The Crusades

"God wills it!"

On 27 November 1095, in a field outside the town of Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II preached one of the most consequential sermons in history. Eastern Christians, he said, were being attacked by the Turks. Holy places were being defiled. Knights of the West, instead of fighting each other, should take up arms to help their brothers and free Jerusalem. Those who went with pure motives would receive full remission of the penance due for their sins. The crowd shouted Deus vult!, "God wills it!", and many sewed crosses onto their clothes. From the Latin crux, cross, came the later name "crusade."

Why the Crusades happened

Several causes came together:

• A plea from Byzantium: In 1071 the Seljuk Turks crushed the Byzantine army at Manzikert and overran most of Asia Minor. The emperor Alexios I Komnenos I asked the pope for mercenaries.
• Pilgrimage: Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a deeply loved act of devotion. Reports, some exaggerated, of attacks on pilgrims stirred outrage. A crusade was an armed pilgrimage.
• Penance: Knights lived by violence and feared hell. The crusade offered a way to fight that would save rather than damn their souls. This was a revolutionary idea: warfare as an act of penance.
• Papal leadership: Urban, heir to the Gregorian Reform, saw a chance to lead Christendom and perhaps reunite with the Eastern church.
• Other motives: Land, adventure, wealth and escape from debt or family problems mattered too, though recent historians stress that crusading was ruinously expensive and that most crusaders were genuinely devout.

The First Crusade

Urban's call produced a response far beyond what anyone expected. First came the "People's Crusade," tens of thousands of poor pilgrims stirred up by preachers like Peter the Hermit. On the way some bands massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz in 1096, despite the efforts of some local bishops to protect them. "Why fight God's enemies far away," they asked, "when they are here among us?" The People's Crusade itself was wiped out by the Turks in Asia Minor.

The main armies of knights, led by great lords from France, Normandy and southern Italy, gathered at Constantinople in 1097. Relations with the Byzantines were tense from the start. The crusaders captured Nicaea, survived a terrible siege at Antioch (1098), and finally reached Jerusalem. On 15 July 1099, they stormed the city. They massacred much of its Muslim and Jewish population. One crusader chronicle boasts of men wading in blood up to their ankles, an image probably exaggerated but reflecting real slaughter. Then they went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to weep and give thanks.

The crusaders set up four crusader states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli. Western Christians called them "Outremer," "beyond the sea." They survived for nearly two centuries, always outnumbered.

Routes of the main Crusades

Warrior monks

A new kind of religious order appeared: the military orders, whose members took monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but also fought. The Knights Templar (founded 1119) protected pilgrims. The Knights Hospitaller began as nurses in a Jerusalem hospital and became soldiers too. The great abbot Bernard of Clairvaux of Clairvaux wrote in praise of this "new knighthood" and later preached the Second Crusade. The Templars grew enormously rich as bankers, which led to their brutal suppression by the king of France in 1307–1312.

Saladin and the Third Crusade

Muslim resistance gradually united. Edessa fell in 1144, and the Second Crusade (1147–1149), preached by Bernard and led by the kings of France and Germany, was a humiliating failure. Then a brilliant Kurdish general, Saladin, united Egypt and Syria. In 1187 he crushed the crusader army at the Horns of Hattin and retook Jerusalem. Unlike the crusaders in 1099, he allowed most of the inhabitants to leave on payment of ransom. He became a legend of chivalry, admired even in the West.

The shock launched the Third Crusade (1189–1192), led by three kings. The German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa drowned crossing a river in Turkey. Philip II of France went home early. Richard I "the Lionheart" of England won battles and recaptured Acre but could not take Jerusalem. He negotiated a treaty with Saladin allowing Christian pilgrims access to the holy city.

Crusades gone wrong

The crusading idea was soon turned in other directions:

• The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), launched by Innocent III, ended up attacking Christian cities: first Zara in Dalmatia, then Constantinople itself, which the crusaders brutally sacked in 1204 (see The Great Schism).
• Crusades against heretics: The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) against the Cathars of southern France was savage. At the sack of Béziers in 1209, a papal legate is said, by a later chronicler, to have answered a question about how to tell Catholics from heretics with "Kill them all; God will know his own."
• Northern Crusades against pagan Baltic peoples, led by the Teutonic Knights, combined conquest and forced conversion.
• Spain: The Reconquista against Muslim Spain was given crusade status.
• Political crusades against the pope's Christian enemies, such as Frederick II.
• The "Children's Crusade" (1212), a mass movement of young people and the poor, ended in tragedy and, according to legend, slavery.

Later crusades to the East, including two led by the saintly French king Louis IX of France, failed. In 1291 Acre fell to the Mamluks of Egypt, and the crusader states were gone.

Another way: Francis and the Sultan

In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade's siege of Damietta in Egypt, Francis of Assisi of Assisi walked across the battle lines unarmed to meet the Sultan al-Kamil. He apparently hoped to convert him or die as a martyr. The Sultan received him courteously, listened, and sent him back safely. The episode has become a symbol of an alternative to holy war: encounter and witness instead of the sword.

What did the Crusades leave behind?

• For Jews: Crusading zeal unleashed waves of massacres in Europe, beginning a long period of worsening persecution.
• For Eastern Christians: The Crusades poisoned relations between Catholics and Orthodox, especially after 1204, and weakened Byzantium, which eventually fell to the Ottomans in 1453.
• For the papacy: They increased papal prestige at first. They also developed the system of indulgences, remission of penance granted for crusading and later for money, which Martin Luther would attack.
• For Europe: Contact with the East boosted trade, especially for Venice and Genoa, and some exchange of ideas, though the main channel for learning was Spain and Sicily.
• For Muslims: At the time the Crusades were a fairly minor episode for most of the Islamic world. In modern times, partly under the influence of colonialism, they became a powerful symbol of Western aggression.