Crusades

I

Introduction

Crusades, holy wars fought on the command of the Pope against enemies of the Roman Catholic Church outside and within Christendom, a distinctive feature of the militant Christian culture of western Christendom for half a millennium from 1095 when Pope Urban II summoned the faithful to liberate the Christian Church in Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Participants wore crosses on their garments and so were known as crucesignati (Latin, “those signed with the cross”), from which the modern words for the Crusades derive. In return for active commitment, Crusaders could hope to receive indulgence, that is, the remission of the penalties for all their sins or, after around 1200, full remission of the sins themselves, the so-called plenary indulgence. Although soon applied to a wide variety of wars involving the Church—for example, against the Moors in Spain (see Reconquista), pagans in the Baltic, political opponents of the papacy, heretics, and non-Latin Christians—the initial impetus came from the desire to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre (the traditional site of the tomb of Jesus Christ, see Church of the Holy Sepulchre), a priority that never entirely lapsed. Between 1095 and 1270, almost a dozen major international expeditions embarked to reclaim or defend the Holy Land in Palestine.

II

Origins of the Crusades

Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, possessed a long tradition of sanctified warfare. The Christian tradition was based on two complementary foundations, scriptural and classical. The Old Testament told of repeated acts of violence in the service of the God of Israel. At least since Aristotle in the 4th century bc, theories of legitimate or just war in defence or pursuit of rights were developed in the Greek and Roman worlds. Under the Roman Empire, wars by the state waged against external enemies were almost automatically regarded as just. After the adoption of Christianity as its official religion in the 4th century ad, Rome’s wars became Christian wars. St Augustine of Hippo proposed a series of general principles for Christian just war. It required that a just war must be defensive or for the recovery of rights; must be sanctioned by a legitimately constituted authority; those who fought must be motivated by good intentions; and the violence should be proportionate. Thus war, by nature sinful, could be a vehicle for the promotion of righteousness.

In western Europe during the early Middle Ages, the ruling classes placed war at the cultural and political centre of society. The Church had no option but to recognize this. The archetype of the Christian warrior was Charlemagne, king of the Franks and emperor of the Romans, whose wars against pagans were depicted as religious. Facing the attacks on western Europe by Scandinavians, Magyars, and Muslims in the 9th and 10th centuries, wars to defend Christendom were perceived as “battles of Christ”. The 11th century witnessed the increasing dominance of society by networks of independent property-owning arms-bearers (knights); an increased emphasis in Church teaching on the ubiquity of sin and the need for penance; the growing popularity of pilgrimages, notably to Jerusalem; a reaction to growing economic prosperity that led some to imagine or desire the coming of the Apocalypse; the reform of the papacy that led Church leaders to claim primacy over the direction of secular as well as religious affairs; and the beginnings of Christian counter-attacks against earlier Muslim conquests in and around Europe, notably in Spain and Sicily. Schemes were hatched for western help for the Byzantine Empire against the new invaders of the Near East, the Seljuk Turks who, after their defeat of the Byzantine emperor at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, briefly seemed to threaten the survival of eastern Christendom. Pope Gregory VII proposed to lead an expedition to assist Byzantium and liberate the Holy Sepulchre. In this fashion, warfare on behalf of the papacy would be regarded as penitential, not simply just but holy. These strands of secular politics, practical churchmanship, and militant theology were fashioned by Gregory’s successor Pope Urban II into the Crusade.

III

The First Crusade

In March 1095 Byzantine ambassadors appealed to Urban II for western military aid. This may have coincided with increased awareness of Turkish oppression of the Holy Land spread by returning pilgrims such as the Picard preacher Peter the Hermit. Urban conducted an extensive preaching tour of France between July 1095 and September 1096 to attract support to the crusading cause. At the Council of Clermont in November 1095 he proclaimed his new form of Christian religious war, initiating the ceremony of taking the cross and offering remission of all penance on confessed sin to those who joined up. The date for the muster of the Christian forces was fixed for August 15, 1096; the initial rendezvous was to be at Constantinople (now İstanbul), capital of the Byzantine Empire.

The response was enormous; perhaps as many as 100,000 men in total headed east between 1096 and 1097. For political reasons, the Pope aimed his message not at kings but at the second, third, and lower levels of aristocratic arms-bearing society. Recruitment followed patterns of rural and urban social ties: lordship, kinship, shared locality, peer pressure, employment, and communal association. Crusading was and remained expensive, requiring access to property or cash. Crusaders had to be legally free. Their motives centred on spiritual profit, notably the alleviation of the burden of sin, supported by the expectation of enhanced reputation and status, complemented for some by the hope of material gain and adventure. Many went as clients of patrons or employees, as in any other medieval army. Crusaders were sustained by military skill based on heavily armoured mounted knights and a conviction in their own righteousness that increased as the arduous campaign unfolded.

The first contingents, inaccurately described as the Peasants’ or People’s Crusade, began leaving northern France and the western German states in the early spring of 1096. A number of these early bands became involved in anti-Jewish massacres in the Rhineland (May and June 1096). Following the pilgrim route down the valley of the River Danube and across the Balkan Mountains to Constantinople, the city was reached in July and August 1096. With the help of the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, the Crusaders established a base near Nicomedia (now İzmit), only to be destroyed in a series of engagements with the Turks from their nearby capital of Nicaea (now İznik) in September 1096. Between August 1096 and May 1097 five more significant armies travelled to Constantinople: Lorrainers; Norman settlers from southern Italy; troops from the Île-de-France; northern French from Normandy, Blois, and Flanders; and southern French from Languedoc. With the help of Alexius, the Crusaders captured Nicaea on June 19, 1097, and were given Byzantine aid and military assistance for the march across Anatolia (see Asia Minor), defeating the Turks near Dorylaeum on July 1, 1097.

In September, while the main army crossed into northern Syria via the Taurus Mountains, splinter groups captured the chief cities of Cilicia. The army reunited at Antioch in October 1097, before Baldwin of Boulogne led a private venture across the River Euphrates, seizing control of Edessa in March 1098. The siege of Antioch tested the Crusaders to the limit. Despite reinforcements arriving by sea, the western army had to repel a succession of relief armies from Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul. Desertions rose; Emperor Alexius refused to commit a Greek army to come the westerners’ aid. Only the defeat of the relief army of Kerboga of Mosul (June 28, 1097) secured the expedition’s survival. In the light of Alexius’s failure to help, the Crusaders claimed Antioch for themselves, the city being handed to Bohemond of Taranto. In January 1099 the Crusaders marched south into Palestine, reaching Jerusalem on June 7. The city fell on July 15, victory being accompanied by what in later possibly exaggerated sources appeared as a massacre. Godfrey de Bouillon was chosen to rule the Holy City. A belated relief Egyptian force was defeated at Ashqelon on August 12. Within a month the bulk of the survivors began the journey back to the west leaving Godfrey de Bouillon with perhaps as few as 300 knights to defend Jerusalem. Other leaders who remained in the east included Raymond of Toulouse, who soon carved out a territory for himself around the port of Tripoli.

IV

Outremer: Western Settlement in Palestine

In the west, the First Crusade became regarded as the symbol of Christian heroism soon elevated to a moral exemplar and fund of romantic adventure stories. In the east, its legacy was occupation and rule by western settlers for the next two centuries over what became known as Outremer (French, “the land overseas”). Despite the failure of a follow-up expedition in 1101, Outremer was sustained by the popularity of campaigning in the Holy Land, pilgrimages, exploitation of commercial opportunities, and immigration. Four principalities emerged: Edessa (1098-1144), Antioch (1098-1268), the kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1291, although the Holy City itself was only held 1099-1187 and 1229-1244); and Tripoli (1102-1289).

The occupation by what both westerners and local Arab-speakers called the Franks rested on the control by the military nobility of the considerable agrarian and commercial resources of the region. There were pockets of significant Frankish rural settlement in Palestine, but dominance of the trade routes and ports, notably Acre (Akko), Tyre (Şūr), and Tripoli, and entrepôts such as Antioch underpinned Christian power. Frankish military strength was stiffened by the creation of the military religious orders of the Templars and Hospitallers (see Knights of St John of Jerusalem). Relations with indigenous subjects were exploitative although not persecutory, characterized by separation, accommodation, and indifference. Superficial cultural assimilation was inevitable most notably in the areas of food, bathing habits, medical care, architecture, clothing, and an increased knowledge of the Arabic language among Frankish settlers. Relations with the sizable communities of Syrian Christians were awkward, neither warm nor hostile. However, segregation divided Christians from Muslims and Jews. Castles and fortified manor houses reflected the need for internal administration as much as external defence. While never losing the ideology or self-image of a beleaguered Christian garrison, the Franks were just one more group of external conquerors living off the locals, alongside Seljuk Turks, Kurds or, later, Mamelukes from Egypt or Mongols.

Divisions in the Muslim world allowed the Franks states to expand, by the 1150s controlling the Syrian-Palestinian coast from Cilicia to the Red Sea, although key inland cities such as Aleppo and Damascus eluded their grasp. Once the warring city-states of Syria and northern Iraq began to unite under the Turkish mercenary captain Zengi and his son Nur ad-Din in the 1140s, Outremer faced a concerted threat sustained by an Islamic religious revival and the re-emergence of enthusiasm for Muslim holy war, jihad. Edessa fell to Zengi in 1144. Although powerful enough to intervene in Egypt in the 1150s, the Franks were placed on the defensive by the unification of Syria and Egypt under Saladin, a former Kurdish mercenary in the service of Nur ad-Din. Helped by a slackening of western aid to Outremer after the failed Second Crusade (see below) and factional divisions within the kingdom of Jerusalem, Saladin, in a majestic campaign between 1187 and 1189, re-conquered most of Outremer, including Jerusalem and Acre, reducing Frankish possessions to a few ports such as Tyre and Tripoli, some castles, and Antioch.

The Third Crusade (see below) began a Frankish recovery with the recapture of Acre (1191). Richard I of England’s conquest of the island of Cyprus (1191) provided an additional bastion to Frankish security, although never politically integrated into mainland Outremer. By 1240, through war, diplomacy, and divisions among Saladin’s heirs, the Ayyubids, the limits of Outremer had returned to something similar to those before 1187. Now western settlement was almost wholly confined to cities and was dependent upon the rich commercial pickings managed by the rival Italian cities of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. Dynastic failure left Outremer with weak local political leadership, prey to the ambitions of acquisitive western rulers such as Frederick II of Germany and Charles I of Sicily. With shifts in trade routes, the advance of the Mongols, and the replacement of the Ayyubids in Egypt by the Mamelukes in 1250, Outremer lacked sufficient internal resources or external aid to survive. From the 1260s, Outremer was dismantled by successive sultans of Egypt. Antioch was lost in 1268; Tripoli in 1289. After Acre, the last main stronghold, finally fell in May 1291, the few remaining Frankish holdings on the mainland of Syria and Palestine were abandoned. Cyprus continued to be ruled by western Christians until 1571.