The crusades were a series of holy wars called by popes with the promise of indulgences for those who fought in them and directed against external and internal enemies of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defense of the Church or Christian people. Crusades were characterized by the taking of vows and the granting of indulgences to those who participated. Like going on pilgrimage, to which they were often likened, crusading was an act of Christian love and piety that compensated for and paid the penalties earned by sin. It marked a break in earlier Christian medieval conceptions of warfare in that crusades were penitential warfare. Crusades combined the ideas of: a) Holy War and b) and Pilgrimage to produce the concept of "indulgence" (remission of penance and/or sin granted by papacy for participation in sacred activity).
Where, exactly, the Crusades were fought is subjective. It depends on if you count a crusade as an expedition aimed at recovering or protecting Jerusalem or if you think any expedition preached as a crusade in which the participants took crusading vows and received crusading privileges should be regarded as crusades. If you think the former is correct, then the crusades were fought not only in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, but in Spain, the Baltic (Latvia and Prussia), Italy, Sicily, and southern France. The first crusade was launched by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095. There is controversy over the last crusade. Some historians think the Crusades ended in 1291 with the fall of the last crusader castle of the Latin Kingdom, the city of Acre (on the northern coast of present-day Israel). Other historians disagree, and think the Crusades ended after that or during the Spanish Armada of 1588.
Pope Urban II called for a Crusade in 1095. The principal stated objective was to drive the Turks out of Anatolia. The principal hidden agenda was to heal the Great Schism on Rome's terms once and for all by rescuing the Byzantines from a grave threat and thereby obligating them. The objective of going on to reconquer the Holy Land for Christendom (as long as we're in the neighborhood) was almost an afterthought.
It took about a year to assemble the Crusaders at Constantinople in 1096-97. They were barely out of Constantinople when omens of things to come appeared. The Crusaders retook the ancient city of Nicaea, and the Byzantine emperor moved swiftly to post troops in the town to prevent the Crusaders from looting it. This action aroused intense resentment on the part of the Crusaders. Neither Crusader discipline nor Western-Byzantine relations were to improve as the Crusades wore on.
Nevertheless, the First Crusade from 1097 to 1099 achieved all its major objectives in the Holy Land. The Crusaders did not decisively defeat the Turks but mauled them severely enough to halt their expansion and provide a promising basis for future offensives. They marched into Palestine, besieged and captured Jerusalem, and indulged in wholesale massacre and plundering once they took the city. The response of the Moslem powers was surprisingly restrained. The two principal powers in the region were Egypt and the Caliph in Baghdad. Egypt's principal strategic interest was North Africa and the Mediterranean. The Caliph was principally concerned with Persia. The two parties were looking in opposite directions and possibly believed that a buffer state in between might be desirable. Palestine was not of strategic importance to the Moslem powers, and perhaps could have been held indefinitely with a little skill, tolerance, and insight. The Crusaders were not noted for these qualities.
t should come as no surprise that the Crusaders adopted precisely the wrong tactics. Their ideal strategy should have been to seek rapprochement with their neighbors and act to maintain stability in the region. Instead, believing that they could eventually overcome Islam itself, they allied themselves with every destabilizing force in the region. They assisted one Moslem ruler in attacking Damascus, despite his professed intent of later launching a jihad against the Crusaders themselves. Predictably enough, he did just that, capturing the Crusader citadel of Edessa. The loss jolted Europe, and the Second Crusade was launched in 1147. Two land armies marched down across Anatolia; one was destroyed and the other badly mauled by the Turks. The seaborne forces squabbled over strategy, besieged Damascus, ran out of water, and had to retreat. The Crusaders lost military respect in the eyes of the Turks, moderate Moslems started to doubt the wisdom of cooperating with the Crusaders, and Western Europeans blamed the Byzantines for the destruction of the armies in Anatolia.
The jihad gathered strength and the Kurdish leader Saladin eventually assumed leadership. The Crusaders in Palestine were splintered by internal strife and when one of them attacked a Moslem caravan in which Saladin's sister was traveling, the jihad began in earnest. Saladin invaded Palestine in 1187. The Crusader leaders, still squabbling, marched their army out of sound defensive positions across a wasteland, where it was routed. Saladin went on to take Jerusalem and all of Palestine except a few coastal strongholds. The consequent Third Crusade, from 1189 to 1191, is what most people picture by the term "Crusade". It was led by Richard I of England, Phillip II of France, and Frederick I of the Holy Roman Empire. It's also the Crusade in which Robin Hood fought, according to legend. The Crusaders captured the port of Acre, several other ports, and secured treaty rights for pilgrims to visit Jerusalem.
The less than total success of the Third Crusade led a number of French nobles to plan a Fourth, beginning in 1199. Poorly financed, they were soon in debt to Venice and agreed to pay off the debt by capturing a port in Dalmatia (modern Adriatic coast of Croatia). Now little more than mercenaries on the Venetian payroll, they then agreed to help the Venetians install a puppet ruler on the throne of Constantinople. The puppet ruler was soon overthrown and the Crusaders stormed and pillaged Constantinople. Remember the original aim of healing the Great Schism? It was now forever out of reach. The Byzantines preferred surrender to the Turks in 1453 to seeking aid from the West. Not until the 1960's did a Pope and Greek Orthodox patriarch meet in person.
Meanwhile, Jerusalem was still in the hands of the Moslems. The Fifth Crusade attempted a quite different strategy. The Crusaders would capture the port of Damietta at the mouth of the Nile, bottle up Egypt's commerce, and swap the port for Jerusalem. Damietta was besieged in 1218-1219 and the sultan of Egypt finally agreed to the swap. By this time, the Crusaders, suffering from megalomania, decided to attempt the conquest of all of Egypt. They were stranded by the annual Nile flood and had to retreat, miraculously snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Frederick II of Germany had promised to lead a Crusade in 1215, finally started on the Sixth Crusade in 1227, and turned back. For this he was excommunicated. He finally landed in Palestine and in 1229, after little fighting and much negotiation, concluded a treaty that gave the Crusaders Jerusalem and all the other holy cities and a truce of ten years – more than they had achieved by all the previous failed Crusades. He was widely condemned for conducting the Crusade by negotiating rather than fighting.
With that sort of thinking, it is no surprise that the peace did not last long and that the Crusaders again lost Jerusalem in 1244. King Louis IX of France, the patron saint of France and the Saint Louis after whom the city and Louisiana are named, led the Crusade. Louis was brave in battle, kind to his friends, generous
to his enemies, pious, a truly noble man, and hopelessly incompetent as a general. The events of the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254) are almost exactly a replay of the Fifth: attack Damietta, agree to trade it for Jerusalem, succumb to an attack of hubris, attempt to conquer Egypt, lose it all. A militant dynasty, the Mamelukes, came to power in Egypt and soon swept most of the Crusader strongholds remaining in Palestine.
(The Mamelukes arose from an institution that has been used at times in the East but has no counterpart in the West – a slave army. The reasoning seems to be that soldiers are bound to obedience anyway, so they might as well be slaves. Don't get the image of whips and poverty – they may have been slaves in the legal sense but were better off than most other members of their societies. Invariably, sooner or later, the slaves eventually reasoned "We're the ones with the swords. Why should we be slaves?" and staged a coup, as the Mamelukes did in Egypt.)
The Eighth and last Crusade (1270) is in some ways the most poignant. One can easily picture Louis, now in middle age, a bit bored, the chain mail a bit snug at the waist perhaps, reminiscing about his youth as a Crusader, and deciding to have one more try at it. His brother, Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, had strategic plans of his own in the eastern Mediterranean and did not want a Crusade interfering with them. He diverted the expedition to Tunisia, where Louis died. The last Crusader cities on the mainland of Palestine fell in 1291; one small island stronghold lasted until 1303.
With Louis' death, the Crusades died out with a whimper and not a bang. Continued military failure was a principal reason for their end. For a chronicle of military and political ineptitude, coupled with sheer hubris, they have no comparison in history. The Crusaders had victory in their grasp four times. They won the First Crusade in battle, had a trade almost in hand in the Fifth and Seventh Crusades, and negotiated a victory in the Sixth Crusade, and in the end they still managed to lose it all. Where else can we find a war that was won four times and still finally lost? Even the most ardent backers of Crusades were able to see eventually that the strategy was not working. Moreover, Europe in 1270 was a very different place than it was in 1087. Rising European prosperity and the increasing interest in internal affairs helped to lessen interest in the Crusades. The concept of crusading was also discredited by "crusades" against Christians (for example, aberrant sects like the Albigensians) or rulers who otherwise displeased the Pope.
The effects of the Crusades were the final fatal weakening of the Byzantine Empire. The Crusades failed to recover Anatolia from the Turks, and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 destroyed Byzantium as a first-rate power. Henceforth, it would exist only as a convenience to the Turks. Initially it served as a buffer state against the Turks. By the late 1300's the Byzantines were encouraging the Turks to invade the Balkans to create a buffer to protect the Byzantines from rival Europeans. For a while longer Byzantium was useful to the Turks as a point of contact with the West; when it had outlived its usefulness, they took it in 1453.
Perhaps the most significant effect of the Crusades was a vast increase in cultural horizons for many Europeans. For every European who went on a Crusade (let alone the minuscule fraction who returned) there were hundreds who knew someone who had gone, or who had seen the Crusaders march by. Palestine was no longer a quasi-mythical place that people knew only from Bible readings in church; it was a real place where real people went. Once Crusader kingdoms, however fragile, were set up in Palestine, they traded with their kin in Europe, sending finished goods to Europe and importing raw materials. The result was a stimulus to Mediterranean trade. The need to transfer large sums of money for troops and supplies led to development of banking and accounting techniques. If the combatants in the Crusades came mostly from France, Germany and England, the middlemen tended to be merchants from northern Italy. The Crusades launched the economic dominance of cities like Genoa and Venice. The financial burdens of the Crusades, coupled with the need to borrow money to finance them, weakened the power of the nobility and strengthened the merchant classes and the independence of cities.
A number of cultural institutions we think of as characteristically medieval came into being during the Crusades. Crusader knights, almost all of them illiterate, soon began using emblems and geometric designs to identify themselves. This practice later evolved into a complex code of heraldic emblems and coats of arms. Romantic and imaginative literature also blossomed during the Crusades. Although we typically picture the Middle Ages in terms of stone castles, a great deal of Europe's knowledge of heavy stone masonry, and construction of castles and stone churches was returned from the Middle East. So were improved techniques of siege technology, tunneling, and sapping. Although tunneling technology would later be of great use in mining, its purpose in warfare was to undermine or sap enemy fortifications. (Engineers, often called "sappers", have been considered a completely different branch of the military from the Army itself in many countries.) European churches also began to include spires or steeples at about the time of the Crusades, possibly inspired by minarets.