Numerous histories, plus oral storytelling, often in the form of Chansons de geste , popular within the early flowerings of the chivalric age, celebrated the First Crusade. Historians have previously looked at these narratives to construct the framework of events but now many scholars are looking behind these texts to consider more deeply the reasons why they were written, the different styles of writing, the use of classical and biblical motifs, the inter-relationships and the borrowings between the texts.
Another area to receive increasing attention is the reaction of the Muslim world. Robert Irwin draws attention to this in his article, as well as considering the impact of the crusade on the Muslims of the region.
It was a fortunate coincidence that during the mids the death of senior leaders in the Seljuk world meant that the crusaders encountered opponents who were primarily concerned with their own political infighting rather than seeing the threat from outside. Given that the First Crusade was, self-evidently, a novel event, this was understandable. The lack of jihad spirit was also evident, as lamented by as-Sulami, a Damascene preacher whose urging of the ruling classes to pull themselves together and fulfil their religious duty was largely ignored until the time of Nur ad-Din and Saladin onwards.
The Frankish settlers had to fit in to the complex cultural and religious blend of the Near East. Their numbers were so few that once they had captured places they very quickly needed to adapt their behaviour from the militant holy war rhetoric of Pope Urban II to a more pragmatic stance of relative religious toleration, with truces and even occasional alliances with various Muslim neighbours.
Had they oppressed the majority local population and many Muslims and eastern Christians lived under Frankish rule , there would have been no-one to farm the lands or to tax and their economy would simply have collapsed.
Recent archaeological work by the Israeli scholar Ronnie Ellenblum has done much to show that the Franks did not, as was previously believed, live solely in the cities, separated from the local populace. Local Christian communities often existed alongside them, sometimes even sharing churches. The Frankish states of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem established themselves in the complex religious, political and cultural landscape of the Near East. One of the early rulers of Jerusalem had married into native Armenian Christian nobility and thus Queen Melisende had a strong interest in supporting the indigenous as well as the Latin Church.
The quirks of genetics, coupled with a high mortality rate among male rulers, meant that women exerted greater power than previously supposed given the war-torn environment of the Latin East and prevailing religious attitudes towards women as weak temptresses. It still needed a strong personality to survive and, in the case of Melisende, that was certainly so, as Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts in a article, which also gives a sense of the city of Jerusalem during the 12th century, as well as some contemporary Muslim views of the Christian settlers.
The Franks were always short on manpower but were a dynamic group who developed innovative institutions, such as the Military Orders, to survive. The Orders were founded to help look after pilgrims; in the case of the Hospitallers, through healthcare; in that of the Templars, to guard visitors on the road to the River Jordan. Soon both were fully-fledged religious institutions, whose members took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
It proved a popular concept and donations from admiring and grateful pilgrims meant that the Military Orders developed a major role as landowners, as the custodians of castles and as the first real standing army in Christendom. They were independent of the control of the local rulers and could, at times, cause trouble for the king or squabble with one another.
The Templars and Hospitallers also held huge tracts of land across western Europe, which provided income for the fighting machine in the Levant, especially the construction of the castles that became so vital to the Christian hold on the region. Fortified by this powerful call to live up to the deeds of their first crusading forefathers, coupled with the inspiring rhetoric of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the rulers of France and Germany took the cross to mark the start of royal involvement in the Crusades.
Christian rulers in Iberia joined with the Genoese in attacking the towns of Almeria in southern Spain and Tortosa in the north-east ; likewise the nobles of northern Germany and the rulers of Denmark launched an expedition against the pagan Wends of the Baltic shore around Stettin.
While this was no grand plan of Pope Eugenius but rather a reaction to appeals sent to him, it shows the confidence in crusading at this time. In the event, this optimism proved deeply unfounded. A group of Anglo-Norman, Flemish and Rhineland crusaders captured Lisbon in and the other Iberian campaigns were also successful but the Baltic campaign achieved virtually nothing and the most prestigious expedition of all, that to the Holy Land, was a disaster, as Jonathan Phillips explains in his article.
The two armies lacked discipline, supplies and finance, and both were badly mauled by the Seljuk Turks as they crossed Asia Minor. Then, in conjunction with the Latin settlers, the crusaders laid siege to the most important Muslim city in Syria, Damascus. Yet, after only four days, fear of relief forces led by Zengi's son, Nur ad-Din, prompted an ignominious retreat.
The crusaders blamed the Franks of the Near East for this failure, accusing them of accepting a pay-off to retreat. Whatever the truth in this, the defeat at Damascus certainly damaged crusade enthusiasm in the West and over the next three decades, in spite of increasingly elaborate and frantic appeals for help, there was no major crusade to the Holy Land.
To regard the Franks as entirely enfeebled would, however, be a serious error. They captured Ascalon in to complete their control of the Levantine coast, an important advance for the security of trade and pilgrim traffic in terms of reducing harassment by Muslim shipping. The following year, however, Nur ad-Din took power in Damascus to mark the first time that the cities had been joined with Aleppo under the rule of the same man during the crusader period, something that greatly increased the threat to the Franks.
Nur ad-Din's considerable personal piety, his encouragement of madrasas teaching colleges and the composition of jihad poetry and texts extolling the virtues of Jerusalem created a bond between the religious and the ruling classes that had been conspicuously lacking since the crusaders arrived in the East. During the s Nur ad-Din, acting as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy, seized control of Shi'ite Egypt, dramatically raising the strategic pressure on the Franks and at the same time enhancing the financial resources at his disposal through the fertility of the Nile Delta and the vital port of Alexandria.
This period of the history of the Latin East is related in detail by the most important historian of the age, William, Archbishop of Tyre, as Peter Edbury describes. William was an immensely educated man, who soon became embroiled in the bitter political struggles of the late s and s during the reign of the tragic figure of King Baldwin IV , a youth afflicted by leprosy.
The need to establish his successor provided an opportunity for rival factions to emerge and to cause the Franks to expend much of their energy on bickering with each other. That is not to say that they were unable to inflict serious damage on Nur ad-Din's ambitious successor, Saladin, who from his base in Egypt, hoped to usurp his former master's dynasty, draw the Muslim Near East together and to expel the Franks from Jerusalem. Norman Housely expertly relates this period in his article.
In , however, the Franks triumphed at the Battle of Montgisard, a victory that was widely reported in western Europe and did little to convince people of the settlers' very real need for help. The construction in and of the large castle of Jacob's Ford, only a day's ride from Damascus, was another aggressive gesture that required Saladin to destroy the place. Yet by the sultan had gathered a large, but fragile coalition of warriors from Egypt, Syria and Iraq that was sufficient to bring the Franks into the field and to inflict upon them a terrible defeat at Hattin on July 4th.
Within months, Jerusalem fell and Saladin had recovered Islam's third most important city after Mecca and Medina, an achievement that still echoes down the centuries.
News of the calamitous fall of Jerusalem sparked grief and outrage in the West. Pope Urban III was said to have died of a heart attack at the news and his successor, Gregory VIII, issued an emotive crusade appeal and the rulers of Europe began to organise their forces. Frederick Barbarossa's German army successfully defeated the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor only for the emperor to drown crossing a river in southern Turkey.
Soon afterwards many of the Germans died of sickness and Saladin escaped facing this formidable enemy. The Franks in the Levant had managed to cling onto the city of Tyre and then besieged the most important port on the coast, Acre.
This provided a target for western forces and it was here in the summer of that Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart landed. The siege had lasted almost two years and the arrival of the two western kings and their troops gave the Christians the momentum they needed. The city surrendered and Saladin's prestige was badly dented. Philip soon returned home and while Richard made two attempts to march on Jerusalem, fears as to its long-term prospects after he left meant that the holy city remained in Muslim hands.
Thus the Third Crusade failed in its ultimate objective, although it did at least allow the Franks to recover a strip of lands along the coast to provide a springboard for future expeditions. For his part, Saladin had suffered a series of military setbacks but, crucially, he had held onto Jerusalem for Islam. Portrait of Saladin. The pontificate of Innocent III saw another phase in the expansion of crusading. Campaigns in the Baltic advanced further and the holy war in Iberia stepped forwards too.
In Muslims had crushed Christian forces at the Battle of Alarcos, which, so soon after the disaster at Hattin, seemed to show God's deep displeasure with his people. By , however, the rulers of Iberia managed to pull together to rout the Muslims at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa to seal a major step in the recovery of the peninsula.
That said, the particular cultural, political and religious make-up of the region mean that it would be wrong, as in the Holy Land, to characterise relations between religious groups as constant warfare, a situation outlined by Robert Burns and Paul Chevedden. In southern France, meanwhile, efforts to curb the Cathar heresy had failed and, in a bid to defeat this sinister threat to the Church in its own backyard, Innocent authorised a crusade to the area. See the piece by Richard Cavendish.
Catharism was a dualist faith, albeit with a few links to mainstream Christian practice, but it also had its own hierarchy and was intent upon replacing the existing elite.
Years of warfare ensued as the crusaders, led by Simon de Monfort, sought to drive the Cathars out, but ultimately their roots in southern French society meant they could endure and it was only the more pervasive techniques of the Inquisition, initiated in the s, that succeeded where force had failed.
The most infamous episode of the age was the Fourth Crusade which saw another effort to recover Jerusalem end up sacking Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world.
Jonathan Phillips describes this episode. The reasons for this were a combination of long-standing tensions between the Latin Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox; the need for the crusaders to fulfil the terms of a wildly over-optimistic contract for transportation to the Levant with the Venetians and the offer to pay this off by a claimant to the Byzantine throne.
This combination of circumstances brought the crusaders to the walls of Constantinople and when their young candidate was murdered and the locals turned definitively against them they attacked and stormed the city. At first Innocent was delighted that Constantinople was under Latin authority but as he learned of the violence and looting that had accompanied the conquest he was horrified and castigated the crusaders for 'the perversion of their pilgrimage'.
One consequence of was the creation of a series of Frankish States in Greece that, over time, also needed support. Thus, in the course of the 13th century, crusades were preached against these Christians, although by Constantinople itself was back in Greek hands. In spite of this series of disasters, it is interesting to see that crusading remained an attractive concept, something made manifest by the near-legendary Children's Crusade of Inspired by divine visions, two groups of young peasants best described as youths, rather than children gathered around Cologne and near Chartres in the belief that their purity would ensure divine approval and enable them to recover the Holy Land.
The German group crossed the Alps and some reached the port of Genoa, where the harsh realities of having no money or real hope of achieving anything was made plain when they were refused passage to the East and the entire enterprise collapsed. I cringe when I think of the centuries of slaughter and pillaging done in the name of Christ, with the blessing of the church.
But the crusaders were real Christians. They deplored their sins. They longed for forgiveness. They loved fellow Christians in the East. They yearned to do something noble and lasting for their Lord. They prayed and fasted before battles and praised God after victories.
Their devotion and courage make ours look juvenile. So much of what they did was wrong. Yes, and all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Better to try to understand the crusaders in the context of their times. This issue focuses on crusades to the Holy Land, made between and , especially on the First Crusade.
But church-sponsored military action, with an indulgence attached, continued against unbelievers and bad believers heretics through the sixteenth century. Interpretation of the crusades changed again towards the end of the 19th century: viewed as heroic enterprises led by pure and generous knights.
The idea and use of the word evolved accordingly, designating any noble cause. Both world wars were dominated by ideologies of simplistic opposition of good against evil. This new meaning of the word crusade fitted well this conception. As a result, crusades against diseases , war or unemployment , crusades for temperance , children or good manners flourished in western societies in the s and s, particularly in Catholic and Anglo-Saxons countries.
The final change occurred in the s. Criticism against colonialism and western interventions considered the medieval expeditions in the Middle East as acts of racism and violent conquest. Positive meanings became more frequently condemned or avoided. Christian supremacists remain faithful to the early 20th-century visions and consider the crusade as a holy cause. Muslim fundamentalists are influenced by later conceptions and condemn them as an act of imperialism.
In both cases, the crusades are read as a basic opposition between Christians and Muslims.
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