Eight times, during two hundred years, was the effort repeated, as the fortunes of the Christian principalities in the East were shaken or overthrown by Moslem assailants, and as the papacy saw its chance or need to weaken the emperor, or otherwise avert danger to itself, by renewing the call to arms. No religious teacher seems ever to have doubted the fitness of the undertaking. St. Bernard preached the second Crusade as zealously as Peter did the first; eloquent monks were found, as they were needed, to rouse enthusiasm for each of the rest in turn; and King Louis IX of France, the model monarch of Christendom, saw in his vain expedition to recover Jerusalem (1248) the highest service he could do to God or man. As each successive crusade failed in the act or was followed by decadence and defeat, the Church professed to see in the disaster a penalty for Christian sin; and under Innocent III the very cardinals of Rome vowed to mend their ways, by way of reviving the warlike zeal of the laity. Among other fruits of the crusading movement had been a vast increase in the papal revenues; and whereas the imposts specially laid on for crusading purposes were said by many to have been appropriated by the papal court, the pope undertook to put the administration of all such revenue under non-clerical trustees. But between the hardness of the military task and the endless strifes and degeneracies of the leaders on the one hand, and the growing distrust of the Church on the other, the crusading spirit died out in the thirteenth century.