7.5 — The Crusades

At Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II preached a sermon. We do not have its text — five accounts survive, all written after the crusade's success, all shaped by it. What is agreed is that he called on the knights of western Europe to go east, that he promised remission of sins to those who went, and that the crowd responded with the cry Deus vult — God wills it.

Within four years an army had taken Jerusalem and massacred its inhabitants. Within two centuries the whole enterprise had failed, and it left a set of grievances that are still being invoked nine hundred years later, usually by people with little idea of what actually happened.

Why they were called

Four causes, and the first is the immediate one.

The Byzantine request. The Seljuk Turks had destroyed a Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071 and taken most of Anatolia — the empire's main recruiting ground. Emperor Alexios I asked the Pope for mercenaries, expecting a few thousand professional soldiers under his own command. He got a mass movement of tens of thousands he could not control, and the relationship soured immediately.

Papal ambition. Urban's position as Pope had been strengthened by the Investiture Controversy (Chapter 7.4), and directing the military energies of Europe was a demonstration of papal authority over kings. A crusade also offered the prospect of reuniting the eastern and western churches under Rome.

Violence at home. Europe had a surplus of armed men, produced by primogeniture — the eldest son inherited the estate, and the younger sons had training in war and nothing else. The Church had been trying to contain them for decades with the Peace and Truce of God, which restricted whom knights could attack and on which days. A crusade exported the problem.

And genuine belief. This is the part modern accounts most often underrate. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was central to medieval piety, penance was a live daily concern, and an indulgence remitting the penalty of sin for a warrior whose profession was killing was an enormous offer. People sold their land to go. Many did not expect to return.

One correction: the frequently repeated claim that the Crusades were a response to Muslim persecution of pilgrims is weak. Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule since 638; pilgrimage had generally continued; and the destructive episode under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009 was nearly a century earlier and had been followed by rebuilding. The Seljuk disruption of the routes is real and is a contributing factor rather than the cause.

The First Crusade, 1096–1099

The People's Crusade came first — an unofficial mass movement under a preacher, Peter the Hermit, which set off ahead of the knights, massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland along the way, and was destroyed by the Seljuks shortly after crossing into Anatolia.

The Rhineland massacres of 1096 deserve their own sentence. Several thousand Jews were killed at Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne by crusaders who reasoned that they should deal with the unbelievers at home before travelling to fight those abroad. Bishops in several cities tried to protect them and were overwhelmed. It is the first large-scale organised massacre of Jews in medieval Europe and it set a pattern.

The main crusade succeeded, against expectation, largely because the Muslim world was politically fragmented — the Seljuk sultanate had broken up, and the Fatimids in Egypt were Shia rivals of the Sunni Turks and initially welcomed a distraction.

Antioch was taken in 1098 after a long siege, in which the crusaders were themselves besieged by a relief army immediately afterwards and starved, and were rallied by the discovery of a lance claimed to be the one that pierced Christ — an object almost certainly planted, and effective.

Jerusalem fell on 15 July 1099. The massacre that followed is documented by the crusaders themselves, whose accounts describe killing in the streets and in the Temple Mount enclosure, and describe it with satisfaction as the fulfilment of prophecy. Muslims and Jews were both killed; a synagogue in which Jews had taken refuge was burned. Contemporary figures of tens of thousands are inflated by the standards of the city's likely population, and the event was a general massacre and is not seriously disputed.

Four crusader states were established — Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa and Tripoli — as feudal principalities on the Levantine coast, and they survived by castle-building and by exploiting Muslim disunity.

The rest of them

The Second Crusade, 1147–49, launched after Edessa fell, was a failure — it attacked Damascus, a city that had been an ally against a common enemy, and achieved nothing.

Saladin and 1187. Salah ad-Din, a Kurdish general who took Egypt and then Syria and united them, destroyed the crusader army at Hattin in July 1187 by cutting it off from water in July heat and forcing it to fight thirsty. Jerusalem surrendered in October.

And his conduct there is the reason he became a legend in Europe as well as in the Muslim world. He permitted the inhabitants to ransom themselves, set the price, paid for many of the poor himself or allowed them out free, and prevented general massacre. Christian pilgrimage was permitted to continue. Compare 1099 directly, and the comparison was made at the time.

Saladin also fought Muslim rivals for years to unify Egypt and Syria before facing the crusaders, and his reputation was contested in his own world.

The Third Crusade, 1189–92, brought Richard I of England, Philip II of France and Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in Anatolia. Richard took Acre and won at Arsuf and did not attempt Jerusalem, judging that he could not hold it. He negotiated a treaty allowing Christian pilgrims access.

Richard also had around 2,700 Muslim prisoners executed at Acre when negotiations over their ransom stalled, which belongs in the record beside the chivalric reputation.

The Fourth Crusade, 1204, sacked Constantinople (Chapter 7.3). A crusade that never reached Muslim territory and destroyed the largest Christian city in the world.

The Albigensian Crusade, 1209–29, was directed against the Cathars in southern France — Christians declared heretical. Tens of thousands were killed and a distinctive regional culture was destroyed. The remark attributed to a papal legate at Béziers, to kill them all and let God sort them out, is probably apocryphal and accurately captures the campaign.

The Children's Crusade of 1212 is mostly legend built on a real popular movement of poor people, and the story that they were sold into slavery is not supported by good evidence.

Later crusades in the thirteenth century achieved little. Acre, the last mainland crusader stronghold, fell in 1291.

And the crusading idea continued elsewhere — against pagans in the Baltic, in the Iberian Reconquista, and against political enemies of the papacy in Italy. The instrument outlived the original target.

What it achieved and what it cost

Militarily, nothing lasting. Jerusalem was held for 88 years out of nearly 200 of effort, and no crusader state survived.

For the Byzantine Empire it was fatal (Chapter 7.3).

For European Jews it was catastrophic and the pattern of massacre established in 1096 recurred repeatedly.

Economically it enriched Venice and Genoa enormously, since they carried the armies and then dominated the trade the contacts opened.

Culturally the transmission ran mostly the other way from the popular assumption. Europeans acquired sugar, cotton, silk textiles, spices, citrus, and words — arsenal, admiral, tariff, magazine, sugar, cotton, damask, muslin. Castle design improved substantially from Byzantine and Muslim models — concentric walls, machicolations, the barbican. Krak des Chevaliers in Syria is the best-preserved example.

The intellectual transmission mostly did not come through the crusades. Sicily and Spain were the main channels for Greek and Arabic learning into Latin (Chapter 7.2), through translation centres in Toledo and Palermo, and those operated independently of the crusading enterprise.

And in the Muslim world the crusades were, at the time, a regional problem rather than a civilisational trauma. Arabic historians treat them as one set of wars among many, and the Mongol invasions of the following century (Chapter 7.6) were far more destructive. The word for them in Arabic — hurub al-salibiyya, the wars of the cross — became standard only in the nineteenth century, and the modern framing of the crusades as the defining confrontation between Islam and the West was constructed largely in the colonial period, on both sides.

How it is used now

This is why the chapter matters beyond the history.

Both European colonialism and modern jihadist movements have invoked the crusades. French and British commanders entering Damascus and Jerusalem in 1918 made explicit crusading references. Osama bin Laden's statements used the word repeatedly. A US president's use of the word "crusade" in 2001 caused an immediate diplomatic problem for exactly this reason.

The historical reality does not support the frame either side uses. Crusaders allied with Muslim rulers against other Christians and other Muslims routinely. The Fourth Crusade's only conquest was Christian. The crusader states survived by playing local politics, and there were long periods of trade, treaty and cohabitation. Muslims lived under crusader rule and Christians under Muslim rule throughout.

The honest description: a series of wars, religiously motivated and religiously justified, that were also ordinary medieval wars of conquest, plunder and dynastic ambition, conducted with the brutality standard to the period on both sides, and one of which turned out to be against fellow Christians.

Where this shows up in your life

The word "crusade" in English now means any vigorous campaign, which is a considerable semantic softening.

The Knights Templar and Hospitaller were founded in this period. The Templars developed a system whereby a pilgrim could deposit funds in Europe and draw them in the Levant against a letter — an early international banking network — and their wealth is what got them destroyed in 1307 by a French king who owed them money. The Hospitallers survive as the Order of Malta.

And the reading habit. The five accounts of Urban's sermon were all written after the crusade succeeded, and each attributes to him the motives that its outcome had made attractive. That is the ordinary condition of historical sources, and Chapter 16.4 makes the general point: when the only accounts of an event's beginning were written after its end, you are reading the end being projected backwards.

What the next page covers

In 1206 a man named Temujin was proclaimed ruler of the united Mongol tribes. Within eighty years his family ruled from Korea to Hungary, the largest contiguous land empire in history. Chapter 7.6 covers how — what the Mongol army actually did that nobody could counter, the scale of the destruction and the honest figures, what the Pax Mongolica did for trade and for the transmission of technology, why they failed at Japan and in Egypt, and what they left behind including, indirectly, the Black Death.