Download 12.1 The Crusades

The Crusades
Medieval Christendom shared experiences and values to which few if any modern nations
or peoples could relate. Death came sooner in life and was so readily apparent through war,
famine, and pestilence that its personification, the Grim Reaper, was an easily recognizable
figure to illiterate peasants. Societal divisions were also simple to grasp. Medieval society has
been famously summed up as, “those who farmed, those who fought, and those who prayed.”
These distinctions outline European feudal occupations, but don’t miss that fact that all of life for
everyone was about agriculture, war, and religion. The last one points to the main aspect of
medieval life that is hard for modern students to grasp. Everyone held common religious values
and beliefs, or their prevalence was so pervasive that dissenters remained silent or were silenced.
For there to be any understanding of the causes, course, and consequences of the series of wars
known as the Crusades, these military expeditions organized by the pope to free the Holy Land
from the infidel (Muslims) must be examined within the context described above.
The Crusades made apparent two realities—an adventuresome Christian zeal and the preeminence of the papacy. European Christians, having been the victims of Muslim expansion as
well as barbarian invasions, were by the end of the 11th century embarked on a period of their
own expansion. The Crusades coincide with a period of history known as the High Middle Ages
when feudal society was at its height. European Christians pioneered the settlement of lands that
had either never been inhabited or had been uninhabited since the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Knights in Spain began a 500-year struggle to take back the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors.
Normans knights took back southern Italy and Sicily from Muslims by 1091. Germans pressed
eastward into Slavic territories. During the same period, Seljuk Turks had conquered the
Byzantine province known as Anatolia (Asia Minor). After the death of the Turkish sultan in
1092, Byzantine Emperor Alexius sought help from the West to regain his lost lands. All eyes
turned toward the papacy, the office of the Vicar of Christ that had been in a long power struggle
with kings and nobles to determine who was really in charge of Europe. Of late the popes were
winning, and the Crusades would reveal just how much influence over the lives of European
Christians the medieval popes possessed.
One of the most powerful popes in history answered the Emperor Alexius’s call. Urban
II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095 with the following speech:
I exhort you . . . to strive to expel that wicked race from our Christian lands. Christ
commands it. Remission of sins will be granted for those going thither. Let those who
are accustomed to wage private war wastefully even against believers go forth against
the infidels. Let those who have lived by plundering be soldiers of Christ; let those who
formerly contended against brothers and relations rightly fight barbarians; let those who
were recently hired for a few pieces of silver win their eternal reward. The sorrowful
here will be glad there, the poor here will be rich there, and the enemies of the Lord here
will be His friends there. Let no delay postpone the journey.
Urban ended the speech with the Latin phrase that would become the Crusaders’ rallying cry,
“Deus volt!” which means, “God wills it!”
Analysts of Urban’s rhetoric and actions question his motives. Some of them suggest he
was merely trying to rid Europe of its aggressive military classes by busying them with a foreign
enemy. Another motive might have been to finally assert the role of the papacy as the real leader
of the West. With Turks hammering at Byzantium and with Jerusalem in the hands of a fanatical
Muslim dynasty emanating from Egypt, Urban perhaps saw a chance to woo Eastern Orthodox
Christians under his influence by sending armies to help. Those who answered Urban’s call at
Clermont could also have operated on motives other than zeal for the Holy Land and its holy
destinations for pilgrims. The remission of sins was a powerful pull, but many nobles, knights,
and commoners surely had plunder on their minds. The aristocratic warrior class perhaps
dreamed of new lands to possess. Regardless of motives, an astonishing response answered
Urban’s call. Even totally unarmed, untrained plain folk were swept along by the crusading
spirit and followed a man named Peter the Hermit who led them all the way into Turkish
territory where they were slaughtered. Another wave of spontaneous lower-class crusading
started in Germany by massacring Jews in the Rhineland and then made it east as far as Hungary
where the Magyars did not like their plundering and annihilated them.
The real First Crusade followed these abortive attempts and succeeded because this time
the crusaders were heavily armed and armored knights on horseback. They mustered in
Constantinople and then lay siege to Antioch, capturing it by 1098. By 1099 they used siege
weapons to break through the wall of Jerusalem and then slaughtered all its Muslim and Jewish
inhabitants. This most successful crusade, of what would total eight or nine Crusades by the end
of the 13th century, established a series of Christian states between Jerusalem and Antioch in
Palestine. The First Crusade’s success served to increase the power and prestige of the medieval
popes who called subsequent crusades to protect or enlarge these original holdings.
As for Emperor Alexius, he discovered he liked Latin Christian armies better when they
were just an idea. He was suspicious of the western knights as they moved through his capital
and refused to help them in the siege of Antioch. Instead of healing the breech in Christianity,
the events of the Second and Third Crusades merely widened it. The Byzantines were not
enthusiastic about these ongoing efforts at the behest of the western pope, and they even resorted
to making treaties with the Turks against the Crusaders. For this treachery European knights
eventually sacked Constantinople in 1204. Christian disunity only encouraged the usually
divided Muslim states to unite under the Fatimid Caliphate, especially when their ablest general,
Saladin, recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. The Crusader states in Palestine were reduced to just a
few fortified seacoast towns, and this retreat shocked the three greatest kings of the West to
mount the Third Crusade.
Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, Philip Augustus of France, and Richard the
Lionhearted of England united their forces against Saladin. Frederick unfortunately drowned in
a shallow stream on the way to Palestine because his horse threw him and he landed face down
in the water in full armor. Philip Augustus helped recapture Acre, but then went home leaving
Richard to fight alone. Richard launched several attacks and fought with such bravery as to
become the legendary disciplinary scourge mentioned earlier in the year as Muslim mothers
threatened their misbehaving children with, “Richard the Lion Heart will get you!” He never had
enough force to assail Jerusalem, however, and could only piece together a coastal territory that
lasted only for another century.
The most powerful pope in history, bar none, was Innocent III (p.1198-1216). He called
the Fourth Crusade partially just to prove his power to do so. In 1202, 10,000 crusading knights
gathered in Venice, but then they were distracted. Since they didn’t have enough money to pay
the Venetians for sea passage to the Holy Land, the Venetians offered the crusaders a deal. They
knocked off the price as long as the knights would knock off a rival trading-post city of the
Hungarian king. Having sacked Zara, the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade again missed their
intended target and was the Crusade to sack Constantinople in 1204. Another crusading king,
Louis IX of France, missed the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea entirely and attacked the
sultan of Egypt. This bumbling effort earned Louis the title of St. Louis, but only served to
outrage the Mamluk warrior-slaves of Egypt who fought until 1291 when they defeated the last
Christian stronghold. Another crusade led by Frederick II of Germany regained access to
Jerusalem at last but did so by negotiation, a fact which got Frederick excommunicated. No
other crusade gained a foothold in the East or stopped the continued advance of the Turks.
Besides killing off large numbers of the ruling elite of European Christendom and
thereby undermining feudalism, the Crusades had other political and economic consequences.
The Italian towns came out on top of the whole process and emerged as city-states built on the
wealth acquired from shipping crusaders east and newly discovered luxury trade items west.
These new products led to higher standards of living for Europeans and even stimulated farther
and farther voyages of exploration and eventually colonization. Crusading armies, however, did
not seek cultural exchange by their very nature. Nothing like the eventual cultural flowering
created by Christian/Jewish/Moorish interaction in Spain occurred in the East. The Crusades
marked the first attempt by medieval Europeans, though, to live beyond Europe. No other
expansion by any people, not even the Mongols, would have such a profound effect on the fate
of other peoples and on the course of world history.