AQA A-Level History

The world before the crusades

The Latin Church and the papacy

In the later eleventh century the Church in western Europe, known as the Latin Church, was the main institution that bound the kingdoms of Christendom together. It owned a great deal of land, its bishops and abbots sat beside lay lords as rulers, and its teaching shaped how people understood sin, penance and salvation. Pilgrimage was a normal act of penance, and Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela were the great destinations.

The papacy in these years was claiming more authority than it had held before. The reform movement associated with the abbey of Cluny wanted a Church free of lay control, with clergy who were celibate and not bought into office. Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085) turned this into a programme in which the pope stood above kings, and the Investiture Controversy was the quarrel that followed, over whether popes or lay rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor had the right to appoint bishops. At Canossa in 1077 Emperor Henry IV did penance before Gregory to have his excommunication lifted, though the struggle went on for decades. A pope who could command an emperor to kneel was a pope who might also summon Christians to arms under his own authority, and this is the background to Urban II's call in 1095.

The Latin Church was also divided from the Greek, or Orthodox, Church of the Byzantine Empire. In 1054 the pope's legates and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated one another. The quarrel concerned papal primacy and points of doctrine and practice, and it did not at first seem permanent, since many on both sides expected that it could be mended.

Islam and the Seljuk Turks

By the middle of the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks, a Sunni Muslim people from central Asia, had taken control of Persia and Iraq. In 1055 their leader entered Baghdad and became the effective ruler on behalf of the Abbasid caliph, who remained the spiritual head of Sunni Islam without real power. The Seljuks then pushed west against the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, a Shia dynasty that was their religious and political rival. Muslim unity was therefore more apparent than real: Sunni and Shia fought for control of Syria and Palestine, and a Seljuk sultan's authority depended on the loyalty of local emirs and military governors.

That unity broke down further after 1092. The great Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah died that year, and so did his vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and the Seljuk lands split into rival emirates. In Syria two brothers, Ridwan in Aleppo and Duqaq in Damascus, were enemies, and the Fatimids took Jerusalem from a local Turkish ruler in 1098, while the first crusaders were in northern Syria. When the Franks arrived the Near East was a patchwork of mutually suspicious rulers, and this goes a long way to explain why the crusaders were able to cross it.

The Byzantine Empire and Manzikert

The Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, still held Anatolia and the Balkans in the 1060s, but it was weakened by quarrels among its aristocracy and by pressure on several frontiers, from Normans in southern Italy, nomads in the Balkans and Turks in the east. In 1071 the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes led an army against the Seljuks and was beaten at the Battle of Manzikert by Sultan Alp Arslan, who captured him. The sultan treated him with some courtesy and released him, but the real damage followed from Byzantine politics: Romanos was deposed and blinded, civil wars broke out, and in the confusion Turkish bands settled across the interior of Anatolia, which had been the empire's recruiting ground and its richest source of revenue.

Alexios I Komnenos, who seized the throne in 1081, rebuilt the empire's finances and army. He faced Normans under Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond in the west and Turks in the east, and in 1095 he looked to the West for mercenary soldiers. This is the immediate source of the First Crusade, although what Alexios wanted, a few thousand experienced troops under his own command, was very different from what he received.

Urban II and the call to crusade

Pope Urban II (1088–1099) was a French reformer and a former monk of Cluny. In March 1095 envoys from Alexios attended the Council of Piacenza and asked for help against the Turks. Urban responded at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, where he preached, to a large audience of clergy and nobles, a campaign to free the Christians of the East and to liberate Jerusalem. No contemporary wrote down his words as he spoke them; the surviving accounts were composed after the crusade had succeeded, by Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Baldric of Dol and Guibert of Nogent, and they shape the speech to what the writers knew had happened. Historians therefore agree that Urban offered a spiritual reward and a call to arms, and that Jerusalem became the goal, but disagree about how far he planned the Holy City from the start.

Urban's motives were political as well as religious. A successful expedition would show that the papacy, and not the emperor, led Christendom. It might also help reunite the Latin and Greek Churches by showing the West's goodwill to Byzantium, and it would direct the violence of the knightly class away from Christian neighbours towards an enemy, a goal that the Peace and Truce of God movements had already pursued. Urban also needed to strengthen his own position, since in 1095 he still faced a rival pope supported by Henry IV.

The central offer was an indulgence, the remission of the penance owed for sins already confessed. Those who took the cross made a vow, and in doing so became pilgrims under the protection of the Church, so that their lands and families were safe while they were away. Crusaders sewed a cross onto their clothes as the sign of the vow. The idea of an armed pilgrimage was new, and it combined the existing ideas of penitential pilgrimage and holy war into one.

The motives of the crusaders

Historians have argued for generations about why thousands of people left home for a dangerous expedition of several thousand kilometres. The older view, strong in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stressed land hunger and adventure: younger sons of the French and Norman nobility with little to inherit, and merchants looking for markets. Carl Erdmann emphasised the papal idea of holy war. More recent scholars, above all Jonathan Riley-Smith, have argued that most crusaders were motivated by genuine religious conviction and the wish to do penance, since the cost of the expedition was enormous, many knights spent several years of their income on it, and few of them gained land in the East. The evidence of crusaders' own charters, which record gifts to monasteries and the sale or mortgage of property before departure, supports this view. Most historians now accept that motives were mixed and differed from person to person.

The leaders

The First Crusade had no single commander and no king among its leaders. Raymond of Toulouse, the wealthy count of Toulouse and Saint-Gilles, was the oldest and the richest, and the first great lord to take the cross. The papal legate Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, accompanied the main army and acted for the pope. Bohemond of Taranto, a Norman from southern Italy, had fought Alexios in the Balkans and was ambitious for a principality of his own. Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne came from the Rhine and Meuse region. Others included Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, Robert of Flanders, Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois, the king of France's brother. The leaders made their own arrangements and competed, and Raymond's rivalry with Bohemond was among the most damaging disputes of the campaign.

The popular movements

Preaching also drew crowds of poor and unarmed people. Peter the Hermit, a preacher from northern France, led a large band of followers east in the spring of 1096, and other groups followed. This People's Crusade crossed to Anatolia and was destroyed by the Turks in October 1096 at Civetot. Some of these bands attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland on their way, including those at Speyer, Worms and Mainz, under leaders such as Count Emicho of Leiningen, and the massacres of Jews in 1096 were condemned by some bishops who tried, mostly without success, to protect them. They mark the first large persecution of Jews in medieval Europe connected with crusading.

The First Crusade, 1096–1099

The main armies travelled in separate groups by different routes in 1096 and gathered at Constantinople in the winter of 1096–1097. Alexios, alarmed at the size of the forces, required the leaders to swear an oath to return to him any former Byzantine territory they took, and most of them did so. With Byzantine help the crusaders took Nicaea from the Seljuks in June 1097, and shortly afterwards defeated a Seljuk army at Dorylaeum in July 1097. They then marched across Anatolia in the heat, with heavy losses of men and horses.

Baldwin of Boulogne broke away to pursue his own interests and took Edessa in 1098, which gave the crusaders their first territorial base in the East. The main army besieged Antioch from October 1097. The siege lasted about eight months, and the crusaders suffered hunger and disease. Bohemond arranged for an Armenian officer in the city to let him in, and Antioch fell in June 1098. A Muslim relief army under Kerbogha, the ruler of Mosul, arrived days afterwards and besieged the crusaders in turn. Morale was restored when a peasant, Peter Bartholomew, claimed to have found the Holy Lance, the spear said to have pierced Christ's side, and the crusaders defeated Kerbogha in battle outside the city. Many contemporaries and later historians doubted that the relic was genuine, but it shows how much belief shaped the crusade.

Bohemond now kept Antioch, arguing that Alexios had not come to help and that the oath no longer held. This was the start of a long dispute with the empire. Raymond of Toulouse had been the leading supporter of the oath and was reluctant to accept this. The march on Jerusalem resumed in 1099 under pressure from the rank and file, who were impatient to reach the Holy City. They reached the city in June and took it on 15 July 1099 after a siege of about five weeks, using siege towers. Many of the inhabitants, Muslims and Jews, were killed. In August the crusaders defeated a Fatimid relief army at Ascalon, which secured the conquest. Godfrey of Bouillon was chosen as ruler, with the title Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, and not king, because it was said that no one should wear a crown where Christ had worn a crown of thorns.

Impact by 1099

On the Muslim Near East the effect was immediate but not at first long-lasting. Muslim writers recorded the loss of Jerusalem with shock, but the divisions between Seljuk emirs and the Fatimids prevented a united reply, and some rulers at first treated the Franks as another faction. For the Byzantine Empire, Alexios regained Nicaea and, in the following years, parts of western Anatolia and the coast, but a Norman Antioch became a rival rather than a buffer. In the Latin West the success raised the prestige of the papacy, which had called the crusade, and made crusading a permanent feature of the Christian world.

The foundation of Outremer, c1099–1149

Outremer, "the land beyond the sea", was the name for the states the crusaders founded. There were four: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa and the County of Tripoli. The Edessa county was founded by Baldwin of Boulogne in 1098 and Tripoli was won in 1109 with the help of the family of Raymond of Toulouse, who died in 1105 while besieging it.

Godfrey died in 1100 and his brother Baldwin I (1100–1118) became the first king of Jerusalem. He was a practical ruler who extended the kingdom's coast with the help of Genoese and other Italian fleets, taking Acre in 1104 and Beirut and Sidon in the following decade, and he defended it against repeated Fatimid attacks. Baldwin II (1118–1131), formerly count of Edessa, was a cousin of Baldwin I and a respected ruler. His reign saw the capture of Tyre in 1124 with Venetian help. A disaster at the Battle of Ager Sanguinis in 1119, where Roger of Salerno, the ruler of Antioch, was killed by the Muslim commander Ilghazi, led Baldwin to act as regent of Antioch. Baldwin II had no sons, and his daughter Melisende inherited the kingdom, so that in 1131 her husband Fulk of Anjou became king with her. Melisende insisted on her own rights, and after Fulk's death in 1143 she ruled with her young son Baldwin III, remaining a powerful figure until about 1152.

The Franks formed a small ruling minority. The countryside was largely populated by Muslims, Greek and Syrian Christians and Armenians, and most Franks lived in the towns and castles. The Frankish kingdom was a sort of feudal society, in which land was held in return for military service and the king's powers were limited by his barons and by a court. The Council of Nablus in 1120 issued laws that covered moral and religious matters. A chain of castles and fortified coastal cities protected the settlements. Trade and pilgrimage brought wealth: the Italian cities of Venice, Genoa and Pisa gained trading quarters and tax privileges in return for naval help, and moved spices, silk and other eastern goods to the West, while pilgrims brought money to the holy places.

The military orders

The military orders combined the lives of monks with those of knights. The Hospitallers began as a charity caring for sick pilgrims in Jerusalem, were given papal protection in 1113, and in the next decades took on military duties and the defence of castles; the great fortress of Krak des Chevaliers was given to them in 1144. The Templars were founded about 1119 by Hugues de Payens and a few companions to protect pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem, and gained official Church recognition at the Council of Troyes in 1129 with the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote in praise of the new knighthood.

The orders had three roles. Their military role was to provide trained and disciplined soldiers, always at hand, in a kingdom that never had enough men, and they held key castles. Their religious role was to give crusading a permanent form: knights who lived under monastic vows made the war a standing duty. Their economic role grew steadily, since gifts of land across Europe made them wealthy, and they ran estates, protected pilgrims' money and later acted as bankers. Their independence from local bishops and kings, and from each other, was also a source of friction.

Relations with neighbours

Antioch's status caused repeated trouble with Byzantium, since the emperors regarded it as theirs. John II Komnenos forced Antioch to accept his overlordship in 1137–1138, and his successor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–1180) renewed these claims. Relations with the Latin West were close, through pilgrims, merchants and the orders, but western help came only when a crusade was preached. Relations with the Muslim neighbours were not simply a matter of war: truces and trade agreements were common, and some Frankish rulers made alliances with Muslim emirs, for instance with Damascus against Zengi at the end of the 1130s. The indigenous peoples, Muslim and Christian, paid rents and taxes to Frankish lords and were largely left to practise their religion, though Muslims were generally barred from living in Jerusalem itself.

Zengi and the idea of jihad

Zengi, appointed atabeg of Mosul in 1127, took Aleppo in 1128 and built a power that joined northern Syria and northern Iraq. An atabeg was a Seljuk military governor, who in principle ruled for a young prince. His wars were against other Muslims as much as against the Franks, but his propaganda spoke of jihad, the duty of holy struggle. The call for jihad against the Franks was already being made: the Damascus scholar al-Sulami wrote about it about 1105, urging Muslim unity against the invaders. It was Zengi who made use of it for power. On 24 December 1144 he captured Edessa, the first crusader state to fall, and this was the event that led to the Second Crusade. He was murdered in 1146 and his territories were divided, with Nur ad-Din taking Aleppo.

The Second Crusade, 1145–1149

Pope Eugenius III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores in December 1145 and reissued it in March 1146. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous preacher in Europe, spread the message from Vézelay in 1146, and both Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany took the cross, so that for the first time kings led the crusade. Louis was accompanied by his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Other crusaders attacked pagan Slavs in the Baltic region, in the Wendish Crusade, and a fleet on its way east helped to take Lisbon from the Muslims in 1147.

The main armies marched through the Byzantine Empire, where relations with the emperor Manuel were poor. Conrad's army was badly defeated by the Seljuk Turks near Dorylaeum in 1147, and Louis's army suffered heavy losses crossing Anatolia. The two kings and the leaders of Outremer met at Acre in June 1148 and agreed to attack Damascus, the city that had been an ally of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The siege in July 1148 failed within days, and the kings withdrew. Conrad went home in 1148 and Louis in 1149. Raymond of Poitiers, prince of Antioch, who had wanted an attack on Aleppo, was killed by Nur ad-Din in 1149.

Impact by 1149

The Second Crusade was a failure, and it had lasting results. It raised Muslim confidence and, by pushing Damascus towards Nur ad-Din, helped him bring that city under his control. In Outremer it showed that western kings could not secure the states and had little understanding of local politics. The Byzantines blamed the Latins for the failures, and suspicion between the two grew. In the West many blamed the sins of the crusaders, and criticism fell on Bernard, who wrote about it afterwards; enthusiasm for the East fell for a generation.