10 The Crusades

For two centuries, from 1096 to 1291, the rulers of western Europe mounted a series of military campaigns against the Muslims of the Near East in an attempt to recover the holy places—especially Jerusalem—for Christendom. The Crusades were preached by the Roman Catholic Church, which granted remission of sin to those who vowed to become Crusaders.

No doubt the motives of many of those who “took the Cross” were idealistic—at least at first. But as is so often the case, religious zealotry brought with it an inhumane cruelty toward non-believers. And, as is also often the case, wars that were launched with the purest of motives soon degenerated into undignified scrambles for power and profit.

Although the best-known Crusades were those dispatched to the Holy Land, there were also religiously motivated campaigns mounted against pagans such as the Slavs and Balts of northeast Europe, against heretics such as the Cathars of southern France, and against the Muslim rulers of Spain in a process called the Reconquista. These campaigns too were marked by fervor, intolerance and savagery.

The Reconquista

The Christian campaign to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors took some four centuries, and, unlike the Crusades in the Near East, its success was permanent. The northern Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon began to seize territory from the Moors in the mid-11th century, and after the decisive victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the process became irreversible. Granada, the last Muslim possession in Spain, fell in 1492. But whereas the Muslims in Spain had presided over a generally tolerant and pluralistic culture, the country’s new Christian rulers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, forced the country’s Jews and Muslims to convert, or face death or expulsion. Subsequently, even converts were subjected to the attentions of the Spanish Inquisition, and those suspected of secretly practicing their original religion were burned at the stake.

The First Crusade The First Crusade originated in an appeal from Alexius I, the Greek Orthodox ruler of the Byzantine empire, who begged help from Pope Urban II in resisting the Muslim Seljuk Turks. Following the decisive Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Seljuks had occupied most of Anatolia, and Alexius requested the assistance of western mercenaries in dealing with the threat to his empire.

The Greek Orthodox Church in the east and the Roman Catholic Church in the west had become increasingly alienated from each other, and the pope saw in Byzantine misfortune an opportunity to assert the primacy of Rome over all Christendom, and to reverse the advance of Islam over lands that had previously been Christian. In 1095 he preached a sermon in Clermont in his native France, citing atrocities carried out by the Muslims against Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land—although generally speaking the Muslims had been tolerant toward Christian pilgrims, realizing that they were a significant source of income.

“Let those who were brigands become soldiers of Christ …”

Pope Urban II preaches the First Crusade at Clermont, 1095

The impact of Urban’s sermon proved to be electrifying. Western Europe at that time was undergoing a period of population expansion, economic prosperity and spiritual self-confidence, and Urban’s sermon helped to focus the ambitions of many restless warrior-barons—many of them Norman or French—who saw an opportunity of carving out a niche for themselves in the east while aiding fellow Christians and saving their own souls.

Within a year a number of armies had set out for the Holy Land. In 1098 they captured Antioch in Syria from the Seljuks after a long siege, and in 1099 took Jerusalem itself and proceeded to put its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants—men, women and children—to the sword. “If you had been there,” wrote a contemporary Christian chronicler, “your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain.” The city’s mosques were also destroyed. The Crusaders established a new kingdom of Jerusalem, under which were three vassal states: the counties of Tripoli and Edessa and the principality of Antioch.

On the uses of propaganda

Baha ad-Din, the friend and biographer of Saladin, related how, in order to rouse the spirits of the warriors of Christendom for a Third Crusade, Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, had a painting made showing a mounted Muslim knight trampling on the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, while his horse urinated on the holy spot. This painting was widely circulated, and served as an effective means of recruiting a huge army.

The later Crusades It has been said that the First Crusade was successful because no kings—and thus no national rivalries—were involved. The Second Crusade was a more royal affair, being led by King Louis VII of France and Conrad III, the German emperor. It was prompted by the recapture of Edessa by the Muslims in 1144, but had little success—the Crusader siege of Damascus was a failure, and was abandoned.

In 1187 Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, recaptured Jerusalem, prompting the Third Crusade, led by the German emperor, Frederick “Barbarossa” (who died en route), King Philip II of France, and King Richard I (“Lionheart”) of England. After the capture of Jerusalem, Saladin had spared the Christians and left their churches and shrines largely untouched; in contrast, when Richard I captured Acre, he slaughtered some 3,000 prisoners. The Crusaders failed to retake Jerusalem, but before he left the Holy Land Richard negotiated a treaty with Saladin, by which Christian pilgrims would be given safe passage by the Muslims.

“Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left …”

Richard I to Saladin

“Jerusalem is ours as much as yours; indeed it is even more sacred to us than to you …”

Saladin to Richard I This correspondence was recorded by Saladin’s biographer, Baha ad-Din, himself an eyewitness of the Third Crusade

The Fourth Crusade turned into an utterly cynical exercise. At the behest of the Venetians, the Crusaders diverted their attention from the Holy Land to the Byzantine empire, Venice’s trade rival in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1204 Constantinople itself was captured and its holy places desecrated, and a Latin state established there that lasted half a century. This marked the final breach between the eastern and western branches of Christianity.

Later Crusades to Egypt and the Holy Land achieved little, while the Muslims steadily recaptured the remaining Crusader strongholds along the coast of Syria and Palestine. Although Jerusalem was recovered by treaty in 1228, it was lost again in 1244, and in 1291 Acre, the last Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land, fell to the Mamelukes of Egypt.

The Crusades—which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche characterized as “nothing but superior piracy”—left a legacy of enduring bitterness against the West in the Muslim world. President George W. Bush’s use of the word “crusade” to describe his “war on terror” after 9/11 caused widespread consternation outside the USA; and Islamist radicals deliberately characterize Western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as “Crusaders,” knowing full well how that word conjures up the bloody atrocities committed in Jerusalem and Acre a millennium ago.

the condensed idea

European military adventurism in the Muslim world left a bitter legacy