A few years after Louis’ accession he became involved in a quarrel with the pope over a candidate for a bishopric. When the Count of Champagne sided with the Holy Father Louis invaded his domains. During the siege of the town of Vitry no fewer than thirteen hundred people who had taken refuge in a church were burned to death with the destruction of the building. Remorse for this disaster for which he was responsible made him lend a willing ear to the exhortations of Saint Bernard, an opponent of Abélard’s heresies who was now preaching the Second Crusade, and when Pope Eugenius came in person to France he gave the French king the pilgrim’s equipment and the _oriflamme_ of Saint Denis in the Saint’s own church. The crusade ended in bitter disaster, and Louis died before the Third Crusade was under way, but his interest in the Holy Wars led to his patronage of the order of Knights Templar, which had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. At the time when Pope Eugenius went to Paris there was a mighty gathering there of Templars, and probably it was then that King Louis granted them the land not far from the Priory of Saint Martin on which they built a huge establishment, part fortification, part religious house, whose surroundings they made fair by draining the marshes and converting waste land into fruitful fields. The king does not seem to have been the cause of much civic improvement of Paris in spite of his long reign. He built an oratory to Notre Dame-de-l’Étoile near the palace. If we may judge by his usual oath--“By the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem”--it must have been he who gave the name to the cemetery of the Holy Innocents and its chapel, though probably they were established before his day. The burying ground was near the Halles, and it was laid out when that section was far beyond the crowded part of the town. By the time of the accession of Philip Augustus (1180), however, the population had pushed northwards from the busy river bank, the marsh had been made habitable, and the quickly increasing cemetery stood on the outskirts of the town, not in the country, and needed the wall which Philip gave it. The Pont au Change, the bridge leading from the right bank to the island near the palace--perhaps the very line which the Grand Pont drew across the river at the time of the siege by the Normans--received its name at this time. There were houses built upon it from end to end, and Louis allowed the money-changers to do business upon it along one side and permitted the goldsmiths to establish themselves on the other. For four centuries this was the fashionable promenade of Paris until Henry IV finished the Pont Neuf whose open expanse across the western tip of the Cité gave more space for display. When a new king made his formal entry into Paris it was customary for a huge flock of birds to be let loose from the Pont au Change that they might carry the glad news abroad.