The Crusades the Crusades Left a Complex and Troubling Legacy In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Crusades The Crusades left a complex and troubling legacy in world civilization. In order to direct noble violence away from Christendom, in 1095 Pope Urban II urged Western Knights to use their arms to free the Holy Land from Muslim occupation. In return, he promised to absolve them from all of the punishment due for their sins in this life or the next. Nobles and commoners alike responded with enormous enthusiasm, and soon gangs of looting peasants and organized bands of noble warriors headed east. The commoners left a swath of destruction in their wake, and few mourned when they were destroyed by the Muslims. The nobles, composed primarily of second sons and lower nobility in search of land and fortune as well as salvation, were remarkably successful. After terrible hardships, the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and eyewitness reported that blood ran ankle deep in the old city as the Latin crusaders killed all Muslims Jews and Orthodox Christians they found. The then established a Latin (the language of the Catholic Church) kingdom in Palestine. For more than two centuries, bands of Western warriors went on armed pilgrimage to defend that precarious kingdom. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was the first experiment in European overseas colonization. Its rulers, a tiny minority of Western knights who established a feudally structured monarchy modeled on the European society they had known, ruled a vastly larger population of Muslims and eastern Christians. Although the Christian rulers were not particularly harsh, they made little effort to absorb or even to understand the native population. Crusaders were uninterested in converting Muslims, and their efforts to impose Roman forms of Christian worship and organization alienate the indigenous Orthodox Christian population of the kingdom. In art, culture, architecture, and social values, the crusaders remained Latins, absorbing only some of the food and spices, and making some accommodation in their clothing and housing to the climate of the area. Otherwise, the Latin kingdom played a negligible role as a bridge between the eastern and western worlds. The crusaders remained isolated, supported by the regular supplies brought by Italian merchants (for which cities such as Genoa and Pisa obtained valuable economic rights in the kingdom) and by periodic infusions of fighters in the form of individuals or as part of subsequent organized Crusaders. The success of the First Crusade eluded subsequent expeditions. In the middle of the twelfth century, the erosion of the Latin kingdom alarmed Westerners, and the kings of France and Germany, Louis VII and Conrad III, responded to Bernard of Claircaux’s call to take up the cross. The second Crusader ended in defeat and disaster at the hands of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor. In 1187 the Kurdish Muslim commander, Saladin, defeated the Latin kingdom at the battle of Hattin and reconquered Jerusalem. Saladin allowed most Christians to safely evacuated the city and did not engage in a bloodbath. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the kings of France and England, Philip II Augustus and Richard the Lion-Hearted, responded with the Third Crusade. Frederick drowned in Anatolia, and Richard and Philip quarreled to such a point that Philip abandoned the crusade and returned to France. Richard failed to recapture Jerusalem but signed a peace treaty with Saladin, who he came to like and respect. On his way home, the English king was captured and imprisoned in Austria until his mother, Eleanor, could raise a king’s ransom to buy his freedom. The Fourth Crusade never even made it to Palestine. It was sidetracked, with Venetian encouragement, into capturing and sacking the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Although the Byzantines took back their city it was fatally damaged and would fall to Turks in 1453. The Fifth Crusade organized by Pope Innocent III and manned primarily by nobles from Austria and Hungary, was unsuccessful. It failed after the crusaders refused an offer by the sultan al-Kamil to exchange the rich seaport of Damietta in return for the holy city of Jerusalem and the rest of the Latin kingdom. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who regained Jerusalem through a peace treaty with the Muslims, led the sixth crusade. The treaty angered the pope and led to Frederick’s excommunication from the Catholic Church. In 1244, the Muslims once again seized Jerusalem. That inspired King Louis IX of France to lead the Seventh Crusade. The Crusade ended when Louis and many of his men were defeated and captured by the Muslims. Louis was freed after a large ransom was paid. In 1270, Louis led the Eighth Crusade against the Muslims. Louis died from a plague soon after arriving in Tunis in northern Africa. Although military failures, the Crusaders appealed particularly to younger sons and knights acquired in the East the status that constricting lineages denied them in the west. Other such holy wars were directed against their Muslims in Spain, the Slavs in Eastern Europe, and even against heretics and political opponents in France and Italy and were more successful. More important the Crusades opened the world-view of Europeans. They saw there were other people in the world who had more wealth and culture than they did. They wanted the silk clothing and spiced meals they had found in the Middle East and the Italy merchants of Genoa, Pisa and Venice would bring those eastern goods to them. Those good and the expanded world view would cause the High Middle Ages to continue its Renaissance until it was short-circuited, but not stopped, by the disasters of the 13th Century. DO THE FOLLOWING ON NOTEBOOK PAPER – WRITE ITEM – NUMBER AND LETTER YOUR ANSWERS 1. Define the following – a. Legacy b. Complex c. Subsequent d. Bloodbath e. Ransom f. Appealed 2. Define the following from your Reading – a. Latin 3. Identify the following – Tell Who/What? and Why? – a. Seljuk Turks b. Saladin c. Genoa d. The 4th Crusade e. Frederick II f. Louis IX 4. Answer the following using complete sentences a. What did Pope Urban II tell Western Knights they would gain if they went to Jerusalem to engage in violence instead of staying in Europe? b. Describe the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. c. How did Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem differ from its capture by the 1st Crusade? d. Who lead the 3rd Crusade? e. How did the Crusades make the European High Middle Ages more cultured? .