Post by PeterB on May 29, 2007 11:57:07 GMT -4
As I've mentioned a couple of times before, I have a regular spot on radio. Every three weeks, I get about 15-20 minutes to discuss a topic with the presenter. This year, we've been focussing on topics of history, and this time I decided to look at the Crusades - and despite being more than 700 years in the past, they still have an influence today.
= = = =
Last Friday week, 18 May, marks the 716th anniversary of the fall of Acre, the last major Crusader city in the Holy Land, to Muslim forces. It brought to an end nearly 200 years of Christian occupation of a narrow strip of land along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, known as Outremer.
The connection between Christianity and Crusading is strong, despite the apparent contradiction of violence committed in the name of a peaceful religion. Saint Augustine had developed the concept of a just Christian war in the 5th century, and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Heraclius had called on the Church’s help in a war against invading Persians in the 7th century. Then there was the Church’s involvement in the gradual recovery of Spain from the Muslims, starting in the 9th century. It was only another short step to invade kingdoms half a world away which weren’t a direct threat.
The Crusades are often reduced to a simple conflict between Christian and Muslim, but the reality, as you might expect, is considerably more complex. They were caused, at least in part, by events outside Europe, and even outside Christianity. Their purpose, at least in part, had nothing to do with freeing the Holy Land from the Saracen. And during the time that the Crusader states existed, religion often took second place to politics.
The impetus behind the First Crusade is generally taken to be Pope Urban II. In 1095 he received a letter from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, asking for mercenaries to come and fight in the Byzantine army. Alexius had sent similar letters to kings and princes all over Europe, but Urban’s unique position as the only religious leader to receive a letter gave him an idea.
Urban was the latest in a series of Popes over the previous 50 years who had gained for the Papacy power it hadn’t had for centuries. At first the Papacy had stripped from the German Emperor his part in selecting new Popes, and followed this by removing his right to appoint lesser clergy as well. Finally, taking advantage of a weak regency of a child Emperor, they claimed the right to decline to crown an Emperor if they chose. Logical steps to increase the Papacy’s power even further were to free the Holy Lands from Muslim rule, and to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which had formally split in the mid 11th century. The Pope was also concerned at the level of violence in Western Europe. In the previous 100 years, external threats (such as Vikings, Arab pirates and Hungarians) had been brought under control, and so the soldiers of Europe turned to fighting each other. Urban therefore called for an armed pilgrimage to free Jerusalem at a public speech in Clermont, southern France.
The effect was spectacular, and within a year, four large armies gathered, in Normandy, southern France, western Germany, and in the Norman lands of southern Italy. The four armies represented many more soldiers than the Byzantine Emperor had expected, and in any case they had no intention of serving in his army as mercenaries. All he could do was extract an oath of loyalty from their leaders, and to feed the armies and send them on their way as quickly as he could.
The reason Alexius had needed to call for mercenaries was that in 1071, the Byzantine army had been destroyed in an unnecessary battle against the Seljuk Turks, following which nearly half the Empire’s lands (roughly corresponding to today’s Asian Turkey) had been occupied by nomadic Turkish tribesmen. The battle had been unnecessary, because the Turks had been on their way to invade Egypt.
The object of the Turks was the overthrow of the Fatimid dynasty which ruled Egypt. The Fatimids were Shia Muslims, while the Turks were recent converts to Sunni, or Orthodox, Islam. The Turks were fired by the fanaticism of the newly converted to re-unite all of the Islamic world under the rule of the Orthodox Caliphate in Baghdad, and destroy the Shia Caliphate in Egypt. This is why at least one of the causes of the Crusades was completely unrelated to either Europe or Christianity.
Christians who’d recently returned from the Holy Land supported the Pope’s call for an armed pilgrimage. Since the first wave of Islam had conquered the Holy Land in the 7th century, Christians had been freely allowed to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the pilgrims’ economic contribution to the region ensured continuing good treatment. This changed when Turkish raiders began to target pilgrims from the mid-11th century, presumably both on religious and economic grounds.
The success of the First Crusaders was remarkable, despite losing more than two-thirds of their number to death or desertion. At Dorylaeum, in Asia Minor, they defeated a Turkish army by fortuitously attacking it in the flank and rear while it was engaged to the front. They captured the large city of Antioch after an eight month siege during which many besieging Crusaders starved, the night before a relieving Turkish army arrived. They then defeated the relieving army despite their weakened state. Having reached the end of their supplies, they captured Jerusalem by assault in 1099. Finally, they defeated an army from Egypt which greatly outnumbered them. It’s not surprising that many Crusaders believed God was on their side. But it’s worth noting that the almost complete lack of co-operation among the Turkish and Arab states in the region played a large part in the Crusader’s success.
The capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099 has entered the popular imagination as a Christian massacre of the entire non-Christian population of Jerusalem. While there was certainly a very un-Christian massacre, it certainly didn’t result in the death of all Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, as some survivors were granted safe passage. Given that a number of Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem were also killed, the massacre also should not be seen as having a religious undertone. Instead, it was an almost inevitable consequence of capturing a town by force, sanctioned by the laws of war as they existed at the time. Likewise, after the city’s capture, non-Christians were again allowed to live there.
But if the First Crusade was a spectacular religious success, religion soon took second place to politics, as the Crusader kingdoms (collectively known as Outremer, “Beyond the Sea”) squabbled with each other and engaged in diplomacy with the neighbouring Islamic states. Within 10 years of the capture of Jerusalem, there’s a record of a battle between two Crusader armies, with each of them supported by local Muslim forces. From time to time, various Muslim leaders fought the Crusaders, but while the Muslim Middle East remained divided, Outremer remained relatively secure – Egypt and Syria in fact would occasionally ally with the Crusaders against the other. On the other hand, when Syria and Egypt were ruled by a single dynasty, the Crusaders were in trouble.
Leading the defence of Outremer were two orders of chivalry, the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Templars, no doubt familiar to people who’ve read “The Da Vinci Code”, started out in the early 12th century as a group of armed monks who originally assigned themselves the task of protecting pilgrims on the still dangerous roads to Jerusalem. Pious but ruthless, they soon attracted many noble recruits, boosting their wealth and reputation. The Hospitallers started out as a hostel in Jerusalem for pilgrims before the First Crusade, but added guarding duties around the time the Templars were created. The charge of the Orders’ knights was almost irresistible, but, like the rest of the Crusaders, they often wasted their strength in violent quarrels with each other.
Economically, the Crusader kingdoms were rarely a going concern. Many soldiers, including a large proportion of the members of the First Crusade, literally only went to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, and, having seen Bethlehem and Jerusalem, returned to Europe. Also, because of the cost, few peasants made the pilgrimage, meaning that the economy of the kingdoms rested on the native Arab population, most of whom had no great love for their masters. With large armies a rarity, most of the defence of Outremer relied on the magnificent castles the Crusaders built, some of which survive today.
The Byzantine Empire was another intriguing factor in the life of Outremer. Emperor Alexius gave the First Crusaders considerable financial and logistical help in the first part of the expedition, but withdrew this assistance during the siege of Antioch, after deserting Crusaders told him all was lost. Forty years later, his son John tried to get Crusader help to fight local Muslims, but the Crusaders were wary of losing their cities to him, so offered as little help as they could. Generally, though, the Crusaders despised the Byzantines as cowards and envied their wealth. They ignored the fact that the Byzantine Empire had been Europe’s bulwark against Islam for over four centuries, and focussed instead on the Byzantine willingness to negotiate instead of fight, and their schismatic Orthodox faith. There were even senior clerics in Western Europe who called for a crusade against Constantinople.
But another factor which counted against the long term survival of Outremer was the undeniable fact that some Crusades had nothing to do with freeing the Holy Land from the Muslims. One of these was the Fourth Crusade of the early 13th century, which attacked Constantinople, essentially for its wealth, rather than for any religious reasons. The Byzantine Empire was fragmented for half a century, and the only real beneficiary was Venice, which turned a profit out of transporting the Crusaders, and was able to strengthen its Mediterranean trading network. A second problematic Crusade was the Albigensian Crusade, which took place around the same time. The Albigensians were a sect of some popularity in southern France, whose beliefs seem to have been a combination of Christianity and Manichaeanism. But despite being law abiding and sober citizens, their main sin in the eyes of the Church was their rejection of Papal authority. The Crusade against the Albigensians attracted a lot of recruits, largely because it was much closer to home, and the lands the “Crusaders” captured were wealthy.
The last hope for the survival of Outremer, perhaps surprisingly, was the Mongols. Although Mongol armies had overrun Russia, and defeated Polish and Hungarian armies, all of them Christian, other Mongol armies had conquered Muslim states in the Middle East. By the middle of the 13th century, their next target was Egypt. The German Emperor Frederick II managed to negotiate the return of Jerusalem with its then ruler, the Sultan of Egypt, forty years after Saladin had conquered it for Islam. Frederick’s action is all the more remarkable because he was excommunicated by the Pope at the time. But the reality was that the Sultan was more concerned about the Mongols, and didn’t want to be distracted by Crusaders while important things were happening elsewhere.
The last act in the story of Outremer was played out from 1250 to 1291, with the Crusaders, now too weak to field an army, waiting in their cities. In 1250 the Mamelukes, the Sultan’s slave soldiers, took power in Egypt, and 10 years later defeated a Mongol invasion. The Mongols and Crusaders discussed alliances, but nothing resulted, and in any case the Mongols gradually converted to Islam. Instead, the Mameluke armies moved up and down the coast, besieging and capturing the Crusader cities one by one. The last to fall was Acre, the largest and strongest. Here, the Templars and Hospitallers fought side by side, but the effort was hopeless, and after six weeks of bombardment and assault, the city fell.
Both the Templars and Hospitallers survived the fall of Outremer, but they were to have very different fates. The Templars’ wealth proved too tempting for the King of France, and their order was dissolved by Papal order in the early 14th century. The Hospitallers survived, raiding Muslim lands, based first in Cyprus, then on Rhodes, and finally in Malta, where, in 1565, they withstood a siege by the Ottoman Turks. They survive today, more familiar to us as the St John Ambulance Service.
The legacy of the Crusaders became part of popular culture in Europe. When Vienna was besieged by a Turkish army in 1683, the alliance of European armies which defeated the Turks was seen in almost Crusading terms. In 1917, when the British captured Jerusalem from the Turks late in World War One, the British commander, General Allenby, consciously chose to walk into the city rather than ride, though perhaps his gesture had more in common with Christianity than Crusading.
There were positive aspects to the Crusades. They brought Western Europe and the Middle East into much closer contact than had previously been the case, and trade between the two increased considerably, in spite of the violence. There was also a steady flow of technology and ancient texts from the Middle East to Europe, and it could be suggested that this preserved a lot of knowledge as the Middle East declined into a cultural and economic backwater from the 15th century onwards.
The Crusading legacy is with us even today. Muslims opposed to the presence of Coalition troops in Iraq call them Crusaders, presumably trying to draw a number of appropriate parallels from history. The Holy Land is once again an incredibly popular place for Christian pilgrims, and it remains to be seen whether they can continue to visit without needing to resort to the force of arms.
= = = =
Last Friday week, 18 May, marks the 716th anniversary of the fall of Acre, the last major Crusader city in the Holy Land, to Muslim forces. It brought to an end nearly 200 years of Christian occupation of a narrow strip of land along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, known as Outremer.
The connection between Christianity and Crusading is strong, despite the apparent contradiction of violence committed in the name of a peaceful religion. Saint Augustine had developed the concept of a just Christian war in the 5th century, and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Heraclius had called on the Church’s help in a war against invading Persians in the 7th century. Then there was the Church’s involvement in the gradual recovery of Spain from the Muslims, starting in the 9th century. It was only another short step to invade kingdoms half a world away which weren’t a direct threat.
The Crusades are often reduced to a simple conflict between Christian and Muslim, but the reality, as you might expect, is considerably more complex. They were caused, at least in part, by events outside Europe, and even outside Christianity. Their purpose, at least in part, had nothing to do with freeing the Holy Land from the Saracen. And during the time that the Crusader states existed, religion often took second place to politics.
The impetus behind the First Crusade is generally taken to be Pope Urban II. In 1095 he received a letter from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, asking for mercenaries to come and fight in the Byzantine army. Alexius had sent similar letters to kings and princes all over Europe, but Urban’s unique position as the only religious leader to receive a letter gave him an idea.
Urban was the latest in a series of Popes over the previous 50 years who had gained for the Papacy power it hadn’t had for centuries. At first the Papacy had stripped from the German Emperor his part in selecting new Popes, and followed this by removing his right to appoint lesser clergy as well. Finally, taking advantage of a weak regency of a child Emperor, they claimed the right to decline to crown an Emperor if they chose. Logical steps to increase the Papacy’s power even further were to free the Holy Lands from Muslim rule, and to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which had formally split in the mid 11th century. The Pope was also concerned at the level of violence in Western Europe. In the previous 100 years, external threats (such as Vikings, Arab pirates and Hungarians) had been brought under control, and so the soldiers of Europe turned to fighting each other. Urban therefore called for an armed pilgrimage to free Jerusalem at a public speech in Clermont, southern France.
The effect was spectacular, and within a year, four large armies gathered, in Normandy, southern France, western Germany, and in the Norman lands of southern Italy. The four armies represented many more soldiers than the Byzantine Emperor had expected, and in any case they had no intention of serving in his army as mercenaries. All he could do was extract an oath of loyalty from their leaders, and to feed the armies and send them on their way as quickly as he could.
The reason Alexius had needed to call for mercenaries was that in 1071, the Byzantine army had been destroyed in an unnecessary battle against the Seljuk Turks, following which nearly half the Empire’s lands (roughly corresponding to today’s Asian Turkey) had been occupied by nomadic Turkish tribesmen. The battle had been unnecessary, because the Turks had been on their way to invade Egypt.
The object of the Turks was the overthrow of the Fatimid dynasty which ruled Egypt. The Fatimids were Shia Muslims, while the Turks were recent converts to Sunni, or Orthodox, Islam. The Turks were fired by the fanaticism of the newly converted to re-unite all of the Islamic world under the rule of the Orthodox Caliphate in Baghdad, and destroy the Shia Caliphate in Egypt. This is why at least one of the causes of the Crusades was completely unrelated to either Europe or Christianity.
Christians who’d recently returned from the Holy Land supported the Pope’s call for an armed pilgrimage. Since the first wave of Islam had conquered the Holy Land in the 7th century, Christians had been freely allowed to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the pilgrims’ economic contribution to the region ensured continuing good treatment. This changed when Turkish raiders began to target pilgrims from the mid-11th century, presumably both on religious and economic grounds.
The success of the First Crusaders was remarkable, despite losing more than two-thirds of their number to death or desertion. At Dorylaeum, in Asia Minor, they defeated a Turkish army by fortuitously attacking it in the flank and rear while it was engaged to the front. They captured the large city of Antioch after an eight month siege during which many besieging Crusaders starved, the night before a relieving Turkish army arrived. They then defeated the relieving army despite their weakened state. Having reached the end of their supplies, they captured Jerusalem by assault in 1099. Finally, they defeated an army from Egypt which greatly outnumbered them. It’s not surprising that many Crusaders believed God was on their side. But it’s worth noting that the almost complete lack of co-operation among the Turkish and Arab states in the region played a large part in the Crusader’s success.
The capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099 has entered the popular imagination as a Christian massacre of the entire non-Christian population of Jerusalem. While there was certainly a very un-Christian massacre, it certainly didn’t result in the death of all Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, as some survivors were granted safe passage. Given that a number of Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem were also killed, the massacre also should not be seen as having a religious undertone. Instead, it was an almost inevitable consequence of capturing a town by force, sanctioned by the laws of war as they existed at the time. Likewise, after the city’s capture, non-Christians were again allowed to live there.
But if the First Crusade was a spectacular religious success, religion soon took second place to politics, as the Crusader kingdoms (collectively known as Outremer, “Beyond the Sea”) squabbled with each other and engaged in diplomacy with the neighbouring Islamic states. Within 10 years of the capture of Jerusalem, there’s a record of a battle between two Crusader armies, with each of them supported by local Muslim forces. From time to time, various Muslim leaders fought the Crusaders, but while the Muslim Middle East remained divided, Outremer remained relatively secure – Egypt and Syria in fact would occasionally ally with the Crusaders against the other. On the other hand, when Syria and Egypt were ruled by a single dynasty, the Crusaders were in trouble.
Leading the defence of Outremer were two orders of chivalry, the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Templars, no doubt familiar to people who’ve read “The Da Vinci Code”, started out in the early 12th century as a group of armed monks who originally assigned themselves the task of protecting pilgrims on the still dangerous roads to Jerusalem. Pious but ruthless, they soon attracted many noble recruits, boosting their wealth and reputation. The Hospitallers started out as a hostel in Jerusalem for pilgrims before the First Crusade, but added guarding duties around the time the Templars were created. The charge of the Orders’ knights was almost irresistible, but, like the rest of the Crusaders, they often wasted their strength in violent quarrels with each other.
Economically, the Crusader kingdoms were rarely a going concern. Many soldiers, including a large proportion of the members of the First Crusade, literally only went to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, and, having seen Bethlehem and Jerusalem, returned to Europe. Also, because of the cost, few peasants made the pilgrimage, meaning that the economy of the kingdoms rested on the native Arab population, most of whom had no great love for their masters. With large armies a rarity, most of the defence of Outremer relied on the magnificent castles the Crusaders built, some of which survive today.
The Byzantine Empire was another intriguing factor in the life of Outremer. Emperor Alexius gave the First Crusaders considerable financial and logistical help in the first part of the expedition, but withdrew this assistance during the siege of Antioch, after deserting Crusaders told him all was lost. Forty years later, his son John tried to get Crusader help to fight local Muslims, but the Crusaders were wary of losing their cities to him, so offered as little help as they could. Generally, though, the Crusaders despised the Byzantines as cowards and envied their wealth. They ignored the fact that the Byzantine Empire had been Europe’s bulwark against Islam for over four centuries, and focussed instead on the Byzantine willingness to negotiate instead of fight, and their schismatic Orthodox faith. There were even senior clerics in Western Europe who called for a crusade against Constantinople.
But another factor which counted against the long term survival of Outremer was the undeniable fact that some Crusades had nothing to do with freeing the Holy Land from the Muslims. One of these was the Fourth Crusade of the early 13th century, which attacked Constantinople, essentially for its wealth, rather than for any religious reasons. The Byzantine Empire was fragmented for half a century, and the only real beneficiary was Venice, which turned a profit out of transporting the Crusaders, and was able to strengthen its Mediterranean trading network. A second problematic Crusade was the Albigensian Crusade, which took place around the same time. The Albigensians were a sect of some popularity in southern France, whose beliefs seem to have been a combination of Christianity and Manichaeanism. But despite being law abiding and sober citizens, their main sin in the eyes of the Church was their rejection of Papal authority. The Crusade against the Albigensians attracted a lot of recruits, largely because it was much closer to home, and the lands the “Crusaders” captured were wealthy.
The last hope for the survival of Outremer, perhaps surprisingly, was the Mongols. Although Mongol armies had overrun Russia, and defeated Polish and Hungarian armies, all of them Christian, other Mongol armies had conquered Muslim states in the Middle East. By the middle of the 13th century, their next target was Egypt. The German Emperor Frederick II managed to negotiate the return of Jerusalem with its then ruler, the Sultan of Egypt, forty years after Saladin had conquered it for Islam. Frederick’s action is all the more remarkable because he was excommunicated by the Pope at the time. But the reality was that the Sultan was more concerned about the Mongols, and didn’t want to be distracted by Crusaders while important things were happening elsewhere.
The last act in the story of Outremer was played out from 1250 to 1291, with the Crusaders, now too weak to field an army, waiting in their cities. In 1250 the Mamelukes, the Sultan’s slave soldiers, took power in Egypt, and 10 years later defeated a Mongol invasion. The Mongols and Crusaders discussed alliances, but nothing resulted, and in any case the Mongols gradually converted to Islam. Instead, the Mameluke armies moved up and down the coast, besieging and capturing the Crusader cities one by one. The last to fall was Acre, the largest and strongest. Here, the Templars and Hospitallers fought side by side, but the effort was hopeless, and after six weeks of bombardment and assault, the city fell.
Both the Templars and Hospitallers survived the fall of Outremer, but they were to have very different fates. The Templars’ wealth proved too tempting for the King of France, and their order was dissolved by Papal order in the early 14th century. The Hospitallers survived, raiding Muslim lands, based first in Cyprus, then on Rhodes, and finally in Malta, where, in 1565, they withstood a siege by the Ottoman Turks. They survive today, more familiar to us as the St John Ambulance Service.
The legacy of the Crusaders became part of popular culture in Europe. When Vienna was besieged by a Turkish army in 1683, the alliance of European armies which defeated the Turks was seen in almost Crusading terms. In 1917, when the British captured Jerusalem from the Turks late in World War One, the British commander, General Allenby, consciously chose to walk into the city rather than ride, though perhaps his gesture had more in common with Christianity than Crusading.
There were positive aspects to the Crusades. They brought Western Europe and the Middle East into much closer contact than had previously been the case, and trade between the two increased considerably, in spite of the violence. There was also a steady flow of technology and ancient texts from the Middle East to Europe, and it could be suggested that this preserved a lot of knowledge as the Middle East declined into a cultural and economic backwater from the 15th century onwards.
The Crusading legacy is with us even today. Muslims opposed to the presence of Coalition troops in Iraq call them Crusaders, presumably trying to draw a number of appropriate parallels from history. The Holy Land is once again an incredibly popular place for Christian pilgrims, and it remains to be seen whether they can continue to visit without needing to resort to the force of arms.