The Cistercian Preaching of the Second Crusade

It has often been suggested that Quantum praedecessores, the letter by which Pope Eugenius III signalled the official proclamation of the Second Crusade, was of great significance to the institutional development of the crusading movement. Indeed, Giles Constable went so far as to say that Quantum praedecessores marked:

However, even though Quantum praedecessores was regarded within the papal curia as being of use for almost a generation, it is now clear that Eugenius's contribution to the ‘juridical development’ of crusading needs to be reassessed. He may well not have been the first pope to issue a general letter for a crusade to the East, and it is obvious that he did not wish to be thought of as an innovator. One of his letter's central themes was that he was following the example of ‘our predecessors the Roman pontiffs [who] have worked for the liberation of the eastern Church’, and the privileges that he offered to second crusaders were propagated as being the same as those that ‘our aforesaid predecessor Pope Urban instituted’.