And, though he promised to lead another Crusade, his conscience was appeased by his pilgrimage, and his love of praise was satisfied by the honours he received. Therefore he went no more. Moreover, two new methods of crusading were discovered, nearer home, and far more profitable. In the north of Germany lay a large and fertile country, inhabited wholly by pagans. Why not conquer that, and reduce so fair a land to Christianity? And in Spain, so close at hand for pious Frenchmen, were vast provinces, rich beyond measure, all in the hands of those very Saracens whom they were asked to go all the way to Palestine in order to fight. And then there died both Bernard and Suger, the sagacious Suger, who saw the disgrace which had fallen on the Christian arms, and wished to repair it by sending out another army in place of that which Louis had madly thrown away. The boundaries of poor young Baldwin’s kingdom were greatly contracted. Nothing now remained but what we may call Palestine proper, with a dubious and tottering hold on a few outlying towns. Fifty years had been sufficient to turn the sons of the rough and straight-forward soldiers of Godfrey, whose chief fault seems to have been their ungovernable fits of rage, into crafty and double-faced Syrians, slothful and sensual, careless of aught but their own interests, and brave only when glory, to which they still clung, could be got out of it. Nor was the kingdom itself free from discord and variance. Queen Milicent retained her authority, nor could she be persuaded to give it up. It was the most monstrous thing—it shows, however, how the feudal ideas had become corrupted—that she should insist on holding part of the realm in her own name. She did so, however, giving Baldwin Tyre as his principal place, and retaining Jerusalem as her own. She had a following of barons, who preferred, for many reasons, to be under the rule of a woman. The reins of government were confided to her own cousin, one Manasseh, and Baldwin had the mortification of finding himself in times of peace, few enough, it is true, only the second man in a country of which he was the nominal king. He claimed his rights; these were refused. He besieged Manasseh in his castle; he even besieged his mother in hers. The patriarch acted as mediator, and, after long negotiations, a compromise was effected, by which Milicent, more fortunate than her equally ambitious sister, Alice of Antioch, received the city of Nablous to hold as her own for the rest of her life. It was during these negotiations, or at their close, that the king held a great council at Tripoli on the state of the kingdom. And it was while the council was sitting that Count Raymond was assassinated—no one knew at whose instigation, because the murderers were instantly cut to pieces.