Crusades

 

The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to recover Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Islamic rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the recovery of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of Crusades were fought, providing a focal point of European history for centuries.

These were a series of military campaigns organised by popes and Christian western powers to take Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control and then defend those gains. There were eight major official crusades between 1095 and 1270, as well as many more unofficial ones. Although there were many crusades, none would be as successful as the first, and by 1291 the Crusader-created states in the Middle East were absorbed into the Mamluk Sultanate. Involving emperors, kings, and Europe's nobility, as well as thousands of knights and more humble warriors, the Crusades would have tremendous consequences for all involved. The effects, besides the obvious death, ruined lives, destruction and wasted resources, ranged from the collapse of the Byzantine Empire to a souring of relations and intolerance between religions and peoples in the East and West which still blights governments and societies today.

In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine emperor Alexios I against the Seljuk Turks and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe, there was an enthusiastic response. The first Crusaders had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations, opportunities for renown, and economic or political advantage. Later crusades were conducted by generally more organized armies, sometimes led by a king. All were granted papal indulgences. Initial successes established four Crusader states: the County of Edessa; the Principality of Antioch; the Kingdom of Jerusalem; and the County of Tripoli. The Crusader presence remained in the region in some form until the fall of Acre in 1291. After this, there were no further crusades to recover the Holy Land.

Concurrent military activities in the Iberian Peninsula against the Moors and in northeastern Europe against pagan West Slav, Baltic, and Finnic peoples (the Northern Crusades) have also been called crusades – sometimes retroactively, long after the event had ended - due to the facts that they also had central approval by the Roman Catholic Church and that the military campaigns were organized in comparable fashion, with often similar rhetoric, symbolism, and banners as applied during the campaigns in the Middle East. Other church-sanctioned campaigns called crusades were fought against heretical Christian sects (precursors of proto-Protestantism), against the Ottoman Empire, and for political reasons. Unsanctioned by the church, there were also several Popular Crusades of ordinary citizens.

Proclaimed a crusade in 1123, the struggle between the Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula eventually became better known as the Reconquista in European historiography, and only ended in 1492 with the fall of the Muslim Emirate of Granada. From 1147, campaigns in Northern Europe against pagan tribes were considered crusades. In 1199, Pope Innocent III began the practice of proclaiming crusades against Christian heretics. In the 13th century, crusading was used against the Cathars in Languedoc and against Bosnia; this practice continued against the Waldensians in Savoy and the Hussites in Bohemia in the 15th century and against Protestants in the 16th. From the mid-14th century, crusading rhetoric was used in response to the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and ended around 1699 with the War of the Holy League.

Causes & Motivations

The 11th century First Crusade (1095-1102) set a precedent for the heady mix of politics, religion, and violence that would drive all the future campaigns. The Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118) saw an opportunity to gain western military aid in defeating the Muslim Seljuks who were eating away at his empire in Asia Minor. When the Seljuks took over Jerusalem (from their fellow Muslims, not the Christians who had lost the city centuries earlier) in 1087, this provided the catalyst to mobilise western Christians into action. Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) responded to this call for help, motivated by a desire to strengthen the Papacy and milk the prestige to become the undisputed head of the whole Christian church including the Orthodox East. Taking back the Holy City of Jerusalem and such sites as the Holy Sepulchre, considered the tomb of Jesus Christ, after four centuries of Muslim control would be a real coup. Consequently, the Pope issued a Papal Legate and set in motion a preaching campaign across Europe, which appealed for western nobles and knights to sharpen their swords, suit up and get themselves over to the Holy Land to defend Christendom's most precious sites and any Christians there in danger.

The warriors who 'took the cross', as the oath to crusade was known, and made the incredibly arduous journey to fight in a foreign land were motivated by any number of things. First and foremost was the religious aspect - the defence of Christians and the faith, they were promised by the Pope, brought a remission of sins and a fast-track route to Heaven. There were also ideals of chivalry and doing the right thing (although chivalry was in its infancy at the time of the First Crusade), peer and family pressure, the chance to gain material wealth, perhaps even land and titles, and the desire to travel and see the great holy sites in person. Many warriors had far less glamorous ambitions and were simply compelled to follow their lords, some sought to escape debts and justice, others merely sought a decent living with regular meals included. These motivations would continue to guarantee large numbers of recruits throughout all subsequent campaigns.

Terminology

In modern historiography, the term "crusade" first referred to military expeditions undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to the Holy Land. The conflicts to which the term is applied has been extended to include other campaigns initiated, supported and sometimes directed by the Roman Catholic Church against pagans, heretics or for alleged religious ends. These differed from other Christian religious wars in that they were considered a penitential exercise, and so earned participants forgiveness for all confessed sins. What constituted a "crusade" has been understood in diverse ways, particularly regarding the early Crusades, and the definition remains a matter of debate among contemporary historians. The meaning of a "crusade" is generally viewed in one of four ways. Traditionalists view Crusades as only those to the Holy Land from 1095-1291 (as shown in the Infobox). Pluralists view Crusades are military expeditions that enjoyed papal endorsement, including those to the Holy Land before and after 1291, to Northern Europe and Iberia, and against Christians. Popularists focus on the popular groundswells of religious fervour. Generalists focus on the basic phenomenon of Latin holy wars. Most modern Crusades historians consider a combination of pluralism and popularism, which is also the focus of this article.

14th-century miniature of the Second Crusade battle from the Estoire d'Eracles

At the time of the First Crusade, iter, "journey", and peregrinatio, "pilgrimage" were used for the campaign. Crusader terminology remained largely indistinguishable from that of Christian pilgrimage during the 12th century. A specific term for a crusader in the form of crucesignatus-"one signed by the cross"-, however, emerged in the early 12th century. This led to the French croisade-the way of the cross. By the mid 13th century the cross became the major descriptor of the crusades with crux transmarina-"the cross overseas"-used for crusades in the eastern Mediterranean, and crux cismarina-"the cross this side of the sea"-for those in Europe. The use of croiserie, "crusade" in Middle English can be dated to c.1300, but the modern English "crusade" dates to the early 1700s.

The Arabic word for struggle or contest, particularly one for the propagation of Islam-jihād-was used for a religious war of Muslims against unbelievers, and it was believed by some Muslims that the Quran and Hadith made this a duty. "Franks" and "Latins" were used by the peoples of the Near East during the crusades for western Europeans, distinguishing them from the Byzantine Christians who were known as "Greeks". "Saracen" was used for an Arab Muslim, derived from a Greek and Roman name for the nomadic peoples of the Syro-Arabian desert. Crusader sources used the term "Syrians" to describe Arabic speaking Christians who were members of the Greek Orthodox Church, and "Jacobites" for those who were members of the Syrian Orthodox Church. The Crusader states of Syria and Palestine were known as the "Outremer" from the French outre-mer, or "the land beyond the sea".

Crusades and the Holy Land, 1095-1291

The Crusades to the Holy Land are the best known of the religious wars associated with the term, beginning in 1095 and lasting some two centuries. These Crusades began with the fervent desire to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims, and ran through eight major numbered crusades and dozens of minor crusades over the period.

Background

The Arab-Byzantine wars from 629 to the 1050s resulted in the conquest of the Levant and Egypt by the Muslim Rashidun Caliphate. Jerusalem was captured after a half-year siege in 637. In 1025, the Byzantine emperor Basil II was able to extend the empire's territorial recovery to its furthest extent in 1025, with frontiers stretching east to Iran. The empire's relationships with its Islamic neighbours were no more quarrelsome than its relationships with the Western Christians, after the East-West Schism of 1054. 

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

The political situation in the Middle East was changed by waves of Turkic migration - in particular, the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the 10th century. Previously a minor ruling clan from Transoxiana, they were recent converts to Islam who migrated into Persia. They conquered Iran, Iraq and the Near East to the Seljuk Empire. Byzantium's attempted confrontation in 1071 to suppress the Seljuks' sporadic raiding led to the defeat at the Battle of Manzikert, eventually the occupation of most of the Anatolian peninsula. In the same year, Jerusalem was taken from the Fatimids by the Turkish warlord Atsiz, who seized most of Syria and Palestine throughout the Middle East. The Seljuk hold on the city resulted in pilgrims reporting difficulties and the oppression of Christians.

Consequences & Effects

The Crusades had tremendous consequences for all those involved. Besides the obvious death, destruction and hardships the wars caused, they also had significant political and social effects. The Byzantine Empire ceased to be, the popes became the de facto leaders of the Christian Church, the Italian maritime states cornered the Mediterranean market in East-West trade, the Balkans were Christianized, and the Iberian peninsula saw the Moors pushed back to North Africa. The idea of crusading was stretched even further to provide a religious justification for the conquest of the New World in the 15th and 16th century. The sheer cost of the crusades saw the royal houses of Europe grow in power as that of the barons and nobles correspondingly declined. People travelled a little more, especially on pilgrimages, and they read and sang songs about the crusades, opening up a little wider their view of the world, even if it turned out to be a prejudiced one for many.

In the longer term, there was the development of the military orders, which eventually became tied with chivalry, many of which exist in one form or another today. Europeans developed a greater sense of their mutual common identity and culture, which also resulted in a sharper degree of xenophobia against non-Christians - Jews and heretics, in particular. Literature and art perpetuated crusading legends on both sides - Chrisitan and Muslim, creating heroes and tragedies in a complex web of myth, imagery, and language which would be applied, very often inaccurately, to the problems and conflicts of the 21st century.