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Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained
Who won the crusades, how many were there, and what caused them? Medieval expert Rebecca Rist answers these major questions, exploring how centuries of religious conflict reshaped the medieval world
The crusades were a centuries-long sequence of era-defining medieval holy wars that transformed dynamics of power and religious ideas across Europe and the Middle East. But who won the crusades, and just how many crusades were there? Those are two of the questions answered by professor Rebecca Rist, an expert on the crusades and their broader medieval context. Speaking about the topic on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Rist steps into the dust of medieval roads and the heat of besieged cities to explain why these campaigns erupted, what the major expeditions set out to accomplish, how those ambitions played out on the ground, and how the long arc of conflict finally came to an end. Who won the crusades? Overall, the Muslim forces won the crusades, and the Christians lost. However, as Rist explains, while that was the final state of play, the granular details were far from that simple. "The final bastions of the crusader states were lost in 1291 (having been founded originally in 1099) to Muslim forces. In that sense, obviously the Muslims won the crusades and the Christians were defeated. "However, the crusades span a very long period of time, starting with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the loss of Acre in 1291. There were many individual crusades within that period, some of which were won by the Christians – by the Western Franks, like the First Crusade – and others by Muslims. For example, the Muslim forces were successful in the Fifth Crusade in capturing Damietta." In other instances, Rist says there were greater degrees of complexity. "In some crusades, we have partial victories. If we take the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was partially successful, in the sense that he was able to take and maintain Acre. But, of course, he didn't win back Jerusalem with a military victory." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1186332544-4f0a3d8-e1764009254971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This illustration depicts Richard the Lionheart paying homage to King Philip Augustus of France during the Third Crusade. Although allies in their campaign to the Holy Land, the two monarchs maintained a tense partnership" title="Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus" /> How many crusades were there? "There were eight crusades during the period from 1095 to 1291 in the Near East," says Rist. However, Rist is careful to caveat this: it's a number that's subject to debate, as what precisely counts as a full-scale crusade is difficult to define. Still, according to Rist, the eight major crusades were broadly as follows: "The First Crusade (1095–99), is where the crusaders take Jerusalem and set up the crusader states. The Second Crusade (1147–50), is a subsequent response to the fall of the first crusader kingdom of Edessa (the crusader kingdom in the north). The Third Crusade (1189–92) is launched to try to win back Jerusalem and is perhaps the most famous because it involved Richard the Lionheart. The Fourth Crusade (1202–04) doesn't end up in the Holy Land at all, but the crusaders instead sack the town of Zara and then Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) is an attack that the crusaders make on Egypt, on the town of Damietta in particular (and this ends in failure). The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) is very interesting because it's not authorised by the papacy, but it’s a crusade where emperor Frederick II, goes out under excommunication. He has a lot of success and makes a truce with the sultan and gets Jerusalem back for 10 years. Finally, I like to think of the Seventh (1248–54) and Eighth (1270) Crusades, which are the two crusades of Louis IX, launched respectively at Egypt and at Tunis." Read more | Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? In addition to these eight core crusades, there were other conflicts that need to be recognised. "There were also many more minor expeditions [with] small groups of fighters between these major crusades as well. So we can think of the Barons’ crusade of 1236, for example, or the crusade by Edward, prince of England, sometimes called the Ninth Crusade (1271–72). These little ventures are going on between these major responses [when] great papal calls are put out, and very large armies take up that call." How many people died in the crusades? The crusades' death toll likely came in at around 5-6 million, possibly reaching as high as 9 million, according to Rist. But, once again, there are serious caveats to consider. "It's very difficult to estimate [the crusades' death toll] because of the source material. We're dealing with very unreliable sources: medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when they give figures of battles and losses." Despite the problems with the sources, it's still possible to come to a very broad conclusion. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Crusades "There are figures ranging from 1 million to 9 million over the whole period from 1095 to 1291. John Robertson famously, in his Short History of Christianity – a very old but seminal book first published in the early 20th century – had that really huge figure of 9 million. But I've seen other historians estimate much lower numbers. When I'm giving these figures, I'm including Christians, Muslims and all those who followed the armies, not just the combatants. "Historians generally prefer to try to give estimates for individual battles rather than for the crusades overall, and I think that gives us a better sense of the carnage and the losses. Regarding the overall estimates between 1 million and 9 million, certainly one million seems far too few to me." She concludes, "I would go for a much higher figure: 5 or 6 million." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1435556881-76ecf57-e1764009379800.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 14th-century illustration by the Maître de Fauvel depicts the Battle of Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097, one of the First Crusade’s major engagements. It shows crusader forces rallying after a surprise Turkish attack, capturing the drama and brutality of a battle that helped secure the crusaders’ advance into Anatolia." title="The Battle Of Dorylaeum On 1 July 1097" /> What caused the crusades between 1095­–1204? The motivations behind the crusades were a mixture of: "religious, political, social, and economic," says Rist. "To highlight a few definite motivating factors: I think the papacy granting a ‘remission of sins’ in the 12th century is a driving force. People want to be free from their sins, to try to wipe the slate clean, and they know that crusading will assure them that spiritual privilege. There is another religious motivation: to help fellow Christians. The pope had called for the First Crusade to help the Byzantines in the east. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had asked for help from the west because the Byzantines were struggling against the Seljuk Turks at this time." But it was far from just religion that motivated the conflicts, as Rist explains. Read more | Did the crusaders fight for God or gold? "There are many other non-religious motivations, such as the charismatic preaching that we see happening with these crusades. Take a figure like Bernard of Clairvaux on the Second Crusade. He preaches all over Europe drawing large crowds, and influences kings to ‘take the cross’. "I think crusaders were also spurred on by the idea of the glory that can pertain to their families if they take part in these great expeditions. Certainly, kings and emperors think it will do their ‘PR’ no harm. They take the cross often when they become kings. Often, it's a way of showing that there is a new reign and that they’re different from their fathers. "There's no doubt that there were also ideas of adventure. At the time of the First Crusade, there had been very bad harvests; there was famine in Europe, so people wanted something different and new. Of course, when they get out there, they didn't necessarily like it. But there were all kinds of romantic and adventurous ideas associated with the crusades." Ultimately however, Rist stresses that the motivation behind crusades was neither singular, nor homogenous. "An individual crusader doesn't just have to have one motivation. He can be conventionally very pious. He can also be hoping to be in favour with his lord. He can be hoping that there might be some land parcelled out to him. He can be inspired by charismatic preaching." How did the crusades end? The crusades ended in 1291 "when the Mamluks captured Acre," says Rist. She concludes, "For decades, Acre had been the centre of what remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem – and so it was the most important city that was still left of the crusader states. It fell to the Mamluk Sultan Khalil in 1291. In the days that followed, the rest of the remaining crusader towns – Beirut, Haifa, Tyre, Tortosa – all fell in a domino effect." The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they traversed through their eyes. Listen to all episodes now
Saladin: a hero of Islam and scourge of the crusaders
In the West, he is most often depicted as the antagonist – if a noble and revered one – to the crusader king, Richard the Lionheart. From the other perspective, though, Saladin was a cultured sultan, a mighty leader and a Muslim hero. Emily Briffett, speaking to Jonathan Phillips on the HistoryExtra podcast, charts his rapid rise to dizzying heights of power and prestige
Who was Saladin? A Sunni Muslim of Kurdish descent, Saladin was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty (which ruled over modern-day Egypt and parts of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Yemen) and was the first man at the time of the crusades to be sultan of both Egypt and Syria. Leading a confederation of territories, he inspired the Muslim military effort against the crusader states. In 1187, Saladin both defeated crusader forces at the battle of Hattin and captured Jerusalem after nearly nine decades of the holy city being in the hands of the Franks. He then repelled the resultant Third Crusade. On the podcast | Jonathan Phillips details the astronomic rise of Saladin Only six months after securing a truce with Richard the Lionheart, one of his most significant achievements, he died. Saladin was, and remains, a hero of Islam, and was praised by his enemies in the West for his military skills, his lack of vanity, and his generous and virtuous nature. What was Saladin’s full name? Saladin’s full name was Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. He was known as Yusuf, a name he remained particularly fond of during his life since it had connotations to the Biblical figure Joseph (the Latinised version of Yusuf), who had been sent to Egypt as a slave but rose to be a powerful leader – a story that shared similarities to Saladin’s own career path. The name Salah ad-Din (westernised to Saladin) was actually a title, meaning ‘righteousness of the faith’. Ayyub was his father’s name, hence ibn Ayyub, meaning son of Ayyub. What was Saladin’s early life like? Born in either 1137 or 1138 in the city of Tikrit (now in Iraq), Saladin was raised in a prominent Kurdish family, with his father and uncle holding prestigious positions in the ranks of the Muslim Syrian rulership. As a boy, Saladin moved with his family to one of the great cities of the Near East: the wealthy and bustling Damascus, ruled over by the powerful Nur al-Din. With the growing sentiment of counter-crusade in the air, the young Saladin was thrust into an environment where the idea of jihad was prominent. It was under his uncle Shirkuh, a stocky, grizzled warrior and arguably Nur al-Din's best general, that Saladin began his own military career and accompanied him on his campaigns in Egypt. How did Saladin become a military leader and ruler? During the 1160s, a struggle erupted between the Syrian Muslims and the crusader states over the control of Egypt. The region’s great wealth and declining rulership under the Fatimid Shi’ite Caliphate made it a tempting target. Shirkuh, with a young Saladin in his ranks, seized control of the region in January 1169, but died just two months later from complications brought on by overeating. In his early 30s, Saladin was appointed commander of the Syrian forces and the new vizier of the Fatimids. Despite facing revolts, assassination attempts and crusader aggression, Saladin’s rise continued apace. Two years later, he would abolish the Fatimid Caliphate and, at the head of the new Ayyubid dynasty, become the governor of Egypt. “This was one of the most exciting moments in Saladin’s life,” says crusades historian Jonathan Phillips, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “He was a Kurd at the head of a Sunni Syrian invasion army that had conquered Shiite Egypt. That rapid ascent from a relatively unknown position to having this authority was truly remarkable.” How did Saladin draw together the Muslim Near East? With Egypt under his control, Saladin was quick to learn the required skills of rulership. He took harsh punitive measures against those who tried to remove him from power, while surrounding himself with a stable and loyal group of administrators. To understand his new domain better, he commissioned a survey of Egypt's economy and a book of local etiquette. All the while, he remained theoretically loyal to Nur al-Din, his patron in Syria, but that eventually fell apart. Saladin rejected all advances from Nur al-Din to plan a coordinated attack upon the crusader states, and in 1174 ordered the conquest of Yemen in the name of the Ayyubids (so-called for Saladin’s father, who died in 1173). Read more | Why does Saladin have such an enduring reputation? Nur al-Din recognised Saladin’s challenge to his authority and marched against him. Over the next few months, however, Saladin proved to be extremely lucky: Nur al-Din died, soon followed by the king of Jerusalem. Saladin set about taking control of Nur al-Din’s empire. He returned to Syria with an army and secured Damascus; he married his former patron’s widow, Ismat al-Din (sometimes known as Asimat); and he announced his intention to rule over the Muslim territories of Egypt (now a Sunni regime), Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine and to take the holy war to the crusader states. It took 12 years, and the result was a fragile confederation rather than a fully united Muslim world, but Saladin had achieved his aim through force and diplomacy by 1186. Was Saladin motivated by personal ambition or religious fervour? Saladin was driven by both ambition and religious devotion. There was no question that he was out to build a dynastic empire for his family, the Ayyubids. Yet as the writers around him show, he was clearly a pious Muslim. He actively extended Sunni control over Egypt, which had been ruled by Shiite Muslims under the Fatimids, and sponsored the religious classes considerably. His devotion shines through most clearly in his determination to recover Jerusalem, the third most holy city in Islam as the place the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven during his Night Journey. What do we know about Saladin’s personality? “Pious, merciful, generous, devoted – according to contemporary Muslim sources Saladin ticked all the boxes. If social media had been around in the 12th century, Saladin's entourage would have been all over it,” says Phillips. “They were great propagandists who wrote constantly about how great their frontman was, so Saladin has this strong, outward-facing PR profile.” While his exaggerated image might appear to have elements of a literary confection conjured up by his admiring inner circle, Saladin certainly achieved many successes that earned him praise from both ally and enemy alike. “Examining sources written by Christian writers can be a good litmus test,” adds Phillips. “You might expect them to be negative about Saladin – and many of them are – but some provide us with a more nuanced picture.” William of Tyre, a contemporary Christian historian and chronicler of the crusades, described how Saladin possessed three qualities to frighten any opponent: he was wise in counsel, valiant in war, and generous beyond all measure. Saladin was regarded as a model of chivalric behaviour, a lover of poetry and hunting, modest in the way he presented himself (he reportedly refused to dye his hair when it turned grey), and his generosity saw him give away money in huge amounts. Incidentally, it was said that after he died his personal treasury was so empty that money had to be borrowed for his funeral. Such munificence to all came at a price though – unwavering loyalty. What was Saladin’s relationship like with the crusader states? Saladin’s ultimate aim was a holy war against the crusaders and to oust the Latin Christian forces, or Franks, from the states they had established after the First Crusade in 1099. These included the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Yet securing his domain had to be achieved first, leading to years of fighting against his fellow Muslims and the seizure of important cities like Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul. Fighting against the crusader states was intermittent and, initially, unsuccessful. The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they traversed through their eyes. Listen to all episodes now Saladin’s crushing defeat at the battle of Montgisard in 1177, near Ramla in modern-day Israel, was a severe blow and ended with him fleeing all the way back to Egypt. But gradually the tide turned in his favour: almost two years later, his forces besieged and captured a newly constructed castle at Jacob’s Ford, over the Jordan River. As momentum built, Saladin set his sights firmly on Jerusalem and attempted a number of invasions between 1183 and 1184. The Franks who had controlled Jerusalem since 1099, however, adopted a frustrating but sensible response, according to Phillips. “They simply refused to engage in conflict. Saladin wanted and needed to fight them, but they always stayed out of range, like a boxer dodging out of the path of their opponent’s blows.” It would not be until 1187 that he launched a full-scale attack. Utilising a Frankish attack on a Muslim caravan in the trans-Jordan area as a cause for war, he invaded the kingdom of Jerusalem with a huge force of troops gathered from across his domain, and laid siege to the crusader castle at Tiberias. This finally provoked the Franks into battle. What happened at the battle of Hattin? The Franks decided to relieve the besieged castle, sending a large army that was ultimately trapped and harassed by Saladin’s forces. “They hoped to march across about 32 kilometres of arid land in the middle of the summer while being bombarded,” explains Phillips. “Saladin had so much water, his men poured it onto the ground in front of the Franks, [and] set alight any dry brush to choke them with smoke.” On 4 July 1187, the two armies met near an extinct volcano, known as the Horns of Hattin. Saladin outnumbered the crusaders, led by the king of Jerusalem himself, Guy of Lusignan, and secured a resounding victory. So complete was the destruction of the Christian army at the battle of Hattin that Saladin’s troops were able to capture their great talisman, the True Cross, a large piece of wood encased in silver that was believed by the crusaders to be from the cross upon which Christ was crucified. The victory had broken the military strength of the Franks. Over the next few months, Saladin captured many cities that had been in crusader control, such as Acre, Nazareth and Jaffa, but more importantly it opened the way to Jerusalem. How did Saladin recapture Jerusalem? In September 1187, Saladin took up position outside the strong walls of Jerusalem. If he captured the holy city, some expected him to avenge the massacre of the Muslim defenders in 1099. When the time came, though, he acted differently. “The Frankish commander of the city did not have many cards to play, but he played them well,” explains Phillips. He gave Saladin two options: agree to their surrender or attack the city and face the consequences. With the fate of potentially thousands of Muslim prisoners and the holy shrines of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the line, Saladin chose the former. Jerusalem was captured on 2 October with minimal bloodshed, after 88 years of Frankish control. Saladin allowed those inside to be ransomed, often at low prices or, if they could not pay, for nothing at all. While Christian churches were converted into mosques, Saladin did permit Eastern Orthodox and Coptic Christians to remain in Jerusalem and he ensured the protection of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Read more | Does Richard I deserve his reputation as a martial genius? “This is the moment where Saladin’s great reputation for mercy really comes to the fore,” says Phillips. “Rather paradoxically, he’s both stuck a stake in the heart of Christianity by capturing the city, and yet has shown great power in this unexpected act of mercy to those of the Christian faith.” Saladin’s authority, and status in Islam, had never been greater. Yet the capture of Jerusalem simultaneously created an immediate problem, as Phillips explains. With much already in the balance in terms of preserving his large empire and safeguarding the Islamic faith, “he had essentially just pressed the starting button on what we now call the Third Crusade.” What did Saladin do in the Third Crusade? The news that Jerusalem had been lost shocked Christian nations in the West, and then rallied them. Pope Gregory VIII called for a crusade with the intention of reconquering the Holy Land and the call was answered by three mighty heavyweights of Western Europe: Philip Augustus of France, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and England’s Richard the Lionheart. Saladin would have to face them all. To create a strong defensive position, he seized as much land from the crusader states as possible and called the Muslim people to action. He could do nothing to stop tens of thousands of Christian men and women, inspired by the loss of Jerusalem, from signing up to the cause and making their way from Europe. In 1188, the first of these crusaders landed on Saladin’s doorstep. Yet the fact that Saladin had failed to capture the city of Tyre was significant, as the fortress on the coast became a rallying point for what was left of the Christian forces he had already defeated. From there, Guy of Lusignan laid siege to Acre (modern-day Akko). Read more | Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land This would be the great set piece of the Third Crusade, described by contemporaries as akin to the ancient Siege of Troy. “Saladin was not expecting this, and he ended up besieging Guy, the man who was besieging Acre,” says Phillips. His attempts to break through the crusader ranks led nowhere, and a long and arduous siege dragged on. At one stage, a truce was decided upon due to the physical and mental exhaustion on both sides. Saladin struggled to maintain morale amidst his own dire health. “Suffering from colic, he had terrible stomach pain and vomiting,” explains Phillips. “It was as if his immune system had packed in.” Luck did strike once again, though: in 1190, while travelling through modern-day Turkey, Frederick Barbarossa drowned and his army broke up before getting anywhere near Jerusalem. But with the arrival of kings Philip Augustus and Richard I in the summer of 1191, the fate of Acre was sealed. With momentum and sheer number of troops, the siege was broken and the city fell into crusader hands. Those inside were forced to surrender, but Richard did not treat them with the same understanding that Saladin had shown in Jerusalem. “In what can only be described as a war crime, Richard executed around 2,500 prisoners in cold blood,” says Phillips, “As well as a horrifying atrocity, this was something that humiliated Saladin. It showed he was incapable of looking after his people.” Did the Third Crusade succeed in recapturing Jerusalem? From Acre, Richard marched his army down the coastline and defeated Saladin at the battle at Arsuf in September 1191. Following a final defeat for the Muslim forces at Jaffa, in July 1192, the need for diplomacy was at an all-time high. Saladin was ill – as was Richard – and both were running out of money and morale. While Richard seemed convinced that negotiations could get somewhere, Saladin refused to attend himself, noting that rulers only met once they had an agreement in place. Instead, Richard spent a lot of time talking with Saladin’s brother (and later, successor) Saphadin. Yet despite them getting on remarkably well, they failed to reach a truce at this point. Richard had to deliver on the main goal of the crusade: he marched his army to Jerusalem. At such a long distance inland across both mountains and plains, and with the crusader forces depleted and tired, it would have been a monumental task to capture the city. Saladin was able to stall Richard’s progress, forcing the crusade into the harsh winter of 1191. Facing appallingly bad weather and fears of being surrounded, Richard’s forces retreated from the idea of any attack on Jerusalem. Then when a second attempt failed in the summer of 1192, Richard concluded that even if he could capture the city, he would not be able to hold it. “His justification was that he did not want to go down in the annals as the man who reclaimed Jerusalem and then lost it,” says Phillips. “It's a curious calculation, and one which devastated his army.” he Third Crusade ended with a negotiated truce in September 1192. Saladin’s forces had been battered, yet he had held the mighty crusader armies to a draw, secured a three-year and eight months peace treaty and kept hold of Jerusalem. While it was agreed that Christian pilgrims could have access to the city and its holy sites, the ultimate aim of the crusade set out by the pope had been unsuccessful. How did Saladin die? Saladin died on 4 March 1193, just a matter of months after the Christian armies of the Third Crusade had left. He was in his mid-50s. He had returned to his favourite city, Damascus, where he fell ill. Suffering from crippling stomach pain and vomiting, his physicians attempted to aid him using treatments like bleeding and emetics. These ultimately worsened his condition and likely, along with the toll of his many years as a warrior and leader, caused his death. Jonathan Phillips is Professor of History of the Crusades at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was speaking to Emily Briffett about Saladin’s life and legacy on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Leper Crusaders: how disease-stricken knights forged an army in the Holy Land
During the Crusades, one Christian order transformed from caring for those suffering from leprosy in Jerusalem to fielding an army of leper knights. Matthew Doherty explores the story of the the Lazarites
In the history of the Crusades, a number of military orders made their names with their exploits in the Holy Land. The likes of the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, and the Teutonic Order all formed in the 12th century, in the decades after the First Crusade (1095-99) had captured the holy city of Jerusalem from Islamic control. Alongside the more prominent orders, however, was a small group called the Order of Saint Lazarus. Although formed with the sole purpose of caring for the sick, by the 13th century the Lazarites, adorned in white with a green cross, were among the ranks of crusader knights. But they were no ordinary fighters: the majority of them suffered from the dreaded scourge of leprosy. Read more | Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land Rise of the order The beginnings of the Order of Saint Lazarus can be found in a leper hospital in 12th-century Jerusalem, with the purpose of helping and caring for sickly pilgrims to the Holy Land. Leprosy appears to have been particularly prevalent in the Near East in the 12th and 13th centuries, at the same time as waves of Christian invaders descended on the region. In 1142, Fulk, the Christian king of Jerusalem, conceded to “the church of Saint Lazarus and the convent of the sick who are called miselli, an estate… which is between the Mount of Olives and the Red Cistern on the road which leads to the River Jordan.” Miselli can be roughly translated to “little wretched ones” and referred to leprous beggars. The land granted to this church was well situated, for it was on a key crossroads close to the Jordan, where those suffering from leprosy could bathe in its supposedly curative waters. Styling themselves ‘Lazarites’, the monks who cared for the afflicted were successful enough to buy more land two years later and expand their ministrations. Read more | Melisende of Jerusalem: the queen of a crusader kingdom A living death In the 21st century, it’s known that leprosy (also known as Hansen’s disease) is spread in humans by Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis (leprosy bacteria). Symptoms include thickened and deeply furrowed skin, discoloured sores on the body, and numbness in the arms and legs. If untreated, it can lead to severe facial disfigurement, paralysis, and blindness. The hands and fingers tend to wither and shorten. Non-healing ulcers can also develop on the soles of the feet, forcing many sufferers to shamble painfully as they walk. Though the disease itself is not fatal, complications arising from infection can often lead to septicaemia and death. During the medieval age, it was often called a “living death”, for the sufferer would have looked – to the unscientific and unsympathetic eye – like a moving corpse. Those suffering from leprosy were often viewed with horror and suspicion by a fearful population, especially in the wake of the Black Death. The classic image of the hooded leper, shunned by a society who assumed the disease was divine punishment from God, does hold much truth. However, more recent scholarship is redefining the longtime perception of the medieval leper as an eternal outcast. At the time of the Crusades, many regarded the leper as suffering a type of purgatory on Earth, and so believed that they would ascend straight to heaven upon death. Accepting donations from the nobility of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Lazarites continued to grow and gained more ‘lazar houses’ across the Crusader states, or Outremer. Pilgrims and penitents would come to pray and care for the lepers at these houses. Read more: Crusader queens: the formidable female rulers of Jerusalem The most spectacular case of penance was that of a nobleman called Alberic, who “ate those things which the lepers had left, kissed each one daily after Mass, washed and wiped their feet, made their beds, and carried the weak on top of his shoulders.” Alberic must have felt himself to have led a particularly violent and impious life prior to serving at the lazar house, considering that he whipped himself relentlessly and wore a goat-hair shirt (worn so the coarse hair would scratch the wearer). He even took the bowl used to wash the lepers and, though the blood and discharge within moved him to nausea, immerse his face in it. For the first 50 years of its existence, the monks of the Lazarite Order only concerned themselves with tending to the sick. But this would all change after the great sultan Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslim world in 1187. Men who are not afraid to die One of the greatest problems faced by Crusader forces was manpower: they were almost always outnumbered by opposing Muslim armies. To combat this shortcoming, several orders took an active role in defending Outremer, including the aforementioned Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Order. These military orders contained some of the most highly trained and motivated fighting men in the Christian world. But when a knight contracted the dreaded disease of leprosy, he would usually be ordered to live separately, or encouraged to report to a lazar house. Since leprosy in its early stages rarely renders the sufferer infirm, the Lazarites began to add to their ranks men who were the fighting elite of the Crusader states, and could still wield a blade. In 1191, the Lazarites relocated their headquarters to the coastal city of Acre and built a fortress-hospice called l’Eglise des chevaliers de Saint Lazare, or House of the Knights of St Lazarus. Popes gave them similar dispensations and tax breaks to the ones bestowed upon other key military orders, while their knights began to combine military and medical duties. At the beginning, the knights were likely all made up of lepers. It is definitely known that Walter de Novo Castro and Reynald de Fleury, two master generals after the order’s militarisation, suffered from the disease. In battle, Lazarite knights wore a green cross on a white background. It is likely that brothers with facial deformities or scarring would have wrapped up in white bandages. Though the group was small in number, they must have been a terrifying sight, especially given that their opponents may have believed that close combat ran the risk of contracting leprosy. The ‘Leper King’? The most famous sufferer of leprosy in the Crusader states was one of its greatest kings: Baldwin IV. King of Jerusalem from 1174 to 1185, it is likely he had an association with the Lazarites. His father Almaric gave an annual rent of 50 bezants to the lazar house in Jerusalem, specifically for the support of one leper. This was in 1171, around the time he became aware of his son’s condition. By the time he ascended the throne at the age of 13, Baldwin’s leprosy had already caused one hand to wither. He was therefore taught to ride a horse using his knees. He became known as the ‘Leper King’. In 1177, Saladin led a huge army of his Ayyubids against the Crusaders, and Baldwin elected to head up his forces in person. As one chronicler put it: “Everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin.” In the subsequent battle of Montgisard, Baldwin achieved a spectacular against-the-odds victory, completely routing Saladin’s army. This was in large part down to Baldwin's daring leadership, not to mention horsemanship. Yet by 1183, Baldwin was blind, had lost the use of both hands, and could not walk without help. Until his death in 1185, he forced himself to perform administrative duties. Though never an official member of the Lazarite Order, Baldwin was in every respect a leper knight. How successful were the Lazarites? Despite occasional battlefield successes, the tide opposing Christian forces in the Holy Land was unstoppable, and the position of the Crusader states grew ever more precarious as the 13th century ground on. At the battle of La Forbie in 1244, an allied army – made up of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the military orders and breakaway Ayyubids – took on the Muslim forces of Egypt. While the Egyptians swept up much of the enemy, the knights – including the Lazarites – made a ferocious mounted charge, which nearly restored the situation. Even when they pressed too far into the Egyptian ranks and became surrounded, they fought bravely until eventually be overwhelmed. Some Hospitallers and Templars cut their way out, but Robert of Nantes, Patriarch of Jerusalem, reported that “all the leper knights of the [Lazarite Order] have been miserably killed by the enemies of the faith.” Further losses were to come in 1252, when the reformed Lazarites decided, on their own initiative, to launch a chevauchée near Ramla. This was a fast-moving raid aimed at civilian targets, during which cattle would be seized and crops burned, in an effort to spread terror. In the end, things did not go so well for the Lazarites, as one French knight called De Joinville remembered: “After [the master of St Lazarus] had collected his spoils the Saracens attacked him, and so thoroughly defeated him that of all the men he had in his company no more than four escaped.” The defeats at La Forbie and the Ramla raid crippled the already small Lazarite order. To replace their losses, it became necessary to accept healthy knights into the ranks. For those men, this was seen as an act of extreme piety and faith in God, for they risked contracting leprosy. By 1255, Pope Alexander IV described the order as a convent “of active knights and others, both healthy and leprous, for the purpose of driving out the enemies of the Christian name.” And in 1260, it became official policy for a leprous Templar brother to transfer to the Lazarites. Yet despite their (often-suicidal) courage, the tiny band of Lazarite knights could not hope to hold the Crusader states. Matters came to a head at the Siege of Acre. The Siege of Acre In April 1291, a large Muslim army from the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt surrounded Acre. To many, the fall of the city was inevitable, leading women and children to evacuate by sea, but most of the fighting men stayed – including the knights of Saint Lazarus. By now the order had been so whittled away that it could only muster around 25 knights for the defence, with some backing from lighter armed retainers. Tightening the ring, the Mamluks brought up siege engines to batter the walls. The night of 15/16 April saw a foray led by the Templars, which probably included Lazarite brethren. Though unsuccessful in burning the siege engines, they engaged over a thousand Mamluks and brought home valuable trophies. Yet nothing could stop the fall of the city. On 18 May, the Mamluks attacked the entire length of the wall. Templars and remaining Lazarites had been given responsibility for defending the Montmusard wall. This constituted the short straw: a lengthy section with a small number of defence towers, built straight which meant that it lacked opportunities for crossbowmen and archers to provide covering fire. When the ‘Accursed Tower’ fell on the other side of the city, the Templars scrambled to retake it, leaving the Lazarites to guard the wall. The Mamluks pressed Montmusard again with the Lazarites spread too thin. All the “military brethren” of the order fought to the death. The fall of Acre represented the end of the Crusader presence in the Near East. What happened to the Lazarites? While the Lazarite cause in the Holy Land collapsed, the order was growing in Europe. During the Crusader period, they had built a network of lazar houses centred on the Castle of Boigny near Orléans in France, and Lazarite monks continued to care for the afflicted. The next centuries would see the order survive papal disfavour, political revolutions, and two world wars. Today, the modern Order of Saint Lazarus boasts 4,500 members across five continents. And it still maintains its original mission of caring for the sick, with a special focus on the one to two million people still suffering with leprosy. Matthew Doherty is a military historian, writer and teacher
Should we stop talking about the crusades?
William Purkis explains how looking at the crusades from a different perspective might give us a truer insight into the medieval mindset
When you think about 'the crusades', you probably think of a series of military campaigns in the Holy Land, representing a great battle between the forces of Islam and Christianity. But is this actually a helpful way to view the subject? Speaking to Emily Briffett, historian William Purkis opens the lid on historical scholarship to reveal the wide and complex reality of crusading fervour in the Middle Ages – and considers how, if we look at it from a different perspective, we might gain a truer insight into the medieval mindset.
Steve Tibble reveals how the medieval Holy Land became a hotbed of lawlessness during the crusades
The crusades sparked centuries of violence and chaos, and not just on the battlefield. This Long Read, written by Steve Tibble, examines the surge in criminality, from petty theft to cold-blooded murder, that accompanied the warring armies to the Holy Land. HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the August 2024 issue, and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.
Jonathan Phillips details the astronomic rise of Saladin – who went head to head with crusading forces and was able to reclaim the holy city of Jerusalem
The name of medieval leader and military commander Saladin has gone down in history for unifying the Muslim Near East, capturing the holy city of Jerusalem and an iconic rivalry with Richard the Lionheart. But, is this extraordinary reputation just the product of his savvy PR team? Speaking to Emily Briffett, Jonathan Phillips charts the extraordinary rise of the Muslim leader, who usurped his patron before reaching dizzying heights – and questions how his legacy has changed across the centuries. View Green Video on the source website
Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land
The crusades sparked centuries of violence and chaos – and not just on the battlefield. Steve Tibble describes the surge in criminality – from petty theft to cold-blooded murder – that accompanied the warring armies to the Holy Land
Modern statesmen live in the expectation of a metaphorical knife in the back from their political enemies. The situation in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was similar, but the knives were far less metaphorical. Miles of Plancy, a powerful nobleman, was not popular with his peers. He could be rude. He could be arrogant. But his main failing, in the eyes of his fellow nobles at least, was that he was far too successful. Miles stepped in to become regent in July 1174, after King Amalric – who had ruled the crusader state since 1163 – died unexpectedly. Miles’s elevation to one of the most important roles in all of the Christian Levant was unwelcome to the older families. He was warned that conspiracies were in train. But instead of taking a more conciliatory stance, Miles appears to have made light of it. Read more | Crusaders: did they fight for God or gold? Events moved far more quickly than Miles expected, however. One day, “while staying at the city of Acre, he was stabbed on the public street just at dusk”, so William of Tyre, the famous chronicler of the crusades, tells us, and “died after suffering ignominious and shameful treatment”. The murder was ruthlessly carried out and the assassin was probably on a ship back to France or Italy within the hour. The brutal world of crusader politics moved on without skipping a beat. Bishop William of Acre appears to have made far fewer enemies than the ambitious Miles of Plancy. But that didn’t prevent him from meeting a similarly grisly fate two years earlier, in 1172. After hearing blood-curdling cries, William’s servants had broken into his room in the Byzantine city of Adrian- ople to discover his butchered body. An assailant had slashed at the highly respected bishop while he rested and recovered from his long, exhausting travels. It was an astonishing episode. Although it occurred during the crusades, William was a member of a peaceful mission travelling through the Byzantine empire, deep inside Christian territory. His was a diplomatic corps of unassuming mediators – priests going about their business. Violence was the last thing they expected. Even more astonishingly, as we’ll see, the killing had been perpetrated by one of their own. Yet perhaps William’s party should have been accustomed to such bloodshed, because they were living in a region swamped by wave after wave of often violent crime. Existential threat By the time of the attack on Bishop William, the long, episodic fight for the Holy Land that followed the launch of the First Crusade in 1096 had been raging intermittently for three-quarters of a century, and was reaching a bloody crescendo. A Kurdish general named Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – better known to the crusaders and to posterity as Saladin – had taken Egypt, in the process gaining control of great wealth and large numbers of mercenaries. He now posed an existential threat to the crusader states established across the region. Read more | Crusader queens: the formidable female rulers of Jerusalem In 1171, these Christian states launched a flurry of diplomatic activity, seeking allies who could help them face this new danger. Bishop William of Acre and his small team of negotiators and household servants were part of this charm offensive. By June 1172, they had been travelling on the punishing roads of the eastern Mediterranean and the Byzantine empire for more than a year. The gruelling mission had taken a heavy toll on everyone in the party, but had proved particularly hard on one young man, a valued member of Bishop William’s household named Brother Robert. He seems to have had a breakdown of some kind, brought on by stress and the seemingly unending rigours of their journey. Read more | Crusader, deserter and traitor: the life and legacy of Raymond III of Tripoli So the group stopped at the city of Adrianople (now Edirne, far north-west Turkey) on their way back to the Byzantine court in Constantinople. There they rested, hoping that Brother Robert would recover enough to be able to continue the journey. Sadly, the opposite hap- pened. It seems that Robert experienced a psychotic episode, sparking a bout of inexplicable violence. While his companions were asleep, wrote William of Tyre, “suddenly a madness came upon him; he seized his sword and stabbed the sleeping bishop, inflicting fatal wounds”. The attack was over within seconds, leaving the bishop fatally wounded. The dying man didn’t, though, call for revenge to be meted out to the young priest. Instead, he insisted that Robert be treated gently. The assailant was clearly not responsible for his actions, William recognised. Yet that defence wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny for the majority of crimes committed across the region – and there were many. We think of the crusades as a succession of campaigns in which violent attacks on Muslim-held targets in the Middle East were met with violent resistance – a bloody clash of ideologies and faiths. But the real problem of the crusades was not religion – it was young men. Dislocated, disinhibited young men, arriving in disturbingly large numbers. This tsunami of youth was the propellant that fuelled two centuries of warfare and shocking levels of criminality. Co-opting criminals The myriad of anecdotes that I discovered while researching my new book, Crusader Criminals, suggests that a massive, and largely untold, increase in crime took place at this time. And this crusader crimewave was shaped by three principal – and surprisingly modern – factors: migration, male entitlement and climate change. In the decades before the launch of the First Crusade, the climate in the eastern Mediterranean and western Eurasian steppes became unstable, frequently causing unusually cold and unusually hot spells, typically accompanied by famines or droughts. The nomadic Turkic tribes of the western Eurasian steppes were hit particularly hard. Unlike sedentary societies, they maintained limited food reserves, so their only response to a sudden famine was to move away. This was the first major wave of migration to consider in this story: the movement of a loose confederation of Seljuk Turkic warbands into the Middle East in the second half of the 11th century. These nomadic tribes were recent converts to Sunni Islam, but most had little interest in theology. They attacked settled communities, fighting Christians and Muslims alike, and took what they wanted. By the 1080s, these steppe war- lords had taken much of Byzantine Anatolia and Palestine, plus most of the Arab Syrian city-states. The Byzantine empire called on the Christian powers of western Europe for help, sparking the expedition that became known as the First Crusade – the second pivotal migration. Following a succession of military victories, including the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, some of the crusaders established colonies in the region – polities that later became known as the ‘crusader states’. That was, of course, far from the end of the conflict. Two centuries of war followed, fuelling an ongoing recruitment drive for young mercenaries and other long-distance recruits to bolster both Christian and Muslim forces, drawing a torrent of often dangerous men into the region. The incidence of violence soared – and remained spectacularly high, even by the standards of a region noted for its lawlessness, resulting in widespread chaos and social upheaval. That’s unsurprising when you look at the kind of men being recruited. Consider this episode of 1248, during the French king Louis IX’s preparations for what became known as the Seventh Crusade, recounted by the chronicler Jean de Joinville. “As I was on my way to Paris,” wrote Jean, “I came across three dead men on a cart whom a clerk [a trainee priest] had killed, and I was told... that the men were three [policemen]” who had set out to rob local people. On encountering the young priest, they “stripped him of all his clothes. The clerk, wearing only his chemise, went to his lodgings and took up his crossbow.” He also got hold of his falchion – a short, hefty sword with a broad, curved blade, like a machete. Chasing his assailants, he “drew his crossbow, fired and struck one of them in the heart. The other two took flight, while the clerk took up the falchion... and chased them by the light of the moon, which was bright and clear.” The angry clerk struck one fleeing man with his sword “and cut right through his leg so that only the boot [was] holding it on”. He then struck the other’s head with his falchion, splitting his skull down to the teeth. The king recognised a useful man when he saw one. With ecclesiastical employment now unlikely to be an option for the triple killer, Louis gave the clerk the opportunity to make a radical career change. The church’s loss was the Seventh Crusade’s gain. To catch a thief Crime wasn’t just tolerated and its perpetrators recruited to the crusaders’ cause – it was even nurtured by some in the ‘wild east’ of the medieval Holy Land. When Jean de Joinville was on crusade in the 1250s, he discovered a theft. “I asked my new servant, Guillemin, to show me his accounts, which he did,” Jean later wrote. “I found that he had cheated me out of a good 10 livres or more... I dismissed him and told him I would give him what he owed me, since he had certainly earned it.” A curious reaction? Perhaps Jean’s later discoveries – and his own actions – explain his leniency. Read more | 3 poems and songs that reveal how medieval people felt about the Crusades It transpired that Guillemin already had an extensive criminal record. Speaking later to his servant’s previous employers, a band of Burgundian knights, Jean “learned from them that they had brought Guillemin overseas in their company, and that he was the most obliging thief that there ever was”. Indeed, he often pilfered things on their orders: “Whenever a knight was in need of gloves or spurs or anything else,” they told Jean, “Guillemin would go and steal it and then give it to him.” Was Jean, too, party to some of Guillemin’s criminal activities? Or did his servant know things about Jean that he’d prefer left untold? We know, for instance, that Guillemin had found lodgings for them conveniently – perhaps suspiciously – close to the sex workers and bath-houses of Acre. Was that at his master’s request? And did Jean avail himself of these facilities? We don’t know – but it’s clear that, even at the highest echelons of crusading societies, crime was pervasive. Multi-ethnic murder Crime in the region wasn’t confined to theft. Bloodshed, fuelled by demographic imbalance, testosterone and cultural disinhibition, was endemic among the crusaders and their enemies in the region. An episode involving Zengi, the powerful 12th-century Turkic ruler of Mosul (now in Iraq) – an opponent of the crusaders whose family had been part of that wave of migration from the steppes – was just one of thousands of examples of wanton violence. Zengi had a predilection for murder, violence and rape, and a preference for young men. From the outset of his rule, it was said that “when he was unhappy with an amir, he would kill him... and leave that individual’s children alive but castrate them. Whenever one of his pages pleased him by his beauty he would treat him in the same way so that the characteristics of youth would last longer in him.” Zengi’s sleeping arrangements reflected these tastes. “A few of his servants sleep around his bed,” wrote one chronicler. “He loves them as they love him and, despite their loyalty to him, he is sometimes harsh with them. They are the children of the... Turkish, Armenian and Byzantine lords.” The First Crusade Explore the First Crusade with our in-depth podcast series,nwith contributions from Steve Tibble among others. Listen now His rule – and his life – was ended at the hands of one of those beautiful but mutilated pages. On the night of 14 September 1146, Zengi had, as usual, been drinking heavily. He slumped into a stupor and woke to find his servants, led by a Frankish slave named Yaranqash, finishing his fine wines. Enraged, Zengi made the mistake of telling his prisoner-lover that he was going to have him killed in the morning. The Frankish eunuch, presumably also drunk, responded by killing his master and – in a final act that speaks to the high emotions involved – beheaded him for good measure. On one level, this dramatic incident seems lurid but perhaps not too unusual. Yet consider: who were the people involved? The answer highlights the issues at the heart of the crusader crimewave. First, everyone was male and, apart from Zengi himself, they were all young. Importantly, all were also foreigners or relatively recent arrivals. Zengi was a Turk of steppe heritage, while his assassin was said to be of European ethnicity. Others present were Byzantine or Armenians, displaced by the Turkic invasions of the preceding decades. None were Arab. Similarly, religion wasn’t a prominent factor in anyone’s actions or motives. Zengi was – nominally, at least – a Sunni Muslim, but his predilection for alcohol and mutilated slave boys suggests a less-than-orthodox approach to observance. Many, perhaps the majority, of his young lovers seem to have been from a Christian back- ground. So the diverse origins of the people involved was a consequence of demographic forces particular to this time and place: lots of young men detached from their families and the countries of their birth. The two centuries of conflict in the Middle East known today as the crusades sucked in a huge number of often violent young men, armed and adrift, who were let loose in the Holy Land, with profoundly scarring effects on the region. War was the most visible consequence of these forces – but criminality and pervasive civil violence were just as prevalent, and arguably even more fundamentally destructive. Tide of crime Shiploads of men, including merchants and mercenaries, turned to piracy in the eastern Mediterranean As well as driving the incidence of violence and theft on land, the deluge of young men surging into the Middle East also coincided with a rise in crime at sea. Vast numbers of ships, sailors and naval entrepreneurs were drawn to the region. Crusader pirates did not feature heavily in the chronicles of the time, but evidence shows that they were always there in the background, often operating in large numbers. In medieval times, piracy was part of a ‘portfolio career’ long before anyone thought of such first-world issues as early retirement or the gig economy. In the Latin East, it was treated with a huge dose of pragmatism. Largely unfettered by legal frameworks, a medieval pirate was, in most instances, simply someone with a ship and an opportunity. Such an opportunity might attract men from every walk of life. Take Godric of Finchale (c1070–1170), the English ship’s captain and venture capitalist who saved the life of King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, carrying him safely to Jaffa after defeat by Egyptian forces at Ramla in 1102 – thus influencing the course of cru- sading history. He later became a hermit monk, and even found time to write the lyrics to the earliest known English-language songs surviving with their original melodies. But he’s also equated to a pirate named Godric who operated in the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Some men arriving as crusaders engaged in slave-trading: one such was William Jiba, who operated out of Acre in the early 1140s and who was renowned for his cruelty. Even one of his customers called him “a real devil of a Frank”. There are even tales of crusading Viking pirate-knights who boasted that, en route to the Holy Land, they had landed on the north African coast to “shoot at the lions as they were spurring their horses on as hard as they could”. It’s a story so strange that it’s probably true. Steve Tibble is honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. His new book is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press), published in July This article was first published in the August 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
The crusade against the odds: how the First Crusade succeeded despite the obstacles
Chronic starvation, hostile landscapes, powerful foes – the First Crusade overcame seemingly insurmountable challenges. Emily Briffett speaks to expert historians to reveal how zeal, strategy and sheer luck secured military success for this ambitious campaign
After three long years, the campaign reached its climax. In June 1099, a crusader army arrived outside Jerusalem and stared up at its towering walls. From late 1095, men, women and children from western Europe had left their homes and set out east on a vast military expedition that would take them to the Holy Land. Now, after enduring lightning ambushes, desperate sieges and periods of near starvation, the jewel in the crown of Christendom was in their sights. But not yet within their grasp. Between the crusaders and the conquest of Jerusalem stood the city’s determined defenders. These troops of the Fatimid caliphate – a Shia Muslim empire spanning north Africa and parts of the near east, with its capital in Cairo – guarded a population of perhaps 20,000 Muslims, Jews and eastern Orthodox Christians massed within. At first, the defenders prevailed, resisting everything the increasingly frustrated crusader forces could throw at them. But then, after weeks of skirmishes and as a last resort, the nobleman Godfrey of Bouillon used a siege tower to gain a priceless toehold on the walls to the north of the city, and was able to open the nearest gate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-463919331web-22dbb30.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting showing a melee on a battlefield in front of a city, with armoured men fighting and dying, and three horses dying." title="A scene from the First Crusade, as depicted in Les Passages d’Outremer, a 15th-century chronicle of the crusades. (Image by Sebastian Marmoret/Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector via Getty Images)" /> Hundreds of crusaders poured in. In the searing heat, simmering anger and frustration was unleashed, and a number of the inhabitants were slaughtered. When the dust settled, Godfrey was declared ‘Defender of the Holy Sepulchre’ – ruler in all but name. The holy city was finally in the hands of the crusaders. Read more | How the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 The capture of Jerusalem was a bloody catastrophe for its inhabitants. Indeed, the campaign that preceded it – and others that followed, along with the partisan European views of these events – continue to be problematic in modern eyes. Yet in purely military terms, the conquest of Jerusalem was an astonishing victory for those Christian attackers – and the culmination of one of the most unlikely, against-the-odds endeavours of the entire Middle Ages: the First Crusade. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-463894745web-4a5a3b5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Pope Urban II addresses the Council of Clermont, which he called in November 1095, in a late 15th-century illumination. His speech on the final day of that synod launched the First Crusade. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector viaGetty Images)" title="Pope Urban II addresses the Council of Clermont, which he called in November 1095, in a late 15th-century illumination. His speech on the final day of that synod launched the First Crusade. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector viaGetty Images)" /> The spark that lit the tinder for this campaign was Pope Urban II’s famous rallying cry at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, when he exhorted people across western Europe to take up arms and free the Holy Land from Seljuk Muslim rule. To those listening, the magnitude of the military adventure he was proposing must have been clear. In the late 11th century, simply embarking on a pilgrimage was considered dangerous enough. The idea of leaving home for several years, trekking thousands of miles across continents to fight an enemy in utterly alien terrain, was nothing short of extraordinary. And the perilous nature of the task ahead clearly weighed heavily on the minds of crusaders and their families. “Contemporary accounts record that women wept copiously, wondering if they would ever see their husbands again,” says Danielle Park, teaching fellow at the University of Leicester. They had every reason to worry. Facing perilous mountain passes and vast, arid plains, the crusaders encountered landscapes radically different from western Europe. Without accurate maps, they also had little idea of where they were going or what they would find when they arrived. By the time they reached Asia Minor and then the Levant – the Muslim lands of the near east, comprising what is today Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Jordan – they were exhausted, and facing an unfamiliar and hostile population they struggled to understand. Many of their friends had died. They had suffered starvation to the point of cannibalism, and witnessed things that would make anyone recoil in terror. The First Crusade should not have been successful – yet it was. How were the crusaders able to pull off this medieval feat of arms? Find out more in our podcast series, The First Crusade: The War That Transformed The Medieval World. All episodes are available to members of HistoryExtra now Rival powers Urban’s original motivation for issuing his fateful call to arms continues to spark debate. Certainly, that rallying cry was a direct response to a plea for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081– 1118). Since the 1060s, Christian Byzantine forces had been engaged in a conflict with the Sunni Muslim Seljuk empire – a rival power to the Fatimids that had conquered much of Anatolia and the near east. The Byzantine empire had long been the dominant force in the eastern Mediterranean, and was now pushing to win back lost territory. Alexios needed western knights to beef up his campaign against the Seljuks and recapture lands to the east. Alexios’s appeal to Urban seemed to offer a solution to two issues troubling that pope in the 1090s. The first was faltering papal authority; the second was a surfeit of aggressive knights lacking outlets for their martial energies. A hugely ambitious military campaign to the Holy Land promised to tackle both problems in one fell swoop. So Urban wove his narrative like a medieval spin doctor, claiming back for Christendom the Holy Land – the location of Jesus Christ’s burial, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension – and promising salvation to those who joined the cause. The result was an explosion of religious fervour that inspired tens of thousands across Europe – mostly from France, but also from Iberia to England, and from the Italian peninsula to the German states – to rally to the crusading cause. (Some, of course, joined for other reasons: a sense of honour, or simply because they had no choice other than to follow their lords.) That fervour remained largely undimmed when, from late 1096 through to early 1097, the crusader armies gathered at the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, before crossing the Bosphorus and marching through Asia Minor. And it carried those forces all the way to Jerusalem. Holy War: A timeline of the First Crusade 27 November 1095: Pope Urban II issues a call to arms at the Council of Clermont, setting the idea of crusading ablaze in western Europe’s Christian states. April 1096: Some 30,000 people set off on the ‘People’s Crusade’. In October, they are crushed by Seljuk Turks at the battle of Civetot, south-east of Constantinople (now Istanbul). November 1096–April 1097: The main wave of the crusading army gathers outside the walls of Constantinople before crossing the Bosphorus. Many of the leaders swear an oath of fealty to Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. 14 May–19 June 1097: In the first major clash of the First Crusade, Christian forces besiege Nicaea (near the site of modern-day İznik, north-west Turkey), where the defending Seljuk Turks surrender to the Byzantines. 1 July 1097: A crusader contingent is ambushed at the battle of Dorylaeum (now Eskişehir, south-east of Istanbul). Relieved by the main army, a crusader victory ensues. 20 October 1097–3 June 1098: The crusaders besiege Antioch (now Antakya, south-east Turkey). After striking a deal with a local man, Firouz, they sneak into the city and seize it. 10 March 1098: Baldwin of Boulogne becomes Count of Edessa (in what is now south-east Turkey) after an Armenian uprising overthrows its previous lord, Thoros. 7–28 June 1098: A Seljuk relief force besieges the crusaders inside Antioch. The crusaders break the siege at the battle of Antioch. 7 June–15 July 1099: The crusaders arrive at Jerusalem and besiege it. Once they breach the city walls, they massacre many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants before making Godfrey of Bouillon ruler in all but name. 12 August 1099: Crusaders defeat Fatimid forces at the battle of Ascalon (now Ashekelon, north of Gaza), securing their hold on the Levant. Exploiting a power vacuum Religious zeal alone can’t explain the success of the First Crusade. Another factor was the state of play in the near east at the time, where their Muslim foes were riven by infighting and destabilised by power vacuums. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/CPA0028597-2web-3307c87.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An old and damaged illustration of a man being assassinated." title="An assassin murders Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the Seljuk empire, as he travels to Baghdad in 1092. The deaths of several Muslim leaders left the near east riven by infighting and vulnerable to crusader attacks. (Image from TopFoto)" /> One poet described 1094 as the “year of the death of caliphs and commanders”, with chaos roaring across the Muslim near east. The tumult had begun two years earlier, in 1092, when Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the Seljuk empire, was assassinated. That same year, the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I also died in suspicious circumstances. Then, in 1094, Al-Muqtadi, the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, died, along with al-Mustansir, the Fatimid caliph and his vizier. In short, internal strife was weakening Muslim powers in the region, notably the Seljuk and Fatimid empires. “In the space of a few years, the leadership across the Muslim near east had been removed,” says Jonathan Phillips, professor of crusading history at Royal Holloway, University of London. “All those decades of experience were wiped out.” As a result, authority fragmented across the region. Rivalries that had built up over decades spilled over into conflict. So when the crusaders arrived, they were not confronted by a unified opposition. “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, had the First Crusade turned up in 1090, it would not have got past its first obstacle,” argues Phillips. “Such was the strength and organisational ability of the Seljuks, the crusaders’ main foe.” Many Muslim towns and cities were distracted by their internal woes, and were unprepared to deal with the sudden arrival of a huge crusader army on their doorstep. “Every town decided what to do for itself, and this often depended on who was ruling there,” says Suleiman A Mourad, Myra M Sampson professor of religion at Smith College, Massachusetts. “Some fled in fear, while others thought they could make a deal with the crusaders.” Read more | Your top questions about the crusades – answered Friends among foes Another aspect helping the crusaders’ push east was the fact that much of the population of the near east was Christian. Many of the towns en route to the Holy Land had been ruled by Muslims for just a few years. For example, Nicaea – an ancient Greek city in north-western Asia Minor, which fell to the crusaders in June 1097 – had been ceded by the Byzantines to the Seljuks as recently as 1081. As a result, locals were often much more supportive of the crusaders than we might initially imagine. For some of them, the First Crusade was not a war of religion but, rather, a means of ejecting a hostile occupying force. This resentment against Muslim rule had major repercussions during the siege of Antioch (October 1097–June 1098). That Seljuk Turk-held city lay on the crusaders’ route to Jerusalem through Syria. It proved a fiendishly tough nut to crack, and by early 1098 huge numbers of crusaders were dying of starvation outside its walls. Fortunately for them, they had an inside man. An Armenian guard in Antioch, Firouz, struck a deal with the crusader leader Bohemond of Taranto to allow the latter’s army to pour into the city and capture it. Once Antioch was taken, it was not only the crusaders who massacred the Turkish garrison but also the local Christian population. Yet to ascribe the First Crusade’s success to Muslim infighting alone – or to the help of sympathetic locals – is to do the crusaders a disservice, argues Steve Tibble, honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. This was – at times, anyway – an impressively executed military campaign. “The crusaders were brave and well motivated, and had some very aggressive, entrepreneurial generals,” Tibble explains. These commanders “were more like trade union convenors than dictators”, making strategic decisions based on group discussions. And there was a logic to their choices of targets: they attacked Nicaea to rid the Byzantines of a nearby Seljuk hub, Antioch to establish a defendable base en route to Jerusalem. Read more | Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? Inherent violence The First Crusade also benefited from the fact that many of those involved were well versed in the ways of war before they’d even contemplated a military campaign in the east. In the 11th century, western Europe was a fragmented, fractious place; elites held sway through what were, in effect, military protection rackets. Violence was already inherent in the system. And after years of dangerous travel and combat had winnowed out weaker and less-accomplished fighters, those crusaders who eventually reached Jerusalem were the best-equipped and militarily most skilled. The fact that the enemies were unfamiliar to each other also aided the crusaders. On this campaign they mostly faced Seljuk forces that, even while weakened by infighting, boasted what was probably the best light cavalry in the world. But while the new opponents were still getting the measure of each other, they tended to avoid open combat, which would have left the crusaders’ slower, heavy cavalry and other troops at risk. Perhaps the European armies’ greatest advantage during the First Crusade, though, was their unity. There were times, of course, when that unity came under enormous pressure. Language differences, bickering commanders with competing agendas, disease and starvation in an alien and often unforgiving landscape – all stretched the bonds linking the crusaders to breaking point. Yet those bonds never quite snapped. “Whatever it was that drove the crusaders – religious zeal, honour, money, land – all those things coalesced in an ability to stay together,” says Phillips. And they stayed together until the crusaders reached their ultimate goal in the burning heat of the decisive summer of 1099: Jerusalem. A hollow victory? The First Crusade was a major military feat, but its legacy over the following two centuries proved problematic. The capture of Jerusalem in summer 1099 was rapidly feted across western Europe as a major triumph – evidence of Christendom’s apparent superiority over its Muslim foes. Yet the crusaders’ unlikely victory would have dramatic and long-lasting consequences – not all of them benefiting the victors. Big questions still remain about the original aims of the First Crusade. To what extent was Jerusalem central to Pope Urban II’s thinking when he issued his call to arms, for example? Was the holy city always his ultimate target – or did the Byzantines or papacy tag it on as an additional incentive to entice western Christendom to action? “Most of the narrative material was composed in the wake of the crusade, so it would have been relatively easy for clerics to project that goal backwards,” says Danielle Park. Whatever Urban’s original intentions, after the capture of Jerusalem the First Crusade became a blueprint for further military expeditions to the Holy Land. “It was the crusade’s perceived success that allowed the church to say: ‘God clearly wanted this to happen, therefore crusading is something we should con- tinue to do’,” explains Natasha Hodgson, associate professor of medieval history at Nottingham Trent University. The success of the First Crusade led western European powers to believe it could be repeated – not recognising that this first triumph was, in some respects, down to chance. In the event, over the following two centuries, much blood was spilled and vast amounts of money spent both on further campaigns and on attempting to defend the network of crusader states that emerged across the Middle East – ultimately to no avail. The crusades also, of course, had a grave impact on relations between Christians and Muslims. Religious anger about the presence of Christian states in the near east gradually weaponised Muslim resentment. By the mid-12th century, this had erupted into a full-blown campaign of retaliation spearheaded by Muslim generals who had learned from their past defeats. “Maintaining a western presence in the Levant was never sustainable,” reflects Steve Tibble. And less than two centuries later, defeat to Muslim Mamluk forces at the 1291 siege of Acre, now in coastal Israel, heralded the end of the Christian states in the Holy Land. Emily Briffett is the HistoryExtra podcast editorial assistant and host of our new series exploring the First Crusade This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
BONUS | The First Crusade: wrapping up the story
In this subscriber-only bonus episode, Emily Briffett brings back several historians from our First Crusade podcast series, putting the biggest questions surrounding crusading history to them and answering listener questions
How different would the late 11th century have been if the First Crusade hadn't happened? From muddled motivations to its impactful legacy, what are some of the biggest misconceptions about the crusades? In a special bonus episode available to HistoryExtra subscribers, Emily Briffett is rejoined by medieval experts Jonathan Phillips, Natasha Hodgson and Suleiman Mourad to unpick some of the biggest questions surrounding crusading history, and answer listener queries along the way. View Green Video on the source website
What were the landmark sieges of the First Crusade? Who went on this long and arduous journey? And what caused Pope Urban II to spark the idea of crusading in the minds of western Europe? We answer your top questions surrounding the armed pilgrimage that kickstarted years of military campaigns to the Holy Land and beyond…
When was the First Crusade? The First Crusade was launched on 27 November 1095, and culminated in the siege of Jerusalem in June to July 1099 and the subsequent battle of Ascalon in August that year. However, most of the major events of the First Crusade took place after the agreed departure date: 15 August 1096. Who called for the First Crusade? Pope Urban II first sparked the idea of crusading when he issued a landmark call at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, commanding the Christian warriors of western Europe to take up arms against perceived enemies in the east, in order to reclaim the Holy Land. Urban hailed from a noble French family, before becoming a Cluniac monk and later pope. He understood the wants and needs of those he called upon in Clermont, appealing to a throng that included all kinds of religious leaders, from archbishops to clerics. According to eyewitness contemporary chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, it was the mission, said the pope, of warriors “to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends”. Urban also promised a reward: that all who should embark upon such a crusade and die would receive remission of their sins: in other words, guaranteed entry into heaven. Pope Urban II’s rallying cry soon became what is known today as the First Crusade, as men and women, young and old, set off to reclaim the Near East for Christendom. Within months, thousands had ‘taken the cross’. By the summer of 1096, four crusading contingents – estimates vary between 30,000 and 100,000 crusaders – were on their way to Jerusalem. Find out more in our podcast series, The First Crusade: The War That Transformed The Medieval World. Why did the First Crusade happen? There is a complex web of reasons why the First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II. Since the 1060s, Christian Byzantines had been engaged in conflict with the Sunni Muslim Seljuk empire – a rival power to the Fatimids that had conquered much of Anatolia (now part of modern-day Turkey, then a part of the Byzantine empire) and the near east – and by 1095 they had hoped to claim back what they had lost. Read more | Who was Saladin? Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos had pleaded for western warriors to strengthen his own troops, sending envoys to Pope Urban II at the Council of Piacenza (March 1095) and, later, the Council of Clermont (November 1095). Alexios’ appeal offered a solution to two issues that had troubled Urban. It not only allowed him to establish himself as the true leader of Christendom at a time of wavering papal authority, but provided the aggressive knights of western Europe with an outlet for their martial energies – all while offering his flock the chance to achieve salvation. View Green Video on the source website It is uncertain to what extent Jerusalem was central to Pope Urban II’s thinking when he issued his call to arms; it may have been tagged on by the Byzantines or the papacy as an additional incentive to entice western Christendom to action. Certainly, in later sources, it is attributed as a main aim of the campaign, but it could have been easy to reverse-engineer as justification for Jerusalem’s conquest. In terms of practicalities, after years of poor harvests, 1095 AD had proven a bountiful year, making supplying a large army on the move feasible. Timeline: key moments of the First Crusade 27 November 1095 Pope Urban II issues a call to arms at the Council of Clermont, setting the idea of crusading ablaze in western Europe’s Christian states. April 1096 Some 30,000 people set off on the ‘People’s Crusade’. In October, they are crushed by Seljuk Turks at the battle of Civetot, south-east of Constantinople (now Istanbul). November 1096–April 1097 The main wave of the crusading army gathers outside the walls of Constantinople before crossing the Bosphorus. Many of the leaders swear an oath of fealty to Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. 14 May–19 June 1097 In the first major clash of the First Crusade, Christian forces besiege Nicaea (near the site of modern-day İznik, north-west Turkey), where the defending Seljuk Turks surrender to the Byzantines 1 July 1097 A crusader contingent is ambushed at the battle of Dorylaeum (now Eskişehir, south-east of Istanbul). Relieved by the main army, a crusader victory ensues. 20 October 1097– 3 June 1098 The crusaders besiege Antioch (now Antakya, south-east Turkey). After striking a deal with a local man, Firouz, they sneak into the city and seize it. 10 March 1098 Baldwin of Boulogne becomes Count of Edessa (in what is now south-east Turkey) after an Armenian uprising overthrows its previous lord, Thoros. 7–28 June 1098 A Seljuk relief force besieges the crusaders inside Antioch. The crusaders break the siege at the battle of Antioch. 7 June–15 July 1099 The crusaders arrive at Jerusalem and besiege it. Once they breach the city walls, they massacre many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants before making Godfrey of Bouillon ruler in all but name. 12 August 1099 Crusaders defeat Fatimid forces at the battle of Ascalon (now Ashekelon, north of Gaza), securing their hold on the Levant. Who fought in the First Crusade? While the pope had intended to rally the elite troops of western Europe, his summons had a surprising result: an explosion of popular religious fervour that inspired tens of thousands across Europe to travel thousands of miles to fight an enemy in utterly alien territory. Nobles, knights, engineers, clergy, peasants, women and children all set out. They were mostly from France, but also from the Iberian peninsula to England, and from the Italian peninsula to the German states, and were spurred on by religious zeal, or travelled either out of obligation to a lord, or even for honour, land or wealth. This crusading army encompassed four contingents that, while not always cooperative, were held together by their common goal – to recapture Jerusalem. What were the key sieges of the First Crusade? While there were several other notable confrontations, there were four major sieges during the First Crusade. 1) The siege of Nicaea The first target of the crusading army lay just under 100 miles into Asia Minor: the ancient Greek city of Nicaea, which had been captured by Seljuk Turks in 1081. This first encounter was relatively anticlimactic as, after at the end of the siege – which lasted from May and June 1097 – the Byzantine contingent of the crusading army negotiated a surrender with the defenders. This forced the crusaders to move on before they had a chance to loot the city. As they travelled further through Asia Minor, some of the crusaders were ambushed at the battle of Dorylaeum in July 1097, before being rescued by a relief force. 2) The siege of Antioch Arguably the most arduous moment of their journey was to be found shortly afterwards at Seljuk-held Antioch (modern-day Antakya in Turkey), which the crusaders besieged from October 1097 until June 1098. For much of that time, starvation rocked the crusader camp, and it ended not with open battle, but guile and violence. In the spring of 1098, one of their leaders – Bohemond of Taranto – made a deal with an Armenian guard, Firouz. He allowed Bohemond and a small party into Antioch, who subsequently opened the gate, allowing the rest of the crusading army to flood in and take the city by storm. 3) The second siege (and subsequent battle of Antioch) Having conquered Antioch, within days the crusaders were in a desperate position, as they were then besieged themselves – trapped by a relief force of Seljuk Turk Kerbogha. It was during this month-long siege that a priest called Peter Bartholomew claimed to have made a miraculous discovery – the Holy Lance that had pierced the side of Christ as he was tied to the cross. In a last-ditch attempt, they marched out of the city, scattering Kerbogha’s forces in battle on 28 June 1098. 4) The siege of Jerusalem The crusaders final challenge was the holy city of Jerusalem, which they besieged in the simmering heat of July 1099. Good fortune struck, and utilising timbers from allied supply ships trapped in a nearby harbour, the crusaders were able to build two siege towers and scramble over the city walls, where they sacked and massacred many of its inhabitants. The crusaders’ victory of 15 July 1099 AD at Jerusalem prompted widespread celebration in the Christian world. In the Muslim world, stories and rumours about the crusaders’ conquests swirled and were weaponised over time, which had long repercussions in the following centuries. What was the outcome of the First Crusade? The First Crusade was interpreted in western Europe as a major success. The crusaders had captured the holy city of Jerusalem, and with it the supposed site of Jesus Christ’s burial, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. The Church seized upon this achievement quickly, establishing crusading as a worthy military endeavour. In future years, it would hark back to the First Crusade as the blueprint for any subsequent campaigns. There were geopolitical changes, too. In the wake of the campaign, the crusaders also established four crusader states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa and the County of Tripoli. Although Edessa was lost in 1150, the remaining three survived for almost 200 years, providing defence for Christian communities in the Middle East, as well as maintaining a western presence on the borderlands of Christian control. Read more | Muslim-Crusader interactions: a clash of civilisations? However, in the long-term, the First Crusade created a series of problems. Primarily, the success of the First Crusade led western Christians to believe they could seize and hold the Levant – a broad geographical term describing the eastern part of the Mediterranean, with its islands and the countries adjoining. In reality, the crusader states were too far from Europe’s heartlands, and were on the edge of a vast, militarily impressive Islamic empire. Gradual resentment among the Muslim caliphates about these Christian landholdings escalated into a growing counter-crusade which, by the 1140s, had exploded into full-blown retaliation. Against such a threat, maintaining a western presence in the region became an unsustainable campaign. Find out more about the First Crusade in our podcast series, The First Crusade: The War That Transformed The Medieval World. All episodes are available to members of HistoryExtra now