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THE CRUSADES

Death toll: 3 million¹

Rank: 30

Type: holy war

Broad dividing line: West Christians (“Franks”) vs. Muslims (“Saracens”) vs. East Christians (“Greeks”)

Time frame: 1095–1291

Location: Levant

Who usually gets the most blame: definitely not Richard the Lionheart and Saladin

Truce of God

When Arab conquerors overran the Middle East in the seventh century, they ended up controlling the birthplace of the Christian faith. These new overlords usually let their Christian subjects live in peace and allowed Christian pilgrims easy access to their holy sites, but every now and then a new Muslim king or dynasty burning with an extra dose of fanaticism would launch a persecution. It got especially bad under Caliph (Arabic for “successor”) al-Hakim of Egypt, who harassed Christians and destroyed churches throughout his domain, including Christendom’s holiest shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in 1009. Even though subsequent caliphs returned to a policy of tolerance, new seeds of mistrust had been sown.²

Then in 1071, a new team of empire-building Muslims, the Seljuk Turks, wiped out the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert, which opened up the remaining Byzantine provinces in Asia to conquest. The Byzantine emperor asked the West to save him, but it took many years of indifference before the West finally realized that letting all of Asia fall to the Turks would be a mistake. Meanwhile, the Turks moved south to take Palestine from the Egyptians. As the tide of battle rolled back and forth, Jerusalem changed hands a few times, with at least one massacre of the mostly Muslim ruling class of the city. Christian pilgrims from Europe found themselves caught in a dangerous war zone and returned home with tales of abuse at Muslim hands.

Through most of its early history, Christianity had frowned on war. Saint Augustine had established strict and nearly impossible criteria for declaring and fighting a just war. The church calendar forbade fighting on so many holy days that even officially approved combat was off limits for almost half the year. By the second millennium, the Roman Catholic Church had imposed so many limitations on war-making that it was difficult for the western European aristocracy to get a really good war going.

Not that they didn’t try. Some of the larger states, such as the German Empire, which had imposed rules of civilized behavior on the nobility, were weakening, leading to more and more local disputes being settled by force of arms. Too many unemployed sons of the nobility were wandering around Europe, brawling and fighting, killing each other and innocent bystanders.

Pope Urban II hoped to channel their energy into more acceptable activities, like killing infidels. With a stirring speech at the 1095 Council of Clermont, he encouraged the warrior class of Europe to take up the cross and plant it once again in the Holy Land. It seemed like a good task to keep all those spare knights busy, and it would guarantee the safety of pilgrims. Pope Urban assured them that anyone who took up a crusade would earn valuable spiritual bonus points to boost their score on Judgment Day. The volunteers pledged to see it through to the end, or may God strike them dead.³

First Crusade

Meanwhile, a wandering holy man, Peter the Hermit, was preaching directly to the people about the need to free the Holy Land from the Saracens. This People’s Crusade fired the imagination of Europe and attracted a massive following of men and women, soldiers and civilians, all sworn to free the Holy Land.

But first they decided to get rid of the infidels among them, so they rampaged through the Jewish communities in the Rhineland. A thousand Jews were killed or driven to suicide in Mainz. In Worms, crusaders broke into the bishop’s palace and slaughtered 800 Jews who had been given refuge there. More Jews were massacred in Speir, Cologne, and Prague before the crusaders set out for the Holy Land.

As these mobs of armed pilgrims crossed Europe, they tended to commandeer supplies from the communities along their path, secure in the knowledge that God held their quest in the highest favor. The local people, however, had a different opinion and fights broke out. One large crusader band that was killing Jews and plundering supplies across Germany was wiped out by the king of Hungary as it crossed the border. Finally, the first wave of crusaders arrived outside Constantinople, and the Byzantine emperor quickly ferried them across the straits to Asia before they could cause any trouble.

The Turks, meanwhile, had been hearing frightening rumors that a vast horde from the west was bearing down on them. The rumor became reality when the Byzantines dumped the People’s Crusade in Asia and pointed them toward the Saracens. The crusaders flowed forward, and soon surrounded Nicaea, a Greek city the Turks had recently taken. The Turkish sultan gathered his forces and set out to break the siege. They approached cautiously and skirmished tentatively. Finally, the full armies clashed, but it was not much of a battle. The inexperienced and incompetent mob of Franks was easily wiped out, leaving thousands dead on the field and tens of thousands more on route to the slave markets.⁴

When the next wave of crusaders arrived, the Turks shrugged. They were still congratulating each other on how easy it had been to dispatch the first batch; however, the second wave comprised the more level-headed and prudent crusaders. The first wave had been overeager and unprepared. The second wave was neither. These were the ones who had stayed behind and put some effort into planning and preparation. They sharpened their swords, transferred their estates to competent caretakers, and loaded up on provisions. They put less faith in God and a stout heart, and more in horseflesh and steel.

After crossing into Asia, three columns of Franks converged on the Turks, who mistakenly put all of their effort into fighting the first column they came across, at Dorylaeum in July 1097. When the second column suddenly arrived on their flank, the Turks were surprised, tired, and running out of arrows. Then the third column showed up behind them, and the Turks were slaughtered and scattered in confusion. The sultan fled, abandoning his servants, treasury, and baggage train.⁵

With the Turks broken, the Franks marched across Asia Minor, reclaiming the lost territory of the Byzantines and pushing toward Syria. There weren’t enough crusaders to totally surround the great city of Antioch, so they camped outside for several months trying to figure out what to do next. Eventually, scouts reported that a Saracen relief force was coming to break the siege, but then, at the last minute, the crusader spy network inside the city paid off. That night, assisted by a Christian Armenian resident of Antioch, a strike force scaled the walls, killed the sentries, and flung open the gates for the waiting army.⁶

When the Turkish relief force arrived and found the crusaders inside the city, they surrounded the city for a siege of their own. But just as the crusaders lost all hope, they discovered, hidden under the floor of an ancient church, the actual^a spearhead that had been thrust into Christ’s side at Calvary. Heartened by this powerful talisman, they sallied beyond the gates to fight the Turks.

The long march had killed most of the Franks’ horses, so now they fought on foot, which accidentally turned out to their advantage. Unlike their Saracen counterparts, European knights trained to fight both on horse and on foot, but the Turks had never come up against heavily armored foot soldiers before. Without big warhorses to hit, Turkish arrows had little effect, and when the crusaders closed in with the Saracen light infantry, they butchered the Muslims.⁷

The First Crusade had never developed a strict command structure. It usually operated as a collection of allied armies voluntarily cooperating (or not) according to consensus, but Prince Bohemond of Taranto had been the practical commander of the crusaders so far.⁸ Now Bohemond settled down to rule Antioch, while Count Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon led the Crusade south toward Jerusalem.

In December 1098, crusaders took the town of Ma’arra after a month-long siege and slaughtered some 20,000 Saracen captives. By now, with two years of hard marching behind them, the crusaders were exhausted and starving. They had lost most of their horses, and the countryside had been stripped of food. The hungriest crusaders followed the massacre at Ma’arra by roasting and feeding on the bodies of dead Muslims.^{b 9}

Finally, Jerusalem was besieged and captured in July 1099. The crusaders looted the city and killed 70,000 people in the streets—Muslims mostly, but also anyone who looked Muslim. Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue were burned inside. The chroniclers wrote of crusaders wading through blood as deep as their horses’ bridles—an exaggeration obviously, but we can certainly imagine them splashing through sticky puddles of blood leaking from bodies in the streets.

Style of War

In history books, the Crusades are usually numbered as a sequence of distinct events, but they only looked like that from Europe. What we usually call the First or Seventh Crusade is really the first or seventh large wave of new recruits rounded up and marched out from Europe. This doesn’t mean that peace reigned in Palestine between officially designated Crusades. In Asia, war came and went on its own schedule based on local circumstances.

In both armies, the knights were a specialized minority who fought from horseback. Wrapped head to toe in light chain mail, they fought with a lance, sword, axe, or mace, bobbing and ducking behind a large shield that bore the brunt of the enemy’s blows. Each knight was at the head of a team of noncombatant support personnel—squires, pages, grooms—and supplemented by light infantry and archers.

The Seljuk Turks were recent arrivals from the steppe who fought mostly as mounted archers. The older nations of the Mideast, such as the Fatimids of Egypt, fought much the same way as the Europeans. Neither style of fighting had a clear advantage. European knights were more heavily armored but slower than the Turks. European crossbows had a longer range but a slower rate of fire than the short bows of the Turks. On open ground, the Turks had the advantage, but at close quarters and in siegecraft the Franks did.

Some of the more dedicated crusaders formed into orders of fighting monks to escort and protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Headquartered in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount and the Amalfitan Hospital, these Templars and Hospitallers kept monastic vows of poverty and chastity, and then worked off all that pent-up energy by smiting the heathens. Because the Templars controlled movement to the Holy Land, they invented the letter of credit, whereby pilgrims would leave cash at an office of the order in Europe and carry a receipt to be redeemed at any other office of the order worldwide. As the only Europeans who understood the dark art of moving money around, the Templars acquired a sinister reputation.

The Crusades into the Holy Land coincided with a couple of other efforts to expand Christendom: the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain and the Teutonic conquest of the pagan Baltic Sea. All three efforts exchanged personnel and learned from one another. The Second Crusaders even stopped in Spain on the way to Palestine and helped the local Christians by capturing Lisbon from the Moors.

Second Crusade

Almost a half century passed, and the crusaders were settled comfortably into four crusader states: Edessa, Tripoli, Jerusalem, and Antioch. The Holy Land was firmly in control of the children of the First Crusaders, but then the new Saracen ruler, Zengi, consolidated an empire in Syria and reduced the crusader states to three by capturing Edessa, the inmost outpost of Christendom. Europe organized a second crusade to take it back (1147), and this time kings jumped on the bandwagon—Philip Augustus of France, Conrad III of Germany. However, the royal dilettantes of the Second Crusade were not as dangerous as the hungry, landless adventurers of the First Crusade, so they didn’t make a dent in the surrounding Saracens.

Third Crusade

After Zengi’s death, the empire was passed around to several young Zengids until Saladin, a Kurdish general acting as regent, decided to rule in his own name instead. At first, Saladin maintained peaceful relations with the Christians on the Levantine coast, but then a crusader lord, Reginald of Chatillon, ambushed a Muslim caravan and seized Saladin’s sister. Saladin avenged the offense with a new jihad that climaxed in a massive Saracen victory at the Battle of Hattin. This opened the way for Saladin to capture Jerusalem along with many Templar prisoners, whom he put to death.

Losing Jerusalem convinced Europe to get serious about crusading again. In 1190, Richard the Lionheart, the brand new king of England, set out from Marseilles with King Philip II of France. The Holy Roman Empire in central Europe was supposed to supply the backbone of the expedition, but shortly after crossing into Asia Minor, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa slipped in a river he was fording and was pinned underwater by the weight of his armor, drowning.

History likes the Third Crusade. This was the classy crusade, where wise and virtuous kings hacked each other apart with honor and style. There was none of that wading through rivers of blood after capturing every city. In the Third Crusade, all of the rivers of blood came from people who jolly well knew what they were getting into. After an especially good fight, a victor might simply salute his stunned and helpless opponent instead of sliding a dagger into the eye slot of his helmet to finish him off.

OK. It probably wasn’t nearly as sporting as later stories imagine, but both sides in the Third Crusade received good press. Saladin is one of the most beloved warlords in Muslim history, and many otherwise somber historians describe him in unusually affectionate language; “when he smiled, he could light up a room” is an actual quote from a recent history.¹⁰ Dante imagined Saladin in the minimum-security wing of Hell, where decent heathens are merely quarantined rather than boiled in lava. Richard the Lionheart, meanwhile, has gone down as one of the most beloved kings in English history (with one of history’s greatest nicknames) based entirely on his crusading. He barely even visited his own kingdom, which he impoverished to support his holy war. Philip II stuck around only long enough to earn his points with the pope, and then he hurried home to France.

In reality, Saladin’s sense of honor was flexible. After Hattin, two leading crusaders were brought before him in chains. He fed the first one, explaining that the rules of hospitality now forbade him from killing a prisoner who had been given food and drink by his captor. The other prisoner—Reginald of Chatillon, whom Saladin was planning to kill for breaking the truce—lunged for a cup of wine and downed it before anyone could stop him. Reginald thought, Aha! I’m safe! But Saladin killed him anyway because no one likes a smart-ass.¹¹

Richard, too, was not completely chivalrous. After taking Acre from the Muslims, Richard gave Saladin a week to come to terms. When the deadline passed, Richard dragged his 2,700 Saracen prisoners of war outside the city gates and beheaded them, along with 300 of their family members. Freed from this encumbrance, the full crusader army rode off to battle.

The two titans fought only one pitched battle. After a frustrating campaign of maneuver, the armies finally met at Arsuf. Richard held his anxious knights back under a shower of Arab arrows until the right moment presented itself. Then, the Lionheart released a cavalry charge that broke the enemy ranks and slaughtered them. The victory, however, went nowhere because Richard had to hurry home to save his wobbly throne from his brother and save his fiefs in France from his onetime comrade, Philip II. Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands.

Fourth Crusade

By now, Christendom had realized that Palestine could not stand alone; its larger neighbors, Egypt and Syria, conquered it too easily. No empire in recorded history has ever been anchored on Palestine, so the next wave of crusaders (mobilized by Pope Innocent III) decided to take Egypt by sea and build on that.

When this new batch of crusaders arrived in Venice, it turned out that they didn’t have enough money to pay for their trip to the Orient. Being businessmen above all else, the Venetians said, No problem, the crusaders could earn the money by taking the Adriatic port of Zara away from Hungary. The city was duly assaulted and turned over to the Venetians.

The pope immediately excommunicated the entire crusader force for this assault on fellow Christians, and several leaders backed out of the enterprise, but the bulk of the crusaders pushed on. Faced with crusader stubbornness, the pope backed down and took the crusaders back into the church.

Because every wave of crusaders had, like locusts, left a trail of desolation as it made its way through the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantines were reluctant to let the crusaders pass again. The crusaders themselves had mixed feelings about the Byzantines. Sure, these Greeks were Christians, but they were also schismatics who practiced their own alien version of the religion in defiance of the pope. Rather than negotiate rights of passage this time, the crusaders found an exiled Byzantine prince who claimed the throne, and in 1204 they seized Constantinople on his behalf. When he turned stingy about paying them for their support, however, the Franks installed one of their own as king. Thus, the last city left unlooted from the Ancient Era was thoroughly ransacked, and many precious books, pieces of art, and archives from the Greco-Roman zenith disappeared—burned, trampled, melted, smashed, or stolen.

As payment for ferrying the crusaders into battle against Byzantium, Venice took four big bronze horses to decorate Saint Mark’s Square, plus a scattering of easily defensible islands to control the trade of the eastern Mediterranean.

While western Europeans occupied the strategic core of the Byzantine Empire, three backwater provinces remained under Greek rule. Over the next few decades these parts painfully reassembled themselves into the Byzantine Empire, finally retaking Constantinople from the Franks in 1261.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this activity, the whole business of attacking the Saracens completely slipped everyone’s mind.¹²

Children’s Crusade

In 1212 a new outbreak of crusading fever swept Europe as a couple of wandering child evangelists stirred up the youth of France and Germany with impassioned pleas and sermons. Enthusiastic mobs of young people followed them in devotion from town to town. As with most medieval history, we have only a few sentences written at the time and many pages of embellished tales written a generation later as our source of information, so no one is sure exactly what happened, but apparently thousands of children—teenagers, more likely—ran away from home and took to the road, determined to free the Holy Land after their elders had failed. Many never made it out of Europe, and most were never seen again.

The most common story is that a column of 20,000 eager French children descended on the port of Marseilles, where they were told transportation awaited them. They embarked on ships and sailed off to do God’s bidding—except that it was a trick: the shipmasters sold them all in Mediterranean slave markets instead. Another wave of 30,000 German youngsters made the hazardous crossing over Alpine passes; many were lost along the way. Some drifted over to Genoa, where they gave up and settled down. Others pressed on. When the survivors gathered in Rome to be blessed by the pope, he thanked them for their piety, but seeing their pitiful condition, sent them home.¹³

Fifth Crusade and Beyond

By now, the crusader movement was fizzling out, and the European presence on the Levantine shore was down to three coastal enclaves—Acre, Tripoli, and Antioch. A new outburst of crusaders under King Louis of France (later Saint Louis) tried to conquer Egypt. They took the port of Damietta and won some battles as they moved deeper into Egypt, but in the end, they simply lacked the stamina to keep moving forward. While withdrawing from Cairo, the king and his army were captured and held for ransom.

The next Crusade, the Sixth, was a disappointment for everyone involved. With Mongols bearing down on the Muslim world from the Far East, the Saracens had to keep their armies freed up and ready to meet the next raid from the east. They needed to keep the crusader states in their rear quiet, and the price for this was returning control of Jerusalem to the Franks.

So the crusaders got Jerusalem back, but they got it through diplomacy and didn’t get to kill anyone. Even so, it was a temporary measure and Jerusalem was shortly back in Muslim hands. Meanwhile, the crusader state of Antioch fell to the Mongols.

In 1289, Tripoli fell to the Egyptians, leaving only Acre in crusader hands. Then in 1291, a band of Christian pilgrims from Acre brawled with Syrian merchants, and the sultan of Egypt demanded compensation for the Muslims killed. When the price proved beyond the means of the Christian community, the sultan attacked and removed this last crusader state from the map.

Legacy

Some historians say that the Crusades drove a wedge between Christianity and Islam that still exists to this day, but let’s be realistic. Neither of these religions gets along with anybody. It would be difficult to find any time in history when their followers weren’t killing each other—and even if you could, that would only be because they were resting up and getting ready for another round.

However, by putting huge numbers of western European aristocrats in close contact with the sophisticated Orient, the Crusades were able to jump-start Western Civilization—in a happy history book that would be the main legacy of the Crusades. For our purposes, however, the main legacy was a harshening of the Christian religion. For the next five hundred years—until the Enlightenment tamed it—western Christianity had an unfortunate tendency to direct violence against unbelievers.

We will see other religious wars in this book, but those will be wars about people—people trying to impose their beliefs, people wanting to be left alone, people being punished, people being rescued. The Crusades were about a place: the Holy Land.¹⁴

While fighting over land is quite common, the land in dispute usually provides some practical resource—minerals, crops, harbors, farms, strategic location, exploitable labor, or sheer size. Palestine has none of these. The sole resource of the Holy Land is heritage. There’s no gold, no oil, very little fertile land, and few natives, nothing but sacred sites, so in essence, the Crusades killed 3 million people in a fight to control the tourist trade.