King Louis also organized the last major Crusade, in 1270. This time the response of the French nobility was unenthusiastic, and the expedition was directed against the city of Tunis rather than Egypt. It ended abruptly when Louis died in Tunisia during the summer of 1270.The tale of the Crusader states, after the mid-13th century, is a sad and short one. Though popes, some zealous princes including Edward I of England and various religious and political thinkers continued to call for a Crusade to unite the warring armies of Europe and to deliver a smashing blow to Islam, later efforts were too small and too sporadic to do more than buy time for the Crusader states. With the fall of akko in 1291, the last stronghold on the mainland was lost, though the military religious orders kept garrisons on Cyprus and Rhodes for some centuries. However, the Crusading impulse was not dead. As late as 1396 a large expedition against the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans, summoned by Sigismund of Hungary, drew knights from all over the West. But a crushing defeat at Nicopolis on the Danube River also showed that the appeal of these ventures far outstripped the political and military support needed for their success. Crusades and Counter-Crusades After the astonishing success of the First Crusade, many crusaders fulfilled their vows by completing their pilgrimage at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and went home. Others stayed, however, and continued to build up the society known as Outremerconsisting of the four Crusader States established by the First Crusade. They quickly became part of the world of the Middle East, and were viewed as just another set of players in the power struggles of the area. One of their contributions to history was the formation of the military religious order, or “military order,” in the early part of the twelfth century. These orders, a fusion of the monastic and knightly callings, were both a response to the desperate need for manpower in the East, and an example of the way the Church was attempting to tame and even monasticize the warrior class. Eventually, however, as the Muslim world began to recover from the disruptions caused by the Turkish invasions, major Muslim leaders began to emerge. These men sought to reunite the Islamic world under one ruler, and they quickly saw that one way to gain prestige as an Islamic leader was to show that one could win victories against the Christian Franks .In this way the Islamic Counter the Crusade arose. The Islamic Counter Crusade was a form of Jihad, an Islamic doctrine which roughly parallels, but does not exactly duplicate, the Christian doctrine of Holy War. The first such leader was Zengi. On Christmas Eve, 1144, Zengi’s troops took the capital of the County of Edessa and destroyed the oldest Crusader state. The West reacted strongly to this disaster, and the result was the Second Crusade, preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux and led by King Louis VII of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II. The Second Crusade was a near complete failure, however, and people quickly lost interest in another such expedition. Meanwhile, successors to Zengi such as Nur ed-Din continued nibbling away at the Crusader states. After Nur ed-Din’s death the mantle of Islamic leadership fell on a Kurdish officer named Salah ed-Din, or Saladin as he is commonly known in the West. Saladin was arguably the greatest of Muslim generals, and possessed an appealing and admirable character. In 1187 he caught the entire army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the mountain known as the Horns of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee, and annihilated it. Within a few months he held all of the Kingdom except for the seaport of Tyre and a nearby castle. Tyre held out, however, and the West once again came to the aid of the Crusader states by mounting the Third Crusade. Led by King Richard the Lion-Hearted of England, King Philip II Augustus of France, and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, it managed to recover much of the lost territory. It passed into European and Muslim folklore as a time of great chivalry, particularly between Saladin and Richard the Lion-Hearted, who became the principle crusade leader. But despite Richard’s best efforts, Jerusalem was not recovered. Both Richard and the local barons agreed that unless the powerbase of Egypt was in friendly hands, Jerusalem could not be kept even if it could be captured. In 1198 the great medieval pope Innocent III came to power. He was intensely interested in crusading, and one of his first acts was to promote a Fourth Crusade. Unfortunately, this crusade suffered a series of mischances and never reached the Holy Land at all. Through the intervention of Venetian commercial interests and disinherited Byzantine princes, it was diverted against the current government of Byzantium and ended in the capture and disastrous sack of Constantinople in 1204. Although the Byzantines recovered their capital in 1261, the Fourth Crusade did lasting damage to their Empire. By the time it was over, the frictions and misunderstandings between East and West which had begun with the First Crusade had turned into permanent hatred. Disappointed, Innocent began preparations for another crusade. He died before it got under way in 1217. The Fifth Crusade was directed against Egypt, in recognition of the strategic reality which Richard had noted, and it was very nearly a complete success. But in the end it too failed. The Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Crusades accomplished some limited objectives. None was really successful, though the Seventh Crusade in particular, led by King Louis IX of France, has come down to us as a romantic episode equal in some ways to the Third Crusade. Meanwhile, the Muslim Counter-Crusade recovered from the setback of the Third Crusade, and in 1291, the Christians were driven from their last strongholds. The Holy Land was once again lost to Christendom. Having seized the initiative, the Muslims retained it. It was difficult to get Western Europeans interested in crusades unless they lived in areas bordering the Muslims, and France and England were about to begin the Hundred Years’ War, a conflict which would distract them and absorb their resources. . But the Turks increasingly seemed invincible. In 1453 they took Constantinople from the last survivors of the Byzantine Empire, putting an end to nearly 2,000 years of Roman Imperial rule in the East. They also pressed ever deeper into Central Europe. The Later Crusades It used to be thought that the Crusades ended in 1291, with the loss of the Holy Land. Recent scholars have argued that medieval men may have thought of expeditions to other places as carrying the same kind of weight and prestige as crusades to Syria-Palestine. The primary sources confirm that most if not all of the administrative mechanism which supported Crusades to the East also supported crusades to other theatres. Very few scholars cling to the notion that crusading died with the Holy Land. Rather we now see that the crusading idea evolved and adapted to changing circumstances and needs, remaining very much alive well into the modern period. The Iberian peninsula had been the site of continual fighting since the Muslim Arabs invaded it in 711. By about the middle of the eleventh century, Christian forces had managed to recover about half the peninsula, and the popes, in order to help them in their struggle, had made limited indulgences available to those who came from other lands to assist the Spanish in their business of reconquest . In some ways, then, the Reconquista may claim to be the real “first Crusade.” When St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade in the mid-1140s, after the fall of Edessa, the Spanish asked for and received similar crusade privileges for a renewed push against the Muslims. Additionally, the Saxons received some crusade privileges for an inconclusive crusade against their pagan neighbors, the Wends. Hence the Second Crusade was in fact a three-front war, and although this probably contributed to its ultimate failure, it also established the precedent that crusades could be officially declared for areas other than the Holy Land. Another step in the evolution of crusading came at the beginning of the thirteenth century. A dualist heresy, whose followers were known as Cathars or Albigensians, arose in southern France. It became very widespread and proved impossible to stamp out by ordinary means such as persuasion. Innocent III declared a crusade against these heretics, making the Albigensian Crusade the first against internal enemies of Christendom instead of external ones. Through this time period the papacy carried out a long conflict with the Holy Roman Empire, primarily fought in the Italian peninsula. At times of great need popes would sometimes declare crusades against their political enemies in these conflicts. This considerably devalued the crusading ideal and brought it into some disrepute. Meanwhile, German bishops began missionary work among the Baltic pagans. Some Prussians, Lithuanians, and Livonians they were people living the the area of modern Estonia and Latvia they did convert, but their unconverted neighbors often persecuted and killed both converts and missionaries. Eventually the missionaries called for help to protect their converts, and crusades composed primarily of Germans answered the call. Soon a military order, the largely German Teutonic Knights, became involved in the area, and a perpetual Baltic Crusade against the heathen began. This conflict was marked by a much greater level of savagery than that in the Holy Land. The civilization of the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians was vastly inferior to that of the relatively sophisticated German Christians for one thing, and partly as a result the mutual respect which often marked contacts between Turks and Franks was almost entirely absent from the Baltic theatre. And as might easily be guessed, under the circumstances the Christian prohibition against forcible conversion sometimes became blurred and even forgotten. The Teutonic Knights set up “Order-States” in both Prussia and Livonia, and soon their crusading policy became inextricably entwined with the foreign policy of these states. As a result the Teutonic Knights often found themselves “crusading” against Christians, including the Catholic Poles and the Orthodox Russians. Occasionally the papacy tried to restrain them, but without much effect. At the end of the fourteenth century the Lithuanians converted to Christianity, and the crowns of Lithuania and Poland were united in marriage. The combined power of the Polish-Lithuanian union proved too much for the Teutonic Knights. In 1410 they were badly defeated at the First Battle of Tannenberg, and they ceased to be a major player in the area thereafter. In the next century the Prussian and Livonian Teutonic Knights converted to Lutheranism and founded the secular duchies of Prussia and Courland.Crusades were also called against the Hussites in Bohemia in the fifteenth century. The Hussites were followers of the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, who was declared a heretic and burned at the stake in 1415. Many Bohemians, motivated by both religious and political reasons, revolted against their Catholic German rulers and formed a sort of republic. Several crusades were declared against them, but all failed. Eventually the Hussite Crusades were ended by a compromise, not by a crusade. Background From this account it might appear that the beginning of the Crusades was a purely military and political affair. This was not the case. There were many other elements which laid the groundwork for the phenomenon of crusading, which involved the participation of Christians in organized warfare on behalf of their religion and their God. In the beginning Christianity had an uncertain attitude towards warfare. Pacifism was never the official position of the Church. There was always a pacifist faction within Christianity, some of the first Christian converts were soldiers and apparently remained at their jobs after their conversion . After the Roman government became officially Christian, the Christian officials needed guidelines for the use of violence. In response to this need the doctrine of Just War was evolved. It assumed that violence was evil, but acknowledged that passivity in the face of others’ violence might be a greater evil. Consequently three main conditions were laid down; if these conditions were meet,Christian people could engage in warfare without fear of damnation. The war must have a Just Cause, it must be waged under Due Authority, and the Christian combatants must have Right Intentions. The theological structure of Just War is complicated, but in brief, it meant that the war must be waged either to avoid a likely injury or to rectify a past injury; it must be waged under the direction and at the call of a supreme governmental authority; and that the violence employed might not be excessive.In the tenth and eleventh centuries, a number of churchmen became concerned about the moral and organizational state of the Church. They formed a movement, sometimes known as the Cluniac Reform movement, which eventually took control of the papacy and brought sweeping change to Western Christianity. One of these changes involved an adjustment to the Just War doctrine. Church and state were closely intertwined in this period, and some thinkers concluded that this meant that Christ’s Will for mankind, embodied in the Church, could also be advanced by the political structures of Christian peoples. They also theorized that violence might not simply be the lesser of two evils violence, they said, was morally neutral, and those who used violence to advance Christ’s kingdom might be doing positive good. The doctrine is known as Holy War. Another change involved the noble warrior classes of the West. Fighting men had defended Christian civilization against successive waves of barbarian assaults in the second half of the first millennium, but by the eleventh century the barbarians were either tamed or destroyed. Only the Muslims, or “Saracens,” were left. In areas which were far from the Muslim frontier, these noble warriors turned their energies on each other or worse, on the non-combatants around them. This endemic violence in society plainly contradicted Christian teaching and deeply troubled thoughtful churchmen. The reforming monks put considerable effort into taming these unruly noble warriors. Various church councils proposed times when hostilities must cease, and stipulated that noncombatants must not be attacked. These attempts had only limited success. Another element of West European society which undoubtedly influenced formation of crusading was excitement and speculation about the Second Coming of Christ, or millenarialism. Scholars argue over the importance of this factor, but it seems likely that at least some people believed that Jerusalem must beheld by Christians before Christ would return, and some people .among the lower classes, had a vague mental picture of “Jerusalem” which conflated the earthly city in Palestine and the Heavenly Jerusalem. Bad as it might be for unbelievers to hold the earthly city, it would be much worse for them to rule the heavenly one. Socio-economic factors contributed to the formation of the Crusades as well. In the second half of the first millennium West Europeans adopted a number of agricultural innovations, including the heavy plow and the horse collar. It seems likely that these innovations increased food production, which in turn increased population, making manpower for expeditions available . The rise of a class of lesser nobles who collected and disposed of local production with relative efficiency may have contributed, by focussing resources in the hands of the very people who could most profitably help the crusades. Some scholars used to make much of the idea that crusaders gained great wealth from the Crusades, and that most crusaders were motivated by greed and a hunger for power. The primary sources do not bear this out, as crusading seems to have been a hard, lonely, expensive, dangerous proposition. It also used to be fashionable to portray the crusaders as musclebound, dull-witted warriors led by fanatical clerics, out to slaughter anything which crossed their path. While such individuals certainly participated in the crusades . The primary sources do not support this view either. It took careful thought to formulate the doctrines which supported the crusades, and it took great skill to shepherd large numbers of men and women across strange and hostile territory. This view is now mostly discredited. There are other factors which laid the groundwork for the Crusades, but those described were some of the most important ones. Crusades were an immensely complex phenomenon, spread across many lands and centuries. Many motivations for crusading existed, and many probably coexisted within the minds of individual crusaders. Bibliography Barber, Malcolm. Crusaders and Heretics, 12th – 14th centuries, Aldershot Variorum, 1995 pages 45-78 Brundage, James. Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, Madison, Wis., and London, 1969 pages 89-91 Boase, T. S. R. The Backrounds of the crusades, Oxford, 1967. pages 106-111 Prawer, Joshua. The Crusaders’ Kingdom: European colonialism in the Middle Ages, New York & Washington, 1972 pages 68-74 The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374, Cambridge, 1993 pages 208 -210 The Later Crusades: from Lyon to Alcazar, 1274-1580, Oxford, 1992 pages 150-152 Kedar, Benjamin. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims, Princeton, NJ, 1984. pages 184-189
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