Within months, Jerusalem fell and Saladin had recovered Islam's third most important city after Mecca and Medina, an achievement that still echoes down the centuries. News of the calamitous fall of Jerusalem sparked grief and outrage in the West. Pope Urban III was said to have died of a heart attack at the news and his successor, Gregory VIII, issued an emotive crusade appeal and the rulers of Europe began to organise their forces.
Frederick Barbarossa's German army successfully defeated the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor only for the emperor to drown crossing a river in southern Turkey. Soon afterwards many of the Germans died of sickness and Saladin escaped facing this formidable enemy. The Franks in the Levant had managed to cling onto the city of Tyre and then besieged the most important port on the coast, Acre.
This provided a target for western forces and it was here in the summer of that Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart landed. The siege had lasted almost two years and the arrival of the two western kings and their troops gave the Christians the momentum they needed.
The city surrendered and Saladin's prestige was badly dented. Philip soon returned home and while Richard made two attempts to march on Jerusalem, fears as to its long-term prospects after he left meant that the holy city remained in Muslim hands. Thus the Third Crusade failed in its ultimate objective, although it did at least allow the Franks to recover a strip of lands along the coast to provide a springboard for future expeditions.
For his part, Saladin had suffered a series of military setbacks but, crucially, he had held onto Jerusalem for Islam. Portrait of Saladin. The pontificate of Innocent III saw another phase in the expansion of crusading. Campaigns in the Baltic advanced further and the holy war in Iberia stepped forwards too. In Muslims had crushed Christian forces at the Battle of Alarcos, which, so soon after the disaster at Hattin, seemed to show God's deep displeasure with his people.
By , however, the rulers of Iberia managed to pull together to rout the Muslims at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa to seal a major step in the recovery of the peninsula. That said, the particular cultural, political and religious make-up of the region mean that it would be wrong, as in the Holy Land, to characterise relations between religious groups as constant warfare, a situation outlined by Robert Burns and Paul Chevedden.
In southern France, meanwhile, efforts to curb the Cathar heresy had failed and, in a bid to defeat this sinister threat to the Church in its own backyard, Innocent authorised a crusade to the area. See the piece by Richard Cavendish. Catharism was a dualist faith, albeit with a few links to mainstream Christian practice, but it also had its own hierarchy and was intent upon replacing the existing elite. Years of warfare ensued as the crusaders, led by Simon de Monfort, sought to drive the Cathars out, but ultimately their roots in southern French society meant they could endure and it was only the more pervasive techniques of the Inquisition, initiated in the s, that succeeded where force had failed.
The most infamous episode of the age was the Fourth Crusade which saw another effort to recover Jerusalem end up sacking Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Jonathan Phillips describes this episode. The reasons for this were a combination of long-standing tensions between the Latin Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox; the need for the crusaders to fulfil the terms of a wildly over-optimistic contract for transportation to the Levant with the Venetians and the offer to pay this off by a claimant to the Byzantine throne.
This combination of circumstances brought the crusaders to the walls of Constantinople and when their young candidate was murdered and the locals turned definitively against them they attacked and stormed the city. At first Innocent was delighted that Constantinople was under Latin authority but as he learned of the violence and looting that had accompanied the conquest he was horrified and castigated the crusaders for 'the perversion of their pilgrimage'.
One consequence of was the creation of a series of Frankish States in Greece that, over time, also needed support. Thus, in the course of the 13th century, crusades were preached against these Christians, although by Constantinople itself was back in Greek hands. In spite of this series of disasters, it is interesting to see that crusading remained an attractive concept, something made manifest by the near-legendary Children's Crusade of Inspired by divine visions, two groups of young peasants best described as youths, rather than children gathered around Cologne and near Chartres in the belief that their purity would ensure divine approval and enable them to recover the Holy Land.
The German group crossed the Alps and some reached the port of Genoa, where the harsh realities of having no money or real hope of achieving anything was made plain when they were refused passage to the East and the entire enterprise collapsed. Thus, the early 13th century was characterised by the diversity of crusading.
Holy war was proving a flexible and adaptable concept that allowed the Church to direct force against its enemies on many fronts. The rationale of crusading, as a defensive act to protect Christians, could be refined to apply specifically to the Catholic Church and thus when the papacy came into conflict with Emperor Frederick II over the control of southern Italy it eventually called a crusade against him. Frederick had already been excommunicated for failing to fulfil his promises to take part in the Fifth Crusade.
This expedition had achieved the original intention of the Fourth Crusade by invading Egypt but became bogged down outside the port of Damietta before a poorly executed attempt to march on Cairo collapsed.
Frederick's attempts to make good this were frustrated by genuine ill health but by this time the papacy had lost patience with him. Recovered, Frederick went to the Holy Land as, by this time, king of Jerusalem by marriage to the heiress to the throne where — irony of ironies — as an excommunicate, he negotiated the peaceful restoration of Jerusalem to the Christians. His diplomatic skills he spoke Arabic , the danger posed by his considerable resources as well as the divisions in the Muslim world in the decades after Saladin's death, enabled him to accomplish this.
A brief period of better relations between pope and emperor followed, but by the curia described him as a heretic and authorised the preaching of a crusade against him. Aside from the plethora of crusading expeditions that took place over the centuries, we should also remember that the launch of such campaigns had a profound impact on the lands and people from whence they came, something covered by Christopher Tyerman. Crusading required substantial levels of financial support and this, over time, saw the emergence of national taxes to support such efforts, as well as efforts to raise money from within the Church itself.
The absence of a large number of senior nobles and churchmen could affect the political balance of an area, with opportunities for women to act as regents or for unscrupulous neighbours to defy ecclesiastical legislation and to try to take the lands of absent crusaders. The death or disappearance of a crusader, be they a minor figure or an emperor, obviously carried deep personal tragedy for those they had left behind, but might also precipitate instability and change.
The previous year, Jerusalem had fallen back into Muslim hands and this was the principal prompt for what turned out to be the greatest crusade expedition of the century known as the Seventh Crusade led by King later Saint Louis IX of France. Simon Lloyd outlines Louis's crusading career. Well financed and carefully prepared and with an early victory at Damietta, this campaign appeared to be set fair only for a reckless charge by Louis's brother at the Battle of Mansourah to weaken the crusaders' forces.
This, coupled with hardening Muslim resistance, brought the expedition to a halt and, starving and sick, they were forced to surrender. Louis remained in the Holy Land for a further four years — a sign of his guilt at the failure of the campaign, but also a remarkable commitment for a European monarch to be absent from his home for a total of six years — trying to bolster the defences of the Latin kingdom.
By this time, with the Latins largely confined to the coastal strip the settlers relied more and more on massive fortifications and it was during the 13th century that mighty castles such as Krak des Chevaliers, Saphet and Chastel Pelerin, as well as the immense urban fortifications of Acre, took shape. By this stage the political complexion of the Middle East was changing. The Mongol invaders added another dimension to the struggle as they conquered much of the Muslim world to the East; they had also briefly threatened Eastern Europe with savage incursions in which also prompted a crusade appeal.
Saladin's successors were displaced by the Mamluks, the former slave-soldiers, whose figurehead, the sultan Baibars, was a ferocious exponent of holy war and did much to bring the crusader states to their knees over the next two decades. James Waterson describes their advance. Bouts of in-fighting among the Frankish nobility, further complicated by the involvement of the Italian trading cities and the Military Orders served to further weaken the Latin States and finally, in , the Sultan al-Ashraf smashed into the city of Acre to end the Christian hold on the Holy Land.
Some historians used to regard this as the end of the crusades but, as noted above, since the s there has been a broad recognition that this was not the case, not least because of the series of plans made to try to recover the Holy Land during the 14th century.
Elsewhere crusading was still a powerful idea, not least in northern Europe, where the Teutonic Knights originally founded in the Holy Land had transferred their interests and where they had created what was effectively an autonomous state. The masthead of the prominent white supremacist website The Daily Stormer features a cartoon image of a crusader knight and the phrase Deus Vult.
Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women. Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand, where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping at mosques in Christchurch.
The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch. It is easy to see why. The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and in which there can only be one victor.
Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a way. From the s until the s, territorial wars were thereafter waged against a variety of Muslim rulers in Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
Later, from the fourteenth century onwards, Christian rulers and crusading military organizations did battle with armies of the Ottoman empire across the Mediterranean and into eastern Europe and the Balkans.
This is one reason why the anti-Islamic fascist rhetoric is particularly prevalent today in countries like Serbia and Hungary. They were massacred by the Turks. An army of knights followed, led by Godfrey of Bouillon Frankish knight and another leader of the first Crusades , which massacred Muslims and captured Jerusalem in The Crusaders massacred the Muslims until, it was said, the streets ran red with blood. But they quarrelled, and failed to capture Jerusalem.
On the way home, Richard was kidnapped and held ransom until February when the English paid for his release. October originally published February last revised. Considered at the time to be divinely sanctioned, these campaigns, involving often ruthless battles, are known as the Crusades.
At their core was a desire for access to shrines associated with the life and ministry of Jesus, above all the Holy Sepulcher, the church in Jerusalem said to contain the tomb of Christ Absolution from sin and eternal glory were promised to the Crusaders, who also hoped to gain land and wealth in the East.
Nobles and peasants responded in great number to the call and marched across Europe to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire. With the support of the Byzantine emperor, the knights , guided by Armenian Christians In June , the Crusaders began a five-week siege of Jerusalem, which fell on July 15, Eyewitness accounts attest to the terror of battle.
The Crusaders took over many of the cities on the Mediterranean coast and built a large number of fortified castles across the Holy Land to protect their newly established territories For the Crusaders, the Dome of the Rock was the Temple of Solomon; the Aqsa mosque was converted to use as a palace and stables. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem established by the Crusaders boasted fifteen cathedral churches. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, for example, became the seat of a Western Christian bishop in Artists from different traditions met in the city of Jerusalem, with, for example, Syrian goldworkers on the right of the market near the Holy Sepulcher, and Latin goldworkers on the left Conder Indeed, metalwork from this period sometimes combines an Islamic aesthetic with Christian subject matter Some pieces even bear an inscription indicating that they were made by an Islamic goldsmith for a Christian.
Precious works of art fashioned for the churches of Europe celebrated their links to the Holy Land The campaign was a dismal failure because the Muslims had regrouped.
Let them go.
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