The Crusades inspired the most dedicated valor, the most bloodthirsty
cruelty, and the greediest vandalism of medieval men. They offered
the fullest opportunity for combined fulfillment of Germanic heroic
aspirations and Christian ideals of brotherhood and self-sacrifice.
Early relations with the Muslims were relatively simple. They
were mainly military. When the Muslims moved westward along the
north African coast after the death of Mohammed, western European
Christians were too absorbed in their own internal conflicts to
be greatly disturbed. When they defeated the Visigothic rulers
of Spain in 711 and pushed the Christians up into the mountains
in the north, they became a more immediate problem.
When they began to raid the Mediterranean coast of the Frankish
kingdom and to extend their power north of the Pyrenees, Charles
Martel, the Frankish ruler, collected his forces south of the
Loire and in 732 defeated a Muslim band so decisively that they
retreated. Nonetheless, Muslims continued to raid the Frankish
seacoast on the Mediterranean. To stop these raids and to protect
his frontier, Charlemagne carried the war beyond the Pyrenees
to the south.
From Charlemagne's time to the beginning of the 11th century,
relations between the Muslims and European Christians were mainly
commercial and intellectual. There developed a flourishing trade
in slaves and northern products such as honey, amber and furs.
Muslims wanted slaves. Christian teaching forbade Christians to
enslave other Christians, but there were always Finns, Slavs,
and other pagan peoples to be captured, and commerce with Islam
was profitable. Some of this traffic went down through central
Europe to the Muslim world through the channels of Byzantine trade.
Some of it went through Spain.
A great center of pilgrimage for Christians was St. James of Compostella
in Muslim Spanish Galicia. Commercial contacts and pilgrimage
led to awareness of Muslim learning, not to mention Muslim wealth
and luxury. The Muslims had absorbed Greek learning as well as
lore from Persia and India. They had produced a rich synthesis
of their own. Some northerners, like Gerbert of Aurillac, who
died Pope Sylvester II in 1103, did try to gain some knowledge
from the Muslims, particularly of science. Cordoba and Toledo
in Spain in the tenth century and Sicily in the 11th century could
have been centers for transmission of Muslim culture to the West.
But Western Christians did not take advantage of these offerings,
and they remained ignorant and indifferent with respect to Islam,
the Muslim religion, and Muslim culture in general. In the "Song
of Roland," for example, the Muslims are credited with a
trinity of pagan deities -- Tervagan, Mahomet, and Apollo -- "gods
of stone," whose idols they carry with them to war. Christians
preferred not to know of a rival and more vigorous monotheism.
Muslims could be credited with chivalry, as they often are in
the literature of the 12th and 13th centuries, but they could
not be credited with acceptable religious ideas.
For their part, the Muslims, before the Crusades, generally extended
courteous hospitality to Christian pilgrims visiting the holy
places in their realm. To them the Europeans from the West seemed
crude and barbaric compared to themselves. They did not, any more
than Greek Christians, think that Latin Christians held the future
in their hands.
The causes of the long war between Western Christians and the
Muslims are many and difficult to assess. In Spain the intensive
phase of the Reconquista, which began in the eleventh century,
was mainly a matter of seizing opportunity. The caliphate of Cordoba,
which had included all of Muslim Spain since the 8th century,
began to break up into small states warring with one another.
In Sicily and southern Italy Norman adventurers who had passed
through on pilgrimage to the Holy Land saw an opportunity to create
a unified Christian state from the remnants of Byzantine power
there and from Muslim Sicily. The main factor in bringing about
the Crusades was the weakness of the eastern section of the Empire
in relation to the Seljuk Turks.
The Byzantines had just endured a "time of troubles"
in which the succession had been in dispute and the state system
had collapsed. Alexius' appeal tot he West acknowledged the weakness.
Ecclesiastical leaders in eastern Europe had long been troubled
about internecine war among Christian nobles and knights. Gregory
VII had wanted to divert this energy to war against the "infidel,"
but he had neither the time nor the resources to spare for the
task. Alexius' appeal in 1095 seemed to offer a great opportunity.
Pope Urban II met with leaders among the French nobility at Clermont
and delivered a rousing call. This is in part what he said:
"Frenchmen! You who come from across the Alps; You who have
been singled out by God and who are loved by Him -- as is shown
by your many accomplishments; you who are set apart from all other
peoples by the location of your country, by your Catholic faith,
and by the honor of the Holy Church; we address these words, this
sermon to you!....Distressing news has come to us (as has often
happened) from the region in Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople;
news that the people of the Persian kingdom, an alien people,
a race completely foreign to God...has invade Christian territory
and has invaded this territory with pillage, fire and the sword.
The Persians have taken some of these Christians as captives to
their own country; they have destroyed others with cruel tortures.
They have completely destroyed some of God's churches and have
converted others to the uses of their own cult. They ruin the
altars with filth and defilement. They circumcise Christians and
smear the blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw
it in the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by
cutting open their bellies, extracting the ends of their intestines,
and tying it to a stake....
And so the pope continues, with more atrocities listed, including
the "shocking rape of women." No doubt atrocities did
occur. They do constantly in human affairs, especially in the
midst of wars. Urban II was less concerned to establish the truth
about the Seljuks (Persians, he calls them) than to rouse the
Franks. A skilled propagandist, he told them that they fought
each other because their land was poor. Let them just put aside
their local hatreds and conflicts and go to the Holy Land (as
the Scriptures said, the land flowed with milk and honey) to put
down the infidels who threatened their brethren and the holy places
of Christendom. Thus, war to seize the land from the infidel became
a "good thing."
The Crusaders surprised themselves and others by winning, by medieval
standards, a quick initial victory. Despite the disastrous failure
of a People's Crusade led by Peter the Hermit, the diversion of
a number of German bands to the more immediate rewards of Jew-killing
in Germany, and the difficulties the Frankish lords encountered
in their relations with Byzantine Emperor Alexius, a western Army
entered Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. A bloodbath ensued with the
Crusaders cutting down all before them. A few Muslims escaped
by buying their safe exit from the city.
The Jews took refuge in their chief synagogue and were all burnt
within it. Muslims were killed as long as the blood lust lasted.
In the words of a Christian witness:
"Our men followed [the city's defenders], killing and beheading
them all the way to the Temple of Solomon. There was such slaughter
there that our men waded in blood up to their ankles....Soon our
men were running all around the city, seizing gold and silver,
horses and mules, and houses filled with all kinds of goods. Rejoicing
and weeping for joy, our people came to the sepulcher of Jesus
our Savior to worship and pay our debt....Our men then took counsel
and decided that everyone should pray and give alms so that God
might choose for them whomever the pleased to rule over the others
and govern the city....The living Saracens dragged the dead outside
the gates and made heaps of them as large as houses. No one ever
saw or heard of such a slaughter of pagan peoples, for funeral
pyres were formed of them like pyramids and no one knows their
number save God alone."
The massacre impressed the world. Many even among the Christians
who participated were sickened and shamed by the brutality. When
more humane and sane counsels did prevail in Christian circles,
the Muslims remained justifiably distrustful and suspicious. Having
destroyed Muslim power, the Crusaders had to set up a state. They
took counsel as to who should be chosen to rule in the Holy Land.
After much intrigue, Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine,
was offered the title of king. He chose instead to be called the
Defender of the Holy Sepulcher, saying that he could not wear
a crown of gold in the city where his Savior had worn a crown
of thorns.
This was the catastrophic beginning of the long series of wars
that marked the Crusade period. It does not much matter that the
families of the permanent settlers in the Holy Land learned of
necessity a great deal about Islamic material culture. The Holy
Land did not flow with milk and honey and could not be made to
support the Latin principalities there without commerce. Westerners
had to learn from the Muslims how to live in a climate different
form that of England and northern France.
Commerce with the enemies and adoption of Islamic foods, clothes,
sanitary precautions as well as marriage with Muslim wives brought
on the Latin Christians charges of betraying the Christian cause.
Individual friendships between Muslims and Christians did develop,
but these had no effect on the precarious nature of Christian
rule in the land. Rivalries existed among the rulers of the Crusader
states, and distrust between them and new arrivals was commonplace.
Thus unity against the enemy was difficult to maintain.
In 1187 Saladin, who had overthrown the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt,
expanded his power into Palestine and seized Jerusalem. The Crusaders
were left holding only a narrow strip of coastal plain from Acre
to Antioch. This remnant of the Latin kingdom they lost in the
course of the next century. In 1291, when Acre fell, Christian
rule in the Holy Land ceased to be a matter of practical politics.
There were Crusades after 1300, but having no secure base from
which to operate, they had no chance of success.
In 1144 St. Bernard of Clairvaux advocated a more military policy
in dealing with the Muslim menace. So he organized the Second
Crusade, a bigger and better organized expedition than the first.
Two kings led this Crusade: Louis VII of France and Conrad III
of Germany. Eleanor of Acquitaine (wife of Louis VII, who later
divorce her) went along for the "ride." She and her
attendant ladies dressed in the costume of Amazon princesses.
The result was a fiasco of the first magnitude, one from which
the Muslims derived the encouragement to go forward to throw the
Westerners out. There was also a Third, Fourth, and Fifth Crusade,
ending with equally disastrous consequences.