The Crusades

A Beginner's Guide

Andrew Jotischky

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780745022
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1095 Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade to recover Jerusalem from the Seljuq Turks. Tens of thousands of people joined his cause, making it the single largest event of the Middle Ages. The conflict would rage for over 200 years, transforming Christian and Islamic relations forever.Andrew Jotischky takes readers through the key events, focussing on the experience of crusading, from both sides. Featuring textboxes with fascinating details on the key sites, figures and battles, this essential primer asks all the crucial questions: What were the motivations of the crusaders? What was it like to be a crusader or to live in a crusading society? And how do these events, nearly a thousand years ago, still shape the politics of today?

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‌What were the Crusades?

Toward the end of the first decade of the twelfth century, a monk from northern France sat down to write an account of the First Crusade, which had captured Jerusalem from the Seljuq Turks in 1099. He was looking back over the events of ten years before, in which a force of perhaps 60,000 mostly French, Flemish, Normans, Germans and Italians, including fighting men and unarmed pilgrims, men and women, had travelled from western Europe across the Balkans and modern-day Turkey into Syria, and south to Jerusalem. Only a fraction of the original force survived the three-year odyssey, but the remnants, battered by the climate, the hazards of travel and shortages of food and fodder for their horses, seized the city of Jerusalem amid scenes of slaughter in July 1099. The monk, Robert of Rheims, struggled to find a similar phenomenon with which to compare the First Crusade. In the end, he decided that it was, simply, the most important event in human history since the birth of Jesus Christ.

There are very few historical phenomena that are as susceptible to re-invention as the Crusades. The term has been used and re-used so many times since its original coining that it has come to have a much wider application than originally intended. For much of the twentieth century, in the Western world, ‘crusade’ was used metaphorically in public discourse and invariably in contexts where some moral virtue was to be associated in the reader’s mind with the act of crusading. One of the most famous is Crusade in Europe, the title used by General Dwight D. Eisenhower for his account of the D-Day invasion in 1944. But ‘crusade’ has also been used to describe campaigns for the public good in non-military spheres: we have become used to reading in newspapers about crusades against crime, against drugs, even litter. The carelessness with which the word has been used indicates its loss of real meaning, and this loss of meaning itself shows the amnesia of modern Western society about its past. The Crusades were a feature of a long-dead society in which religious values governed political action: an age of faith and of barbarism. In the West, at least, the Crusades were an anachronism, and the word could thus be re-used for more relevant social contexts.

This view of the Crusades tends to see them as a series of events more or less contingent on Western European society. One reason why the Crusades are still important, however, is because the First Crusade of 1095–9 was not a single event but a process. After the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, a small group of crusaders stayed in the East and established new states along the Levant coast from the south-east corner of modern-day Turkey to the Sinai peninsula. These territories – the Crusader States – were western European lordships in which political and economic control lay mainly in the hands of the descendants of the crusaders and subsequent immigrants: the Franks.

The Crusader States lasted about two hundred years on the Asian mainland before the Franks were themselves displaced by military conquest in 1291. Crusading itself, however, continued to take place well into the sixteenth century. Even before the fall of the Crusader States, crusading had been extended into other geographical areas: not only to places where Muslims lived, such as Spain, but into the north-east of Europe where the concept of holy war was applied against the pagan Livonians, and even into the heartland of Western Christendom, to aid in the Church’s struggle against heresy. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the rise of the Ottomans aroused fears of a Turkish invasion of Christendom, and crusading changed its focus to mobilize Europeans to meet this new threat. Crusades in the later Middle Ages were launched against a wide variety of targets: not only the Turks, but also political enemies of the papacy. The Spanish Armada of 1588 borrowed from the language developed centuries earlier for crusading. The concept of holy war for the purposes of converting the world to Christianity, which became one of the justifications for crusading in the Middle Ages, was also used to rationalize the conquest of the New World by Spain in the sixteenth century.

Everyone knows, or thinks they know, what is meant by the term ‘crusade’, but even professional historians find it difficult to agree on a definition. One reason for this is that, surprisingly perhaps, the word ‘crusade’ was not used by or even known to the original crusaders. Instead, they were usually known simply as ‘pilgrims’, and the Crusades themselves as ‘the business of the cross’. The word ‘crusader’ first appears in the twelfth century to describe someone who had ‘signed himself with the cross’ – literally, adopted the sign of the cross on his clothing as a public sign of his vow to undertake the holy war – but did not become common until about a hundred years after the First Crusade. As a noun describing an event or phenomenon – the holy war – the term took even longer to emerge and was not in common use until the seventeenth century. The implications of this are worth dwelling on. For one thing, it could suggest that people at the time had no real need for a special word to characterize what they were doing. Moreover, it could mean that they did not regard what we think of as crusading as anything particularly special. Perhaps a crusade was simply a different kind of war, waged against a new enemy – the Muslims – or in a particular part of the world. But this does not seem wholly convincing, because, in fact, we know that people did see the First Crusade (1095–9) as something special.

One reason we know this is the large number of accounts written of the crusade either soon after 1099 or in the next twenty years. The first, an anonymous account known as The Deeds of the Franks, may have been written within the first twelve months of the capture of Jerusalem. It circulated widely and was taken back to western Europe to be read and copied as an authoritative version of the events of the expedition. The Deeds of the Franks is especially valuable because it is an eyewitness account, probably written by a cleric who accompanied one of the crusading contingents. Most of the contemporary or near-contemporary accounts were not by eyewitnesses, however, but by monks or other clerical writers – the professional historians of the day – who had read the Deeds or heard reports of the action from returning crusaders. In total, over a dozen such accounts survive. This figure does not include contemporary writings in which the crusade is mentioned as part of a larger series of events, but only those that were written specifically about the crusade. This is important because it was relatively unusual for writers to devote an entire book to a single event in this way. Most history-writing was in the form of a long chronicle, sometimes centred on the history of a particular monastery and beginning with its foundation. In such histories, regional, national and international events were described, but they were not the main purpose of the writing. The contrast between the reporting of the crusade and of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, of which only about six contemporary accounts survive, is striking. For one thing, it shows the universal interest in the crusade across the whole of Christendom. For another, the fact that writers continued to find the crusade important subject matter even years after the events they were describing shows that interest in the crusade had not diminished. In fact, writers read and commented on each others’ versions. One monastic chronicler, Guibert of Nogent, the abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy in northern France, said in the preface to his Deeds of God through the Franks that his reason for writing was that he had recently read another account by an eyewitness, Fulcher of Chartres, and did not think it fit for purpose. An account of an event such as the crusade, explained Guibert, deserved to be written in much better style and with a more considered approach to the question of what the crusade was and how it should be seen as an event in human history. For Guibert, what mattered was not so much reporting what had happened between 1095 and 1099, but the meaning of these events in a larger scheme of understanding – real history, in other words, as classical authors had written it. The events themselves explained how God worked through human agency to accomplish his purposes, and the deeds of individuals provided moral examples of worthy or unworthy conduct.

None of these contemporary historians of the crusade seems to have thought that the events they were describing were the start of a new phenomenon that would be a feature of medieval life for centuries to come. Just as, after 1918, people looked back on ‘the war to end all wars’, in the years immediately after 1099 contemporaries had little reason to suppose that the events of what we call ‘the First Crusade’ would ever be repeated. Even those historians who continued their accounts after 1099, so as to cover the first generation of Frankish settlers in the East, did not write about the local wars in which they became embroiled in the course of establishing new states in the same way as they did the events of 1095–9. Doubtless because later crusades were unable to repeat the same military success, the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 became a rallying cry for subsequent generations looking back to past glories. The knights who had stormed the walls of the city were lauded as Christian heroes, and the first Frankish ruler of Jerusalem, the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon, assumed legendary status in later medieval literature. Noble families invented crusading pedigrees in order to associate themselves in retrospect with the valorous crusaders of 1099. In launching a new crusade in 1145, Pope Eugenius III referred explicitly to the opportunity for a new generation of knights to cover themselves in glory as their grandfathers had done.

Surprisingly, given the impact that it had on contemporary and later writers, nobody could quite agree on how the crusade had started. One version is recorded by a German chronicler, Albert of Aachen, who thought that the idea for a military expedition to Jerusalem had begun with a character called Peter the Hermit. According to Albert, Peter had been shocked to find, while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, how badly the local Christians were treated by their rulers, the Seljuq Turks. He sought an audience with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the spiritual leader of the Christians living in the Holy Land, and asked what the West could do to help. Send an army to defeat the Turks and free us from persecution, replied the patriarch. Once back home, Peter relayed this message to the pope, who launched his crusade. The Seljuqs were a highly militarized people from central Asia who had taken over key positions of power in most of the Near East in the middle of the eleventh century. The Abbasid regime that had ruled the region since the eighth century had been weakened by succession disputes, and by about 1000 CE Egypt was in control of a rival Shi‘ite regime, the Fatimids, while northern Syria had been reconquered by the Byzantine Empire. The Seljuqs, who had converted to Islam only a couple of generations before their arrival in the Near East, made life difficult for both Christian and Jewish communities in the Holy Land. There had been bouts of hostility toward Christians under the Abbasids and Fatimids, especially in 1009, when the Egyptian Fatimid ruler Al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christ’s burial place. But although the Christian communities of the Holy Land had periodically looked to the West for protection since the ninth century, reaction to these events in Europe had not provoked any military response on their behalf. Why should it have been so different in the 1090s?

Map 1: The Crusader States

One reason is that, over the course of the eleventh century, Jerusalem had become much better known to Europeans. The conversion of the Hungarians to Christianity – achieved bloodily by their king, István, in the early eleventh century – had succeeded in opening up a previously unusable land route from western Europe to Constantinople and the East. This meant that pilgrimage from the West, though still an uncertain and expensive undertaking, was within the bounds of possibility for more people. Consequently, large groups of pilgrims made the journey eastward to venerate the tomb of Christ. We have contemporary accounts of such massed pilgrimages from France and Germany in the 1020s, 1030s and 1060s. We also know of many individual noblemen and women who made the pilgrimage – sometimes, like the count of Anjou, Fulk the Black, going as many as three times. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was encouraged and promoted by monasteries, and abbots set an example: at least half a dozen Norman abbots are known to have made pilgrimages to the Holy Land between the 1070s and 1090s. But monks and laypeople from France, England, Germany, Spain and Italy also flocked to Jerusalem. Relics were brought back from the Holy Land, and new churches were founded and dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. In monasteries all over Europe, Easter was celebrated with re-enactments of the resurrection that involved processions made around wooden copies of the Holy Sepulchre. One German bishop, Meinwerk of Paderborn, even sent monks to Jerusalem to take the measurements of the Holy Sepulchre so as to be sure that the new copy he wanted to make would be accurate. Jerusalem, symbolized by the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, had entered the European consciousness as never before. There was thus every reason for Europeans to respond to an appeal from the Christians of the Holy Land for deliverance from oppression – assuming that the story told by Albert was true. Although the details of his account of Peter the Hermit may reflect later invention, the essence of the story of an appeal to Western powers is not in itself implausible.

The Franks

The term francus – more commonly its plural form, franci – came into prominence during the Crusades as a collective noun to describe the crusaders. Technically, Franks were the French-speaking inhabitants of the territories that came to make up France, but contemporary chroniclers needed a term to designate the collectivity of Westerners who embarked on crusades and settled in the East, to distinguish them both from the Muslim enemy and from the native inhabitants of the lands they conquered. Thus, in the terminology of crusading and the Crusader States, ‘Franks’ can mean not only French speakers but Germans, Italians and even English.

For most chroniclers of the time, however, the initiative came not from the East but from the West. According to the author of The Deeds of the Franks, the crusade happened when it did simply because the time was right. The knighthood of Europe responded to a widespread feeling that, in the words of the chronicle, the time had come for Christians to take up their cross and follow Christ – literally, to Jerusalem. But most of the chroniclers who wrote their histories after some years, and who were more reflective about the meaning of the crusade, thought that it must have begun with a flourish. The particular moment they saw as the beginning of the crusade was a church council summoned by Pope Urban II in November 1095 at Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auvergne region of south-central France. Here, on the penultimate day of the council, 27 November, Urban preached a rousing sermon to the assembled crowds in a field outside the town. Urban’s famous ‘crusading sermon’ thus marks the starting point of what became a movement lasting hundreds of years and affecting untold millions of people across Europe and the Near East. It is particularly frustrating, then, that no single authoritative version of his words survives – only the reports of the four writers who turned the speech into the set piece that launched crusading. Before these reports can be examined, we first need to understand why Urban chose such an occasion and how the journey to Clermont had begun.

Urban II became pope in 1088 at a low point in papal fortunes. During the previous thirty years, the papacy had been struggling to assert itself as an office with truly international authority. The first step in this process, in 1059, was the creation of the College of Cardinals to elect new popes. Until then, popes had been chosen from among the more powerful Roman noble families, with the result that they had often been unable to act independently of the influence of these political forces. A reforming clique within the Church emerged during the middle years of the eleventh century and tried to end the dependence of the papacy on the Roman nobility. This group, headed between 1073 and 1085 by Pope Gregory VII, came into conflict not only with local entrenched interests but also with the most powerful political figure in Western Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor. The emperors thought themselves the successors not only to Charlemagne, who had revived the title in 800, but also to the Roman emperors of antiquity. The imperial title had since the middle of the tenth century been in the hands of the German royal dynasty that had succeeded Charlemagne’s grandson Lothar. The defining moment of an emperor’s career w...

Table of contents

• List of maps and illustrations
• Timeline
• 1 • What were the Crusades?
• 2 • An anatomy of crusading
• 3 • The First Crusade
• 4 • The kingdom of Jerusalem
• 5 • The Islamic reaction: Zengi, Nur ad-Din and Saladin
• 6 • Pope Innocent III: the crusading pope
• 7 • Unlikely success and glorious failure: royal crusades in the thirteenth century
• 8 • The loss of the Holy Land
• 9 • Life on the frontier: crusader society
• 10 • The transformation of the Crusades