Historians of the crusades are accustomed to thinking of Eugenius III chiefly as the pope who initiated the Second Crusade. So large do the crusade of 1146–8 and its planned but unfulfilled successor of 1150 loom in Eugenius's short pontificate that Rudolf Hiestand has asserted that it was ‘without doubt the central event in the pontificate of Eugenius’. The weight of attention paid to the Second Crusade over the past twenty years has added to this perspective. The intricacies of the language and timing of his crusading bull, and the intentions behind it, the attitudes of Eugenius and the Cistercians to a further attempt to launch a crusade in 1150, and papal crusading policy in general in Eugenius's pontificate, have been analysed rigorously.

Given the importance of crusading as an activity of Eugenius's pontificate, it is perhaps understandable that less attention has been paid to the apparently more mundane business of his pontificate relating to the Church in the Crusader States. Yet, as Hiestand himself acknowledged, the wider context of the preaching and planning of the Second Crusade must take into account the increased involvement of the papacy in the ecclesiastical affairs of the Crusader States from the 1130s onward. Petitions to the papal Curia from the churches of the Crusader States increased markedly under Innocent II (1130–43), and even the brief pontifical reigns of Celestine II (1143–4) and Lucius II (1144–5) bear evidence of this continuing trend.