Chapter 2
In This Chapter
● Uncomplicating the Byzantine: Discovering the causes of the Crusades
● Introducing the medieval Y1K crisis
● Nation-building in the Holy Land
● Counting till you run out of fingers: Crusading by the numbers
You can’t understand the Templars without understanding the upheaval that gave them birth: the Crusades. This series of wars isn’t just the stuff of dusty history books. The Crusades are featured in today’s newspaper on a fairly regular basis.
After the attacks of 9/11, one former and one sitting U.S. president each put a very large foot in their even larger mouths, and both on the very same day. George W. Bush made the blunder of referring to the war on terrorism as a “crusade,” while Bill Clinton felt compelled to “apologize” for the Crusades, which had occurred four centuries before Columbus set foot in America.
Both were chastised, but not nearly hard enough.
The Catholic pope was the juiciest target of all, when he made a pretty boring speech in September 2006 on “reason and faith.” In his address, Pope Benedict XVI quoted from a lot of sources. Unfortunately, one was a 14th-century Byzantine emperor named Manuel II, repeating part of his conversation with an unnamed “learned Persian,” on the subject of Islam’s practice of conversion by force, forbidden in early Islam, but encouraged later during periods of conquest. The pope quoted it to show just how old the argument is, that faith can’t be forced, but must come from reason. In his own glue-footed way, he was getting his licks in against the free-thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, two centuries too late. But the quoted put-down of the Muslim faith set off a firestorm of protest in the world of fundamentalist Islam, with imams from Cairo to Mogadishu calling for the pope’s head, literally.
All this brouhaha over wars that happened nine centuries ago seems incomprehensible to Americans; we have a hard time remembering who was vice president in the last administration. This chapter clarifies some of the vague facts you may know, and lets slip some startling ones you may not, about the series of wars between East and West, between Muslim and Christian, that history calls the Crusades.
Getting a Handle on the Crusades
The dictionary says that any “vigorous cause,” taken in concert to end an injustice or abuse, is a crusade. But historically, the word crusade generally means any war of the Christian West to gain control of the Holy City of Jerusalem, as well as other sites associated with the life of Jesus Christ. For most people, some very definite images come to mind when they think of the Crusades — some true, and some the product of myths and movies. The real Crusades, the ones closest to that image, lasted about two centuries, from 1096, until the loss of the last Crusader possessions in Syria in 1291.
The First Crusade is pretty easy to understand, but as the centuries unfolded, the Crusades became more complicated. Historians can’t even seem to agree on how many Crusades there were, or how many years the crusading impulse lasted. Sir Stephen Runciman, the respected medieval scholar, sets the number at five in his three-book history of the Crusades. But some say there were really only four. Other say six, and still others go as high as eight. Sir Stephen dates the end of the Crusades as 1291, with the fall of the city of Acre, the last Crusader possession in the Holy Land. But some historians claim that the Crusades didn’t end until the late 14th century, and others contend they went on into the 16th and 17th centuries, right up to the doorstep of the Age of Enlightenment.
So, if the chaotic jumble of the Crusades has always confused you, reading this chapter should make you sound like a pro to family, friends, and history professors alike. The first part of the chapter covers the cultural forces that led to crusading. The second part explains the whys and the wherefores of the very important First Crusade, and of the seven Crusades that followed.
Or the six. Or maybe the four. At any rate, dive in and get the straight facts on the Crusades — all of them. Sir Stephen would be proud of you.
So, what is a crusade anyway? Is a crusade any war between the Christian West and the Islamic East, or is it something more? For some historians, it’s like the infield-fly rule in baseball: Only an umpire can call that batter out.
And only a pope can proclaim a real and legitimate Holy Crusade.
Oddly enough, Islam has the same problem, today more than ever before.
It’s a similar muddle resulting from definitions — just who has the right to declare jihad, when, and why? Jihad is something of an abused word. It simply means “struggle” — sometimes an inner, spiritual one; sometimes an outer struggle against an enemy. Nowadays, when people hear the word jihad, they think of an Islamic declaration of war against the West, the Muslim version of a Crusade. And when they hear the word fatwa, they think of a Muslim cleric putting out a hit on someone, like author Salman Rushdie, who’s been deemed an enemy of the faith, despite the fact that a fatwa is simply a declaration of canon law, something like a papal bull. At one time, the real power to proclaim a fatwa or a jihad generally lay with the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and his religious leader, the Mufti of Istanbul. (The Byzantine capital of Constantinople was renamed Istanbul by its conqueror and sultan, Mehmed II, in 1453.) Until the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims lived in the empire or one of its client states.
Simply defined, the Crusades were a group of military campaigns that began late in the 11th century, sanctioned by popes and conducted in the name of Christianity. The original goal of the Crusades was to protect the Christian Eastern Orthodox Empire of Byzantium from invading Muslim forces, and to recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Islamic forces who had invaded and captured the city in A.D. 638.
A Snapshot of the 11th Century
To comprehend the domino theory that led tens of thousands of European Christians to wake up one morning and set off on a 10,000-mile stroll to the Holy Land and back, you need to understand how society was set up at the time. The whole idea of crusading may strike our modern minds as being pretty barbaric, not to mention bloodthirsty and arrogant. But the Crusades, as well as the political, spiritual, and military issues that gave birth to them, are way too complicated to be dismissed with a quick hipshot.
Of course, looking at the key players and the main events, there’s plenty of ignorance, fanaticism, and brutality to go around. However, in the case of the fanatical and brutal Crusades, lots of things were going on at the dawn of the 11th century that seemed to lead the people of Europe, almost naturally, into this centuries-long conflict with the Islamic East.
Fealty, fiefs, and feudalism
At the dawn of the crusading era, Europe was organized in a feudal system. Feudalism is like a chain of command, an iron bond of what was called “fealty,” rising up from the serfs, who did most of the work, all the way to the king.
Fealty comes from the Latin word for “faithfulness,” and in essence that’s what it means, though a better definition would be “obligation.” In the feudal system, each man was a vassal to the knight or earl or duke above him, which meant that he owed his overlord the obligation of fealty — meaning taxes or tribute in time of peace, and men and weapons in time of war.
One of the effects of feudalism is that these self-same barons, earls, and dukes became petty princelings, with a great deal of power. This is the essential problem with the system, as far as building a nation is concerned. Feudalism created powerful lords and a central authority, usually a king, who often isn’t quite powerful enough to control them — if there’s a king around at all.
So, you’ve got petty wars between petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and fiefdoms; a lousy centralized government that can’t create anything even resembling an infrastructure, like passable roads; and roving bands of lawless criminals and out-of-work mercenaries preying on anyone crazy enough to travel from one place to the next. It would seem that any king in 11th-century Europe would have enough to deal with without worrying about what was going on 5,000 miles away, yet the crusading impulse took root in the soil of feudalism.
Pilgrimage
In the 11th century, pilgrimage was hardly a new idea. Since very nearly the dawn of Christianity, the concept of pilgrimage had been an integral part of the faith. It was also occasionally a penance given to major sinners. You can only make someone repeat so many Hail Marys before the punishment loses its impact.
Though there were dozens of destinations for pilgrims, three were the most popular; clerics sometimes referred to them together as the Axis Mundi, the spiritual axis of the world:
● Rome: Rome is the home of the Holy See and of numberless Christian relics and sites, like the prison cell of St. Peter and the place where St. Paul was executed.
● Santiago de Compostela: This city in northwestern Spain was home to a chapel that contained the bones of St. James the Great, both an apostle and a Christian martyr. The city was sacked in 997 by the Umayyad vizier and general Muhammad Ibn Abu Amir al-Mansur, the commander of Moorish Cordoba, which did not endear the Muslims to the Christians of Europe.
● Jerusalem: The greatest pilgrimage site was Jerusalem; it was the centerpiece to all the holiest shrines of Christendom. It was also the hardest one to get to, so it was considered the most powerful balm for the soul of pilgrims.
This business of making pilgrimages was a serious one, particularly considering the fact that travel was so difficult and dangerous. “Roads” were little more than cattle tracks. The Romans had built far better ones, ten centuries before; in fact, many of these were still in use, despite being overgrown and in poor repair. Inns and monasteries, where food and a place to sleep could be had, were far apart and miserably uncomfortable. Plus, a thousand or so years ago, the trackless distances between towns were infested with wild animals, and travelers were in danger of attack from wolf packs, boars, and other even more unusual animals, such as aurochs (similar to buffalo, but with a nastier disposition). Worse than the savagery of the animal kingdom was the savagery of man, in the form of the pitiless thieves and cutthroats lurking around every bend and behind every stand of shrubbery.
The difficulty of travel makes it all the more remarkable that most of the pilgrims to Jerusalem and other holy sites were not wealthy, but rather were simple peasants, dressed in coarse brown wool, carrying all their worldly possessions in a gunnysack called a scrip slung over their shoulders, and usually holding a staff and wearing a simple wooden cross. They chose to make the journey for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes they were seeking forgiveness for their own sins, and sometimes they were making the journey for a loved one whom they feared was in purgatory. Sometimes they were headed for a shrine to cure their own illness or that of a family member, and sometimes they were simply pious and devout, determined to see the site of Christ’s crucifixion before their death.
The nobility, too, went on pilgrimages, although a bit more comfortably. Sometimes pilgrimage was their sentence of penance for their sins, as in the case of Count Fulk III (“the Black”) of Anjou. The count had very much earned his dark nickname, having been a sinful man with many crimes on his conscience. When he reached middle age, and the grave yawned before him, he asked for a penance that would be the price of forgiveness for all his sins. Legend has it that he fainted when the sentence was passed. He was ordered to endure a triple Jerusalem pilgrimage, which was the worst thing his priest could come up with. He was forced to make the journey on foot, three times from France to Jerusalem, or a total of 15,300 miles. On his third arrival in the Holy City, barely able to stand, he was lashed through the streets of the Way of the Cross as a grand finale, dragged on by the monks each time he fell.
Along with the spiritual potency of a pilgrimage, the story of Fulk also highlights the power of the clergy, over high and low born. Even kings stood before the papal palace in sackcloth and ashes, sometimes for days on end, in the rain or snow if the pope were lucky, in order to have the dreadful judgment of excommunication lifted from them. They held in their hands the scissors and the rod, symbols that they were willing to be whipped or shorn, at the pope’s pleasure. In the days before Martin Luther, you just didn’t mess with Holy Mother Church.
Y1K: The end of days
The year A.D. 999 was a terrifying one for the Christians of the world. Respected theologians had been predicting for some time that the world would come to an end in the year A.D. 1000, which was precisely 1,000 years after the birth of Christ. Looking around themselves throughout the 900s, the virtuous saw a world packed to the brim with sin, violence, greed, and apostasy. A good deal of it was in the very bosom of the Church, with a line of popes throughout that century that were far worse than merely incompetent — they were downright heretical, Machiavellian, and unbelievably sinful. Between A.D. 872 and A.D.
1012, more than a third of those on the papal throne died violent deaths, usually at the hands of their successors. To the faithful, they were anti-Christs, masquerading as popes. It seemed clear that the world was mired in the “abomination of desolation” Jesus had spoken of in Matthew, a quote from the prophecy of Daniel concerning the signs pointing to the end of the world.
On the night of December 31, 999, Christians stood in frightened silence, filling St. Peter’s in Rome inside and out, while Pope Sylvester II prepared a special midnight Mass. Many of the worshippers were face-down, their arms spread to form a cross, waiting for the end of the world. Women fainted, old men succumbed to bad hearts, and it was, in general, one of the darkest nights of the soul mankind has ever endured.
But the sun came up on January 1, as the sun has a habit of doing. Which, of course, brought on the time-lag two-step. Maybe it wasn’t 1,000 years after the birth of Christ. Maybe it was 1,000 years after the crucifixion of Christ. Or maybe it was 1,000 years after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
Or maybe the numbers were out of whack because of the differences between the old Roman calendar and the present Julian calendar.
The upshot was that “millennial fever,” the fear that the world would soon end, lagged on throughout the tenth century, and on into the 11th. Perhaps a quick stroll down memory lane, to New Year’s Eve of 1999, will make it a little easier to understand the general aura of fear and unease during the millennium. After all, times change, but people don’t. Come on, you remember the hysteria over Y2K. The headlines ran the gamut, from warnings that folks might have a little trouble accessing their bank accounts by ATM, to terrifying predictions of nuclear apocalypse. In the United States, the authorities tried hard to keep a level head in public, but their advice on what to do to prepare for Y2K had a reasonable tone that just couldn’t hide the uncomfortable fact that the government was telling its citizens to store canned food and bottled water, set aside an extra sum of cash, and have plenty of batteries on hand. And maybe we should get Dad’s old pistol down from the closet and make sure it still works. Or buy a $5,000 space heater that runs on gasoline so we don’t freeze to death in January. Or maybe just build ourselves a nice, dry, fallout shelter in the basement.
These same millennial fears of doom had an effect on the period leading up to the Crusades. Pilgrimages increased throughout that nervous era, and any interruption of Christian access to the shrines of their God would have been looked upon with grave seriousness by the Church, as well as the Christian peoples of Europe. To a Christian pilgrim, being barred from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Way of the Cross was a worse crime than murder, because far more than his life was at stake — his very soul was on the line. Perhaps this fact makes the ideology behind the Crusades a little easier to understand.
The Spanish ulcer
Napoleon Bonaparte once made an ill-considered attempt to bring the Iberian Peninsula into the French empire. As the conflict wore on, Napoleon called it his “Spanish ulcer,” a galling sore that wouldn’t heal, but just kept bleeding him of men and money.
Spain presented a similar nagging sore in the 11th century. After the death of the Prophet Mohammed in A.D. 632, his followers swept out of Arabia at warp speed, converting the population to Islam by fire and sword. In less than a century, they had carved out a vast empire, one that extended from Spain to the steppes of Central Asia. When they had the Berber nations of North Africa in their pocket, it was an oh-so-easy jump across the Straits of Gibraltar into southern Spain, a leap they made in the year A.D. 711. From that time forward — in fact, for the next six centuries — Spain would be a battleground between the forces of the Christian north and the Islamic south, and the Mason-Dixon line between them shifted more often than the San Andreas fault. At the peak of Arabic power, Christian forces were hanging on to a tiny strip of property, chiefly Aragon and Navarre.
The wave of Arab conquests that flashed over Spain in 711 moved on, across the Pyrenees, and deep into the heart of Gaul (present-day France). At last they were turned back by the French king Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, in his stunning victory over the Saracens at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. For several centuries afterward, Europe seemed willing to look on Spain as simply a wall to keep Islam from going any farther. But continued Islamic-Christian wars there coincided with an unnerving cultural development in Spain. Various mystical and heretical brands of Christianity were growing, as well as melding their ideas with Islam, both of which in their turn were being influenced by other heretics, Sufis and Coptics and Maronites, as well as by the growing communities of Sephardic Jews, who’d been arriving since the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in the first century. All this free-thinking and fusing of faiths really scared the Church, and every fresh Islamic conquest brought these heresies closer to their doorstep.
The Abbey of Cluny was in Saone-et-Loire in France, and its monks became a powerful force within the Benedictine order. It was the influential monks of Cluny who first began floating the idea of offering “warriors of Christ” salvation instead of a salary if they would take back Spain from the Moors. Templar historian Juan Garcia Atienza called it “a dress rehearsal for the East.”
By 1064 Pope Alexander II was issuing “collective indulgences” to Christian knights in Spain; he had the full support of Cluny in the person of his chancellor, Hildebrand, an influential Clunaic monk and scholar who would one day be pope himself, as St. Gregory VII. Eventually, these papal dispensations on a small scale led to the first Crusade Bull, issued by the newly-elected Urban II in 1089, granting dispensation to knights who fought to recapture Tarragona in northeastern Spain. Urban II, incidentally, had also once been a monk of Cluny. Drafting “warriors for Christ” doubtless wasn’t ethical, but tactically speaking, a glance at a map of the Mediterranean basin in the 11th century makes the shaky position of Christianity and the West crystal clear.
Figure 2-1 is a map of the entire area of the Mediterranean basin just before the Crusades. The Muslim onslaught that poured out of Arabia in the seventh century had swallowed up startling amounts of real estate, Christian, Persian, and pagan. The speed of these conquests was in the same vein as Alexander or Napoleon or Hitler. The Mediterranean had once been teeming with lucrative trade from East to West and back again, but Muslim corsairs were making trade impossible. It doesn’t take a cartographer or a military genius to see that Christian Europe was being roped in. Soon, all that the forces of Islam would have to do was tighten the noose.
The war in Spain, the battleground between East and West, became the precursor to the Crusades, the bony finger pointing to the next war that was bound to break out, sooner or later. The losses in Spain for Christians painted a very gloomy picture of what could happen elsewhere in medieval Europe.
Figure 2-1: Europe and the Mediterranean in A.D. 1000.
The dilemma of the second son
The annihilation of whole towns and villages by the bubonic plague was still three centuries off in the future, and in the 11th century, Europe was undergoing a steady increase in population. For that reason, it’s important to understand the meaning of the ten-dollar word primogeniture, the system of inheritance that was dominant throughout the feudal period. For any man of noble rank, everything — his title, his money, and his lands — went to the eldest son in the family. It may seem unfair, but the reasoning behind it was that it kept the fief or holding together, instead of breaking it up again and again through the generations until there was nothing left that was worth inheriting.
Unfortunately, this left second sons in a dicey position. Like the vice president of the United States, everyone knew what he was there for — he was the spare, in case war or pestilence carried off the firstborn. But in a time of rising population, families often had more than one, or even more than two, sons who survived to adulthood. Therefore, the typical medieval question was, “Whatever are we to do about Harry (or John or Phillip or Irving)?” He had a right to stick around in the household after the death of his father, and to be provided with at least a subsistence living from his elder brother. But for many knights, or simply proud young men, this was an intolerable situation in which to live, and they were usually gently but firmly encouraged to leave the nest, in order to keep jealousy and internal squabbling to a minimum.
Many younger sons of the nobility chose the Church as their profession; in fact, doing so was quite common, because it was a way that even a moderately intelligent young man of good family could achieve his own rank and respectability. It’s interesting to note just how coolly and clinically the Church understood the second-son dilemma: It was common practice, if the elder son were killed without having had any sons of his own, for the second son of the family to be released from his vows to Holy Mother Church so that he could return home to take up his earthly burden.
Feckless younger sons who were allergic to the discipline of the Church might choose to live on as dependants, despite the potential for humiliation. And handsome younger sons might marry well, perhaps a wealthy widow, in order to acquire a fiefdom of their own.
The final route to personal fulfillment for a second son was foreign adventure and conquest, if and when the opportunity presented itself. This despite the physical danger, and the very real possibility that he’d never see his homeland again. But as the 11th century drew to a close, another route to personal achievement for the second son was born, one that melded knightly opportunity with Christian grace — he could take the Cross, and become a Crusader. With the dawn of the age of crusading, the noble calling of serving God was added to the already potent blend of the opportunity to achieve personal wealth and military glory in a faraway and exotic foreign land.
Piracy and trade
This last is probably the easiest cultural factor to explain. At this time, there was a rising middle class in Europe. This business class would endure plague, war, and calamity, and just keep coming back for more. The wealth of this brand-new class was based on one thing more than any other: trade. By the time of the First Crusade, Arab pirates on land and sea were making trading expeditions very difficult and dangerous. The Silk Road, the 4,000 mile caravan route between Rome and the great Chinese city of Xi’an, with a large stopping-off juncture in the Levant, had been an artery of merchandise and ideas from East to West and back again since ancient times. Now it belonged to the Turks, and was no longer safe for business travelers. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean was becoming an Islamic backyard swimming pool. As the borders of Christian Europe shrank, their world becoming ever smaller, it was clear that something had to be done.
The First Crusade: A Cry for Help, a Call to Arms
Pope Urban II got a very unusual letter in 1095, while he was in Italy at an ecclesiastical conference. It was from the Emperor Alexius Comnenus, ruler of the Byzantine Empire. There was never any more than a polite civility between Catholic Christians in the West and Orthodox Christians in the East. In the last century in particular, a tiff over the Frankish Norman invasion of Byzantine territories in the south of Italy had set off a skirmish between the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople, one that ended in mutual excommunication and a formal schism.
But the Emperor Alexius was asking Pope Urban to put aside those differences, and stand together as Christians to face an oncoming horde of Islamic Turkish warriors, the Seljuqs. In A.D. 1071, at Manzikert, Alexius had lost a major battle to the Seljuqs, who then took huge chunks of his empire, including Persia, Syria, and Palestine, before turning north to nest at Nicaea, on Alexius’ very doorstep. Urban II was one of many theologians who had dreamed of reconciliation between the two halves of Christianity. The timing must have seemed heaven-sent to him.
Meet the Byzantines
Most people don’t know very much about the Byzantine Empire, and it’s little wonder. The art, the architecture, and especially the religious icons of Byzantium are so very foreign to Western eyes that it makes their long and complex history seem even harder to understand. Many times, in U.S. history classes, textbooks go directly from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, with perhaps an all-too-brief stop along the way to mention the other half of the old Roman empire, the half that didn’t fall — at least not for another ten centuries, when the Ottoman Turks overran the old empire in A.D. 1458.
For centuries, Westerners seemed to feel that there was a corruption at the core of Byzantium. The Byzantines had a reputation, right or wrong, for opulent decadence, serpentine court intrigues, and poison-in-the-wine-cup politics. The very word fell into the language of the West as a generally unflattering adjective. To say that a politician has the twists and turns of a byzantine mind still is no compliment.
But as far as the Byzantines were concerned, they weren’t some offshoot or weird eastern outcropping of the Roman Empire. They were the Roman Empire, period. All through its history the Roman Empire had contained a natural dividing line between the eastern and western halves, one that was eventually recognized by creating two emperors — one in the Latin West, the other in the Hellenic East. So, as far as the Byzantines were concerned, the western half of the Roman Empire may have dropped the ball, but they hadn’t.
The Byzantines were essentially Greek in character, while Europe was essentially Latin. As is so often true, everywhere in the world, cultural differences spring up from a difference in language.
No matter how different their churches or their vestments looked, the Byzantines were Christians, with the same essential belief system as Catholicism.
Go East, young man!
When Alexius sent his call for help to Pope Urban II, the pope had several very good reasons to answer it:
● It was simply an ethical question of universal Christian unity.
● That unity seemed more important in the face of Muslim encroachments, from the Spain to the Black Sea.
● These Muslim incursions were now menacing the Christian West, not only emotionally in their invasion of the Holy Land, but politically and militarily, in Islam’s wildfire spread across the steppes of Asia to Constantinople, literally the gateway to the West. Worst of all, the Seljuq Turks were robbing and killing Christian pilgrims, as well as blocking access to Christian shrines.
Urban convened the Council of Clermont on November 18th, 1095. Most of the Catholic bureaucrats who attended were churchmen of the south of France. A series of canons were to be voted upon, including an important one on the subject of the Truce of God. This was a peace movement in France, an attempt to limit violence between feudal lords, and to protect the clergy and other travelers from being preyed upon on the roads. It was a movement that Urban very much favored, as well as an issue that becomes even more important later, in the story of the birth of the Templars. This was the perfect opportunity to present Alexius’s plea.
At the close of the Council, Urban had a chair brought outside to an open field where he had invited a gathering of the entire city to hear an important papal announcement. He explained Emperor Alexius’s predicament, and offered a plenary indulgence (the remission of all penance for sin) to anyone willing to go East and aid the Byzantine emperor in fending off the infidels. He wanted the Truce of God extended to all endangered Christians making their pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Historians have no reliable record of exactly what was said, but Urban definitely moved his listeners with his eloquence and idealism, and he managed to hit a collective nerve in the larger-than-expected crowd. Apparently, he spent a good deal of breath on the knights of France, reminding them of what knighthood had once meant in terms of chivalry and piety, and then delivered a verbal lashing to them for having become robbers, murderers, and blasphemers. He wanted them to turn that violent energy to a noble cause — freeing the Holy Land from the heavy hand of the Muslim invaders.
It seems likely that even the pope was astonished at the overwhelming reaction to his speech. Nothing on this sort of scale had ever before been proposed. Legend has it that people in the crowd began shouting over and over again, “Deus volt! Deus volt!” meaning “God wills it!” It must have seemed a little like a rock concert, as the faithful immediately began tearing up strips of cloth, to pin them to their clothing in the shape of a cross. The concept of “taking the Cross” was born, for men, women, and even children. It wasn’t a nodding up and down of heads, a few huzzahs, or even a general chorus of agreement — it was a literal stampede.
Urban had not envisioned this mass response. He tried his best to set reasonable limits on who could, and who should, make the journey. He forbade the elderly or the infirm, pleading that only fit young men take the Cross. Surprisingly, he also asked that married men consult with their wives first. And, if a wife wished, she could go along with her husband. Many did so, adding to the chaos of Crusader “armies” that looked like straggling columns of refugees.
France, being the most stable and powerful country in Europe at that time, would be the chief player in the First Crusade. England was still trying to pick up the pieces after the Norman invasion of A.D. 1066, while Spain was already fighting for its life in its own battle with Islam, which came to be called the Reconquista, the retaking of Spain. But the knights who could go, the Franks as they came to be called (because French was their common language), were all completely won over.
Preparations for the grand adventure began at once, with everyone packing, making arrangements for someone to watch the house, and muttering “tickets, passport, money” over and over again. The Church helped in any way it could, from holding mortgages on the property of Crusaders, to making them untouchable by civil courts — their lawbreaking would be handled by softball ecclesiastical courts.
Peter the Hermit
It was not Pope Urban, however, but an itinerate preacher named Peter the Hermit, who opened the floodgates to anyone of any age, sex, or condition to march with him to Constantinople. He is surely one of the oddest figures in history, especially for a man who would have so much influence on the events to follow.
These unarmed and untrained hordes of people set out at once for Constantinople, without waiting for the Crusader knights, in a mass exodus often called the “People’s Crusade” or the “Peasant’s Crusade.” They followed Peter the Hermit and his chief lieutenant, Walter the Penniless. This last was an apt nickname, because all these unruly, unarmed, and untrained people were short of money and supplies, racing headlong to disaster.
However, Peter did have one talent, albeit not a military one. As he preached his way through Europe, he gathered up several trunkloads of gold. Although it came from many supporters, it also seems Pete had a gift for extorting money out of the Jews of Europe. The Jews of this period had a reputation for being moneylenders, which was not entirely born of the rampant medieval anti-Semitism, but out of the fact that Jews in medieval Europe had very few ways to earn a living. They were forced to live in ghettos, the area of each large city set aside for them, and walled off to the main, Christian part of the city. Jewish physicians were renowned, and this often allowed them to cross over the wall. But Jews were not allowed into any of the trade guilds, and consequently, they could not earn their living in any of the typical professions of the period, such as masons or carpenters or blacksmiths. Moneylending became a way that Jews could earn a living, particularly because Catholics were forbidden to practice what was called “usury.” And so was born the repulsive myth of the money-grubbing and usurious Jew, with hoards of gold stashed away in his mattress. (The Knights Templar would later find a loophole around these rules and become the first international bankers; see Chapter 4.)
So, with about 25,000 Christians marching behind him, who’s going to tell the old hermit that they really aren’t interested in making a donation? Of course, these masses of people caused nothing but trouble along the way, even occasionally setting off a major battle. In the Hungarian city of Semlin, for example, an argument with a tradesman over the price of a pair of shoes erupted into a full-scale riot, then a battle, claiming the lives of over 4,000 people in the city.
The meanderings of Peter the Hermit illuminate one very important fact of crusading: that the lack of centralized authority in government under the feudal system was reflected in the same lack of organization of the Crusades. There was no single leader, no organized place of embarkation, and no central clearinghouse for weapons and supplies, not to mention information. As word of the Crusade was spread over Europe, the Christian West ambled its way to Asia Minor in ragtag bands, with no connection to one another apart from a determination to rendezvous at the gates of Constantinople. It’s difficult to grasp what 25,000 Christians on the march in one party must have been like. Many would die on the journey, and many would simply give up in despair, too short on food, supplies, and men to continue the journey. Entire contingents of thousands of Crusaders sometimes disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.
Get out the beer, We're here!
Nearly a year after his distress call, a horrified Alexius woke up one morning, wandered out to the stoop in his jammies, and found an unimaginable mob of Christians headed for his doorstep, nearly as frightening as the Turks. There were not only thousands of armed soldiers, but also their women, children, squires, servants, donkeys, hunting dogs, and various and sundry whatnots.
It must have been something to see. According to the 12th century chronicler William of Tyre, Alexius had expected a small, well-armed force of Christian knights, just to help out. What he got was a horde the size of the population of Racine, Wisconsin.
Still, Alexius graciously met with Peter the Hermit, giving him gifts and thanks. But when the locals began to complain of thievery and trouble, he asked them very politely to cross the Bosporus and make camp on the Asian side, in the remains of a fortress there called Civetot. Small groups were let into the city each day to tour its wonders, while the rest remained on the other side, completely vulnerable. The Turks, having word of their arrival as well as their position, mounted a devastating attack that all but wiped out the entirety of Peter’s “army.” It was the first full-scale disaster of the Crusades, but hardly the last.
In August of 1096, the main military force of the Crusaders moved out for the East. By April of 1097, all of them had arrived, by various routes. There were many lords and knights, but the following were the principle players: Hugh of Vermandois, who was the brother of King Phillip I of France; Godfrey de Bouillon, along with his brothers Eustace and Baldwin; Bohemond of Taranto, a battle-hardened Norman warlord; Raymond de Saint-Gilles, the Count of Toulouse, who assembled the largest force of armed men; and Robert of Flanders, another powerful Norman warlord, who also happened to be the brother of the king of England, William II Rufus.
It was a vast army assembled before Constantinople. Alexius, who’d already dealt with Peter the Hermit, now had the time to try to absorb the pandemonium he had unleashed with a simple letter asking for a bit of help. But, as recorded in the fascinating journals of Alexius’ daughter, Anna Comnenus, he felt a little threatened by this combined force of over 4,000 mounted knights, and about 25,000 infantry — as well he might. After all, Alexius was himself a usurper, and he knew how easily a throne could be taken. Therefore, before anyone set off to battle any Turks, he asked for a parley with the principle leaders above, and then asked each of them to take a solemn oath that any lands they conquered that had once belonged to Byzantium would be returned to Byzantium. After a short huddle and a little grumbling, all three knights knelt to give their solemn vow. Only Raymond of Saint-Gilles would make any serious attempt to stick to their bargain.
Forward ho!
That uncomfortable business aside, everyone seemed chummy once again, and the official First Crusade started out fairly well. The Christian army, together with a contingent of Byzantine forces, marched on the city of Nicaea, taking it with relative ease. The city was promptly handed over to the Byzantines, as promised. Next they headed south and east for the great prize, the city of Antioch, in present-day Syria. Since Roman times, Antioch had been one of the most populous and powerful cities in the Levant.
The Levant is simply another term for the Holy Land, usually the important coastal areas. It comes from Old French, levaunt, the word for “rising,” a metaphor for the sun rising in the land of the East.
Now Antioch was a Christian city in the hands of the Seljuq Turks. To reach it, they had to slog their way through the miserably hot, dry, and mountainous region of Anatolia. On the way, they faced a major attack by the Turks on their advance guard and won a great victory, sharpening their appetite.
The Christian and Byzantine army arrived at Antioch on October 20, to begin a very long and grueling siege. When the Emperor Alexius never showed up to help them, as he had promised, the feelings against him began running very high. They took the city in the spring of the following year, and by agreement, Bohemond took charge of the city. It would remain with his descendants for two centuries.
There was by now a great restlessness amongst the crusading army, and a general desire to move on and to get the job done. Raymond de Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, led the army south, toward the ultimate prize of Jerusalem.
The massacre of Jerusalem
The Christian army that arrived at the gates of Jerusalem on June 7, 1099, was considerably reduced in power from the army that had arrived at Alexius’ doorstep two years before. Casualties, epidemics, and those who’d just drifted away left them with roughly 1,500 knights of cavalry (perhaps less) and about 12,000 foot soldiers — still a considerable force.
The Crusaders began the construction of siege towers and scaling ladders, ignoring the frequent catcalls and raspberries from the Muslims guarding the walls of the city. The guards laughed as the entire Christian army, led by their priests, would walk the whole parameter of the city, finishing on the Mount of Olives to hear services from Peter the Hermit, who was just as incendiary as ever, despite the thousands he’d led to their deaths.
The fighting began in earnest on July 13, and by July 15 Godfrey de Bouillon had taken a section of the city’s walls. The north gate was opened, and the army poured through to take the city. And after the city was theirs, be it a holy city or not, the Crusaders gleefully did what the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and the Turks had done there before them: They massacred everyone in sight whom they deemed an enemy — in other words, anyone who wasn’t a Christian.
At the Tower of David, the noble Tancred, the nephew of the not particularly noble Bohemond, escorted the governor and his entourage from the city in safety, promising that the al-Aqsa Mosque would not be touched, and no reprisals taken. It was a promise he couldn’t keep — in fact, the slaughter had already begun.
For the Christian Crusaders, this moment in history was something else altogether. The massacre in Jerusalem was a hypocritical betrayal of everything their faith had taught them. In the 11th century, most people couldn’t read, so the largest part of what they knew about their own religion had come to them from the words of priests and churchmen, many of whom put their own selfserving twist on Christ’s teachings. One tenth-century pope burned several Franciscans at the stake for having preached the “heresy” that Christ and his apostles lived in poverty.
Islam's warrior heritage
The massacre in Jerusalem has long formed a centerpiece of Crusader legend. They slaughtered the Muslims, despite the many beliefs of Christianity that are held to be true by Islam, as well. Jesus was the great prophet preceding Mohammed, the last prophet. But Islam is a very different religion, one founded by a constant soldier; it was a warrior's faith and a warrior's code, and their attitude about massacres was a bit different.
In A.D. 638, when Omar of the Umayyad caliphate captured Jerusalem, many a Christian there had cause to rejoice. All of Palestine contained many Christian sects considered heretical by the Byzantine emperor, and they had been persecuted under his rule. But during the next peaceful century, the Umayyads brought order and tolerance. Christians were allowed access to Jerusalem and were allowed to worship as they pleased. A century later, the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad drove the Umayyads into Spain and took the Near East. They disliked Christians, and many suffered under their rule, but things did settle down. The Abbasids got along very well with the Nestorians, their favorite brand of Christian. But three centuries later, the arrival of the newly-converted and warlike Turkish Muslims, the Seljuqs, spelled the end to any tolerance of Christians. They believed in the Five Pillars of Islam — belief in God and Mohammed as his prophet, prayer, fasting, the giving of alms to the poor, and pilgrimage to Mecca. But every warlike passage of the Koran and the Hadith became the special code of the Turks. (The Hadith is a body of the sayings and acts of the prophet, set down for the most part two or three centuries after his death; it is just as holy to Muslims as the Koran.)
"Know that Paradise is under the shade of swords," were the words of the Prophet Muhammad. "When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads . . ." (Koran 47:5). The Koran repeatedly calls unbelievers "the vilest of creatures" (Koran 8:65), leaving no doubt that their slaughter will not weigh heavily on the Islamic conscience. Therefore, Muslim warriors (as well as Persian warriors, Mongol warriors, and Berber warriors, not to mention a dozen others) had many times taken part in such massacres following a victory, in Egypt, in Cyprus, in Armenia — in fact, all over the East. In the medieval world, slaughter of the defeated seemed to be every bit as expected as a wrist carnation on a prom date. For these proud warriors, their own holy book, the Koran, permitted them the option of slaughtering unbelievers, particularly if they refused to convert — they were to "slay the unbelievers wherever you find them" (Koran 9:5).
When Muslims conquered a city, the citizens had three choices — convert, die, or pay the jizyah, which was a heavy tax on unbelievers. The ceremony of payment by the dhimmis, or unbelievers, was incredibly demeaning and generally included body blows and slaps on the face, or outrages to their women. "The dhimmi has to be made to feel that he is an inferior person when he pays, he is not to be treated with honor." They were generally made to dress in clothing identifying them as non-Muslims, and were subject to endless laws and edicts that increased the feeling of humiliation. Of course, in other instances, the prophet was far more blunt: "Kill any Jew that falls into your power," for instance. This quote is part of a long story in the hadith about Jewish perfidy in general — Mohammed had expected the Jews of Arabia to convert, and when they did not, he grew less tolerant of them. In keeping with this sentiment, Muhammad personally ordered the execution of between 600 and 900 Jews in Medina in a single day.
Yet Christianity was not, at its core, a warrior’s faith, and the words of the gentle carpenter from Nazareth would hardly inspire the slaughter of the innocents. Despite the fact that the romanticized image of the Crusaders would come into fashion again and again over the course of the centuries, there was always a tension between Christian lore and Christian belief. It was a tension that would worsen in many ways after the 15th century, when the miracle of Gutenberg’s printing press would soon put a Bible, in the everyday language of the people, into the hands of anyone who wanted to read it.
Though some of these knights were more savage than any foe, others, like Godfrey de Bouillon, were educated men who knew the words of the Bible. They would carry a heavy burden of guilt over the spilling of an ocean of blood in the City of God. It is a guilt that has remained with Christians to the present day.
A relief army from Egypt attempted to reach the city, but they were defeated by the victorious Christians. Now Jerusalem and the Palestinian territory surrounding it were in the hands of the Crusaders, without doubt.
The founding of Outremer
Despite the massacre at Jerusalem, and despite the chaotic disasters of the “People’s Crusade,” the First Crusade is really the only one that could be called a tactical success. The military goals of the leaders had been met, their targets taken, and Christian access to the shrines of their God ensured. As at the close of all wars, there was a general desire at that point to go home, and it didn’t seem to occur to most of the army that they couldn’t just walk away from their conquest and expect it to remain open to Christians. Like the proverbial dog that catches the car he’s chasing, they had the city by the bumper, with no idea what to do with it.
And so the powwows began. There was a strong sentiment that government in the city should be in the hands of the clergy, which many of the remaining knights saw as a tactical folly, because the city was still surrounded by enemies. At last, the respected Godfrey de Bouillon was elected to govern, at least temporarily, and he took the modest title of “Defender of the Holy Sepulcher.” Many Christians still felt that the governance of the Holy City should be, like the Vatican, in the hands of the Church, an open city for all faiths. But a year later, on Godfrey de Bouillon’s death, his brother Baldwin was called back from Edessa, and was crowned King of Jerusalem in November of 1100. For good or ill, the Crusader States, sometimes called the Latin States, were born.
Actually, there was another name for this new nation, one that isn’t heard as often. They called it “Outremer,” and though it sounds like a mythical land at the center of the earth in a Jules Verne story, Outremer was simply an invented French word for a faraway kingdom across the sea (mer being French for sea). And when wistful and homesick citizens of Outremer spoke of home, they called it Citremer, implying the civilization, or les cites (cities) across the sea.
Four kingdoms made up the Latin States:
● The Kingdom of Jerusalem
● The County of Edessa: This was to the north, in present-day Syria, and was populated mainly by Armenians and Syrians. The kingdom was established by Godfrey’s brother Baldwin, by means fair and foul that are still debated by Crusader scholars. When Baldwin became King of Jerusalem, he gave Edessa over to his cousin Baldwin Le Bourg.
● The Principality of Antioch: It was ruled by Bohemond, the Norman warlord. After he was captured by the Muslims in 1100, it was given over to his nephew Tancred. They replaced the Greek patriarch with a Latin one, and bristled Christian sensibilities in the predominantly Greek, Syrian, and Armenian Eastern Orthodox population.
● The County of Tripoli: It was founded by Raymond of Toulouse, who began the siege of the city in 1102, after his part in the failed Crusade of 1101. After his death in 1109, this kingdom was taken by Raymond’s descendants, creating a new baronial house.
Islamic politics were a mess at this time, and it wasn’t until the arrival of Saladin on the scene, nearly a century later, that Muslims began pulling their oars in the same direction. But the Christians knew they couldn’t count on Muslim factionalism as a defense forever. They began at once to build a line of defensive forts, many of which still exist. The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller were a very important part of this building boom (see Chapter 3).
Let’s Give It Another Shot: The Second Crusade
A powerful Muslim warlord named Zengi of Mosul came out of the north in the mid-12th century, attacking Damascus first. In 1144, Zengi overran the County of Edessa, massacring the Franks and the Christians of the city. Pope Eugenius III issued a papal bull calling for another Crusade, and the war was on again.
There’s one fact to remember about all the Crusades that would follow the first: All were trying to imitate the success of the First Crusade, and for the most part, all of them failed. The pope abused his powers in later centuries by proclaiming a “crusade” against temporal powers that were giving him a headache, or, more commonly, against factions of Christianity that he considered “heretical.” These “Crusades” were not popular, and they ended by lowering the prestige of the Church.
Like the sinking of the Titanic, the marriage of George II to Caroline of Brunswick, or the 1972 Super Bowl, the Second Crusade was one of those grand and epic failures that leaves people hooting from the cheap seats, giving off Bronx cheers, despite the dignity that Bernard of Clairvaux brought to the whole affair.
Two powerful kings got on board for the Second Crusade: Louis VII of France, and Conrad III, emperor of Germany. Although the Third Crusade would be known as the Kings’ Crusade, the Abbot Bernard had drafted some impressive bluebloods into this debacle.
Arriving at Constantinople late in 1147, each king would face major defeats at the hands of the Turks. Conrad had brought with him a slew of nobles from Germany, as well as the King of Poland and the King of Bohemia, and none of them was any help whatsoever.
Conrad, in strange territory, was too proud to listen to the sound advice of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel, disdaining his recommendations on routes and supplies. As he waltzed his main force past Nicaea into the heart of Anatolia, his men weary and his supplies running out, he may just as well have been wearing a KICK ME sign on his back. He was attacked by a large Turkish force on October 25, and his army was virtually annihilated. Conrad gathered together the pathetic remnants of his forces and retreated to Nicaea.
Louis didn’t do much better. He had brought along his wife, the remarkable Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was related by blood to several of the powerful families of the Latin States. Shrewd, powerful, and immensely wealthy in her own right, she would be the wife of both the French king and the English one, and two of her sons would go on to become kings themselves. (For more on Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Court of Love, see Chapter 10.)
Even after Conrad’s humiliating defeat, Louis could still put a staggering 50,000 men into the field. Unfortunately, his marriage to Eleanor was sinking into the squabbling and accusations of adultery that would be its finish, and this had a great effect on his ability to think tactically. Louis stubbornly ignored the shrewd advice of Eleanor and her uncle, Prince Raymond of Tripoli, that he should attack the city of Aleppo, which was the center of power for the Crusaders’ new principle enemy, Nureddin, the son of Zengi. Digging in his heels, Louis refused to listen to either of them, and finally decided, for reasons unclear and probably capricious, to attack Damascus.
Unur, who was the Turkish commander of Damascus, was also afraid of Nureddin, and may well have been made an ally had Louis not had the bad taste to lay siege to his city.
The campaign was bungled all around, and on July 28, after a mere five-day siege, news came that Nureddin was approaching. Louis and his forces retired with their tails between their legs, looking incredibly foolish. This disaster, born out of a family squabble, led to bitter accusations of treachery all around. Louis went home in a huff, leaving the Latin States, and his wife’s family, to fend for themselves.
A dynamic new Muslim force
With the death of Nureddin in 1174, the Muslim forces of both Egypt and Syria fell to his tactically brilliant protege — the mighty Saladin (for more about Saladin, see Chapter 5). Unfortunately, in that same year, Nureddin’s principle enemy, King Amalric also died, leaving the Franks in a dynastic mess.
Amalric’s 13 year-old son, Baldwin IV, succeeded, but he had leprosy. With his death eminent, two parties began to form around the deathbed — one headed by the young king’s sister Sibyl and her husband, Guy of Lusignan, a newcomer to the East, and the other around the “old” baronial families, including Raymond III of Tripoli. It didn’t help Frankish nerves that their urgent appeals to Pope Alexander III for help had gone unanswered. In March of 1185, when the young Baldwin IV died, Raymond of Tripoli became regent for Sybil’s son, Baldwin V. But when Raymond died in 1186, the faction around Sibyl had its way and hastily crowned her queen. She, in turn, crowned her husband, Guy.
So, the Franks were already near to civil war when Reginald of Chatillon, lord of Kerak and Montreal, broke the truce they’d had with Saladin by attacking a caravan. Saladin proclaimed jihad against the Latin Kingdoms.
In 1187, he crossed the Jordan River and took up a position on the other side. The Crusaders had mobilized about 38,000 men, with about 1,200 in heavily armed cavalry, a larger force on horseback than the enemy, although Saladin probably had as many as 50,000 men.
The new king, Guy of Lusignan, would not exactly prove to be a tactical genius. Ignoring the wise advice of the old campaigners, who were certain that Saladin was baiting a trap for Guy in the city of Tripoli, the king led his men, who were exhausted from a long march, with not enough food and water, straight into Saladin’s trap. This was the battle at the Horns of Hattin, (an extremely important moment in Templar history; see Chapter 5). It was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the Frankish forces. The foot soldiers broke and ran, causing chaos in the cavalry, and Saladin’s final charge finished them. The king’s life was spared, but Saladin ordered many executions, including the instant decapitation of Reginald of Chatillon, who’d attacked Saladin’s caravan, and the execution of every Templar or Hospitaller knight he could lay hands on, at least 200 of them. Saladin feared these warrior monks as he feared no others, and the rules of the game did not apply to them. As for the rest, it was the usual — highborn were ransomed, lowborn sold into slavery. At this point in time, there was really no military force left for the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem falls
Saladin moved quickly, taking Tiberius, and then charging up the coast to take Acre. By September of 1187, he had most of the major Latin strongholds, including all the ports south of Tripoli except Tyre. There were only a handful of men to defend Jerusalem, and, on October 2, Saladin took the city. He wanted ransom rather than death. Inhabitants who could pay it were allowed to leave freely. Several thousand of the unredeemed poor were sold into slavery. Most who elected to stay were Syrian or Greek Christians. Later, he let some of the Jewish population back in. By 1189, Saladin was pretty much the lord of all he surveyed.
The news of the fall of Jerusalem reached the West even before the archbishop who had been sent by the Franks to appeal for aid. The new pope, Gregory VIII, promptly obliged with a crusade bull, calling for fasting and prayer as well. One quick recovery was made by Conrad of Montferrat, Baldwin V’s uncle, who put together a small force of Italian ships and took back the city of Tyre from Saladin, while he was busy marching on Jerusalem. The following year, Saladin released his prisoner, Guy of Lusignan, the king of Jerusalem, and, ominously, Montferrat would not submit his fealty. The Latin barons were still sniping at one another when the prayed-for ships appeared off Acre, bringing supplies and the joyous news that a new army was on its way.
The Third Crusade
There is a very definite aura around the Third Crusade, one that resembles the star power without a decent script that erupts into a big-budget Hollywood flop-buster. All style and big budget, no substance.
Insofar as the players are concerned, the Third Crusade is definitely the most famous of all the Crusades, but truth to tell, it didn’t accomplish much. It did restore the Latin States, sort of. It left them well-enough fortified to linger on for another century, which isn’t much of a victory, considering this Crusade’s size and splendor.
Cecil B. DeMille
In 1935, Hollywood's most powerful director, Cecil B. DeMille, was working on his latest oversized epic, The Crusades. He received a letter from an Islamic citizen's group, worried over his portrayal of Islam in his film. DeMille certainly had the power to file it in the circular, if he'd chosen to. But being a gentleman of the old school, he arranged a prescreening for the group, in order to ensure that he'd done nothing to offend them. At that "work print" stage, he would be able to alter anything that they found objectionable.
When the lights came up after the movie, Mr. DeMille found a roomful of people who were perfectly happy with his film. Actually, they were delighted with his film. In fact, they asked to see it again. When The Crusades had its initial run in Cairo, it played for an astonishing three years. And when DeMille went to Egypt to film The Ten Commandments in 1957, he was fawned over by no less a fan than President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who gushed that The Crusades was his favorite film, and as a boy he'd seen it 20 times.
This isn't at all hard for a historian to understand. DeMille was a very well-read man, and he'd been raised on the Crusader stories of the 19th century. In those stories, the larger-than-life figure of Saladin was a man of heroic proportions. He was the epic figure of an enemy worthy of a knight's steel — courageous and courteous, honorable and proud, with a deep spirituality that was matched by his skill as a warrior. This gave the troubadour tales an aura of tragedy; had Richard and Saladin been born on the same side, they would doubtless have been friends. As it was, the relationship between these two mythic figures was something of a mutual admiration society. In DeMille's film treatment of the Third Crusade, there's no question at all that the brave and noble Saladin, played by the handsome actor Ian Keith, comes off a whole lot better than Henry Wilcoxon's loutish and lunkheaded Richard. In fact, Richard very nearly loses the girl to Saladin's charms. This is hardly a case of fanatical Western Christians demonizing a Muslim.
Well, perhaps one other thing was accomplished. The Third Crusade became the wellspring for the West’s most enduring myths and legends of Crusader knights, their ladies fair, and their Muslim enemy. This was the Crusade of Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Robin Hood, and the evil Prince John. Unfortunately, these deeply engrained myths can overshadow truth.
Lately, a lot of books about the Crusades are skewed by what’s called “revisionist history,” a good thing so long as people aren’t blinded by a new, but equally unchallengeable, orthodoxy. As the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, and Crusaders become the bad guys, certain aspects can be particularly annoying. These works often suggest that the people of the West have always seen Muslim leaders like Saladin in a negative light. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be farther from the truth. Saladin was a legendary figure in Western mythology, sharing the stage with Richard the Lionheart. (See the nearby “Cecil B. DeMille” sidebar for more.)
The celebrity crusade
Here are the bare facts of the Third Crusade, starting with a list of the kings who dropped everything to answer the pope’s appeal. It was definitely the Hollywood Squares of the Crusades:
● William II of Sicily, known as William the Good, in contrast to his father, who had been called William the Bad. Sicilians let you know what they think of you.
● Frederick I Barbarossa, fabled emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
who came at the age of 70, despite the fact that he’d been feuding with the pope off and on. He crossed Hungary into Byzantium with the largest Crusader force ever assembled. In 1190, he reached Iconium, after defeating a Turkish army on the way. He then crossed into Armenian territory, but on June 10, while riding ahead with his bodyguard, he was drowned fording a stream. His death broke the spirit of the German army, many of whom turned back, but smaller contingents kept on, under his son Frederick of Swabia, and Leopold of Austria. Saladin had been a little discomfited at the thought of facing the legendary Frederick in battle and thought his drowning an act of God.
● Phillip II Augustus, king of France, son of Louis VII, and perennial enemy of Richard.
● Henry II of England, who took the Cross but died before he could go, in 1189, passing the ball to his eldest son, Richard the Lionheart. The British and French were feuding with one another over territorial claims of the English in France, but they arrived together in 1190, three years after Hattin. In 1191, they laid siege to Acre.
Richard did stop along the way to conquer Cyprus. In all fairness, the renegade Comnenus there, Isaac Comnenus, was holding both Richard’s sister Joan and his fiance Berengaria as hostages, after they’d been shipwrecked there on the way to join Richard. It was a small event of the Third Crusade, though in later years Cyprus would prove to be a valuable tactical possession for the West.
Richard and Saladin
A month after the siege began, Acre fell to the Crusaders. The arguments started about ten minutes after the kings passed through the gates. Saladin seemed to be trying to dance out of signing a surrender agreement, and Richard massacred a couple thousand Muslim prisoners as a result.
This Crusade developed into something of a grudge match, since both forces were roughly equal, and both commanders, Richard and Saladin, tactically brilliant. They also had enormous respect for one another as adversaries. Both
could be ruthless, and both had an unusual and singular sense of honor that seemed to mirror one another’s, far more so than in the testy relationship between Richard and the other Christian kings. Consequently, the war was a stalemate; a diplomatic solution was needed, but both proved to be lousy diplomats. At last came the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192, which left the Franks in control of the coast from Acre to Jaffa, and gave Christians access to Jerusalem.
Tactically, the Third Crusade failed to retake Jerusalem, its principle objective, but it did take Acre and secure enough of the coastline to keep the Latin States going. Richard also conceded to the majority of the Latin barons that King Guy should be deposed, and he endorsed Conrad of Montferrat, who was assassinated soon after, another scandal that would involve the Templars in accusations of collusion with the Islamic cult of the Assassins (see Chapter 5). Guy was given the governorship of the new possession of Cyprus, which he managed not to screw up.
Unfortunately, Richard and Saladin, by that time, seemed to need each other in some way in order to function. Saladin died six months after the treaty was signed. Richard, himself very ill, was shipwrecked on his journey home. (It’s easy to see why the Crusaders eventually left the business of sea transport to the Venetians.) Later, Richard fell into the hands of Leopold of Austria, who had not forgotten Richard’s slights to him at Acre. He was held hostage until the English people could raise enough money to sooth Leopold’s hurt feelings.
The Final Curtain
It’s probably not fair to say that nothing of much importance happened in Crusades number 4, 5, 6 and 7. But the fact is, nothing of much importance happened, at least, not until the finale. Also, despite all that death and dysentery and derring-do, nothing much happened that is of great importance to the Templar story that we don’t cover in far greater detail in Chapter 5 on the fall of the Templars. So, what follows is a miniaturized, encapsulated, freeze-dried, and vacuum-packed version of the last four important Crusades.
The Fourth Crusade
If the Second Crusade was a disaster, the fourth played out like a darkly comic farce. Pope Innocent III tried to recapture the glory days of the First Crusade but made his biggest mistake in 1199 when he hired the Venetians, the trading lords of the Mediterranean, to ferry his army across to the Holy Land. Venice had once been a colony of Byzantium, and there was bad blood between them. Once again, as always, the Crusaders wanted to break the Cairo/Syrian axis by attacking Cairo, but Venice had close trading ties with Egypt.
Before long, the wily Venetians were running the show, talking the two chief knights of the Crusade, both of whom were married to Byzantine princesses, into overthrowing the emperor of Byzantium instead. The combined Latin and Venetian forces sacked Constantinople and set up their own government. When the pope tried to stop them, he was told to butt out.
It was the ugliest and most ignoble of all the Crusades. Chaos reigned, with no heroes in sight. Saladin was dead, and Muslim alliances were falling apart. In Europe, occasional outbreaks of mass hysteria resulted in tragedies like the “Children’s Crusade” and the “Shepherd’s Crusade,” in which thousands of innocent children marched off to Constantinople with the pope’s blessing, ending up dead or in the slave markets of the East. Meanwhile, the nobility was growing disenchanted with the whole mess.
The Fifth Crusade
Pope Innocent III was of the “if at first you don’t succeed” school of military planning. In May of 1218, he fast-talked the emperor of Germany into a Crusade, even dusting off the old plan that had failed twice before — attack and take Cairo, break the Egypt/Syria axis, and use the city as a bargaining chip to get back Jerusalem. It was an eight-year debacle. Many times the Egyptians were ready to make peace and a compromise, but the papal legates along for the ride kept interfering in military matters, and it all ended in a lot of blood spilled for nothing.
The Sixth Crusade
Civilization and common sense actually triumphed in this Crusade. Pope Gregory IX sent the German emperor to make war in Egypt, and instead he brokered a ten-year peace with the equally wise sultan of Egypt. Not a drop of blood was spilled, and warmongers on both sides were deeply disappointed. About five minutes after the peace ran out, early in 1239, the newly powerful Kwarezmian Turks invaded the Levant. Eventually the Egyptians joined them, and together they sacked Jerusalem in 1244.
The Seventh Crusade
Sacking Jerusalem was always an invitation to war with the Christians. In 1245, the truly brave and noble French king, Louis IX, drafted Pope Innocent IV into helping him put together a Crusade, reversing the process for once. He tried twice to take back the Holy City and was finally captured by the Muslims. When he was ransomed back in 1254, he was too weak and ill to fight any longer.
By 1260, two powerful new forces were slugging it out, using Palestine as a battleground:
● The Mongols who were sweeping out of the East
● The new dynasty of Mamluks out of Egypt, former slave-bodyguards of the sultans who were devastating warriors
Baybars, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, who is still a great hero in the Islamic world, drove out both the Mongols and the Franks, reducing the Crusaders to a few fortified coastal cities. He massacred the inhabitants of all the cities he took, on the flimsy pretext that they had aided the Mongols.
In what’s often called the Eighth Crusade, poor Louis IX, still weak in health, felt guilty over all the massacres that wouldn’t have happened if he had succeeded. He returned in 1270, though he could get no other king to accompany him. Both Louis and his son died in Egypt within the year, and the army lost more men to fever and dysentery than to war. Louis’s brother Charles evacuated what was left of the army, and when a small force of English knights arrived to relieve him (the Ninth Crusade?) they were too late. So everybody went home, where they probably should have stayed to begin with.
In 1274, at the Council of Lyon, Pope Gregory X called for another Crusade to rescue the Holy Land. He got dead silence in reply, punctuated by a few cricket noises. European kings were now in debt up to their eyeballs, most were at war or planning to be with one another, and they were all sick of pumping money into the Middle East. By 1291, the Mamluks conquered the last Crusader stronghold of Acre on the Levantine coast, massacring anyone left alive. The era of the Crusades was finished.