The Crusades

Urban II's call at Clermont: relieve the Byzantines, reopen the pilgrim roads, and recover Jerusalem.

An unofficial first wave of peasants under Peter the Hermit left early in 1096 and was destroyed in Anatolia. The armies of the nobles followed.

They took Nicaea in 1097, won at Dorylaeum, and besieged Antioch for eight months across 1097 and 1098. They took Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. The sack that followed killed a large part of the city's population, Muslim and Jewish, and the crusaders' own chroniclers describe it without embarrassment.

Four Crusader States followed along the coast: Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The holy places stayed in Christian hands, and pilgrimage ran, for the next eighty-eight years.

Pope Urban II. Godfrey of Bouillon, who took the city and declined the title of king. His brother Baldwin, who took the crown in 1100. Bohemond of Taranto, who kept Antioch for himself. Raymond of Toulouse. Adhemar of Le Puy, the papal legate, who died at Antioch. Emperor Alexios I, who asked for mercenaries and got something he could not control.

Edessa, the northernmost Crusader State, fell to the Turkish commander Zengi in 1144. It was the first of the four to go.

Pope Eugene III called it and St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached it at Vézelay in 1146. Two reigning kings answered, which had not happened before.

One fleet stopped in Iberia on the way and helped Afonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, take Lisbon in October 1147. That is the campaign's one lasting gain, and it is the reason the Second Crusade shows up in the story of Portugal.

Both main armies were cut to pieces crossing Anatolia. What arrived at Jerusalem then marched on Damascus, a Muslim city that had been on friendly terms with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The siege lasted four days in July 1148 and the army went home.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached it and afterward had to answer for it. King Louis VII of France and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. King Conrad III of Germany. Zengi, and after him his son Nur al-Din. Afonso Henriques of Portugal.

Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin, July 4, 1187, and took Jerusalem that October. He allowed the Christian inhabitants to ransom themselves and let the eastern Christians stay.

Three of the most powerful rulers in Europe went, which is why this one is called the Kings' Crusade. Frederick Barbarossa drowned crossing a river in Cilicia in 1190 and most of his army turned back. Philip II helped take Acre and sailed home in 1191.

That left Richard the Lionheart. He seized Cyprus on the way, finished the siege of Acre in July 1191, and beat Saladin at Arsuf that September. He also had roughly 2,700 prisoners at Acre executed when the ransom talks stalled. He advanced inland toward Jerusalem twice and turned back both times, on the judgment that he could take the city and not hold it.

The Treaty of Jaffa, September 1192: the Christians keep the coastal strip, and unarmed pilgrims are readmitted to Jerusalem. Saladin died the following year.

Saladin. Richard I of England. Philip II Augustus of France. Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor. Guy of Lusignan, the king who lost at Hattin.

Pope Innocent III called it in 1198. The plan was to strike Egypt first, where the Ayyubid power actually sat, and trade it for Jerusalem.

The crusaders contracted with Venice for a fleet sized to carry 33,500 men. Roughly a third of that number turned up, so they could not pay what they owed. Venice offered terms: work off the debt.

In 1202 they besieged and took Zara, a Catholic city on the Adriatic. Innocent III excommunicated the army for it. Then a Byzantine claimant, Alexios Angelos, offered money and troops if they would restore his family to the throne, and the fleet sailed for Constantinople instead.

The payment never came. In April 1204 the crusaders stormed and sacked Constantinople over three days, stripping its churches and relics. They installed a Latin emperor there who ruled until 1261. Innocent III condemned what they had done.

Two men who were there wrote it down: Robert of Clari, a poor knight, and Geoffrey de Villehardouin, one of the leaders. They do not tell it the same way, which is the point of reading both.

Pope Innocent III, who called it and then condemned it. Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice, past ninety and blind. Boniface of Montferrat. Alexios IV Angelos, whose bargain turned the fleet north.

The Egypt plan again. The crusaders took Damietta in November 1219. Sultan al-Kamil offered to hand over Jerusalem in exchange for it. The papal legate Pelagius refused, marched on Cairo, was caught by the Nile flood, and surrendered Damietta in 1221.

St. Francis of Assisi crossed the lines at Damietta in 1219 and preached to al-Kamil in person. Both men came away unharmed and, by every account, impressed.

Cardinal Pelagius. John of Brienne. Sultan al-Kamil. St. Francis of Assisi.

Emperor Frederick II took the crusade vow and then delayed for years, so Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him. He sailed anyway, still excommunicated, and in February 1229 negotiated Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth back from al-Kamil. There was almost no fighting. He crowned himself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because no bishop would do it for him.

Christians held Jerusalem for the next fifteen years. It was lost for good in 1244.

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor. Pope Gregory IX. Sultan al-Kamil.

King Louis IX of France went because Jerusalem had fallen in 1244. He took Damietta in 1249, lost at Mansurah in February 1250, and was captured in April 1250 and ransomed. He stayed in the Holy Land four more years rebuilding its fortifications. Egypt meanwhile passed to the Mamluks, who become the last and most effective enemy the Crusader States face.

Louis IX of France, canonized in 1297 as St. Louis. His biographer Jean de Joinville, who went with him. The Mamluks.

Louis IX went again, this time to North Africa. Disease swept the camp and he died outside Tunis on August 25, 1270. His brother made terms and withdrew. Prince Edward of England arrived after him and accomplished little in 1271 and 1272, which some books count separately as a Ninth Crusade.

Louis IX. Charles of Anjou, his brother. Prince Edward, later Edward I of England.

The Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil took Acre in May 1291. It was the last crusader city in the Holy Land. Just under two hundred years after Clermont, the Latin states were finished.