of France and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, prostrated themselves to receive the cross. So many followed that the cloth for making crosses ran out and Bernard tore strips from his own garments. Conrad III of Germany took the cross as well—the first time reigning kings had committed themselves to the enterprise on this scale. Their armies marched separately through Europe and Asia Minor, suffered catastrophic losses to Turkish attacks and to the hardships of the road, and never achieved effective unity of command. Conrad’s forces were shattered near Dorylaeum; Louis’s army was mauled in the Cadmus Mountains. When the remnants finally reached the Levant, the decision to attack Damascus rather than press north toward Edessa or Aleppo reflected the priorities of the Jerusalem court more than a coherent strategy shared by the two kings. Personal suspicions, competing routes, and the absence of a single accepted commander undid what the shared vow had begun. The Second Crusade failed in its stated aims. The fact of two royal houses committing themselves to the same distant sacred objective nonetheless marked a further step in the normalization of participation. The summons invented in 1095 could now draw crowned heads, not only lesser magnates, into a common enterprise—even when the enterprise itself went badly. Normalization of the summons is not the same as military success.
In 1187, after the disaster at Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin, the response was broader still. Gregory VIII’s bull Audita tremendi framed the catastrophe as a call to penitence and action for the whole of Latin Christendom. Richard of England, Philip II of France, and Frederick Barbarossa all took the cross. Barbarossa, the most powerful ruler in the Latin West, assembled a vast army and marched overland; he died crossing a river in Asia Minor, and his army largely dissolved. Richard and Philip, long-standing rivals whose domains and claims overlapped in France, met at Vézelay in July 1190, agreed to share the profits of conquest equally, and set out with a display of unity that masked deep mistrust. They wintered together in Sicily, quarreled over marriage alliances and the division of spoils from the conquest of Cyprus, and arrived separately at the siege of Acre. At Acre, despite illness, friction, and competing claims over the future of the Jerusalem crown—Richard supporting Guy of Lusignan, Philip supporting Conrad of Montferrat—their combined presence, ships, and siege engines helped force the city’s surrender in July 1191. Philip, citing illness and the need to settle the succession in Flanders after the death of the count, left for home soon afterward, extracting from Richard an oath not to attack French lands in his absence. Richard remained, recovered a stretch of coast including Jaffa, and negotiated a treaty with Saladin that left Christians with a viable foothold and access to the holy places. The Third Crusade did not restore Jerusalem. It did demonstrate that the coordinating claim could still draw the greatest rulers of the Latin West into a common enterprise more than ninety years after Clermont, and that even bitter personal enmity could be subordinated, for a time, to the shared obligation of the cross.
The financing of these later expeditions reveals how far institutional coordination had developed. In 1188 Henry II of England and Philip II of France, taking the cross together at Gisors, each levied in his own dominions the tax known as the Saladin tithe: a tenth of revenues and movables on those who did not go, collected in each parish in the presence of the priest, a Templar, a Hospitaller, and royal and baronial officials. Crusaders were exempt and could claim the tithes of their non-crusading vassals. The tax aroused resentment—it was seen as a dangerous precedent for royal taxation—and was collected more effectively in the Angevin lands than in Philip’s; opposition forced Philip to suspend parts of it. These were parallel royal levies, not a single jointly administered transnational tax. Yet the framing was shared: a fiscal instrument justified by a common sacred goal, administered with the participation of the military orders. Smaller taxes for the Holy Land had already been tried in 1166 and 1185. The Saladin tithe was the most ambitious. It became a model that later secular rulers would adapt for their own purposes, and it pointed toward the papal clerical tenths that would fund thirteenth-century expeditions under direct papal authority.
Between the great royal expeditions, continuous reinforcement and the military orders kept a Christian military presence in the East. The Templars, founded in the aftermath of the First Crusade and recognized at the Council of Troyes in 1129 with a rule shaped by Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Hospitallers, who evolved from a charitable hospice into a military order, provided permanent, transnational instruments that did not depend on the arrival of a new general summons. A Templar commandery in France or England or Aragon raised money and men for a front that none of its local patrons would ever see. Brothers took lifelong vows; the order’s structure crossed the boundaries of kingdoms as a matter of course. The Teutonic Knights later added a further German-speaking network. Preaching campaigns repeatedly renewed the call when a new crisis or a new papal summons required it. Indulgences, taxation, and the legal privileges attached to the cross became familiar parts of the ecclesiastical and political landscape. Men who had never seen the Levant still took the vow, paid the taxes, or redeemed their vows with money that supported those who went. The project had become a standing possibility rather than a single astonishing event.
The pattern continued into the thirteenth century. The Fourth Crusade, whatever its disastrous diversion to Constantinople in 1204, began as another general summons under Innocent III, the most systematic organizer of crusading the papacy had yet produced. The Fifth Crusade drew contingents from France, Germany, Hungary, and the Low Countries and achieved the temporary capture of Damietta before failing in the Nile Delta. Frederick II recovered Jerusalem by treaty in 1229, a diplomatic success that many contemporaries refused to recognize as a true crusade because it involved negotiation with the sultan rather than conquest. Louis IX of France led two major expeditions in the middle of the century. In 1248 he sailed from Aigues-Mortes with an army that included his brothers, counts from Flanders and Burgundy, and a contingent under the English earl William Longespée; the assembly point was Cyprus, where local and Levantine forces joined. Damietta fell in June 1249. The subsequent advance toward Cairo ended in disaster at Mansurah; during the retreat the king and a number of his surviving nobles were captured at Fariskur on 6 April 1250. The military failure was complete. The political fact remained: more than a century and a half after Clermont, a western king could still assemble a multi-regional force under the sign of the cross and project it to the Nile. Even after the final loss of Acre in 1291, the idea of a coordinated recovery retained its hold on the imagination of popes and princes for generations. Projects were drawn up, taxes levied, vows taken. The coordinating claim outlasted the states it had helped to create.