The Crusades 1095-1197

by Jonathan Phillips

  1195-98 German crusade; recaptures Beirut (24 October 1197)

  1197 10 September Death of King Henry of Jerusalem

  1197 October Aimery of Lusignan, ruler of Cyprus, secures a crown from the German Empire for the island. He also marries Isabella, heiress to Jerusalem, and becomes king of Jerusalem

  Genealogy of the Rulers of Jerusalem

  Royal house of Jerusalem (simplified)

  Map 1 The Eastern Mediterranean

  1

  Introduction

  Why study the crusades?

  The study of the history of the crusades is flourishing in schools and universities, in academic research (in Europe, the Middle East and North America); it is also a subject that attracts considerable interest from the general public. In part this is a consequence of the enduring fascination fostered by such a dramatic and important aspect of the histories of western Europe and the Middle East, of Christianity and Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity and Judaism. The sense of adventure in trying to conquer and hold a distant and unknown land still exerts a powerful pull on the imagination of the modern West; the perceived glamour of men such as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin have great allure too. Alongside this, there is, to some modern western eyes at least, a curiosity and confusion as to how and why people could fight and kill in the name of God.

  There is also the historical legacy of the crusades — a legacy of brutality and fanaticism that has cast a deep shadow across relations between Christianity and Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and among Christians themselves. From a western perspective, first the Protestant Church and then an increasingly secular European society have relegated the crusades to a distant and exotic escapade carried out by barbaric and foolhardy knights. While recent academic scholarship has done much to bring the subject back into focus as a complex and central element in the history of medieval Europe, the origins and meaning of the word have become obscured. The term ‘crusade’ has become casualised and secularised. It is used readily in everyday life: a crusade to cut hospital waiting lists, a crusade for fair play in sport. Given the fact that, ultimately, the crusades to the Holy Land collapsed, the continued deployment of the word in such ways shows how far removed it has become from historical reality. Why do people want to identify with something that failed? Its current, generic meaning, therefore, is one of a sense of right, or a quest for justice, and in this form it can trace back its roots to the medieval usage.

  In the world of contemporary Islam, however, the crusade has retained a much sharper and more vivid presence, in large part because the outline of events in the medieval period have a number of pertinent parallels to the present. In 1099 the armies of the First Crusade (representing the Catholic Church of western Europe) captured Jerusalem and were popularly reported as wading ankle-deep in the blood of their slain Muslim foes; in the wake of this conquest the Crusader States were formed and Christian rule was established in the Levant. By 1187 Saladin had united the Muslims of the Eastern Mediterranean region under the banner of the jihad, or holy war. The forces of Islam retook the city of Jerusalem and relegated the Christians to a strip of land on the Mediterranean coast until their eventual expulsion in 1291. For today’s Muslim world the ingredients seem familiar: violent western incursions, slaughter and oppression of the faithful and the loss of the holy city of Jerusalem. These are among the reasons why the crusade still has such a high profile in the Muslim Middle East. At the start of the twentieth century, as the Arab world began to try to shake off the shackles of western imperialism, the struggles of their predecessors against the crusaders seemed highly relevant and this is a perception that has continued. Even more significantly, a role model was available: Saladin — a devout Muslim who succeeded in driving out the invaders. Such a figure has obvious attractions in the modern age and contemporary political leaders have striven to appropriate his legacy. Saddam Hussein, for example, has a huge mural depicting himself leading his Iraqi tanks into battle alongside an image of Saladin in front of his own mounted warriors. Saddam has, therefore, identified himself as someone who, like Saladin, will defeat the westerners and drive them from the Middle East. In 1992, the late President Assad of Syria oversaw the construction of a large equestrian statue of Saladin in Damascus. The emir is riding to victory, guarded by Muslim holy men and with defeated crusaders trailing on the ground behind his horse. Placed just outside the old citadel of Damascus, Saladin is, of course, symbolically protecting Islam and the city, while the West bows to him. Colonel Gadaffi is another Muslim leader who has employed the ideas of jihad and in the 1980s he compared the United States to the crusaders and described the Americans as ‘leaders of the modern crusader offensive’.

  A further, important parallel with the age of the crusades exists for Muslim militants in the form of the state of Israel. Although the First (and subsequent) crusades were responsible for numerous atrocities against the Jews of Jerusalem (in 1099) and in western Europe (1096, 1147, 1190), the close identification of Israel with the USA, and, in the eyes of some, as an enemy of Palestine and occupier of the holy city, means there is a perception that the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem was a forerunner of the modern Israeli state. Some Muslim polemicists argue that the creation of Israel was the West’s revenge for the failure of the crusades and they point out that the Christians were eventually expelled from the Levant: inevitably, therefore, they argue that the Jews will suffer the same fate. The militant Islamic groups in the Middle East, Hamas and Hizbollah, both invoke the struggle between the crusaders and jihad in their efforts to liberate Palestine. Most pointedly of all today, one name of Osama bin Laden’s organisation is ‘The World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders’. When, after the bombings of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush described the struggle with bin Laden as a crusade (a phrase that the president backed away from very rapidly once the implications of the word were revealed to him) he had fulfilled the stereotype created by those looking for the historical parallel and offered an opportunity to tap into the emotional tinderbox of centuries of conflict.

  The purpose of this book

  This book is concerned to move back from the modern constructs and possible misconceptions of the crusades to explore the origins and development of the idea in its historical context. It will outline the key events and issues in the history of the crusades to the Holy Land down to the end of the twelfth century. The work sets out to show the roots of the First Crusade; the motivation of the First Crusaders; to reveal the challenges of settlement in the Levant; to demonstrate the complexities of relations among the Frankish settlers and also their relations with their co-religionists in western Europe; to assess the impact of the crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean and to follow the Muslim response to the crusades through the rise of the jihad. The mixture of narrative and thematic chapters is designed to analyse and tell the story of events, but also to provide an insight into new areas of research and to synthesise them into a mainstream textbook. The Documents have been chosen from as wide a range of sources as possible with material from the Latin West and the Frankish East, as well as Muslim, Byzantine and Hebrew writers. Narratives, official documents and letters, charters, poetry, songs and art are all represented. It is hoped that this selection will, in some small way, demonstrate the breadth of evidence available to the historian and also help to bring this intriguing subject to life.

  Historiography and definition

  The historiography of the crusades has seen significant changes over recent decades, both in terms of approach and interpretation. The first modem analyses of the crusades were in the early twentieth century by French scholars, such as Rene Grousset, who tended to view the Frankish East as a forerunner of French colonial enterprise. The next phase of scholarship, represented, for example, by the multi-volume history edited by Kenneth Setton (Setton, 1969-89), was strongly grounded in detailed narrative and looked towards economic motives for the crusades, ignoring much of the evidence for contemporary religiosity
. The most important work to come out of this period was Sir Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades, 3 volumes (Runciman, 1951-54), which is still in print today and has exerted an enormous influence over the subject and the image of the crusades ever since. Runciman’s beautifully written work does much to capture the excitement of the crusades, but as well as the issues just noted in Setton’s work, it has a further, significant flaw. The author was, first and foremost, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and for him, the sack of his beloved city of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 was the ultimate act of betrayal by a bloodthirsty and misguided movement. The contrast with the sophistication of Byzantium and Islam could not have been plainer and the crusaders were seen as ignorant thugs. The violence of the crusading age cannot, and should not, be denied, yet this must be seen in the context of western European society of the time and through proper examination of contemporary motives and values. Without the constricting judgement imposed by Runciman, a complex, and at times innovative, society can be seen to have emerged in the Levant and crusading itself has been revealed to be an adaptable and sophisticated concept that developed over both time and space.

  The next body of crusading history is represented by the work of Jean Richard (Richard, 1979), Joshua Prawer (Prawer, 1980), Jonathan Riley-Smith (Riley-Smith, 1973) and Hans Eberhard Mayer (Mayer, 1988), and has done much to illuminate the judicial, constitutional and structural form of the institutions of the Latin East and is now absorbed into many mainstream texts.

  Since the early 1980s four significant developments have emerged in crusading studies. The first and most important is a conceptual one: previously, ‘true’ crusading had tended to be regarded as taking place only in the Eastern Mediterranean and was something that effectively finished in 1291 with the fall of Acre and the end of the Catholic hold on the Levant. In other words, the expeditions to the Baltic, the reconquest of Spain, the attacks on Albigensian heretics in southern France, the wars against political opponents of the papacy, expeditions against the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century and even the Spanish Armada against Protestant England were distortions of the original idea and were to be treated as separate species. Based on an analysis of the temporal and spiritual privileges (the Indulgence) granted by the papacy, and on a closer examination of contemporary assessments of this issue, crusade historians now accept a much broader (pluralist) and more flexible definition of the subject to encompass these other theatres of war as equals in all but prestige to the crusade to the Holy Land. A workable definition of a crusade is thus: ‘An expedition authorised by the pope on Christ’s behalf, the leading participants in which took vows and consequently enjoyed the privileges of protection at home and the Indulgence, which, when the campaign was not destined for the East, was usually equated with that granted to crusaders to the Holy Land’ (Riley-Smith, 1992: 6). This present book is primarily concerned with crusade and settlement in the Levant down to 1197, and therefore the distinction between expeditions to the Latin East and elsewhere does not perhaps seem immediately relevant. But, this concept is crucial in understanding the broader development of crusading (particularly in the thirteenth century and beyond) and does have significant connections with several episodes concerning crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean, connections which, by their very existence, serve to underline the validity of the pluralist understanding of the subject.

  Christopher Tyerman, in his The Invention of the Crusades (Tyerman, 1998), questioned the whole development of crusading during the twelfth century. He argued that because the distinctive institutions and definitions of the crusade (even the word crucignatus does not appear until the later decades of the twelfth century) were not in place until the legislative programme initiated by Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), the notion of ‘crusade’ in the twelfth century is a construct of modern historians. This view has found little favour for a number of reasons, however. First, simply because a movement lacks formal and defined institutions does not mean that contemporaries failed to understand what was happening. The distinction between pilgrim and crusader that historians sometimes struggle with was evident enough to those contemporaries who wrote pilgrim guides to the religious sites of the Holy Land or answered a papal appeal to fight the infidel in the Levant. It is true that in some cases the evidence is hazy: the practice whereby a western noble would fight in defence of the Holy Land for a year (see below, p. 81) was not linked to a call for a crusade, but more to a sense of Christian honour and duty — although the spiritual rewards for such an act are not specified in any surviving material. By the time of the Second Crusade (1145-49), however, the picture was clearer and, as the relevant chapter shows, this expedition confirms crusading to be a geographically flexible concept, but with the key ideas and rewards plainly defined to all. When Pope Eugenius III (1145-53) or Pope Alexander III (1159-81) put out crusade appeals to the Holy Land (five separate calls in the latter’s case), their audiences knew what they were committing themselves to and the range of privileges and benefits that they would receive: Eugenius and Alexander were working through an idea with consistency and logic. Furthermore, their care in guarding the preaching of such expeditions reveals papal concern over the concept of crusading and an understanding of what lay inside and outside its boundaries. Tyerman also neglects two further points. First, crusading in the Iberian peninsula. The series of privileges and bulls issued here (see below, pp. 70, 165) demonstrates again the development and regulation of the idea from the time of the First Crusade. Secondly, he ignores the foundation of the military orders — institutions inexorably linked to crusading whose growth again indicates a more rapid maturation than Tyerman allows.

  The second notable advance in crusading studies over recent years is the concern with the spiritual motivation of crusaders and the roots of this in the society of eleventh-century Europe. The use of charter evidence (see below) by Jonathan Riley-Smith (Riley-Smith, 1997) and Marcus Bull (Bull, 1993a) has revealed the importance of connections between the local nobility and ecclesiastical institutions and has demonstrated a strong religious drive among the secular knights of the West. It has also, in consequence, shown the existence of family networks of crusaders and the importance of crusading traditions in certain families.

  A third change is the increasingly exciting revelations of archaeological work, principally in Israel. The recent discoveries at Jacob’s Ford, Acre and other sites add real value to our understanding of many aspects of Frankish settlement in the Levant and much of this is discussed where appropriate (Ellenblum, 1998; Boas, 1999, 2001).

  Finally, there is the Islamic world. Long-obscured to western crusade historians by the barrier of language, the landmark work of Carole Hillenbrand (Hillenbrand, 1999), along with an increasing number of texts in translation, are beginning to allow a fuller and clearer appreciation of the impact of the crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean.

  Sources

  There survives a wide range of evidence to reconstruct the history of the crusades and the Latin East. The historical record is, however, uneven, with some events such as the First Crusade attracting considerable attention, while others, such as the history of Frankish settlement or the unsuccessful Second Crusade, are harder to trace. Quite naturally, all writers and record-keepers had their own agendas and were subject to contemporary influences and biases when compiling their work. This can both help and hinder our studies and, where relevant, these traits will be indicated. Alongside written material there remains artistic and archaeological evidence that can add much to our understanding of the period.

  Given the geographical area touched by the crusades, the origins of available source material are broad-ranging. The Documents here include work by contemporary writers from the Latin East, western Europe, and the Muslim, Byzantine and Jewish worlds. A brief outline of the career of the most important of these writers is included in the Who’s Who section or via bibliographical references as appropriate. In broad terms, the majority of writers from the
Latin world were churchmen because literacy was largely confined to the clergy. At times, this can result in a particularly strong theological slant to some analyses, but where possible, alternative or complimentary forms of evidence are brought into play to provide perspective. In conjunction with narrative there is documentary evidence in the form of charters and official documents. Charters, which usually survive from ecclesiastical institutions, are deeds of land transactions, in the form of mortgages or agreements, and in these cases were designed to raise funds for expeditions to the Levant. To us, land deeds of today are dry and formulaic documents, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries they had not been subjected to the strict conventions of bureaucrats and some included lengthy explanatory passages which (in those concerned with the crusade) outline the donor’s motives for taking the cross and his hopes, fears and aspirations. These documents, which are often precisely dated and survive in tens of thousands, allow us an insight into the financing and motivation of crusaders and have helped deepen our understanding beyond the narratives into contemporary ideas and actions. For a good introduction to the subject see Bull, 1997. Official documents can survive in the form of papal calls for the crusade and also legal arrangements concerning diplomatic or feudal obligations. Letters written by important individuals may also remain, either in collections or incorporated into narratives. One further form of evidence worth noting is that of songs, often written by laymen, which provide an important insight into the concerns and ideas of secular society.

  Map 2 Europe at the Time of the First Crusade

  Context

  Many of the elements that came together to form the idea of the crusade were familiar aspects of European society in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. To understand the origins of the First Crusade it is useful to have a brief, schematic overview of western Europe at this period and to highlight those points that bear upon the origins of the crusade (see also Map 2).