THE CRUSADES

Christopher Tyerman

New York / London

www.sterlingpublishing.com

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

Published by arrangement with Oxford University Press, Inc.

© 2007 Christopher Tyerman

Illustrated edition published in 2009 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Additional text © 2009 Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing

c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6

Book design and layout: The DesignWorks Group

Please see picture credits on page 211 for image copyright information.

Manufactured in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-6891-0

For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales Department at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

Frontispiece: An armored knight from the time of the Crusades is depicted in this detail from a twelfth-century fresco decorating the Chapel of St. Gilles, in Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France.

For

P.P.A.B.

•

CONTENTS

•

Preface

List of Maps

Introduction

ONE       Definition

TWO      Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean

THREE   Crusades in the West

FOUR     The Impact of the Crusades

FIVE       Holy War

SIX         The Business of the Cross

SEVEN    Holy Lands

Conclusion

Further Reading

Chronology

Picture Credits

PREFACE

•

WHILE THE EIGHTH-CENTURY Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume thought the Crusades “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation,” he admitted they “engrossed the attention of Europe and have ever since engrossed the curiosity of mankind.” The reasons for this are not hard to find. The twin themes of judgment on past violence and fascination with its causes have ensured the survival of the Crusades as more than an inert subject for antiquarians. Since Pope Urban II (1088–99) in 1095 answered a call for military help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118), by summoning a vast army to fight in the name of God to liberate eastern Christianity and recover the Holy City of Jerusalem, there have been few periods when the consequences of this act have not gripped minds and imaginations, primarily in western society but increasingly, since the nineteenth century, among communities that have seen themselves as heirs to the victims of this form of religious violence. With the history of the Crusades, modern interest is compounded by spurious topicality and inescapable familiarity. Ideological warfare and the pathology of acceptable communal violence are embedded in the historical experience of civilization. Justification for war and killing for a noble cause never cease to find modern manifestations. The Crusades present a phenomenon so dramatic and extreme in aspiration and execution and yet so rebarbative to modern sensibilities, that they cannot fail to move both as a story and as an expression of a society remote in time and attitudes yet apparently so abundantly recognizable. Spread over five hundred years and across three continents, the Crusades may not have defined medieval Christian Europe, yet they provide a most extraordinary feature that retains the power to excite, appall, and disturb. They remain one of the great subjects of European history. What follows is an attempt to explain why.

The phenomenon of violence justified by religious faith has ebbed and flowed, sometimes nearing the center, sometimes retreating to the margins of historical and contemporary consciousness. When I was asked to write this short introduction to the Crusades, holy war, Christian or otherwise, was not high on the public or political agenda. Now when I have finished, it is. So this work conforms to a pattern traced in what follows, of historical study relating to current events. My views on that relationship will, I hope, become clear enough. What remain hidden except to the lynx-eyed are the debts to many other scholars, colleagues, and friends from whom I have learnt so much and should have remembered so much more. They must forgive a collective thanks. The faults in this libellus are mine not theirs. The dedication is a very small recompense for incalculable munificence of advice, support, and friendship over so many years, in dark days as well as bright evenings of exhausting but inexhaustible hospitality.

C.J. T.

OXFORD

MAY 22, 2005

LIST OF MAPS

•

Medieval Europe and Its Frontiers

Europe and the Mediterranean:

Christianity and Its Non-Christian Neighbors

The Near East in the Twelfth Century

The Crusader States of Outremer

The Spanish Reconquista

The Baltic

The Aegean in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

The Castles of Outremer

Pope Urban II, immortalized here in a sculpture in Champagne, France, appealed for a crusade to the East.

INTRODUCTION

BETWEEN 1189 AND 1191, a cosmopolitan army of western invaders besieged the Palestinian coastal city of Acre, modern Akko. Their camp resembled the trenches of the Western Front during the First World War, fetid, disease-ridden, and dangerous. One story circulated to boost morale concerned the heroic death in battle a few years earlier of a knight from Touraine in France, Jakelin de Mailly. A member of the Military Order of Knights Templar, a soldier who had taken religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in order to devote his life to protecting Christians and their conquests in Syria and Palestine, Jakelin had been killed fighting a Muslim raiding party in Galilee on May 1, 1187. In describing what proved to be a massacre of the Christians, the story had Jakelin fighting on alone, hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded. The chronicler who recorded the story before 1192, possibly an Englishman and certainly a veteran of the siege of Acre, is worth quoting in full:

He was not afraid to die for Christ. At long last, crushed rather than conquered by spears, stones and lances, he sank to the ground and joyfully passed to heaven with the martyr’s crown, triumphant. It was indeed a gentle death with no place for sorrow, when one man’s sword had constructed such a great crown for himself from the crowd laid all around him. Death is sweet when the victor lies encircled by the impious people he has slain with his victorious right hand… The place where he fought was covered with the stubble which the reapers had left standing when they had cut the grain shortly before. Such a great number of Turks had rushed in to attack, and this one man had fought for so long against so many battalions, that the field in which they stood was completely reduced to dust and there was not a trace of the crop to be seen. It is said that there were some who sprinkled the body of the dead man with dust and placed dust on their heads, believing that they would draw courage from the contact. In fact, rumor has it that one person was moved with more fervor than the rest. He cut off the man’s genitals, and kept them safe for begetting children so that even when dead the man’s members—if such a thing were possible—would produce an heir with courage as great as his.

Except possibly for the suggestion of sexual fetishism, this story, which would not have convinced all who heard it by any means, represented a standard piece of crusade propaganda. Crusading, fighting for God in return for a promise of salvation, placed a premium on courage, physical prowess, martial skill, and religious conviction. As such, little separated it from other forms of organized violence. Yet the tale of Jakelin de Mailly emphasized certain features particularly characteristic of the Crusades, especially the belief or assertion that violence for the faith will earn heavenly reward. The killer, already a professed religious, becomes a holy man, a martyr, a witness for his God. Such is the hero’s spiritual potency that his physical remains retain a powerful material charge to confer his human qualities to others, even posthumously through his sexual organs. His horrible, violent death was interpreted as “gentle” and “sweet”; his memory provided inspiration; his remains were thought to convey virtue. Death was a completion but no conclusion.

On the face of it, few mentalities—enthusiastic for violence, fixed on an afterlife—could be less accessible to modern observers in the western cultural tradition than this. Yet no aspect of Christian medieval history enjoys clearer modern recognition than the Crusades, nor has been more subject to egregious distortion. Most of what passes in public as knowledge of the Crusades is either misleading or false. The Crusades were not solely wars against Islam in Palestine. They were not chiefly conducted by land-hungry younger sons, nor were they part of some early attempt to impose western economic hegemony on the world. More fundamentally, they did not represent an aberration from Christian teaching. Nonetheless, interest and invention exist as two sides of the same historical coin. That in part explains why the world of Jakelin de Mailly and his eulogist has not been consigned to the same obscurity as that of medieval scholastics or flagellants; that and the drama of the events themselves. Jakelin’s death in a desperate and foolhardy skirmish in the Galilean hills may arouse only modest interest. But his presence two thousand miles from his homeland; the cause for which he swore religious vows, fought, and died; the region for which he battled; and the memorable historical figures drawn into the conflict in which he served have ensured his endeavor and sacrifice can still touch a nerve. That is the excuse for this book.

The word “crusade,” a non-medieval Franco-Spanish hybrid only popularized in English since the eighteenth century, has entered the Anglo-American language as a synonym for a good cause vigorously pursued, from pacific Christian evangelism to militant temperance. However floridly and misleadingly romantic, the image of mailed knights bearing crosses on surcoats and banners, fighting for their faith under an alien sun, occupies a familiar niche in the façade of modern western perceptions of the past. Despite, or perhaps because of, its lack of context, it remains the indelible image of crusading in popular culture, shared even by the sculptors of the late President Assad of Syria. Iconography is never innocent. Assad’s Damascus Saladin is defeating the Christians at their own imperialist game as surely as the Ladybird’s Saladin and Richard I are playing out some nineteenth-century cultural minuet. Polemicists and politicians know—or should know—that to invoke the Crusades is to stir deep cultural myths, assumptions, and prejudices, a fact recognized by Pope John Paul II’s apology to Jews, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians for the intolerance and violence inflicted by Catholic warriors of the cross. Although it is difficult to see how even Christ’s Vicar on earth can apologize for events in which he did not participate, over which he had no control, and for which he bore no responsibility, this intellectually muddled gesture acknowledged the continued inherent potency of crusading, a story that can still move, outrage, and inflame. One of the groups led by the fundamentalist religious terrorist Usama bin Laden was known as “The World Islamic Front for Crusade against Jews and Crusaders.” To understand medieval crusading for itself and to explain its survival may be regarded as an urgent contemporary task, one for which historians must take responsibility. To this dual study of history and historiography, of the Crusades and what could be called their post-history, this is a brief introduction.

This statue of Saladin, commissioned by Damascus, Syria, in 1992, depicts him as the victor of the Battle of Hattin; at his side are an infantryman and a sufi—sword and faith.

The violent legacy of the Crusades was apparent when Pope John Paul II issued an apology from the Vatican to Jews, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Casual modern acquaintance with the Crusades stems from the wide dissemination of crusading motifs from the early nineteenth century, a rather precious, sentimental vision of an invented medieval past, as in Walter Scott’s popular and influential Ivanhoe and The Talisman, the latter actually set during the Third Crusade. A similar sentimentality infected continental responses; romantic images of crusaders became a stock in trade for artists and poets. The cultural familiarity on which the force of these I works relied was maintained into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries chiefly by the popular media of Hollywood, television, and imaginative literature, not all of it describing itself as fiction. Crossovers between history and entertainment at least suggest a market, if only for what the great American crusader scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, J. La Monte, forensically described as “worthless pseudo-historical trash.”

In the nineteenth century, artists and writers, including Scottish novelist, Sir Walter Scott, romanticized the Crusades with an invented history.

Crusading has left a physical imprint on Europe. Most obviously, impressive sites associated with crusading or the military orders remain, such as Aigues Mortes in the Rhone Delta, from where Louis IX of France embarked for Egypt in 1248, or the fourteenth-century headquarters of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg in Prussia (now Malbork in Poland). Some reminders invoke a somber message: the plaque at Clifford’s Tower in York commemorates the Jews who died there in March 1190, victims by murder and suicide of Yorkshire crusaders. More intimate evocation of personal responses and the strenuous conviction of individuals thirty to fifty generations ago can be found in quiet corners like the eleventh-century church at Bosham, Hampshire, on the edge of Chichester Harbor, whose great chancel arch saw Harold Godwineson on his way across the Channel to a fateful meeting with Duke William of Normandy in 1064 and earned a place in the Bayeux Tapestry. Crosses etched deep in the stone of the door jambs and a cross of Jerusalem more lightly scratched on a nearby pillar, whether marks of anxious hope on departure or of thankful relief at a safe return, speak directly of a physical ideal, witness in almost the ultimate degree of devotion to a belief in the tangibility of the divine that allowed ordinary, faithful laymen, through their own action and the material relics of their God and His Saints, to touch Paradise. That identical crosses can also be seen incised on the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem emphasizes both the startling reality of the experience of pilgrims and crusaders and the gulf between their age and our own. Yet, such memorials leave a trace in the mind.

A scene from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe is illustrated in The Abduction of Rebecca, an 1846 painting by Eugène Delacroix. Saracen slaves are kidnapping the novel’s heroine.

Depicted here in the Bayeux Tapestry, future king of England Harold Godwineson crosses the English Channel on a diplomatic mission to Normandy.

Visible reminders are strewn across the modern landscape. In London alone, without the Crusades there would be no shopping in Knightsbridge, no cricket at St. John’s Wood, no law at the Temple—all places that derive their names from the medieval landlords of these suburbs, the Military Orders of the Temple and of the Hospital of St. John, religious orders originally established to succor and protect pilgrims to Jerusalem in the aftermath of its conquest by the first crusaders in 1099. Linguistic and material survivals are matched by a more urgent and in some cases more insidious recognition that has woven the memory of crusading into some of the more intractable modern political problems, the Arab—Israeli conflict, responses to Terrorism, religious inter-faith conflict, the origins of western racism and anti-Semitism, and the nature of and reaction to European and American political and cultural imperialism.

Yet here lurks a paradox. The continuing popular and political resonance of crusading feeds on an historical phenomenon that, both in its own time and later, has lacked objective precision in definition, practice, perception, or approval. In the Middle Ages there existed no single word for what are now known as the Crusades. While those who took the cross were described as crucesignati—people (not exclusively male) signed with the cross—their activities tended to be described by analogy, euphemism, metaphor, or generality: peregrinatio, pilgrimage; via or iter, way or journey; crux, literally cross; negotium, business. This allowed for a flexibility of target and ideology that was matched by a concentration in canon law (the law of the church) on the behavior of the crusader and the implications of the various privileges associated with the activity rather than any general theoretical formula specifically defining a legal concept of a crusade. Thus at the heart of this form of Christian warfare lay a possibly convenient ambiguity of ideas and action that spawned a wide diversity of responses. The wars of the cross, initiated to regain Jerusalem for Christianity in 1095 and extended over the next few generations to encompass a wide variety of violence against the Catholic Church’s perceived external and internal foes, have been understood by participants, contemporaries, and later observers in a protean variety of ways.

By turns, crusading has been variously interpreted. It has been presented as warfare to defend a beleaguered Faith or the ultimate expression of secular piety. Alternatively, some have regarded it as a decisive ecclesiastical compromise with base secular habits; a defining commitment of the church to accommodate the spiritual aspirations of the laity. As the admired pinnacle of ambition for a ruling military elite, crusading is portrayed as an agent as well as symbol of religious, cultural, or ethnic identity or even superiority; a vehicle for personal or communal aggrandizement, commercial expansion, or political conquest. More narrowly, the Crusades appear as an expression of the authority of the papacy in imposing order and uniformity within Christendom as well as securing its external frontiers. Conflicting assessments of the Crusades have described them as manifestations of religious love, by Christians for fellow believers and by God for His people; an experiment in European colonialism; an example of recrudescent western racism; an excuse and incentive for religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, and acts of barbarism; or a noble cause. Steven Runciman, the best-known and most influential anglophone Crusade historian of the twentieth century, imperishably condemned the whole enterprise as “one long act of intolerance in the name of God which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

Even shorn of present prejudices and preoccupations, the history of the Crusades throws up concerns central to all societies, from the forging of identities through the communal force of shared faith and the use and abuse of legitimate violence to the nature of political authority and organized religion. Crusading exemplifies the exploitation of the fear of what sociologists call “the other,” alien peoples or concepts ranged against which social groups can find or be given cohesion: Communism and Capitalism; Democracy and Fascism; Christians and non-Christians; Whites and Non-Whites; Them and Us. There can be no indifference to such issues. That is why the study of the Crusades possesses an importance beyond the confines of academic scholarship. Equally, there can be no summoning of the past to take sides in the present. Plundering history to deliver modern indictments serves no rational or benign purpose. To observe the past through the lens of the present invites delusion; so too does ignoring the existence of that lens. However, the burden of understanding lies on us to appreciate the world of the past, not on the past to provide ours with facile precedents or good stories, although of the latter the Crusades supply plenty.

“At last my dream comes true.” This cartoon is Punch’s response to the entry of General Allenby into Jerusalem in December 1917, as the Union Jack flies over the Jaffa Gate. In actuality, Allenby carefully avoided any overt demonstration of imperialist or Christian triumph, making his entry on foot.

A fifteenth-century depiction shows the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulchre, enclosed within the Edicule (small house) had been the destination of many pilgrims and crusaders over the previous four centuries.

ONE

Definition

AT A COUNCIL OF THE CHURCH HELD at Clermont in the French Auvergne in November 1095 a decree was issued that marked a new beginning in western Christianity’s use of war to further its religious mission.

Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honor or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.

This decree did not invent Christian violence. Nor did it define precise terms of a revolution in thought or practice, or determine how future generations would employ the precedent. Coming half way through a preaching tour of France conducted by Pope Urban II (1088–95), the Clermont assembly was best remembered not for the legal authority granted by the decree but for the pope’s sermon at the end of the council on November 27. What the pope said is not known. Witnesses and later commentators subsequently depicted him as delivering a rousing call to arms to the fighting classes of western Europe to recover the Holy City of Jerusalem, insisting that this was no ordinary act of temporal warfare but a task enjoined on the faithful by God Himself, a message echoed back in the cries of “Deus lo volt!”—“God wills it!”—said to have greeted Urban’s words. To provide a focus for commitment and a sign of distinction, Urban instituted the ceremonial granting of crosses to those who had sworn to undertake the Jerusalem journey. Thus they became “signed with the cross,” crucesignati.

This fifteenth-century image shows Pope Urban II preaching to kings and knights, urging a crusade to the Holy Land.

Over the following century writers in western European vernaculars began to describe these wars in similar terms—crozeia, crozea, or even crozada in early thirteenth-century southern French (langue d’oc). The appropriation of Christianity’s most numinous symbol, as badge, banner, and talisman, followed naturally from the pope’s conception of the enterprise to liberate “the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection.” Observers and veterans of the enterprise understood the pope to have called for Christ-like sacrifice in obedience to the gospel command: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). All Hebrew accounts of the 1096 massacres of Rhineland Jews by the passing Christian armies emphasized that the butchers wore the sign of the cross.

The memory of Urban’s rhetoric at Clermont played a central role in how the events prompted by his speech were later portrayed, providing a convenient start to narratives of the startling consequences of the pope’s preaching. Urban’s decree explicitly proclaimed a holy war in which the effort of the campaign, including the fighting and the inevitable slaughter, could be regarded as equivalent to strenuous performance of penance provided it had been undertaken devoutly. The cause may have been seen as just, but that was not the point. This was an act of total self-abnegating faith demanded by God, hence the language of unrealistic absolutes that failed to match military, social, and psychological reality, an ideal to inspire and against which deeds could be judged. The Clermont decree instituted a holy war, its cause and motive religious, an act of Christian charity for “the love of God and their neighbor” (the eastern Christians). As well as combining violence with a transcendent moral imperative, Urban appealed to a form of “primitive religious nostalgia” embodied in the ambiguously liminal Holy City of Jerusalem, lost to Christendom since its capture by the Muslims in 638 yet central to Christian imagination as the scene of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Here, according to Christian texts familiar through the Mass and liturgy, earth touched heaven. In a short space, the Clermont decree identified reasons for the massive response: the certainties of faith; fear of damnation; temporal self-image; material, social, and supernatural profit; the attraction of warfare for a military aristocracy; an unequivocally good cause; and an iconic objective of loud resonance in the imaginative world of western Christians. It proved to be a formula of sustained power for the rest of the Middle Ages.

What we today call a crusade could be described as a war answering God’s command, authorized by a legitimate authority, the pope, who, by virtue of the power seen as vested in him as Vicar of Christ, identified the war’s object and offered to those who undertook it full remission of the penalties of confessed sins and a package of related temporal privileges, including church protection of family and property, immunity from law suits and interest repayments on debt. The beneficiary earned these grants by swearing a vow symbolized in a ritual adoption of a cross, blessed by a priest and worn on the recipient’s clothing, the vow often being couched in terms parallel to those for a pilgrimage. The duration of the spiritual and temporal privileges was determined by the fulfillment of the vow, by absolution or by death. Those dying in battle or otherwise in fulfillment of their vow could expect eternal salvation and to be regarded as martyrs. At every stage, analogies with a quasi-monastic commitment were drawn, associating the activity with what remained the ideal conception of the perfect Christian spiritual life. Although details of the operation of the vow and its associated privileges developed over the following century or more to cover a multiplicity of political and ecclesiastical concerns, the first appearance and original justification for such a holy war in 1095 was the recovery of Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Thereafter, the Holy Land retained a primacy in rhetoric, imagination, and, for many centuries, ideology.

Numbering the Crusades

Historians organize the past to help them make sense of the evidence. In doing so they run the risk of becoming imprisoned by their own artifice. Between 1095 and, say, 1500 there were scores of military operations that attracted the privileges associated with the wars of the cross. Yet only a few later became known by a number, all of them aimed at Muslim targets in and around Syria and Palestine in the eastern Mediterranean. Obviously, the nobles, knights, foot soldiers, unarmed pilgrims, and hangers-on who answered Urban II’s appeal in 1095–96 did not know they were embarking on the first of anything; they were told their efforts were in a unique cause. Subsequent events altered perceptions. The promoters of the next comparable eastern campaign, in 1146–49, invoked the precedent of 1095–96, casting into shadow smaller expeditions that had embarked to aid the Christian cause in the east in the interim. Thus, in the eyes of later scholars, the 1146 crusade became the Second Crusade. Subsequent numbering followed suit, attached only to general, large-scale international assaults intended to reach the Holy Land. Hence the inclusion in the canon of the Fourth Crusade (1202–24) that planned to attack Egypt, although getting no further than Constantinople. Other crusades are defined by objective, location, participants, or motive. Hence the Albigensian Crusades describe the wars against religious heretics in southern France around Albi between 1209 and 1229. The Baltic Crusades were campaigns launched against local pagan tribes of the region for two and a half centuries from the mid-twelfth century. The Peasants’ (1096), Children’s (1212), and Shepherds’ (1251, 1320) Crusades speak for themselves, socially pigeon-holed by historians’ (and contemporary) snobbery. The wars directed from the thirteenth century against papal enemies in Europe are called, somewhat judgmentally, “Political,” as if all crusades, like all wars, were not political. The dozens of lesser crusades to the Holy Land not deemed large or glamorous enough have remained unnumbered. To add to the confusion, even within the canon, historians have disagreed over some numbers attached to Holy Land crusades in the thirteenth century. Some see Frederick II of Germany’s crusade of 1228–29 that briefly restored Jerusalem as the Sixth Crusade; others as the last campaign of the Fifth Crusade summoned in 1213. Louis IX of France’s Egyptian campaign of 1248-50 (the Sixth or Seventh depending on the view taken of Frederick II) and his campaign to Tunis in 1270 (the Eighth or Ninth) are not now generally described by number. Such games are not new. In the early eighteenth century some historians stuck to five (1096, 1146, 1190, 1217-29, and 1248) while others counted eight. Most modern historians, content to number crusades until the Fifth (beginning in 1213), thereafter dispense with numbering.

Pilgrims approach the holy city of Jerusalem in this 1683 engraving by French artist Alain Manesson Mallet. The crusade as a penitential exercise was intimately linked to the practice of pilgrimage.

“The Four Leaders of the First Crusade,” as this nineteenth-century engraving is entitled, were: Godfrey of Bouillon, first crusader to rule Jerusalem; Raymond, Count of Toulouse; Bohemond I; and Bohemond’s nephew Tancred.

TWO

Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean

The First Crusade, 1095-99

BETWEEN 1095 AND THE END of the Middle Ages, western Europeans fought or planned wars broadly understood as being in defense or promotion of their religion throughout the eastern Mediterranean, in the Iberian peninsula, the Baltic, and within Christendom itself. Yet no campaign rivaled the first in impact or memory. Contemporaries and subsequent generations have been astonished and moved by the exploits of the armies and fleets from western Europe that forced their way into the Near East between 1096 and 1099 to capture Jerusalem in distant Palestine. Excited western intellectuals employed the language of theology: for one, “the greatest miracle since the Resurrection”; for another, “a new way of salvation,” almost a renewal of God’s covenant with His people.

The expedition arose out of a specific social, religious, ecclesiastical, and political context. Western Europe was held together by a military aristocracy whose power rested on control of local resources by force and inheritance as much as by civil law. The availability of large numbers of arms bearers, nobles and their retinues, with sufficient funds or patronage to undertake such an expedition, was matched by an awareness of the sinfulness of their customary activities and a desire for penance. For them, holy violence was familiar and Jerusalem possessed overwhelming numinous resonance. The invitation from the eastern Christian emperor of Byzantium (Constantinople), Alexius I Comnenus to Pope Urban suited the new papal policy of asserting supremacy over both Church and State developed over the previous half century. An earlier scheme by Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) to lead an army eastwards to Jerusalem had come to nothing in 1074. This time, Urban II, already a sponsor of war against the Muslims in Spain, seized on the opportunity to promote papal authority in temporal affairs. From its inception, crusading represented a practical expression of papal ideology, leadership, and power.

The opportunity was no accident. Alexius I had been recruiting western knights and mercenaries for years. A usurper, he needed military success to shore up his domestic position. The death in 1092 of Malik Shah, Turkish sultan of Baghdad, was followed by the disintegration of his empire in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. This offered Alexius a chance to restore Byzantine control over Asia Minor and northern Syria lost to the Turks since their victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071. For this he needed western troops. For political convenience the pope was an obvious and ready ally to choose. Once he had received the Byzantine ambassadors early in 1095, Urban transformed their request for military aid into a campaign of religious revivalism, its justification couched in cosmological and eschatological terms. The pope himself led the recruitment drive with a preaching tour of his homeland, France, between August 1095 and September 1096 that reached its defining moment at Clermont. With the kings of France and Germany excommunicated, the king of England, William II Rufus, in dispute with the pope, and the Spanish monarchs preoccupied with their own Muslim frontier, the pope concentrated on the higher nobility, the dukes, counts, and lords, while casting his net wide. Recruitment stretched from southern Italy and Sicily to Lombardy, across great swathes of France from Aquitaine and Provence to Normandy, Flanders and into the Low Countries, western Germany, the Rhineland, the North Sea region, and Denmark, although both Latin and Arabic sources dubbed them collectively as “Franks”—Franci, al-ifranji. A recent guess puts the number of fighting men reaching Asia Minor in 1096–97 at between fifty thousand and seventy thousand, excluding the non-combatant pilgrims who used the military exodus as protection for their own journeys.

Medieval Europe and Its Frontiers

The first to set out for the agreed muster point of Constantinople in spring and summer 1096 included forces from Lombardy, northern and eastern France, the Rhineland, and southern Germany. One of their leaders was a charismatic Picard preacher known as Peter the Hermit. Some contemporaries attributed the genesis of the whole enterprise to Peter, who allegedly had been badly treated by the Turkish rulers of Jerusalem when on pilgrimage some years earlier. Although unlikely to have been the expedition’s instigator, Peter certainly played a significant role in recruitment, possibly with papal approval, and was able to muster a substantial army within three and a half months of the council of Clermont. Elements of these Franco-German contingents conducted vicious anti-Jewish pogroms the length of the Rhineland in May and June 1096, before moving east down the Danube. Together, these armies have been dismissed as “the Peasants’ Crusade.” This is a misnomer. Although containing fewer nobles and mounted knights than the later armies, these forces were far from the rabbles of legend and contemporary polemic. They possessed cohesion, funds, and leadership, managing to complete the long march to Constantinople largely intact and in good time. One of the commanders, Walter Sans Avoir, was not, as many have assumed, “Penniless”—Sans Avoir is a place (in the Seine valley), not a condition. However, discipline proved hard to maintain. After crossing the Bosporus into Asia in August 1096, these armies were annihilated by the Turks in September and October, only a matter of weeks before the first of the princely-led armies reached Constantinople.

Behind Peter’s expeditionary forces came six large armies from northern France, Lorraine, Flanders, Normandy, Provence, and southern Italy. Although the Provençal leader, Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, had been consulted by Urban II in 1095-96 and traveled with the pope’s representative, or legate, Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, there was no single commander. The most effective field general proved to be Bohemond of Taranto, head of the Normans from southern Italy. Arriving at Constantinople between November 1096 and June 1097, each leader was persuaded or forced to offer an oath of fealty to Alexius I, who, in return, provided money, provisions, guides, and a regiment of troops. After the capture of Nicaea, capital of the Turkish sultanate of Rum (Asia Minor) in June 1097, the campaign fell into four distinct phases. An arduous march across Asia Minor to Syria (June to October 1097) that saw a major but close-run victory over the Turks north of Doryleaum (July 1) was followed by the siege and then defense of Antioch in northern Syria (October 1097 to June 1098). One contingent from the main army under Baldwin of Boulogne established control of the Armenian city of Edessa beyond the Euphrates. As their difficulties proliferated, the depleted western army increasingly regarded themselves as under the special care of God, a view reinforced by visions, the apparently miraculous discovery at Antioch of the Holy Lance that was said to have pierced Christ’s side on the Cross, and the victory a few days later (June 28, 1098) over a numerically much superior Muslim army from Mosul. From June 1098 until January 1099, the Christian army remained in northern Syria, living off the land and squabbling over the spoils.

The final march on Jerusalem (January to June 1099) was accompanied by reports of more miracles and visions, increasing the sense of the army being an instrument of Divine Providence. However, the crusaders may have been single-minded, pious, and brutal, but they were neither stupid nor ignorant. Their advance had taken account of local politics at every stage, notably the chronic divisions among their Muslim opponents that prevented united resistance. Amicable negotiations with the Egyptians, who had themselves conquered Jerusalem from the Turks in 1098, lasted for two years before collapsing only a few weeks before the westerners reached the Holy City. The final assault on Jerusalem (June to July 1099) was crowned with success on July 15; the ensuing massacre shocked Muslim and Jewish opinion. Western observers described it approvingly, in apocalyptic terms. Their triumph secured by defeating an Egyptian relief army at Ascalon (August 12), most of the surviving crusaders returned to the west. By 1100, as few as three hundred knights were left in southern Palestine. Of the upwards of one hundred thousand who had left for Jerusalem in 1096, and of those who had caught up with them during the following three years, perhaps no more than fourteen thousand reached Jerusalem in June 1099. Urban II had been right: the war of the cross had proved a very severe penance indeed.

This detail from an 1840 J. Robert-Fleury painting shows Baldwin of Boulogne triumphantly entering the Armenian city, Edessa, in February 1098.

The Twelfth Century and the Second Crusade, 1145-99

After the First Crusade’s establishment of bridgeheads at Antioch in Syria and Jerusalem in Palestine, four principalities were carved out on the Levantine mainland: the kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291); the principality of Antioch (1098–1268); the county of Edessa (1098–1144); and the county of Tripoli (1102–1289). Collectively these territories were known as Outremer, the land overseas. The eastern crusades were directed at expanding, defending, or restoring these conquests. In the first half of the twelfth century, with Jerusalem in Christian hands, the pilgrim trade exploded, while campaigning in the Holy Land became part of chivalric training for some high-born nobles as well as a martial accessory to pilgrimage. A number of modest expeditions helped conquer the ports, plains, and immediate hinterland of the Syrio-Palestinian coast (for example, those of King Sigurd of Norway, 1109-10; Fulk V of Anjou, 1120 and 1128; and the doge of Venice, 1123-24). Increasingly, the model of penitential war was used on other Christian frontiers, such as Spain, and against papal enemies within Christendom.

Europe and the Mediterranean: Christianity and Its Non-Christian Neighbors

However, the Holy Land retained its primacy as a goal of holy war. The precedent of the First Crusade ensured that a new general summons to arms received an enthusiastic response. In December 1144, the Turkish warlord Zingi, ruler of Mosul and Aleppo (1128–46), captured Edessa, massacring the Frankish inhabitants. In response, Pope Eugenius III (1145–53) launched a fresh crusade with a bull (that is, a circular letter, so called after its seal, or bulla that recited the heroics of 1096–99 as well as explaining the detailed privileges available to those who took the cross. In contrast with Urban II, Eugenius eagerly enrolled monarchs—Louis VII of France (1137–80) and Conrad III of Germany (1138–52). Recruiting lay chiefly in the hands of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the dominant ecclesiastic and spiritual publicist of his generation who conducted a highly effective preaching tour of France, Flanders, and the Rhineland in 1146-47. Bernard’s message of intolerance to Christ’s enemies spilled over into more anti-Jewish violence in the Rhineland, although this was rather disingenuously blamed on a maverick monk called Rudolph. While the pope authorized separate crusading wars in Spain, Bernard allowed a group of disgruntled Saxon nobles to commute their Holy Land vows to fighting on the Baltic German/Slav frontier, which they did without conspicuous success or adherence to holy war in the summer of 1147. One substantial body of recruits from Frisia (a northeastern province of Germany, bordering the North Sea), the Rhineland, Flanders, northern France, and England, traveling east by sea, helped King Alfonso Henriques of Portugal (1139–85) capture Lisbon from the Moors (October 24, 1147) after a brutal four-month siege. Some remained to settle, but most embarked for the Mediterranean the following spring, some finding service in the Spanish siege of Tortosa but the bulk reaching the Holy Land.

The Near East in the Twelfth Century

There they found the remnants of the great German and French land armies. Arriving close together at Constantinople in September and October 1147 after following the land route through central Europe, each was defeated by Turkish forces in Asia Minor. The large German force was destroyed near Dorylaeum in October, King Conrad narrowly escaping but wounded. The French, having earlier rejected an offer of sea transport by King Roger II of Sicily, although badly mauled in western Asia Minor in the winter of 1147-48, managed to reach the port of Adalia, only for Louis VII to abandon his infantry and sail directly to Syria with an army of officers but few men. The subsequent Holy Land campaign failed utterly. Conrad III managed to reconstruct some sort of army from the crusaders who had sailed from Lisbon. With Louis VII and the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin III (1143–63), he led an attack on Damascus (July 23-28, 1148) that ended in a hasty enforced withdrawal as the Christians lacked the resources for a prolonged siege or to protect themselves from Muslim relief armies. The disaster led to bitter recriminations and accusations of treachery that scandalized the west, casting the whole idea of such expeditions in doubt.

The Third Crusade, 1188-92

The four decades after the failed attack on Damascus in 1148 witnessed a gradual erosion of the strategic position of Outremer. The unification of Syria under Zengi’s son, Nur al-Din of Aleppo (1146–74), the conquest of Egypt by his Kurdish mercenary commander Shirkuh (1168–69), and the creation of an Egypto-Syrian empire by Shirkuh’s nephew, Saladin (1169–93), meant that by 1186 Outremer was surrounded. The rhetoric of this new, cohesive Muslim power placed great emphasis on jihad—war against infidels. This coincided with Outremer’s financial weakness, lack of western aid and a descent, in the kingdom of Jerusalem, into debilitation and political instability. The royal succession passed in turn to a possible bigamist (Amalric 1163-74), a leper (Baldwin IV 1174-85), a child (Baldwin V 1185-86), and a woman (Sybil 1186-90) and her unpopular arriviste husband (Guy 1186-92). On July 4, 1187, Saladin annihilated the army of Jerusalem at the battle of Hattin in Galilee. Within a year almost all the Frankish ports and castles had surrendered or been captured; Jerusalem fell on October 2, 1187. Resistance was reduced largely to Tyre, Tripoli, and Antioch.

The Crusader States of Outremer

An illumination from a fifteenth-century manuscript depicts Saladin’s decisive victory over King Guy of Jerusalem in the 1187 Battle of the Horns of Hattin, Syria.

The response in the west was massive. By March 1188, the kings of Germany, France, and England had taken the cross with many of their leading nobles. King William II of Sicily had sent a fleet east. Preaching and recruitment had begun and campaign strategies carefully developed. A profits tax, known as the Saladin Tithe, had been instituted in France and the British Isles. In 1189, King Guy of Jerusalem, recently released from Saladin’s captivity, began to besiege the vital port of Acre. For the next two years, this became the focal point of Christian military effort. In the same year fleets from northern Europe began to arrive. In May 1189, Frederick Barbarossa, king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, set out at the head of an army allegedly one hundred thousand strong. After successfully forcing a passage through the unhelpful Byzantine Empire and the hostile Turkish Anatolia, Frederick’s crusade ended in tragic bathos when he drowned trying to cross the River Saleph in Cilicia on June 10, 1190. Demoralized, his huge army disintegrated, only a small rump reaching Acre.

Although English and French contingents began sailing eastwards in 1189, the kings did not embark until 1190, delayed by political feuding over the succession to Henry II of England (d. July 1189). Given the delicate relationship caused by the English king holding extensive lands as a vassal of the French crown, King Philip II of France (1180–1223) and the new king of England, Richard I (1189–99), decided to travel together. Richard’s skills as a general and administrator of men, ships, and materials and his vast reserves of cash soon elevated him to the central role in the crusade. Deflected not at all by anti-Jewish riots and massacres in English towns, notably York, in 1189-90, the kings departed in July 1190, making their rendezvous in September at Messina in Sicily, where they wintered. While Philip sailed for Acre in March 1191, arriving on April 20, Richard’s larger forces were blown off course to Cyprus. With elements in his army being mistreated by its independent Greek ruler, Richard took the opportunity to conquer the island in a lightning campaign in May. Cyprus remained in Christian hands until 1571. Richard finally arrived at Acre on June 6, 1191. After a further six weeks’ hard pounding, the city surrendered on July 12. On July 31, Philip II abandoned the crusade, pleading illness and pressing business at home but clearly discomforted by Richard’s dominance. Most of his followers showed what they thought of his action by staying. After executing hundreds of Muslim prisoners in his impatience at Saladin’s prevarication over implementing the Acre surrender agreement, Richard began his march south toward Jerusalem on August 22.

The Palestine war of 1191–92 revolved around security. Since overwhelming victory eluded both sides, the only resolution lay in a sustainable political agreement. Richard I used force to try to frighten Saladin into restoring the pre-1187 kingdom of Jerusalem. If diplomacy succeeded, battles and sieges became unnecessary. The conflict was prolonged because neither side achieved sufficient military advantage to persuade the other to make acceptable concessions. On September 7, 1191, Richard repulsed Saladin’s attempt to drive the crusaders into the sea at Arsuf, the major engagement of the campaign. Twice Richard marched his troops to within twelve miles of Jerusalem (January and June/July 1192) only to withdraw each time, arguing he had insufficient men to take or keep the city. These were prudent decisions but jarred with the reason why he was in southern Palestine in the first place. With Saladin failing to take the important port of Jaffa in late July 1192 and Richard unable to develop a scheme to attack Saladin’s power base in Egypt, military stalemate dictated a diplomatic conclusion. Negotiations proved tortuous. Saladin refused to contemplate suggestions of any formal Christian authority within Jerusalem, but was otherwise prepared to accept a measure of Palestinian partition. The Treaty of Jaffa (September 2, 1192) left the Franks in control of the coast from Acre to Jaffa and allowed access to Jerusalem for pilgrims and freedom of movement between Muslim and Christian territories. Ill and eager to return home, Richard sailed from Acre on October 9. Ironically, Saladin died less than six months later (March 4, 1193).

This statue of King Richard I of England, Richard the Lionheart, stands outside Parliament in London.

While failing to recapture Jerusalem, the Third Crusade determined the pattern for later eastern crusades. Thereafter, support for the reconstituted kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted until 1291, came exclusively by sea. Cyprus provided a new and valuable partner for the Frankish settlements of the mainland. Diplomacy and truces between Muslims and Christians became standard practice. The subjugation of Egypt adopted center stage in western strategic planning. Preaching and recruitment for crusading became increasingly professional, with finance being arranged by governments or the church through taxation. A more precise theology of violence refined the privileges and obligations of the crusaders themselves. After the failures of 1191–92, even the focus on Jerusalem shifted, the iter Jerosolymitana (Jerusalem journey) became subsumed into the negotium terrae sanctae (the business of the Holy Land), or simply the sanctum negotium (the holy business).

The Fourth Crusade, 1198-1204

The thin strip of Palestinian coast restored to Christian rule by the Third Crusade proved a commercially viable base for a restored, if reduced, kingdom of Jerusalem over the following century, although the Holy City itself only returned to Christian rule between 1229 and 1244. After recovering much of the coast during the 1190s, the Franks found protection in a sequence of truces with Saladin’s heirs in Egypt and Syria. Until the mid-thirteenth century, western aid came largely on its own terms rather than in response to a specific crisis. The inception of the Fourth Crusade rested with Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), who envisaged all Christians as to some degree obliged to pursue the Lord’s War. This Innocent promoted as part of the general devotional life of the west through preaching and the liturgy. An enthusiast for wars of the cross against a wide range of perceived threats to the church, Innocent regarded the recovery of the Holy Land as a central and urgent objective. One of the first things he did was to proclaim a new eastern expedition in August 1198.

The tomb of Pope Innocent III is in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, in Rome. This pope’s declaration that going on Crusade was every Christian’s obligation was an important force in launching the Fourth Crusade.

By 1201, Innocent’s call had been answered by a group of powerful northern French barons, including Count Baldwin of Flanders, who chose as their leader the well-connected northern Italian marquess Boniface of Montferrat, whose family had a long history of close involvement in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt was chosen as the target of the expedition. The absence of kings denied the crusaders access to national taxes or fleets, forcing them to seek transport from Venice. Unfortunately, the agreement with Venice stipulated an optimistically large number of crusaders and a commensurately inflated price to be paid. It became apparent in the summer of 1202 that the crusaders, by now gathered at Venice, could not raise the agreed sum. As well as supplying fifty warships of their own, the Venetians had committed much of their shipping and hence annual income to carry the crusade. Realistically, they could neither abandon the enterprise nor cancel the debt. As a solution, the doge, Enrico Dandolo (d.1205), offered a moratorium on the debt in return for the crusaders’ help in capturing the port of Zara in Dalmatia, even though this was a Christian city belonging to a fellow crusader, King Emeric of Hungary. Despite evident qualms and papal disapproval, the crusaders had little option if they wished to pursue their ultimate objective. Zara fell to the Veneto-crusader force on November 24, 1202.

By then, elements in the crusade and Venetian leadership were considering a further diversion to Constantinople in support of Alexius Angelus, son of the deposed Byzantine emperor Isaac II (1185–95). Young Alexius promised to subsidize the crusaders’ attack on Egypt if they helped him take the Byzantine throne from his usurping uncle Alexius III (1195–1203). Many crusaders were disgusted by the plan and withdrew, but the leadership and the bulk of the army sailed with young Alexius and the Venetians to Constantinople, arriving in June 1203. A month later an amphibious assault on the city persuaded Alexius III to flee, allowing for the restoration of Isaac II with his son, now Alexius IV, as co-emperor. Their dependence on loutish westerners alienated Greek opinion, while their inability to honor Alexius’ promise of subsidy and assistance undermined support from the crusaders. In January 1204 they were deposed, murdered, and replaced by Alexius V Ducas Murzuphlus, who began hostile maneuvers against the crusaders. Faced with a crisis of survival, the western leaders decided to impose their will on the Greeks, in March 1204 agreeing to conquer and partition the Byzantine Empire. On April 12–13, the crusaders breached the walls of the city. Alexius V fled and the victorious westerners were allowed three days of pillaging. Although probably exaggerated, this atrocity has rung down the centuries in infamy. Within weeks a Latin emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, had been appointed and the territorial annexation of the Greek Empire begun. A year later, hopes of continuing the crusade to Egypt were abandoned. The Latin empire of Constantinople lasted until 1261; western occupation of parts of Greece for centuries. The precarious state of parts of the Frankish conquests in Greece prompted crusades to be proclaimed against the Greeks from 1231 until well into the fourteenth century.

The capture of Constantinople was not an accident; it had been considered by every major expedition since 1147. Successive popes had voiced disappointment at Greek failure to contribute to the recovery of the Holy Land. In the circumstances of 1202–03, conquest appeared viable; in the spring of 1204 necessary. However, it was never the ultimate object of the crusade, and for Venice marked a new departure into territorial instead of simply commercial imperialism. The diversion was a result of policy not conspiracy, its motives a mixture of pragmatism, idealism, and opportunism that characterized all other wars of the cross.

The Fifth Crusade, 1213-29

More than its predecessors, the Fifth Crusade reflected the institutionalization of crusading in Christian society as envisaged by Innocent III. In the context of a wider process of semi-permanent evangelization, crusading acted as one manifestation of Christian revivalism. The papal bull Quia Maior (1213) launching the new eastern enterprise extended access to the crusade remission of sins, the indulgence, to those who sent a proxy or provided a proportionate sum of money in redemption of their vow. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council of the western Church authorized universal clerical taxation to support the cause. A massive and carefully orchestrated campaign of recruitment, propaganda, and finance produced a series of expeditions to the east between 1217 and 1229. The bulk of recruits came from Germany, central Europe, Italy, and the British Isles instead of France, the traditional heartland of crusade enlistment. After early contingents landed at Acre in 1217-18, including one led by King Andrew of Hungary (1205–35), the focus of military operations turned to Egypt when, in 1218, the crusaders attacked Damietta, a port in the eastern Nile Delta. The city fell only after a difficult and costly siege in November 1219. Egyptian proposals to exchange Damietta for Jerusalem were rejected as improper and unworkable by a group led by the Cardinal Legate, Pelagius, whose control of the purse strings gave him considerable authority within the crusade army. Lack of leadership proved more damaging. The westerners refused to accept orders from the king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne (1210–25). However, the commander chosen by the pope, Frederick II of Germany (1211–50), remained in Europe. In the summer of 1221, to prevent the crusade disintegrating through inactivity, the Christian army moved south toward Cairo, only to be cut off by floods, harried by the Egyptians, and forced to surrender on August 30. Damietta was evacuated on September 8, 1221.

Recruiting continued almost unabated despite the setback in Egypt. In 1227, Frederick II finally embarked for the east, only to turn back immediately because of sudden and serious illness. Although Pope Gregory IX (1227–41), a veteran crusade recruiting agent, lost patience and excommunicated him, Frederick, undaunted, sailed to the Holy Land in 1228. Exploiting the rivalries between the rulers of Egypt and Syria, in February 1229 Frederick agreed to a treaty with the sultan of Egypt that restored Jerusalem to the Franks. The city was to be open to all and the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, to remain under the Islamic religious authorities (not dissimilar to the arrangements in Jerusalem after 1967). However, unpopular for his high-handedness, when Frederick embarked for the west from Acre on May 1, 1229, he was pelted with offal. With a brief interruption in 1240, Jerusalem remained in Christian hands until captured by Khwarazmian raiders, Turkish freebooters in the pay of the sultan of Egypt, in 1244. The city remained under Muslim control until 1917.

The Thirteenth Century

After 1229, eastern crusades progressed from the pragmatic to the optimistic to the desperate. Truces with feuding Muslim neighbors continued to sustain Frankish Outremer until the accession to power in Egypt of the militant Mamluk sultans, members of a professional caste of Turkish slave warriors, who replaced the heirs of Saladin in the 1250s. The Franks’ alliance with the Mongols who invaded Syria in the late 1250s, followed by the Mongols’ defeat by the Mamluks and withdrawal from the region in 1260, left them vulnerable to the new Egyptian sultan, Baibars (1260–77), who was committed to eradicating the Christian settlements. Successive western expeditions under a series of great nobles (the Count of Champagne in 1239; the Earl of Cornwall in 1240; the Lord Edward, later Edward I of England, in 1271) achieved little other than temporary advantage or respite. Rulers, such as the kings of France and Aragon, dispatched occasional relief flotillas or stationed modest garrisons in Acre. Despite the continued popularity of crusading as an ideal and activity, between 1229 and the final loss of the last Christian outposts in Syria and Palestine in 1291, only one international campaign of substance reached the eastern Mediterranean, the crusade of Louis IX of France, 1248-54.

Pope Gregory IX (1227–41), who reigned during the final years of the Fifth Crusade, excommunicated Frederick II of Germany for initially failing to reach the Holy Land.

Louis IX’s crusade proved the best prepared, most lavishly funded, and meticulously planned of all. It was also one of the most disastrous, its failure matching its ambition. Louis intended to conquer Egypt and change the balance of power in the Near East. Taking the cross in December 1244, over the next three years he assembled an army of about fifteen thousand, a treasury of over 1 million livres, and a stockpile of food and equipment stored in Cyprus, where Louis arrived in the late summer of 1248. The following spring, supported by the Outremer Franks, Louis invaded Egypt, capturing Damietta the day he landed (June 5, 1249). The assault on the interior began on November 20, only to get bogged down in the Nile Delta for more than two months. After a hard-fought but indecisive engagement outside Mansourah on February 7, 1250, Louis’s army could make no further progress and became cut off from its base at Damietta. Withdrawal in early April turned into a rout as the Christian army disintegrated through disease, fatigue, and a superior enemy. Louis himself, suffering badly from dysentery, was among those captured, being released in return for Damietta and a massive ransom. Stunned by what he saw as God’s chastisement, Louis remained in the Holy Land until 1254 bolstering defenses (those at Caesarea can still be seen) and shoring up Outremer’s diplomatic relations with its neighbors. Yet while securing his reputation for piety, Louis’s stay did nothing to reverse the verdict of 1250. The best-laid crusade plan had failed dismally.

Following the defeat of the Mongols in 1260, Baibars of Egypt and his successors Qalawun (1279–90) and al-Ashraf Khalil (1290–93) systematically dismembered the remaining Frankish holdings in Syria and Palestine. Antioch fell in 1268; Tripoli in 1289; and, finally, after an heroic but futile defense, Acre in 1291, after which the remaining Christian outposts were evacuated without further resistance. To ensure the Franks would not again return, the sultans leveled the ports they captured. The west watched this collapse with alarm, concern, and impotence. Political rivalries, competing domestic demands, and a more realistic assessment of the required scale of operation conspired in the failure to organize adequate military response. Louis IX’s new projected eastern expedition of 1270 reached no further than Tunis on its way to Egypt. There Louis died on August 25, 1270, and most of his followers went home. Yet after the final loss of Acre in 1291, plans continued to be hatched and raids conducted in the Levant throughout the fourteenth century until the new threat of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans and the Aegean supervened from the 1350s and again in the mid-fifteenth century, redirecting the focus of holy war.

This c.1899 engraving depicts Louis IX of France, who led a crusade (1248–54) that was well funded and well planned, but ended in disaster.

The Children’s Crusade of 1212 was launched by zealotry directed at freeing the Holy Sepulchre from non-Catholics.

THREE

Crusades in the West

Popular Uprisings

THE IDEOLOGY AND RHETORIC OF the Holy Land wars were applied easily to internal religious and political conflicts within Christendom and to frontier wars with non-Christians. Socially, its grip was exposed in the popular outbreaks of revivalist enthusiasm for the recovery of the Holy Land witnessed by the so-called Children’s Crusade and the Shepherds’ Crusades. The Children’s Crusade in the summer of 1212 comprised two distinct outbursts of popular religious enthusiasm prompted by an atmosphere of crisis provoked by the preaching of the threats to Christendom simultaneously posed by the Muslims in the Holy Land, the Moors in Spain, and heretics in southern France. A series of penitential and revivalist processions in northern France, led by Stephen of Cloyes from the Vermandois, marched to St. Denis near Paris voicing vague appeals for moral reform. There is no clear evidence these marchers intended to liberate Jerusalem. Further east, at much the same time, large groups of young men and adolescents (called in the sources pueri, meaning children but also anyone under full maturity) as well as priests and adults, apparently led by a boy called Nicholas of Cologne, marched through the Rhineland proclaiming their desire to free the Holy Sepulchre. It seems some of these marchers reached northern Italy seeking transport east but probably getting no further. Their holy war was of the spirit. Taking the church’s teaching literally, they apparently believed their poverty, purity, and innocence would prevail where knights could not. Experience soon taught them otherwise.

The marches of 1212 found parallels in the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1251, a populist rising in France that blamed Louis IX’s Egyptian debacle on a corrupt nobility. Once its leaders were exposed not as holy men but disorderly rabble-rousers, the movement was violently suppressed. However, there were similar expressions of social and political anxieties through support for the transcendent cause of the Holy Land in Italy in 1309 and France in 1320. All were closely linked to news or rumors of external threats to Christendom, the dissemination of a clearly defined redemptive theology incorporating the crusade as a collective penitential act, and the perceived failure of the leaders of society to live up to their obligations on either count.

Crusades Against Heretics and Christians

Official Church teaching increasingly encouraged the wide application of wars of the cross, even if Innocent III, in his bull Quia Maior (1213), was at pains to stress the priority of the Holy Land. From the 1130s Jerusalem indulgences on the model of 1096 were being offered to those fighting political enemies of the pope such as Roger II of Sicily (1101–54) or Markward of Anweiler in Sicily in 1199, assorted heretics, their protectors and mercenary bands. These indulgences were seemingly granted without the attendant vows, preaching, or cross-taking. The first time the full apparatus of the wars of the cross was directed against Christians came with the war declared by Innocent III in 1208 against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc, known later as the Albigensians, and their Christian protectors. One of the most notorious of all medieval wars, the Albigensian Crusades (1209–29) degenerated from a genuine attempt to cauterize widespread heresy, which many saw as a dangerously infectious wound bleeding all Christendom, into a brutal land seizure. The puritanical dualist Cathar heresy had grown in strength in parts of Languedoc controlled by the count of Toulouse. The assassination of the Papal Legate for the region in 1208 led Innocent III to offer Holy Land indulgences and the cross to northern French barons. Under a militant monkish zealot, Arnald-Amaury, abbot of Cîteaux, and an ambitious adventurer, Simon de Montfort, the crusaders began to annex the county of Toulouse and its surrounding provinces, often with great savagery meted out indiscriminately to local Christians as well as heretics. The sack of Béziers in 1209 was remembered as especially brutal. In 1213, Simon defeated and killed the count of Toulouse’s ally King Peter of Aragon at the battle of Muret. After Simon’s death in 1218, the impetus of the crusade faltered until revived by King Louis VIII of France (1223–26) in 1226. By the end of the year Languedoc had effectively been conquered, its subjugation confirmed in the Treaty of Paris (1229).

Christ crowns Roger II of Sicily (1101–54) in this mosaic in the church La Martorana, in Palermo. The papacy broadened the scope of the Crusades by granting indulgences to those who fought the pope’s enemies—who included Roger.

Ironically, for all its ultimate political success, the Albigensian Crusade failed to eradicate the Cathars, a task effected by the more pacific and reasoned methods of the Inquisition. However, crusades against heretics remained in the Church’s arsenal for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond. Six crusades were launched or planned against the Czech Hussite evangelicals of Bohemia between 1420 and 1471. Protestant Reformations in the sixteenth century stimulated a revival of crusade schemes against enemies of the Catholic Church, such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, and remained a traditional resort for devout and threatened Catholics in the new Wars of Religion, for example against the Huguenots in France in the 1560s.

The Albigensian Crusades (1209–29) targeted the Cathars, some of whom took refuge at Montsegur, a castle whose ruins still stand in the French Pyrenees. The crusaders combined persecution of the heresy with land seizure.

To assert and sustain the thirteenth-century papacy’s plenitude of power, drive for doctrinal and liturgical uniformity, and acquisition of a temporal state in Italy, popes found the crusade a malleable instrument. Those attacked by crucesignati as “schismatics” included peasants in the Netherlands and the Lower Weser (1228–34); Bosnians opposed to Hungarian rule (from 1227); and rebels against the pope’s vassal Henry III of England (1216-17 and 1265). The main crusades against Christians were fought over papal security in its lands in Italy. From the 1190s, popes were fearful of being surrounded by the Hohenstaufen dynasty, kings of Germany who were also rulers of southern Italy and Sicily. This caused the Thirty Years’ War with the Hohenstaufen Frederick II and his heirs (1239–68) that ended with a papal nominee, Charles of Anjou, as ruler of Sicily and Naples. Following a Sicilian rebellion against Charles in 1282, much of the fighting during the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302) also attracted the apparatus of crusading: cross, preaching, indulgences, church taxation, and so on. This habit continued for the regular local or regional campaigns in pursuit of papal interests in central and northern Italy during the popes’ residence at Avignon (1309–77). These Italian crusades scarcely pretended to conceal papal corporate or personal interest, to the disgust of critics such as Dante. The failure of crusades launched by both contending parties to end the Great Papal Schism (1378–1417) led to the abandonment of this form of holy war, only occasionally to be revived by bellicose popes such as Julius II (1503–13).

Spain

The ceremonies and privileges associated with expeditions to Jerusalem had been extended to cover those fighting the Muslims in Spain since the 1090s, a process regularized by the First Lateran Council in 1123. Further authorization for crusades against the Moors came in 1147-48, during the Second Crusade, and at intervals thereafter. A church council in Segovia in 1166 even offered Jerusalem indulgences to those who defended Castile from Christian attack. The later twelfth-century invasions of Iberia by the Muslim fundamentalist Almohads from North Africa threatened Christian conquests and provoked a greater frequency in crusading appeals, culminating in the crusade of 1212 against them. This led to the great Christian victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) over the Almohads. Thereafter the campaigns of the Spanish Reconquista became more obviously national concerns, although still liable to elicit crusade status, as with the conquests of the Balearic Islands (1229–31) and Valencia (1232–35) by James I of Aragon (1213–76). With the fall of Cordoba (1236) and Seville (1248) to Ferdinand III of Castile (1217–52), formal or active crusading against the Moors, now penned in the emirate of Granada (until 1492), became effectively redundant. Ironically, the peninsula’s most intimate subsequent experience of crusading was as victim when the French invaded Aragon in 1285 as part of the crusade called at the start of the War of Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302).

The Baltic

The Baltic crusades acted as one element in a cruel process of Christianization and Germanization, providing a religious gloss to ethnic cleansing and territorial aggrandizement more blatant and, in places, more successful than anywhere else. Crusading in the Baltic, first applied to Danish and German anti-Slav aggression between the Elbe and Oder in 1147 during the Second Crusade, cloaked a missionary war which, given the Christian prohibition on forced conversion, represented a contradiction in canon law. These wars directly served local political and ecclesiastical ambitions. The main areas of conquest after 1200 included Prussia, Livonia, Estonia, and Finland. In Prussia, the expansion of land-grabbing German princes in Pomerania gave way to the competing interests of Denmark and the Military Order of Teutonic Knights. This order had originally been founded by Germans in Acre in the wake of the Third Crusade in the 1190s, but because of its regional associations soon became heavily, and ultimately almost exclusively, involved in fighting for the cross in the north. The fighting in Livonia devolved onto the church under the archbishop of Riga and the Military Order of Sword Brothers (founded in 1202). In Estonia the Danes again clashed with the Military Orders, as well as with Swedes and Russians from Novgorod. Finland became the target of Swedish expansion. By the 1230s, control of war and settlement in Prussia, Livonia, and southern Estonia had been taken up by the Teutonic Knights, with whom the Sword Brothers were amalgamated in 1237. In 1226 their Master, Hermann von Salza, was created imperial prince of Prussia, which was declared a papal fief held by the Teutonic Knights in 1234. Although some specific grants for crusades in the Baltic continued, most of these northern wars adopted the character of “eternal crusades” once Innocent IV in 1245 confirmed the right of the Teutonic Knights to grant crusade indulgences without special papal authorization. This gave the Teutonic Knights a unique status, not held even by the rulers of the kingdom of Jerusalem, of a sovereign government possessed of the automatic right of equating its foreign policy with the crusade. Cashing in on this in the fourteenth century, the Knights developed a sort of chivalric package tour for western nobles eager to see some fighting, enjoy lavish feasting, earn indulgences, and gild their reputations. The Knights’ appeal slackened with their failure to overcome Lithuania-Poland and the conversion of pagan Lithuania in 1386. Their transformation into a secular German principality was completed in 1525 when the Master of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia embraced Lutheranism and secularization. The Livonian branch followed suit in 1562.

The Spanish Reconquista

The Baltic

Jews

Frontiers, medieval or modern, can be religious, ethnic, cultural, and social as well as geographic. In such cases, wars of the cross added a particular edge of hostility or intensity. While no crusades were specifically directed against the Jewish communities anywhere in Europe or Asia, the ideology of crusading encouraged violence against them, despite official secular and ecclesiastical disapproval. The ringing condemnation of enemies of the cross and the concentration on the Crucifixion story in the preaching of Urban II in 1095-96, or Bernard of Clairvaux’s in 1146-47, needed little misunderstanding to be applied to the Jews. The pogroms in the Rhineland in 1096 and 1146-47 and in England in 1190 were not the sum of anti-Jewish violence, which spread widely in northern Europe. But the Jews were only ever collateral targets of crusading. Local rulers reserved exploitation and expropriation to themselves; Richard I condemned the attacks on Jews in London in 1189 because he regarded their property as his. A cultural myopia on the part of Christians refused to see Jews as fully human, a dismissive attitude prominently displayed by the great crusader Louis IX of France. Such discrimination could translate into persecution, although increasingly it led to expulsion from regions of the British Isles and France in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Lacking civil rights or in most cases effective systems of autonomous rule or defense, Jews in medieval Europe suffered through Christian schizophrenia. Protected by Christian Biblical prescript, Jews were politically not sufficiently visible to constitute the sort of material threat that would elicit a crusade against them. Yet at the same time Christian teaching also saw them as malign and therefore a religious challenge to Christianity. Increasingly, blood libels, accusations of Jews murdering Christians, rather than crusades, provoked massacres. Where daily experience and long tradition denied both Jewish malignity and cultural invisibility, as, ironically, in two regions most infected by active crusading, Spain and Outremer, Jews were less molested, even tolerated. Crusading played a part, at times a gory one, in constructing a closed, intolerant society. However, to blame the excesses of anti-Semitism, medieval or modern, on the wars of the cross is facile and unconvincing. That well of hatred fed from many streams.

A manuscript illumination from a French Bible, c. 1250, shows two Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death as retribution for the death of Jesus, shown at the top left. Though European anti-Semitism cannot be blamed only on the Crusades, the tenth through fourteenth centuries saw Jews become the victims of persecution.

The End of Crusading

The traditional terminal date for the Crusades, the loss of Acre in 1291, makes no sense. People continued to take the cross, if in diminishing numbers. The attendant institutions of indulgences, legal obligations, and taxation persisted in use by rulers and popes for centuries. At least until the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in the 1330s, the recovery of the Holy Land seemed viable, if difficult and expensive. In the Mediterranean, attacks on piratical Turkish emirs and the Mamluks continued sporadically, such as the sack of Alexandria in 1365 by Peter I of Cyprus. The growing power of the Ottoman Turks from the mid-fourteenth century redefined the objective of crusading, throwing Christendom once more on the defensive. At Nicopolis on the Danube (1396) and Varna on the Black Sea (1444) western crusade armies sent to combat the Ottomans in the Balkans were crushed, on both occasions with the Turks receiving aid from Christian allies, respectively Serbs and Genoese. Rhodes, occupied by the Military Order of St. John, the Hospitallers, since 1309, held out until 1522 before relocating to Malta, from where they were evicted by Napoleon in 1798. Cyprus remained in Christian hands until 1571, Crete until 1669; both fruits of earlier crusades. Crusading mentalities were re-forged in the Adriatic and central Europe in the face of the Ottoman advance in the fifteenth century. After the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453, crusading again seemed a vital necessity to the Renaissance papacy. In response to the fall of the Greek imperial capital a new crusade was proclaimed. Belgrade was saved in 1456 by an unlikely crusading force gathered by John of Capistrano. As long as the Ottomans presented a danger, crusading ideas retained relevance and interest, even into the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon dismissed them as “the rendezvous of cracked brains that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat.” Yet the appeal lingered. Men may have taken the cross and expected indulgences in the anti-Turkish Holy League (1684–97). The end of crusading came not in the drama of a failed campaign or a siege lost, but as a long, dying fall, finally obliterated as kingdoms and secular powers, not churches or religion, claimed the morality as well as control of warfare.

Polish artist Jan Matejko painted a scene of hand-to-hand combat during the 1444 Ottoman victory over Polish and Hungarian forces near the Black Sea fortress of Varna, in Bulgaria.

The fourteenth-century Sultan Hassan Mosque, in Cairo, was built during the Mamluk Period. The Mamluks were among the forces that brought unity and strength to what was once the Outremer, and ended the Crusades.

FOUR

The Impact of the Crusades

TRADITIONALLY, THE CRUSADES outside Christendom have been credited with profound influence over the distribution of political and religious power in the regions they affected. Yet their impact as well as success was determined by forces usually beyond the crusaders’ control. Without the disintegration of the unity of the Muslim Near East in the late eleventh century and of Muslim Spain two generations earlier, wars of the cross against Islam would probably not have begun or would have rapidly stalled. Conversely, without the westerners’ political and economic capacity to sustain conquest and colonization, in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, these wars would have proved evanescent. The thirteenth-century failure of the Muslim powers of North Africa and southern Iberia and of the disparate tribes of the southern and eastern Baltic to maintain any concerted resistance to Christian expansion allowed crusades to prevail. In marked contrast stood the rise of Lithuania in the fourteenth century that successfully resisted further crusading advances in the Baltic, a unification comparable strategically to that of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt under the Ayyubids (c.1174-1250) and the Mamluks (1250–1517) which sealed the fate of Outremer.

The consequences of crusading activity varied hugely. In Spain, the Christian reconquest decisively reoriented the political and cultural direction of the region. In the Baltic, the conquest and Christianization of Prussia, Livonia, and Finland redefined the area and its peoples within Latin Christendom. In Greece and its islands, large areas of which were occupied by western nobles and Venetians after the Fourth Crusade, in some cases for centuries, the effect of western conquest tended to be superficial, but while it lasted, as in the case of Venetian Crete (held until 1669), often unpleasant or downright brutal for the indigenous population. By contrast, in the Near East, with the exception of Cyprus which fell to Richard I of England in 1191 and remained in the hands of Latin Christians until 1571, the western presence that had begun when the first crusaders burst into Anatolia and northern Syria in the summer and autumn of 1097 left few traces except physical and, possibly, cultural scars. Although western-sponsored coastal raids continued into the fifteenth century, after the expulsion of the last Latin Christian outposts on the Levantine shore in 1291, the systematic destruction of the ports by the sultans of Egypt prevented any prospect of return, apart from a trickle of determined, well-heeled pilgrims and a few friars as resident tourist guides. Nothing remains of the Latin presence in Syria and Palestine except stones, some still standing as built but mostly ruins, and a revived memory of bitterness.

The Aegean in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

It is possible to argue that suppression of heresy within Christendom in the thirteenth century and papal campaigns against their political opponents from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries did not require a special ideology of holy war. Similarly, the frontier expansion in the Baltic and the integration into the polity of western Europe of powers such as Denmark and Sweden preceded their association with crusading ideology and practices. In Spain, the Christian reconquest, or Reconquista, predated its reinvention as a holy war. The wars would have occurred in any case. By contrast, the wars in the eastern Mediterranean can be seen only as the consequence of this new form of holy war. Geographically, Syria and Palestine did not lie on western Christendom’s frontiers. Only through imaginative empathy did the politics of the Near East directly impinge on Latin Christendom, a consequence of the ubiquity in the west’s religious culture of endless repetition of the Bible stories, in preaching, liturgy, and the plastic arts. Perhaps the strangest aspect of crusading to the Holy Land lay precisely in its lack of connection with the domestic circumstances of the territories whither the armies were directed. While the First Crusade answered the interests of the eastern Greek Christian empire of Byzantium, it was hardly portrayed as such and developed a momentum quite removed from Greek frontier policy. There existed no strategic or material interest for the knights of the west to campaign in Judaea. This is where comparisons with modern imperialism collapse. For the land-hungry or politically ambitious adventurer, other regions nearer home offered easier, richer pickings. With the partial exception of the Third Crusade (1188–92), currents of western enthusiasm and policy, as in the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, determined the timing and recruitment of eastern crusades rather than the immediate needs of the western settlements in the Levant. More generally, while the presence of western warriors and settlers on the immediate frontiers of Muslim Iberia or the pagan Baltic made some economic or political sense, this was not true for the Holy Land, where the motive for occupation depended on its status as a relic of Christ on earth, a fundamentally religious mission however material the methods employed to achieve it. Consequently, the Christian wars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Near East provide startling testimony to the power of ideas.

The Crusades and Muslim Power

How significant, therefore, were these eastern crusades in the development of international patterns of power? They certainly thrust westerners into geopolitical events otherwise far removed from their orbit of interest. A particular religious perception of world history led to western European involvement in fashioning the political destiny of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq in a period of decisive re-alignment of Near Eastern power.

Urban II possessed an acute interest in Christian political history, which often made gloomy reading. The successes of the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the fourth century and the subsequent conversion of the Germanic successor powers in the ruins of the western empire from the fifth to seventh centuries had been offset by the irruption of Islam in the seventh and early eighth centuries. The rapid Arab conquests of the Christian provinces of Egypt, Palestine and Syria, North Africa, and most of the Iberian peninsula between 634 and 711 had reduced Christendom, as one late medieval pope had it, to an “angle of the world.” Jerusalem had fallen to Arab rule in 638; almost all the Biblical scenes familiar to the faithful lay under Muslim control. Further advances in the ninth century, including the capture of Sicily and bases in southern Italy, seemed to threaten Rome and convert the western Mediterranean into a Muslim lake. The two most powerful regimes in the west, the Carolingian Empire of the eighth century or the German emperors of the tenth and eleventh, despite laying claims to an Italian kingdom, rarely engaged directly with the loss of southern Christian provinces. For the empire of Byzantium, with its long frontiers with Islamic states, the confrontation occupied a habitual rather than urgent element of foreign policy, especially after the stabilization of borders in eastern Anatolia from the eighth century.

The Mezquita of Cordoba, now a Roman Catholic church, was the second-largest mosque in the world when Islamic rule governed much of the Iberian peninsula. In the eyes of Pope Urban II, Moorish rule of the region was a grave setback to Christianity.

The hundred years before 1095 saw a transformation. In the western Mediterranean, Muslim pirates were ejected from bases in southern France at the end of the tenth century. Between 1061 and 1091, Italian-Norman forces conquered Sicily. Further west, the collapse of the caliphate of Cordoba in Spain in 1031 and its replacement by a patchwork of competing principalities, ruled by the so-called taifa (or “party”) kings, presented Christian rulers and mercenaries from outside the peninsula with opportunities to extract tribute and extend territory. Driven by politics and profit, not religion, Christian rule advanced piecemeal, Muslim—Christian alliances being as common as conflict. The famed conqueror of Valencia in 1094, the Castilian Roderigo Diaz (d.1099), “El Cid,” spent as much of his career fighting for Muslim lords against Christians as vice versa. However, when the usually squabbling Christian princes united, significant gains were achieved, notably the capture of Toledo by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085. Dynastic and ecclesiastical links drew recruits from Catalonia and north of the Pyrenees, although only with hindsight could they be equated with crusaders.

The Castilian military leader, Roderigo Diaz (El Cid, d. 1099), who fought for both Muslim and Christian lords, is honored by this statue in Balboa Park in San Diego, California.

In the eastern Mediterranean in the second half of the tenth century, Byzantine armies had re-established a foothold in northern Syria, capturing Antioch in 969, which remained in Greek hands until 1084, only a decade and a half before the arrival of the First Crusade. Otherwise, the Anatolian/Syrian frontiers had remained largely static. The tripartite balance of power in the region was based on the Byzantine Empire to the north and west; the orthodox Sunni Muslim Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad in nominal control of Iran, Iraq, and Syria; with the Shia Muslim Caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt since 969. In the eleventh century the political configuration of the Near East was severely jolted by the eruption of the Seljuk Turks from northeast Iran. Establishing themselves in control of the Baghdad Caliphate in 1055 as sultans (sultan is Arabic for power), the Seljuks pushed further west, by 1079 establishing their overlordship in most of Syria and Palestine, having in 1071 defeated a Byzantine army at Manzikert in northeastern Anatolia. Within twenty years, a Seljuk Sultanate had been consolidated in Anatolia with a capital at Nicaea close to Constantinople. However, despite the Seljuk conquests, Muslim unity was a charade, especially after the outbreak of civil war between the heirs of Sultan Malik Shah. The Seljuk empire in Iraq and Syria comprised a loose confederation of city states, often controlled by Turkish military commanders (atabegs) and slave mercenaries (Mamluks) who owed allegiance to one or other rival Seljuk prince. Throughout the region ethnic diversity and alienation of ruler from ruled prevailed. In parts of Syria, immigrant Turkish Sunnis ruled an indigenous Shia population or forced their protection on local Arab dynasts. The Shia Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, with power in the hands of often non-Arab, Turkish or Armenian viziers, ruled a largely Sunni population. Such complexity ensured a continuing political volatility that offered rich opportunities to the ambitious, the ruthless, the skilful, and the fortunate. The appearance of the western armies of the First Crusade in 1097–98 merely added one more foreign military presence to an area already crowded with competing rulers from outside the region.

In contrast with the impact of wars of the cross in and around western Europe, the conquests in Syria and Palestine played only a modest role in defining the political direction of the Near East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and none thereafter. Developments beyond the Muslim frontiers and Christian control largely determined the settlers’ fate. The twelfth century witnessed the establishment first of Syrian unity under Zengi of Aleppo (d.1146) and his son Nur al-Din (d.1174) and then of the unification of Syria with Egypt under Nur al-Din’s Kurdish mercenary commander turned independent Egyptian sultan, Saladin (d.1193). Apart from a serious attempt to contest control of Egypt between 1163 and 1169, the Christian rulers in Palestine, the Franks, observed the process as largely impotent bystanders. Only after he had secured the three inland Muslim capitals of Damascus, Aleppo, and Mosul did Saladin turn his armies on the Franks in the crushing campaign of 1187-88 that gave rise to the Third Crusade.

Although Saladin, Zengi, and Nur al-Din all located their policies in the vanguard of a Muslim religious revival that swept westwards from Iran and Iraq, decking their wars with the language of jihad, most of their energies and violence was directed both materially and ideologically against other Muslims. Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 was matched by his suppression of the heretical Fatimid Caliphate in 1171. For Saladin and his successors, their main concerns focused on the internal maintenance of their empire, reflected in Saladin’s pragmatic approach to negotiating the partition of Palestine with the Franks during the Third Crusade. The repeated civil wars among Saladin’s successors, the Ayyubids, encouraged them to enter into truces with the Franks, who still controlled much of the Syro-Palestinian coast between the 1190s and 1260s. Beyond temporary panics following their capture of Damietta (1219 and 1249), the Ayyubid military system successfully resisted the two Christian attacks on Egypt (1218-21 and 1249-50), although in 1250 the role in defending Egypt played by corps of Mamluk mercenaries precipitated their assumption of the Egyptian sultanate. The advent of the Mamluks, by origin Turks from the Eurasian steppes, conformed to the pattern of alien rule in the Near East, as did the chief challenge to their new empire, the Mongols, who by the late 1250s had penetrated Iraq and Syria. Baghdad had been sacked and the last caliph executed in 1258; Frankish Antioch had become a client and Syria briefly occupied. The defeat of a Mongol army by the Mamluks of Egypt in September 1260 at Ain Jalut in the valley of Jezreel helped determine which of the two dominant Near Eastern forces would rule in Syria and roughly where the frontier between them would fall in a political settlement that lasted until the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Empire in 1517. The Franks and their western allies could only watch.

The final expulsion of the Franks, begun by the fearsome Baibars and completed by al-Ashraf Khalil in 1291, carried a negative charge generated by the conquerors not the Franks themselves. In annexing the Christian strongholds of the coast, the Mamluks deliberately razed them to the ground, thereby, in H. E. Mayer’s words, achieving the “destruction of the ancient Syro-Palestinian city civilization.” The decisive verdicts of 1260 and 1291 crowned the Mamluks as victors in the long struggle over which foreign group would rule in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine—Greeks, Kurds, Turks, Franks. The last were merely one of many who lost out; their role in the reconfiguration of the political map intrusive, not decisive.

This nineteenth-century painting by Dominique Papety shows the 1291 Siege of Acre, in which al-Ashraf Khalil’s assault drove the Franks from Acre, one of the last bastions in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Steven Runciman, the most read anglophone historian of the Crusades, thought the Crusades proved to be a disaster for Christendom because the Byzantine Empire was weakened as a result of the Fourth Crusade. Permanently undermined, Byzantium “could no longer guard Christendom against the Turk,” this incapacity ultimately handing “the innocent Christians of the Balkans” to “persecution and slavery.” Yet it may be worth considering that the victory of the Mamluks in the second half of the thirteenth century saved not only western Asia from the Mongols but southern and eastern Europe too. The failure of Byzantium to defend itself in 1203–04 did not augur well for any putative role as a bastion against future Turkish attacks; the occupation of parts of the Greek Empire by Franks and Venetians at least ensured lasting western investment in the later resistance to the Ottomans. Its disastrous failure to accommodate the crusaders before 1204 makes it hard to believe Byzantium left to itself would have coped any better with the Turks. While scarcely interested in the minutiae of local politics and religion, the Mongols might have proved even more disagreeable conquerors than the Ottomans. Although fatal to the Franks of Outremer, the Mamluk triumph restricted the Mongols to Persia and preserved an Islamic status quo that can only be condemned on grounds of race or religion. Precisely the same can be said of those who assume the malignity of Ottoman rule or that fractious Christian rule in the Balkans would have proved more beneficial to their inhabitants. While easy to re-fight the Crusades in modern historical or cultural prejudices, it remains unprofitable if not actually harmful. One legacy of the Crusades was the estrangement of Greek and Latin Christendom, but not the triumph of the Turk.

This stained glass window (c. 1450) in the Musée National du Moyen Age (National Museum of the Middle Ages) in Paris, depicts Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), who preached and recruited for the Second Crusade.

FIVE

Holy War

CHRISTIAN HOLY WAR, ALTHOUGH A conceptual oxymoron, has occupied a central place in the culture of Christianity. Crusading represented merely one expression of this warrior tradition. Urban II did not invent Christian holy wars in 1095; neither did they cease with the demise of the Crusades; nor were the Crusades the only manifestation of medieval religious violence. However, the Crusades have appeared almost uniquely disreputable because of the apparent diametric and exultant reversal of the teaching of Christ and the appropriation of the language of spiritual struggle and the doctrine of peace for the promotion of war, exquisitely demonstrated in the ubiquitous use of the image of the cross. In the New Testament seemingly the ultimate symbol of Christ’s explicit refusal to fight or even resist in the face of death; in the hands of crusade propagandists the cross became a sign of obedience through the physical sacrifice of martial combat, a war banner, an icon of military victory through faith, the mark of those, in the words of a charter of one departing crusader in 1096, who fought “for God against pagans and Saracens” and saw themselves as “milites Christi,” warriors or knights of Christ. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24) appears an incredible battle-cry in the context of Christ’s words in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:52-4): “Put up again thy sword… all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

This transformation can be illustrated startlingly in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153), chief propagandist and recruiting agent for the Second Crusade, one of the most influential interpreters of Christian spirituality of the entire Middle Ages. As if to counter directly those who condemned the church’s advocacy of holy war as unchristian, Bernard took New Testament passages and radically reinterpreted them. The Epistles of St. Paul used military metaphor to emphasize the revolutionary nature of the new faith in contrast to the Roman world dominated by religiously sanctioned military systems: “We do not war after the flesh: for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (II Corinthians: 3-4). In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul descants on this spiritual military theme:

Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood… Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace… taking the shield of faith… and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.

(Ephesians 6:11-17)

Bernard redirects Paul in his tract welcoming the founding of the Templars, “a new sort of knighthood… fighting indefatigably a double fight against flesh and blood as well as against the immaterial forces of evil in the skies”; “the knight who puts the breastplate of faith on his soul in the same way as he puts a breastplate of iron on his body is truly intrepid and safe from everything… so forward in safety, knights, and with undaunted souls drive off the enemies of the Cross of Christ.” While not entirely new—similar transmutations of Paul’s spiritual armor date back to the eighth century at least—the volte face seems complete.

Scripture and Classical Theory

The ideology of crusading may thus appear casuistic in its interpretation of Scripture, if not downright mendacious. Yet the contradiction of holy war in pursuit of the doctrines of peace and forgiveness boasted long pedigrees. While remaining a utopian model, the behavior and circumstances of the Early Church soon ceased to reflect the idealism or experiences of Christianity. Although Biblical authority remained one of the cornerstones of belief, literalism proved intellectually and culturally untenable and Christianity evolved only indirectly as a Scriptural faith. The foundation texts of the Old and New Testaments needed translation, literally and conceptually, to nurture accessible and sustainable institutions of thought and observance in a context of the lives of active believers within a temporal church. The works of the so-called Church Fathers (notably Origen of Alexandria, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, and Pope Gregory I) found ways of reconciling the purist doctrine of the Beatitudes with the Greco-Roman world. A mass of apocryphal scripture, imitative hagiography, legends, relic cults, and lengthening tradition expressed, informed, and developed popular belief, while ecclesiastical and political authorities codified articles of faith, such as the Nicene Creed (325). The church’s teaching on war exemplified this process.

The spectacular stained glass rose windows of Chartres Cathedral combine the stories and prophecies of the Old Testament with aspects of the New Testament.

The charity texts of the New Testament insisting on forgiveness were interpreted as applicable only to private persons not the behavior of public authorities, to whom, both Gospel and Pauline texts could be marshaled to show, obedience was due. In Jerome’s Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate (c.405), which became the standard text in the medieval west, the exclusive word for enemy in the New Testament is inimicus, a personal enemy, not hostis, a public enemy. Paul, conceding that “kings and those in authority” protect the faithful in “a quiet and peaceable life,” sanctioned public violence to police a sinful world. For those justifying religious war, the Old Testament supplied rich pickings. In contrast to modern Christians not of Biblical fundamentalist persuasion, the medieval church placed considerable importance on the Old Testament for its apparent historicity, its moral stories, its prophecies, and its prefiguring of the New Covenant, as in the thirteenth-century stained glass windows in the nave of Chartres Cathedral where Old Testament scenes are coupled by their exegetical equivalents from the New. Bible stories operated essentially on two levels (although medieval exegetes distinguished as many as four): literal and divine truth. In the Old Testament the Chosen People of the Israelites fight battles for their faith and their God, who commands violence, protects his loyal warriors, and is Himself “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3). Not only does God intervene directly, but He instructs His agents to kill: Moses enlisting the Levites to slaughter the followers of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:26–8); God instructing Saul to annihilate the Amalekites “men and women, infant and suckling” (I Samuel 15:3). Warrior heroes adorn the Scriptural landscape—Joshua, Gideon, David. In the Books of the Maccabees, recording the battles of Jews against the rule of Hellenic Seleucids and their Jewish allies in the second century BCE, butchery and mutilation are praised as the work of God through His followers, whose weapons are blessed and who meet their enemies with hymns and prayers. “So, fighting with their hands and praying to God in their hearts, they laid low no less than thirty-five thousand and were greatly gladdened by God’s manifestation” (II Maccabees 15:27–8). Many Old Testament texts, especially those concerning Jerusalem (for example Psalm 79: “O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps,” were easily incorporated into crusading apologetics and polemic, but nowhere was the idiom of crusading more apparent than in the Books of the Maccabees.

Of course, stories regarded by some as authorizing legitimate or even religious warfare could be interpreted by others as prefiguring Christian spiritual struggle, the sense of St. Paul as well as many medieval commentators, or consigned to the Old Covenant not the New Dispensation. Trickier for Christian pacifists were the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament. The Revelation of St. John described a violent Last Judgment when celestial armies followed “The Word of God” and judged, made war, smote nations, and trod “the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God” (Revelation 19:11-15). It is no coincidence that one of the most famous and vivid eyewitness descriptions of the massacre in Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, quoted verbatim Revelation 14:20: ’And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horses’ bridles.” Apart from examples of godly mayhem, the Bible imposed a generally providential and specifically prophetic dimension on Christian holy war that is hard to underestimate. If wars are seen as God’s will, then they act as part of His scheme, either in imitation of past religious wars or, more potently, as fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, a fixation as appealing to crusaders as later to Oliver Cromwell.

Christian holy war, therefore, derived from the Bible its essential elements: Divine command; identification with the Israelites, God’s chosen; and a sense of acting in events leading toward the Apocalypse. The historical and emotional vision of the holy warrior encompassed the temporal and supernatural. The fighting was only too material but the purpose was transcendent. However, it is difficult to see how even the most bellicose interpretation of Scripture alone could have produced such an acceptance and later promotion of warfare without the need to reconcile Christianity with the Roman state in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. While the Bible bore witness to the Law of God, old and new, the Helleno-Roman tradition had developed laws of man on which Christian writers drew to devise a new theoretical justification for war. Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE, had coined the phrase “just war” to describe war conducted by the state “for the sake of peace” (Politics I:8 and VII:14). To this idea of a just end, Roman law added the just cause consequent on one party breaking an agreement (pax, peace, derived from the Latin pangere, meaning to enter into a contract) or injuring the other. Just war could therefore be waged for defense, recovery of rightful property, or punishment provided this was sanctioned by legitimate authority, that is the state. Cicero argued for right conduct—virtue or courage—in fighting a just war. Consequently, all Rome’s external wars against hostes, public enemies, especially barbarians, were regarded as just wars.

With the fourth-century recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the empire, Christians shouldered duties as good citizens, encouraged to fight in just wars for the defense of the Christian empire. For the Roman state, religious enemies joined temporal ones as legitimate targets for war: pagan barbarians and religious heretics within the empire who could be equated with traitors. However, no sooner had Christian writers such as Ambrose of Milan (d.397) integrated Christian acceptance of war based on the model of the Israelites with the responsibilities and ideology of Roman citizenship than the political collapse of the empire in the west threatened to undermine the whole theoretical basis of Christian just war. This conundrum was resolved by Augustine of Hippo (d.430) who, in passages scattered unsystematically through his writings, combined Classical and Biblical ideas of holy and just war to produce general principles independent of the Christian/Roman Empire. To the Helleno-Roman legal idea of right causes and ends, Augustine added a Christian interpretation of moral virtue to right intent and authority. From his diffuse comments three familiar essentials emerged: just cause, defined as defensive or to recover rightful possession; legitimate authority; right intent by participants. Thus war, inherently sinful, could promote righteousness. These attributes form the basis of classic Christian just war theory, as presented, for example, by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). But Augustine did not regard violence as an ideal, preferring the world of the spirit to that of the flesh. His justification of war looked to the wars of the Old Testament: “the commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged war on the authority of God.” Augustine was implicitly moving the justification of violence from lawbooks to liturgies, from the secular to the religious. However, his lack of definition in merging holy and just war, extended in a number of pseudo-Augustinian texts and commentaries, produced a convenient conceptual plasticity that characterized the development of Christian attitudes to war over the subsequent millennium and more. The language of the bellum justum became current, while what was often described came closer to bellum sacrum. This fusion of ideas might conveniently be called religious war, wars conducted for and by the Church, sharing features of holy and just war, in a protean blend that allowed war to become valid as an expression of Christian vocation second only to monasticism itself.

Cicero, seen here in the façade of Rome’s Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice), defined the parameters of a just war, often waged against barbarians.

A just war was not necessarily a holy war, although all holy wars were, per se, just. While holy war depended on God’s will, constituted a religious act, was directed by clergy or divinely sanctioned rulers, and offered spiritual rewards, just war formed a legal category justified by secular necessity, conduct and aim, attracting temporal benefits. The fusion of the two became characteristic of later Christian formulations. Where Rome survived, in Byzantium, the eastern empire of Constantinople, the coterminous relation of Church and State rendered all public war in some sense holy, in defense of religion, approved by the Church. However, Byzantine warfare remained a secular activity, for all its Divine sanction, not, as it became in late eleventh-century western Europe, a penitential act of religious votaries. Elsewhere in Christendom, while the ideals of pacifism remained fiercely defended by the monastic movement and its ideal of the contemplative life, Christians and their Church had to confront new secular attitudes to warfare consequent on political domination by a Christianized Germanic military elite and new external threats from non-Christians.

New Defenders of the Faith in the Early Middle Ages

War occupied a central place in the culture as well as politics of the Germanic successor states to the Roman Empire from the fifth century. The great German historian of the origins of the crusading mentality, Carl Erdmann, argued that for the new rulers of the west war provided “a form of moral action, a higher type of life than peace.” Heavily engaged in converting these warlords, the Christian Church necessarily had to recognize their values, not least because, with the collapse of Roman civil institutions, economic and social order revolved around the fiscal and human organization of plunder, tribute, and dependent bands of warriors held together by kinship and lordship. Their Gods were tribal deliverers of earthly victory and reward. It has been said that the early medieval army, the exercitus, assumed a role as the pivotal public institution in and through which operated justice, patronage, political discipline, diplomacy, and ceremonies of communal identity, usually with the imprimatur of religion, pagan or Christian. The effect of the conversion of these Germanic peoples worked in two directions: the Christianizing of their warrior ethic and the militarizing of the Church.

Contemporary descriptions of the conversion and early Christian kings of the new political order are peppered with martial heroes in the style of Constantine himself, such as Clovis the Frank (d.511) or Oswald of Northumbria (d.644). Conversely, Christian evangelists and holy men were depicted exercising physical aggression as God’s agents in the style of the Old Testament Moses. Unsurprisingly, Germanic warrior values infected the language of the faith being conveyed, even if only in the seedbed of metaphor. In the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, Christ is depicted as “the young warrior,” “the Lord of Victories”; death on the cross as a battle, with Heaven a sort of Valhalla. A ninth-century Old German poetic version of the Gospel story shows Christ as a lord of men, “a generous mead-giver,” his disciples a war band traveling in warships, Peter “the mighty noble swordsman.” While fiercely resisted by many academics and monks, this militarized mentality received the powerful confirmation of events.

King Clovis of the Franks (d. 644), shown in this sixteenth-century engraving, was one of the martial heroes of Christianity in the early Middle Ages.

The historical as well as literary type of the early medieval warrior was Charlemagne (d.814), king of the Franks and, from 800, emperor of the west, his wars against pagan Saxons and Avars portrayed by eulogists, official propaganda, and the Church in terms of the Faith. Given that forcible conversion acted as part of his policy of subduing the Saxons, the image reflected actual war aims. Through prayers, blessings of warriors and their arms, liturgies, and differential scales of penance, the Frankish Church elevated these conflicts into holy wars. More widely, the Church presided over a political culture in which the figure of the armed warrior increasingly received religious as well as social approbation, a development sharply illustrated in contemporary saints’ lives. Warfare came to be recognized as possessing positive moral as well as political value. As with the Roman Empire it professed to be reviving, in the Carolingian Empire of the eighth and ninth centuries, public war was ipso facto just and sanctioned by God. This became even more apparent from the mid-ninth century when, with the disintegration of Carolingian power, western Europe was beset by new external attacks from Muslims, Vikings, and Magyars which lent an urgent, dynamic quality to the practice as well as theory of Christian warfare. Political and religious survival became synonymous as a concept of a religious community, Christendom (Christianitas), replaced the disintegrating political community of the Frankish Empire. Confronted by Muslims threatening Rome itself, Pope John VIII (872–82) offered penitential indulgences remitting the penalties of sin to those who fought and died fighting. His predecessor Leo IV (847–55) had similarly promised salvation to warriors against the infidels. The identification of religion and war surfaced across western Europe. Monkish propagandists invariably called the Danish enemies of Alfred, king of Wessex (871–99), pagans; his commanders decorated their swords with Christian motifs and their battles were accompanied by prayers and alms. A Frankish monastic annalist similarly described Danish attacks as an “affront not to us but to Him who is all powerful.” Such explicit Christian militancy, designed to inspire resistance and confirm communal solidarity, enlisted some unlikely recruits. Even St. Benedict (d.c.550), founder of the main contemplative monastic movement of western Europe, was depicted in the later ninth century as fighting the Vikings “with his left hand directing and shielding the cavalry and with his right killing many enemies with his staff.”

This militarization of western Christian culture that long predated the Crusades should not be exaggerated. The monastic ideal persisted, Aelfric of Cerne, abbot of Eynsham, at the end of the tenth century insisting on the monks’ vocation as “God’s champions in the spiritual battle, who fight with prayers not swords; it is they who are the soldiers of Christ.” Although examples of warrior saints, or saints who were once warriors, proliferated in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the moral dangers of fighting continued to be recognized. However, at least from Carolingian penitential observances onwards, churchmen drew a distinction between killing in a public conflict authorized by a legitimate secular (or religious) authority, bellum, and illicit private war, sometimes distinguished by the word guerra, those fighting in the former receiving lighter penances for their killing than those engaged in the latter. Still, the actual act of combat remained sinful; despite fighting under a papal banner in a cause considered by their clergy to be just, William of Normandy’s followers in 1066 were forced to perform modest penance for the slaughter they inflicted at the Battle of Hastings. The late eleventh-century revolution lay particularly in the settled transformation of the actual violence, rather than its purpose, scale, or intent, into a penitential act.

This fifteenth-century fresco shows St. Benedict (died c.550), sometimes portrayed as a warrior fighting the Vikings, in the militant style of some Middle Ages Christian imagery.

The Origins of the Crusade in the Eleventh Century

The changing articulation of the long-held acceptance of legitimate religious war that combined elements of the Helleno-Roman and Biblical traditions was fashioned as much by political circumstance as by theology. Renewed attention to Augustinian theory from the late eleventh century came in response, not as an inspiration, to greater ecclesiastical militancy. Secular influences included the problem of public authority and social order after the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire in the ninth and tenth centuries; the altered terms of the frontier conflicts with Islam, with Christians from the tenth century increasingly on the offensive; and a greater ideological and political stridency of the papacy. Behind all of these lay the cultural identity between lay and clerical rulers who belonged to the same propertied aristocracy. Bishops took the field in battles, sometimes in armor, often at the head of their own military entourage, occasionally engaging in physical combat. Equally, many of the most vicious secular lords were patrons of monasteries, went on exhausting and dangerous pilgrimages, and died in monastic habits as associate members of religious orders.

This cultural intimacy, a feature of the whole of the early Middle Ages, took on greater significance in the development of holy war as the apparatus of civil authority devolved downwards nearer to the human and material resources on which all power depended as public authority was usurped by private lordships. Although less anarchic than once imagined, new social conditions by the end of the tenth century encouraged violence as a means of settling disputes as well as achieving more larcenous or territorial ambitions. This fragmentation of power in western Francia (more or less the region from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, later the cradle of the crusade), by negating kingship, resulted in a deficit of effective public arbitration or political discipline. In such circumstances, to secure protection and status, many churchmen deliberately promoted the responsibility of men of violence to protect the church. To achieve this, the activities of the warrior had to receive explicit praise not just on the level of public wars against pagans and heretics. This acceptance of the need for warlike protectors can be traced in saints’ lives and monastic chronicles that exhibit a characteristic schizophrenia when tackling the gilded “faithful to God” who were also self-serving killers, the contrast later favored by crusade apologetics between militia and malitia.

The symbiotic relationship of church and local military aristocracies found concrete expression in formal proceedings organized by local or regional clergy to ensure the physical protection and policing of their property. From the late tenth century, across the duchy of Aquitaine and Burgundy, later spreading to northern France and the Rhineland, church councils were convened that proclaimed the Peace of God with arms bearers swearing, in public ceremonies, to protect those outside the military classes, effectively churchmen and their property. From the 1020s specific periods of weeks or months were designated as Truces of God, during which all such violence should cease, again to be policed by sworn warriors. Although some have challenged the direct influence of the Peace and Truce of God on the origins of crusading, the Council of Clermont in 1095 authorized a Peace of God at the same time as initiating the Jerusalem campaign. These local churchmen, often in concert with regional counts, were not simply condemning illicit attacks on their interests but approving, indeed promoting, violence to prevent them. From being called upon to bless wars for causes sacred and profane, the Church now assumed the roles of author and director, its warriors that of religious votaries.

This trend received strong impetus from the 1050s through the concern of successive popes with the idea and practice of holy war as a weapon to establish the independence of the Church from lay control, contest the authority of the German emperor, ensure the political autonomy of the Roman see, and recover the lost lands of Christendom. The moral standing of those who fought for the papal agenda became an important aspect of the general policy, both in the need to attract support and to assert the uniqueness of the cause.

Even before the First Crusade, Pope Leo IX (1048–54) led troops into battle in a regional war, promising absolution in return for their enlistment.

In 1053, Leo IX (1048–54), leading an army in person against the Normans of southern Italy, offered German troops remission of penance and absolution for their sins, a tradition followed by his successors. Papal banners were awarded to the Norman invaders of Muslim Sicily (1060) and England (1066) and to the Milanese Patarines, street gangs contesting control of the city against the imperialists in the 1060s and 1070s in a struggle elevated in papal rhetoric to a bellum Dei, a war of God. To combat the ecclesiastical power of Emperor Henry IV (1056–1106) in Germany and his political ambitions in Italy, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), one of whose favorite quotations was “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood” (Jeremiah 48:10), sought to recruit his own army, the militia Sancti Petri. Papal apologists began to write of an ordo pugnatorum, an order of warriors, who fought “for their salvation and the common good,” very much the target audience identified by Urban II in 1095. By the end of his pontificate, Gregory’s rhetoric transformed the status of his warriors, comparing their service in defense of the Church as an imitation of Christ’s suffering against “those who are the enemies of the cross of Christ.” War had become an act of penance. An abortive project for an eastern expedition in 1074 proposed by Gregory VII to aid Byzantium evinced many elements later deployed by Urban II. Gregory referred to the mandate of God and example of Christ; the goal of Jerusalem; help for the eastern church as an act of charity; and the offer of “eternal reward.” All that was missing were the vow, the cross, and the associated privileges.

Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) predated the Fin Crusade, but preached for combining war and pilgrimage in a march to the Holy Sepulchre.

The papacy’s advocacy of a more embracive theory and practice of holy war mirrored a wider transformation in the religious life of eleventh- and twelfth-century western Europe from an essentially local and cultish faith, with regional saints and liturgies, to one more regulated by pastoral uniformity, canon law, and international ecclesiastical discipline. Devotion to saints and their relics became increasingly universal, with a concurrent emphasis on the historicity of the gospel stories, the humanity of Christ, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, which began to dominate church dedications across Christendom. Coupled with the development of elaborate Easter rituals featuring Christ’s agonies for Man’s Redemption and an increased concentration on the Christocentric aspects of the Mass (for example the Real Presence, the use of crucifixes, and so on), the image of the Holy Land, of Christ’s suffering, and of Christian obligation penetrated far beyond the reach of papal rhetoric. The increased popularity of international or Biblical saints reflected anxiety over salvation that the new conception of war addressed directly. The perceived celestial clout of saints had long been a factor in their level of popularity, leading to the strenuous promotion of local shrines by their guardians and the reciprocal gifts of alms and property from the faithful. Penance emerged as a most urgent issue for laymen because the methods for laymen to attain remission of the penalties of sin remained rudimentary. The problem may have appeared especially acute for lay arms bearers, paradoxically because their function had come under such close ecclesiastical scrutiny and acceptance. If monastic charters and chronicles can be believed, penitential war answered a genuine craving to expiate sin. The First Crusade drew excited praise as “a new way of salvation” for the military classes. Apart from donations to monasteries so that monks could pray for their souls, increasingly laymen in the eleventh century found pilgrimages promoted by the clergy as a means to expiate sin, with Jerusalem prominent in practice and imagination. Psychologically, if not legally, religious wars, especially against distant targets such as infidels, lent themselves to identification with pilgrimages as both were conducted for God and involved journeys, always a powerful spiritual metaphor. Gregory VII’s reference to going on to the Holy Sepulchre in his 1074 plan suggested a fusion of war (to help eastern Christians) and pilgrimage, a connection repeated by Urban II in granting indulgences in 1089 to those colonizing Tarragona on the Muslim frontier in Spain. The Pisans who attacked Mahdia in Tunisia in 1087 fitted in a pilgrimage to Rome. The concept of an armed pilgrimage has frequently been identified as the key to explain the novel appeal of the expedition preached by Urban II, offering a familiar frame for a new secular act of penance.

However, there remain problems with this interpretation of Urban’s scheme. On the one hand, armed pilgrimages to Jerusalem pre-dated 1095; at least one group of armed German pilgrims in 1064 also wore crosses. On the other, in his correspondence in 1095–96, Urban avoided any explicit reference to pilgrimage, talking instead of a military expedition (expeditio) to “restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms.” The portrayal of the Jerusalem war as a pilgrimage emerged during the recruitment process, possibly from the clergy who had to broadcast the message and articulate crusaders’ motives when compiling records of their fundraising. Urban’s penitential journey could best be understood canonically as a pilgrimage, with the emphasis on its spiritual quality. The pope’s language and many charters were less ambivalent, calling for the violent expulsion of the infidel from the holy places “to fight for God against pagans and Saracens,” as one Burgundian charter put it. Images of infidel atrocity, brutality, and force permeate Urban’s letters stressing the legitimacy of the war, both in terms of right authority (the pope’s) and right intent (“devotion alone”) to counter any unease at such a blatant call to arms. Early responses, such as the Rhineland massacres, indicated the centrality of violence in the enterprise. The current historiographical emphasis on the pious motives of crusaders can obscure the direct relationship between piety and violence that influential elements in the Church had willingly encouraged, recognizing them as mutually engaged mentalities: service to Christ as physical vengeance; the dangers of campaigning as the imitation of Christ’s sufferings; war as an act of charity. In addressing a violent society, Urban, a French aristocrat as well as a former monk, did not compromise with its values: he and his ideology were part of it. Charters provide as much evidence for martial as for pious responses to the First Crusade. Even the letters of crusaders on the march are sparing in their association with pilgrimage, although by 1099 and after the link became ubiquitous. As a holy war, transcendent, spiritual, emotive, the Jerusalem journey was rendered special by the plenary indulgences and the elevated goal of the Holy Sepulchre. Given its stated objective—Jerusalem—an armed pilgrimage may have seemed an appropriate analogy to clerical observers, as nervous of unashamed innovation as of unfettered violence. Only by virtue of the Jerusalem journey becoming a habit did it require fitting into the existing structure of devotional exercises. Urban seemed to have conceived of the operation as unique and unrepeatable; he preached it openly as holy war not armed pilgrimage, a new vision of a very old idea.

Western Christianity held no monopoly on holy war. The Byzantine Empire retained the Roman unity of Church and State that allowed all State conflicts to attract ecclesiastical blessing. Greek emperors portrayed themselves as champions of the Church, especially when fighting pagan Slavs in Bulgaria or Muslims in the Near East. While never interfering with practical diplomacy, Byzantine holy war rhetoric could adopt motifs familiar in the west, as in 975 when John I Tzimisces (969–76) invaded Syria and northern Palestine and may have dangled the prospect, if only in his propaganda, of the reconquest of the holy sites of Jerusalem. Byzantine holy war asserted an integral dimension of public policy, while never attracting the association of violence as penance. It lacked the novelty or the political and spiritual autonomous dynamism of its western counterpart, hence the slightly jaded, condescending superiority expressed by Greek observers, such as Anna Comnena (1083–1153), daughter and biographer of Emperor Alexius I, at the enthusiasm of the early crusaders.

By contrast, the Muslim jihad has regularly and lazily been compared with western Christian holy war and the crusade. Unlike the crusade, under Islamic law derived from the Koran, jihad, struggle, is enjoined on all members of the Muslim community. Unlike the crusade, according to classical Islamic theory traditionally dating from the seventh and eighth centuries but possibly later, the jihad takes two forms: the greater (al-jihad al-akbar), the internal struggle to achieve personal purity, a concept not too far removed from St. Paul’s martial metaphors for the spiritual life; and the lesser (al-jihad al-asghar), the military struggle against infidels. Both were obligatory on able-bodied Muslims, but while the former existed as a permanent individual obligation, the lesser jihad could be interpreted as a communal activity. Unlike the crusade and Christian holy war, to which the Islamic jihad appears to have owed nothing (and vice versa), jihad was fundamental to the Muslim faith, a sixth pillar. The essence of jihad remained as a spiritual exercise. Its operation depended on context. In the Muslim lands, the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam), a grudging religious tolerance was guaranteed by early Islamic texts, at least for the People of the Book, Jews and Christians; instead of persecution or enforced conversion they more profitably paid a special poll tax, the jizya. Pace modern sentimentalists and apologists, there existed little generosity in such tolerance, merely pragmatism. By contrast, beyond Islamic rule, in the Dar al-harb (House of War), non-Muslim political structures and individuals were open to attack as, in Koranic theory, the whole world must recognize or embrace Islam (which means surrender, that is to God) through conversion or subjugation. As with Christian holy war, circumstances determined the mujahiddin nature and conduct of jihad as much as theory. In frontier areas, such as in Spain or Anatolia, groups of ghazi or mujahiddin holy warriors, flourished as mercenaries, in tribal groups or, as in the military ribats of Muslim Spain, in quasi-monastic communities. With the zeal of new converts, the Seljuk Turks gave the jihad a new impetus along the border with Byzantium, but for generations before the spiritual revival of the twelfth century there was little attention paid within the Muslim Near East to martial as opposed to spiritual jihad. It remains a moot point whether the advent of the crusaders or fundamentalist revivalism originating further east excited the new military fanaticism espoused by the twelfth-century Zengids and Ayyubids. In later periods, the dominance of the Ottomans and an uncertainty, which persists, about the existence of a genuine Dar al-Islam, complicated attitudes to jihad. However, the genesis, nature, and implementation of jihad cannot be equated directly with those of the crusade; it operated and operates in a very different ideological and religious value system, with different inspirations and justifications, even if its power to inspire and its physical consequences can be equally bloody for its victims and obsessive for its initiates.

Jihad, a pillar of the Muslim faith, means “struggle.” The greater jihad is the internal or personal struggle, and the lesser jihad is the struggle in the believer’s daily activity.

Holy War, Crusade, and Christian Society after 1095

In medieval Christendom the malleable contingency of the crusade in concept and practice ensured its popularity and longevity. The defined uniqueness of the Jerusalem journey allowed its essentials—the vow, the cross, plenary indulgence, and temporal privileges—to be transferred to other theatres of religious and ecclesiastical conflict on the principle of equivalence: Spain, the Baltic, internal enemies of the papacy, and heretics. The success of 1099 silenced most critics as well as establishing later conduct. Holy war, commanded by God, earning spiritual reward, continued to provide an important weapon in the papacy’s armory. To signal especial gravity (or papal favor), a comparison with the Jerusalem war could be drawn. However, the Jerusalem model exerted only limited influence on canon law and in no sense became the universal or exclusive form of Christian holy war. Its most profound and lasting innovation came with the twelfth- and thirteenth-century creations of military religious orders, embodiments of the oxymoronic nature of Christian holy war, whose members became, uniquely in Christian society, permanent, professional holy warriors. As a holy war, the crusade fell outside the categories for just war explored in detail in the Decretum (first redaction c.1139, enlarged edition by 1158) traditionally ascribed to Gratian of Bologna, its legal implications deriving from its associated privileges standing apart from both the academic attempts to define and limit warfare and the experience of battles of the cross. Away from the Curia, especially in frontier regions on Christendom’s northern and southern borders, where traditions of inter-communal and inter-faith conflicts readily merged, holy war offered a natural recourse, its acceptability parallel to that of crusading, deriving from similar cultural impulses, but not necessarily narrowly determined by the Jerusalem war. The Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus (c.1200) carefully cast his heroes in the Danish wars against their neighbors in terms both specifically of crusade and more generally of holy war. For his employer Archbishop Absalon of Lund (d.1201), it was “no less religious to repulse the enemies of public faith than to uphold its ceremonies”; he was content to make “an offering to God not of prayers but of arms.” Similarly in Spain, the granting of formal crusading privileges acted within a context of growing identification of the Reconquista with holy war; as early as c.1115, the patron saint, the Apostle St. James, was described in a northern Spanish chronicle as “the knight of Christ.”

While the long tradition of holy war continued to supply the emotional intensity for a range of Christian warfare, the Jerusalem war and its derivatives did not escape the scrutiny of lawyers and academics who increasingly sought to integrate the crusade into a comprehensive canonical justification for violence, rather than, as the appeals for the First and Second Crusades implied, rely simply on Divine mandate and the individual devotional standards of participants. Until the thirteenth century, and arguably beyond, the crusade remained an ill-defined legal concept. Where Christian war coincided with classical just war categories, as with the defense of Outremer (“the heritage of Christ”), national defense, or the suppression of heretics, fusion with classical and Augustinian just war appeared obvious. In the temporal sphere, it also became necessary, in clerical eyes, to produce a detailed set of legal conditions determining the validity of warfare as crusade targets diversified around 1200, at the same time as secular attitudes to violence coalesced into social norms manifested in the cult of “chivalry.” The more respectable war became, the more urgent the need for the Church to define what was and what was not sinful about it, especially as Innocent III and his successors transformed crusading into a universal Christian obligation involving all society. Thus, as an aspect of the pastoral reformation within the western church, holy war, not specifically crusading, became tempered by theories of the just war, so much so that the mid-thirteenth-century canonist Hostiensis came close to defining a crusade simply as a papally authorized just war. By the end of the fourteenth century, Honoré Bonet (or Bouvet) in the Tree of Battles (1387) answered the question “By what law or on what ground can war be made against the Saracens?” with wholly traditional arguments based solely on a just cause—occupation of Christian land or rebellion against Christian rule, and papal authority. In this fashion, the crusade had become reintegrated into a characteristic western European concept of legitimate violence, catching its inspiration from holy war and its legality, rules, and restraints, if any, from classical just war theory. As such the language, motifs, and institutions of crusading penetrated into conflicts where no formal apparatus of crusading existed, for example the adoption of crosses by national armies, such as the Danes c.1200 or the English in the fourteenth century. So pervasive were the symbols and habits of crusading that they could be turned to any political conflict that boasted an ideological tinge, even in the most contradictory of circumstances. Crosses were offered enemies of papal crusaders in southern Germany in 1240. During his rising against what he saw as the misgovernment of Henry III of England in 1263–65, Simon de Montfort’s rebels donned the white crusader crosses of the English kings, traditional since the Third Crusade, to fight royalist crusaders. The prominence lent holy war by the Crusades contributed to the familiar western European habit of warring parties of more or less whatever description invoking self-righteous religiosity in support of their cause, a habit, exported to European settlements around the world from the seventh century, that remains current in the twenty-first century.

In this nineteenth-century Laurits Tuxen painting, the martial Bishop Absalon of Roskilde topples the statue of Slavic deity Svantevit.

Two crusaders in a medieval fresco, from an Italian cathedral, represent the ideal qualities of a crusader knight: piety and power.

Whatever its legal frame, crusading operated as the ultimate manifestation of conviction politics in medieval western Europe, entrenching a narrow cultural and religious exclusivity. When crusaders sacked Lisbon in October 1147, they murdered the local Mozarab Christian bishop alongside his fellow Arabic-speaking Muslim neighbors before happily installing an Englishman, Gilbert of Hastings, as the new bishop. The failure of the Latin Church hierarchy easily to cooperate or combine with higher ranks of the eastern churches in Outremer or, later, Greece was notorious. Although inherent in all holy wars, demonization of opponents reached extreme levels in crusading rhetoric, reflecting both a literary genre and a worldview conducive to a siege mentality, a form of cultural paranoia so often the underbelly of cultural assertiveness. Racism and intolerance of minorities were not caused by the Crusades. Indeed, both in the Baltic and Spain, legal, linguistic, cultural, and blood racism deepened in the centuries after the main conquest by warriors of the cross. Yet, in anti-Jewish pogroms and wars against heretics and dissent, crusading helped define a rancid aspect of a persecuting mentality that came as the almost inevitable concomitant of a Church bent on supremacy and uniformity to secure its pastoral ends and secular rulers eager for ideological sanction for their wars.

As holy war addressed fundamental issues of Christian identity and, it was frequently proclaimed, Christian survival, its elements remained embedded in European society as well as providing a cutting edge in the expansion of Latin Christendom southwards, eastwards, and northwards. The habit of crusading died hard; in the fifteenth century crusading formulae were natural appendages for the expansion of European power down the west coast of Africa and into the eastern Atlantic, as they were in the religious wars in Bohemia as well as in defense against the Turks. In the sixteenth century and beyond, the Ottomans kept the images and occasionally the reality of the war of the cross alive, while the internal religious divisions in Europe ushered in a period of religious wars no less vicious in commitment and butchery than anything witnessed in previous centuries. Some historians would argue that the period of the Crusades defined Christianity’s affection for holy war—far from it. The Crusades formed only one articulation of Christian holy war, whose origins long pre-dated 1095 and whose legacy refused to fade. Even in a supposedly more secular age, self-righteous, ideologically justified warfare persists. The modern world has embraced, variously with horror and energy, ideological, religious, and pseudo-religious violence as well as racist, nationalist, and anti-Semitic pogroms on an industrial scale, all in the context of justifying moralities. The moral high ground of the twenty-first century, whether shaded by the banners of religion, reason, capitalism, or freedom, still lies pitted with the rank shell-holes of holy war.

A medieval map from Robert the Monk’s Chronicle of the Crusades (c.1099) shows at its center the holy city of Jerusalem.

SIX

The Business of the Cross

CRUSADING WAS NOT A SPONTANEOUS ACT. An individual rush of conviction or the sudden collective convulsion of a crowd might provoke the initial act of commitment, the adoption of the cross. However, the translation of that obligation into action depended on personal, political, social, financial, and economic preparation and planning and generated widely diffused legal and fiscal institutions. No cross, no crusade, but equally no money, no crusade; no group, no crusade; no leadership, no crusade; no transport, no crusade. If this sounds reductive, it is. Piety and what may pass for religious energy contribute to an explanation of motive and campaign morale. Armies may march on their stomachs, but it is difficult to make them fight and die without a cause, without some internal dynamic that acts beyond reason to send warriors over the top or stand their ground. But all the passion in the universe could not, cannot, create war, crusading or not, without the organization and manipulation of recruitment, finance, logistics, military structure—and ideas.

Preaching

Preaching demonstrates this, providing some of crusading’s most familiar images. A preacher, arriving in a town or village bearing a tale of disaster, a call to battle, a promise of salvation, and a knapsack of crosses, converts his audience by his fervor and eloquence alone. Urban II at Clermont provided the prototype, Christ and John the Baptist the imagined models. Such scenes punctuate crusade history: the inspirational Bernard of Clairvaux on the hillside at Vézelay in 1146; the prosaic Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury stomping around Wales in 1188; the charismatic Fulk of Neuilly stirring up northern France around 1200; the sophisticated James of Vitry beguiling the rich women of Genoa in 1216. Yet preaching worked within tightly organized programs of information and recruitment in which the sermon provided only a focus. Chroniclers and the preachers themselves idealized the process into a perfect system of evangelism which engaged the faithful directly with the orthodox teaching of the Church, as well as supplying a useful starting point for a didactic narrative. In a semi-literate society, ceremonial rituals, of which the crusade sermon was one of the most conspicuous, provided a powerful medium for conveying public messages. However, to achieve any effect, the significance of such rituals needed to be understood beforehand, either by long use, as with the Latin Mass, prior publicity, or rehearsal. The crusade preacher expected to preach, if not to the converted, then to the prepared whose interest needed confirmation through a series of formulaic responses, most obviously the taking of the cross. Along with their supply of cloth crosses to be given to the crucesignati, crusade preachers armed themselves with rolls of parchment on which to write the names of the recruits. Without good preparation, the whole procedure could fall flat; in 1267, when Louis IX took the cross for the second time, apparently many refused to follow his example because they had not been warned what was afoot.

Evidence for crusade sermons before the late twelfth century remains dependent on chronicle accounts. From these it appears such sermons were neither regular nor widespread before the Third Crusade. With the rise in the use of crusading as a military weapon and its integration into the wider devotional life of the Christian west, the frequency of crusade preaching increased and its organization by the papacy became more systematic. Innocent III used Cistercians for the Fourth Crusade and a corps of Paris-trained reformers such as James of Vitry for the Albigensian and Fifth Crusades. From the 1230s his successors employed the Friars as the main crusade proselytizers. Paradoxically, after Innocent Ill’s bull Quia Maior (1213) for the Fifth Crusade, the frequency of sermons operated in inverse proportion to their role in recruitment as the offer of the uniquely redemptive plenary crusade indulgence was extended to non-combatants. Crusade preaching increasingly acted as part of more general evangelizing. Still promoting a particular spiritual endeavor and commitment, the function of sermons broadened to include fundraising as well as recruitment.

Crusade sermons followed patterns of form and presentation to ensure the outcome peculiar to this particular ritual, the physical commitment of taking the cross. As at modern evangelical and revivalist meetings, the congregation could not remain passive. They had to “come on down” and, therefore, needed to be primed by example and expectation. All rituals need careful stage-management if they are to convey meaning and avoid absurdity and the disbelief of the audience—crusade sermons, with their layers of intent and lack of regularity, more than most. At Clermont, Urban II was careful to ensure that, once he had finished speaking, Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, immediately came forward to show the rest of the congregation how to take the cross, while a cardinal in the back row set up the chant of “God wills it!” as a means of inspiring a sense of group involvement. Neither Clermont nor any of the other assemblies that witnessed the great arias of crusade rhetoric over the next five centuries gathered by chance, but by careful arrangement. In 1146, no accident had brought together the nobility of France to hear Bernard of Clairvaux at Vézelay; he had brought with him “a parcel of crosses which had been prepared beforehand.” Louis VII, sitting on the platform beside Bernard, had voiced his interest in the Holy Land campaign months before, and was already wearing a cross sent him by the pope, leaving no doubt as to the purpose of the occasion. Bernard’s task was to publicize the papal bull, explaining the need for war and the spiritual and temporal privileges, and to confirm recruits. His sermons in 1146—47 merely highlighted the issues and secured previously agreed responses. This became the usual form. When Archbishop Baldwin toured Wales in Lent 1188, his audiences knew in advance exactly when and where to meet him and what to do. At Basel in 1201, the crowds flocking to hear Abbot Martin of Pairis’s formulaic, if apparently moving, address had been “stimulated by rumors” of crusade preaching and arrived “prepared in their hearts to enlist in Christ’s camp… hungrily anticipating an exhortation of this sort.” Yet the author of this account went out his way, despite his own testimony, to portray Martin’s sermon as autonomously inspirational.

Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch, welcomes Louis VII of France in this fourteenth-century image. Before embarking on the journey, Louis had taken part in a staged crusade sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux, to drum up support for holy war.

A whole gallery of manipulative techniques was employed to support the rhetoric. Props included relics of the True Cross, crucifixes, and visual aids. A Muslim contemporary described how preachers of the Third Crusade in 1188 traveled around with a large illustrated canvas. On it, a Muslim cavalryman was depicted trampling the Holy Sepulchre, on which his horse had urinated. While, by the thirteenth century, congregations had grown familiar with special prayers and processions dedicated to the Holy Land as well as ceremonies for taking the cross, there were still no liturgical formularies for responses to sermons. In this ritual of penance and commitment, the congregation needed direction. One aid was provided by the seasons of the church calendar, crusade sermons often being delivered during the penitential seasons of Lent or Advent, or at the great Christocentric festivals of Easter and Christmas, or on September 14, Holy Cross Day. Another came from a telling liturgical setting, frequently the Mass with its concentration on the physicality of the Body and Blood of Christ. Audiences were softened up and involved by the use of chants and slogans—football crowds meet Billy Graham in religious circus. When Cardinal Henry of Albano preached in Germany in 1188, the clergy and laity sang hymns about Jerusalem to get everyone into the mood. Once signed up, crucesignati sang songs or chants to encourage corporate identity, or recited together the General Confession from the Mass to underline the penitential nature of their undertaking. Getting audiences to that point was not left to chance or oratory alone. James of Vitry observed that to encourage others it helped to have a member of the audience come forward promptly to take the cross at the end of the sermon, to break the ice, and, like Adhemar of Le Puy at Clermont, show how it was done. At Radnor in March 1188, Gerald of Wales, having been told by Archbishop Baldwin, the Chief Justiciar of England, and King Henry II himself to set the requisite example (the primate not being the world’s most inspirational evangelist), stood up first to take the cross: “In doing so I gave strong encouragement to the others and an added incentive to what they had just been told.” According to admiring written accounts, crusade preaching campaigns were accompanied by sightings of miracles, sometimes as simple as clouds shaped in the beholders’ eye as crosses or other celestial portents, natural accompaniment to such overt religious exercises. The whole operation rested on calculation, planning, and showmanship.

The content of sermons functioned within this highly artificial, ritualized staging. Often using the relevant papal bull, preachers rehearsed past events and explained the justification for war both on the grounds of atrocities to be avenged and of moral duty. A common literary and possibly genuine experience described how the emotions not the actual words preached were understood, the message reaching the uncomprehending audience by divine rather than oral or aural mediation. The preacher and his words, especially if delivered in Latin to large crowds, were distant, inaudible, or unintelligible as means of direct communication, rather like William Gladstone at his mass meetings in the late nineteenth century. The occasion was as important as any words. Medieval sermons provided witnesses to divine mystery, settings for spiritual, political, or social dialogue. In the thirteenth century, to signal this religious ceremonial function, those attending sermons were offered indulgences of their own whether or not they took the cross. Such sermons ritualized enthusiasm rather than rousing rabbles. Repeated references to interpreters, the survival of morally edifying vernacular anecdotes (exempla), and the advice contained in increasingly popular thirteenth-century preaching manuals suggest that attempts were made to communicate in audiences’ own languages as well as Latin. While the sermons that have been preserved tend toward the elaborate and the academic, some preaching veterans emphasized the need for simplicity; others indicated the importance of oratorical tricks, including repetition of almost mantra-like phrases or the inclusion of arresting moral stories variously to illustrate duty, adventure, or salvation.

In combining symbolic spiritual commitment with public church evangelism, crusade sermons represented much of the new reformist idealism associated with the pontificate of Innocent III. Preachers began to think of taking the cross as a form of conversion, a complete amendment of spiritual life similar, if less permanent, to becoming a monk. The crusade sermon’s mixture of direct appeal to the laity, penance, confession, and duty to Christ touched most of the key elements of the reformers’ program. Yet these ceremonies also served as key moments in political processes such as the pacification of kingdoms. Monarchs could find in them occasions to confirm their status and elicit open demonstrations of support from their nobles, as did Louis VII of France at Vézelay, Easter 1146; Conrad III of Germany at Speyer, Christmas 1146; and Frederick I of Germany at the so-called “Court of Christ” at Mainz, where he took the cross in March 1188. At the conference between Philip II of France and Henry II of England at Gisors in January 1188, the need to unite to recover the Holy Land eased the reconciliation of suspicious rivals. Diplomatic compromise could both be sealed and disguised under the banner of the cross. However, whether as an expression of evangelism or diplomacy, or simply a means of raising men and money, the crusade sermon, for all its prominence, performed a series of roles largely subsidiary to the wider organization of crusading. Recruitment followed patterns established beyond the preachers’ congregations; locally, ceremonies for taking the cross existed independently. Nonetheless, sermons orchestrated a measure of discipline, of people, responses, and ideas, increasingly attractive to a Church ever more intent on uniformity of belief and devotional practice.

Recruitment and Finance

Crusading armies, like any other, were assembled through a mixture of loyalty, incentive, and cash, and maintained and run through ties of lordship, clientage, sworn association, or, for defaulters, legal coercion. In the absence of kings as clear overlords, for example on the First and Fourth Crusades, these mechanisms proved vital in producing coherence and order. Recruitment revolved around the households and affinities of princes, lords, knights, and urban elites. The misnamed Peasants’ Crusade of Peter the Hermit in 1096 differed from other major expeditions only in the social standing of its leaders and the ratio of knights to infantry and, perhaps, non-combatants. In a society in which in many regions the bulk of the population were bound to landlords by servile tenure, only freemen could legitimately take the cross; serfs who did so were ipso facto manumitted. On campaign, if no previous bond of allegiance existed, crusaders made their own. Peter the Hermit’s expedition in 1096 possessed a common treasury. By the time the Christian host reached Antioch in 1097-98, a joint command had been formed by the leaders of the different contingents with a common fund that channeled money through a sworn confraternity toward essential construction work for the siege. Loyalties could be bought, knights and lords transferring allegiance when they or their own lords died, deserted, or went bust. Even with the involvement of kings, as in the Second and Third Crusades, individual lords remained responsible for their own followers, whether subsidized by monarchs or not.

When lordship threatened to collapse or no clear order of precedence existed, crusaders, like their contemporaries in towns across Europe, resorted to sworn associations known as communes. These established procedures for making decisions, settling disputes, dividing spoils, and imposing discipline. This decidedly non-feudal system of self-government became a crusade commonplace, from the disparate North Sea fleet that assembled at Dartmouth in May 1147 and later helped capture Lisbon, to individual ships’ companies from northern European cities in the Third Crusade, to the leadership of the Fourth Crusade. One of the failures of the Fifth Crusade at Damietta lay in its inability to establish either an agreed leader or a sworn commune. Such associations also operated, at least in some corners of France in 1147, at the level of local seigneurial bands coming together to embark on the Lord’s business. Sometimes these arrangements failed. The rules sworn by Louis VII and his captains before leaving France in 1147 on the Second Crusade were ignored. Months later, to save the French army from annihilation in Asia Minor, another sworn commune was formed, this time to accept the leadership and discipline of the Templars. Communal leadership did not preclude the military requirement for a clear command structure. The election of Simon de Montfort as commander of the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 saved it from degenerating into a brief foray of rampage and pillage.

Peter the Hermit is shown in a sculpture at the cathedral of Amiens, France. His crusade of 1096 has been misnamed the Peasants’ Crusade.

The importance of access to finance cannot be overestimated. The commonest reason given by backsliders in England around 1200 for non-fulfillment of the vow was poverty. It is no accident that rules for borrowing money figure prominently in the earliest crusade bull, Quantum praedecessores (1145/6) and its most important successors, Audita Tremendi (1187) and Quia Maior (1213). Much of the evidence for the identity and circumstances of individual crusaders derives from their land deals to raise cash from their landed estates and property, usually from the Church. The cost of crusading represented many times a landowner’s annual income. The need for money determined the agreement of the First Crusade leadership in 1097 to swear fealty to the Byzantine emperor. It provided the impetus for the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Zara (1202) and Constantinople (1203-04). Money allowed Richard I to dominate the Palestine war of 1191-92 on the Third Crusade, and Cardinal Pelagius, through his control of the funds raised by taxation of the church in the west, to influence decisions at Damietta during the Fifth Crusade in 1219-21. Although foraging allowed land armies to subsist, chroniclers repeatedly exclaimed at the iniquities of local markets and exorbitant prices from the Balkans to Syria. For sea transport, the capital outlay could be huge. During the Third Crusade, Philip II’s promise to the Genoese of 5,850 silver marks to ship his army to the Holy Land in 1190 appears extremely modest compared with Richard Is expenditure—in advance—of 14,000 pounds (c.21,000 marks) on his large fleet alone. Small wonder Richard felt the need to extort 40,000 gold ounces from Tancred of Sicily in the winter of 1190-91. The Fourth Crusade leadership’s massive commitment of 85,000 marks to Venice constituted almost literally a king’s ransom (Richard Is came to 100,000 marks in 1194) but paled before Louis IX’s estimated expenditure on his first crusade of 1.5 million livres tournois, six times his annual income.

This manuscript illustration depicts the siege of Acre by Richard I of England and Philip II of France. This costly Third Crusade required wide-ranging fundraising, sometimes considered extortion, by Philip and Richard.

Talk of money throws up the two old chestnuts of profit and younger sons. Crusading was very expensive. Without royal or ecclesiastical subsidies, money had to be raised through selling or mortgaging property, often at high hidden rates of interest. One cliché of medieval history insists that people sought to increase their property at any opportunity, except, it seems, crusaders who condemned their families at the very least to a short-term and possibly permanent loss. Given that most crusaders desired, if not expected, to return, having little interest in permanent emigration, it is hard to identify where crude material profit in the modern sense featured in their motives, contenting themselves with the seemingly no less real rewards of relics, salvation, and social status.

This distinction between crusaders and settlers operates even more sharply when considering the idea that crusading appealed especially to younger sons on the make, forced out of the west by the spread of patrilinear inheritance rules that left only the eldest holding the inheritance. While it is feasible that settlers, in Syria but perhaps especially in the Baltic regions, were encouraged to migrate by lack of prospects at home, this cannot be shown for crusaders. The need for finance meant that armies were manned by those in possession or expectation of patrimonies or those, such as the large number of artisans recorded in crusade forces, who had marketable skills. The foot soldiers were legally but not necessarily economically free. The sources show that crusading ran in propertied families without distinction of inheritance claims, eldest sons, great lords as well as younger siblings and dependent relatives. Emigration, at least among aristocrats, may show a tendency to favor those lacking great expectations at home, but this must remain no more than a plausible guess given the inadequate statistical base available of known individual immigrants to Syria, Iberia, or the Baltic. The idea that western inheritance customs, either by excessive partibility of estates or the exclusion of younger sons, explain the twelfth- and thirteenth-century diaspora from the central regions of early medieval Europe—Italy, France, Germany, England—to the Celtic, Slavic, Finno-Ugrian, Greek, or Arabic peripheries may be attractive as a mechanistic model of causation. But evidence suggests it cannot explain the particular phenomenon of crusading where the crusaders were not settlers by intent or even accident. The assumption prevalent until recently that most of the immigration into Frankish Outremer came from the crusade armies no longer looks either credible or accurate; it was never advanced for settlement in Iberia or the Baltic when civilian settlement followed military conquest. Although they individually existed, as general defining types, the mercenary crusader and the younger son must ride into the sunset of serious historical debate together.

In any case, changes in crusade funding in the thirteenth century transformed the whole basis of participation and organization. Increasingly configured as an obligation on all Christendom, in theory the business of the cross could demand contributions from all the faithful. However, this principle only translated into reality with the development of secular and ecclesiastical political control and fiscal exploitation. Taxation for crusading was introduced only fitfully. To pay for Duke Robert of Normandy’s crusade in 1096, his brother King William II Rufus of England levied a heavy land tax in England to pay the ten thousand marks to mortgage the duchy for three years. In 1146—47, Louis VII of France raised money from the church and perhaps from towns in the royal demesne. In response to diplomatic pressure, in 1166 and 1185 the kings of England and France imposed general but modest taxes (of between 1 and 0.4 percent) on revenues, property, and movables (that is, profits). The defeat at Hattin and loss of Jerusalem in 1187 prompted the radical innovation of the Saladin tithe of 1188 in England and France, a tenth on movables payable by non-crucesignati. Once again left to secular rulers to collect, Henry II, always keen to try new forms of financial exaction, met with some success, while opposition forced Philip II to cancel collection in 1189. In Germany, where no tradition of direct royal taxation survived, no such levy was instituted. Although it is unclear how much money Henry II raised from the Saladin tithe, still less how much was actually spent on the crusade, the form of the tax provided a model for consensual and parliamentary grants in the following century. However, taxation operated by secular powers was subject to the vagaries of secular politics and custom. In France, the obligation to pay for a lord’s crusade joined the three traditional feudal aids of ransom, knighting of the eldest son, and marriage of the eldest daughter. In England, government crusade taxation only surfaced when the holy business became central royal policies, as in the years leading to the Lord Edward’s crusade of 1271-72, which elicited a parliamentary grant in 1270. In France in the 1240s, Louis IX similarly channeled large sums from royal revenues toward the crusade.

Henry II of England (d. 1189) raised funds for the crusades through the implementation of the “Saladin tithe” in 1188.

However, Louis IX did not have to rely on his own resources; two-thirds of his estimated expenses came from a grant of church taxation. The raising of money directly from ecclesiastical revenues by the church authorities themselves revolutionized crusade funding. First instituted, unsuccessfully, by Innocent III in 1199, after the decree Ad Liberandam of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 approving a grant of one-twentieth of church income for three years for the Fifth Crusade, all subsequent major crusade enterprises sought similar ecclesiastical taxes, often to the dismay of local church leaders. Such institutionalized fiscal incorporation of the church into crusading operations matched the newly articulated ideology of universal involvement of Christendom in the Lord’s War. Beside ecclesiastical taxation, mechanisms were developed between 1187 and 1215 that allowed pious laymen to donate funds for the crusade on a more or less permanent basis through charitable giving (gifts and alms), legacies, and, from 1213, vow redemptions. Far from signaling mercenary exploitation of a corrupt ideal, as some historians have argued, the offer of cash redemption of crusade vows in return for crusade indulgences mirrored the Church’s attempts to evangelize the laity through a wider range of penitential exercises, on a par with the adoption of compulsory aural confession in 1215. Chests designated for crusade donations appeared in parish churches across Christendom and preachers increasingly sought to promote cash vow redemptions, a move that aroused healthy cynicism among some observers when the task became the preserve of the supposedly mendicant Friars. By the fourteenth century, crusade indulgences were beginning to be sold outright, without the need to take the cross. Such moves widened the social embrace of crusading and its indulgence to include the old, the infirm, the less well-to-do, and women. The funds from taxation, donations, legacies, and redemptions were gathered by local collectors and administered by the Church, creating a series of cash deposits eagerly sought by aspiring crusaders. Much of the practical business of the cross after 1215 revolved around the management and disposal of these ecclesiastically generated or held funds that directly affected how crusades to the east in particular were recruited.

Sea transport and independent Church funding prompted a more professional approach in assembling armies, with written contracts and cash retainers playing a more evident role. Thus, in 1221, Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, later Pope Gregory IX (1227-41), toured northern Italy signing onto the Church’s payroll crusade recruits who had not taken the cross. Contracts between crusaders specifying payment for a set number of soldiers survive from the 1240s. Richard of Cornwall hoped to pay for much of his crusade in 1240—41 from the proceeds of vow redemptions. Edward of England’s crusade of 1271—72, paid for from lay and clerical subsidies, has been described as “perhaps the first English military force to be systematically organized by the use of written contracts, with standard terms available for service.” The cohesion central funding could provide can be illustrated by the contrasting fates of two of the best-equipped expeditions to the east, Frederick of Germany’s of 1189 and Louis IX’s of 1249. Frederick’s followers had to pay for themselves; after he drowned in 1190 the force disintegrated. Louis IX spent much time both before leaving France in 1248 and throughout the campaign of 1249—50 trying to entice nobles who were not his vassals, like the chronicler John of Joinville, into his paid service. Even after the debacle in the Nile Delta in 1250, Louis’s resources held his shattered army together. Ironically, more efficient exploitation of resources reflected increased central control in many kingdoms of the west, which ultimately impeded the crusade by elevating national or dynastic self-interest above international stability. It also altered perceptions of how crusading should best be conducted. The early fourteenth-century Venetian Marino Sanudo, in advice never actually implemented, argued that any initial attacks of Mamluk Egypt should be undertaken by forces paid from central church funds and manned by professionals, and explicitly not by crucesignati. This, he felt, would ensure a more efficient military outcome.

An alternative institutional method of funding and recruitment reached its apogee and nadir in the century after 1215. The Military Orders had long offered a source of permanent manpower, with a constant pool of money from their estates in the west. From the 1130s, the Orders had received lavish donations of land and property from pious donors, the profits of which subsidized their activities in the Holy Land and elsewhere. Increasingly, they took over the defense of the Latin states of Outremer and acted as bankers for visiting crusaders. In Spain, strategic frontier defenses were entrusted to local as well as international orders. In the Baltic, Military Orders offered the solution to the sporadic, transient, and underfunded lay crusading, with the Teutonic Knights creating their own states in Prussia and Livonia. However, the evacuation of the Holy Land in 1291 led to a widespread soul-searching about the Orders’ role and use of their extensive wealth. This debate contributed directly to the persecution and suppression of the Templars between 1307 and 1314 on trumped-up charges of heresy, corruption, and sodomy, as well as to the relocation of the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg in 1309 and the Hospitallers’ conquest of Rhodes the same year. Yet many still regarded a combination of general church subsidy with the model of a Military Order, with its channels of funding and structures of command, commitment, and discipline, as potentially the most effective way of organizing a new eastern crusade. However, the very techniques that made such theories possible militated against their fulfillment. Church taxes or the lands of discredited Military Orders were far too lucrative for national governments to leave for the business of the cross that had inspired them.

Malbork castle (in Malbork, Poland, formerly Marienburg, Prussia) was the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights after they left the Holy Land.

The Crusade and Christian Society

Crusading was a function of western European society. Assessment of its impact must distinguish between the distinctive and the contingent. The wars of the cross did not create the expansion of Latin Christendom or the internationalization of saints’ cults. Nor did they create Christianity’s embrace of holy war, a more sophisticated penitential system, the birth of purgatory, the militancy of the papal monarchy, the rise in anti-Semitism, or the exclusion or persecution of minorities and Christian dissidents. Unlike the campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean, the conquests and colonization in Spain or the Baltic and the papal wars against its enemies did not owe their inception to crusading formulae. Most people did not go on crusade. Only occasionally could crusading enterprises be regarded as “popular” in the sense of being initiated primarily by groups below the rural and urban elites, such as the Children’s Crusade of 1212 and the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The wider social involvement came from large-scale recruitment by the nobility in limited areas for specific campaigns and, increasingly, through taxation, the legal implications of the taking of the cross and the extension of access to the indulgence via contributions and vow redemptions after 1200. The concept of “Crusading Europe” misleads. Nevertheless, these wars added a particular quality to society in their rhetorical definition of a pathology of respectable violence, the unique attraction of the associated privileges, and the disruption to public and private life.

The peculiar fashioning of a vocabulary and practice of penitential violence that developed in the century and a half after 1095 provided the Church with a powerful weapon to aim at its opponents and a means to cement its importance in the politics of its allies and the lives of the faithful. As an activity that justified the social mores of the ruling military elites of the west, crusading became the context for a wide range of unconnected social and political rituals. Landowners dated their charters from their crusading deeds. Diplomatic alliances were agreed under the cloak of aiding the Holy Land. Taking the cross acted as a symbol of reconciliation between parties in dispute or a demonstration of loyalty and allegiance in which no side lost face. Politicians at a low ebb sought help in the language of the cross; King John of England took the cross in 1215 shortly before being forced to agree to the Magna Carta. By the mid-thirteenth century, commitment to the business of the cross had become a requisite in diplomatic exchanges, rulers, such as Henry III of England, who left their vows unfulfilled cutting morally ambiguous figures. Those refusing to go on crusade were popularly known as “ashy,” tied to their home fires. The familiar literary stereotype of the descroisié, content to enjoy his crusade privileges through vow redemptions, frightened of the sea, and anxious to protect his position at home, indicated how far crusading institutions had penetrated beyond the recruiting hall.

King John of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta of 1215. It was in such moments of weakness that he, and other European monarchs, looked for legitimacy by taking up the cross.

The social and economic disruption of active crusading varied. The expeditions east of Theobald of Champagne or Richard of Cornwall in 1239-41 did not compare with the great efforts of 1146-48, 1189-92, or 1248-50, while crusades in Spain and the Baltic added only marginal luster and perhaps some recruits to the habitual campaigning of the Iberian, Danish, or German princes. Yet even small-scale enterprises could influence local land markets and regional balances of wealth and power as crusaders mortgaged or sold their property. For families, the cost of crusading and the absence of property owners for very long periods could be highly damaging, leading to disparagement of estates and widows, or worse, some wives being murdered by impatient claimants to the crusaders’ lands. Casualty rates, especially on the land-based expeditions, could be extreme; perhaps over 80 percent of those who set out in 1096-97 did not survive. Enhanced social standing for returning crusaders may have been little compensation. More generally, the liberation of church-held bullion to subsidize crusaders may have encouraged the circulation of wealth and thus stimulated local economies. Regionally, prices of war commodities, such as horse shoes, arrows, sides of bacon, and cheese could rise, as they did in England in the early 1190s. Suppliers of transport, from mules and carts to the great transmarine fleets, benefited. However, a fair proportion of the wealth collected in the west was dissipated unproductively on war materials and campaign expenses far from home. Crusade taxation, like any other in the Middle Ages, tended to be regressive, falling on those at the base of the economy. That helped to ensure the popularity among aristocratic crusaders of the new financing arrangements in the thirteenth century. Vow redemptions cost less than active crusading but acted as a hidden tax on the faithful. Yet, without crusading, it cannot be clear that this wealth would have been redirected to more ostensibly productive ends or even circulated at all. International trade between the eastern and western Mediterranean piggy-backed on the Crusades and vice versa; they were manifestations of a single, if diverse, process of commercial expansion of markets and trade routes. An overall financial balance sheet is impossible to determine, but the Crusades, however wasteful of lives and effort, of themselves neither significantly ruined nor enriched the economy of western Europe.

The legal privileges granted crusaders reached as far as finance into the interstices of social life. Church protection and immunity from interest, debts, and law suits were enforced by secular as well as ecclesiastical courts from the Papal Curia downwards. Away from the high-profile cases of infringement of the rules, as when Richard I’s lands were threatened in his absence, the operation of the privileges and church protection was conducted in local courts across Christendom, whose decisions defined and determined much of the effect of the crusade on the home front, from whether or not a crusader could participate in a trial by battle in Normandy, to illegal wine-sellers avoiding fines in Worcestershire by citing their crusader status, to whether crucesignati could literally get away with murder. The civil attractions of the crusader privileges made abuse inevitable, a problem recognized by the decree Ad Liberandam (1215). There were regular complaints that crusaders were using their status as license to commit theft, murder, and rape; criminals or those facing awkward litigation regularly cited crusade privileges to delay or avoid the day of reckoning. This did not mean the system was corrupt, merely open to corruption. References to the operation of crusading immunities in the records of secular courts allow a glimpse of the extent of the Crusades’ reach. They also point to a high level of cooperation between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, not least because there were so few detailed rules, the practical implications and extent of privileges being worked out over many generations on a national, regional, local, or even individual basis.

With the institution of vow redemptions and spiritual rewards for contributing as well as participating in crusading, and the paraphernalia of alms-giving, special prayers, liturgies, processions, and bell-ringing that developed after 1187, the spiritual privileges entered the habitual devotional life of the west. Church reformers saw in the dissemination of its indulgence the opportunity to use the crusade as a model as well as a metaphor for spiritual and penitential amendment of life. Taking the cross became depicted as part of a regenerative cycle of confession, penance, good works, and redemption, a sort of conversion, its votaries described by James of Vitry as a religio, a religious order. Some argued that taking the cross could end demonic possession, secure time off purgatory for relatives, even dead ones, cure the sick, and console the dying. Sermons de Cruce, on the Cross, were used almost interchangeably for preaching the crusade or moral reform. For devout thirteenth-century puritans such as Louis IX or Simon de Montfort, the crusade formed part of their private religious life as well as their public career. Thus as a religious habit as much as a martial endeavor, crusading survived its defeats on the battlefields of the later Middle Ages.

Simon de Montfort’s military campaigns to exterminate the Cathars won him royal favor. This 1216 vellum document is de Montfort’s homage to King Philip II of France for the gift of territories confiscated from Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, who had sympathized with and defended the heretics.

This does not imply universal or consistent commitment. The myriad sermons and devotional works reminding the faithful of some basic tenets of Christianity, among other evidence, suggest that the Middle Ages were no more or less a period of faith or skepticism than the twenty-first century. Contemporaries were as keen to delineate contrasting crusade motives as modern historians. Much of the typology was equally crude. After the fiasco of the Second Crusade, one bitter observer in Würzburg accused the crusaders of lack of sincere love of God; most “lusted after novelties and went in order to learn about new lands” or out of a mercenary desire to escape poverty, debts, harsh landlords, or justice. Such brickbats are the price of failure and the small change of moral rearmers. The idea that crusaders to the east were driven by greed is considerably less convincing than that they were fired by anger and intolerance. Anti-Jewish attacks had been known in northern Europe before 1096, most notably after 1009, but the repeated ferocity of attacks by crusaders indicates that the wars of the cross lent spurious justification to such communal barbarism. Yet the attacks on the Jews signal a piety of sorts, however underpinned by ignorance, larceny, and criminality. To suggest mixed motives for many crusaders does not convict them of hypocrisy, merely complexity.

It has become fashionable to ascribe purely mercenary inspiration to the citizens of the Italian maritime cities, in a peculiar modern historiographical combination of retrospective snobbery and a belief that commerce is “modern” and so immune from “naive” or “medieval” religious sincerity. Material advantage and genuine religious commitment have never been mutually exclusive; nor were they among crusaders. The Venetian crusade of 1122—25, in a sort of foreshadowing of the Fourth Crusade, raided Byzantine territory to force a restoration of preferential trade rules. Yet it also fought a hard sea battle against the Egyptians and helped capture the port of Tyre, again in return for trading privileges and property. On return to the Adriatic further raiding carried off booty and relics. Modern disapproval misses the essence. The Italian trading cities’ contributions to crusading of men, blood, treasure, and materials were second to none. Crusading enthusiasm did not stop at the gates of commercial ports, nor did the desire for profit or, at least, an avoidance of loss contradict the spirituality as well as the material risks inherent in taking the cross, any more than did a knight’s desire to fight to earn salvation and to survive. While elements of duty, fear, devotion, repentance, excitement, adventure, material profit, and escapism feature in the sources as contributory spurs to action, one overwhelming urge, with secular and spiritual dimensions, may have been what could inadequately be described as status—with church, peers, neighbors, relatives, God. The most typical trophies of this status were relics which the returning crusader bestowed on local churches, further enhancing both social reputation and godly credit; the lure of the unique richness of treasure houses of Christian relics at Constantinople acted as a spur to its destruction in 1204. The discredit afforded those who failed to fulfill their vows, or those who deserted or refused to enlist, alone reflected the continuing social admiration that clung to veterans of the cross.

It is often argued that the crusade declined as a political, religious, and social force from the mid-thirteenth century. This has been attributed to a growth in the wealth of western Europe, which is supposed to have begun a process of “modernization” in which crusading appeared old hat as a cause inspired by God not Mammon. The decadence of crusading has been attributed variously to the corruption of money in the professionalization of the business of the cross and to the rise of national self-interest over the demands of Christendom in general. The diversion of holy war to internal enemies of the papacy has been taken as a barometer of this decay. Many of these arguments refer to the Holy Land crusade and make little sense applied elsewhere. It is undeniable that papal crusades in Italy aroused the anger of clerics who had to pay taxes for them or political opponents; successive popes trod carefully to avoid inciting opposition. Preaching for internal crusades tended to be far more restricted geographically than that for eastern expeditions, and there persisted a nervous sensitivity to local feeling if internal crusades were to be preached in parallel or in competition with eastern campaigns. Yet much of the hostility to the anti-Hohenstaufen or Italian crusades in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, beyond the overtly partisan, revolved around anxieties lest they diverted attention from the plight of the Holy Land. The business of the cross retained its popularity, even if its adherents were more discriminating than papal apologists hoped or imagined. The rise of stronger national regimes delivered a more damaging blow. By appropriating political energy, material resources, and even holy war mentalities, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337—1453) sealed the loss of the Holy Land as decisively as the military system of the Mamluk Empire. Fighting for God remained an ideal and practice throughout the later Middle Ages and beyond, its legal implications absorbed into secular as well as canon law codes. Libraries were full of crusade histories and romances; veterans’ artifacts became cherished heirlooms; illuminated manuscripts, theatrical re-enactments, paintings, tiles, and tapestries in palaces, houses, and town halls kept the images fresh. However quixotic it may seem to blinkered modern eyes peering at the past for the origins of our own world, the Christian holy war we call the Crusades, partly because of its lack of rigid definition and protean adaptability, had seeped into the bedrock of western public consciousness through social and religious as well as political and military channels, embodying many of the human qualities and inspiring martial actions that remained highly regarded for centuries after Outremer had faded into a golden memory.

The Battle of Crécy (1346), shown in this sixteenth-century painting, was a decisive English victory in the Hundred Years’ War—a conflict that redirected the militant energy of the French and English.

The Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, pictured here at sunrise, was a long-sought-after prize of Crusaders and a symbol of Islam in the Holy Land.

SEVEN

Holy Lands

CRUSADING SACRALIZED THE LANDS it attacked or conquered. These were seen in terms of recovery of the heritage of Christ (Palestine), His Mother (Livonia), or His disciples, such as James (Spain) and Peter (any region placed under papal protection or lordship). Less obviously, crusading also tended to sacralize the lands from which the holy warriors had been drawn. The numinous distinction bestowed by participation in crusading merged with concepts of just wars fought for the patria, the homeland. These consecrations provoked a series of anomalies between image and reality. Crusade frontiers, in Spain, Syria, Prussia, or Livonia, were at once ideologically rigid while physically, culturally, or politically porous. Promoters and chroniclers of conquest proclaimed sharp religious and ethnic divisions when economic contact and the mechanics of lordship required social exchange leading to cultural transmission. The universal homeland of these New Israelites, Christendom (Christianitas), became fragmented into distinct patria, kingdoms or cities, appropriating to themselves the concept of a “Holy Land” where, for the political elite, involvement in the crusade stood as a touchstone of identity, respect, and authority. Crusading stood as an objective of national policy and an analogy for national war. No less than the holy lands of crusader conquest, these patria were bolstered by images derived from the Israel of the Old Testament and egregious apocalyptic political propaganda and thought, in which any successful crusader king could lay claim to the prophecies of the Last Emperor at the End of Time. The consequent habit of equating national aggression with transcendent universal good and vice versa constitutes a lasting inheritance. “One nation under God” has a complex ancestry but it includes the medieval holy wars of the cross.

The Holy Land Overseas: Outremer and Colonial Myths

Shortly after the First Crusade, the northern French writer and abbot Guibert of Nogent coined the phrase “Holy Christendom’s new colonies” for the Christian conquests in Syria and Palestine. The question of whether the Christian settlements in the east can be described as colonies in any modern sense has exercised historians for two centuries. If a colony can be understood as, in some fashion, deliberately created to act as a subordinate in a larger commercial, economic, or strategic system operated by a distant colonial power in its own interests, then Outremer, despite its name, hardly fits the model. If, however, a colony implies a plantation of an alien population of rulers and settlers who retain their cultural identity and association with their regions of origin, then Outremer displays colonial characteristics. However, Outremer formed part of no secular or ecclesiastical western empire except as provinces of the Latin Church. Unlike Prussia, the kingdom of Jerusalem, while paying Peters Pence to the papacy, was not a papal fief, and in the thirteenth century fiercely resisted attempts to incorporate it into the Hohenstaufen empire. Despite intimate dynastic links with western aristocracies, no trans-Mediterranean lordships were created. Despite a constant flow of pilgrims and, in the twelfth century, settlers in both directions, contacts between immigrants and their countries of origin quickly faded, Franks tending to adopt local places as surnames. No reigning Frankish monarch of Jerusalem ever visited western Europe.

While the constant need for western reinforcement and an increasing reliance on the international networks of Italian commercial cities and of the Military Orders never permitted relations between Outremer and the west to lose their umbilical quality, the polity of Outremer (twelfth-century Byzantine claims to Antioch excepted) remained socially and institutionally autonomous. Westerners and easterners increasingly traded mocking insults about each other. Outremer’s distinctive characteristic of a garrison society did not guard vital sea lanes, trade routes, markets, or sources of raw materials but what many regarded as a huge religious relic, “Christ’s heritage.” Direct material profit had not driven the conquest of Outremer, although this did not impede subsequent economic exploitation. The most self-evidently colonial element in Outremer were the representatives of the Italian commercial cities who established quarters in ports such as Acre and Tyre to house a transient population of merchants and sailors from their home ports. Most of these agents did not become permanent settlers in the east. While Outremer conformed to the medieval pattern of foreign settlements in replicating home societies rather than to the modern colonial model of voluntary or enforced dependency, it did not compare in emulation with the thirteenth-century Frankish establishment in Greece—“new France” as one pope called it—in emulating the old country. In contrast with Spain and Prussia, where land frontiers with Latin Christendom ensured heavy potential immigration, or with Prussia, Livonia, and Estonia, where religious conversion of the conquered allowed a measure of acculturation of the natives with the intruders, there was no melting pot shared by immigrant and native in twelfth-century Outremer. Instead, Outremer presented a mosaic of faith and ethnic communities, pieces of social tesserae wedged tightly together to form a single pattern.

Although cast in a holy land and founded by crusaders, Christian Outremer was not a “crusader society.” While permanent peace with Muslim neighbors was, for both sides, conceptually impossible, during much of the period of Frankish occupation 1098 to 1291, truces and alliances nourished. Parts of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the mid-twelfth century were more peaceful than contemporary England, France, or Italy. Most castles and fortified houses lay far from the frontiers and played the same administrative rather than military role in the organization of lordships as their counterparts did in England. The rulers and settlers were neither technically nor actually crusaders. Unlike thirteenth-century Prussia or Livonia, Outremer was not ruled by crusading Military Orders, however significant their role in its defense and aggression. Although the rulers’ rhetoric spoke differently, with popes, politicians, and chroniclers presenting a particular frontier myth of heroic conquest and battle to justify the Franks’ presence and excite western support, Outremer society, while sustained by this cohesive ideology of “exiles” for the faith, reflected a far more humdrum diversity of experience than such crude caricatures allow.

Following behind soldiers of the Crusades, Italian merchants and sailors settled in cities like Acre, today part of Israel. This 1843 lithograph shows boats in Acre’s harbor; minarets rise above the city.

The task of occupation fell far below the epic vision, still less did it fit either of the alternative modern interpretations of Outremer as a conduit of inter-cultural exchange and cooperation or as a bleak, arid, and doomed system of apartheid. Demographic imperatives ensured diversity in Outremer, as in its Muslim-ruled neighbors, but no deep cultural synthesis. The Franks’ clothes (such as the fashionable turban or the prudent loose garments and surcoats), food, domestic architecture (even the rugged Hospitallers seem to have installed bathrooms at their castle of Belvoir), personal hygiene, and medicine were adapted to the environment. Franks learnt Arabic, a process accelerated by commerce, lordship, and the unfortunately frequent habit of their leaders getting captured and spending long years in Muslim custody. In some ways, the Frankish ruling elite resembled in status and relationship to the indigenous population the Turkish atabegs who ruled elsewhere in Syria, foreigners sustained by military strength and the extraction of revenues from an alien local labor force.

The Castles of Outremer

In Outremer, religion not race formed the technical test of civil rights and citizenship. Intermarriage occurred between Franks and local Christians and converted Muslims. The idea that the Franks faced an exclusively Muslim native population seems far from the case; in parts of Outremer, Muslims were not even a majority. Where necessary, Frankish rulers occasionally extended patronage to Muslim settlers, doctors, and merchants, while at the same time showing no qualms about using Muslim slave labor. A few shared sites of religious worship survived, such as in the suburbs of Acre in the twelfth century, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the thirteenth century, or the remarkable Greek Orthodox shrine of Our Lady of Saidnaya, north of Damascus. After the initial stage of conquest, Muslim resistance to Frankish rule, in the absence of political leadership, which had fled, rarely reached beyond the level of localized banditry. The new rulers’ and settlers’ enjoyment of resources did not entail systematic persecution of other faith communities. Overt aggression to non-Christians seemed the preserve of zealous, boorish newcomers. In market courts at the port of Acre, jurors were drawn from both Latin and Syrian Christians and witnesses were permitted to swear oaths on their holy books—Christians on the Gospels, Jews and Samaritans on the Torah, and Muslims on the Koran—“because,” the Jerusalem law code insisted, “be they Syrians or Greeks or Jews or Samaritans or Nestorians or Saracens, they are also men like the Franks.” The Hospitallers, who ran the great hospital in Jerusalem that could accommodate hundreds of patients at a time, agreed. They treated anyone regardless of race or religion. Only lepers were excluded, for obvious reasons.

This does not imply that Christian Outremer operated as a haven of tolerance. Medieval racism was largely cultural, revolving around external differences in customs, law, and language, more than the distinctions of blood inheritance preferred by some modern racists. In that sense, discrimination on the grounds of religion was inherently racist. This extended to the de facto religious discrimination against native Christian communities—Armenians, Greeks, and Arabic- or Syriac-speaking Melkites, Nestorians, Jacobites, and Maronites—not in terms of civil but ecclesiastical rights. The Franks Latinized the Church in Outremer, occupying all the top jobs and monopolizing much of the endowment and income. However, local Christians, at least in chroniclers’ descriptive language, charters, and the law courts, were not confused with the Muslim settled population, the Bedouin on the borders, or the Turci beyond the frontiers. The Jewish population of Palestine declined sharply after 1099, although the remaining communities avoided direct persecution, many working in the dyeing business. Local Christians lived within the ambit of Frankish society and law, owning property, intermarrying, and in some rural areas actually sharing villages with immigrants, who tended to be attracted to regions already occupied by co-religionists. Muslims and Jews dwelt apart, except in towns and cities, where trade, agriculture, tax collecting, or revenue gathering brought the communities into contact. As a special distinction, all Franks were, ipso facto, free. Political and social barriers precluded multiculturalism just as firmly as differences of religion, race, and ethnicity. Occasionally, more general cultural hostility erupted, as in 1152 in Tripoli after the assassination of Count Raymond II, when “all those who were found to differ either in language or dress from the Latins’ were massacred. Such racial rather than religious discrimination was grounded on certain mundane but inescapable differences in language and manners: Syrians shaved their pubic hair not their beards; Franks did the reverse or neither. Yet at the non-threatening margins of civility, transmission of customs could flourish.

Tripoli in the twelfth century was the site of hostility and violence resulting from cultural and racial differences, rather than simply religious contentiousness. The city fell to the Mamluks in 1289, as depicted in this thirteenth- or fourteenth-century painting.

Although, unlike in Sicily after its eleventh-century conquest by the Normans, there were few anti-Muslim riots, Outremer presented a picture of recognized diversity and enforced inequality. In 1120 laws were promulgated forbidding sexual congress between Christians and Muslims and imposing dress discrimination. The Jerusalem law code listed severe penalties for Muslim violence on Christians, but none vice versa. Taxation fell more heavily on the peasantry and most severely on Muslims, who had to pay a poll tax (as Christians had under Muslim rule). In Galilee in the 1180s, local Muslims referred to King Baldwin IV as “the pig” and his mother, Agnes of Courtenay, as “the sow.” One settler, encountering black Africans for the first time, “despised them as if they were no more than seaweed.” At either end of the twelfth century some Muslim communities aided invaders. In Antioch, treatment of Muslims veered from economic encouragement to extortion, prompting sporadic uprisings. Although in Muslim rural areas, and even in cities such as Tyre, public Islamic worship was permitted, Muslim shrines and cemeteries fell into disrepair and in the 1180s old men recounted tall stories of the heroic defense of the coastal cities against the invading infidel. Muslim slaves, including women in shackles, were a common sight. Without a Muslim social or intellectual elite, either in exile or denied status, their popular cultures inevitably stagnated.

Always a minority, especially in the thirteenth century when effectively penned in to the narrow coastal strip, the Frankish peasantry and artisans adapted to local methods of agriculture which would have been familiar, if tougher, to settlers from southern France, Italy, and Spain. Perhaps the most distinctive feature imported by westerners were pigs. The Franks lived in villages of their own, or beside local Christians, but mixed with all other groups in towns and cities. The experience of Nablus, north of Jerusalem, illustrated the tensions and accommodations of inter-communal relations. A Frankish wineshop stood opposite a Muslim guesthouse. A local Muslim woman who had married a Frank murdered him and took to a life of crime, ambushing and killing passing Franks, while the Frankish wife of a local draper became the expensive mistress of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Not all was conflict. The Frankish viscount invited an Arab emir from northern Syria to witness a trial by battle between two Franks over allegations that one of them had set Muslim thieves onto the other’s property. A bullying local Frankish landlord forced a community of devout Muslims to emigrate to Damascus while at the same time the local Samaritan sect was allowed to continue with its annual Passover ritual that attracted worshippers from across the Near East. Such practical coexistence punctuated by extremes of faith or criminality undermines neat generalizations about the colonial experience.

At the top of society, the Frankish aristocracy created a world as much like the west as possible, in law, landholding, military organization, religion, and language. However, the setting inevitably impinged. Slavery, dying out in western Christendom, formed a staple of Near Eastern society which the Franks adopted. Proximity bred contact, especially where non-Franks, even non-Christians, possessed useful talents. King Baldwin I of Jerusalem (1100-1118) took a Muslim convert as an intimate servant, probably lover, giving him his name as well as religion. The royal court of Jerusalem in the twelfth century was almost as cosmopolitan as those of Norman-Greco-Arabic Sicily or the Arab-Turkish-Kurdish-Armenian-Jewish courts of the Near East. King Amalric (1163-74), who campaigned in Egypt and visited Constantinople, was married to a Greek, employed as family doctors and riding masters Syrian Christians who had worked for the Fatimids of Egypt and later served Saladin, and a tutor, William of Tyre (c.1130-86), steeped in the finest state of the art learning from Paris and Bologna. Some Frankish knights and nobles seemed to have forged amicable relations with Muslim counterparts across the frontiers during times of truce; a number regularly sought service with Turkish armies. Alliances between Franks and Muslim powers were commonplace, even if former allies happily slaughtered each other when the diplomatic and military wheel turned. “Apartheid” seems an inappropriately narrow and monochrome description of such a society.

Yet Outremer did own a unique status that made integration with native non-Christians impossible. The western settlement only occurred because of the religious aspiration of the conquerors. Although the motives of immigrants remain hidden, one element in persuading non-noble settlers to try their luck in such a relatively inhospitable and distant region was the desire to live in the land where Christ and His saints had lived. The pious rhetoric of exile on one level matched the reality. With a largely immigrant higher clergy and a constant influx of lords from the west, the sense of mission kept on being renewed. The holiness of the Holy Land exerted an important influence in Outremer society. The conquests of 1098-99 opened Palestine to a flood of pilgrims from Christendom with expectations fuelled by Biblical and crusading stories. At any one time, there could be seventy pilgrim ships docked at Acre, some capable of carrying hundreds of passengers. Traveling on one of the two annual “passages,” when the currents and winds in spring and autumn allowed for easier journeys, these tourists found eager hosts. The Jerusalem kings exacted tolls on them (just as their Muslim predecessors had done). The two great Military Orders of the Temple (1120) and Hospital (1113, militarized probably by 1126) were founded to protect and heal them. The catering trade grew rich on them. Residents in Outremer gave them places to visit, by sprucing up old sites, excavating others, such as the relics of the Patriarchs at Hebron in 1119, and imaginatively recreating the Biblical landscape, “New Holy Places newly built” according to John of Würzburg in the 1160s. In re-mapping the sacred landscape, the Latin Christians were following a process familiar from the Roman emperors Titus and Hadrian in the first and second centuries, the Greek Christians in the fourth century, the Muslims after 638, 1187, and 1291, and the Zionists and Israelis in the twentieth century.

This habit of importing or annexing a new sacred landscape was common to conversion, colonization, and crusading. As on the Spanish and Baltic frontiers, in Outremer it served to reinforce a particularly strong sense of exceptionalism, at least among the articulate, and was of a piece with the “fractured colonialism,” as it has been described, of Frankish society. How far settlers and rulers felt the pull of divine immanence in their material surroundings can only partly be reconstructed from the opinions of their interpreters, such as William of Tyre, or from their behavior. Those modern historians such as Joshua Prawer who have accused the Franks of cultural myopia in regard to other communities miss the point. By definition, the Frankish settlement could not overtly compromise with other ethnic models. Yet neither could—or did—they ignore them. It has become modish to condemn the western settlements in the east as a brutish intrusion into a more civilized and sophisticated Islamic world. Yet the Turkish invasion of the mid-eleventh century was more disruptive. The warring political and religious factions within the Islamic polity—Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Mamluk, Sunni, Shia, Ishmaeli Assassins—created violent contest and instability only resolved by greater violence practiced by unscrupulous warlords such as Zengi, Saladin, or Baibars, none of whom flinched from barbaric atrocities to further their material ends. Like the Franks, they promoted a self-serving ideology of legitimate force. Western Christians held no monopoly on intolerance, any more than they did on sanctity. Islamic lawyers warned against inter-faith fraternization; an eleventh-century Baghdad legist proposed discriminatory dress for Christians and Jews. The fate of non-Christian communities in Outremer was little different to that of Christian communities under Islam. It appeared harsher because the social configuration of the remaining Muslim population, largely peasant or artisan, lacked a skilled or wealthy elite, in contrast to Muslims in Christian Spain or Christian communities in the Islamic world. This is not to deny the exclusive and discriminatory nature of Frankish rule in Outremer. However, to romanticize those whom they discriminated against is to rewrite the past to suit present sentimentality.

In his twelfth-century chronicle of the Crusades, History of the Outremer, William of Tyre recounted the events of the first crusade and the founding of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. King Baldwin II of Jerusalem is depicted in this thirteenth-century manuscript illumination from William’s history.

The Holy Lands on the Frontiers

Spain

In Spain, as in the Baltic, crusading was secondary or complementary to secular considerations and wider association of Christian conquest and holy war. A decade before the First Crusade, Alphonso VI of Castile had characterized his capture of Toledo from the Moors in 1085 “with Christ as my leader” as a restoration of Christian territory and the recreation of “a holy place.” It is not entirely clear how far the explicit religiosity of twelfth-century accounts of earlier campaigns against the Moors in Spain reflected the assimilation of crusading formulae, an older tradition of holy war or a separate local development. While defense and restoration of Christian lands matched the new rhetoric of the Jerusalem war, indigenous writers and religious leaders transformed the Iberian patronal saint, the Apostle James the Great, Santiago, into a “knight of Christ” and heavenly intercessor for the success of Christian warfare. Such promotion of a distinctive pan-Iberian war cult helped local rulers retain ownership of their campaigns even when enjoying papal crusade privileges, while at the same time reinforcing Christian solidarity. St. James, an international saint through his shrine at Compostella, did not become the exclusive preserve of any one Iberian kingdom, his cult sustaining the political ideologies of all of them. The same was generally true of the half dozen Iberian Military Orders founded in the second half of the twelfth century, including one dedicated to St. James.

An Apostle of Christ, Saint James is depicted as a conqueror of the Moors, in this eighteenth century painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The incongruity of this transformation of one of Jesus’s disciples into a warrior saint escaped most medieval observers.

Crusading in Spain adopted a local flavor. The great warrior kings of the thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile (1217-52) and James I of Aragon (1213-76), rolled back the Muslim frontier self-consciously in the name of God and each flirted with carrying the fight beyond Iberia, to Africa or Palestine. Yet neither found the commitment that led their contemporary Louis IX of France to the Nile. Although some conquests, such as the capture of Cordoba by Ferdinand III in 1236, were accompanied by religious gestures of restoration and purification familiar from the eastern crusades, and in places, as at Seville (captured 1248), foreign Christian settlers were recruited, much of the Reconquista involved negotiation and accommodation of the religious and civil liberties of the conquered: James I “the Conqueror” of Aragon’s annexation of Mallorca (1229) and Valencia (1238), and Ferdinand Ill’s conquest of Murcia (1243). Christian complaints about the calls of the muezzin persisted in some areas for centuries. Although suffering from the problems of being ruled by an elite with separate laws and religion, Muslims under Christian rule, the mudejars, and Jews and converts—conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) and Moriscos (Muslim converts)—were a feature of Spanish life until the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when a recrudescence of a manufactured neo-crusading religious militancy led to the imposition of intolerant Christian uniformity under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon (1479-1516) and Isabella of Castile (1474-1504), coinciding with the final expulsion of the Moorish rulers from Granada (1492). This new identification of a crusading mission, which persisted under Charles V and Philip II, depended as heavily on recasting Castile, in particular, as itself a new holy land with a providential world mission as it did on genuine Aragonese crusading traditions. In turn, this spawned a myth of the crusading Reconquista and the providential identity and destiny of Catholic Spain later insidiously expropriated by General Franco and his fascist apologists, academic as well as political.

“Isabella the Catholic” is the title of this c.1839 engraving depicting Isabella of Castile (r. 1474—1504), queen of Spain during the completion of the Reconquista.

Ferdinand II of Aragon (r. 1474–1516), seen here in a Madrid monument, was king of Spain during the Reconquista—an era which led to the portrayal of Catholic Spain as another holy land.

The fate of Peter II of Aragon (1196-1213), father of James the Conqueror, reveals the nuances and contradictions in the Iberian experience. The twelfth-century invasion of Spain by the Almohads, Muslim puritans from North Africa, had placed the Christian advances of the previous century in jeopardy. In 1212, a large international crusader host combined with Iberian kings to resist. Before confronting the Almohad forces at Las Navas de Tolosa, most of the French contingents abandoned Peter and the kings of Castile and Navarre, partly over disagreements with the local rulers’ leniency toward defeated Muslim garrisons, a frontier pragmatism that, as in Palestine, struck the French as scandalous. They also did not care for the heat. The subsequent Christian victory became, as a result, almost wholly a Spanish triumph, a useful detail in the later projection of Spanish destiny. Fourteen months later Peter was defeated and killed at the battle of Muret in Languedoc by an army of French crusaders led by the church’s champion, Simon de Montfort, testimony to the political cross-currents upon the surface of which crusading bobbed, and the impossibility of divorcing “crusade” history from its secular context.

After the conquests, new (or in propaganda terms restored) sacred and secular landscapes were created, from converting mosques to churches to changing Arabic place names. In some areas, notably in Castile, immigrant settlement from further north was encouraged. Elsewhere, the pre-conquest social and religious structures felt only modest immediate impact. It may be significant of a decline in frontier militarism that after 1300, the cult of Santiago faded before that of the Virgin Mary. Nonetheless, the holy war tradition, in its crusading wrapping, persisted among the knightly and noble classes, available to those engaged in wars against infidels, Muslim or heathen, a living cultural force as well as a stereotype. While his captains were observing West Africans outside the straitjacket of crusading aesthetics, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) fervently embraced crusading aspirations and campaigned in North Africa. As late as 1578, a Portuguese king, Sebastian, at the head of an international force armed with indulgences and papal legates, fought and died in battle against the Muslims of Morocco. The penetration of Latin Christendom into the islands of the eastern Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attracted crusading grants for the dilatio, or extension, of Christendom. The Iberian tradition ensured a sympathetic hearing for the Genoese crusade enthusiast Christopher Columbus. It formed one strand in the conceptual justification for the conquest of the Americas and, more tenuously, in the mentality of the slave trade which some saw as a vehicle for expanding Christianity. This was made possible by the idea, popular by c.1500, that Spain itself (however imagined) was a holy land, its Christian inhabitants new Israelites, tempered and proved in the fire of the Reconquista, championing God’s cause whether against infidels outside Christendom or heretics within.

The Baltic

On the face of it, the idea that the crusades in the Baltic were directed to conquer holy lands appears fanciful, given that the regions attacked had no Christian pre-history. Yet perhaps precisely because of its extreme incongruity, this concept gained credence: alone of the regimes established in the wake of crusader conquest, Prussia and Livonia were ecclesiastical states. The association came early. A propagandist exhortation to attack the Wends east of the Elbe in 1108 described the campaign as being to liberate “our Jerusalem.” This challenging analogy operated in ways that remained central to the early association of crusading with German expansion eastwards; cashing in on the new impetus to holy war provided by the Jerusalem wars; the need to defend Christendom; and the implication that the wars were aimed at recovering lost Christian land. Some lands beyond the Elbe targeted by German crusaders in the twelfth century had been occupied by the Ottonian emperors before the great Slav revolt of 983 drove them back. Other areas had experienced more recent missionizing of fluctuating success. On the shifting German-Slav frontier, areas that had been conquered, even as far back as the tenth century, and then lost could attract accusations of apostasy. This confusion could work the other way; one contingent of the 1147 crusaders found themselves besieging recently Christianized Stettin.

The distinctive character of the Baltic crusades lay in the explicit alliance of crusade and conversion, or, as saintly Bernard of Clairvaux put it, conversion or extermination. Innocent III freely employed the language of compulsion to “drag the barbarians into the net of orthodoxy.” This unsound doctrine acknowledged the religious component in ethnicity, cultural identity, and racial awareness. In contrast with Spain or the Near East, in the Baltic, conversion came as the inevitable corollary and recognition of conquest. Paradoxically, this allowed for greater cultural accommodation and transmission from Slav to German and vice versa. Descendants of the pagan Wendish prince Niklot, victim of the first crusader attack in 1147 and killed by Christians in 1160, became the Germanized princes and dukes of Mecklenberg, one of whom joined a crusade to Livonia in 1218. However repellent to the religiously fastidious, enforced conversion worked; by 1400 the Baltic had become a Latin Christian lake, even if elements of pagan culture swam freely beneath the surface. Conversion not backed by coercion would have had a harder struggle, as the successful resistance of pagan Lithuania showed, only accepting conversion undefeated on its own terms in 1386. The application of crusading incentives from the mid-twelfth century did not manufacture this link between force and faith, it merely recognized a process of cultural and political imperialism already well established.

Crusading in the Baltic contributed to the twelfth-century German expansion into territory between the Elbe and Oder and western Pomerania; thirteenth-century German penetration into the southern Baltic lands between the Vistula and Niemen, Prussia, Courland, and later, in the fourteenth century, Pomerelia west of the Vistula; the transmarine colonization of Livonia by a combination of churchmen and merchants from German trading centers such as Lübeck and Bremen; the aggressive expansionism of the Danish crown, especially in northern Estonia; and the advance of the Swedes into Finland. Until the thirteenth century crusading, as opposed to more general associations of war with Divine favor, played only an intermittent role. The application of crusade privileges to the summer raids on the western Wends during the Second Crusade in 1147 had more to do with buying Saxon support and internal peace within the empire in Conrad Ill’s absence in the Holy Land than the institution of a new sustained crusade front. One of the protagonists in the 1147 expeditions, Albert the Bear, did not need crusade privileges to carve out a principality of Brandenberg beyond the Elbe; his territorial acquisitiveness was in any case portrayed by apologists as attracting God’s approval. Such conquests went together with the implanting of bishoprics and monasteries and so earned clerical plaudits. The secular reality was brutal for the conquered, harsh for the German and Flemish settlers, and, as one pious frontier priest lamented, encouraged the avarice rather than the piety of another 1147 crusader, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. Between 1147 and 1193 only one papal crusade grant was directed toward the Baltic, in 1171. However, the often savage wars of conquest and conversion conducted against the Slavs by the German princes and kings of Denmark were recognized by the papacy as “inspired with the heavenly flame, strengthened by the arms of Christ, armed with the shield of faith and protected by divine favor,” as Alexander III put it in 1169. Nonetheless, to ascribe responsibility for medieval German imperialism on the crusade would be misleading; one might as well accuse the Christian Church. It might also be added that the Baltic pagans were no less keen on massacring opponents and eradicating symbols of an alien faith. Although, except in Lithuania, the pagan holy wars ended in defeat, this does not mean they did not happen.

Crusader Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, commemorated in this statue in Braunschweig, Germany, combined holy war with secular territorial wars in the Baltic region.

The real impetus toward affixing technical apparatus of crusading—vow, cross, indulgence, and so on—to Christian conquest in the Baltic came when attention shifted from the western Slavs of the southern Baltic to the heathen tribes further east, in Livonia, Estonia, Finland, and Prussia, the theatres of crusading operations that dominated the period from the 1190s. While defense of the missionary churches established in Livonia or Estonia around 1200 were relatively easily justified, support for extensive conquests in either region, still less in Prussia, demanded these areas acquire a new holy status. Each answered this need in different ways. The campaigns of the kings of Denmark along the southern Baltic coast and the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland in northern Estonia attracted sporadic papal grants of crusade privileges familiar elsewhere, while the monarchs surrounded themselves with the useful aura of Christian warriors, “active knights of Christ,” to justify foreign conquest and internal authority. The pagans were to be rooted out by force and Christendom expanded. Here the conquerors were performing holy tasks and thus their conquests, by incorporation into Christendom, became ipso facto holy.

Away from the muddled but powerful religiosity of Christian monarchy, the consecration of crusade targets followed more precise lines. From c.1202, the missionary bishop of Riga recruited a religious order of knights, the Militia of Christ or Sword Brothers, to defend and extend his diocese in Livonia centered on the River Dvina. A few years later his colleague on the Polish-Prussian frontier assembled a similar body, the Militia of Christ of Livonia against the Prussians, also known as the Knights of Dobrin (or Dobryzin) after their original headquarters on the Vistula. Again, the status of the conquests was defined by that of the conquerors, bishops, and sworn professed, as well as professional, knights of Christ. The dedication of the Christian settlement created at Riga by the missionaries and merchants to the Virgin Mary allowed Livonia to be depicted as the land of the Mother of God, her dowry, allowing crusade apologists in the region to describe crusaders there as pilgrims or “the militia of pilgrims.” This brought them further into line with crusaders elsewhere; even crusaders against the Albigensians were called pilgrims by some, almost as a sine qua non of legitimacy. The first two churches built in the new town of Riga before 1209 were dedicated to Mary, the patroness, and Peter, the guarantor of ecclesiastical privileges. When the Teutonic Knights took over war and government in both Prussia and Livonia in the 1230s, absorbing the other military orders in the process, and from 1245 the direction of a permanent crusade in the region, the identification with the Virgin Mary was complete, as she was the patroness of the German order. In Livonia the knights bore her image as a war banner. With the papacy designating Prussia a papal fief (as part of its anti-imperial policy) in 1234, the Teutonic Knights’ territory was doubly sanctified. In the absence of a historic justification for war, a late thirteenth-century rhyming chronicle from Livonia, probably by a Teutonic Knight, insinuated a transcendent context. Beginning his work with accounts of the Creation, Pentecost, and the missions of the Early Church, the author admitted that no apostle reached Livonia, unlike the myth of James converting Spain. Instead, a higher mission was being pursued in the wastes of the eastern Baltic, the holy task begun by the Apostles of proselytizing the world now carried forward through service and death in the armies of the Mother of God in defense of Her land.

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian settlements in the Baltic region were often dedicated to the Virgin Mary, as depicted in this seal of the Hochmeister, Grand Master, of the order of the Teutonic Knights.

Such literary devices could reassure participants and attract recruits while not fully reflecting the nature of war in Prussia, Livonia, and Estonia. Not all enemies were pagan. In Estonia, the Teutonic Knights competed for power with fellow crusaders, the Danes. In 1242 an attack on the Orthodox Christians of Russian Pskov ended in the famous defeat on Lake Peipus/Chud by Alexander Nevsky, evocatively imagined in Eisenstein’s memorable propagandist film. In Prussia, especially in the west, German and Flemish settlement appeared substantial; in Livonia and Estonia, only accessible by a tricky and expensive sea voyage when the water was free of ice, negligible and almost exclusively limited to the fortified religious trading posts on the main rivers. Prussia witnessed a slow process of acculturation similar to that between the Elbe and the Oder. Slavs became Germans, an uncomfortable thought for later racial nationalists on both sides of the linguistic divide. The judicial pluralism and segregation familiar from other crusading fronts did not prevent the Prussians adopting elements of German inheritance laws. Over generations, the brutality of forced conversion, occupation, alien settlement, and discrimination against natives transformed Prussia into a distinctively German province. By contrast, only a small military, clerical, and commercial elite survived in Estonia and Livonia, where the Teutonic Knights remained until 1562, thirty-seven years after the order’s secularization in Prussia. In the shadow of this past, Hitler, with his obscenely warped historical squint, rejected the loss of any part of Prussia from the Reich, demanding Memel, established by the German invaders in 1252, from the Lithuanians in March 1939, an act that provoked Britain’s guarantee to protect Poland. Yet a few months later, he consigned the Baltic states to the lot of the Russians as if they were less “German.”

Centuries after the Crusades, Adolf Hitler, pictured giving a speech in 1942, repeated old German claims to parts of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.

However, the link from the Teutonic Knights to the SS and the nationalized racism of the Third Reich, lovingly traced by Himmler and his historically illiterate ghouls, relied on rancid imagination not fact. The crusades did not drive the expansion of German power, nor the expansion of Spain. Wider cultural, economic, demographic, social, and technological forces did that. In so far as these impulses were articulated in religious terms, crusading offered a particular vocabulary, both practical and inspirational, that could service self-referential ideologies and self-righteous policies of domination. Holy symbols achieved cultural and political significance, the Catholic churches and churchmen transmitted a distinctive western culture, yet, for all their importance, in the expansion of Latin Christendom across its frontiers, the grammar and syntax remained resolutely secular.

The Holy Lands within Fortress Christendom

The image of Christendom as a beleaguered fortress, with bastions or antemurales opposing the advance of the infidel, had a long history. In 1089, Urban II so described the projected rebuilding of Tarragona on the Spanish coast south of Barcelona. From the fourteenth century, the whole concept of antemurales gained wide currency along the frontier with the Ottomans from Poland, through Hungary to the Adriatic. As defense of these bastions clearly formed one aspect of holy war, rulers along these frontiers themselves adopted holy war rhetoric and promoted the sacralization of their individual territories, thereby engendering a strong sense of national exceptionalism.

Away from the front line, participation in crusading also became a central feature of emergent myths and rituals of corporate or national identity. Pisa, Genoa, and especially Venice proudly proclaimed their civic involvement in the eastern crusades in art, literature, and civic ceremony. In Florence, where the cross acted as a sign both for the crusade and the city’s popolo, or populace, participation in crusading provided opportunities to reinforce civic exceptionalism; the banner borne at Damietta in 1219 became a revered relic in the Church of San Giovanni. Similar attention to their role in crusading, especially in the east, came from the cities of northern Europe, such as Cologne and London. The Danish kings adopted the cross as their symbol around 1200. The canonization of royal holy warriors and crusaders became widespread: Charlemagne, regarded as a proto-crusader (canonized in 1166); St. Eric IX of Sweden (d.1160, canonized 1167), scourge of the Finnish “enemies of the faith”; Ferdinand III of Castile (d.1252, a recognized cult figure from the thirteenth century, officially canonized 1671); and Louis IX of France (d.1270, canonized 1297). Some of the legends circulated after the canonization of King Ladislas of Hungary (d.1095, canonized 1192) portrayed him as the lost leader of the First Crusade, in fact evoking the career of Bela III (d.1196) who had sponsored Ladislas’ sanctification. Politically and diplomatically having pulled Hungary, like Denmark and later Poland, toward Latin Christendom, the crusades were then recruited to sanctify local royal dynasticism.

This association was most evident in France. The French kings’ habit of crusading helped create what has been called the “religion of monarchy” with its elevation of the kingdom by royal propagandists from c.1300 into a Holy Land, and the French as God’s Chosen People. A striking illuminated manuscript produced at Acre c.1280 depicted Louis IX at Damietta in 1249 emblazoned with fleurs de lis; there is not a cross in sight. The crusade and the providential destiny of France and its ruling dynasty merged in the later Middle Ages into a form of apocalyptic royal or national messianism. One contemporary prophesied that Joan of Arc’s victories over the English in 1429 would result in her leading King Charles VII (1422-61) to conquer the Holy Land, a theme recalled in 1494 when Charles VIII of France (1483-98) launched his invasion of Italy by declaring his intention to recover Jerusalem. Even after the French religious polity had been shattered by the Reformation and the destructive Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, the image of crusading as the special preserve and responsibility of “the Most Christian Kings” of France (a twelfth-century courtesy title) survived among both Catholic and Huguenot apologists of Henry IV (1589-1610). This French experience found a close parallel in late medieval Spain, in particular Castile, where a prophetic tradition nurtured by the Reconquista inspired a sense that the Iberian holy wars required ultimate fulfillment in the recovery of Jerusalem. The expulsion of the Moors from Granada led to North African forays by Ferdinand and his grandson Charles V (1516—55) which were cast by royal polemicists as preludes to the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. For Charles’s son, Philip II (1555—98), the synergy of God’s war and Spain’s war occupied the center of his worldview.

This transformation of lands of crusaders into crusading kingdoms and thus into holy lands went one step further by harnessing the model of the Old Testament Israelites and the Maccabees defending God’s heritage, which had occupied a prominent place in traditional crusade semiotics. If the Holy Land or Christendom were patria, why not the crusaders’ own kingdoms or city states? Pope Clement V’s answer in 1311 was clear: “Just as the Israelites are known to have been granted the Lord’s inheritance by the election of Heaven, to perform the hidden wishes of God, so the kingdom of France has been chosen as the Lord’s special people.” Others could play the same game. Reflecting on English victories in the Hundred Years’ War to parliament in 1377, Chancellor Haughton, bishop of St. David’s, commented that “God would never have honored this land in the same way as he did Israel… if it were not that He had chosen it as his heritage.” One popular verse of the time even suggested that “the pope had become French, but Jesus had become English.” God’s career as an Englishman had many centuries to run.

This nineteenth-century painting by Sir John Gilbert shows the morning of the Battle of Agincourt, as Henry V’s chaplain uses the language of the crusades to bless soldiers dressed “in the armor of penitence.”

These Scriptural borrowings operated within a pre-crusading tradition of finding Old Testament precedents for the defense of homelands, and cannot necessarily be linked directly with crusading. However, the language employed by those attempting to sacralize national warfare was so congruent to current crusade rhetoric as to make neat distinctions impossible; propagandists probably deliberately elided the two. Of course, not all national holy wars were associated with crusading. The Hussites in fifteenth-century Bohemia self-consciously created their own holy land, renaming cult sites after places in Palestine, such as Mount Tabor or Mount Horeb, while rejecting utterly the crusade tradition that fuelled the campaigns launched against them. By contrast, within Catholic Christendom, from the fourteenth century crusading motifs were increasingly recruited to national causes, such as the conflicts between France and Flanders, England and Scotland, and, most pervasively, England and France. Occasionally, as in 1383 or 1386, actual crusade grants were applied to campaigns in the Hundred Years’ War. More frequently, language and images of holy war made familiar by crusading were inserted into descriptions or justifications of events. Henry V’s chaplain presented the English at Agincourt (1415) as “God’s people,” dressed “in the armor of penitence,” encouraged by their king to follow the example of Judas Maccabeus. Such transference was eased by the ubiquitous appropriation of the cross as national uniform across Europe in the later Middle Ages (for example, the red cross of the English), a symbol that spoke more loudly than legal or canonical logic-chopping. There were many influences on the creation of national holy lands and the sacralizing of political rule and identity in the later Middle Ages. In so far as self-defining civic, dynastic, or national conflicts adopted some ideological and rhetorical features derived from the most charismatic expression of medieval holy war, the crusade was one of them.

The Lutheran Frauenkirche rises over Dresden, Germany. The Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther, questioned the legacy of the Crusades, since Protestants did not consider the holy wars as being exclusively Catholic efforts.

CONCLUSION

Crusading Our Contemporary

LONG BEFORE THE LAST ROMAN Catholic took the cross, perhaps in the early eighteenth century for the Habsburgs against the Ottomans in central Europe or the kings of Spain against Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, the history and legends of the Crusades had entered the mythic memory of Christian Europe.

From the First Crusade, the wars of the cross had been sustained, developed, and refined by concurrent description and interpretation, popular and academic. By the fifteenth century, appreciation of what passed for crusade history underpinned all serious discussion of future projects. Provoked by immediate political concerns, such studies tended to polemic and self-interest, blind to the distinction between legend and evidence. From humanist scholarship and theological hostility in the sixteenth century emerged a more independent historiography. The academic study of crusading—or holy war as it was generally called—was encouraged and distorted by the two great crises that threatened to tear Christendom apart: the advance of the Ottomans and the Protestant reformations.

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries secured the continued cultural prominence of the Crusades. Much of the responsibility for this lay with Protestant scholars in Germany and France. Despite Roman Catholics seeking crusading privileges when fighting Protestants, admiration for the faith and heroism of the crusaders crossed confessional divides, as did fear of the Ottoman Turks. The refusal of certain Protestant scholars to dismiss crusading simply as a papal corruption provided a bridge between the Roman Catholic past and what they imagined as the Protestant future. The Crusades were rendered as national achievements, ecumenical even, at a time when religious passions still burned violently. Elevating the Crusades away from partisan religious ownership allowed the past to be reconciled with the present through inherited national identities, a process that contributed to the creation of a secular concept of Europe.

As long as the Catholic Church attached crusading apparatus to wars against the Turks and confessional enemies, and political and social radicalism were articulated in religious terms, some still found it controversial. For others, crusading slipped into the quiet reaches of history, settling into channels of moral and religious disapproval or admiration for distant heroism, often tinged with nationalism. With the evaporation of the Ottoman threat in the eighteenth century, past wars against Islam could be viewed with detached rather than engaged prejudice. Observers of the apparently defeated culture could indulge their tastes for the exotic and the alien with the frisson of danger replaced by a thrill of superiority lent intellectual respectability by emerging concepts of change and progress. Fear of the Turks gave way to contempt, fascination, and a sort of cultural and historical tourism. Muslims in the Near East, increasingly accessible as the sea-lanes became passable, were transformed from demons to curiosities. Such concerns produced an inevitable narrowing of focus onto crusades to the Holy Land and Christian Outremer. They also made the emotions behind crusading seem even more remote.

The prevalent eighteenth-century intellectual attitude, lit by anti-clericalism, was set in a disdainful grimace at what was caricatured as the ignorance, fanaticism, and violence of earlier times. Yet Gibbon’s “World’s Debate” appeared to have been won by the west, with European successes in Mogul India supplying further consolation and confirmation of superiority. External stimulus to shifting perceptions came from the elite fashion for Oriental and Near Eastern artifacts and the direct contact with the Levant following Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Syria in 1798-99 and the opening up of the region to upper-class tourists, from Chateaubriand to Benjamin Disraeli, whose romantic instincts were stirred by what they saw or imagined. The past required re-arrangement to suit these new enthusiasms and assumptions. Thus discussion of the Crusades to the east had to dwell more on the motives and behavior of the crusaders rather than the dismal outcome of their exertions, on cultural values and potential rather than undoubted failure. The Crusades were refashioned into a symbol of western valor and cultural endeavor, a process encouraged by the growing popularity of another form of “otherness” to contrast with the self-perceived modernity of Enlightenment Europe—medievalism. The early nineteenth century saw the combination of Orientalism and medievalism revive crusading as a set of literary references. As an example of passion over pragmatism, the Crusade became an analogy for romantic or escapist policies of those troubled by creeping capitalism and industrialization. The political exploitation of the history of the Crusades possessed a sharper edge in continental Europe, where it became a tool of reaction against the ideals and practices both of the French Revolution and liberalism. The new cult of neo-chivalry supplied moral, religious, and cultural as well as actual architectural buttresses for an aristocratic ancien régime losing much of its exclusivity if not power.

From the late eighteenth century, the word “crusade” was applied metaphorically or analogously to any vigorous good cause. More precisely, in the absence of devastating general conflicts after 1815, nineteenth-century Europe spawned a cult of war which could be projected back onto the Crusades. The association of just causes and sanctified violence, sealed with the confused sentimentality of Romantic neo-chivalry, found stark concrete form in war memorials across western Europe after the First World War, a conflict regularly described by clergy as well as by politicians as “a great crusade”; bishops might have been expected to know better. More scrupulous observers caviled at such meretricious rhetoric, yet the imagery persisted even when the idealism had drowned in Flanders mud; General Eisenhower’s Order for the Day of June 6, 1944, described the D-Day offensive as “a great crusade.” The connection with spiritually redemptive holy warfare had become drained of much meaning. Any conflict promoted as transcending territorial or other material aims could attract the crusade epithet, increasingly a lazy synonym for ideological conflict or, worse, a sloppy but highly charged metaphor for political conflicts between protagonists from contrasting cultures and faiths. In ways unimaginable when Runciman denounced the morality of crusading in the mid-twentieth century, the Crusades no longer just haunt the memory but stalk the streets of twenty-first-century international politics, in particular in the Near East. In an irony often lost on protagonists, these public perceptions of the Crusades that underpin confrontational rhetoric derive from a common source. The Near Eastern radical or terrorist who rails against “western” neo-crusaders is operating in exactly the same conceptual and academic tradition as those in the west who continue to insinuate the language of the crusade into their approach to the problems of the region. This is by no means a universal set of mentalities, as demonstrated from the literary and academic cliché of a civilized medieval Islamic world brutalized by western barbarians, to the almost studiously anti-crusading rhetoric and policies of NATO and others in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, to opposition to the crude caricaturing of Islam after September 2001. The re-entry of the Crusades into the politics of the Near East is baleful and intellectually bogus.

This 1915 German World War I poster by Fritz Boehle (after an Albrecht Dürer woodcut) is titled In Deo Gratia (Thanks Be to God). The poster, promoting the German war effort, reads: “Giv’st thou a mite. Be it e’er so small. Thou shalt be blessed by God.”

President Bush II and Usama bin Laden are co-heirs to the legacy of a nineteenth-century European construct. Here, one of the most influential historians of the Crusades was Joseph François Michaud (1767-1839). A publishing entrepreneur, Michaud combined uncritical antiquarianism with a keen sense of the market and prevailing popular sentiment. A monarchist, nationalist, and anti-Revolutionary Christian, Michaud allied admiration for the Crusades’ ideals with a supremacist triumphalism over Islam. He helped provide apparent historical legitimacy for colonialism and cultural imperialism, increasingly the litmus test of European hegemony and national status. Thus crusading could be transmuted into a precursor of Christian European superiority and ascendancy, taking its place in what was proclaimed as the march of western progress. Michaud’s convenient and seductive vision left an indelible stain.

Yet Arab, Arabist, and Islamic outrage ignored the uncomfortable fact that Michaud’s construct played its part in setting their own agenda too. In rallying opinion against European intrusion, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) labeled their imperialism as a crusade, his remark that “Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us in the form of a political campaign.” Much subsequent Islamic discourse on western attitudes to the Crusades and the Near East has been colored by a negative acceptance of the Michaud version of history as if this were the immutable western response or historically accurate. No continuity exists in Arabic responses to western aggression between medieval crusading and modern political hostility, any more than there is between medieval and modern jihad, except in rhetoric and an ahistorical appeal to the past. Assumptions of an inherent conflict of power and victimization that elevates a wholly unhistorical link between modern colonialism and medieval crusading. It is Michaud in a mirror. Occidentalism and Orientalism share the same western frame. The idea that the modern political conflicts in the Near East or elsewhere derive from the legacy of the Crusades or are being conducted as neo-crusades in anything except extremist diatribe is deceitful.

All sides seem reluctant to accept that the images of crusade and jihad introduced into late twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflicts are not time-venerated traditions of action or abuse, but modern imports.

Battle between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land is depicted in this illumination from the fourteenth-century French manuscript, History of Godfrey of Bouillon. Modern politicians still sometimes invoke the Crusades, whether in reference to the Western-led “War on Terror” against Islamic extremists, or to a struggle against Western aggressors by aggrieved Muslim nations.

It has been observed that no Islamic state has formally launched a jihad against a non-Muslim opponent since the demise of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Even that Islamic holy war had been sponsored and encouraged by the Turks’ German allies. Most African and Near Eastern jihads proclaimed in the nineteenth century and since were not against infidel imperialists but Islamic rivals, oppressors, and heretics or for religious reform. This is not to deny the presence of jihad language and theory, as in the propaganda of states at war with the State of Israel in 1948, 1967, or 1973. However, there is nothing old-fashioned, still less “medieval,” about the techniques, recruitment, or ideology of al-Qaeda. The devious polemical association between “crusaders” and “Jews” is historical nonsense. Al-Qaeda’s international reach is a creation of modernity and globalization as surely as the World Wide Web. Many states most disliked by those who claim to be fearful of Islam are explicitly secular. Yet fanciful analogies with crusading have accompanied most major conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean from the First World War onwards, including unlikely associations such as the siege of Beirut in 1982 with the siege of Acre in 1189-91. The Arabic propaganda transmuting Israelis into crusaders is a direct consequence of this. While on their side some Israeli extremists hark back to an older tradition of almost Maccabean revivalism, others are content to re-fashion their landscape to exclude, in place names or archaeological designation, Arabic traces, seeing the State of Israel as a liberation not an occupation. There are obvious historic parallels with Christian Outremer, but also with Umayyad Palestine or Roman Syria—conquerors imposing their own space. However, Israelis are not the new crusaders, any more than the Americans. Saddam Hussein was not the new Saladin, even though they shared a birthplace.

To imagine otherwise goes beyond fraudulence. It plays on a cheap historicism that at once inflames, debases, and confuses current conflicts, draining them of rational meaning or legitimate solution. The Crusades reflected central human concerns of belief and identity that can only be understood on their own terms, in their own time; so, too, their adoption and adaptation by later generations. While it is tempting to draw conclusions derived from geographical congruity or superficial political similarities, the land in which Jakelin de Mailly fell over eight hundred years ago and the cause for which he died held truths for his time, not ours.

FURTHER READING

•

Historically, the study of the Crusades has usually been marked by prejudice, bias, and judgmentalism. Very little surviving primary evidence is without inherent distortion. Later interpretations have consistently reflected the concerns of the historians rather than objective assessment of the phenomenon. Medieval observers represented the Crusades in a scriptural context as signifiers of divine providence. Since the sixteenth century, shifting religious, political, and intellectual fashions have determined very different presentations: confessional or philosophical disdain, romantic exoticism, assumptions of cultural conflict, colonial apologetics, imperialism, and nationalism. Some have always sought to frame the Crusades as a mirror of the modern age, reassuring or troubling in similarities or contrasts. Modern scholarship, while embracing a far wider range of sources, from canon law to archaeology, is no less prone to factionalism, the influence of politics, as in the Israeli school led by Joshua Prawer, or of conflicting metaphysical constructs of the past. On the contentious issue of definition, the ecclesiastical historian Giles Constable has characterized the competing interpreters as generalists, who locate the origins and nature of crusading in the long development of Christian holy war before 1095; popularists, who favor the idea that crusading emerged as an expression of popular piety; traditionalists who insist on the centrality of Jerusalem and the Holy Land to legitimate crusading; and pluralists, who concentrate on pious motivation, canon law, and papal authorization to include all conflicts enjoying the privileges of wars of the cross regardless of destination or purpose. Such academic disputes may appear arcane. Yet they matter if understanding of the past is to be liberated from oversimplified and misleading public history and the maw of modern polemic. Having previously wreaked so much havoc, the Crusades should not be recruited to the battlegrounds of the twenty-first century nor yet condescendingly condemned as one of Christianity’s legion of aberrations.

GENERAL

M. Barber, The New Knighthood (Cambridge, 1994)

C. Erdmann, The Origins of the Idea of Crusading, tr. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, 1977) (the classic generalist text)

A. Forey, The Military Orders (London, 1992)

C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999)

N. Housley, The Later Crusades (Oxford, 1992) (pluralist)

H. E. Mayer, The Crusades, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1988) (traditionalist)

J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (London, 1987) (pluralist)

J. Riley-Smith (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995)

J. Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 3rd edn. (London, 2002) (pluralist)

S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1951–54) (traditionalist, once described as “the last great medieval chronicle”)

C. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (London, 1998)

HOLY WAR

N. Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002)

J. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels (Liverpool, 1979)

F. H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975)

HOLY LANDS

R. Barlett, The Making of Europe (London, 1993)

E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 2nd edn. (London, 1997)

D. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978)

J. Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (London, 1972)

R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare (Cambridge, 1956)

THE BUSINESS OF THE CROSS

J. Brundage, Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison, 1969)

P. Cole, The Preaching of the Cross to the Holy Land 1095—1270 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)

S. Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade 1216-1307 (Oxford, 1988)

C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095—1588 (Chicago, 1988)

INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION

M. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (London, 2000)

P. Partner, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam (London, 1997)

E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1979)

E. Siberry, The New Crusaders (Aldershot, 2000)

CHRONOLOGY

•

c.400

Augustine of Hippo outlines a Christian theory of just war

638

Jerusalem is captured by the Arabs under Caliph Umar

800

Charlemagne the Frank is crowned Roman Emperor of the West

9th century

Holy wars proclaimed against Muslim invaders of Italy

11th century

Peace and Truce of God movements in parts of France mobilize arms bearers to protect the Church

1053

Leo IX offers remission of sins to his troops fighting the Normans of southern Italy

1050s–70s

Seljuk Turks invade Near East

1071

Seljuk Turks defeat Byzantines at Manzikert; they overrun Asia Minor and establish a capital at Nicaea

1074

Pope Gregory VII proposes a campaign from the west to help Byzantium and liberate the Holy Sepulchre

1095

Byzantine appeal to Pope Urban II for military aid against the Turks; Urban II’s preaching tour of France (ends 1096); Council of Clermont proclaims Crusade

1096–99

First Crusade

1101 onward

Smaller crusades to Holy Land

1104

Acre captured

1107–08

Crusade of Bohemund of Taranto against Byzantium

1109

Tripoli captured

c.1113

Order of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem recognized; militarized by c.1130

1114 onward

Crusades in Spain

1120

Order of the Temple founded in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims

1123

First Lateran Council extends Jerusalem privileges to Spanish Crusades

1144

Edessa captured by Zengi of Aleppo

1145–49

Second Crusade

1149 onward

Further crusades in Spain and the Baltic; a few to the Holy Land

1154

Nur al-Din of Aleppo captures Damascus

1163–69

Franks of Jerusalem contest control of Egypt

1169

Saladin succeeds as ruler of Egypt

1174

Death of Nur al-Din; Saladin begins to unify Syria with Egypt

1187

Battle of Hattin; Saladin destroys army of Kingdom of Jerusalem; Jerusalem falls to Saladin

1188–92

Third Crusade

1193

Saladin dies

1193–1230

Crusades to Livonia in the Baltic

1198

Foundation of Teutonic Knights in Acre; Pope Innocent III proclaims Fourth Crusade

1199

Church taxation instituted for the Crusade; Crusade against Markward of Anweiler in Sicily

1201–04

Fourth Crusade

13th century

Crusades in the Baltic by Teutonic Knights (Prussia), Sword Brothers (Livonia), Danes (Prussia, Livonia, Estonia), and Swedes (Estonia and Finland); Crusades against German peasants and Bosnians

1208–29

Albigensian Crusade

1212

Children’s Crusade; Almohads defeated by Spanish Christian coalition at Las Navas de Tolosa

1213

Innocent III proclaims Fifth Crusade and extends crusade privileges to those who contribute but do not go on crusade

1215

Fourth Lateran Council authorizes regular crusade taxation

1217–29

Fifth Crusade

1231 onward

Crusades against the Byzantines to defend western conquests in Greece

1239–68

Crusades against Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily

1239–41

Crusades to Holy Land of Theobald, Count of Champagne, and Richard, Earl of Cornwall; crusaders defeated at Gaza (1239)

1242

Teutonic Knights defeated by Alexander Nevsky at Lake Chud

1244

Jerusalem lost to Muslims; Louis IX of France takes the cross

1248–54

First Crusade of Louis IX of France

1250

Mamluks take rule in Egypt (to 1517)

1251

First Shepherds’ Crusade

1260

Mamluks repulse Mongols at Ain Jalut; Baibars becomes sultan of Egypt (to 1277)

1261

Greeks recover Constantinople

1267

Louis IX takes cross again

1268

Fall of Antioch to Baibars of Egypt

1269

Aragonese Crusade to Holy Land

1270

Louis IX’s Crusade ends at Tunis, where he dies

1271–72

Crusade to Holy Land of Lord Edward, later Edward I of England

1272–91

Small expeditions to Holy Land

1282–1302

Wars of the Sicilian Vespers; include French crusade to Aragon (1285)

1289

Fall of Tripoli

1291

Fall of Acre to al-Ashraf Khalil of Egypt and evacuation of mainland Outremer

1306–1522

Hospitallers rule island of Rhodes

1307–14

Trial and suppression of Templars

14th century

Papal crusades in Italy; crusading continues against heretics in Italy; Moors in Spain; pagans in the Baltic (to 1410)

1309

Popular Crusade; Teutonic Knights move headquarters from Venice to Prussia

1320

Second Shepherds’ Crusade

1330s onward

Naval leagues against Turks in Aegean

1350s onward

Ottoman Turks established in Balkans; soon establish overlordship over Byzantine emperors

1365–66

Crusade of Peter of Cyprus; Alexandria sacked (1365)

1366

Crusade of Count Amadeus of Savoy to Dardanelles

1383

Crusade of Bishop Despenser of Norwich against supporters of Pope Clement VII in Flanders

1390

Christian expedition to Mahdia in Tunisia

1396

Christian expedition against the Ottomans defeated at Nicopolis on the Danube (September)

15th century

Numerous small crusading forays against the Ottomans in eastern Mediterranean and east/central Europe

1420–71

Crusades against the Hussite heretics in Bohemia

1444

Crusaders defeated at Varna in Bulgaria (November)

1453

Fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II

1456

Belgrade successfully defended from Ottoman Turks with help of crusaders under John of Capistrano

1460–64

Abortive crusade of Pope Pius II

1480

Turks besiege Rhodes

1492

Granada falls to Spanish monarchs

16th century

More crusades against Turks in Mediterranean and central Europe; from 1530s crusades threatened against heretics (Protestants)

1522

Rhodes falls to Turks

1525

Secularization of Teutonic Order in Prussia

1529

Turks besiege Vienna

1530–1798

Hospitallers rule Malta

1560s–90s

French Wars of Religion; some Catholics receive crusade privileges

1561–62

Secularization of Teutonic Order in Livonia

1565

Turks fail to conquer Malta

1571

Holy League wins a naval battle against the Turks at Lepanto; Cyprus falls to Turks

1578

King Sebastian of Portugal defeated and killed at Alcazar on crusade in Morocco

1588

Spanish Armada attracts crusade privileges for Spanish

1669

Crete falls to Turks

1683

Turks besiege Vienna

1684–97

Holy League begins to reconquer Balkans from Turks

1798

Hospitallers surrender Malta to Napoleon Bonaparte

1898

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany visits Jerusalem and Damascus

1914–18

First World War; Ottoman Turkey allies with Germany which encourages proclamation of jihad against the Turks’ enemies

1917

British under General Allenby take Jerusalem

1919

Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations confirm mandates for Britain and France in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and the Lebanon

1948

Creation of the State of Israel (defended in wars 1948, 1967, 1973)

1982

Israeli invasion of Lebanon

1990

Gulf War

2001

Al-Qaeda attack on United States

2003–04

Iraq War

PICTURE CREDITS

•

ASSOCIATED PRESS: 5: AP Photo/Massimo Sambucetti.

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY: 135: Homage to King Philip II (1165–1223) from Simon de Montfort (c.1160–1218) for the territories confiscated from Raymond VI (1197–1249) c.1216 (vellum) by French School (thirteenth century), Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

CLIPART.COM: 6.

CORBIS: 12: © The Art Archive/Corbis; 18: © Chris Hellier/Corbis; 110: © Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis; 177: © Swim Ink 2, LLC/Corbis.

GETTY IMAGES: ii: DEA/G. Dagli Orti/Getty Images; 106: Pietro Cavallini/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images; 170: Sir John Gilbert/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images; 180: The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images.

THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK: 20; 58; 60.

COURTESY OF PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: 14: LC-USZ62-58246; 44: LC-USZ62-120685; 47: LC-USZ62-36166; 89: LC-USZC4-2149; 95: LC-USZ61-1435; 122: LC-USZ62-120684; 125: LC-USZC4-2148; 131: LC-USZ62-55247; LC-USZ62-88830; 144: LC-USZC4-3484; 157t: LC-USZ61-252; 166: LC-USZ62-114861.

COURTESY OF PROJECT GUTENBERG: 11: Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 19, 1917.

SHUTTERSTOCK: 36: ©Shutterstock/Paul Cowan; 53: ©Shutterstock/Eduard Cebria; 82: ©Shutterstock/St. Nick; 86: ©Shutterstock/Jozef Sedmak; 101: ©Shutterstock/Eray Haciosmanoglu; 129: ©Shutterstock/Stanislav Bokach; 140: ©Shutterstock/Joshua Haviv; 157b: ©Shutterstock/Elias H. Debbas II; 172: ©Shutterstock/K-i-T.

COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS: xii: Pope Urban/Author: Nelson Minar (http://flickr.com/photos/62218395@N00); 4: Standbeeld Saladin Damascus/Author: Godfried Warreyn; 7: Eugàne Ferdinand Victor Delacroix 047/Source: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH; 8: Harold bayeux tapestry; 26: Baldwin of Boulogne entering Edessa in Feb 1098/Source: Painting by J. Robert-Fleury, 1840, Les Croisades, origins et consequences; 34: Hattin/Author:Bibliothàque Nationale FR. 5594 Fol. 197, Sebastian Mamerot, Les Passages fait Outremer, vers 1490; 39: Tomb Innocentius III San Giovanni in Laterano 2006-09-07/Author: Jastrow; 51: Martorana RogerII2008/Author: Matthias Süßen; 62: Battle of Varna 1444/Author: Jan Matejko (1838–1893); 64: Sultan Hasan Mosque2/Author: Effeietsanders; 70: Mosque Cordoba/Author: Timor Espallargas; 72: CID-Balboa/Author: Michael Seljos (http://www.flickr.com/people/99149846@N00) from San Diego, California, USA; 76: SiegeOfAcre1291/Source: Chateau de Versailles, reproduced in Brieve histoire des Ordres Religieux, Editions Fragile/Author: D. Papety (1815–1849); 78: Stained glass St Bernard MNMA C13273/Source: Jastrow (2006), Musée national du Moyen Age—Thermes de Hôtel de Cluny, Paris, France; 92: Fra Angelico 031/Source: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202; 96: Pope Gregory vii illustration/Source: Weltgeschichte-Eine Chronik, ISBN 3-88703-814-2/Upload to commons by RoterRabe 23:24, 19 July 2006 (UTC); 104: Bishop Absalon topples the god Svantevit at Arkona/Source: www.hopegallery.com/php/detail.php?artwork=438/Artist: Laurits Tuxen; 114: RaymondOfPoitiersWelcomingLouisVIIinAntioch/Source: Passages d’Outremer, 14th century/Author: Jean Colombe and Sebastien Marmerot; 120: Saint Pierre l’Ermite Amiens 190908/Author: Vassil; 122: 139: Crécy jean froissard/Source: Chroniques de Jean Froissard/Author: Copiste inconnu; 149: Siege of Tripoli Painting (1289)/Source: Painting reproduced as Plate #26 in Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War. Credited as “British Library, London [Ms Add 27695 Fol. 5]” (Tyerman, p. vii); 154: BaldwinII ceding the Temple of Salomon to Hugues de Payns and Gaudefroy de Saint-Homer/Source: Histoire d’Outre-Mer, Guillaume de Tyr, thirteenth century, reproduced in Les Templiers, Patrick Huchet, p.21, ISBN 9782737338526; 156: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo-St Jacobus in Budapest/Source: Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts; 162: Braunschweig Brunswick Heinrich der Loewe Heinrichsbrunnen (2005)/Author: Brunswyk; 164: Siegel Grossmeister Deutschritterorden/Source: Buch-Scan von Wolpertinger.