The Crusades and Crusader Castles

First Crusade

Second Crusade

Third Crusade

Fourth Crusade

Cathar Crusade

Fifth Crusade

Frederick II's Crusade

The crusades were a series of military expeditions promoted by the papacy during the Middle Ages, initially aimed at taking the Holy Land for Christendom. The concept of a crusade was developed in the eleventh century partially as a result of organised Christian forces fighting Muslims in Sicily and Spain. The Holy Land had been in the hands of the Muslims since 638, and it was against them that the crusades were, at least nominally, directed. Expansionism along with desire for adventure, conquest and plunder seem to have been at least as influential in attracting Christians to the cause as any desire to restore Christ's supposed patrimony.

The main crusades spanned more than two centuries (1096-1300 CE). These extended military raids stemmed from changes hat had taken place outside Europe before the time of the Crusades, most notably the growth and expansion of Islam. Christian holy wars such as these bear a striking resemblance to the Moslem practice of the jihad, which by then had become a very successful Islamic institution. By translating the notion of a "holy warrior" into Christian terms, fMedieval popes created the crusader, a "knight of Christ."

Popes who promoted the Crusades gained the authority to muster an army, appoint its military leaders, and send it on its mission. (Part of the reason for the failure of the crusades was bishops acting as field commanders and chosing the wrong military targets, the wrong battles, and the wrong military maneuvers).

These Church-sponsored wars brought some benefit to Medieval Europe. For instance, crusading allowed westerners to take advantage of the much richer East for the first time since the days of ancient Rome. It served as an outlet for Europe's youth and aggression as population exploded during the High Middle Ages (1050-1300 CE). Sending young men off to fight in a holy cause temorarily stifled the internal wars that had afflicted the West since the collapse of Roman government . That a few of the early Crusading skirmishes produced victories of some kind helped Europeans regain a sense of self-confidence, after centuries of losing on nearly every front, they temporarily turned the tables on their military and cultural superiors to the east.

The Church regarded crusaders as military pilgrims. They took vows and were rewarded with privileges of protection for their property at home. Any legal proceedings against them were suspended. Another major inducement was the offer of indulgences for the remission of sin. Knights were especially attracted by what were effectively Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free cards allowing them to commit any sins throughout the rest of their lives without incurring liability in this or the next world.

During the Crusades the Western Church developed new types of holy warrior. These were military monks such as the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar. They were literally both soldiers and monks, and took vows for both callings, fulfilling their holy duties by killing God's enemies.

Underlying the crusaders' excursions was the impulse to migrate and conquer, the same drive that had long before pushed their Indo-European forebears out of their homeland and across Eurasia, and that had also motivated the Vikings. If the Crusades proved unsuccessful attempts at expansion, it is safe to assert that they nudged Europe out of its provincialism.

Indeed, not since the days of ancient Rome had westerners found many viable opportunities to expand their horizons in any respect, not just militarily but also economically, culturally and politically. Crusading gave them a glimpse of the larger world that lay beyond their immediate frontiers. This taste of the globe sparked in them a curiosity about life beyond Europe, which, in turn, helped to lay the groundwork for the colonial period to follow. In fact, one can argue that the Crusades of the twelfth century, not Columbus' expeditions three centuries later, mark the real onset of Western expansionism, arguably the single most significant development of the millennium just past. The crusaders, modern Europe's first colonists of a sort, headed the wrong direction: east, not west.

Nine crusades are generally recognised, although there were many others. Many of them collapsed before they got out of Christendom. Some, such as the Children's Crusade, are now disowned as crusades. Others were directed not against Muslims but fellow Christians in Europe, the Church at Constantinople, Christian emperors and kings, sects who rejected the Roman Church, even powerful Italian families hostile to the pope of the day.

The First Crusade (1096-1099 CE)

The spark that set off the Crusades was struck in the East, when the Byzantines first confronted a new Moslem force, the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuk Turks were originally an Asian horde which, like the Huns of earlier times, had penetrated far into the West, the Seljuk Turks controlled much of the Near East by the eleventh century. With Persia in their control, including Baghdad, the capital of the Moslem world, they converted to Islam en masse and presented a truly terrifying prospect: "Moslem Huns," or Mongol jihadis.

Byzantine concern turned to panic when Turkish forces began expanding into eastern Asia Minor. The Byzantines were defeated by the Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071and stood on the verge of losing the whole of Asia Minor to Turkish onslaught. Casting about for help and seeing none nearby, they were forced to go for their last resort, appealing for aid from the West.

Ever since Justinian's Gothic Wars, the Byzantines' failure to impose iconoclasm on the West, and the ever growing claims of the papacy, Byzantium and Western Europe had suffered from strained relations. This tension grew to such a pitch that, by the middle of eleventh century (during the 1050's CE), they splintered into separate sects: the Catholic Church based in Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople. The result was that, by the time of the Crusades, the Christians of Western Europe belonged to a different religion from their brethren in the Middle East. To re-open the channels of communication between these former allies who did not speak the same language and had not fought side-by-side for centuries, seemed impossible, but with Islamicized Mongols poised on one's borders, the impossible starts looking feasible.

The Turkish situation, moreover, affected Europeans as well. The few direct contacts between Moslems and Western Europeans in this day were largely the result of Christian pilgrims wending their way to Jerusalem and the Holy Lands. Prior to the Turkish takeover, Moslems had not actively prevented their coming and going. Indeed, Moslems in the day must have chuckled a little at these pale northern pilgrims, a harmless if rather misguided lot who, like children imitating adults, were attempting to incorporate into their unenlightened religion the sacred hajj. Little did they imagine how much of Islam these Christians would soon be borrowing.

As Byzantine-Turkish antagonism escalated in the late eleventh century, it had become increasingly difficult for Christian pilgrims, or anyone for that matter, to pass through Asia Minor and Syria safely and reach the Holy Lands. Looking for ways to leverage military assistance from the West, some sort of bargaining chip he could play, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus used his conflict with the Turks and its impact on pilgrimage and tourism as the basis of an appeal for Western aid. Writing to the Church in Rome, he intentionally spread stories (some corroborated, some aparently invented) of Turkish atrocities against Christians in Asia Minor and then offered an enticement he knew was virtually irresistible to the Pope. He proposed reunifying the recently severed Eastern and Western Churches.

Pope Urban II warmly embraced the idea of helping Europe's "beleaguered allies" and fellow Christians in the East, so he proposed a holy war — a shift in Christian doctrine — and explained this maneouver not as any substantive change of direction but as an extension of a policy already in place entitled theTruce of God. This program of measures was part of the Church's attempt to limit warfare within Europe in the day by insisting there be no fighting on holidays or weekends.

In Urban's hands, the Truce of God was remolded into a declaration ending all wars in which Christian fought Christian and deflecting European militarism toward what was perceived as the "real" enemy now, the Moslem infidels in the East. Thus seen ideologically, the Crusades were the culmination of a "peace" movement, as illogical as that may sound. Needless to say, it took some monumental re-reading of the New Testament where, at least on the surface, war is hardly the preferred vehicle of peace, but in those days the Pope had the advantage of being one of the few in Europe who could read at all, much less re-read.

In giving knights a holy vocation and calling them "the vassals of Christ," Urban II was granting anyone who joined his crusade an automatic indulgence—namely, the forgiveness of all prior sins. Instead of paying penance for murder, killing could spell a sinner's salvation, as long as he slew the right sort of person, a Moslem that is. Not since "Die for Rome!," had Europeans heard such a stirring advertisement and, when Urban began to sense how well this was going to work, he took his marketing campaign on the road.

In a spell-binding speech before a crowd of French knights, Urban exhorted his adherents to win back "the land of milk and honey" and avenge the Turkish atrocities allegedly perpetrated against their fellow Christians. He cited several of the gory details sent him by Alexius Comnenus and ended by bidding them fight "for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of imperishable glory." Whether or not he meant it, "Kill Moslems indiscriminately!" is what the crowd understood him to say and chanted back Deus le vult! Deus le vult!" ("God wills it! God wills it!")

From the perspective of history, it is clear that there was much more than religious frenzy at work here. The Crusades reflect other aspects of life in Europe at that time, in particular, its burgeoning population during the High Middle Ages. That is, around the turn of the millennium (ca. 1000 CE), destructive invasions like those of the Vikings had abated and, amidst the relative calm which followed, the continent had quickly repopulated. It's hard not to suppose, then, that the Crusades, a century later, are tied to the rapidly changing demographics within Europe, since the first three come every forty years or so, in other words, at intervals of about a generation and a half. If so, they are, in one respect, a means of bleeding off the ever-replenishing supply of young warriors, especially sons without inheritances or livelihoods and, in general, people seeking some purpose and direction in life.

There were political forces at work as well, since the Crusades were also tied to the Investiture Controversy, the struggle for power between the rising authority of the Pope and the ruling political system in the day. From the papal perspective, the kings of Europe had long intruded upon the sacred right of the Pope to run his own business (ie to choose the men who constituted the Church's administration) and in calling the First Crusade, Urban II shifted the theatre of action in this political conflict to an arena where medieval kings had traditionally reigned supreme, the battlefield. In doing so, Urban usurped the prerogative most secular rulers had claimed traditionally to declare an enemy and muster troops for battle.

Worse yet, by reinterpreting the Truce of God as a warrant for Europeans to kill Moslems and not each other, he also sought to embarrass secular leaders for all their intra-European wars which now looked positively "un-Christian," in spite of that fact that the Church had for centuries up until then sanctioned European-upon-European carnage. Nevertheless, popes briefly owned the momentum and set the spin. That is, the Crusades gave them, if only for a minute by historical standards, the opportunity to make the rules of the game.

But for all these underlying causes, the major motivation driving the Crusades—both on the surface and well beneath it—was religious sentiment bordering on hysteria. There can be no doubt that a majority of Christian Europeans saw Urban's call-to-arms as a means of salvation and a way of ridding the world of infidels. That, to them, referred not only to the Moslems but also the Jews in Europe, many of whom were slaughtered before the knights of the First Crusade rolled out in search of the Holy Lands. After all, good Christians couldn't send their men off to fight one infidel and abandon the homeland to another. With this benighted stab at genocide pitched as protecting the loved ones they left behind, the crusaders surged out of Europe on a tidal bore of blood, only to wash up on the shores of the Near East soon to be bathed in the same.

The First Crusade began in 1096, when Christian knights assembled from all over Europe and move toward Constantinople. The Byzantines were horrified to see hordes of Western Europeans knocking at their doors, particularly because most of the crusaders were poor and, worse still, poorly armed. When he had made his initial request, Alexius Comnenus was not asking the Pope for mobs of indigent desperadoes but a small force of skilled fighters who could help him repulse the Turks. To the Byzantines, this multitude was no army but a different sort of invasion.

The lowest estimate of the crusaders' force is indeed around 25,000—there were probably far more, perhaps as many as 100,000—and as far as the Byzantines were concerned, it was an uncivilized, ill-equipped throng driven by a fanaticism as poorly cloaked in words of faith and brotherhood as their ragged flesh. Moreover, the crusaders' aims corresponded little with those of the Byzantines who were seeking to stem the tide of Turkish aggression. The Europeans, on the other hand, entertained fantasies of "liberating" Jerusalem and the Holy Lands from Moslem oppression; thus, neither understood or listened to the others' words.

As a result, the Byzantines acted in a fashion typical of Easterners, from the Western European perspective at least. Following a long-standing policy of baffling, stalling and deceiving intrusive foreigners, Alexius Comnenus greeted the crusaders with cold but reasonable hospitality and, as soon as it was feasible, escorted them through his kingdom and beyond the eastern boundaries of the Byzantine Empire, vowing military and financial support. Once they were gone, however, the Emperor promptly reneged on his deal and slammed the gate shut, preventing their return. Surely, he thought the Turks would make quick work of them and he would be free of this pest, but the Byzantines grossly underestimated the crusaders' will and, by defaulting on his pledge of support, he earned Europe's distrust. Byzantium was now as much the crusaders' foe as any Moslem state.

At length and against all odds, many of the crusaders survived this betrayal. After all, as poor folk, most of them were used to getting by on little food and few comforts. Indeed drawn onward by their religious convictions, they managed to get further than anyone would have guessed, making it all the way to Syria, in fact, and somehow engineering the capture of the capital city Antioch in June of 1098.

Though it proved a long and arduous siege, this victory gave new life to their cause and, continuing south, they pushed their way into the Holy Lands where they successfully effected the capture of Jerusalem in the next year (1099). Instrumental in that success was a brutality astonishing in its barbarity and ruthlessness, bloody enough to make a Viking wince. Of course, most of these marauders were Vikings one way or another, genetically or culturally.

Treating the defeated as animals, the crusaders ravaged whole populations. For instance, after they captured Antioch, they exterminated all the Turks there. Later, following the sack of Jerusalem, they boasted of their own savagery, claiming "We rode in the blood of the infidels up to the knees of our horses"—if true, this is horrific, and if invented history, it's worse—whatever the case, the crusaders' disregard of basic human decency has struck few over time as anything but utterly repugnant. To wit, a non-crusader Christian who witnessed their wanton cruelty wrote:

If you had been there, you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of our people were left alive: neither women nor children were spared . . . And after they were done with the slaughter, they went to the Sepulcher of the Lord to pray.

Few crusaders had any long-term interest in settling the Holy Lands. With Jerusalem now seemingly secure in Christian hands, most of its western assailants opted to return home, where they were hailed as heroes. Some, however, stayed and set up Christian-run governments, the four so-called Crusader states, along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. There, they buil tEuropean-style castles called kraks. It's somewhat disconcerting to look across Syria today and see crumbling medieval castles of a sort one would expect to find in England or France. Thus, along with the other devastations they wrought—such as the enmity they inspired between East and West—the crusaders brought enormous disharmony to the cultural landscape of this area, arguably one of the more enduring legacies of their savagery.

The First Crusade The First Crusade was planned by Pope Urban II and more than 200 bishops at the Council of Clermont. It was preached by Urban between 1095 and 1099. He assured his listeners that God himself wanted them to encourage men of all ranks, rich and poor, to go and exterminate Muslims. He said that Christ commanded it. Even robbers, he said, should now become soldiers of Christ. Assured that God wanted them to participate in a holy war, masses pressed forward to take the crusaders" oath. They looked forward to a guaranteed place in Heaven for themselves and to an assured victory for their divinely endorsed army. The pope did not appoint a secular military supreme commander, only a spiritual one, the Bishop of Le Puy. Initial expeditions were led by two churchmen, Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless. Peter was a monk from Amiens, whose credentials were a letter written by God and delivered to him by Jesus. He assured his followers that death in the Crusades provided an automatic passport to Heaven.

One German contingent in the Rhine valley was granted a further sign from God. He sent them an enchanted goose to follow. It led them to Jewish neighbourhoods of Spier, where they took the divine hint and massacred the inhabitants. Similar massacres followed at Worms, Mainz, Metz , Prague, Ratisbon and other cities. These pogroms completed, Peter the Hermit's army marched through Hungary towards Turkey. On the way they killed 4,000 Christians in Zemun (present day Semlin) , pillaged Belgrade, and set fire to the towns around Niš. They thieved and murdered all the way to Constantinople, by which time only about a third of the initial force remained. The Emperor was astonished. He had asked for trained mercenaries, but what arrived was a murderous rabble. To minimise the risks of danger to his own city he allowed the crusaders to proceed. Once across the Bosphorus, they continued as before. Marching beyond Nicæa, a French contingent ravaged the countryside. They looted property, and robbed, tortured, raped and murdered the mainly Christian inhabitants of the country, reportedly roasting babies on spits. Some 6,000 German crusaders, including bishops and priests, jealous of the French success, tried to emulate it. However, this time an army of Turks arrived and chopped the holy crusaders to pieces. Survivors were given the chance to save their lives by converting to Islam, which some did, including their leader Rainauld, setting a precedent for many future crusaders.

The principal expedition that followed was more organised, although crusaders continued to threaten their Christian allies in Constantinople on the way. The Christian Emperor was shocked to find his capital under attack by Western Christians in Holy Week. He developed a technique for bringing the barbarian Westerners under control by speedily processing batches of them as they arrived. His technique was to induce them to swear fealty to him, then swiftly move them across the Bosphorus before the next batch arrived. On the far side of the water their massed forces were no threat to the city. Apart from further devastating the countryside they could do little but prepare for their first encounter with their non-Christian enemies.

Sieges were laid to a series of Muslim cities. Crusaders had little respect for their enemies and enjoyed catapulting the severed heads of fallen Moslem warriers into besieged cities. After a victory near Antioch, crusaders brought severed heads back to the besieged city. Hundreds of these heads were shot into the city, and hundreds more impaled on stakes in front of the city walls. A crusader bishop called it a joyful spectacle for the people of God. When Muslims crept out of the city at night to bury their dead the Christians left them alone. Then in the morning the Christians returned, and dug up the corpses to steal gold and silver ornaments.

When the crusaders took Antioch in 1098 they slaughtered the inhabitants. Later the Christians were in turn besieged by Muslim reinforcements. The crusaders broke out, putting the Muslim army to flight and capturing their women. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres was proud to record that on this occasion nothing evil (i.e. sexual) had happened, although the women had been murdered in their tents, pierced through the belly by lances. Time and time again Muslims who surrendered were killed or sold into slavery. This treatment was applied to combatants and citizens alike: women, children, the old, the infirm — anyone and everyone. At Albara the population was totally extirpated, the town then being resettled with Christians, and the mosque converted into a church. Often, the Christians offered to spare those who capitulated, but it was an unwise Muslim who accepted such a promise. A popular technique was to promise protection to all who took refuge in a particular building within the besieged city. Then after the battle, the Christians had an easy time: the men could be massacred and the women and children sold into slavery without having to carry out searches. Clerics justified this by claiming that Christians were not bound by promises made to infidels, even if sworn in the name of God. At Maarat an-Numan the pattern was repeated. The slaughter continued for three days, both Christian and Muslim accounts agreeing on the main points, although each has its own details. The Christian account describes how the Muslims" bodies were dismembered. Some were cut open to find hidden treasure, while others were cut up to eat. The Muslim account mentions that over 100,000 were killed.

When the crusaders captured Jerusalem on the 14 th July 1099, they massacred the inhabitants, Jews and Muslims alike, men, women and children. The killing continued all night and into the next day. Jews who took refuge in their synagogue were burned alive. Muslims sought refuge in the al-Aqsa mosque under the protection of a Christian banner. In the morning crusaders forced an entry and massacred them all, 70,000 according to an Arab historian, including a large number of scholars. The Temple of Solomon was so full of blood that it came up to the horses" bridles. The chronicler Raymond of Aguiliers described it as a just and wonderful judgement of God. Even before the killing was over the crusaders went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre "rejoicing and weeping for joy" to thank God for his assistance. Muslim prisoners were decapitated, shot with arrows, forced to jump from high towers, or burned. Some were tortured first. Neither was this an isolated incident. It was wholly typical. When the crusaders took Caesarea in 1101, many citizens fled to the Great Mosque and begged the Christians for mercy. At the end of the butchery the floor was a lake of blood. In the whole city only a few girls and infants survived. Soon afterwards, there was a similar massacre at Beirut. Such barbarity shocked the Eastern world and left an impression of the Christian West that has still not been forgotten in the third millennium.

By 1101 reinforcements were on the way, under the command of the Archbishop of Milan, to support the Frankish crusaders already in the Holy Land. Mainly Lombards, the new troops lived up to the record of their French and German predecessors, robbing and killing Christians on the way, and blaming the Byzantine Emperor for the consequences of their own shortcomings. At the first engagement with the enemy they fled in panic leaving their women and children behind to be killed or sold in slave markets. As Sir Steven Runciman, a leading historian of the period says: the Byzantines were "shocked and angered by the stupidity, the ingratitude and the dishonesty of the crusaders". They also questioned the crusaders" loyalty to their Byzantine allies. The crusaders had purportedly gone to help Byzantium, and had sworn to restore to the Emperor any of his territory that they recaptured, but not a single one ever did so. Indeed, Eastern Christians were regarded as enemies as much as the Muslims.

Fired by the success of the crusade against the Muslims, Pope Paschal II (the successor to Urban II) gave his blessing in 1105 to a holy war against his fellow Christians in the East. Preached by a papal legate, the new crusade sought to subjugate the Eastern Empire to Rome. This was unprecedented treachery and undisguised imperialism. For the time being such perfidy got the crusaders nowhere.

The Second Crusade

The Second Crusade (1147-1148 CE) is the heir, so to speak, of the First. Not only did the Second Crusade follow a generation or so after the First—indeed, a number of its soldiers were the actual descendants of those who had gone on the First Crusade—but the later crusade was also precipitated by the earlier one. Thus, in more ways than one, the First Crusade sired its successor, the Second.

In the decades following the First Crusade, the Christian overlords of the Crusader States failed to integrate themselves into Middle Eastern society in any meaningful way. Despised by the natives for their imperious and condescending manner, many turned out to be cruel and abusive despots. Even if a minority proved kinder and gentler, the general impression their rule left behind was not favorable. Even their fellow Christians disliked them, as witnessed by one churchman who wrote home complaining:

They devoted themselves to all kinds of debauchery and allowed their womenfolk to spend whole nights at wild parties; they mixed with trashy people and drank the most delicious wines.

Such a situation cannot endure for long, and indeed in 1144, one of the Crusader states fell back into Moslem control.

This re-ignited crusading fever in Europe and led to the call for a follow-up crusade to re-secure the Holy Lands in the name of Christ. No less than Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, perceived by many to be the "holiest" man of the day, endorsed the notion of a new crusade, and his sanction drew in many of the leading figures and kings in Europe. Bernard, however, had the sense to protect the homeland first and forbade the massacre of Jews, the sad overture that opened the earlier Crusade.

In the end, however, the Second Crusade proved a dismal failure. This time, the Byzantines and the Turks were ready for the "Franks" and plotted together to exterminate them. Thus, betrayed on both sides—by Byzantium and Turkish forces—the Second Crusade was nearly obliterated as the crusaders tried to pass through Asia Minor.

What little of the expedition made it to the Holy Lands only ended up fighting with the survivors and descendants of the First Crusade who saw this new European incursion as a band of thugs sent to rob them of their lands. The result was that most participants in the Second Crusade returned to Europe empty-handed, such a pitiful troupe that Saint Bernard was forced to admit, "I must call him blessed who is not tainted by this." That killed most Europeans' interest in crusading, for a generation at least.

The Second Crusade Pope Eugene III proclaimed The Second Crusade in 1145. It was preached by St Bernard, a leading Cistercian theologian who declared that "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified". He also pointed out that anyone who kills an unbeliever does not commit homicide but malicide*; in other words they kill not a man but an evil. He knew how to sell a crusade to believers. His spiel was reminiscent of that of a high-pressure salesman selling to credulous punters:

But to those of you who are merchants, men quick to seek a bargain, let me point out the advantages of this great opportunity. Do not miss them. Take up the sign of the cross and you will find indulgence for all sins that you humbly confess. The cost is small, the reward is great.... *

The Second Crusade was led by the greatest potentates in western Europe: King Louis VII of France and the German Emperor Conrad III. Once again churchmen promoted anti-Semitism in Germany and France. Without the aid of a single enchanted goose the crusaders once again found unbelievers in their midst. Inspired by a Cistercian monk, they massacred Jews throughout the Rhineland — notably in Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Spier and Strasbourg.

The initial object of the Second Crusade was to recapture Edessa (in what is now eastern Turkey), which had fallen to the Muslims in 1144. Initial contingents were led by military commanders like the bishops of Metz and Toul. On the way, travelling by sea, the crusaders besieged Lisbon, which at that time was a Muslim city. After four months the garrison surrendered, having been promised their lives and their property if they capitulated. They did capitulate and were then massacred. Only about a fifth of the original crusader force got as far as Syria, where the real crusade started. It proved a failure, at least partially because tactical targets were selected for religious rather than military reasons. A military tactician might have gone for Aleppo, but the crusade leaders agreed on mounting an attack on Damascus, apparently because they recognised its name as biblical. The leaders argued amongst themselves until the crusade collapsed in 1149, having failed to take either Edessa or Damascus. The whole thing had been a disaster. As Runciman put it:

…when it reached its ignominious end in the weary retreat from Damascus, all that it had achieved had been to embitter relations between the Western Christians and the Byzantines almost to breaking-point, to sow suspicions between the newly-come Crusaders and the Franks resident in the East, to separate the western Frankish princes from each other, to draw the Muslims closer together, and to do deadly damage to the reputation of the Franks for military prowess*.

The Muslim Turks extended their rule to Egypt soon afterwards. St Bernard had been promised a victory by God, but instead of this he had provided a complete disaster. Bernard and his supporters tried hard to work out why God's purpose had been so badly frustrated. Perhaps the best solution was that the outcome had been a great success after all, because it had transferred so many Christian warriors from God's earthly army to his heavenly one. Not everyone was convinced. Meanwhile the Christian forces resident in the East accommodated themselves to the realities of Eastern life. Eventually they would come to terms with the fact that until their arrival Muslims, Jews and Christians had lived together in amity. Resident Christians often preferred their old Muslim masters to their new Christian ones.

Muslim captives who chose to convert to Christianity rather than die were allowed to, but only if there were no further monetary complications. When Cairo offered 60,000 dinars to the Templars for the return of a putative convert, his Christian instruction was promptly suspended and he was sent in chains to Cairo to be mutilated and hanged. Such incidents brought little glory to either side, but it is fair to say that Muslim princes generally conducted themselves with a degree of honour and chivalry lacking amongst the Christians.

Jerusalem Retaken In 1187, almost 90 years after it had been captured by the Christian army of the First Crusade, Jerusalem was retaken by the Muslim warrior Saladin (c.1137-1193). Originating from Tikrit in modern-day Iraq, Saladin had first demonstrated his military prowess in the 1160s in campaigns against crusaders in Palestine. Succeeding his uncle as a vizier in Egypt, he conquered Egypt in 1175 and then set about improving that country's economy and military strength. Following further campaigns in Syria and Mesopotamia, in 1186 he proclaimed a jihad that led to his capturing Jerusalem for the Muslims in the following year.

In addition to his abilities as a military leader, Saladin is renowned for his chivalry and merciful nature. It is known, for example, that in his struggles against the crusaders, he provided medical assistance on the battlefield to the wounded of both sides, and even allowed Christian physicians to visit Christian prisoners. Once the battle to retake Jerusalem was over, no one was killed or injured, and not a building was looted. The captives were permitted to ransom themselves, and those who could afford to do so ransomed their vassals as well. Many thousands could not afford their ransom and were held to be sold as slaves. The military monks, who could have used their vast wealth to save their fellow Christians from slavery, declined to do so. The head of the Church, the patriarch Heraclius, and his clerics looked after themselves. The Muslims saw Heraclius pay his ten dinars for his own ransom and leave the city bowed with the weight of the gold that he was carrying, followed by carts laden with other valuables. As the prisoners who had not been ransomed were led off to a life of slavery, Saladin's brother Malik al-Adil took pity. He asked his brother for 1,000 of them as a reward for his services, and when he was granted them he immediately gave them their liberty. This triggered further generosity amongst the victorious commanders, culminating in Saladin offering gifts from his own treasury to the Christian widows and orphans. As a contemporary historian has remarked, "His mercy and kindness were in strange contrast to the deeds of the Christian conquerors of the First Crusade"*.

In contrast to the generally honourable behaviour of the Muslims, the Christians repeatedly made promises under oath and them reneged upon them, often with the encouragement of the priesthood. In 1188 the King of Jerusalem, Guy, who had been captured by Saladin, was released. Guy had solemnly sworn that he would leave the country and never again take arms against the Muslims. Immediately, a cleric was found to release him from his oath. Despite this sort of behaviour, Muslim leaders generally stuck to their own promises. They were rather bemused by the cynical behaviour of the Western Christians. Often the cynicism worked to the Muslims" advantage. For example, Saladin was pleasantly surprised to find that Italian city states were prepared to sell him high quality weapons to be used against crusaders.

When the Emperor in Constantinople heard of the Muslim victory, he sent an embassy to congratulate its leaders. Eastern Christians had already generally allied themselves with the Muslims, regarding them as fairer and more civilised rulers than the followers of the Church of Rome. Now they asked to stay in Jerusalem, were allowed to do so, and gave "prodigious service" to their new masters.

The Third Crusade

The Third Crusade (1189-1193) was, as the one before it, precipitated by yet another turnover of power in the Middle East. In Egypt, a new Moslem leader arose named Saladin (r. 1169-1193) who recaptured Syria and much of the Holy Lands, including Jerusalem in 1187. So forceful was his assault that the Crusader States were reduced to little more than the port of Tyre and a few castles.

With Jerusalem no longer in Christian hands, some sort of reprisal was called for—another crusade, of course—but this time one that was well-organized and well-equipped, and no one better to do that than the foremost regents of Europe: the kings of Germany, France and England. Thus, the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the French king Philip Augustus and Richard the Lion-heart, the King of England, pushed aside their political differences and joined forces in the name of God to avenge this affront to Christendom at large. This large, well-funded, planned-out triple-threat had no chance for success, if for no other reason than that it was triple.

Three-headed freaks like the Third Crusade rarely live very long. First, Frederick drowned while crossing a river, either of a heart attack or because he fell off his horse and his armor was so heavy he could not swim to the surface. His troops, now leaderless, turned back. Next, Philip and Richard quarreled—and if one believes the court gossip of the time, they certainly had personal issues to work out—and Philip went back to France. Richard was left alone with his forces, not enough of an army to retake Jerusalem on its own but they continued anyway. When he reached the Middle East, Richard met Saladin and, after a bit of jousting and some general Medieval male-bonding if one can trust the accounts from the day, they managed to forge an agreement to let Christians visit the Holy Lands without being hassled. But making deals with Moslems was, to many in Europe, not the point of crusading.

Richard's stock dropped precipitously, and on his way home, he was captured, not by any Moslem foe, but by Germans—in fact, his former ally Frederick Barbarossa's son—and was imprisoned and held in exchange for the payment of an exorbitant sum. This 100,000 pounds, literally a "king's ransom," nearly bankrupted England and left John, Richard's brother, regent and successor, in deep debt and trouble.

The Third Crusade After the loss of Jerusalem, a Third Crusade was preached by Pope Gregory VIII. It was jointly led by Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of France, and Richard I of England (The Lionheart). The Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin, went along too. Richard had been crowned on 3 rd September in 1189 with crusading fervour already in the air. English Christians emulated their continental co-religionists, and took to murdering Jews, starting with those who had come to offer presents to their new king. This sparked further persecutions throughout the country, most notably in York. Soon the crusaders, including those who had engaged in the murder of Jews, departed for the East along with their continental co-religionists. Frederick Barbarossa died on the way, an event that mystified the crusaders, but which Muslims immediately recognised as a miracle wrought by God for the one true faith. Philip and Richard squabbled and attempted to bribe each other's armies to change allegiance (three gold pieces per month for English knights who joined Philip: four for French knights who joined Richard).

Eventually, Philip gave up and went home. Richard went on to capture Acre in 1191. Saladin was unable to pay for the release of the survivors quickly enough, so Richard ordered the massacre of his 2,700 captives, many of them women and children. They waited in line, each watching the one in front have their throat slit. Wives were slaughtered at the side of their husbands, children at the side of their parents while bishops blessed the proceedings. Corpses were then cut open in the hope of finding swallowed jewels.

Richard found further success difficult to come by, and a truce was made with Saladin, although Richard felt free to break it when it suited him. Despite Richard's behaviour, Saladin continued to treat him with respect when they met on the battlefield, apparently because Richard's fighting prowess impressed him. When Richard's horse fell, wounded in battle outside Jaffa in August 1192, Saladin sent a groom through the mêlée with fresh mounts for him. The Lionheart's treatment by his Muslim enemy contrasted with his treatment by his own Christian allies. On his way home later that year Richard was captured and imprisoned by a fellow crusader, Leopold, Duke of Austria. He was eventually released on payment of the Christian sum of 150,000 marks (£100,000), literally a king's ransom.

The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204)

If crusading was to continue at all, it was going to need some serious restructuring. Having failed in so many respects, the Third Crusade entailed disappointments no one in Europe could ignore. For one, it hadn't returned Jerusalem and the Holy Lands to Christian control. For another, it had led to bitter in-fighting within Europe—which ran directly counter to its Truce-of-God mission to repress wars on the home front and that was, at least in part, because it hadn't deflected the restless aggression of Europe's knights outside the West—by these standards, the Third Crusade might as well not have happened at all, which helps to explain why the Fourth Crusade followed so swiftly on its heels.

Meanwhile, there were other changes afoot within the European community. In particular, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the papacy had found a strong advocate in Innocent III, the most effective pope in Medieval history. This young, intelligent pontiff had been trained in law and thus spoke the language of international diplomacy better than most political rulers in Europe, indeed as well as the best statesmen ever have. His ability to craft strategies promoting the interests of the Church and to put them into effect is unparalleled in Western history, so he gave the next crusade a professional appearance of a sort the Crusades had never enjoyed before. Nevertheless, Europe would soon learn that amateurism suited crusading better.

Yet with Innocent spearheading the venture, it was bound to succeed somehow. The pontiff began by doing his history homework and devised a means by which to avoid the hazards which had scuttled the last two Crusades. What had drowned the most recent one was the division of leadership among three kings, and Innocent resolved to avoid that error by putting himself in charge alone. What had foundered the Second Crusade was the treachery of the double-dealing Byzantines, so the decision was made to send the next wave of crusaders by sea, enabling them to avoid Byzantium completely—that the Fourth Crusade would eventually end up in downtown Constantinople is a rousing tribute to human folly, not an indictment of Innocent's plan—and if everything had gone the way he arranged it, it would have been a perfectly fine Crusade. But the best-laid plans of popes and men . . .

Innocent arranged to contract ships and supplies from the port city of Venice, by now a great sea-power, and it looked like smooth sailing—on paper, at least, which is what lawyer-popes tend to look at anyway—but problems developed before this Crusade even got on board. All participants thought someone else was paying for the "rental" of the ships. So, when the crusaders began to arrive in Venice and were greeted with outstretched hands but no one had any money to offer, the deal nearly fell through

There are more ways than one, however, for a large contingent of warriors to earn their passage across the sea. For instance, Zara, one of Venice's subject states on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, had recently revolted from the city's burgeoning maritime empire and, to avoid Venetian reprisal, the people of Zara had delivered their city into the Pope's warm and all-welcoming embrace. Zara was now one of the Papal States, a burgeoning empire of its own currently under construction by the Roman Church.

In exchange for cash-on-delivery, the Venetians contracted with the crusaders to stop in at Zara on their way out east and force it back under Venice's thumb. Such an agreement was certainly not part of Innocent's plan for this Crusade—that is, his goals did not include that the crusaders he'd assembled would strip his papacy of newly-won territory—and when he learned about their agreement with the Venetians, he withdrew his support of the Crusade, along with his funding. And when that didn't stop them, he laid a writ of excommunication on them all—that is, he effectively ousted them from the Church, condemning their souls to perdition—but that, too, made exactly zero difference in their arrangements. The crusaders sailed to Zara and duly delivered it back into Venetian hands.

While lingering in the area, the crusaders came across a Byzantine exile, a pretender to the throne who had recently been exiled from Byzantium and who offered them a substantial sum if they would put him on the throne. With the sanction of the Venetians who saw nothing but advantage in causing turmoil within Byzantium, their trading rival in the Mediterranean, the crusaders were diverted again from the Holy Lands. This time they headed in the direction of Constantinople.

There, the crusaders' approach inspired considerable panic among the Byzantines, not an unreasonable reaction as this now well-funded, sea-borne assault force bore down on them. The reigning Emperor, along with many others, fled Constantinople. Thus, meeting no real resistance, the crusaders entered the city and set their "Latin" nominee for Emperor on the throne, then turned around and headed for the Holy Lands at last—so far, this expedition could hardly be called a crusade, more a floating band of hitmen-for-hire—but now these Zara-siegers and Byzantine-kingmakers were at last on their way to becoming true crusaders, for the moment anyway.

However, almost as soon as they sailed out of Constantinople's harbor, their "Latin" pretender was murdered. When the news of his assassination reached them, the crusaders turned their ships around and headed back to secure the situation, if for nothing else, to fortify their supply lines. Their earlier treacheries would now come back to haunt the Byzantines. When the crusaders found the city bolted tight against them, the stage was set for a siege and the odds were strongly in the Byzantines' favor. In all the centuries since its founding by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, Constantinople had never succumbed to an assault from outside.

But contrary to historical precedent, these crusading marauders who seemed determined to fight anyone but Moslems accomplished the seemingly impossible. At long last the heavens failed Byzantium and its capital city fell to siege for the first time ever, and not at the hands of Moslems or Vikings or Mongols—not that all of those hadn't at some point tried to take Constantinople—but to the descendants of the Byzantines' closest relatives, western Europeans, the other heirs of Rome. To put it another way, when Constantine's "New Rome" finally fell, it fell to the original Rome.

The resulting Sack of Constantinople in 1204 lasted three days, though its tremors are still felt today. For one, the great library there was destroyed when the crusaders ransacked it, even stabling their horses there—it's unimaginable how much ancient learning and literature was lost in that catastrophe—it's almost certain the complete works of some ancient authors whose writings now exist only in tattered fragments, some entirely lost, were housed in this library once. Worse yet, the fire set in that dark year became a cataclysmic blaze two centuries later.

In 1453, the Turks relit the flames of siege and took the city once and for all, exterminating Byzantium at long last. Thus, ironically, it was the Christian crusaders' siege of Constantinople that paved the way for the Moslems' eventual takeover of the entire area. Constantinople is now Istanbul, an Islamic site.

In besieging two cities—and neither of which was Moslem at the time—the men of the Fourth Crusade clearly thought they had done enough. Feeling no particular need to proceed on to the Holy Lands, they returned to Europe with their spoils of conquest, and given that they had briefly re-united East and West, healing momentarily the schism in the Church, Innocent III had little choice but to forgive and "re-communicate" the crusaders. So, they paraded in triumph, bearing the plunder of the East: gold, relics and all sorts of memorabilia, though nary a book of learning. In fact, remarkably little of any intellectual substance would come of the ransacked Byzantines.

The Fourth Crusade The Fourth Crusade was preached by Pope Innocent III and lasted from 1202 to 1204. Although intended to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims by way of Egypt, the crusade was hijacked by the Venetians and directed against the Christian cities of Zara and then Constantinople, which offered a softer target and richer pickings. Constantinople was taken, the Emperor deposed, and Baldwin of Flanders was set up in his place. The victorious crusaders amused themselves in the usual way, even though this was the capital of Christendom. As well as the standard bout of destruction, the men of the cross desecrated imperial tombs, plundered churches, stole holy relics, wrecked houses, vandalised libraries, destroyed whatever loot they could not carry, raped nuns, and murdered at will. They also set a prostitute on the patriarch's throne in Sancta Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, the greatest Church in Christendom. Later a Latin (i.e. Roman Catholic) patriarch was installed, and the Venetians shipped off the remaining treasures to their own city, where some of them remain to this day. We have sympathetic accounts of these events, including one of an Abbot threatening to kill an Orthodox priest if he did not hand over a stash of “powerful” relics*. The Eastern Churches still harbour bitter resentment about the behaviour of Western Christians during this time. Here is a modern Orthodox bishop on the subject:

Eastern Christendom has never forgotten those three appalling days of pillage. "Even the Saracens are merciful and kind," protested Nicetas Choniates [a contemporary historian], "compared with these men who bear the Cross of Christ on their shoulders". What shocked the Greeks more than anything was the wanton and systematic sacrilege of the Crusaders. How could men who had specially dedicated themselves to God's service treat the things of God in such a way? As the Byzantines watched the Crusaders tear to pieces the altar and icon screen in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and set prostitutes on the Patriarch's throne, they must have felt that those who did such things were not Christians in the same sense as themselves*.

The Western Church saw nothing wrong with its conduct. It is true that the Pope was initially irritated by the crusade having been diverted to attack Zara. But His Holiness was soon reconciled by a victory in his name over the Emperor, and any pretence that the crusade was ever intended to fight the infidel was abandoned. A papal legate, Peter of Saint-Marcel, issued a decree absolving the crusaders from having to proceed further to fight the Muslims. The new Emperor in Constantinople, Baldwin, wrote to the Pope about the sack of the city as "a miracle that God had wrought". The Pope rejoiced in the Lord and gave his approval without reserve*. Modern historians tend to take a different view. As Sir Steven Runciman put it "There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade"*.

In 1208 Pope Innocent III launched crusades against the Cathars in southern France, and in 1211 against Muslims in Spain, but it was difficult to raise interest in expeditions to the more distant and dangerous Holy Land. The year 1212 saw the so-called Children's Crusade. This crusade was preached by a French shepherd boy aged around 12, inspired by a vision of Christ. Christ gave him a letter for the King of France, and despite the King's indifference, the boy succeeded in rousing 30,000 recruits, none over the age of 12. The crusader children were blessed by priests and marched off to Marseilles. The idea was that God would protect them and supply them with suitable fighting skills. He would even part the sea so that they could walk from Marseilles to the Holy Land. But God declined to perform his promised miracle at Marseilles. Instead two men, monks according to one tradition, Hugh the Iron and William the Pig according to another, offered the children ships free of charge to take them to their destination. Most accepted, embarked, and were promptly sold as slaves to African Muslims. This was not an isolated incident. Roman Catholic traders were engaged in an established commerce involving the sale of young boys to Muslim rulers*.

Some 40,000 German children also set out on the crusade, but God declined to perform his promised miracle for them either. How many ever arrived to fight, if any at all, is not known. Few ever returned home.

Meanwhile in the Holy Land the resident Christians were becoming ever more accustomed to Eastern life. They wore robes and turbans, ate Eastern food, married Eastern women and learned Eastern medicine. Alliances were made between powerful rulers, often irrespective of religion. Christians accepted Muslims as their feudal Lords and Muslims accepted Christians as theirs.

The Albigensian Crusade, or War against the Cathars

The next wave of crusading came soon after the Fourth Crusade which, like the Third, had depleted little of Europe's material resources or manpower. A perceived success in hindsight, the siege of Constantinople reinvigorated Western Europeans' interest in religious warfare with the East. None of the subsequent crusades, however, resembled their immediate forebears much—certainly not in constituency or outcome—which should probably be counted a blessing.

Called by Innocent III in 1208, the so-called Albigensian Crusade took many years to complete. Moreover, it was directed not against the Moslem East but at lands inside Europe, a dramatic shift in focus for something dubbed a Crusade. The ostensible aim of this campaign was to rid southern France of the Albigensians, a heretical sect who refused to recognize the authority of the Church—shades of the Gnostics!—which makes it more of a "papal" war than a Crusade really, at least inasmuch as it promoted fighting inside Europe.

But the days when the Crusades had to be excused as an extension of the "Truce of God" were by then long past—they were now accepted for what they'd always really been, military missions launched by the Pope against the Church's, or at least his enemies—even so, the rewards were still the same. Namely, one could still earn a place in heaven not only by fighting "infidels" but also one's neighbors in Europe. This proved very attractive to many since it was much less risky to go on a Crusade close to home, as opposed to trekking hundreds of miles across hostile and sometimes barren lands to rescue Jerusalem from ungrateful heathens.

As evidence of just how hard it was to mount a foreign expedition, no western army had even come near the holy city since Richard shook lances with Saladin. Still, not even trying to head east seemed to many so far from the true spirit of crusading that Innocent's campaign against southern France was never numbered with the other Crusades. History and its own age agreed: this was not the "Fifth Crusade" but the "Albigensian Crusade," and that says it all.

The Fifth Crusade

What no Crusade since the Second had achieved, the mass exportation of European aggression and manpower outside the West, theFifth Crusade (1217-1221) at last accomplished. It killed thousands of disenfranchised Europe-born hotheads and bled off their pent-up hostility from their homeland, even though this expedition to the East was still not aimed squarely at the Holy Lands. Sent by sea to Egypt instead—after all, ocean travel had been good to the men of the Fourth Crusade—these benighted knights landed on the shores of the Nile just at the time of the annual flood. Trapped in high waters, they met a collective watery death at hands of the natives there.

With this, the consequences of the ignorance which had embraced the West since the Fall of Rome were now fully apparent. For, if these crusaders had read their Herodotus, they would have known about the flooding of the Nile, but since virtually no one in Europe could read Greek, how could they have anticipated the perils they faced? The Fifth Crusade stands alone as one of the best arguments ever for the practical merits of studying history—and the value of a liberal education.

The Fifth Crusade This crusade was preached by Pope Innocent III but undertaken in the reign of Pope Honorius III. It was led by Cardinal Pelagius of Lucia and lasted from 1217 to 1221. Although ultimately intended to recover Jerusalem, the main force was initially directed against Egypt. Damietta (a Mediterranean port on the Nile delta) was besieged. Saladin proposed a deal. He would cede Jerusalem, all central Palestine, and Galilee if the crusaders would spare Damietta. Pelagius rejected this offer, against military advice.

Damietta duly fell to the Christians. The surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery, and their children handed over to the Christian priests to be baptised and trained into the service of the Church. But Saladin soon recovered Damietta by force. The Christian campaign had been another failure, undermined by a combination of personal and national jealousies along with the lack of strategic insight on the part of Cardinal Pelagius, a man who has been described as "an ignorant and obstinate fanatic". As the defeated Christians sailed off, stories of their atrocities triggered a wave of persecution of Christians communities in Egypt, which until then had happily coexisted with their Muslim masters for centuries.

Frederick II's Crusade

Like the Albigensian Crusade, the next European expedition to the East is not numbered either, this one also disqualified for being too far from the spirit of crusading. Named instead Frederick's Crusade (1228-1229 CE) for the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, it was neither called for nor sanctioned by the papacy but was, in fact, an attempt to forge peaceable relations with the Middle East. Even after Frederick managed to return Jerusalem to Christian control, the pope would not acknowledge it was a "Crusade"—if Innocent III had still been alive, he might have appreciated the emperor's ambassadorial finesse but Innocent had died by then—because Frederick had effected his mission not through force of war but by diplomacy, and negotiation was not the point of crusading, any more than promoting war within Europe. Besides, Moslem forces retook Jerusalem soon thereafter, where it remained until very recently.

The Sixth and Seventh Crusades

The last of these military expeditions are the Sixth and Seventh Crusades (1248/1270), each led by Saint Louis (Louis IX), the King of France. Both proved utter failures. Louis, in fact, died leading the latter and in neither came anywhere near the Holy Lands. They did little more than ensure the King's journey to canonization.

So, when in 1291 the last Christian outpost in the Middle East, the port city of Acre, fell to Moslem forces, the Crusades were brought to an ignominious close. As a sign of this, at his great centennial Jubilee in 1300, a celebration of Christianity's might and longevity, Pope Boniface VIII offered indulgence to Christian pilgrims if they would "crusade" to Rome, not Jerusalem. It was the papacy's veritable admission that crusading had failed, as if to say, "There's no point anymore in fighting for the Holy Lands."

The same door that closed the Crusades opened another path leading down one of the darkest stretches of European history. The series of self-destructive conflicts which erupted soon thereafter amongst the nations of Europe—the most notable of them was the Hundred Years' Warbetween France and England—these combined with the Black Death to make for dismal days. As it turned out, the Crusades were not, in fact, the main event but a warm-up to the real "dance of death," lying in wait and limbering its swollen loins.

The Sixth Crusade The Sixth Crusade was proposed by Pope Gregory IX, but found few takers, previous crusades having proved such failures. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II organised his own crusade while under sentence of excommunication, and pursued it between 1222 and 1229. Despite the Pope's machinations and much to his embarrassment Frederick's military and strategic skill led to a negotiated settlement under which Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem came under Christian control. On his return to Europe the victorious Frederick crushed the papal forces that had been sent to destroy him, and the Pope had no choice but to lift the sentence of excommunication.

The Seventh Crusade The Seventh Crusade lasted from 1248 to 1254. It was initiated under Pope Innocent IV, Jerusalem having been lost to the Muslims again in 1244. It was led by King Louis IX of France ( St Louis) who started by attacking Egypt. Once again Damietta was captured, and once again the Sultan offered to exchange it for Jerusalem. Once again the offer was rejected, and once again the Muslims won Damietta back by force of arms. Louis himself was captured and had to be ransomed for 400,000 bezants (gold coins). After his release he went to the Holy Land but failed to recover the holy cities, and so gave up and went home.

Innocent's successor, Pope Alexander IV, tried to organise yet another crusade, this time against the Mongols, but he was unsuccessful. Had he had a better grasp of strategy he might instead have allied Western Christendom with the Asian powers. Nestorian Christianity was still influential in Asia, and the Mongols might easily have become allies, some of their leaders having already been baptised. Western and Eastern forces combined could have overcome the forces of Islam. In 1254 the Great Khan Mongka, whose mother had been a Nestorian Christian, had offered to recover Jerusalem for the Christians, if they would co-operate. But European Christians were unwilling to co-operate with each other, much less a remote and unknown semi-heathen whose mother had been a heretic. In time the victorious Mongols would themselves convert to Islam and spread their new religion throughout Asia, eclipsing Christianity from the Levant to the Far East.

he Eighth Crusade The Eighth Crusade was proposed by Pope Gregory X, but not organised until a later reign. It lasted only from 1270 to 1271, and was initially led once again by St Louis. An English contingent was made up largely of men who needed to hold on to lands they had taken by force in the baronial wars of the 1260s. By joining a crusade they were assured of the protection of the Church, and thus able to keep their newly acquired property. The project was another failure. It collapsed after Louis died of disease while attacking Carthage (modern Tunis).

The Ninth Crusade The Ninth Crusade continued St Louis's Eighth Crusade. It was led by Prince Edward, the future English King Edward I, between 1271 and 1272. Edward reached the Holy Land and was mystified by what he found. The Venetians were supplying the Sultan with all the timber and metal he needed to manufacture his armaments, while the Genoese controlled the Egyptian slave trade. Like Edward, new arrivals were generally surprised by the realities of life in the East. Italian city states jostled with each other for trade with Christians and Muslims without distinction. Senior churchmen paralysed strategic military initiatives. Noble families argued and betrayed each other without compunction. So did the representatives of European nation states, jealous of each other's favour or success. Members of the Eastern and Western Churches bickered continuously. Military Orders squabbled with each other and subverted military expeditions when they threatened their own commercial interests. The Knights Templar created the first true multinational banking corporation serving Christians and Muslims alike, while Muslim Assassins continued to pay homage to the Hospitallers. Native Christians resented their supposed saviours from the West, and would have preferred life under Byzantine or Muslim rulers. Edward got nowhere in such a milieu, so alien to his preconceptions. Like earlier crusades, this one fizzled out, a total failure.

Civil wars in the remaining Christian territories in the East hastened the end of the crusading period in the Holy Land. Christian princes burned each other's castles and besieged each other in their strongholds. Western Christians were regarded as barbarians by almost everyone. They were likely to kill anyone on a whim, whether Muslim, Jew or Christian. In 1290 newly arrived Italian crusaders went on a Muslim-killing spree in Acre, but since they assumed that any man with a beard was a Muslim, they murdered many Christians as well. The Italians seem to have been even worse than most of their fellow crusaders:

…the Italians, with their arrogance, their rivalries and the cynicism of their policy, caused irremediable harm. They would hold aloof from vital campaigns and openly parade the disunity of Christendom. They supplied the Muslims with essential war-material. They would riot and fight each other in the streets of the cities*.

By the last Crusade, many in Europe had come to see the Pope as no more than another war-mongering king.

Further Crusades In 1297 Pope Boniface VIII preached a crusade against the Colonnas, a powerful Italian family that regarded the papacy almost as its hereditary possession, and that felt free to take papal treasure at will, even when the papacy was temporarily out of its control. The crusade was announced, complete with indulgences, but Colonna forces captured the Pope. Although he was rescued, he died a month later, a broken man. New crusades against the Turks were proposed by a number of fourteenth century popes, but they never got started. Benedict XII , Innocent VI , Urban V and Gregory XI all proposed them, and Urban even got as far as proclaiming his in 1363, but nothing ever came of it.

King Peter I of Cyprus organised his own crusade, which attacked and took Alexandria in 1365. The subsequent massacres followed traditional lines of Jerusalem in 1099 and Constantinople in 1204. Crusaders massacred native Christians indiscriminately along with Jews and Muslims. Some 5,000 survivors, representing all three religions, were sold into slavery. European triumphalism over this victory soon waned. Muslim bitterness was revived, Venetian merchants were almost ruined, the spice and silk trades dried up, pilgrims" access to the Holy Land was imperilled, and native Eastern Christians were persecuted once more. Christendom became alarmed at what might happen next. Providentially, Peter was assassinated in 1369, and a peace treaty was signed the following year.

In the fifteenth century, Pope Martin V organised an unsuccessful crusade against the Hussites, a Christian sect in Bohemia. Pope Eugene IV tried to organise another crusade to recover the Holy Land, but it was a failure. A few years later Cardinal Cesarini persuaded the King of Hungary to support another crusade against the Turks. A ten-year truce was in place, but the Cardinal gave assurances that an oath sworn to a Muslim was invalid. Battle was joined at Varni in Bulgaria, in 1444, where the Christian forces were roundly defeated, leaving Cardinal Cesarini amongst the dead. The annihilation opened up central Europe to the Muslims and further weakened Constantinople.

In 1453 the Turks finally sacked Constantinople, news of which terrified European leaders. Pope Nicholas V tried to organise a crusade to recover the city, but it was yet another failure. Pope Callistus III did manage to organise one, funded by the sale of indulgences, but it was diverted and finished up attacking Genoa. Pope Pius II was so keen to revive the Crusades that he went himself, but hardly anyone else could be coerced into going with him. He waited near the coast at Ancona in the summer of 1464, hoping for others to turn up. His attendants concealed the fact that no supporting armies were on the way, and drew the curtains of his litter so that he should not see the desertions from his own fleet. When a few Venetian galleys hove into sight His Holiness died, apparently of excitement, and the crusade was promptly abandoned. Over the next three centuries, several further attempts were made at organising a crusade, but nothing came of them.

Conclusion: The Results of the Crusades

The Crusades are more telling in their failures than their successes. Because of them, the credibility of the Pope as the agent of God on earth suffered irreparable damage, especially those Crusades that turned out not so well, which added up to virtually all of them in the long run. But even the ones that did succeed in some respect accomplished little real good over time.

Laying the groundwork for the destruction of the Byzantine Empire can hardly be seen as a boon to Europe, if for no other reason than Byzantium no longer could serve as a buffer state against Moslem expansion to the west. That opened Eastern Europe to Turkish incursion, the consequences of which can still be seen in the recent conflicts in the Balkan region. Ironically, then, the two parties which had instigated these grand experiments in foreign atrocity—the Byzantines and the papacy—suffered the most in the end.

In sum, by all reasonable standards none of the Crusades profitted Europe much, certainly not in proportion to their cost. Only the First Crusade delivered any substantial and immediate gains. Moreover, the commercial progress, the extension of trade which might have followed in their wake, didn't, as if even that would excuse the extermination of so many souls. Besides, even then only the Venetians in the wake of the Fourth Crusade managed to advance their mercantile interests in the East long term. But, on the whole, was the toppling of Constantinople a fair price for this small gain? Few would say so today.

Still, to be fair to the complexity of these military expeditions, they surely amounted to "more than a romantic bloody fiasco," as some historians claim, but not much more. Surely, then, there's something to be learned from all this somehow but what that lesson is has yet to be determined since we still live today in the aftermath of the Crusades' devastation. Until we decide what drove our ancestors to this mad exploit, how we became the enemy of our brethren in the East, we will find no safe path out of the morass of intolerance and animosity which characterizes Christian-Islamic relations in the modern world. No other aspect of life today makes it clearer that there can be no secure future as long as we continue to war over our past and what-really-happened back then.

Repercussions The object of the crusades had been to save Eastern Christendom from the Muslims. They were undertaken with God's encouragement, support and promise of victory. When they ended they had proved a disastrous failure. The whole of Eastern Christendom was under Muslim rule. The Crusades, especially the later ones, had been characterised by partisan self-interest, short-sighted pettiness, internal squabbles, strategic mismanagement, poor military leadership, bigotry, barbarism, corruption and dishonour. The implications were wide-ranging. The popes had succeeded in ruining the emperors of both East and West, while strengthening and unifying disparate Muslim enemies. The greatest Church in Christendom, Sancta Sophia, was now a mosque. Many Eastern Churches, which had always enjoyed toleration under Muslim rulers, now suffered persecution and decline. The schism between East and West, which might have been healed by allies in war, was instead made permanent. Asia was lost to Christianity and was soon to convert wholesale to Islam. The balance of world power had shifted irrevocably. The death toll of these expeditions will never be known accurately for either side, but it is certain that it numbered hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions. Most of the dead were Christians. In fact Christian forces themselves may have killed as many Christians and Jews as they did Muslims.

Both sides fought fiercely, not to say barbarously. Christian virtues such as mercy and cheek-turning had been almost totally absent throughout, at least on the Christian side. At the end of it all nothing positive had been achieved. Before the crusades, Muslims had established a great reputation for tolerance. Now that they had suffered Christian atrocities and perfidy, they had become fanatical in defence of their religion. As Runciman wrote of the slaughter at Jerusalem during the First Crusade: "It was this bloodthirsty proof of Christian fanaticism that recreated the fanaticism of Islam"*. Muslim respect for Eastern Christians was superseded by hatred and contempt for Western ones.

The bitterness that was generated between the Christian West and the Muslim Levant was so great that its effects rumbled down the centuries and echo to the present day. Across many Eastern countries the word for a western foreigner is ferenghi, a corruption of Frank, and an echo of the fact that crusaders were usually referred to as Franks in the Middle Ages — but this is far from the most serious reverberation from the crusades.

In the nineteenth century the Crimean War was triggered by Holy Russia declaring itself protector of Christians in Ottoman lands, establishing itself as the successor of Constantinople. Moscow even called itself the Third Rome, i.e. the third capital of the Empire. Among others the new Rome sought to protect the Armenians, the victims (as well as the perpetrators) of numerous atrocities over the centuries. In 1915 Christian Armenians rebelled against the Turks and massacred Muslims. At Van alone they were reported to have killed 30,000. Over the next five years, hundreds of thousands died. According to some the victims were mainly Christians, according to others they were mainly Muslim. Such killing has continued into recent times. In 1988 Christians and Muslims started killing each other again, this time over the enclave of Ngorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan.

In the 1980s and 90s Christian-Muslim fighting broke out in Africa, notably in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. It happened in Europe as well — in Bosnia and Kosovo. Christian forces were also heavily involved in the civil war in the Lebanon. Arguably, the most brutal incident during the whole war was perpetrated by Christians against Muslim refugees. In 1982 hundreds of men, women and children were massacred by Christian troops in the refugee camps in Sabra and Chatila. It was like the original crusades all over again, except with machine guns. Maronite Christians, who are in communion with Rome, still emulate the behaviour of their crusader forbears. When General Michel Aoun launched a Christian offensive in March 1989 against Syrians in the Lebanon, he explicitly called it a "crusade". Some Muslim fighters in the Lebanon call themselves Salabeyen after Saladin's men who fought the crusaders.

There are many other echoes of the Crusades — louder in the East than in the West. Many in the Middle East are familiar with the story of the French General Henri Gouraud. After marching into Damascus in July 1920 he is reported to have kicked Saladin's tomb and said: "The Crusades have ended now! Awake Saladin, we have returned! My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.". Many Muslims regarded the Anglo-French Suez expedition of 1956 as another attempted repeat of crusader victories in 1191. The Palestine Liberation Organisation regards Israel as the West's new crusader State. Two of the PLO's divisions are named after the sites of Muslim victories over the Christian crusaders (Hattin and Ayn Julat). Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, described his victim in a letter as the "supreme commander of the Crusades"*. During the Gulf war of 1991, Saddam Hussein was guaranteed massive public support in many Muslim countries by likening the Western offensive to a Christian crusade, and implicitly likening himself to Saladin - that other famous native of Tikrit.

Following terrorist actions against the USA in 2001, President George W. Bush characterised America's response by remarking that "this crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while" — thus opening up the whole issue of the crusades again. Although the reference passed almost unnoticed among Americans, it sounded to many Muslims like a call for a holy war against Islam. In 2010 it was revealed that the US were using gun sights produced by Trijicon Inc, a Michigan arms company. These sights were stamped with biblical references and widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The practice had been started by the firm's founder, a devout Christian*. Most people in countries such as the USA and UK are still unaware of how sensitive the whole issue still is in the Muslim world. Not so in Spain, where it is widely known that the train bombings of 2004 were carried out in retribution for Spain's part in the war in Iraq as well as the reconquista — the fifteenth century Christian crusade against the moors of Iberia.

The crusaders" cross is still remembered by Muslims and it is for this reason that any symbol in the form of a red cross is not acceptable in Muslim countries, even if it has no connection with the crusaders" cross. The organisation generally known in the west as the Red Cross is to Muslims known as the Red Crescent. Nor is this the only symbolic reminder: Western swords are still made in the shape of a cross, just as scimitars are still made in the shape of a crescent.

Crusading brought no significant new territories or allies into the European cultural sphere. At t best, it can be said it opened the door for western traders to do business abroad, but even that proved harmful by making the Church seem commercial and greedy, and worse yet, the drain of energy and manpower won the West little more than increased antagonism with its neighbors in the East, a situation which still resonates in modern international relations. The Crusades didn't look as much like God's will as a catastrophic mistake.

For those living in the Near East during this period it's fair to say the results of these invasions — "Viking raids" is how many in the Islamic world saw, and still do see, the Crusades — were entirely negative. To the highly civilized and peaceful states there, the crusaders were marauders who left behind in their wake little more than bloodshed, turmoil, ashes and a well-earned hatred, an animus subsequently extended to all Europeans. It is as hard to build a case that the Moslem East benefitted in any way from the Crusades as it is to argue that the Huns brought blessings to Europe seven centuries prior.

Adhemar of Le Puy a bishop, recognisable by his mitre, riding to battle with other knights at Antioch on 28th June 1098. He is carrying a Holy Lance.