The Crusades

Crusaders lost Acre, their last large city on the coast of the Levant, in 1291, almost two centuries after Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095.

A call at Clermont

In 1095 the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked Pope Urban II for western soldiers to help against the Seljuk Turks, who had taken most of Anatolia after Manzikert (unit 2). On 27 November 1095, at the end of a church council at Clermont in France, Urban preached to a large crowd in a field outside the town. No text of the speech survives. We have several versions written by chroniclers, some of them present, set down years later, and they differ a good deal. All agree that he urged western knights to help the eastern Christians and to free Jerusalem, and that he promised forgiveness of sins to those who went. People who took the vow sewed a cloth cross onto their clothes. The word crusade, which came into use later, comes from the Latin crux, cross; at the time people mostly spoke of a pilgrimage or a passage.

The First Crusade and the crusader states

Several armies led by nobles set out in 1096. Before them went a large, poorly organised popular crusade that was destroyed in Anatolia; on its way, bands of crusaders massacred Jewish communities in Rhineland towns such as Mainz and Worms. The main armies took Nicaea in 1097. Baldwin of Boulogne broke away to take Edessa in 1098, and the rest captured Antioch the same year after a long siege. On 15 July 1099 they stormed Jerusalem and killed a great many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants; chroniclers on both sides recorded the slaughter. The victors set up four crusader states: the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem. The Muslim world was divided between rival Seljuk princes and the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, which helps explain the crusaders’ success. To defend the new states, military orders of knights who lived under monastic vows appeared, the Templars and the Hospitallers, and built castles such as Krak des Chevaliers in Syria.

Saladin and Richard

Edessa fell to Zengi, ruler of Mosul and Aleppo, in 1144, and the Second Crusade that followed failed before the walls of Damascus in 1148. Saladin, a Kurdish commander who became sultan of Egypt and Syria, then united the lands around the crusader states. On 4 July 1187 he destroyed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee. Britannica describes how about 20,000 crusaders marched across a hot, dry plain, ran out of water and spent a night without it before the battle. In October 1187 Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin, who allowed many of its Christians to ransom themselves. The Third Crusade (1189 to 1192), led by Richard I of England and Philip II of France, recaptured Acre in 1191 but not Jerusalem. In 1192 Richard and Saladin agreed a truce that let Christian pilgrims visit the holy places.

Crusades that went elsewhere

Later crusades often never reached the Holy Land. The Fourth Crusade, unable to pay Venice for its fleet, was diverted to Constantinople and sacked the Christian city in April 1204. Popes also called crusades against Muslims in Spain, pagans around the Baltic and Christians they judged heretics in southern France, as in the Albigensian Crusade from 1209. Meanwhile the crusader states shrank. The Mamluk sultans of Egypt took Antioch in 1268 and Tripoli in 1289, and Acre fell in 1291. The crusades drew Italian merchants into closer trade with the eastern Mediterranean, but they also left a long memory of violence against Muslims, against eastern Christians and against Jews.