MEDIEVAL WARFARE

The Crusades

Crusade: Holy War fought to defend or spread Christianity. The word itself did not exist at the beginning of the crusading movement. A participant became known as a crusader.
Origin of the term Crusade:  comes from the Latin “crux” meaning “cross”.  Crusaders were said to be “taking the cross” something they did literally since it was sewed to their clothing, at first, on the shoulder, later on the chest of the surcoat.
During a crusade, it was worn in front; on the return journey, it was reversed, symbolizing the fact that they had completed their mission.
Crusades were fought against various opponents:
1.  Moslems (Arabs and Turks)
2.  Pagans in north central Europe
3.  Christians  
a.  Fourth Crusade attacked Greek Orthodox Constantinople
b.  Christian heretics in the west (Albigensians and Hussites)
Innnocent III (Lothair de Segni): Most powerful churchman of the Middle Ages as well as the most crusade oriented of all popes.
Crusades agains Moslems should be seen as part of the extensive Christian counter-offensive undertaken in response to the Moslem conquests of
the 7^th century, as well as those that followed the reign of Charlemagne.
Eleventh century crusading activity:
1. Iberian Peninsula:
In Spain, the Reconquista (or Reconquest) of the peninsula that had been underway since the 8^th century received a major boost when the caliphate or Cordoba collapsed and Moslem Spain divided into a score of weaker independent principalities.
Crusading bull: papal bull calling on warriors from around the west to fight in Spain; the first was issued in 1063 for the Barbastro Crusade in Spain.
Conquest of Toledo (1085): major advance by Alfonso VI, king of Leon and Castile. Although a new wave of Moslem invaders from North Africa (the Almoravides)arrived in 1086, occasioning a back-and-forth struggle for generations, Toledo remained in Christian hands.  Later, the inexorable movement southward resumed.
2. Italy:
The merchant cities of Genoa and Pisa reclaimed the island of Sardinia, then helped the Norman invaders of southern Italy retake the other major island, Sicily. These losses cost the Moslems naval control of the western Mediterranean.
The First Crusade aimed at the Near East was just one part of this much broader movement.
How many crusades? 
It is difficult if not impossible to arrive at any exact total for the number of crusades undertaken in the Middle Ages or even for those directed against the Near East. It all depends on just what the historian decides to count as a real crusade.  (How does one count the Peasants’ Crusade, the Childrens’ Crusade, crusading activity in north central Europe, later crusades, etc.
Period of the Near Eastern Crusades (1095-1291)
Seljuk Turks: a new group of invaders from the steppes of Central Asia ethnically related to the Huns and Mongols whose arrival in the Near East in the Near East sparked the crusading movement. Converts to Islam, they seized many of the lands once held by the Arabs, including the Holy Land and, according to some sources, began to interfere with the pilgrims who came from the west. Just how accurate were the stories of Turkish attrocities is a matter of some debate among modern scholars.
There is no doubt they constituted a military threat to the Byzantine Empire.
Battle of Manzikert: the Byzantine army crushed at a site in what is today eastern Turkey; after which the Turks were able seize most of Asia Minor, arriving just across the strait from Constantinople.
Alp Arslan:  Turkish war leader or sultan who won the battle.
Alexius Comnenus: Byzantine general who seized the throne in 1081 and stabilized the situation. Eventually, he appealed to the west for a manageable force of knights who could help in the on-going struggle. He got the First Crusade!
Religious differences of east and west: Definitive split between the Roman Catholic Church of the west and the Greek Orthodox Church (1054) largely over headship of the pope. Given this break,only a disaster of the magnitude of Manzikert could have brought the emperor to appeal to the west for aid.
Papal Reasons for sponsoring crusade:
1.  Desire to free the Holy Land from infidel control
2.  Desire to aid fellow Christians (Greek Orthodox)
3.  Desire to protect Roman Catholic pilgrims from the west
4.  Fear that if the empire fell, the Turks would be free to push on into Europe
5.  Hope that in return for aid, the Byzantines might accept
6.  Rome's position as head of the entire church.
7.  Internal politics: if the papacy could sponsor a holy war and reconquer Jerusalem, the resulting religious fervor would greatly strengthen its position back home.
Council of Clermont (1095):  Urban II gave one of history’s most famous speeches in all of history calling for a crusade.
Deus vult (God wills it):  Response of the audience; became the rallying cry of the crusades.
Reasons for “taking the cross”:
1.  Religious motives:   the desire to help fellow Christians, to promote pilgrimage, to free the Holy Land, to obtain rewards from the church
Crusading bull: Document spelling out the rewards crusaders would obtain. (Men would be forgiven their past sins.  Those who died for the faith would gain immediate entry into Heaven; other crusaders would be forgiven time in purgatory.)
2.  Opportunity to find wealth or glory or just adventure in the Holy Land.
3.  Merchants hoped to open new trade routes
4.  To escape responsibilities back home
5.  To escape punishment for crime
First Crusade (1095-1099):  growing out of Urban’s speech at Clermont, it became the most successful in the crusading movement. 
Peasant's Crusade (1095):  spontaneous and poorly organized movement among the common people of Europe that preceded the First Crusade.
Led by this marginal figures such as the preacher Peter the Hermit and the knight, Walter the Penniless.
Eleventh Century Holocaust:  massive pogroms, especially during the Peasant’s Crusade, directed against Jewish ghettos.  They devastated major northern European centers of Judaism and are still mourned in modern Judaic ceremonies.
Peasant crusaders also murdered and looted Christians in their  pathway; as a result, quite a number were slaughtered by the members of the Christian population. When survivors reached Constantinople, the emperor shipped off to Asia Minor, where most soon died fighting the Turks.
Pattern established by this first expedition: a majority of the participants might die of starvation or disease,or from fighting fellow Christians, before ever seeing an infidel.
First Crusade (also known as the Baron’s Crusade to distinguish it from the peasants movement:  Thousands of knights from France, Germany, and Italy arrived a year later. Like most future crusaders, they got along badly with the Byzantines who hurried into Turkish territory.
Battle of Dorylaeum (1097):  first battlefield victory of the crusaders.
Siege and Battle of Antioch (1098): Led by the Norman crusader, Bohemond, who became Prince of Antioch.
Edessa:  City taken by the French crusader, Baldwin.
Siege of Jerusalem (1099):  besieged in spring 1099 and taken on July 15 by the crusade leader, Godfrey de Bouillon, who became the first Christian ruler of the city in centuries.  A major  military feat, it was marred by another of those massacres, so characteristic of the crusading period.
Battle of Ascalon (1100):  crusaders threw back a Moslem counterattack launched from Egypt.
Crusader Kingdoms:
Kingdom of Jerusalem
Principality of Antioch
County of Edessa
County of Tripoli 
Year 1100:  Highwater mark of the entire crusading period. Afterwards, one by one, the crusader kingdoms would be reconquered by the Moslems; 1291, the last Christian stronghold in the east fell back into Moslem hands.
Much of the initial success of the crusaders had been due extensive division within the Islamic world. In the next two centuries, a series of leaders would unite the region and drive out the crusaders.
Four Principal Moslem leaders:
1. Zangi
2. Nureddin
3. Salahadin (Saladin)
4. Baibars
First Moslem victory (1444): Edessa retaken by Zangi, a leading lieutenant to the ruler of Mosul.
Second Crusade (1147-1150):  highly unsuccessful response to the fall of Edessa. Preached by the most powerful churchman of the  period, Bernard of Clairvaux, and led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany. Defeated by  Zangi’s son and successor, Nureddin.  The most memorable event was the estrangement of Louis VII from his young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had accompanied her husband on crusade. She would later divorce Louis and marry Henry II of England.
Later crusades ressembled the second more than the first.  They were originally inspired by a new loss of territory, but despite an outburst of crusading enthusiasm, none was successful in getting the territory back.
Afterwards, Nureddin added Damascus to his growing territory (1154) and began a campaign to acquire Egypt.
Salahadin (westernized to Saladin):  nephew of Nureddin’s favorite general who eventually replaced him as sultan, after having acquired Egypt from the Fatimate caliphs and returned it to the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad. During the 1180s, provocations by the crusaders, most notably Raynald de Chatillon,led the sultan to wage a successful Jihad against the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Battle of the Horns of Hattim (1187):  the most signifcant battle of the crusading period in which Saladin lured the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem into the desert where he annihilated it and captured the new king, Guy of Lusignan, who had recently replaced Baldwin the Leper.  Even though crusaders would remain in the east for another century, the battle sealed their eventual fate.
Conquest of Jerusalem (1187):  when Saladin took the city, he spared the Christian population, unlike the crusaders a century ealier.
Balian of Ibelin: leader of the city’s defense who threatened to destroy all of the holy places, including the Dome of the Rock,if Saladin did not show mercenary.
Frangi (Arabic for Franks): Arab name for the crusaders.
Third Crusade (1189-92): Also known as the Crusade of Kings, it was inspired by the fall of Jerusalem and conducted by the three leading monarchs of Europe:
King Richard the Lionheart of England
King Philip Augustus of France
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.The crusade accomplished relatively little, except to enhance the military reputation of Richard, whose performance at the siege of Acre and the battles of Arsuf and Jaffa lead military historians to rank him among the finest generals of the Middle Ages. His skills were both organizational and tactical; he combining infantry and cavalry to defeat far larger forces led by Saladin. The emperor drowned in Asia Minor, Philip left the crusade, and Richard was finally forced to sign a treaty that did no more than secure the right of pilgrims to visit Jerusalem (1192). On the journey home, Richard was captured by a former ally whom he had insulted on crusade, Leopold of Austria, and was forced to pay an enormous ransom collected by his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Fourth Crusade (1204):  Most infamous of all expeditions, it was originally to be directed against Egypt, but after being “hijacked” by the city of Venice under the direction of its blind doge, Enrico Dandolo, the Fourth Crusade ended up with the crusaders, excommunicated for their earlier attack on the city of Zara, seizing and sacking Constantinople in what some historians believe to have been the most barbaric act of the Middle Ages. The Latin Empire of the East, set up by the crusaders, continued to rule Constantinople until expelled by the Byzantines in 1261. Not only was the Byzantine Empire fatally weakened, but much art and literature was destroyed.
Innocent III:  the most powerful and principal crusading pope of the Middle Ages; the crusades on his watch included:
1. Fourth Crusade (1204)
2. Albigensian Crusade (1208)
3. Children’s Crusade (1212)
4. Crusade in Spain leading up to the most significant battle of the Reconquista, the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa  (1212)
Children's Crusade (1212):  A study in mass delusion; thousands of unarmed children, believing that they could capture the Holy Sepulcher by faith alone, egan to march south toward the Mediterranean. While many were turned back, others gathered in Marseilles and Genoa for the expedition where merchants sold many slavery.
Sixth Crusade (1225): led by one of the most remarkable figures of the Middle Ages, the emperor, Frederick II (known to his contempories as stupor mundi). Frederick regained Jerusalem through negotiation with the sultan of Egypt, despite which the reigning pope excommunicated him, condemned his expedition, and placed the Holy City under an interdict.
Mongols:  In 1206, under Tamujin, who took the name Ghengis Khan, they united the tribes of Mongolia and soon began to move outward, attacking both China and central Asia.  When the Khan died in 1227, his empire stretched westward into the Near East and eastern Europe.  In 1258, they put an end to the Abbasid Dynasty at Baghdad.  Driven west by Mongol expansion, a new wave of Seljuk Turks took back Jerusalem for the sultan of Egypt.
With the defeat of several more mid-century led by King Louis IX of France (later Saint Louis), it became merely a question of whether the Mongols or the Sultans of Egypt would finally expel the crusaders.
Battle of Ain Jalut (1260): Severe defeat of the Mongols settled the question in favor of the sultans of Egypt.
Baibars (d. 1277): Member of the Egyptian slave army known as the Makelukes, he murdered the sultan and seized power, then inexorably drove the crusaders from most of the strongholds, including the great Hospitaler fortress, Krak des Chevaliers.
Fall of Acre (1291):  Collapse of last Christian outpost; accompanied by the last great massacre of the crusading period.
Later attempts to resurrect the crusading movement ended in failure.
Victory of the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kossovo (1389) in southeastern Europe led to one of the last crusades to actually start out; it was crushed at the Battle of Nicopolis (1396).
Reasons for Crusader survival for two centuries:
1. Divisions in the enemy camp
2. Use of local mercenaries (archers, cavalry, engineers)
3. Creation of the Militant or Crusading Orders
Members were monks who lived according to a rule of conduct, known in Latin as a regulum and were therefore members of what is called the regular clergy. They took the usual vows of a monk (poverty, celibacy, obedience); however, their sevice to the church involved defending the faith and the faithful by force of arms. The head of such an organization became known as a grandmaster; a member was a knights.
Major orders:
1.  Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (Hospitalers)
2.  Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (Templars)
3.  Teutonic Knights
Order of the Knights Hospitaler: First of the military orders, with roots stretching back before the First Crusade, it received papal recognition in 1113.  Although its original duties were to lodge and care for poor pilgrims who visited the Holy Land, from the time of the second grandmaster, Raymond of Provence, it began to take on military functions as well.  Recruited both European warriors, led by a marshal, and local mercenaries (turcopoles).One master died fighting at the Horns of Hattim. Hospitalers wore a black mantle with a white cross or, in battle, a red surcoat with a white cross to distinguish them from members of other orders. After 1291, the Hospitalers fled to Cyprus, but soon moved to Rhodes, where they established their own military state, building a navy that attacked Moslem shipping.  Much of the wealth of the Templars was turned over to them in 1312. Losing Rhodes in 1522, they moved to Malta where they became known the Knights of Malta and their symbol became known as a Maltese Cross. They still exist today, occupying the world’s smallest country situated in the city of Rome.
Knight Templar:  Destined to become the most famous church order, they were established around 1119, by two middle-ranking crusaders, Hugh de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer.  The original nine members received permission from the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, to set up a new order, dedicated from the start to protecting pilgrims by force of arms.  They received papal recognition and a rule drawn up by Bernard of Clairvaux at the Council of Troyes in 1128.  Members wore a red "Templar" cross on a white surcoat.   Perhaps the best organized military force in the medieval west, Templars were feared by the Moslems who regularly executed captured members. Despite adopting as their heraldic seal two knights riding a single horse, symbolizing poverty and humility, they became proud and rich on the gifts of the faithful.  For nearly two centuries, the order filled the role of international bankers and money lenders, pioneering such innovations as the letter of credit. Unlike the Hospitalers, the Templars did not remain in the east and establish a new military role; instead, the order moved back to Europe and set up headquarters in Paris. The order’s wealth, coupled with secrecy and enforced inactivity spelled disaster for the Templars. Largely for financial reasons, the avaricious king of France, Philip IV, acting with the tacit approval of Pope Clement V, issued secret orders to have them arrested throughout France on Friday, the 13^th of October, 130. In a series of trials, the Templars were accused of numerous crimes, vices, heresies, and blasphemies. Many were burned at the stake or died in prison from torture.  At the Council of Vienne in 1312, Clement he issued a papal bull dissolving the order and turning over most of its property to the Hospitalers. In October, 1314, the last grandmaster, Jacques de Molay, recanted his forced confession. According to the legend, while burning, De Molay summoned both the pope and the king to confront him before God’s judgment seat within the year. Both died shortly afterwards. The alleged Templar treasure was never found.
Teutonic Knights: German offshoot of the Hospitalers became a separate order after the fall of Jerusalem (1187), then moved to north central Europe after 1291, where it fought pagan non-believers. Members wore a white robe with a black cross to distinguish themselves from both Templars and Hospitalers!  Territory carved out by the Teutonic Knights became the genesis of the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1410, the order suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a Polish-Lithuanian army in the battle of Tannenberg or Grunwald, after which its power declined, though the order still exists today.
Iberian Orders:
Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara (Castile)
Montesa (Aragon)
Orders of Christ and of Avis (Portugal)
Influence of the Crusades on trade:  The greatest success of the crusades was probably the stimulus it provided to east-west trade, including not only trade with the Byzantine Empire, but also with the Islamic world. Numerous products reached the west either for the first time or in increasing quantity due to the crusades. The major profiters (profiteers) were the Italian cities such as Venice and Genoa who came to control much of this east-west trade. For their help during the crusades, they were granted by the crusaders extensive concessions in the crusader kingdoms.
Crusade preached against fellow Christians regarded as heretics:
1.  Albigensians and Waldensians (early 13^th century) (Southern France; northern Spain and Italy)
2.  Hussite (early 15^th century) (Bohemia)
Both groups were considered by the western church to be heretics, meriting crusades against them.
The Albigensian Crusade was, at least in a military sense, highly successful.  The Hussite Crusade was a dismal failure.
Peter Waldo:  Founder of the Poor Men of Lyons (1173) who failed to win papal approval from Pope Alexander III and who then went into opposition to the church.  They attacked church wealth, argued that a bad priest was not a valid priest, and that women could enter the priesthood.
Albigensians:  named for the town Albi in southern France, represented the most important medieval example of dualism trying to reshape the Christian story.
Dualism:  belief in two gods, one of good one of evil, fighting throughout time.
Zoroaster:  the great Persian prophet who preached dualism.
The Albigensians believed that good was represented by Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament while the Old Testament Jehovah was the evil force he had to overthrow.  Condemned all material things as evil and therefore attacked Church wealth and condemned marriage that permitted people to bring children into an evil world.
For a generation, the church tried without success less extreme means (preaching, persuasion, action by local church authorities).  Part of the problem lay in sympathy felt for them by local elites, including not only great nobles, but also churchmen.  Then at the beginning of the 13^th century, they ran up Innocent III who soon adopted a much stronger approach.  Following the assassination of a papal legate in 1208, he preached a crusade against them.
Crusaders from all over the West, in particular knights and nobles from northern France descended on southern France, many of whom were interested primarily in making their fortune, at the expense of one of the wealthiest and most cultured regions in Europe, home to several great cities such as Toulouse and Carcassonne.  The crusade lasted for nearly two decades and left the region in shambles.  The principal winner was the crown of France, which in the person of three successive kings, stepped in to pick up the pieces, extending a degree of royal control over southern France that had never existed before..
Simon de Montfort:  talented and ruthless crusade leader who died at a siege of Toulouse as the result of the most famous trebuchet shot in history, according to the story, the machine was worked by an all-female crew.
Results of the Crusade:
1.  Creation of the two great mendicant (begging) orders to combat heresy through preaching and education
a.  Franciscans
b.  Dominicans
2.  Birth of the Papal Inquisition which took jurisdiction over the major religious crimes such as heresy out of the hands of local bishops.  (Although the actual creation of an institution came at the hands of a later pope, Innocent III set the stage by taking the trial of heesy out of the hands of bishops.)
Villalon's Alternative Rallying Cry for the Crusades:
When Simon de Montfort’s men broken through the walls at the Albigensian stronghold of Bezier, they asked the papal legate whom they should kill and whom they should spare, since the population included many good Roman Catholic whose only crime was to live in peace with the Albigensians.  The legate is said to have replied with one of the most famous (and most chilling) statements of the Middle Ages:  “Kill them all.  God will know his own!”