Even had an army composed of such material been well disciplined and well led, it would have been untrustworthy in the face of an adversary like Nour-ed-Din; but Louis VII. of France was as emotional and as irrational as Saint Bernard. His father had been a great commander, but he himself had been educated in the Abbey of Saint Denis, and justified his wife’s scornful jest, who, when she left him for Raymond de Poitiers, said she had married a monk. The whole world held him lightly, even the priests sneered at him, and Innocent II. spoke of him as a child “who must be stopped from learning rebellion.” Indeed, the pope underrated him, for he appointed his own nephew to the See of Bourges in defiance of the king, and the insult roused him to resistance. Louis raised an army and invaded the County of Champagne, where the bishop had taken refuge. There he stormed and burnt Vitry, and some thirteen hundred men, women, and children, who had taken refuge in the church, perished in the flames of the blazing town. Horror seems to have unhinged his mind, absolution did not calm him, and at last he came to believe that his only hope of salvation lay in a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre. On Palm Sunday, 1146, when Bernard harangued a vast throng at Vézelay, the king was the first to prostrate himself, and take the cross from his hands. With that day began the most marvellous part of the saint’s marvellous career, and were the events which followed less well authenticated, they would be incredible. In that age miracles were as common as medical cures are now, and yet Bernard’s performances so astonished his contemporaries that they drew up a solemnly attested record of what they saw, that the story of his preaching might never be questioned. When he neared a town the bells were rung, and young and old, from far and near, thronged about him in crowds so dense that, at Constance, no one saw what passed, because no one dared to venture into the press. At Troyes he was in danger of being suffocated. Elsewhere the sick were brought to him by a ladder as he stood at a window out of reach. What he did may be judged by the work of a single day. “When the holy man entered Germany he shone so marvellously by cures, that it can neither be told in words, nor would it be believed if it were told. For those testify who were present in the country of Constance, near the town of Doningen, who diligently investigated these things, and saw them with their eyes, that in one day eleven blind received their sight by the laying on of his hands, ten maimed were restored, and eighteen lame made straight.”[117]