Indholdsfortegnelse for Crusades i History Extra

In December 1144, the Christian city of Edessa fell to Zangi of Mosul. This was by far the most serious defeat yet for the crusader states, and messengers appealed to Europe for help. The efforts of Pope Eugenius III and Bernard of Clairvaux caused many thousands to enlist, including King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany – the first time major European monarchs risked joining such an expedition. Western Europe was inflamed with crusading zeal and further theatres of war were opened against the pagans of the Baltic region and the Muslims of Spain – marking an extraordinarily confident and aggressive movement of Christian expansionism. In the summer of 1147, the main armies marched into the Byzantine empire. There, as on the First Crusade, relations with…

“Go forth, therefore, knight of Christ; go forth, most Christian prince! … Gird on our sword, so that we may both be avenged on these criminal and inhuman evildoers” Pope Innocent III, 1208 With these words, Pope Innocent III urged Philip II, the self-styled King of France, to go on crusade. Popes had written similarly to kings before. In 1208, however, Innocent was not encouraging Philip to crusade to the Holy Land, but rather to crusade in what is now southern France. In this war, the ‘evildoers’ were in fact local: purported heretics operating in the coastal region of Languedoc. The history of crusading outside the Holy Land shakes up conventional ideas of holy war. Earlier generations of western scholars prioritised geographic location and Christian piety when they tried to determine…

On 25 March 1194, King Richard I, the Lionheart, laid siege to Nottingham Castle. Intent on reasserting his authority over England, the king directed the full force of his military genius and martial resources against this supposedly impregnable, rebel-held fortress. Eleven days earlier, Richard had landed at Sandwich in Kent, setting foot on English soil for the first time in more than four years. During the Lionheart's prolonged absence – first waging a gruelling crusade in the Holy Land, then enduring imprisonment at the hands of political rivals in Austria and Germany – his devious younger brother, John, had sought to seize power. Richard thus returned to a realm threatened by insurrection and, though John himself soon scuttled across the Channel, Nottingham remained an outpost of those championing his dubious…

SALADIN'S CV BORN: To a family of Kurdish ancestry, in Tikrit (modern-day Iraq), in c1137/38 BEST REMEMBERED FOR: Defeating a crusader army at the 1187 battle of Hattin (present-day Israel) and seizing Jerusalem from the crusaders later that year OTHER KEY ACHIEVEMENTS: Establishing a mighty Muslim empire that encompassed today's Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Yemen and the Palestinian territories REVERED BY: The Muslim world, especially his fellow Sunnis. But he was also greatly respected by his sworn enemies, the crusaders, who it is said regarded him as highly as their own leaders DIED: Of a fever in Damascus in 1193 BURIED: In the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus Saladin's achievements in bringing together much of the Middle East under one vast Muslim empire, and crushing a crusader army in 1187, mark…

The real problem of the crusades was not religion – it was dislocated, disinhibited young men, arriving in large numbers Modern statesmen live in the expectation of a metaphorical knife in the back from their political enemies. The situation in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was similar, but the knives were far less metaphorical. Miles of Plancy, a powerful nobleman, was not popular with his peers. He could be rude. He could be arrogant. But his main failing, in the eyes of his fellow nobles at least, was that he was far too successful. Miles stepped in to become regent in July 1174, after King Amalric – who had ruled the crusader state since 1163 – died unexpectedly. Miles's elevation to one of the most important roles in all of…

MEDICINE In the 1110s and 1120s, Stephen of Pisa journeyed to Antioch in search of Arabic knowledge, specifically philosophy. His desire for learning the superior sciences of the Muslims led him into other fields, including medicine and astronomy. He copied some books and acquired others. First in Antioch, and then in Pisa, he led a team, including a Muslim convert to Christianity, to translate these works into Latin for European scholars. It is thanks to the list Stephen composed as a result of his translation of Ali ibn al-Abbas's The Complete Book on the Craft of Medicine that many Arabic medical names entered the medieval vocabulary in Europe. Some are still in use today. FALCONRY A great admirer of falconry, Emperor Frederick II developed such a passion for the subject…

1090 1071 Turks overrun the Byzantine border After taking control of Iraq and Syria, the Seljuk Turks under the command of Sultan Alp Arslan defeat Byzantine forces at the battle of Manzikert and conquer Anatolia. March 1095 A call from the east A papal council at Piacenza receives an envoy from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus. Assailed and desperate, the Byzantines plead for military assistance against the Seljuks - and Pope Urban II determines to respond. 1095 The crusading movement is born Pope Urban II summons a council at Clermont and charges the crowd of knights and churchmen to aid the Greeks in the east and stop the molestation of pilgrims and the desecration of Christian sites in the Holy Land. 1096 The First Crusade gets underway Christian knights…

BBC History Magazine: The crusades were massive military enterprises involving thousands of people. Who answered the call to go? Christopher Tyerman: The social reach was very broad. There were the military elites, the urban elites, military households and those from the wider community who had been recruited to fight as infantry. Beyond that, there's evidence of modest farmers, urban and rural artisans and rich peasants, all of whom could hope to earn some money on crusade. And poor peasants could have gone, but would have needed someone else's funds. So it was socially quite embracing – not just knights and soldiers. Women went too: lists of crusaders from the late 12th century feature around 10 per cent women. Some were wives, but others went by themselves or in groups –…

On the morning of 1 July 1097, tens of thousands of Christian pilgrim soldiers of the First Crusade scrambled to make a desperate stand against a horde of advancing Turkish horsemen. The crusaders were only a few days into a three-month march through 800 miles of hostile terrain when the Turks took them by surprise, attacking early in the morning while the crusaders were still in camp, near an old Roman settlement in Anatolia called Dorylaeum. One eyewitness to the battle, a French priest called Fulcher of Chartres, recalled the terror he felt when the Turks descended, as he and his companions “huddled together like sheep in a fold, trembling and frightened”. The fighting raged for six hours until eventually – miraculously – it became clear that the Turks did…

8 September 1157 Richard is born, the son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, founders of the Angevin dynasty June 1172 Invested as Duke of Aquitaine in the abbey church of St Hilary in Poitiers 11 June 1183 His elder brother dies Richard becomes heir to the English crown and Angevin realm (including Normandy and Anjou) Autumn 1187 Saladin reconquers Jerusalem. Richard is the first nobleman north of the Alps to take the cross for the Third Crusade 3 September 1189 Having rebelled against his father Henry's authority and hounded the old king to his death, Richard is crowned king 4 July 1190 Sets out on crusade to the Holy Land, leaving his younger brother, John, in Europe Summer 1191 Richard seizes Acre from Saladin's forces. He…

On a punishingly hot day at the start of July 1187, Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria, stood beside his son al-Afdal and peered across the battlefield towards a red tent on a hill. The sultan's face was pale with worry. The armies before him had been fighting for hours, tortured by near-unbearable heat, dust and smoke, which billowed up from the desert scrub Saladin's own men had set alight. Thousands of men and horses lay dead. The enemy – a vast force led by the Christian king Guy of Jerusalem – was badly battered and falling back, but until the king's red pavilion fell, victory would not be complete. Al-Afdal, youthful and bullish, cheered every Christian charge that the Muslim army repulsed. Saladin scolded him. “Be quiet!” he…

As well as driving the incidence of violence and theft on land, the deluge of young men surging into the Middle East also coincided with a rise in crime at sea. Vast numbers of ships, sailors and naval entrepreneurs were drawn to the region. Crusader pirates did not feature heavily in the chronicles of the time, but evidence shows that they were always there in the background, often operating in large numbers. In medieval times, piracy was part of a ‘portfolio career’ long before anyone thought of such first-world issues as early retirement or the gig economy. In the Latin East, it was treated with a huge dose of pragmatism. Largely unfettered by legal frameworks, a medieval pirate was, in most instances, simply someone with as hip and an opportunity.…

There were 13 men: unlucky for someone. They were dressed to kill – but so was everyone else. In what was essentially an army camp, crammed with armed men, the assailants blended right in. Moving casually but intently through the bustling camp outside Aleppo in Syria, past stalls and shopkeepers, beggars and soldiers, they headed towards their target. Suddenly their progress was checked by a shout from behind: “What are you doing here?” Cover blown, their response was shocking: an explosion of violence, weapons flashing, blood splashing. The team of Assassins erupted into the tent where their victim sat unawares, surrounded by generals, lackeys and bodyguards. The attackers' daggers and swords struck once more. The target that day in January 1175 was a Kurdish general, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub…

The crusades to the near east were waged on what was tantamount to ‘home turf’ for the Muslims. This simple geographical reality played a fundamental role in the war for the Holy Land. Indeed, it was probably this factor more than any other that accounted for Islam's ultimate victory over the Christian crusaders. For the western Europeans, the difficulties of conducting sustained military campaigns thousands of miles from home during the medieval era were manifold. Issues of transport, supply, communication and logistics all posed almost insuperable challenges. The early crusaders effectively walked 2,000 to 3,000 miles to the Holy Land – often taking years to do so – and although naval travel became the norm for Christian warriors from the later 12th century onwards, the costs involved were enormous. Maintaining…

“When Pope Urban had said these and very many similar things in his urbane discourse, he so influenced to one purpose the desires of all who were present that they cried out, 'It is the will of God! It is the will of God!'" So wrote the monk Robert of Rheims in his Historia Hierosolymitana (‘History of Jerusalem’) during the early 1100s. Some years earlier, on 27 November 1095, Urban II preached a public sermon outside the town of Clermont in central France, summoning Christians to take part in the First Crusade, a new form of holy war. It was a carefully stage-managed event, in which the pope's representative, the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy, supposedly moved by the pope's eloquence, tore up strips of cloth to make crosses…

Around nine o'clock in the morning on 4 July 1187, Count Raymond III of Tripoli took a fateful decision. Around him an apocalyptic battle raged. From his position as commander of the vanguard, Raymond could see that the great army of the kingdom of Jerusalem (the crusader state established after the First Crusade) was crumbling, suffering from heat and thirst. Beset from all sides by arrows and the swirling attacks of Saladin's cavalry, crusader resolve was wavering. At this crucial moment, after years of scheming, rebellion and treachery, Raymond could have chosen to fight and prove his loyalty to the Christian cause. Instead, he and his faction turned and fled. After Raymond deserted the battle at the Horns of Hattin, the Muslim forces inflicted the greatest defeat ever suffered by…

On 4 July 1187, the Muslim sultan Saladin inflicted a crushing defeat on the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem's army in the battle of Hattin, capturing the kingdom's monarch, Guy de Lusignan, and the Christians' revered relic of the True Cross. Saladin went on to seize control of Jerusalem itself on 2 October. These ruinous setbacks sent shockwaves through western Europe, prompting the pope to launch a new call to arms for what would come to be known as the Third Crusade. Tens of thousands of Christians enlisted, including King Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart, who soon ascended to the English throne. Nonetheless, the crusade's first attack was launched by King Guy in late August 1189, shortly after his release from captivity. Guy laid siege to the strategically…

They arrived with no warning, striking swiftly as a guillotine blade. As dawn broke over France on Friday 13 October 1307, hundreds of royal troops stormed the residences of Templar knights, rounded up the brethren and put them in chains. The knights were caught completely unawares – and the charges that were set out against them were extraordinary. Allegations included participating in Satanic initiation ceremonies; spitting or trampling on the crucifix; worshipping idols; and kissing their brothers on the navel, penis, lips and anus in profane masses. It was a spectacular fall from grace for the Knights Templar, a military-religious order that had long been esteemed across Europe and beyond (see God's elite warriors on page 72). For nearly two centuries, since the order's foundation in Jerusalem c1119 (see box,…

At dawn on Friday 18 May 1291, a furious Muslim assault upon the crusader city of Acre began. This heavily fortified and normally bustling port in north-ern Palestine had been locked into a siege for more than a month: encircled by tens of thousands of Islamic troops; subjected to an aerial bombardment that brought hundred-pound boulders crashing down onto its battlements and buildings. Now, on this last morning, the air resounded with the thunder of war drums as thousands of Muslims raced forward, and their archers loosed arrows “in a thick cloud” that, according to one Christian eyewitness, “seemed to fall like rain from the heavens”. Driven forward by the immense momentum of their onslaught, the Muslims broke through two gates and began rushing into the city. Sharing a vain…

Lying in his own blood on the battlefield near Mansoura, his standard covering his grievously wounded body, Emir Fakhr al-Din left this world on 8 February 1250. He had gone out with a handful of his guards to assess the army of King Louis IX and devise a plan to defend Egypt from the onslaught of what became known as the Seventh Crusade. This was a sad ending for someone who had been at the centre of political life for more than 30 years, and only a few months earlier had become the de facto ruler of the Ayyubid sultanate. Fakhr al-Din hailed from a prestigious scholarly family who only two generations previously had moved from eastern Iran to Damascus. But it was luck, too, that positioned him for greatness.…

1 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Jerusalem The crusaders' ultimate goal In 1095, Pope Urban II urged the knights of western Europe to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, saying: “May you be especially moved by the Holy Sepulchre of Our Lord, which is in the hands of unclean races.” In launching the First Crusade, Urban initiated a movement that came to have an extraordinary durability and range, but in 1095 he was especially focused on Christendom's most sacred site: the tomb in which Jesus's body was believed to have been placed after the crucifixion. Within decades of conquering Jerusalem in 1099, the crusaders built much of the church we see today, drawing together the Sepulchre, Calvary (the site of the crucifixion) and other shrines. When Saladin captured Jerusalem in…