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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
History: Sample feature essay
The Crusades
by Simon Hall
The mounting of the Crusades
The Crusades were a series of expeditions mounted by European Christians against Muslims in the Middle East. The most significant crusades took place during the 12th and 13th centuries, although they only ended officially in the 18th century. They were part pilgrimage and part military campaign. The term 'crusade' also describes campaigns by European Christians against Muslims in North Africa and Spain, against non-Christians on Europe's northeastern frontiers, and against heretical Christians in Europe itself. The Crusades began at the end of the 11th century as a result of rising self-confidence and prosperity in Europe.
The rise of the Seljuk Turks
Christians had lived and worshipped freely in Jerusalem after the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 7th century, despite regular wars between Muslims and the Christian Byzantine Empire. In 1071, however, the nomadic Seljuk Turks, who had recently become Sunni Muslims, decisively defeated the Byzantines (in the area that is now Turkey) at Manzikert, captured Antioch in 1085, and took Nicaea in 1092. The threat of resurgent Islam in the region led the Byzantine emperor and Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land (modern Israel and Lebanon), and they appealed to Pope Urban II for help in 1095. His solution was a holy war, in which Europeans could travel to Jerusalem as pilgrims and provide military assistance for their fellow Christians at the same time. The idea received enthusiastic response from both ordinary people and the military nobility, and the same year, several popular crusades, led by charismatic figures like Walter the Penniless and Peter the Hermit, set out for the Middle East. These expeditions were disorderly and undisciplined, and most of their participants died on the way.
The First and Second Crusades
A more organized expedition was mounted in 1096–97; a great army under Godfrey de Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto, and other leaders fought its way through Asia Minor, taking Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099. A Christian kingdom of Jerusalem was established, with Godfrey as its first ruler, his brother Baldwin as Count of Edessa (Upper Mesopotamia), and Bohemund as Prince of Antioch. Godfrey died in 1100 and was succeeded by Baldwin.
For the next half-century, the Christians were hard-pressed by the Turks. Fleets of reinforcements arrived from Genoa, Norway, and Venice. The military-religious orders of the Knights of St John (Hospitallers) and Knights Templar were formed to help defend Jerusalem. Nevertheless, Edessa was lost in 1144 to Imad al-Din Zengi, the Seljuk regent of Mosul (in modern Iraq). In response, the Second Crusade was launched in 1147–48, under Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, but it ended disastrously in a failed attempt to capture Damascus. From the middle of the 12th century the Christian territories were constantly on the defensive, while Zengi and his son Nur al-Din steadily reunited the Muslim territories from Edessa to the Red Sea. In 1169 Nur al-Din, extending beyond the Crusader states, destroyed the Muslim Fatimid power in Egypt, and installed his Kurdish general Saladin as ruler there in 1171.
The rise of Saladin and the Third Crusade
Saladin's impact on the region was tremendous. He consolidated his power after the death of Nur al-Din, taking Damascus from his Zangid rivals in 1174 and Aleppo in 1183. He then swept down through the Crusader states with an immense force. He defeated a Christian army under Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, at the Horns of Hattin (near Lake Tiberias, modern Israel) and took Jerusalem in 1187. Lusignan moved north to set seige to Acre. Tyre, Tripoli, and Antioch were the only towns that remained in Christian hands.
European Christians reacted to this news with a mixture of anger and fear, and mounted several fresh expeditions. The most important of these was the Third Crusade, which set off in 1189 led by Philip II (Augustus) of France, Frederick I (Barbarossa) of Germany, and Richard I (the Lion-Heart) of England. The Germans went through Asia Minor, and the French and English went by sea to Acre, to assist the seige which had now lasted nearly two years without success. Under Richard's leadership, the Crusaders recovered a narrow strip of the Palestine coast, but were unable to recapture Jerusalem. Richard made a truce with Saladin, and returned to Europe.
The Fourth Crusade and beyond
The Fourth Crusade started from Venice in 1202. Instead of reaching Jerusalem, however, the crusaders became involved in Venetian and Byzantine political struggles, helping the deposed Byzantine emperor, Isaac Angelus, to regain his throne. A few months later, in 1204, Angelus's son was assassinated, and the crusaders stormed and sacked Constantinople, setting up the Latin Empire of Constantinople under Baldwin of Flanders.
The failure of the official Crusades expeditions prompted several unofficial ones, including the Children's Crusade of 1212 and the Shepherd's Crusade of 1251. The participants in these came mainly from Normandy, Flanders, and the Rhineland. They were not trained soldiers and were motivated by religious fervour. Their march through Europe was disorganized. They launched unprovoked attacks on Jews that they encountered and few of them even reached the Mediterranean. Those members of the Children's Crusade who
managed to sail for Alexandria, in Egypt, were captured and sold as slaves when they landed.
In 1217–18, King Andrew of Hungary and Duke Leopold IV of Austria led a new crusade to Palestine with only limited success, and an ambitious attack on Egypt, now the centre of Muslim power in the Middle East, led by John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem, in
1218–21, ended in failure. Frederick II of Germany undertook a more successful crusade in 1228. Using diplomacy rather than force, he regained Jerusalem and southern Palestine.
Failure and retreat
Jerusalem fell once more to the Turks in 1244, and Louis IX of France (St Louis) launched a disastrous crusade in 1249 against Egypt. He was captured with the greater part of his army, and had to pay 800,000 pieces of gold as a ransom. In 1270 he led a further crusade to Tunis, but died of disease outside the city. Prince Edward of England (later Edward I) led his own followers onwards to Acre a few months later, but achieved little. The remaining crusader states were threatened by the Mongols moving down from the north and the Muslims in surrounding Palestine. After a stunning victory at Ayn Jalut (in modern Syria) in 1260 over the invading Mongols, the Mameluke Sultanate of Egypt reconquered all of Palestine and Syria, taking the last Christian outpost in 1302.
The enthusiasm for crusades died down as European attention turned inwards during the grim 14th century, as the continent was riven by war and the Black Death (the bubonic plague, a disease that killed between one-third and one-half of the European population). Turkish power grew rapidly under the Ottomans, and crusades directed against them were no more than defensive actions against their incursions into the Balkans. Even the final capture of Constantinople by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, in 1453, failed to prompt a European crusade for its recovery. The Knights Templar were suppressed in 1307, but the Knights of St John, at Rhodes and later at Malta, continued to fight against the Turkish advance in the Mediterranean.
Benefits: trade and knowledge
Despite their military failure, the Crusades brought several benefits to Europe. Relations between European Christian settlers
living in the Middle East and their Muslim neighbours were often much more friendly than the supporters of the Crusades might suggest. Trade between Europe and the Middle East increased greatly, particularly in the hands of Venetian and Genoese merchants. Sugar, cotton, and many other things now in everyday use first became known in Europe through the Crusades. There was also a considerable exchange of knowledge; European scholars gained access to learning from classical Greece and Rome that had survived only thanks to Arabic scholars, and these and the works of the Arabic philosophers themselves helped to pave the way for the Renaissance in Europe.
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