Crusades 1 Crusades The Crusades were religious conflicts during the High Middle Ages through the end of the Late Middle Ages, conducted under the sanction of the Latin Catholic Church. Pope Urban II proclaimed the first crusade in 1095 with the stated goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem. There followed a further six major Crusades against Muslim territories in the east and Detail of a miniature of Philip II of France arriving in Holy Land numerous minor ones as part of an intermittent 200-year struggle for control of the Holy Land that ended in failure. After the fall of Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, in 1291, Catholic Europe mounted no further coherent response in the east. Many historians and medieval contemporaries, such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, give equal precedence to comparable, Papal-blessed military campaigns against pagans, heretics, and people under the ban of excommunication, undertaken for a variety of religious, economic, and political reasons, such as the Albigensian Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, the Reconquista, and the Northern Crusades. While some historians see the Crusades as part of a purely defensive war against the expansion of Islam in the near east, many see them as part of long-running conflicts at the frontiers of Europe, including the Arab–Byzantine Wars, the Byzantine–Seljuq Wars, and the loss of Anatolia by the Byzantines after their defeat by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. Urban II sought to reunite the Christian church under his leadership by providing Emperor Alexios I with military support. Several hundred thousand soldiers became Crusaders by taking vows and by receiving plenary indulgences.[1][2] These crusaders were Christians from all over Western Europe under feudal rather than unified command, and the politics were often complicated to the point of intra-faith competition leading to alliances between combatants of different faiths against their coreligionists, such as the Christian alliance with the Islamic Sultanate of Rûm during the Fifth Crusade. The impact of the Crusades was profound. Jonathan Riley-Smith identifies the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Crusader States as the first experiments in "Europe Overseas". These ventures reopened the Mediterranean to trade and travel, enabling Genoa and Venice to flourish. The collective identity of the Latin Church was consolidated under the Pope’s leadership. The Crusades were the source of heroism, chivalry, and medieval piety that spawned medieval romance, philosophy, and literature. However, they reinforced the nexus between Western Christendom, feudalism, and militarism that ran counter to the Peace and Truce of God that Urban had promoted. The chance of ending the East–West Schism and reuniting the church was ended by the conflict between the Latin Crusaders and the Orthodox Christians, leading to the ultimate weakening and fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans. The conduct of the Crusaders was shocking not only to modern sensibilities but also to a contemporary of the First Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux. The Crusaders pillaged the countries in transit, living off the land, as did all transiting armies of the time. The First Crusade resulted in the massacre of 8,000 Jews in the Rhineland in the first of Europe's pogroms. It also resulted in the slaughter of a purported 70,000 citizens in the fall of Jerusalem. The nobles carved up the territory that they had gained rather than return it to the Byzantines, as they had vowed to do. The Fourth Crusade resulted in the sacking of Constantinople. The majority of crusaders, however, were poor people trying to escape the hardships of medieval life in an armed pilgrimage leading to Apotheosis at Jerusalem. Crusades 2 Terminology Crusade "Crusade" is a modern term, from the French croisade and Spanish cruzada, that was applied to the medieval military expeditions only in retrospect. The French form of the word first appears in the L'Histoire des Croisades written by A. de Clermont and published in 1638. By 1750, the various forms of the word "crusade" had established themselves in English, French, and German.[3] The Oxford English Dictionary records its first use in English as occurring in 1757 by [4] William Shenstone. The Battle of Ager Sanguinis, medieval miniature The crusades were never referred to as such by their participants. The original crusaders were known by various terms, including fideles Sancti Petri (the faithful of Saint Peter) or milites Christi (knights of Christ). Like pilgrims, each crusader swore a vow (a votus) to be fulfilled on successfully reaching Jerusalem, and they were granted a cloth cross (crux) to be sewn into their clothes. This "taking of the cross", the crux, eventually became associated with the entire journey.[5] They saw themselves as undertaking an iter, a journey, or a peregrinatio, an armed pilgrimage. The inspiration for this “messianism of the poor “was the expected mass apotheosis at Jerusalem. Numbering Historians consider that between 1096 and 1291 there were seven major crusades and numerous minor ones. However, some consider the Fifth Crusade of Frederick II as two distinct crusades. This would make the crusade launched by Louis IX in 1270 the Eighth Crusade. In addition, sometimes even this Crusade is considered as two, leading to a Ninth Crusade. The Crusades A pluralist view of the Crusades has developed in the 20th century inclusive of all papal-led efforts, whether in the Middle East or in Europe.[6] This takes into account the view of the Latin Church and medieval contemporaries such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux that gave equal precedence to comparable military campaigns against pagans, heretics and many undertaken for political reasons. This wider definition includes the persecution of heretics in Southern France, the political conflict between Christians in Sicily, the Christian re-conquest of Spain and the conquest of heathens in the Baltic. Countering this is the view the Crusades were a defensive war in the Middle East against Muslims to free the Holy Land from Muslim rule. Political Crusades Popes called frequent crusades for political reasons and crusades were also declared as a means of conflict resolution amongst fellow Christians. Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against his political opponent Markward of Anweiler in Sicily. Only a few people took part, and the need for the crusade ended in 1202 when Markward died. This is generally considered the first "political crusade"[7] Between 1232 and 1234 there was a crusade against the Stedingers, peasants who refused to pay tithes to the Archbishop of Bremen. The archbishop excommunicated them, and Pope Gregory IX declared a crusade in 1232. The peasants lost the Battle with Altenesch on 27 May 1234 and were destroyed.[8] Emperor Frederick II was the object of several political crusades called by a number of popes. In 1240 Pope Gregory IX deposed and preached a crusade against him for his opposition in Italy. In 1248 Pope Innocent IV's [9] crusade against him was transferred in 1250 to his son, Conrad IV when he died to little effect. Crusades were called against Frederick's illegitimate son Manfred, King of Sicily, from 1255 through 1266,[10] and Crusades 3 Conrad's son, Conradin, in 1268 with the urging of Charles of Anjou.[11] Two crusades appear to have been called against opponents of King Henry III of England – one from 1215 to 1217 and the other from 1263 to 1265 with the first enjoying the same privileges as those given to crusaders on the Fifth Crusade. The second got as far as having papal legates being dispatched to England with the power to declare a crusade against Simon de Montfort, but Montfort's death in 1265 ended this.[12] The Norwich Crusade of 1383, also called the Despenser's crusade, which was a military expedition that aimed to assist the city of Ghent in its struggle against the supporters of Antipope Clement VII was really an extension of the Hundred Years War, rather than a purely religious enterprise.[13] Historiography ... The lives and labours of millions who were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire During the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the 16th century, historians saw the Crusades through the prism of their own religious beliefs. Protestants saw them as a manifestation of the evils of the Papacy, while Catholics viewed the movement as a force for good.[14] During the Enlightenment, historians tended to view both the Crusades and the entire Middle Ages as the efforts of barbarian cultures driven by fanaticism.[15] By the 19th century, with the dawning of Romanticism, this harsh view of the Crusades and its time period was mitigated somewhat,[16] with later 19th-century crusade scholarship focusing on increasing specialization of study and more detailed works on subjects.[17] Enlightenment scholars in the 18th century and modern historians in the West have expressed moral outrage at the conduct of the crusaders. In the 1950s, Sir Steven Runciman wrote that "High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed ... the Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God".[18] In the 20th century, three important works covering the entire history of the crusades have been published, those of Rene Grousset, Steven Runciman, and the multi-author work edited by K. M. Stetton.[19] A pluralist view of the Crusades has developed in the 20th century inclusive of all papal-led efforts, whether in the Middle East or in Europe.[6] Historian Thomas Madden has made the contrary argument that "[t]he crusade, first and foremost, was a war against Muslims for the defense of the Christian faith...