The Crusades

In March 1095 envoys of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked Pope Urban II for western soldiers to fight the Seljuk Turks, who had overrun most of Anatolia. In November, at a church council in Clermont in central France, Urban answered with something far larger. The chroniclers who later wrote up his sermon agree that he urged knights to stop fighting each other, march east to help their fellow Christians and free Jerusalem, and that he offered the remission of penance for sins to those who went. The crowd is said to have answered ‘God wills it’. Thousands took a vow and sewed a cloth cross onto their clothes.

The response was overwhelming and partly beyond the Church’s control. In the spring of 1096 popular bands, some following the preacher Peter the Hermit, set off before the main armies. Several of them turned on the Jewish communities of the Rhineland on the way. The princely armies, led by figures such as Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemond of Taranto, gathered at Constantinople in 1097. They took Nicaea, crossed Anatolia, and endured a gruelling siege of Antioch from October 1097 to June 1098, where hunger and disease killed many.

On 15 July 1099 the survivors stormed Jerusalem. Christian and Muslim sources alike describe a massacre of the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, though their numbers are inflated. Latin chroniclers wrote of blood rising to the knees, an image borrowed from the Book of Revelation, and the later Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir gave a figure of 70,000. Many modern historians, drawing on letters found in the Cairo Genizah that mention captives being ransomed, think the dead were more likely in the thousands. The victors founded four Latin states: Jerusalem, Antioch, Tripoli and Edessa.

The Latin states depended on a steady flow of pilgrims and fighters from the West, and on the divisions of their Muslim neighbours. New military orders, the Hospitallers and the Templars, took on much of the defence; the story of the Templars, and of the legends that grew around them, is told separately. When Zengi, the ruler of Mosul and Aleppo, captured Edessa in 1144, Bernard of Clairvaux preached a Second Crusade, which collapsed in 1148 before the walls of Damascus.

Zengi’s son Nur al-Din and then Saladin, a Kurdish officer who became sultan of Egypt and Syria, united much of the region and presented the struggle as a jihad. On 4 July 1187 Saladin destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October. Unlike the conquerors of 1099, Saladin let the inhabitants ransom themselves, and many who could not pay were released, although thousands of the poor were enslaved.

The Third Crusade (1189–1192) brought the kings of England and France and the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned in a river in Anatolia on the way. Richard I helped retake Acre and won battles, but did not try to besiege Jerusalem, and the war ended in a truce. The Fourth Crusade went badly astray: diverted by debts and Byzantine politics, it sacked Constantinople in 1204, deepening the rift between Latin and Greek Christians. Later expeditions attacked Egypt, and the emperor Frederick II recovered Jerusalem by treaty in 1229, only for it to be lost again in 1244. King Louis IX of France led two crusades, was captured in Egypt in 1250 and died outside Tunis in 1270. In 1291 the Mamluks took Acre, and the remaining coastal towns were abandoned within months.

Crusading did not end there. Popes granted the same privileges for wars against Muslims in Spain, pagans in the Baltic, the Cathars of Languedoc, political enemies in Italy and later the Ottoman Turks, at battles such as Nicopolis in 1396 and Varna in 1444. Crusade preaching and taxes continued into the sixteenth century.

For the Jews of western Europe, the First Crusade began with catastrophe. In May and June 1096 bands of crusaders and townspeople attacked the communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz and other towns. Some bishops tried to protect them, with limited success. Hebrew chronicles written in the following decades remember those who were killed and those who chose death rather than forced baptism as martyrs who sanctified God’s name. Violence recurred with later crusades, as in England in 1189–1190, when the Jews of York died in the royal castle.

Muslim writers at first saw the newcomers as one more invading army and called them simply the Franks. Political rivalry among Seljuk princes and the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt helped the First Crusade succeed. Over the twelfth century, preachers and rulers revived the ideal of holy war, and Saladin’s reconquest of Jerusalem became a celebrated triumph. Daily life also involved trade, truces and local coexistence; the memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh describe Frankish customs with curiosity and disdain. Eastern Christians, Greek, Armenian and Syriac, experienced the crusaders as allies, overlords or plunderers depending on time and place.

Few medieval events are so often invoked today, and so often simplified. One popular picture shows crusaders as cynical younger sons seeking land and loot. Research on charters and wills, especially by Jonathan Riley-Smith, shows that crusading was enormously costly, that many families sold or mortgaged property to go, and that religious motives were central, alongside ambition and adventure. Another picture presents the crusades as either the first act of European colonialism or a purely defensive war; historians generally see both as anachronistic labels for a medieval movement with its own logic of pilgrimage and penance.

The idea that the crusades left a continuous, burning memory in the Muslim world is also doubtful. Medieval Muslim historians treated them as one episode among many, and Arabic terms for ‘the crusading wars’ became common only in the nineteenth century, when European colonial expansion gave the old conflict new meaning. Since then, the crusades have been claimed by nationalists, colonial officials, novelists, filmmakers and modern militants on many sides.

Historians emphasise that the crusades were neither simply heroic nor simply barbaric. They were a long series of wars shaped by faith, fear, politics and money, which brought great suffering to Jews, Muslims and Eastern Christians, and to many crusaders themselves.