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The Crusades And Their Aftermath
In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a crusade to liberate the Holy Land, especially the city of Jerusalem, from the Muslims. One of the leaders of the First Crusade was Godfrey of Bouillon (ca. 1060–1100), who was elected first ruler of Jerusalem. He became the hero of two French Chansons de Geste dealing with the Crusades. This fourteenth-century illustration shows Muslims defending their city against the Christian invaders.
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of expeditions that occurred primarily in the 1100s and 1200s, when European armies fought to gain control of Syria and Palestine. European Christians called this region the Holy Land because it contained the city of Jerusalem and other places associated with the life of Jesus Christ.
Muslims had captured this territory from the Byzantine Empire in the 700s but had permitted Christians and Jews safe access to pilgrimage sites in the region. After the Seljuk Turks rose to power in the 1000s and began to conquer other Byzantine territory, Emperor Alexius Comnenus asked western European rulers to help him defend his realm. Feeling a responsibility to aid the Byzantines, who were fellow Christians, Pope Urban II convened the Council of Clermont in France in 1095. Urban called Christians to go on an armed pilgrimage to recover the Holy Land, promising spiritual rewards to those who joined the fight.
First And Second Crusades
Many European leaders answered the pope’s call. Armies of trained soldiers, as well as large groups of peasants, left Europe for Palestine. This First Crusade (1095 – 1099) cost many European lives, but the crusaders also inflicted great casualties and massacred Muslim and Jewish civilians. The crusaders captured Antioch in 1098 and moved on to Jerusalem, which fell the following year. When the Muslim governor of Jerusalem surrendered, the crusader commander promised protection to its inhabitants. His troops disobeyed orders, however, and slaughtered the Muslims and Jews — men, women, and children —within the city.
The First Crusade established crusader states in the Holy Land. Baldwin of Edessa, a French noble, became king of the new crusader state of Jerusalem in 1100. Additional crusader states were established in Mesopotamia, Turkey, and Tripoli. European settlers in these states captured and enslaved some of the remaining Muslims, but they permitted most to keep their lands, subject to a tax, and to continue practicing their religion.
At first, because of local quarrels among themselves, Muslim rulers in surrounding areas were relatively indifferent to the crusader states. The Europeans, however, soon began to encounter more forceful and organized resistance. After Muslim ruler Zangi of Mosul captured Edessa in 1144 , Pope Eugenius III called the Second Crusade to defend the crusader states. Armies from Germany and France reached Jerusalem in 1148 . There, they gathered a force of almost 50,000 men and attacked Damascus, held by the Turkish commander Unur. But Nur ad-Din, Zangi’s son and successor, sent reinforcements to Unur and the crusaders retreated from Damascus in defeat.
Failed Prisoner Exchange
For the next 25 years the crusader states enjoyed a period of relative peace. By the late 1150s, however, Muslim forces began taking over neighboring territory. At the same time, internal conflicts divided the rulers of the crusader states. In the 1180s, Reginald of Chatillon, a European noble from Jerusalem, broke a truce with Muslim leader Saladin, Nur ad-Din’s nephew, and attacked a caravan. Saladin then declared a jihad against the crusader kingdoms. He achieved his first major victory in July 1187, at the battle of Hittin, killing Reginald and about 200 other captives and selling most of the foot soldiers into slavery. Jerusalem fell on October 2, 1187, and by 1189, Saladin controlled almost all of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
Pope Gregory VIII, meanwhile, called for the Third Crusade, which reached the Holy Land in 1189. After Christian armies recaptured the city of Acre in 1191, one of the crusader generals, England’s King Richard I “the Lionheart,” negotiated a prisoner exchange agreement with Saladin. When Richard disagreed with the way the exchange was to be implemented, he refused to hand over his remaining captives and ordered them all killed. Richard went on to fight for control of Jerusalem but failed. The Third Crusade ended with a peace treaty in 1192. Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands, but pilgrims were allowed safe passage to holy sites.
Capture And Pillage
In 1202 the Fourth Crusade was organized against Egypt, which had become the new center of Muslim power. Merchants from Venice, who had agreed to help pay for the expedition, diverted it to Constantinople instead. After helping the Venetians recapture the port city of Zara from the Byzantines, the crusaders conquered Constantinople and pillaged the city. The event outraged the Byzantines and deepened the rift between the eastern branch of Christianity and the Roman church in western Europe.
Later Expeditions
Several other crusader campaigns occurred in the 1200s. Some were focused on Egypt, but they met with little success. One later crusade into the Holy Land became more of an attempt to gain control of the crusader states than to fight a holy war. At one point in the 1220s, Jerusalem was returned to Christian authority by a controversial peace treaty that lasted until 1244, when Muslims reconquered the city. Christian armies continued to have little success in the region. In 1291 Muslim forces recaptured Acre, the last crusader stronghold, completing the defeat of the Europeans and ending crusader rule. Plans for other crusades to the Holy Land never materialized, largely because of dwindling support and lack of funds.
Results Of The Crusades
The Crusades proved largely unsuccessful for western Europe. Christian forces failed to accomplish their main mission of wresting the Holy Land from Muslim control. Although Christians saw the fight for the Holy Land as a sacred responsibility, the Crusades were marked by brutality and greed over land and the spoils of war. Muslims still consider the Crusades a symbol of Western aggression against Islam.
Crusades
Ranging from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century and initially seeking to restore’? Christian control over Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher, the Crusades mobilized medieval European societies for religious warfare against the rise of Islam. Crusading also encompassed papal authorizations for campaigns designed to extirpate heresy and paganism in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, including at various times the Iberian Peninsula and the Baltic region, as well as southern France and Italy. Historians are, however, divided between “traditionalists,” who designate as Crusades primarily the campaigns in the Holy Land and the East, and “pluralists,” who place special stress on religious crusades throughout Europe. This article deals with Crusader campaigns primarily in the Holy Land and their later ramifications in political thought for centuries to come.
The term “Crusade” is derived from the Latin word crux (cross), a symbol prominently displayed on the military regalia of Crusaders. Many Muslim chroniclers of the medieval era preferred “Frankish invasions,” a term that used the Arabic word al-ifranj, designating specifically the French but often applied generally to Westerners.
In 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called for a combination of warrior commitment and pilgrim piety that would restore the Holy Land to Christian rule. The pope had five initial aims:
- Curtailing the internal warfare that had wracked parts of Europe by directing military activities outside Christian communities;
- Asserting Papal supremacy over secular kings who had recently challenged papal authority over such matters as lay investiture;
- Ending the disruption of pilgrimages;
- Healing the East-West schism, which had been made official in 1054, by assisting Constantinople to regain control of cities such as Antioch and perhaps bringing Eastern Orthodoxy back into the Roman fold;
- Continuing to reverse the expansion of Islam, following Iberian Muslim defeat in Toledo in 1085, which secured northern and central Spain for Christians, and the Norman defeat of Muslims in Sicily in 1091.
In the late eleventh century, Christians fired volleys of accusations that the Seljuk Turks were unleashing marauding attacks on pilgrims en route to the Holy Land. While later historians such as Hans Eberhard Mayer have raised many doubts that the Seljuks were engineering assaults on Christian pilgrims, various brigands and bandits from Muslim backgrounds took part in robberies of and interference with European travelers. Graphic stories of Christian humiliation soon were mobilized to inspire concerted action against Muslim control over the Holy Land. The Fatimid caliph Al-Ḥakīm demolished the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009, and the efforts to rebuild it in the mid-eleventh century had not restored its former splendor. Many Christians seemed unaware that the Seljuks were fierce opponents of the Fatimids.
The Seljuk Turks had delivered a stinging defeat to the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 through swift horsemanship, deft use of bow and arrow, and the eagerness of Turkish mercenaries to abandon their service to the Byzantine military. In the battle’s aftermath, various Turkoman nomads soon flowed into Anatolia. Even though they did not always support the in-migration of these Turkish tribes, the Seljuks were on their way to achieving mastery over Asia Minor. The Byzantine emperor eventually requested papal assistance in reversing and repelling Muslim forces in the east.
The Early Crusades
Officially Christian leaders promoted the Crusades as being animated by chivalric warrior practices and the spirit of saintly pilgrimage. Very quickly, these high ideals broke down. Rogue bands of ill-equipped Crusaders, for example, sacked several cities of the German Rhineland and massacred thousands of Jews in 1096. Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz, Archbishop Hermann III in Cologne, and eventually the papacy denounced the Crusader orgy of terror in the Rhineland.
Jews and Muslims fought together, though unsuccessfully, to repel invading Crusaders at Jerusalem. As Crusader forces poured into the breached fortresses of Jerusalem in 1099, Muslim women and children were hacked to death, and Jews perished in a burning synagogue set on fire by exultant Christian warriors. Medieval Christians blamed Muslims for allowing Jews to become entrenched in Jerusalem against the Augustinian vision of the new Christian world order. In the dying days of the Roman Empire, Saint Augustine had promulgated the theology of the Jews as a “witness” people who were rendered abject for all to see as earthly punishment for denying Christ’s divinity. On a brighter, less punitive note, Augustine asserted that Jews should be afforded protection under Christendom following Psalm 59:11: “Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Thy law.” But Augustine had also stressed that Jews were now a Diaspora people who faced perpetual banishment from the Holy City of Jerusalem.
By 1109, the Christians had established four Levantine Crusader states also known by their collective French name, Outremer (overseas): the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Tripoli.
The Muslim world had been racked by many internal conflicts, and it took several decades to mount an effective counter-thrust to the new Crusader states. Edessa was the first place to have been seized from Muslim control by the Crusaders, and it was the first to fall. In 1144, Imād al-Dīn Zangī, the Seljuk Turkish ruler of Mosul and conqueror of Aleppo, met Christian talk of holy war with a new spirit of Islamic unity and jihād. Although murdered in 1146 by a disgruntled slave, Zangī had inspired a new tradition of counter-Crusaders led by his son Nūr al-Dīn and his Kurdish general, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, known in the West as Saladin. Saladin had unified Egypt and Syria, effectively surrounding the Crusader states. His forces took back Jerusalem in 1187, securing his legend as a hero and chivalric figure who honored treaties and treated his enemies fairly.
The early Crusades had been spearheaded by what medievalist Robert Bartlett calls a “knightly-clerical-mercantile consortium,” and many spoke of how the fighting forces of the First Crusade operated “without lord, without prince” or “fought without king, without emperor” (Bartlett, 1993, p. 308). With Saladin’s triumph, European monarchs soon jumped into the fray, as Richard the Lionheart of England, Philip II Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire joined forces in an attempt to take back Jerusalem. Their enterprise met with stiff resistance, though Saladin eventually allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem. Richard secured Crusader control over Cyprus, an island that could be used for projecting sea power and facilitating the delivery of provisions. Many Crusaders developed an ardor for spices and sugar, the latter a relatively rare delicacy in most of Europe. Learning to harvest sugar cane in Cyprus, they sometimes competed with Muslim producers in the Middle East.
Frustrated with Crusader failure to retake Jerusalem, Pope Innocent III, who represented the pinnacle of papal power in medieval Europe, promoted a new Crusade at the commencement of the thirteenth century. This enterprise was diverted to Constantinople when Venetian warriors sought to collect debts from the Byzantine emperor for his use of their ships and provisions. The sacking and pillaging of the city in 1204 led some inhabitants of Constantinople to express the heretical view that they would be better off under the Turkish sultan than being ruled by Christian Crusaders. Innocent III’s outrage at Venice mounted when he later saw that some of its merchants had grown comfortable making cozy trade deals with Muslims.
Later Crusades
In the thirteenth century, Crusaders launched several more attempts to retake the Holy Land with invasions during 1217–1221, 1228–1229, and 1248–1254, and then the last abortive foray of Louis IX of France in 1270. Despite many devastating setbacks, the Crusaders on occasion won concessions. The Egyptian ruler al-Kāmil Muhammad al-Malik reached an agreement in 1229 with the invading Frederick II, King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, allowing Christian rule over most of Jerusalem for the next ten years. Muslims opposed this concession to the invaders, and certain Crusaders railed against the provisions forbidding them from fortifying the city’s walls. In 1244, Muslim forces took back control of Jerusalem.
In 1258, the Mongols rampaged through Baghdad, destroying a city that many regarded as the jewel of the Islamic world. The Mamlūk general Ẓāhir Baybars halted the march of these nomadic invaders at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. Baybars and his successors then took a much harder line toward Frankish settlers, who in 1268 encountered a level of atrocities that shocked some Muslims accustomed to rulers seeking a measure of coexistence with Christians and Jews.
Papal preeminence from the twelfth century was giving way to more powerful monarchies in western Europe in the thirteenth century. But the kings squabbled among themselves and, despite exhibiting some devastating fighting techniques at home, were unable to assemble the kind of formidable military force that could take on the large Mamlūk armies. The Mamlūks benefitted from fresh infusions of experienced troops recruited from the defeated Mongols, who had previously ravaged the Muslim world and threatened Europe. Meanwhile, monarchs in the Iberian Peninsula from time to time asserted their preference for battling Muslims close to home, rather than in distant Jerusalem.
In 1290, newly arrived Crusader troops in Acre killed several Muslim merchants. When the Christians re&fused to turn over to the Mamlūk authorities the soldiers responsible for the murders, alleging that the merchants had provoked the attacks, the Egyptian sultan Qalāwūn assembled one of the Crusade era’s largest armies to retake Acre. The military orders of Hospitalers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights made their last stand. Acre fell to the Mamlūk forces — as did the rest of Louis IX’s carefully constructed fortifications throughout the region — and the age of the Crusaders in the Holy Land was over.
The Crusading impulse was not dead. Christopher Columbus repeatedly spoke of how the wealth of Cathay (China) would be delivered through his expeditions to the New World, and these fabulous riches could allow Europe to liberate Jerusalem with monumental force. In the sixteenth century, the Pope helped assemble the Holy League to stymie Ottoman imperial expansion, and Crusader themes could still be found in the ensuing propaganda onslaught.
Implications For Political Thought And Statecraft
Europeans produced a voluminous literature about the Crusades, by some measures the most studied event in Mediterranean history. However, by comparison, Islamic writing on the topic seems somewhat sparse until the age of modern imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) is recognized as the greatest Islamic theologian and jurist at the time of the First Crusade, and it is striking that in his seventy extant works of philosophy and jurisprudence he seems to have little direct to say about non-Muslim invaders in the region. This seemingly aloof demeanor has provoked scathing rebuke from twenty-first-century Salafists and myriad proponents of puritanical Islam, who prefer the stern calls for resistance to foreign invaders from the anti-Mongol thinker Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and in muscular anti-Crusader tracts such as The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad by Ibn ‘Asākir of Damascus (1105–1176).
And yet, al-Ghazālī remained focused on the dangers of civil war and division within Islam, and he was at pains to stress the primacy of the greater jihād (jihād al-akbar), the spiritual struggle from within, over the lesser jihād (jihād al-aṣghar) encompassing war on the infidel. When Muslims are divided and living in spiritually unsound ways, this opens the possibility for mayhem from external forces, in the view of adherents to al-Ghazālī’s political philosophy. In his Kitāb al-‘aṣā or Book of the Staff, Usāma bin Munqidh (1095–1188), a nephew of the ruler of the small north Syrian principality of Shaizar and the author of vivid descriptions of the Franks, confessed his admiration for the spiritual devotion of Christian priests he witnessed at Nablus by the tomb of Saint John the Baptist: “I saw [there] a sight that moved my heart but also grieved me and made me lament that I had never seen exertions like theirs among the Muslims” (Cobb, 2005, p. 119). According to the thirteenth-century chronicler Abu Shama (d. 1258), Saladin pointed to the power of Christian piety: “We shall never cease to be amazed at how the Unbelievers . . . have shown trust, and it is the Muslims who have been lacking in zeal” (Gabrieli, 1969, p. 214).
After the death of Alp Arslan (r. 1063–1072), the second Seljuk sultan, profound divisions emerged among Muslims that allowed for Crusader attacks to succeed and possibly foment the earlier breakdown of law and order that antagonized Christian pilgrims. Ibn al- Athīr (d. 1233), author of the Universal History, summed up the reasons for Muslim defeat in the First Crusade: “The sultans disagreed, as we shall relate, and the Franks seized the lands.”
Nevertheless, the Byzantine emperor failed to recognize that Sultan Alp Arslan had been open to cooperation with Christian powers, as he was much more preoccupied with the threat of his Shīʿa rivals, the Fatimids. The Seljuks came to be regarded as enforcers of Sunni orthodoxy, and they looked on Shīʿa dynasties with a wary eye. Christian rulers sometimes saw the Islamic world as a monolith and lacked the diplomatic finesse to benefit from these divisions. Just as much of the Muslim world had a tendency to call all Christians “Franks,” the European Christians commonly saw Muslims as undifferentiated teeming masses whom they routinely referred to as “Turks,” even when they were confronting Arabs, Persians, Berbers, or Kurds. And yet the Christian Crusader attacks on their Eastern Orthodox brethren in Constantinople tarnished the image of Latin Christians in the eyes of some Muslims, who could now behold the frightening disunity of the Christian world. Already many Christians dwelling in the Near and Middle East resented the Frankish settlers who, after all, had provoked Muslim dynasties to curtail more tolerant practices toward the indigenous Christian communities.
The comparative neglect of the Crusades among Muslim thinkers in the medieval and early modern period gave way to prolific and vociferous criticism with the rise of European imperialism and then the emergence of the United States as a global power. When France assumed its mandate rule over Syria in 1920, General Henri Gouraud marched to Saladin’s tomb, allegedly gave it a swift kick, and then crowed triumphantly: “Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.” Upon seizing Jerusalem from the dying Ottoman Empire in 1917, British general Edmund Allenby found himself frequently hailed as a conquering Crusader, even though he chafed at this later in life. Major Vivian Gilbert in The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem (1923) exclaimed, “At last Jerusalem was in our hands! In all ten crusades organized and equipped to free the Holy City, only two were really successful, the first led by Godfrey de Bouillon, and the last under Edmund Allenby” (p. 171). The New York Times (18 May 1925) in an editorial saluted Allenby as “the Deliverer of the Holy Land” and “worthy to be remembered . . . beyond the greatest of the Crusaders of the Middle Ages.”
Writing in the 1960s, Muhammad Jalal Kishk, an Islamic author and journalist, produced a militant historical vision of the Crusades as having three phases: the First Crusade, launched in 1095; the Second Crusade, commencing with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the Third Crusade, starting in 1967 in which the Zionist and U.S. war and cultural complex resumed Napoleon’s work, leading to the subordination and enervation of Muslim peoples. Taking note of pious Israeli soldiers praying at the Wailing Wall and semi-secularized Arab warriors who now seem ashamed of open displays of religiosity, Kishk affirms that only a turn to authentic Islam can arrest the decay and deliver meaningful resistance.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings, Osama bin Laden told Al Jazeera on 21 October 2001 that “the ummah (community) is asked to unite itself under this Crusaders’ campaign, the strongest, most powerful, and ferocious Crusaders’ campaign to befall the Islamic nation since the dawn of Islamic history. There have been past Crusader wars, but there has never been a campaign like this before . . . Either you are with the Crusades, or you are with Islam.” During the early days of the response to the 9/11 atrocity, U.S. president George W. Bush steadfastly affirmed on the South Lawn of the White House that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while” (Waldman, p. A1). Then in a speech before the U.S. Congress, he added, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (“World-Wide,” Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2001, p. A1). In testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States on 23 March 2004, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell also referred to his demand to Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf to get behind “this crusade” (“Public Testimony Before 9/11 Panel,” New York Times online, 23 March 2004, p. 23 at www.nytimes.com/2004/03/23/politics/23CND-PTEX.html?pagewanted=23). Though firmly repudiated by bin Laden loyalists as a reprobate enemy of true Islam, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein actively propagandized that he should be looked upon as the second coming of Saladin, doubly ironic given brutal Baʿthist repression of the medieval warrior’s Kurdish descendants.
With the waning of the cold war, preeminent political scientists such as Samuel P. Huntington and the Middle East historian Bernard Lewis made regular appeal to the persistence of “the clash of civilizations,” a construct that regards the storm and stress from the Crusades as a permanent feature of Islamic-Christian relations. Openly embraced by U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, Lewis’s thought earned the Princeton professor the nation’s highest honor for a humanist scholar, the National Medal for the Humanities, personally bestowed on 9 November 2006 by President Bush at the Oval Office. There have been many efforts at demolishing the clash of civilizations idea as a flawed and frozen construct, but the Crusades have remarkable tenacity in modern memory, retaining political potency even in the twenty-first century.
Crusades
Expeditions by Latin Christians, primarily in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to reconquer the Christian Holy Lands of Syria-Palestine, which had been conquered by Muslims. Several Crusader states, lasting for two centuries, were established during this time. Campaigns were mostly aggressive and brutal, with cities pillaged and civilians massacred. Local quarrels among Muslims limited united efforts against the Crusaders. However, anti-Crusade sentiment was an important factor in the rise of the international Sunni movement. Muslim military heroes such as Salah al-Din ( Saladin ) recovered some territory, but Crusader rule did not fully end until 1291 . Though the Crusades placed the Christian Holy Lands exclusively under Christian control for a time and enriched several Frankish lords, they did little for Christianity in the region. The relative tolerance previously extended to Christians faded as Muslims suspected native Christians of collaboration with the crusaders. The Crusades also damaged inter-Christian relations. The fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople, introduced a period of Latin domination and solidified the separation of Eastern and Western Christianity. Since the Crusades, Muslim-Christian relations have often been characterized by aggression, intolerance, and misunderstanding, and the Crusades are frequently identified as a symbol of the conflictual relations.
1168–69 the Zangid prince Nur al-Din ordered woodworkers in Aleppo to make a splendid minbar (a short flight of steps used as a platform by a preacher in a mosque) for the al-Aqsa mosque at Jerusalem in anticipation of his reconquest of the city from the Crusaders. His successor, the Ayyubid ruler Salah al-Din, installed the minbar in the mosque after his conquest of the city in 1187. The minbar, one of the finest examples of medieval woodwork, was destroyed by arson in 1969.
Who won the Crusades?
Two myths pervade Western perceptions of the Crusades: first, the Crusades were simply motivated by a religious desire to liberate Jerusalem, and second, Christendom ultimately triumphed. The Crusades (from crux, cross) were a series of military campaigns continuing over two centuries. This religious warfare or “holy war” was initiated by Pope Urban II to restore (Latin) Christian control over Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Jerusalem was and is a sacred city and symbol for all three Abrahamic faiths – Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Events leading up to the Crusades began in 1071 when the Seljuq (Turkish) army decisively defeated the Byzantine army. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, feared that all Asia Minor would be overrun, and so he called on fellow Christian rulers and the pope to come to the aid of Constantinople by undertaking a “pilgrimage” or crusade that would free Jerusalem and its environs from Muslim rule.
Muslims had ruled the area since 638. During that time the Christian population had been unharmed and Christian pilgrims were allowed continued access to their holy sites. Jews, long banned by Christian rulers from living in Jerusalem, returned to live and worship in the city of Solomon and David. Muslims had built a shrine, the Dome of the Rock, and a mosque, the al-Aqsa, near the area formerly occupied by Herod’s Temple and close to the Western (Wailing) Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple.
For Pope Urban II, the “defense” of Jerusalem provided an opportunity to gain recognition for his papal authority and its role in legitimating the actions of temporal rulers. Under the ostensible goal of uniting in a “holy war” to free the holy city, a divided Christendom rallied as warriors from France and other parts of Western Europe (called “Franks” by Muslims) joined forces against the “infidel.” This was ironic because, as scholar Francis E. Peters has observed, “God may indeed have wished it, but there is certainly no evidence that the Christians of Jerusalem did, or that anything extraordinary was occurring to pilgrims there to prompt such a response at that moment in history.”
In fact, Christian rulers, knights, and merchants involved in the Crusades, driven primarily by their political and military ambitions, were focused on the promise of economic and commercial (trade and banking) rewards and the promise of salvation for those who died in battle that would result from establishing a Latin kingdom in the Middle East. Among the populace, the appeal to religion captured minds and gained widespread support.
The contrast between the behavior of the Christian and Muslim armies in the First Crusade has been etched deeply in the collective memory of Muslims. In 1099, the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem and established Christian sovereignty over the Holy Land. They left no Muslim survivors; women and children were massacred. The Noble Sanctuary, the Haram al-Sharif, was desecrated as the Dome of the Rock was converted into a church and the al-Aqsa mosque, renamed the Temple of Solomon, became a residence for the king. Latin principalities were established in Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli, and Tyre.
What is rarely remembered is that this victory and the establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted less than a century. In 1187, Salah al-Din (Saladin), having reestablished Abbasid rule over Fatimid Egypt, led his army in a fierce battle and recaptured Jerusalem. The Muslim army was as magnanimous in victory as it had been tenacious in battle. Civilians were spared; churches and shrines were generally left untouched. The striking differences in military conduct were epitomized by the two dominant figures of the Crusades: Saladin and Richard the Lion-Hearted. The chivalrous Saladin was faithful to his word and compassionate toward noncombatants. Richard accepted the surrender of Acre, in Palestine, currently northern Israel, and then proceeded to massacre all its inhabitants, including women and children, despite promises to the contrary.
By the thirteenth century the Crusades degenerated into intra-Christian wars, papal wars against Christian enemies who were denounced as heretics and schismatics. The result was a weakening, rather than a strengthening, of Christendom. As historian Roger Savory notes, an ironic but undeniable result of the Crusades was the deterioration of the status of minority Christian sects in the Holy Land.
Formerly these minorities had been accorded rights and privileges under Muslim rule, but, after the establishment of the Latin Kingdom, they found themselves treated as “loathsome schismatics.” In an effort to obtain relief from persecution by their fellow Christians, many abandoned their Nestorian or Monophysite beliefs, and adopted either Roman Catholicism, or — the supreme irony — Islam.
By the fifteenth century the Crusades had spent their force. Although they were initially launched to unite Christendom and turn back the Muslim armies, the opposite had occurred. Amid a bitterly divided Christendom, Constantinople fell in 1453 before Turkish Muslim conquerors. This Byzantine capital was renamed Istanbul and became the seat of the Ottoman Empire.
Many complex factors went into the call of Pope Urban II for a crusade against the Muslims, who since 638 had occupied Jerusalem. For more than four centuries Christians had been allowed to practice their religion freely in that city. In 1076, however, Jerusalem was taken by the Seljuk Turks, who were said to have desecrated the holy places of Christianity and treated the Christian population with brutality. Pilgrims returning from Jerusalem brought sad news of their fellow Christians there. Although the notion of avenging these wrongs and regaining the holy city for Christianity had been seeping into western consciousness for some time, it was not until the preaching of such monks as Peter the Hermit of Amiens that popular opinion began to rise in support of such an effort. Encouraged by an appeal for assistance from the emperor Alexis I in Constantinople, Pope Urban II promised his help and sent out the call for the first crusade.
At the Council of Clermont in 1095 the Pope was greeted with great enthusiasm when he called for an international crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the infidels. Europe at that time was generally ignorant of the lands of the east, whether Christian or Muslim, and was intolerant and xenophobic. Narrowness of mind met with religious zeal for the liberation of the Holy Land, driving the Franks to a near frenzy of enthusiasm and excitement. Virtually for the first time since the early spread of Islam, except for some movement against Muslim-held territories in the Iberian peninsula, Christians were in a position of reacting offensively and not just defensively to Islam. It was a heady venture, combining centuries of pent-up resentment against the Saracens with the hope for spiritual regeneration both of the individuals who dedicated themselves to the venture and for a morally lax Christendom itself. It was supported eagerly by the medieval papacy and by the feudal knights and commoners alike. Many of the crusading efforts were grossly misguided, however, and like the ill-fated “Children’s Crusade” in which numbers of youth were sold into slave markets, they ended in disaster. But in the beginning, however, at least in the eyes of the west, there were crucial victories and the temporary attainment of the prize of Jerusalem.
The first significant group of crusaders to arrive in Palestine, consisting primarily of knights and others from France and Italy, set out in 1096. They moved through the lands of the Byzantines, who despite the emperor’s plea for help greeted them with extremely mixed feelings and offered support and aid out of self-interest rather than enthusiastic approval. In March of 1098 the crusaders captured Antioch in Syria, and by July 1099 they were finally able to claim Jerusalem. The victory, unfortunately, was accompanied by a vicious and cruel slaughter of Jews and Muslims in the city, chronicled by both Christian and Muslim writers. Many Muslim writers referred to the arrival of the Christians not as a crusade but as a Frankish invasion, and they described the carnage of the Christian massacre of Muslims, including many religious leaders and Sufi mystics, as the acts of savage and cruel western barbarians. The sack of Jerusalem is often said to be the effective beginning of many centuries of an active mutual hostility between east and west that was rarely known in earlier days.
In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a crusade to liberate the Holy Land, especially the city of Jerusalem, from the Muslims. One of the leaders of the First Crusade was Godfrey of Bouillon (ca. 1060–1100), who was elected first ruler of Jerusalem. He became the hero of two French Chansons de Geste dealing with the Crusades. This fourteenth-century illustration shows Muslims defending their city against the Christian invaders.
During the tenth century the Byzantines, taking advantage of political disorder in the Muslim lands, had declared war against Islam and gained back much of northern Syria with the hope of recovering Jerusalem. When the Fatimid caliphate was established in 983, however, the tide began to turn and much of the territory taken by the Byzantines was returned to Muslim hands. The violent attack from the west in the form of the crusading armies took the world of Islam by surprise. In a general state of political disunity, it was to be almost half a century before the Muslims gathered their forces to move against the Christian invaders in a call for jihad or holy war. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a monarchy established under the leadership of Baldwin of Edessa, was established partly because of the prevailing disunity of the Muslim world under the Seljuks, the Fatimids, and the waning Abbasid caliphate. The Muslims attempted to restrain the invaders, but the crusaders were able to spread and consolidate their power in the principalities of Edessa and Antioch and finally the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This conquered territory was referred to in the west as “Outremer” (over the sea). The principality succeeded well for some time, but when the Turks moved into Edessa in 1144, an appeal was made for a second crusade. An army consisting of the rulers of Germany and France set out in 1147, but after an unsuccessful attempt to capture Damascus they were forced to return home.
In 1168–69 the Zangid prince Nur al-Din ordered woodworkers in Aleppo to make a splendid minbar for the al-Aqsa mosque at Jerusalem in anticipation of his reconquest of the city from the Crusaders. His successor, the Ayyubid ruler Salah al-Din, installed the minbar in the mosque after his conquest of the city in 1187. The minbar, one of the finest examples of medieval woodwork, was destroyed by arson in 1969.
By this time the Muslim Turks were gaining in strength, while the Christians were starting to lose ground. Crusader zeal was giving way to luxury and waste and territorial squabbling on the part of the Christian rulers. The death of Amalric I, king of Jerusalem, to whom no successor seemed worthy, came at the time of the rise to power of the Ayyubid general Saladin. In 1187 the Christian hold on the Holy Land was effectively ended when Saladin defeated them at Hattin, although they continued for some time to maintain a small portion of the area. The Muslim leader moved swiftly to gain control of most of the other territories held by Christians, and finally he regained Jerusalem for Islam nearly a century after the first Christian invasion. Records of the time indicate that Saladin’s treatment of the Christian population was humane and reasonable, in notable contrast to the way in which Christians had earlier dealt with Muslims and Jews upon their arrival in Jerusalem. Although he returned the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Greek Orthodox custody, however, a number of churches were turned into mosques, and Jerusalem clearly was once again a Muslim city.
The loss of the holy city prompted a third crusade from the west in 1189. Accompanied by much dissension within and slaughter without, these crusaders gained little except for Christian possession of coastal towns in Palestine and free access to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims. Further struggles represented in the fourth, fifth, and final sixth crusades continued until the Mamluks, who had taken over control of Egypt from the weakened Ayyubids, finally drove the crusading Christians from all of Palestine. Throughout the two centuries of active conflict, members of the eastern church, Byzantines and Arab Christians, were caught in a terrible middle position. Although part of the crusader rhetoric in the west had to do with freeing the eastern Christians from the yoke of Islam, actual encounters with the Byzantines led to increased political and cultural hostility between the co-religionists. When the Franks moving through eastern Christian lands from Hungary through Greece to Syria and Palestine were not met with aid and support, they had no compunctions about looting and plundering. Christian Arabs were never any more sympathetic with, or loyal to, the Frankish kingdom in Palestine than they had been to the Byzantines. All parties to the years of conflict — Romans and Byzantines, eastern and western Christians, Christians and Muslims — too often thought of each other as barbarians and frequently had those prejudices confirmed in the reality of hostile interaction.
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem itself during the near century of its greatest flourishing saw most of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in Christian hands. The Muslim population was divided among the farmers, the city dwellers, and the slaves. It was now the turn of the Christians to exact on the Muslims a poll tax as well as rental of farming properties. Those Muslims who tried to resist were treated harshly, and there were numerous attempts at rebellion. In fact, treatment of the subjugated Muslim population differed among the various Frankish lords. Baldwin, king of the Latin Kingdom, was known for his humane administration, and for many Muslims life under the Franks was no worse and perhaps better than they had known previously. The earliest of the crusaders, who then became the long-standing inhabitants of the Latin Kingdom, were generally more tolerant of the native population than the newer arrivals and tried to maintain more supportive relationships. Those more recently arrived were intent on expanding Christian territory and thus on seeing the Muslims as the Saracen enemy. Often the new arrivals forced their co-religionists who had become “native” to revoke existing treaties made with the Muslims in order to aid their aims of expansion.
Nevertheless, as in Spain, the two communities of Christians and Muslims attempted to cooperate and coexist, although they constituted two separate societies with their own laws and administration. Battles were pitched, but those who were not engaged in fighting continued to live normal lives. Muslims and Christians traded with each other, rented properties from each other, and generally carried out their commercial activities uninterrupted. Christians controlled the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, but they allowed Muslims to sail their ships with the appropriate passes. Piracy and pillaging continued as ever, of course, with all parties participating to some degree in looting and taking prisoners to sell on the slave markets.
During the two centuries in which the Christians occupied Palestine, there was a constant pattern of shifting alliances. Muslim rulers were played off against each other, and Franks were sometimes in treaty with one, sometimes with another. This gradually changed as the disarray in which the first crusaders found the Muslims was replaced by a more united front. Many prisoners from among both Muslims and Christians were taken, and elaborate negotiations often were made for their release. Trading in prisoners was an active industry, with many never returned to their original homes. Women prisoners in particular were victimized, often being taken into domestic service upon release, taken as wives or concubines, or sold into slavery.
The Crusades And Their Aftermath
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Last Updated: 04/2022
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