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The Compass Rose, Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 2000 |
The Crusades.1 The very name calls to mind images of knights in shining armor, riding off to do battle for the Holy Land against the evil "Saracens." The reality, however, fell far short of the holy wars that the Church's propaganda portrayed. Seven of the conflicts were officially numbered;2 some of the uglier campaigns were not included in the ranking. These military actions form one of the defining features of the Middle Ages, yet they are among the bloodiest chapters of what humans are willing to do to each other in the name of God.
The Christian religious map of the early Middle Ages was divided roughly in two. The Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire was ruled by the Greek (Eastern Orthodox) Church from Constantinople. The Latin (Roman Catholic) Church reigned over the Holy Roman Empire from Rome. Curiously, the situation that set the stage for the terrifying religious wars was political in nature. The Seljuk Turks rose to power in Central Asia. This tribe converted to the Muslim religion and went to war against the Byzantine Empire. At the battle of Manzikert (1071) the Seljuks delivered a crushing blow to the Byzantine army under Emperor Romanus IV. The Byzantines made several appeals to their Western cousins for aid, to no avail. Then several elements coalesced to form an explosive situation.
A cycle of oral history, which related supposed Muslim atrocities against Christians, was circulating at the time. Since the 600s, stories of caliphs persecuting Christians who attempted to visit the Holy Sepulcher3 in Jerusalem had been trickling back to Europe from the Holy Land. Some of these stories had a degree of truth behind them, since Caliph Omar did indeed attack Christians on pilgrimage in the seventh century. The 700s featured a cycle of plague and famine caused by drought, the combined effect of which destroyed almost three-quarters of the population of Europe. During this time, people were too busy simply surviving to care what was happening in the Holy Land. At the same time there was a notable shift in medieval spirituality away from the organized Church as represented by Rome and toward an individualized sense of religion as represented by hermits.4 Then Charlemagne came along, and people turned their eyes toward the east again. The Carolingian period, while lush compared to the early 700s, produced only a dim reflection of what the Muslims were enjoying in the way of wealth and trade. That knowledge, combined with Charlemagne's efforts to reestablish the Roman Empire as the Holy Roman Empire, whet the Western appetite for the conquest of the East.5 That, plus Charlemagne's image as a defender of the Christian Church, one of the Nine Christian Worthies,6 showed that conditions in Europe were ripe for something like the Crusades to happen. Throughout the rest of the 800s and the 900s, Vikings and other invaders attacked throughout Europe, leaving the Christian nobles with little time to do more than defend themselves.
Then, with the year 1000, disaster struck. The Church, seeking to gain control over secular authorities, preached that Jesus would return with the millennium. So effective was the message that an estimated three-quarters of the medieval farmers neglected to plant crops that year. The famine that followed was devastating, and the secular authorities placed the blame squarely on the Church.
Still, stories of horrors kept filtering in from the Middle East, and the tales were seized upon and spread by the clergy in an attempt to regain their political power. Caliph Hakim of the Fatimites came to power in the eleventh century, and the Christian Church could not have asked for a better "devil incarnate" for their purposes. Hakim despoiled the Holy Sepulcher itself and persecuted Christians so severely that all pilgrimages were suspended until after his death. Christian pilgrims had only recently begun to resume journeys to the sacred site when control of Jerusalem shifted from the Egyptians to the Seljuks (1071), the year Romanus IV suffered his defeat at the hands of the same tribe.
In 1081 Romanus IV died and Alexius Comnenus (Alexius I) became the Byzantine Emperor. Seven years later, in 1088, Pope Victor III of the Latin Church died and Urban II was named to the papacy. At some point prior to 1095, Alexius I asked Pope Urban II for military aid against the Muslims. Urban II apparently realized that he could accomplish two goals at the same time: He could force the Greek Church to become indebted to him and he could become the holy champion of the stories of the persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. All he had to do was defeat the Seljuk Turks. To this end, Urban II preached a sermon at the Council of Clermont (1095) in which he presented the idea for the holy war. Crosses, which were distributed during the sermon to those who agreed to the undertaking, gave rise to the name "Crusader" and to the phrase "to take the Cross." The war that followed eventually became known as the First Crusade.
Urban II was no fool. The papacy was emerging from a troubled period, during which there had been a strong movement away from organized religion and during which the papacy had been discredited. The papacy found itself confronted by a host of very powerful secular rulers, primarily the kings of France and the Holy Roman Emperors, just as had happened under Charlemagne. Alexius I's invitation gave the pope several things he needed. It provided him with a way to portray the papacy as a reigning force throughout Europe, a benevolent power under which peace was universally enjoyed by all and trade flourished. It gave him an outlet through which he could channel the violence that kept breaking out among the European nobles. And it gave him a way to get his political competition--in the form of his secular counterparts--out of Europe. To make the grand scheme work, Urban II built on a movement called the "Peace of God" and a subsequent notion called the "Truce of God," which outlawed warfare during sacred times (such as celebrations of holy days--Christmas, Easter, etc.--and weekly holy periods--namely, Friday through Sunday). Normally, Christian could attack Christian quite blithely during the Middle Ages with little if any consequence. But during a Crusade, the rules changed. The pope guaranteed the knights eternal salvation in exchange for their services in undertaking a Crusade. Additionally, the pope declared that the Crusades fell under the designation of a holy time period, so during those years when a Crusade was officially declared, no Christian was permitted to make war on another Christian. This policy had disastrous results for European Jews, as will be discussed in a bit.
The First Crusade began in 1096 and was fought by knights who came mostly from France and Norman Sicily. Raymond IV of Toulouse was only one of the powerful nobles from those regions to respond to Urban II's call. A decade earlier the infamous Norman pirate Robert Guiscard had conquered Sicily (after sacking Rome) and actually attacked Alexius I's empire; Guiscard's scions were among those to join the Crusade--and it is highly doubtful that they were in the war for anything other than profit. Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother, Baldwin, were also among those who joined the Crusade, most likely with an eye to territorial expansion and control of trade.
From the outset the Crusades were a complete disaster for the Jewish population of medieval Europe.7 As early as 1095, would-be Crusaders chose to fund their venture by slaughtering Jews and taking their money. Since the Jews were not Christians, papal protection did not extend to them, and, since Jews were forbidden to hold land, the bulk of their wealth was in coin, which the Crusaders suddenly needed to fund their wars. The situation was a recipe for genocide, similar to the one Hitler would employ in the twentieth century.
The Crusaders used Constantinople as the meeting place where all of the armies would converge prior to an attack on the Holy Land. The total number of troops is unknown, but it was likely somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000--a very sizable force for the time period. So, while the Byzantine Empire had only wanted to recapture their lost territory, the Crusaders arrived in Constantinople with the goal of conquering the Holy Land itself. Alexius I panicked, and, instead of providing the additional troops he had promised Urban II, he tried to send the Crusaders home. But the juggernaut could no longer be stopped. The Crusaders marched on the Holy Land, slaughtering Muslims every step of the way. And in 1099 the Crusaders took Jerusalem in one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The streets are said to have run with blood at least ankle-deep as the knights slew all of the non-Christian inhabitants of the city and then plundered their prize.
Some of the Crusaders returned home after the gruesome victory. Others remained in the Middle East, establishing the Crusader States of Edessa, Antioch, Tripolis and Jerusalem. These states were to endure for almost two centuries, sending a stream of relics (including Sanct-Sang relics, which supposedly contained the blood of Jesus such as the vessel described in the legends of the Holy Grail) and trade goods into Western Europe.8
In the wake of the First Crusade the great monastic orders of knights began to form. The most widespread and best known were the Knights Templars. Other orders included the Knights Hospitalers, which was comprised mainly of French knights, and the Teutonic Knights, which was comprised mainly of German knights. These orders all became tremendously wealthy as a result of the Crusades, a circumstance that eventually prompted secular authorities to destroy them and that even attracted the enmity of the Church during the Inquisition.
Edessa fell to the Muslims in 1144, which prompted Bernard of Clairvaux to preach a Crusade to recapture it. The Second Crusade ran from 1147-1148. King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany led the Crusade, but the campaign was a complete failure. Conrad's forces reached the Holy Land too far ahead of Louis, so the Turks had already decimated the Germans by the time the French got there. The armies were able to take Acre, but a squabble between the leaders at Damascus (1148) resulted in Conrad taking his troops and heading home. With no one else to share the military burden, Louis gave up the next year.
Perhaps the best known of the Crusades, thanks to the legends of Robin Hood, the Third Crusade took place from 1189-1193. The military action was undertaken in response to the rise of Saladin, who captured Jerusalem in 1187. Preached by Pope Gregory VIII, this Crusade was led by three of the most influential kings of the medieval period: Frederick Barbarossa, Philip Augustus and Richard Lion-Hearted.
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had subdued all of his rebellious vassals, consolidated the Holy Roman Empire and reduced the threat of the papacy to the point he could afford to ignore it. Why, then, he chose to undertake a Crusade is something of a mystery. The best guess most scholars have is that Barbarossa feared that Philip and Richard would gain lands and trade routes in the war effort, prizes that he could not afford to cede to them without a fight. Whatever the case, he was certainly not undertaking the venture because Innocent III asked him to or for any feelings of religious fervor. Barbarossa died somewhat unceremoniously by drowning on the way to Jerusalem. His stunned subjects could not accept that their powerful leader had met such an inglorious end. As a result, a "Once and Future King" cycle of folklore grew up around the unfortunate monarch. In the tale, he sits at a round table beneath a mountain, with his infamous beard growing through the stone table and around the table's base, sleeping until he needs to be awakened to defend his country once more.9
King Philip Augustus of France successfully tightened royal control on all areas of France except those that were held by the Plantagenets. Philip probably joined the Crusade for many of the same reasons that Barbarossa joined, but, following Barbarossa's death, the political situation changed. Philip supposedly had an argument with Richard and went home.10 The true cause of his departure, however, was probably the ascension of Henry VI, Barbarossa's son, to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Philip's kingdom shared an extensive border with the Holy Roman Empire, and he was realistic enough to know that knights and rulers were only obeying the papal interdiction against Christian fighting Christian during Crusades when it suited the secular authorities' purposes. Going on Crusade with the leader of the Holy Roman Empire at his side was one thing; going on Crusade with the leader of the Holy Roman Empire sitting on his border was quite another.
King Richard I, second of the Plantagenets to rule England, actually made it to the Holy Land. There, he waged a particularly bloody campaign against Saladin. Richard reclaimed much of the Holy Land for the Christians, yet, in spite of the bloodshed in which his troops engaged, he failed to take Jerusalem. Then, on his return home, he managed to get himself captured by Emperor Henry VI, and therein lay a legend.
Richard's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was one of the major patrons of the manuscripts of the legends of King Arthur. The tales of Arthur and his knights, however, was a cycle of stories that were favored by the high-ranking nobles of Europe.11 In contrast, the yeomen who served the knights told another set of stories, one that was centered around one of their own, a young man named Robin of Locksley. Robin Hood, as the figure eventually became known, is a composite character, compiled from popular tales about a variety of famous outlaws. The version of his story that most people know today, however, was formed well after Richard's successor, John I, signed the Magna Carta (1215). In this variant Robin fights against the evil minions of King John to raise the ransom needed to free King Richard and bring him back to England. Major themes of the cycle involve the corruption of the Church and the emphasis that monarchs need to pay more attention to what is happening in their homelands than to what is happening in the Holy Land. Thus, judging by the popular traditions, public opinion was shifting from outrage at the eleventh-century oral accounts of the persecution of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem to outrage at the twelfth-century failures of the Crusaders and at the staggering cost that was passed on to their Christian subjects when it could not be met by slaughtering the Jews.
The major force behind the Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) was Pope Innocent III, possibly the most powerful of all of the medieval popes. Instead of relying on kings in his wars against the Muslims, he used lords of vast territories, notably Baldwin IV, count of Flanders. The great irony of this Crusade is that, while it never reached the Holy Land, it was, in terms of Western Europe, the most successful of all the Crusades. What the count of Flanders and his fellow nobles did was accidentally conquer the Byzantine Empire. In fact, the entire Crusade was one "accident" after another, which left Innocent III looking as if he could waffle faster than a modern American politician.
The first mistake was that the lords in charge of the Crusade completely underestimated how many warriors were actually willing to respond to the pope's call to arms. Disillusioned with the results of previous campaigns, the bulk of the knights simply stayed home--the course of action advised in tales such as the legends of Robin Hood. Consequently, the Crusaders found that they had contracted for too many ships to transport their army to the Holy Land. Unable to pay their bill in coin, the Crusaders agreed to pay by undertaking a military action for the Venetian doge, who had supplied the fleet. This action was to recapture Zara, a port that had recently been captured by the king of Hungary. The king of Hungary was a Christian--not to mention a papal vassal--he was supposedly immune from attack by Crusaders. By attacking him in 1202, the Crusaders put themselves in violation of the papal policy that Christian could not attack Christian during a declared Crusade, and, by winning, the Crusaders conquered papal lands. Innocent III responded by excommunicating the Crusaders.
The Crusaders ignored the pope and continued on their campaign, proving that the wars were now only being fought in the name of God rather than out of any genuine religious commitment. Innocent III, having no way to stop them, gave up and reinstated them within the Church, probably hoping that they would now go do what he had intended for them to do.
Still cash-poor, though, the Crusaders responded to a cry for assistance from one of the claimants to the Byzantine throne, which was in dispute at the time. The Crusaders were supposed to do was help the would-be Alexius IV take the throne from Alexius III. What the Crusaders did instead was sack Constantinople, where they installed Alexius IV as co-emperor with his father, Isaac II. When Innocent III heard that the Crusaders had besieged the capitol of the Byzantine Empire, the pope excommunicated them again. But when he learned that they had actually taken the city, he reconsidered. Constantinople was a major windfall to the Latin Church. The victory placed the Greek Church under the command of the Latin Church and reunited the "Roman Empire" for the first time since its final split in 395. Innocent III reversed his position yet again and reinstated the Crusaders as communicate members of the Church.
With such a plum prize to the Crusaders' credit, they gave up all efforts to make it to the Holy Land, instead returning home with countless religious relics that they had captured from the Greek Church. These priceless relics proved to be a tremendous source of income for Western churches and abbeys. Among these relics were the cup of Antioch, which was one of the prototypes for the Holy Grail.12 The influx of these relics caused a major upsurge in popularity of the Holy Grail legends of the Arthurian tradition, which reflected a significant shift in medieval spirituality. With the papacy involved so heavily in secular matters and focused so steadily on matters beyond the borders of Europe, people once more moved away from the institutionalized version of Christianity that was represented by the Church and toward a more personalized faith. The clergy was seen as corrupt and as pursuing conquest for wealth rather than for the religious reasons they claimed. This gave rise to a strong movement toward hermits instead of organized monasteries and created a climate in which groups such as the Waldensians and Albigensians could flourish.
The period following the Fourth Crusade was one of the darkest of the entire Crusading era. These troubled years saw the "Children's Crusade" (1212), during which thousands of children were convinced to leave their homes and march to the Holy Land to do what the Crusaders had not been able to accomplish.13 What actually happened was that most of the children died or were sold into slavery; very, very few returned to their homes. The religious fervor that had been sweeping Europe was partially responsible for making this tragedy possible. The notion ran rampant that the pious and innocent individual could do what the vicious Crusaders and the corrupt clergy that backed them were failing to do.
That same year Innocent III called for a Crusade against the Moors in Spain. This military effort eventually gave rise to the religious order of fighting monks know as the Knights of Santiago de Compostela. At least one Sanct-Sang relic came into the possession of these knights during these years. The knights fought in part to protect the pilgrims who came to visit the relic, but mostly the order was interested in taking wealth and knowledge from the Moors.
Other "Crusades" of these decades included such infamous undertakings as the Albigensian Crusade, which was preached by Innocent III in response to the murder of a papal legate in 1208. In these campaigns, the feudal warriors attacked "the infidel at home." This notion in turn led to an increase in the severity of the persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe. By calling for the Albigensian Crusade, Innocent III made a critical error. The knights no longer viewed Crusades as something to be done elsewhere. The bloodshed could now spread to Europe itself.
The Church's response to the atrocities was mixed. On one hand, the papacy called for Crusade after Crusade, directed both at the Muslims in the Holy Land and in Spain and at heretics throughout Europe, who were popping up with increasing frequency thanks to the religious fervor that was sweeping the land. The tragic episodes that resulted led to the founding of monastic orders such as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, which were both sanctioned by Innocent III. These orders believed that many of the victims of these attacks were simply doing the best they could to make sense out of Church's teachings or even contradictory teachings when the clergy had failed to provide them with anyone who could teach them what the orthodox doctrine happened to be at the time. When the Church itself fell short of practicing what it preached and when Church-backed knights were now slaughtering Christians as well as "Saracens," who could blame the average lay people for becoming confused?
Partially in an effort to bring the chaos in Europe under control, Pope Honorius III directed the Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) against Muslims in Egypt instead of at the traditional goal of the Holy Land. The choice of target was also militarily strategic, instead of theologically important. Egypt had become the center for Muslim power in the Near East. This time King Andrew II of Hungary, Duke Leopold VI of Austria and John of Breinne led the armies.
When the Crusaders captured Damietta, a major Egyptian port, in 1219, they refused to trade the port for Jerusalem. That refusal is often seen as another sign that the religious fervor had gone out of the Crusades and that the nobles were solely in the wars for potential profit by this time. Whatever the case, the army fell apart due to conflicts between the individual commanders who were leading it. The inability of the Crusaders to fight together for a common goal combined with a flood from the Nile to give the Muslims a major victory over the Christians at Cairo. With that defeat, the Fifth Crusade came to an abrupt and inglorious end.
Between the Fifth and the Sixth Crusade a series of events took place that produced the ostensible end result for the major crusades: Jerusalem came under Christian control from 1229-1244.14 But because no war was fought to achieve the goal and because a king rather than a pope (or other cleric) called for the Crusade, the incident has never been officially identified as a Crusade. What essentially happened was Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire simply asked the sultan of Egypt if he could, please, have Jerusalem, and the sultan negotiated a treaty that gave Frederick exactly what he wanted.
But a dispute between the Knights Hospitalers and the Knights Templars tore the treaty apart. The Templars, who preferred to be united with the Muslim faction at Damascus as opposed to the Muslim faction in Egypt, won the argument. The treaty with Damascus (1244) gave Palestine to the Crusaders, but the Mamelukes of Egypt responded to the change of allegiance by sacking Jerusalem.
The rapidity with which the Christians lost control of the Holy City is yet another indicator that the wars were only being fought in the name of God. The nobles who led the Crusades had no real desire to control the sacred Christian sites in the Holy Land. They simply wanted to control land and trade--and they were doing a very poor job of that.
Medieval spirituality continued to shift away from the Church and the Bible Lands and toward the individual and mysticism. By the 1230s the shift had so infuriated the Church that the Inquisition was launched. By the end of the thirteenth century, this Crusade of the Church against its own members would put an end to the Crusades to retake the Holy Land.
The Sixth Crusade (1248)15 was led by Louis IX of France, and was aimed at Egypt in response to the attack on Jerusalem. Once more Damietta fell, and once more the Crusaders were unable to take Cairo. But Louis himself was captured in the debacle, bringing an abrupt end to the campaign.
After Louis's release, he did what he could to refortify the Christian positions in the Holy Land. Apparently he was already planning another martial endeavor. Then Jaffa and Antioch fell to the Muslims (1248), giving him an excuse for the Seventh Crusade.
Louis IX of France also led the Seventh Crusade (1270). This time the campaign was directed at Tunisia. This Crusade is relatively unremarkable except that Louis died during it. With his death, the age of the Crusades effectively came to a close.
For the "Eighth" Crusade,16 Prince Edward of England17 led an army to try to salvage Acre in 1271-1272. He went home, though, after abruptly establishing a truce with the Muslims. This left the way open for the Muslim attack on Tripolis (1289). Finally, with the fall of Acre (1291), the age of the Crusades came to a close.
When Acre fell in 1291, the last of the Crusader States fell with it. The Crusades that had been a part of European life for 196 years ended, leaving a mixed legacy in their wake.
One of the most disastrous effects of the Crusades was the outlet it created for anti-Semitism. With a restriction against Christian attacking Christian throughout most of the Crusades, nobles turned on the Jews. The Jews were forbidden to hold property, so most of their estates were amassed in the form of physical wealth--something that the Christian nobles needed desperately to pay for the protracted wars. Crusaders slaughtered Jews for their cash, with some nobles never intending to mount the military actions that the hate crimes were supposed to fund. The Jewish population was decimated throughout Europe, ostensibly because they were the infidels who had crucified Jesus. In actuality, they were simply killed for their money.
One of the few positive things to come out of the Crusades developed out of the Crusader motive of greed. Trade between East and West flourished. Western Europe was exposed to spices, fabrics, medical knowledge, advanced mathematics, and many other things that changed the lives of the Christian countries forever.
Hollister argued that medieval spirituality, a knightly need to find an outlet for their martial skills, and the basic human greed of land-owning nobles were all needed in order for the Crusades to happen.18 Essentially the greed provided the motive, the knights provided the means, and the shifting nature of medieval spirituality provided the opportunity for one of the most protracted incidents of bloodshed in human history, all committed in the name of the Christian God of love and peace.
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