. The long series of military campaigns that aimed to expand the borders of Latin Christendom against international Islam and to defend Europe against residual paganism and resurgent heresy on the local scene. Drawing inspiration from earlier western notions of just war or divinely sanctioned war, the crusaders acted in the firm belief that their goals—the principal one, especially for the people of feudal France, being the recovery of the Holy Land—not only were justified in God’s eyes but were in fact God’s explicit wish. Deus vult! (“God wills it!”) became their battle cry, which could be heard from the 11th century through the 15th. The campaigns against Palestine and Egypt, the Spanish Reconquista, the wars against paganism in Lithuania, the struggle to stamp out Catharism in southern France, and the 13th-century papal effort to topple the Hohenstaufen regime in southern Italy all form part of crusade history; but the repeated efforts to regain and defend the Holy Land are the center of the story, insofar as French military involvement and popular support are concerned. That support remained surprisingly constant over the centuries, despite the repeated failure of the campaigns themselves. Only the first four Crusades are examined here in any detail. But French enthusiasm for crusading, while it may never again have reached the extraordinary level of explosive energy that inaugurated the First Crusade, lasted well into the age of gunpowder.
The passion for crusading arose from a passionate desire for peace. The decay of Carolingian power in France in the 9th and 10th centuries amid endemic civil strife and renewed foreign invasion brought stable social and economic life to a virtual standstill in some parts of the realm. Famine and disease spread as brutal private wars engulfed the countryside. Desperate for peace, Frankish peasants and village artisans organized an impromptu series of mass protests that came to be known as the Peace of God movement. These were highly emotive, popular demonstrations, in which bishops paraded the relics of local saints, led prayers for peace, and condemned Europe’s warrior caste for its senseless shedding of Christian blood. Among some segments of the Frankish populace, these emotions were inspired by a belief in approaching Armageddon, although the extent to which apocalyptic convictions played a role is still disputed. Proclamations from Peace councils announced the inviolability from harassment of the Christian populace—especially of widows and children, the clergy, and those undertaking pilgrimage to holy sites—on penalty of excommunication. Having outlawed violence against particular persons considered holy, the councils soon took the next step and established the Truce of God, which condemned warfare on holy days as well. The Peace and Truce of God were essential precursors to the crusade phenomenon, since they established the precedent of the church being the arbiter of legitimate warfare.
The rapidly progressing Gregorian reform movement likewise influenced crusade ideology. Reforms like outlawing simony, demanding a celibate clergy, and condemning lay investiture increased popular support for the institutional church that had long been on the wane. The Papal Election Decree of 1059 finally secured the independence of the Holy See from imperial control and gave it the opportunity to exert its new-found strength by promoting a European-wide movement to complete the reformation of the Christian world by ensuring, by force if necessary, Christians’ right to undertake unmolested pilgrimages to the site of Christ’s birth, miraculous works, and death. Pilgrimage, and the cult of the saints to which it was linked, was a particularly popular devotional exercise among the peoples of the feudal north. Whether as voluntary exercises or as required penitential works, these arduous and dangerous journeys to holy sites figured large in Europe’s spiritual life, and pilgrimage routes to popular sites like Canterbury, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, or Jerusalem itself often were filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of the devout. Reports of Muslim harassment of pilgrims en route to the Holy Land, and of the Egyptian caliph ‘al-Hakim’s 1009 slaughter of the Christian populace of Jerusalem and destruction of the Holy Sepulcher, struck European minds with horror. These reports were grossly exaggerated, but a certain amount of anti-Christian violence did occur with some frequency, usually by Arab or Turkish brigands acting independently rather than by state forces themselves. To defend the holy pilgrims as well as the Holy Land itself, the church considered it well within its rights to summon the military caste of Latin Christendom to lead a divinely sanctioned war to liberate Palestine, rescue the Christian populace held in what was believed to be servitude, and guarantee the safety of pilgrimage routes.
The First Crusade (1095–99) was the only complete success. Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont (November 27, 1095) called specifically upon the people of France to “enter the road to the Holy Sepulcher and win back the Holy Land from the wicked race” of the Turks. The main army, trailing a rag-tag group of peasants led by the zealot Peter the Hermit, set off by land for Constantinople, from which, urged on by their nervous Byzantine hosts, they moved southward across Anatolia. Amid extraordinary hardship, they liberated city after city (the battle for Tripoli being the most difficult) before finally entering Jerusalem in July 1099. In their zeal, the crusaders sacked the city brutally, killing Jews and Muslims alike. When the fighting ceased, the army organized the resettlement of the Holy Land into four major Christian states: the principalities of Edessa, Antioch, and Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem.
The Second Crusade (1147–49) was a fiasco. The fall of Edessa to the Mosul-based Turkish warlord ‘Imad ad-Din Zengi raised fears for the remaining three Christian states. France’s Louis VII determined to seize the advantage from the papacy and to lead the new campaign himself. This crusade would be, he hoped, a wholly French affair. The revered abbot of Clairvaux, Bernard, was conscripted to preach and raise recruits—which he did with great success. The soldiers gathered at Paris and set off for the East, by land once again, trailing a German contingent that had taken the cross despite French hopes to exclude them. Most of the German forces were cut down in Asia Minor. Popular tales of Louis’s errant wife Eleanor of Aquitaine’s scandalous behavior while traveling with the army have been exaggerated, but she does appear to have complicated tactical and diplomatic matters along the way with her willful behavior. The French army, arriving safely in Jerusalem, made the disastrous decision to march against Damascus, whose Arab ruler was actually allied with the Christians against Zengi’s successor Nur ad-Din. Caught between the crusaders and Nur ad-Din’s forces, the Damascenes sided with the Turks and forced the withdrawal of the French troops. Defeated on the battlefield, the crusaders returned home humiliated and confronted with angry demands for an explanation of their heavy losses.
The Third Crusade (1189–92) hoped to restore Europe’s tarnished reputation by removing the new Mus-lim leader ‘Al-Nasir Salah ad-Din (Saladin), who had come up from Egypt to unite the territories from the Nile to Aleppo under his control. At the Battle of Hattim (July 1187), Saladin had routed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem and become master of all the Holy Land. This setback triggered the Third Crusade. Led jointly, if somewhat chaotically, by France’s Philip II Augustus, England’s Richard I the Lionhearted, and imperial Germany’s Frederick I Barbarossa (who died en route), the crusaders fought surprisingly well against high odds and managed to secure Christians’ right of free entry to Jerusalem, although the city remained under Saladin’s control.
The Fourth Crusade (1202–04) was doomed from the start. Prompted by Innocent III’s desire to reassert papal control of crusading after the two preceding monarchical efforts, the Crusade was preached throughout Europe by envoys from Rome. The crusaders gathered at Venice, whose government had contracted in advance to transport and supply the expected number of recruits. Too few crusaders enlisted to meet the Venetian bill, however, which necessitated a change of plans. Venice offered to forgive the crusaders’ debt if they agreed to restore Zara, a Dalmatian colony formerly subject to Venice, to their control. With no alternative, the crusaders took Zara by force, even though it was a Christian city. Innocent responded by excommunicating the entire army. Hoping to restore themselves to the church’s good graces, and spurred on by the promise of aid from the exiled claimant to the Byzantine throne in return for their help in ousting his rival, the crusaders then sailed to Constantinople, which they sacked in April 1204 and pillaged ruthlessly. Constantinople remained under Latin control until 1261. Content with their success in returning the Orthodox East to western rule, the crusaders never continued on to the Holy Land.
France’s sainted Louis IX led two crusades against Islam (1248–54 and 1270) and had earlier sent a third crusade force against the Cathar heretics in southern France. Both of his overseas campaigns began in high hopes and ended miserably. After a well-executed assault on Damietta in mid-1249, delay and confusion set in, and Louis’s army wasted five months sitting passively in the Nile delta. Strategic miscalculation in 1250 resulted in the defeat of his entire army at Mansourah and in Louis’s own capture by the forces of the Egyptian sultan. After his ransom, Louis spent four years overseeing the refortification of Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa, and Sidon, before returning to France and devoting himself to civil reforms. Determined to make up for his failure, though, Louis launched a new campaign in 1270, which aimed first at the seizure of Tunis before advancing toward Egypt and the Holy Land itself. Louis fell ill in Tunis, however, and died on August 25, after which his demoralized army returned to France.
The lasting consequences of the Crusades for France, as for the rest of the Latin Christian world, had little to do with the political or military aspects of the wars. Their effect on the Holy Land itself was slight. Indeed, to most of the larger Muslim world the battle to control Palestine was a relatively minor frontier struggle far removed from the center of Islamic life. Economically, the Crusades served as a catalyst for the growth of European commerce by contributing to the evolution of advanced systems of finance and capital administration; they also helped to expand western markets for eastern goods like spices, textiles, metalwork, and glassware. Inevitably, for the feudal north, the increased contact with the Greek, Jewish, and Islamic worlds introduced new ideas and methods into the European tradition—new technologies, new scientific concepts, new philosophical traditions, new artistic methods and techniques. But many of these developments were already well underway in the Mediterranean parts of Europe prior to the Crusades, and it would be a mistake to overemphasize the Crusades’ importance in this regard. Indeed, the cultural influence of the Crusades has been greatest in later centuries, in the way that the conflicts have been remembered and either romanticized or vilified in the Christian and Islamic worlds. In popular western culture, they have come to be synonymous with chivalry and pageantry, the medieval world’s ill-fated but noble attempt to rescue its spiritual homeland from the hands of foreign tyrants; to much of the Muslim world, they have been regarded, just as erroneously, as the clearest example of naked western aggression and hypocrisy, a cultural wounding from which Islam has yet to recover fully. Neither view is accurate.
For France, the most important legacy of the Crusades was the impetus they gave to the expansion of the kingdom’s borders southward to the Mediterranean. The strategic need for a Mediterranean harbor from which to launch further Crusades (and to participate directly in the burgeoning maritime trade) provided a justification for Capetian expansion into the Midi, Languedoc, and Provence—and the crusade against the southern Cathars provided the vehicle for it. French churches acquired innumerable relics from the East, which augmented popular piety and enriched many ecclesiastical houses. Historical writing and poetry in France drew considerable inspiration from the crusade movement; the sheer scope of the enterprise excited the imagination of numerous writers, among them Guibert de Nogent, Jean de Joinville, Geoffroi de Villehardouin, and the anonymous author of the Chanson d’Antioche.
Joinville and Villehardouin. Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Margaret R.B.Shaw. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. [Provides two vivid narratives: Villehardouin’s exculpatory account of the Fourth Crusade and Joinville’s laudatory biography of Louis IX.]
Odo of Deuil. De profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem, ed. and trans. Virginia G.Berry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953. [A detailed, insightful account of Louis VII’s failed Second Crusade.]
Housley, Norman. The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Powell, James, ed. Muslims Under Latin Rule, 1100–1300. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Prawer, Joshua. Histoire du royaume latin de Jerusalem, trans. G.Nahon. 2 vols. Paris: CNRS, 1969–70. [The most wideranging study of the most important of the crusader states.]
Richard, Jean. Louis IX: Crusader King of France, ed. Simon Lloyd, trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A Short History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. [The best single-volume survey.]
Setton, Kenneth M., ed. A History of the Crusades. 2nd ed. 6 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969–89.
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