All posts tagged The First Crusade

The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (2) by Michael Haag (2012)

The Turks were aliens; the crusaders were not.

Haag’s book is opinionated in a very unacademic way. He has certain hobby horses, vehement ideas – about the central role played by the Templars in the crusades, and about justifying the crusades by completely rethinking their context, portraying the crusades not as violent attacks against peace-loving Arabs, but as justified attempts to help oppressed Christians in the Holy Land – which he gives vent to repeatedly and almost obsessively so that, eventually, the detached reader can’t help having misgivings about the objectivity of what they’re reading.

Nonetheless, that big reservation stated right at the start, this is a very interesting and thought-provoking book.

The Tragedy of the Templars signals its unorthodox approach by going back not ten or thirty or fifty years before the founding of its ostensible subject, the Order of the Knights Templars (in 1139), but by going back one thousand four hundred years earlier, to the conquests of Alexander the Great – and then giving a sweeping recap of all the wars and vicissitudes which struck the Middle East from 300 BC through to the eruption of the Muslims from Arabia in the 630s AD.

The book has notes on every page and an excellent bibliography at the back, and yet it sometimes reads like the opinions of a crank, determined at any cost to convince you of his deliberately revisionist point of view. This comes over most obviously in the very unacademic use of repetition. Again and again he drums home a handful of key points. These are:

Haag’s key points

– the Crusades were not an unprovoked outburst of Western, racist, colonialist, greed and violence

– they were a rational response to repeated pleas for help from figures like the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Emperor of Byzantium

Why the pleas? because:

– even as late as the First Crusade (1095 to 1099) the majority population of the Levant, of Jerusalem and all the other holy cities, let alone of Anatolia and even of Egypt – were Christians:

Christians had remained the majority at Damascus until the tenth century and maybe into the eleventh. (p.208)

Five hundred years after the Arab conquest, Egypt was still a substantially Christian country (p.211)

The Nubians were Christians, as were the majority of Egyptians (p.235)

– these Christians had suffered under the lordship of the Muslim Arabs who came rampaging out of Arabia in the 700s and quickly conquered north up the coast of Palestine into Syria, eastwards conquered the old Persian Empire, and westwards conquered Egypt and beyond

– but, despite centuries of inter-marriage, the Arabs remained an aristocracy, thinking of themselves as lords, knights, emirs and rulers over a broad population of subservient serfs – and these serfs remained predominantly Christian

– through the three hundred years from the mid-700s to the mid-1000s these Christian populations suffered from being second-class citizens, forced to wear clothes which identified them as dhimmis and, occasionally, when the oppression got really bad, forced to wear halters round their necks or be branded

– meanwhile they were forbidden to repair existing churches, build any new ones, and had to stand by while existing ones were often desecrated and destroyed in periodic waves of persecution or forcibly converted into mosques

So Haag’s central point, rammed home on scores of occasions, with all the data he can muster, is that it was not the Crusaders who were the foreign invaders – it was the Muslim Arabs. It was the Arabs who had invaded and conquered Christian Egypt, Christian Palestine, Christian Syria and raided into Christian Anatolia.

Bethlehem where Jesus was born, Nazareth Jesus’ home town, the River Jordan where Jesus was baptised, Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified and rose again, Tarsus where the apostle Paul came from, Antioch where the followers of Jesus were first named ‘Christians’, Damascus, on the road to which Paul had his great conversion experience – all these lands had, by about 400, become solidly Christian and were ruled by the Christian Roman Empire.

It was the Arabs who invaded and conquered them and subjected the Christian inhabitants to all kinds of discrimination and persecution. Christians were forbidden to build new churches or repair old ones. Thousands of churches were destroyed or converted into mosques. There were periodic massacres which triggered pleas from Christian leaders in the region to the Emperor in Constantinople for help, with the result that the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim invaders in the East were permanently at war.

And it wasn’t just the Arabs who were the alien invaders…

The Seljuk Turks add to the chaos

What specifically triggered the Crusades was the arrival of a third force on the scene, the Seljuk Turks, who swept out of central Asia, converted to Islam, and conquered Muslim Persia including the capital of the Abbasid Dynasty, Baghdad, in 1055.

From the 1060s the Seljuks besieged and took various cities in Palestine, as well as probing the eastern edges of Anatolia – the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Their ultimate goal was to tackle the Fatimid Dynasty based on Egypt. The Turks had converted to the majority or Sunni brand of Islam. A territorial ambition to seize Egypt – centrepiece of the Muslim lands – was compounded by the fact that the Fatimids were adherents to Shia Islam, which Sunnis regard as a heresy.

The Fatimids, for their part, also wanted control of (at least southern) Palestine, in order to create a buffer against the insurgent Turks. This meant that the two Muslim opponents clashed in various battles, at various times throughout the later 11th century, taking and retaking bits of Palestine from each other.

Meanwhile the Byzantine Empire was reeling from its defeat by the Turks at the momentous Battle of Manzikert in 1071, after which:

the empire lay open before bands of Turkish tribesmen, who looted, murdered and destroyed as they marauded westwards until in 1073 they were standing on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople. (p.76)

As an anonymous chronicler put it:

Almost the whole world, on land and sea, occupied by the impious barbarians, has been destroyed and has become empty of population, for all Christians have been slain by them and all houses and settlements with their churches have been devastated by them in the whole East, completely crushed and reduced to nothing. (quoted on page 76)

It was not the Crusaders who were invading; it was the Seljuk Turks who, in the years after 1071, invaded, conquered, devastated and took control of a vast central region of Anatolia which had been part of the Roman Empire and solidly Christian for at least 600 years. When the First Crusade arrived 25 years later it was to recover solidly Christian lands which had been invaded and to liberate its Christian inhabitants.

Anyway, the Byzantine Emperor survived the Turkish siege and soon began launching retaliatory raids into Syria and against Muslim strongholds in Palestine. So that’s Turks and Byzantines warring across the region.

And the Turks had brought with them bands of Turkomens, tribesmen of similar ethnic origin who didn’t, however, submit to Seljuk centralised authority and so raided, kidnapped and murdered across the region at will.

And the area had become infested by nomadic Bedouin, who took advantage of the prevailing chaos to also raid and kidnap and murder. Haag quotes liberally from the accounts of Christian pilgrims from Western Europe who made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean and then found every step of their way to the Christian Holy Places fraught with the necessity to pay bribes to countless Muslim officials, and to pay armed guards to protect them from all manner of marauders and kidnappers.

Muslim destruction of Christian shrines, churches and towns

In 1077 Turkish forces led by Atsiz bin Uwaq laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying the surrounding orchards and vineyards. The city finally capitulated on promise of good treatment but Uwaq reneged on the deal and massacred about 3,000 of the Muslim population. He went on to devastate Palestine, burning harvests, razing plantations, desecrating cemeteries, raping women and men alike, cutting off ears and noses. He destroyed Ramla then went on to Gaza where he murdered the entire population, devastating villages and towns, burning down churches and monasteries.

In other words, the advent of the Seljuk Turks into the Middle East inaugurated a new era of chaos and disorder in the Holy Land

The Muslim East was wracked by misgovernment, division, exploitation, fanaticism an aggression. (p.79)

And this was widely reported by Christian pilgrims who returned to Western Europe (if they survived) telling tales of kidnap, rape and extortion, tales which had a cumulative effect at local, regional and national levels.

Back in 1009 al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, the sixth Fatimid caliph, embarked on an attempted ‘annihilation’ of Christians in the Levant, and called for the systematic destruction of all Christian holy places which culminated in the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

This was the church built over two of the central holy sites in Christian tradition, the site where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and Jesus’s empty tomb, where he is said to have been buried and resurrected.

On Al-Hakim’s orders the church of the Holy Sepulchre was razed to its foundations, its graves were dug up, property was taken, furnishings and treasures seized, and the tomb of Jesus was hacked to pieces with pickaxes and hammers and utterly obliterated. Al-Hakim’s orders led to as many as thirty thousand churches being destroyed across the region or converted into mosques. News of the utter destruction of one of the holiest sites in Christendom shocked and appalled Christians from Constantinople through to Rome and into the Kingdom of the Franks. How much longer were the holiest sites in Christendom to remain at the utter mercy of fanatical opponents?

It was against this setting that Haag lists the repeated pleas for help, from the Byzantine Emperor and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, among others, which struck a chord, above all, with the Pope in Rome who, more than anyone else, heard eye-witness reports from pilgrims high and low about the mounting chaos in the region, about the wanton violence inflicted on pilgrims, and the wanton destruction inflicted on the Holy Sites themselves.

Seen from this perspective, the Crusades are not the unprovoked eruption of a bellicose West. The question is not why the Crusaders came, the question is why they took so long to respond to the pleas for help from their persecuted fellow Christians.

The Reconquista

The other really big idea I took from the book was that the Crusades happened in parallel to the Christian reconquest of Spain. I sort of knew this but Haag’s book really binds the two processes together, explaining how the Templars (the nominal subjects of his book) played as big or maybe a bigger role in the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim control as they did in the Holy Land in the early years, anyway).

He points out how Popes and senior church figures called for the Christian knights of North and West Europe to put aside their differences and fight the Muslims in both places. When you look at a map of the Mediterranean Haag’s use of the phrase ‘war on two fronts’, fighting ‘on two fronts’, really makes sense.

The map below, from Wikipedia, clearly shows a) how the Muslims conquered the East, the West and the Southern coast of what had once been the Roman Christian Mediterranean and how, as a result, all the Mediterranean islands – Sicily, Sardinia, Crete, Cyprus – became battlefields for the centuries-long ‘assault by Islam against a Christian civilisation that had once embraced the whole of the Mediterranean’ (p.93)

If you were a Christian knight it wasn’t just a case of joining a Crusade to the Holy Land (as Haag points out, the term ‘crusade’ wasn’t coined until centuries after the things themselves had ended – contemporaries wrote about ‘taking the cross’). It was a question of where you chose to sign up to the global effort to stop and repel the invading Muslims – in Spain, in Sicily, in Cyprus or in Egypt or the Holy Land.

Map of the main Byzantine-Muslim naval operations and battles in the Mediterranean

Crusades wicked, Reconquista, OK?

The big question all this left me asking is – Why is the ‘Crusade’ to liberate the Christian Holy Land from Muslim rule nowadays always criticised and castigated in the harshest possible terms as a racist, violent and greedy example of Western colonialism, whereas… the parallel ‘Crusade’ to liberate the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule, which was fought by much the same knights fighting for the same spiritual rewards offered by the same Pope… is totally accepted?

Does anyone suggest we should hand Spain back over to Muslim rule, to its rightful Moorish owners? No. The question is absurd. Does anyone suggest we should apologise to the Muslim inhabitants of Spain who were expelled 500 years ago? No. The notion is absurd.

Is it because the Crusades are perceived as consisting of violent attacks on Muslims living in a land they’d inhabited for hundreds of years? Well, the Reconquista was drenched in blood.

Or does the stark difference in historiographical thinking about the two Crusades mean that morality in history – how we judge the morality of past events – simply boils down to their success? The Christian Crusaders managed to expel the Muslims from Spain by about 1500, it has been a solidly Christian land for the past 500 years and so… it is accepted as the natural state of things…

Whereas the Christian Crusaders who tried to hang onto the Holy Land were always doomed to failure by virtue of the endless waves of new invaders streaming in from Asia (first the Turks, then the Golden Horde of Genghiz Khan’s Mongols) which were always going to outnumber the Christians’ dwindling numbers… and so… their effort is seen as reprehensible and subject to all the insults and abuse modern historians and the politically correct can level at them.

Yet the two Crusades were carried out by the same kind of knights, over the same period, inspired by the same ideology, and offered the same rewards (seizure of land and the remission of sins).

Is one a totally accepted fait accompli which nobody questions, and the other a great Blot on the face of Western Civilisation, simply because one succeeded and the other failed?

The West

Not far behind that thought is the reflection that the West is simply called the West – is the West – because Muslim conquerors conquered the East.

‘The West’ was not some great insurgent triumphant entity – it is all that was left after the rampaging Muslims seized all of North Africa, all of the Middle East and most of Spain, then, in the 1100 began the process of seizing all of what we now call Turkey.

Previously Christendom had encompassed the entire Mediterranean and the lands around it. In this basic, geographical sense, the West is the creation of Islam.

The Knights Templar

So what about the ostensible subject of the book, the Order of the Knights Templar? Well it takes a while to get around to their founding in the 1130s… and then, in the rather unscholarly way which the reader soon gets used to, Haag goes out of his way to praise their involvement – claiming they were decisive or vital in almost every encounter with the Muslims over the next two hundred years – and to exonerate them from all accusations of greed, inaction or treachery brought against them by contemporaries. For example,

– when the contemporary chronicler William of Tyre criticises the Templars for their involvement in the murder of an envoy from the ‘Old Man of the Hills’ (p.251) – Haag dismisses William’s criticism as biased.

– Haag claims that the Crusader states – by the 1100s often administered by the Templars – were far more religiously tolerant than the surrounding Muslim states. When the Templars didn’t support an ill-fated Frankish expedition against the Fatimids in Egypt, Haag makes excuses for them. And so on.

So there’s lots of detail about the Knights Templars (when they were set up, their location in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the vows they took, names of the founders and much, much more).

But, again, I was rather dazzled by one Big Idea about the Templars, which is the notion that they were the first multinational corporation. They were established after the First Crusade had established the Crusader states in Palestine, to guard the Holy Places and protect pilgrims. Quite quickly they began offering banking services i.e. they set up branches in London, Paris, Rome, on the Mediterranean islands – because if you were going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land it was wise not to carry a big sack of gold which all manner of Muslim pirates, kidnappers and bandits might steal from you. Better to deposit the gold in London or Paris or Rome, and receive a chit or docket proving the fact, while the Templars recorded the fact on their increasingly sophisticated ledgers.

Within a hundred years they were on the way to becoming official bankers to the King of France. They made huge loans to the King of England and helped finance the Reconquista. By their constitution they answered only to the Pope in Rome. The point is that – not being allied with this or that European prince or king – they were strikingly independent. No-one had any interest in ‘conquering’ them, there was nothing to conquer except a set of international financial services.

Land and tithes in the West, gold and banking facilities across Europe, and by the time of the Battle of Hattin it is estimated the Templars, along with the Hospitallers (the other great order of knights) held maybe a third of the land of Outremer, the kingdom beyond the sea (i.e. the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land established after the success of the First Crusade).

I found these ideas about the economic roots of their power and wealth more interesting than the blizzard of detail Haag also gives about the Templars’ involvement in various battles and strategic decisions. He follows the story right through to the events leading up to the suppression of the Knights Templar by King Philip IV of France who persuaded the Pope to suppress the order on trumped up charges of blasphemy, heresy and homosexuality, when his real motivation was simply to write off the enormous debts he’d incurred with the order to fund his prolonged war with England.

Saladin

As part of his program to debunk every myth about the Crusades, Haag really has it in for An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, commonly known as Saladin (1137 to 1193) who defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, then seized Jerusalem later the same year, events which triggered the third Crusade (1189 to 1192) in which Saladin was confronted by Richard I of England, both becoming heroes of legend for centuries to follow.

Haag places Saladin carefully in the succession of Turkish leaders who wanted to overthrow the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt and establish their own kingdom. Haag goes out of his way to point out that:

– Saladin was not an Arab, he was a Turk; in fact he wasn’t strictly a Turk, but a ‘Turkified’ Kurd (p.233), having been born in Tikrit of Kurdish family, his father rising within the ranks of the Turkish army to become a city governor

– Saladin spent far more time waging jihad against his fellow Muslims than against the crusaders

[between 1171 and 1186] Saladin had spent no more than thirteen months fighting against the Franks; instead he directed his jihad almost entirely against his fellow Muslims, heterodox in many cases but most of them far from being heretics (p.262)

– this is one of the points Haag really dins home with endless repetition seeking to emphasise that Saladin was not a Muslim hero defending Muslim Palestine from marauding Crusaders – he was a Kurd fighting under the banner of the Seljuk Turks, against his fellow Muslims in Egypt and Syria, in order to establish a dynasty of his own

As the Cambridge History of Islam explains, Saladin’s army was ‘as alien as the Turkish, Berber, Sudanese and other forces of his predecessors. Himself a Kurd, he established a regime and an army of the Turkish type, along the lines laid down by the Seljuks and atabegs in the East.’ In capturing Egypt, and in all his wars against the Muslims of Syria and the Franks of Outremer, Saladin was not a liberator; like the Seljuks and like Zengi and Nur al-Din, he was an alien leading an alien army of conquest and occupation. (p.234, emphasis added)

– Saladin wrote letters and issued edicts claiming he was fighting a jihad against heresy and the infidel – in both cases Haag claims, he was hypocritically assuming a religious mantle to conceal what were basically the same lust-for-power motivations as all the other petty emirs and viziers competing in the region, a record of ‘unscrupulous schemes and campaigns aimed at personal, and family aggrandisement’ (Lyons and Jackson’s biography of Saladin, quoted on page 262)

– Haag goes out of his way to contrast Saladin’s fierce campaigns against what he regarded as Muslim heretics (especially Ismaili Islam, which he explains as a form of dualism), with the religious freedom operating in the Crusader states of Outremer, even quoting a contemporary Muslim chronicler, Ibn Jubayr, who admits that many Muslims preferred to live under the rule of the Franks who didn’t care what style of Islam they practiced, where they were treated fairly in the law courts, and taxed lightly (p.243).

– far from being the chivalrous knight of legend, Saladin routinely beheaded captured prisoners of war, as well as massacring the populations of captured towns, or selling all the women and children into slavery, for example:

after taking the Templar stronghold of King’s Ford in 1179 Saladin took 700 prisoners, who he then had executed
all the Templars and Hospitallers who survived the Battle of Hattin (4 July 1187) were, according to an eye witness account, lined up and hacked to pieces with swords and knives (p.274)
when Jaffa refused to yield to Saladin, it was eventually taken by storm and the entire population either massacred or sent off to the slave market at Aleppo
after taking Jerusalem, Saladin was reluctantly persuaded to allow the inhabitants to go free if they could pay a ransom; about 15,000 of the population was sold into slavery; all the churches had their spires knocked down and were converted into stables

As with Haag’s treatment of the entire period, his treatment of Saladin is detailed, compelling and, you eventually feel, strongly biased. I dare say the facts are correct, but Haag continually spins them with the very obvious purpose of undermining the legend of Saladin the chivalric defender of Muslims.

But to the casual reader, what really comes over is the immense violence and cruelty of everyone, of all sides, during the period. Muslims massacred Muslims. Muslims massacred Christians. Christians massacred Muslims. When Richard the Lionheart took Acre after a siege, he executed 3,000 Muslim prisoners, including women and children. All sides carried out what we would consider war crimes, because all sides were convinced God was on their side.

And all sides took part in the slave trade. Populations of captured towns were liable to be sent off to the great slave trade centres such as Ayas on the coast. I was genuinely surprised to learn that both the Templars and the Hospitallers took part in the slave trade, shipping captives taken in Palestine to work for the houses, especially in southern Italy and Christian Spain (p.229).

In the last decades of Outremer, as town after town fell to the Turks, the men would usually be slaughtered but their women and children would be taken to the slave markets of Aleppo or Damascus. Many thousands of Frankish women, girls and boys must have suffered this fate, as well as great numbers of native Christians.

Otherwise the great centre of the slave trade in the late thirteenth century was the Mediterranean port of Ayas, in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. Marco Polo disembarked at Ayas in 1271 to begin his trip to China at about the same time that the Templars opened a wharf there. the slaves, who were Turkish, Greek, Russia and Circassian, had been acquired as a result of intertribal warfare, or because impoverished parents decided to sell their children, or because they were kidnapped, and they were brought to Ayas by Turkish and Mongol slavers. (p.230)

Slavery is mentioned a lot throughout the book. I would really like to read a good account of slavery in the Middle Ages.

Steven Runciman’s negative interpretation of the crusades

Haag in several places criticises Sir Steven Runciman, author of what, for the second half of the twentieth century, was the definitive three-volume history of the crusades, published from 1951 to 1954.

Haag’s criticism is that Runciman was a passionate devotee of Byzantine culture and the Greek Orthodox church – for example, the Protaton Tower at Karyes on Mount Athos was refurbished largely thanks to a donation from Runciman.

And so Runciman considered the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders one of the greatest crimes in human history. His entire account is heavily biased against the crusaders who he portrays as ‘intolerant barbarians’ and, in the famous conclusion to his history, calls the entire enterprise a long act of intolerance and a sin against the Holy Ghost.

This is important because:

It is no exaggeration to say that Runciman single-handedly crafted the current popular concept of the crusades. (Thomas F. Madden, 2005)

And his three-volume history, still published by Penguin, created the impression which:

across the Anglophone world continues as a base reference for popular attitudes, evident in print, film, television and on the internet. (Christopher Tyerman, Fellow and Tutor in History at Hertford College, Oxford)

Looking it up, I can see that Haag’s criticism of Runciman – that he was consistently and obviously biased against the crusaders, and that his negative interpretation has been massive and widespread and continues to this day – is now widely shared.

Steven Runciman Wikipedia article

Reflections

The big picture lesson for me is not that this, that or the other side was ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ (and Haag’s interpretation has successfully undermined my simple, liberal, politically correct view that the Crusades were xenophobic, colonial massacres by showing how extremely complicated and fraught the geopolitical and military situations was, with a complex meshing of different forces each fighting each other).

The more obvious conclusion is that all sides in these multi-levelled conflicts shared values and beliefs and codes of conduct and moral codes and ethics which are wildly different from ours today – almost incomprehensibly different – drenched with a religious fanaticism few of us can imagine and prepared to carry out atrocities and cruelties it is often hard to believe.

It is in this light that the shambolic fourth (1204), fifth (1217 to 1221) and sixth crusades (1228 to 1229) must be seen – less as the violent intrusions of a homogenous Superpower into the peace-loving affairs of poor innocent Muslims – more as forms of time-honoured attack, war and conquest (and ignominious defeat) which had been practiced by all mankind, over the face of the whole world, since records began.

The 4th, 5th and 6th crusades may well have been blessed by the Pope (who also didn’t hesitate to excommunicate them and their leaders when they wandered off-target) but in practice followed the entirely worldly, calculating, selfish, power-hungry agendas of the various European princes and kings who led them.

Already, during the third crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa had openly plotted with the Serbs, Bulgarians, Byzantine traitors, and even the Muslim Seljuks against the Eastern Empire and at one point sought Papal support for a crusade against the Orthodox Byzantines. Feeling between Latin West and Greek East was becoming ever more polarised.

It is this which helps explain why the so-called fourth crusade ended in the shameful sack of Constantinople in 1203 to 1204. The Venetians were promised a huge sum if they built ships to carry 35,000 warriors to the Holy Land. They stopped all commercial activity to build the fleet. When the knights arrived they were more like 12,000 and the Venetians were told they would only be paid a third of the promised sum. After fractious negotiations, the Venetians came up with a compromise solution – the existing Crusader force would seize the port of Zara in Dalmatia. Zara had been dominated economically by Venice throughout the 12th century but had rebelled in 1181 and allied itself with King Emeric of Hungary and Croatia. It was a Christian city, but the ‘crusade’ proceeded nonetheless, and Zara fell to the combined Venetian-Crusader forces, after which it was thoroughly pillaged. Then, after further complicated negotiations, the crusaders were prevailed upon to attack Constantinople, capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire, by the Venetians, led by their blind Doge Dandolo. The Venetians had long been commercial rivals of the Greeks, and it was said Dandolo had himself been blinded by Byzantine forces in a much earlier conflict between them. There were many more complications – for example, the crusaders were told they were fighting to liberate the deposed Byzantine emperor but, during the resultant siege, this emperor was hastily restored by the population of Constantinople, which robbed the attack of its prime goal. Didn’t stop the ‘crusaders’ from finally storming the walls and sacking the Greek capital.

The point is not that this was appalling. The point is that it quite patently has nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Land or Muslims or liberating the Holy Places and all the rest of crusader rhetoric. It was quite clearly commercial and political warfare of the kind going on all across the world at the time, in a world awash with armies and fighting princes, kings, khans, emperors, sultans and so on, not to mention Chinese emperors and Mayan and Aztec kings.

Same goes for the long-delayed and wandering expedition of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, which he grandly titled the Fifth Crusade, and which led up to him being crowned king of Jerusalem on 29 March 1229 but which was obviously more to do with his personal ambition than any ’cause’, let alone representing anything called ‘the West’. Frederick was excommunicated by the pope three times for pursuing his utterly selfish aims. He only stayed two days in Jerusalem. By this stage the once famous city was a dump, filled with ruins and churches turned into stables. As soon as decent, Frederick took ship back to Europe and got on with the serious job of building up his empire.

The fall of the Templars

And the point – that beneath a thin veneer of religious rhetoric, all these events were just dynasty-making, invading, conquering, and commercial conflicts of a familiar and entirely secular kind – is reinforced by the last few pages of Haag’s book, which chronicle the downfall of the Templars. King Philip IV was hugely in debt to the Templars. He decided to take advantage of the fact that the last Christian enclave in the Holy Land, Acre, had fallen in 1291, and the last little offshore island, Arwan, had fallen to Muslim forces in 1303, to turn on the Templars with a whole string of trumped-up charges of heresy, sodomy and so on which, despite the efforts of the pope to support an order which was nominally under his control, succeeded. The order was convicted of heresy, its leaders were burned at the stake and – the point of the exercise – King Philip’s huge debts were cancelled.

None of this is very edifying. But it is all very, very human.

Maps

There are only three maps in the book but they are excellent, clear and easy to read and they include all the place names mentioned in the text. I can’t find the name of the map designer but he or she is to be congratulated.

Other medieval reviews

Complete list of my medieval reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on May 24, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Crusades, European History, History

Tagged Abbasid dynasty, Acre, al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, Alexander the Great, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Anatolia, Antioch, apostle Paul, Arabia, Arwan, Atsiz bin Uwaq, Ayas, Baghdad, Battle of Manzikert, Bedouin, Bethlehem, Byzantine culture, Calvary, Christians, Christopher Tyerman, church of the Holy Sepulchre, Constantinople, crusaders, Dalmatia, Damascus, dhimmis, Doge Dandolo, Egypt, Emperor of Byzantium, Fifth Crusade, Fourth Crusade, France, Frederick II, Gaza, Genghiz Khan, Golgotha, Haag, Holy Places, Holy Roman Emperor, Ibn Jubayr, Islam, Ismaili, Jaffa, Jerusalem, King's Ford, Kurd, Marco Polo, Middle East, morality, Mount Athos, Muslim, Muslims, Nazareth, Nur al-Din, Outremer, Palestine, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Persian Empire, Philip IV, Ramla, Reconquista, Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, River Jordan, Saladin, Seljuk Turks, Seljuks, Shia Islam, slave trade, Slavery, Steven Runciman, Syria, Tarsus, the Arab conquest, the Battle of Hattin, the Bosphorus, the Crusader, the Fatimid Dynasty, The First Crusade, the Knights Templars, the Middle East, the pope, the Roman Empire, the sack of Constantinople, The Tragedy of the Templars, Thomas F. Madden, Turcomens, Turks, Venice, Zara

Posted by Simon on May 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/the-tragedy-of-the-templars-michael-haag-2/

The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (1) by Michael Haag (2012)

From its title I expected this book to focus narrowly on the history of the Knights Templars, but it is much more than that.

The Knights Templar

The history of the order can be summarised thus:

The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also known as the Order of Solomon’s Temple, the Knights Templar or simply the Templars, were a Catholic military order founded in 1119 after the First Crusade had seized Jerusalem. The order was recognised by the Pope in 1139 and was active until 1312 when it was suppressed by Pope Clement V.

The Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. Non-combatant members of the order, who formed as much as 90% of the order’s members, managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom, developing innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking, building its own network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land, and arguably forming the world’s first multinational corporation.

The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades so that when the Holy Land was lost, support for the order faded. Rumours about the Templars’ secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France – deeply in debt to the order – took advantage of this distrust to destroy them and erase his debt. In 1307, he had many of the order’s members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and burned at the stake. It was under pressure from King Philip that Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312. (Wikipedia)

From that time to the present day rumours have swirled around the Templars, and I have met conspiracy theorists who think that the tentacles of the transnational organisation they founded persist to the present day, and underlie modern banking/wars/global inequality.

Deep history, revisionist history

So much for the order itself. What is surprising about Haag’s book is the extreme thoroughness with which he presents the deep historical background for the crusades themselves, a history so deep it goes back before the founding of Christianity, and covers the conquests of Alexander the Great (333 to 323 BC), the rise of the Roman Empire, the fall of Rome to the barbarians, the endurance of the Byzantine empire, the rise of Persian power, and then the eruption of militant Islam into the Middle East in the 630s.

And the reason he goes back to such an early period is because…

Haag presents the entire crusading enterprise in a radically revisionist light

The politically correct, modern view of the crusades is that they were a racist, orientalist, unjustified, colonial attack by rapacious, cruel and undisciplined European armies, motivated solely by greed and personal aggrandisement, against the peace-loving Muslim world upon whose civilians (and even local Christian populations) they perpetrated grotesque massacres.

By going so very far back into the deep pre-history of the crusades Haag aims to present us with the broadest possible historical context for them, a perspective which then forms the basis of his drastic reinterpretation. Thus he claims that:

1. At the time of the First Crusade the majority of the population of Palestine was Christian – so the crusades weren’t an attack on a majority population of Muslims, but an attempt to rescue the majority population of the area from subjugation by alien oppressors. He quotes a young Islamic scholar Ibn al-Arabi who stayed in Jerusalem from 1093 to 1096 and wrote that, four and a half centuries after the Muslim conquest, Jerusalem was still a predominantly Christian city, as was Palestine generally:

The country is theirs [the Christians’] because it is they who work its soil, nurture its monasteries and maintain its churches. (quoted on page 88)

2. Because it was not the Christians, but the Muslims who were the outsiders and conquerors – erupting into the Levant in the 7th century and imposing a violent, racist, imperialist ideology on the native inhabitants of the region over the next few hundred years.

You can see how that is completely opposite to the self-hating, anti-western narrative most of us are used to. Haag goes back to the start of the Christian era to show that:

The entire Mediterranean basin, from the south of Spain through Italy and Greece on to Anatolia and the Levant, then around Egypt and along the whole coastline of North Africa to Ceuta opposite Spain – this entire region was part of the Roman Empire.
Christianity did not spread via the sword; the exact opposite, for its first three centuries (from Jesus’ execution in 33 AD to the Emperor Constantine decriminalising Christianity in 312) Christianity spread like wildfire around the Mediterranean empire despite the violent and cruel attempts of the Empire to crush it. Christianity was not a religion of the sword but of proselytising and persuasion, which despite all efforts to stamp it out had nonetheless become the de facto religion of the Empire by the mid-350s, and was officially made the state religion by the Emperor Theodosius in the 390s.
With the result that, from around 400 to around 700 AD, the entire Mediterranean basin formed one unified Christian civilisation.

The extent of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Trajan in 117 AD

The invaders were the Muslims, who erupted from Arabia in the 650s and quickly overran Persia and the Levant, then spread along North Africa, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and pushed up through Spain, crossing the Pyrenees and raiding half way-up France until stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732. From about 718 onwards, various Christian princes and armies began the very long, slow process of reconquering Spain for Christianity – the so-called Reconquista – which was only completed in 1492, over 700 years later.

The spread of Islam 622 to 750

Meanwhile, Muslim armies continued pushing eastwards into Persia and on towards India, and north and west through Anatolia towards the embattled centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, which they were only prevented from capturing by a series of heroic stands by succeeding Byzantine emperors.

During the 800s and 900s Muslims also seized the islands of Cyprus, Malta, Sicily (842) and the Balearic Islands, using them and ports along the North African coast as bases for pirate raids on Christian ships and ports. They even attacked the heart of Christendom in the West, the city of Rome, in 846, when Muslim raiders plundered the outskirts, sacking the basilicas of Old St Peter’s and St Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls, and were only prevented from entering the city itself by the sturdiness of the Aurelian Wall. In 849 another Arab raid targeted Rome’s port, Ostia, but was repelled.

This, then, was the broad – and often ignored – context for the crusades. Christian Europe was, in effect, under siege from extremely fierce warriors motivated by an ideology which aimed to suppress or wipe out all traces of Christian civilisation.

Haag goes on to make key points about the new Muslim overlords of the conquered areas:

1. The Muslim rulers generally despised agriculture and manual labour. In all the Mediterranean lands they conquered they saw themselves as a warrior élite whose fierce ideology justified them in subjugating the native inhabitants who were overwhelmingly Christian in culture and belief. The native Christians and Jews (in Palestine, particularly) were subject to punitive taxes, unable to worship openly, forbidden to repair their churches or synagogues and, in some periods, forced to wear specific clothes or even branded to indicate their lowly serf status.

2. The call for Christians in France and Italy – the ‘West’ – to come to the aid of their fellow Christians in the newly-occupied lands were not new to the 11th century (when the crusades began). Throughout the 800s, 900s and 1000s came repeated pleas for help from Spain, from the imperilled emperor at Byzantium, from Christian leaders in Alexandria and Jerusalem – pleas to be liberated from semi-slavery, from the Muslim desecration of Christian holy places, and the destruction of churches and synagogues. From the suppression of the original Christian culture and belief of the native inhabitants.

Of the five original patriarchal seats of the Roman Empire – Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem – by the 1050s Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem had fallen into Muslim hands, and – as mentioned – Constantinople was under permanent threat.

In other words, seen from this deep historical perspective, it is not the Christians who were the aggressors. Christian armies didn’t march on Mecca and Medina and occupy them and tear down their holy places and plunder their treasures and force the native inhabitants to wear special markers on their clothes or even to be branded. Christian armies have never attacked the holy places of Islam.

But Muslim armies had by the 800s:

conquered Alexandria, the great centre of Christian learning
Jerusalem, where Jesus was tried, executed and rose from the dead
Antioch, home of the first Gentile Christian church and where the term ‘Christian’ was first used
and Constantinople, explicitly founded as the new, Christian capital of the Roman Empire

For Haag, then, the crusades are the precise opposite of a colonial Western attempt to conquer peace-loving Muslims; they were an attempt to recover authentically and originally Christian lands, shrines and holy places which the Muslims had seized and whose majority Christian populations the Muslims were oppressing.

Haag makes further arguments.

Jerusalem not a Muslim holy city

By going back into the deep history he shows that Jerusalem was, for centuries, not the Holy City for Muslims which is it now generally seen to be. It is so now because the tradition grew up that the city was the location of the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey. Just to be crystal clear, I’ll quote Wikipedia on the subject of the Night Journey.

The Isra and Mi’raj are the two parts of a Night Journey that, according to Islam, the Islamic prophet Muhammad took during a single night around the year 621. Within Islam it signifies both a physical and spiritual journey. The Quran surah al-Isra contains an outline account, while greater detail is found in the hadith collections of the reports, teachings, deeds and sayings of Muhammad. In the accounts of the Isra’, Muhammad is said to have traveled on the back of a winged mule-like white beast, called Buraq, to ‘the farthest mosque’. By tradition this mosque, which came to represent the physical world, was identified as the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. At the mosque, Muhammad is said to have led the other prophets in prayer. His subsequent ascent into the heavens came to be known as the Mi‘raj. Muhammad’s journey and ascent is marked as one of the most celebrated dates in the Islamic calendar.

But Haag points out that the sura in the Koran which is the basis of this belief in no way mentions Jerusalem, but simply refers to ‘the farthest mosque’ or masjid.

Glory to Him Who carried His beloved by night from the Sacred Masjid to the Furthest Masjid, whose precincts We have blessed, to show him of Our wonders! He it is Who is All-Hearing, All-Seeing![Quran 17:1 (Translated by Tarif Khalidi)]

In Haag’s view, the tradition that Muhammad’s flight took place from Jerusalem was created after Jerusalem was conquered by the Muslims. He describes in detail the career of Muslim warrior Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan, who built the al-Aqsah mosque (which became known as the Dome of the Rock) in Jerusalem in order to promote and aggrandise his achievements, and in deliberate competition with the large Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

But, as Haag highlights, the carved inscription inside the al-Aqsah mosque in which al-Malik claims credit for building it (and which also threatens Christians and Jews with dire punishments unless they obey their Muslim overlords), and which is also one of the earliest written records of a text from the Koran – this inscription nowhere mentions the Night Flight. Thus, in his view:

Far from commemorating the Night Journey, the Dome of the Rock seems to have generated the tradition. (p.34)

The point of this section is that Haag is seeking to undermine or question what most historians (and ordinary people) tend to take for granted, which is that Jerusalem was a Muslim Holy City at the time of the Crusades.

Not so, claims Haag. It certainly had been a Jewish and then a Christian Holy City – it had been founded by Jews and was the centre of their world for a thousand years before the Romans arrived, and it was where the Jewish heretic and/or Son of God, Jesus, was crucified and rose again and preached to his disciples before ascending into heaven, which makes it pretty obviously holy to Christians, too.

But for the Muslim rulers it was, at least to begin with, just one among numerous ports and trading centres in the Levant, with no particular strategic significance in itself, but with the notable perk that – as a destination for European pilgrims could be heavily taxed – it was a useful profit centre.

Saladin not a Muslim hero

In another reversal of the usual story, Haag points out that Saladin (An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub), the legendary opponent of Richard the Lionheart during the Third Crusade (1189 t o1192), was not an Arab at all but a Kurd, who spent more time fighting against his fellow Muslims than against Christians.

For years before he finally took Jerusalem, Saladin fought Muslim rivals in Egypt and Syria in his efforts to found a new dynasty, the Ayyubid dynasty. Above all, Saladin aspired to supersede the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad and his seizure of Jerusalem was, for him, a great propaganda coup.

Thus if Saladin fought the Crusaders it wasn’t as part of a high-minded general Muslim resistance; it was as part of his attempts to gain kudos and respect in the Muslim world in order to reach his deeper goal, the establishment of his own dynasty, achieved through what Haag calls ‘an imperialist war.’ In fact, the core of the Muslim world, the caliphate based in Baghdad, hoped the Christians would defeat Saladin and thus remove this troublesome usurper.

Summary of Haag’s argument

In the section about the Night Flight, in his passages about Saladin, and in numerous other ways throughout this book, Haag sets out to counter the politically correct narrative and to show that:

the crusades were not a violent attack on the Muslim Holy City of Jerusalem because it was not in fact a genuine Muslim Holy City, not in the same way that Mecca or Medina were
the majority population of the Middle East was not Muslim, but Christian and Jewish
that the imperialists in the story were not the Europeans, but the conquering Muslims who (as he vividly shows) at various times massacred the native Christians and Jews (who had both been living there far longer than the Muslims) or imposed all kinds of restrictions on them – forbidding them to practice their religion in public, closing churches and synagogues, mulcting them for money, and making them wear special clothes, or even branding their skin

Which leads up to Haag’s claim that the Crusader States, far from being the oppressive intervention of Christian outsiders, were a rare period when the majority Christian population of Palestine had something approaching local rule, representing local interests.

These are the big, thought-provoking points Haag makes before he even gets to the origins of the Templars.

The vital role of Constantinople

It’s not the main focus of Haag’s book but, covering the Dark and Middle Ages in the East as he does, his narrative can’t help bringing out the way that Constantinople/Byzantium again and again and again proved a bulwark protecting the rest of Europe from the marauding Muslims.

Prompting the reader to reflect that, if Constantine had not happened to win the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 (the battle in which he defeated his main rival to the throne and thus became Emperor of Rome), and if Constantine had not become convinced of the power of Christianity – he would never have decided to create a new capital in the East and commissioned the mighty new city which came to be known as Constantinople. And this city and its outlying territories and warrior population would not have gone on to become Christian Europe’s main bulwark and protection against invading Muslims for eight hundred years (from the 600s until its fall in 1453).

And so, if it had not been for this sequence of fortunate events, might not the whole of Europe – and so its later colonies like America, Australasia and so on – not all now be Muslim?

Other medieval reviews

Complete list of medieval reviews

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by Simon on April 30, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Crusades, History, Middle Ages, War

Tagged 1492, 2012, 732, 846, Abbasid caliphate, Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan, Alexander the Great, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Anatolia, Antioch, Arabia, Ayyubid dynasty, Baghdad, barbarians, Catholic church, Christendom, Christianity, colonialism, Constantine, Constantinople, Cyprus, Eastern Roman Empire, Europe, France, history, Islam, Isra, Italy, Jerusalem, Jesus, Jews, King Philip IV, Knights Templars, Malta, Mecca, medieval history, Medina, Mi'raj, Michael Haag, Middle Ages, Middle East, Muhammad's Night Journey, North Africa, Pope Clement V, Reconquista, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Sicily, Spain, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Battle of Tours, the Byzantine Empire, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the fall of Rome, The First Crusade, the hadith, the Holy Land, the Knights Templar, the Levant, the Middle East, the Muslims, the Order of Solomon's Temple, the Persian Empire, The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the Pyrenees, the Quran, the Roman Empire, the Templars, the Third Crusade, The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States, Theodosius I

Posted by Simon on April 30, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/the-tragedy-of-the-templars-michael-haag/

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)

The sub-title is ‘Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 to 1350’ and that is very much the central idea I take from this book – that before Europe embarked on its well-known colonial adventures from 1492 onwards, it had already experienced centuries of internal colonisation.

Another book I’ve recently read, Robert Fletcher’s ‘The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD’, has prepared my mind for this idea, with its account of the millennium-long process whereby Christianity was spread across the ‘nations’ (such as they were) of Europe, to the pagan peoples and rulers of the fringes.

The final part of that book makes it clear that, after the First Crusade (1095 to 1099), as Christianity was spread along the Baltic and into the last bastions of paganism in Eastern Europe, the evangelising became much more violent. It no longer amounted to a much-venerated saint converting a bunch of open-mouthed peasants by healing a sick girl; it was now about armed bands of knights united in an ‘Order’ – the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, the Teutonic Order – who waged fierce wars of conquest into the East, forcibly converting the populations they conquered and building imperial castles to hold the territory they’d seized.

Charge of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lake Peipus, April 5, 1242

Europe had to colonise itself, before its rulers went on to violently colonise the rest of the world.

Bartlett’s book aims to make you see that a number of scattered events usually treated as separate entities in siloed national histories, were actually all part of One Really Big Pattern: the spread, by conquest, of a centrally organised, Latin, Catholic Christianised state ideology right across Europe, and that this diffusion came from the heart of the old Frankish empire, from the most technologically and ideologically advanced heart of Europe consisting of north-France, north-west Germany and south-east England (after it had been conquered by the Normans in the 1060s).

Thus:

The Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170s was partly a crude seizure of land and resources, but also involved the imposition on Gaelic Christianity of the much more centrally organised Latin Roman version.
A hundred years later, Edward I’s conquest of Wales in the 1280s had a similar aim of imposing a strong, centralised, Latinate organisation onto a culture traditionally made of scores of petty princes.
The Scots had already undergone a European-style centralising ‘revolution’ under King David I (1124-1153) and so could muster more resources to resist Edward I’s imperial ambitions – but only at the expense of handing over large parts of southern Scotland to settlement by Normans (and Flemings).
This period also saw the Reconquista of Spain, the long effort to push the occupying Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula, over the centuries from the reconquest of Toledo in 1085 to the recapture of Seville in 1248.
It was also the era of the Crusades (1095 to 1291), which imposed Latin, Catholic Christianity on formerly Orthodox territories in the Middle East.
Just before the First Crusade began, Norman troops under Roger I conquered the Kingdom of Sicily from the Muslims (complete by 1091).
En route to the Holy Land, King Richard I seized Cyprus from its Greek ruler in 1191, transferring it to Latin rule.
And the sack of Constantinople in 1204 led directly to the imposition of Latin, Catholic dioceses and bishops over much of the Byzantine Empire.

The same period saw the campaigns to Christianise the remote regions of northern and north-eastern Europe, now collectively referred to as the ‘Northern Crusades’. These included:

The Wendish Crusade (1147) against the Wends of north-east Germany and Poland.
The Crusade against the Livonians in the north-east Baltic in the 1190s.
The Teutonic Knights prolonged campaign to crush and convert the Prussians in the 1250s.
And a series of drawn-out campaigns against the pagan Duchy of Lithuania, the last stronghold of paganism in all Europe.

Moreover, this period also saw internal crusades to impose order and uniformity within Latin Christendom – most notoriously against the Cathars, a heretical sect which had followers across the South of France and which was brutally suppressed in the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ from 1209 to 1229 (named for the town of Albi, which was one of the heretical strongholds).

The Frankish expansion

The animation below shows the first 500 years of the spread of Christianity, the loss of the Middle east and Africa to the Muslims in the 700s and 800s, the Christian fightback – permanent in Spain, transient in the Levant – and then the abrupt worldwide explosion of Christianity commencing in 1500. It’s the first 1400 years or so we’re interested in, the fluctuations in and around the Mediterranean, and the period 950 to 1350 that Bartlett is particularly concerned with.

In a host of ways Bartlett identifies this expansion with the Franks, the Gothic tribe which seized Gaul from the Romans in the 500s and quickly established a centralised state which reached its geographical maximum under the legendary Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814. I hadn’t realised that at its peak, Charlemagne’s empire was coterminous with Western Christendom (with the exception of the Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms) as this map shows. It really was an awesome achievement.

Map of Europe around 800 AD

William of Normandy who conquered Britain in 1066 was a descendant of the Frankish kings. Frankish aristocrats played key roles in all the conquests of the day, against the Moors in Spain and the Saracens in the Levant, in Sicily and Crete and Cyprus, and in the north pressing into Denmark, into Poland and along the Baltic towards Finland and Russia. Bartlett has a nifty diagram showing that by the late Middle Ages, 80% of Europe’s monarchs were descended from the Frankish royal family or Frankish nobles.

No surprise, then, that the word ‘Frank’ began to be used widely as a generic name for the conquerors and settlers all over Europe:

the Byzantine Greeks called the incoming Latins ‘the Franks’
a settlement in Hungary was called ‘the village of the Franks’
the newly conquered peoples of Silesia and Moravia had to submit to ‘Frankish law’
Welsh chroniclers refer to incursions by ‘the Franci’
Irish monks referred to the Anglo-Norman invaders as ‘the Franks’

Similarly, in the Middle East of the Crusader era, Muslim commentators, kings and peoples came to call all Westerners ‘the Franks’. So widespread and famous was this association, that Muslim traders took the name Faranga on their journeys through the Red Sea eastwards, spreading the term as far East as China, where, when westerners arrived hundreds of years later, they were identified as the long-rumoured Fo-lang-ki. (pp.104-105).

Questions and theories

All this prompts three questions:

Why did Latin Christianity feel it had to convert the entire continent?
Why did Latin Christianity feel it had to be so centralised; why did it feel so obliged to impose uniformity of ritual and language all across the Christian world?
What gave Latin Christian culture its dynamism – the aggressive confidence which would spill out to the Canary Islands (conquered in the early 1400s), to the Caribbean (1490s), to Central America (1520s), along the coast of Africa (first settlements in Mozambique in 1500), to India and beyond?

1. The first of these questions is answered at length in Richard Fletcher’s book, which shows how Christ’s Great Commission in St Matthew’s Gospel (‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you‘) was interpreted by successive Church authorities to mean, first of all, gaining some converts among the rich in cities around the Roman Empire; then to convert all inhabitants of the cities; then, only slowly, to undertake the task of converting the rural peasants; and only then, in the 700s and 800s, the brave idea of venturing beyond the pale of Romanitas to try and convert pagans.

The second two questions are the ones Bartlett specifically addresses and he approaches them from different angles, examining various theories and sifting a wide range of evidence. I found two arguments particularly convincing:

2. The centralisation of the Catholic Church. This stems from the Gregorian Reforms, a series of measures instituted by Pope Gregory VII from around 1050 to 1080. They banned the purchase of clerical positions, enforced clerical celibacy, significantly extended Canon law to impose uniformity on all aspects of Catholic practice. As Wikipedia puts it, these reforms were based on Gregory’s

conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in his capacity as a divine institution, he is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church under the Petrine Commission, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity.

This gathering of power by the papacy is generally thought to have reached its height under the papacy of Pope Innocent III (1198 to 1216). Innocent further extended Canon Law, upheld papal power over all secular rulers, using the Interdict to punish rulers he disagreed with (e.g. King John of England) and he was personally responsible for some of the violent campaigns we’ve listed: Innocent called for Christian crusades to be mounted against the Muslims in the Holy Land and the south of Spain, and against the Cathars in the South of France.

Making Christian belief and practice uniform was part and parcel of the extension of its power by a vigorously confident papacy, a vision of uniformity which echoed and reinforced the tendency of secular rulers to create larger ‘states’ in which they asserted increasingly centralised power and uniform laws.

3. As to the literal force behind the aggressive military confidence, Bartlett has a fascinating chapter about the technology of medieval war. Basically, the Franks had heavy war-horses, heavy body armour, the crossbow and a new design of impenetrable defensive castles and all of these were absent in the conquered territories, the Holy Land, southern Spain, Wales and Ireland, in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. These advanced military technologies gave the better-armed Franks victory – at least until their opponents managed to figure out and copy them for themselves. (The Crusades are a different case – fundamentally the Crusaders lost for lack of men and resources.)

But I was drawn to a subtler cause for this great expansion: in the 9th and 10th centuries the laws of inheritance were hazy and patrimonies and estates could be divided among a number of sons, daughters, cousins, uncles and so on. (One aspect of this is the way that Anglo-Saxon kings were chosen by acclamation, not rigid law; and this uncertainty explains the long English civil war following Henry I’s death between his daughter Matilda and her cousin Stephen of Blois, which lasted from 1135 to 1153.)

Thus, along with the imposition of clearer laws and rules within the Church went secular attempts in Frankish lands to regularise secular law, and one element of this was to enforce the previously haphazard law of primogeniture i.e. the eldest son inherits the entire estate. But this new rigour had unexpected consequences – it forced all the other male heirs to go off looking for land.

In a fascinating chapter Bartlett sketches the histories of several aristocratic Frankish families where one son inherited the father’s entire estate and left the other 3 or 4 or 5 well-armed, well-educated, ambitious sons literally homeless and landless. There was only one thing for it – to associate themselves with the nearest campaign of Christianisation and conquest. Thus the de Joinville family from the Champagne region of France spawned sons who fought and won lands in Ireland, in Africa and Syria. The descendants of Robert de Grandmenils from Normandy (d.1050) won lands in southern Italy and Sicily, served the Byzantine Emperor, joined the First Crusade, and ended up building castles in northern Wales.

So a newly rigorous application of the law of primogeniture provided the motive for forcing dispossessed aristocrats to go a-fighting – the newly authoritarian Catholic Church provided a justifying ideology for conquest in the name of uniformity – and iron armour, heavy warhorses, the crossbow and castles provided the technology. Taken together these elements at least begin to explain the phenomenal success of the ‘Frankish expansion’.

Other aspects of medieval colonisation

These ideas are pretty clearly expressed in the first three chapters; the remaining nine chapters flesh them out with a host of details examining the impact of the Frankish expansion on every aspect of medieval life: the image of the conquerors as embodied in coins, statutes and charters; the division of time into primitive pagan ‘before’ and civilised Christian ‘after’; the propagandistic literature of conquest (in various romances and epics); the giving of new Latin place names which over-wrote the native names of the conquered – the Arabs, the Irish, the Slavs; the imposition of new Frankish laws and tax codes; the proliferation of New Towns with Western-based charters, and the creation of hundreds of new villages, laid out on logical grid patterns, especially in eastern Europe. (This reminded me of the passage in Marc Morris’s history of Edward I which describes Edward’s creation of New Model Towns on grid plans in Wales (Flint) but also England (Winchelsea)).

Bartlett presents the evidence for the widespread importation from Christian Germany of heavy, iron-tipped ploughs which were much more efficient at turning the soil than the lighter, wooden Slavic ploughs, and thus increased productivity in the new settlements (pages 148 to 152). This went hand-in-hand with a ‘cerealisation’ of agriculture, as woods were cleared and marshes drained to provide more ploughing land to grow wheat and barley, which in turn led to significant increases in population in the newly settled lands. (Although as with all things human this had unintended consequences, little understood at the time; which is that the pagan predecessors, though fewer in number, had a more balanced diet which included fruit and berries and honey from woodlands – the switch to a cereal-based monoculture increased production but probably led to unhealthier people. Analysis of corpses suggests there was a net loss of stature in humans over the period, with the average height decreasing by about 2 inches between the early and the High Middle Ages.)

Names became homogenised. The Normans imported ‘William’ and ‘Henry’ into the England of ‘Athelstan’ and ‘Aelfric’, and then into the Wales of ‘Llywelyn’ ‘Owain’ and the Ireland of ‘Connor’, ‘Cormac’ and ‘Fergus’. Bartlett shows how these essentially Frankish names also spread east replacing ‘Zbigniew’ and ‘Jarosław’, south into Sicily and even (to a lesser extent) into Spain.

In a move typical of Bartlett’s ability to shed fascinating light on the taken-for-granted, he shows how the centralisation and harmonisation of the Latin church led to the diffusion of a small number of generic saints names. Before about 1100 the churches of the various nations were dedicated to a very wide spectrum of saints named after local holy men in Irish, Welsh, Scots, Castilian, Navarrese, Italian, Greek, Germanic or Polish and so on. But the 1200s saw the rise of a continent-wide popularity for the core gospel names – Mary at the top of the table, followed by Christ (as in Christ Church or Corpus Christi) and then the names of the most popular disciples, John, Peter, Andrew.

The names of individual people as well as the names of their churches, along with many other cultural changes which he describes – all followed this process of homogenisation and Latinisation which Bartlett calls ‘the Europeanisation of Europe’ (chapter 11).

New worlds and the New World

Bartlett doesn’t have to emphasise it but the parallels are clear to see between the colonisation by violence and crusading Christianity of the peripheral areas of Europe in the 1000s to 1300s, and the conquest of the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s. It’s a mind-opening comparison, which works at multiple levels.

For example, many of the charters and decrees about the new European lands proclaimed them ’empty’ virgin land ready to be settled, despite the evidence of native populations living in well-developed (though non-Latin) settlements – just as publicists for the Americas and, later, Australia, would declare them ’empty’ of natives.

Even when there are obviously natives (Welsh, Scots, Muslims, Slavs) the official colonial medieval literature disparages the aboriginal inhabitants’ lack of literacy, of iron tools or weapons, of orthodox Christianity, of organised towns with advanced codes of law and so on.

‘They’ are in every way uncivilised; ‘we’ in every way deserve to take their land because only ‘we’ know how to make it productive and fertile.

Many of the other histories I’ve read describe the numerous medieval conquests in terms of battles, alliances, troops and armour and so on; Bartlett’s is the only one I know which goes on to explain in great detail that, once you’ve conquered your new territory – you need people to come and live in it. You have to persuade people from the old lands to risk making a long journey, so you have to advertise and give would-be settlers tax breaks and even cash incentives. Settlers in Ireland, the south of Spain, the Holy Land or Livonia were all told how much empty land they could have, were offered tax breaks for the first few years and then reduced taxes for decades after, and the lords and conquerors fell over themselves to give the new towns attractive charters and independent powers to determine their own laws and taxes.

All of these techniques would be copied by the conquistadors in Central America or the merchant adventurers who launched the first settlements in North America, or the colonial authorities desperate to fill the wide ’empty’ spaces of Australia or New Zealand. It is a mind-opening revelation to learn how all these techniques were pioneered within Europe itself and against fellow ‘Europeans’, centuries before the New World was discovered.

Conclusion

This a very persuasive book which mounts an impressive armoury of evidence – archaeological and ecological, in place names, people’s names, saints names, in cultural traditions, church records and epic poems, in the spread of monasteries and universities and charters and coinage – to force home its eye-opening central argument: that the more advanced, centrally organised parts of Europe (north-west France, north-west Germany and south-east England) (all ultimately owing their authority, technology and ideology to the Frankish empire of Charlemagne) succeeded in conquering and settling the rest of less advanced, less developed and non-Christian Europe with the aid of a panoply of technologies and ideologies, legal and cultural and physical weapons – a panoply which Europeans would then use to sail out and conquer huge tracts of the rest of the world.

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A Chronology of the Crusades

The Crusades lasted about two hundred years from 1095 to about 1295 and were designed to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Places from the control of Muslim rulers. Although there were later military adventures or social movements which called themselves crusades, they either petered out or were diverted to other targets. Historians squabble over whether there were seven or eight or nine crusades.

Muhammed

632 Muhammed dies.

637 Muslim armies besiege and take Jerusalem from the Byzantines.

The Great Schism

1054 Eastern and Western Christianity finally split after years of drift, crystallising into the Eastern Orthodox church based in Byzantium and the Roman Catholic church based in Rome, their respective followers known as Latins (or Franks) and Greeks.

1063 King Ramiro I of Aragon murdered by a Muslim and Pope Alexander II offers an indulgence (forgiveness of all sins; go directly to heaven) to anyone taking arms to revenge this crime.

1064 to 1066 – A group of about 7,000 Germans, some heavily armed, travel to Jerusalem and back unhindered.

1073 Pope Gregory VII helps organise an army against the Muslims in Spain, promising any soldier he can keep the land he seizes.

1095 Byzantine Emperor Alexios I sends an ambassador to Pope Urban II asking for military help against the growing Turkish threat (in fact the fast-expanding Great Seljuk Empire). Urban sees an opportunity to reassert Western control over the East and starts preaching a new idea: anyone who takes up arms and travels to liberate the Holy Land under the order of the Pope will go to heaven. Killing the infidel will no longer require penance: it will be a penance.

The First Crusade 1096 to 1099

1096 Easter. Peter the Hermit led a mass of maybe 20,000 people to set off to the Holy Land. As they moved through Germany they sparked off a series of massacres of Jews in every town and city. Having reached the Byzantine Empire they were ambushed by Muslim forces and only about 3,000 survived. Official crusader armies departed Europe August and September 1096.

1097 Siege of Antioch until June 1098. Crusaders massacre the Muslim inhabitants and loot the city.

1099 15 July – CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM The remnants of the army enter/liberate Jerusalem, massacre native Muslims, killing all the Jews, burning the synagogue, looting all the holy buildings. The chronicler claims some 70,000 were slaughtered and the streets piled high with corpses.

1100 On Christmas Day in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Baldwin of Edessa is crowned King of Jerusalem.

[1101 The Crusade of 1101, also known as The crusade of the faint-hearted due to the involvement of soldiers who had turned back from the First Crusade, was in three distinct groups of western soldiers, all of which were soundly thrashed by Seljuk Turks led by Kilij Arslan. As usual when the crusaders took Caesarea they rounded up all the Muslims into the Grand Mosque and massacred them all. And were then themselves beaten and killed by Kilij. The survivors eventually made it to Jerusalem, more as a pilgrimage than a military force.]

1109 The Franks sack the city of Tripoli after a five year siege, then rampage through it, burning the Banu Ammar library, the largest in the Muslim world, containing over 100,000 manuscripts.

1118 Baldwin dies, succeeded by his cousin, Baldwin II.

1124 Tyre falls to the Franks who now hold the entire cost from Egypt to Antioch.

1131 King Baldwin II dies and is succeeded by his son-in-law, Count Fulk of Anjou.

1122 to 1124 The Venetian Crusade A combination of religious fervour (it was sponsored by Pope Callixtus II) and commercial savvy, some 120 ships carrying over 15,000 men left Venice on 8 August 1122: they besieged Corfu to settle a commercial dispute; defeated a navy from Fatimid Egypt; besieged and took the sea port of Tyre, which became a Venetian trading centre, and on the way home ravaged various Greek islands, forcing the Empire to concede their trading privileges.

1135 Pope Innocent II’s grant of crusading indulgences to anyone who opposed papal enemies can be seen as the beginning of politically motivated crusades.

The Second Crusade 1145 to 1149

1144 King Fulk dies. Army of Imad ad-Din Zengi recaptures Edessa (modern Urfa), massacring the men and selling the women into slavery. Which leads Pope Eugenius III to call for another crusade, supported by various clerics, notably Bernard of Clairvaux.

1146 March 31 – Bernard delivers the first of many thundering first crusade sermons. In May and June armies from France and Germany led by King Louis VII and Conrad III set off.

[1147 A group of crusaders from northern Europe allied with the king of Portugal, Afonso I, retaking Lisbon from the Muslims.]

1147 October 25 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Conrad III and his army of 20,000 men was badly defeated by the Seljuk Turks led by Mesud I. The Germans abandoned the crusade and Conrad and the 2,000 survivors retreated to join the forces of King Louis VII of France.

1148 Louis and Conrad’s surviving soldiers besiege Damascus. It ends in complete defeat and a ruinous retreat. ‘St Bernard’s crusade ended in fiasco.’ (p.93)

1150 Louis and Conrad return home, failures.

The Wendish Crusade

1147 German knights attacked western Slavs on their border with a view to christianising them. Henry restarted efforts to conquer the Wends in 1160, and they were defeated in 1162.

[1172 Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, made a pilgrimage that is sometimes considered a crusade.]

Saladin

1169 Saladin – Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb – a Kurdish Muslim from Damascus, is in complete control of Egypt.

1169 to 1187 the campaigns of Saladin to unite the usually warring Arab kingdoms.

1180 King Baldwin IV negotiates a peace treaty with Saladin.

1185 24-year-old Baldwin IV dies, leaving the throne of Jerusalem to the eight-year-old Baldwin V.

1186 Baldwin V dies. The kingdom is weakened by complicated dynastic feuds which lead to Guy of Lusignan being crowned king.

1187 SALADIN RETAKES JERUSALEM Saladin led an enormous army of 30,000 into Palestine and inflicted a crushing defeat on the army of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July. He took his time capturing all the surrounding towns and then retook Jerusalem on 29 September. In studied contrast to the crusader’s massacre and pogrom of 1099, Saladin enforces his army to respect the city and its inhabitants: not a building was looted, not a person harmed.

When Pope Urban III heard the news he died of a heart attack. On 29 October Pope Gregory VIII issued a papal bull calling for the…

The Third Crusade 1189 to 1192

1189 Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, Holy Roman Emperor, commanded a vast army which sailed to Constantinople, then fought its way across Anatolia, winning battles but suffering from the heat and lack of supplies. Coming down the other side of the Taurus Mountains, Frederick went for a swim in the river Göksu and drowned. His disheartened troops turned back. Philip II of France, and Richard I of England led their armies on to the Holy Land.

1190 Pre-Crusade pogroms of Jews spread across England climaxing in a particularly violent massacre of Jews at York in March.

1191 Richard the Lionheart captured Cyprus from the Byzantines, then recaptured Acre and Jaffa. But they ran out of food before reaching Jerusalem which he knew, anyway, he didn’t have the force to hold.

1192 Richard negotiates a treaty with Saladin allowing Christian pilgrims free passage, then sails home. ‘Jerusalem would never again be captured by crusaders.’ (Crusades p.151) In Palestine Richard had had a big argument with Leopold of Austria. Now, travelling overland back through Leopold’s territory, Richard was identified and arrested. Leopold handed him over to the Emperor Henry VI who held him in prison for a year before a vast ransom could be organised to buy his freedom.

1193 Saladin dies worn out.

1199 Richard dies of gangrene from an arrow wound at an insignificant siege in Aquitaine.

The German Crusade

1197 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, fulfils a promise to his father. Led by Conrad of Wittelsbach the army landed at Acre and captured Sidon and Beirut, but when Henry died most of the forces returned to Germany.

The North European Crusade

1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against Northern European pagans and his successor Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull declaring a crusade against the pagan Livonians. Bishop Berthold of Hanover led a large army against them, during which the Christian settlers found the city of Riga, although Berthold was himself killed in battle in 1198.

1201 Albrecht von Buxthoeven established Riga as the seat of his bishopric in 1201.

1202 Albrecht formed the Livonian Knights to convert the pagans to Catholicism. The Livonians were conquered and converted between 1202 and 1209.

1217 Pope Honorius III declared a crusade against the Prussians.

1226 Konrad of Masovia gave Chelmno to the Teutonic Knights in 1226 as a base for the crusade.

1236 The Livonian Knights were defeated by the Lithuanians at Saule.

1237 Pope Gregory IX merged the remainder of the troops into the Teutonic Knights as the Livonian Order.

1249 The Teutonic Knights completed their conquest of the Old Prussians. They then conquered and converted the Lithuanians, a process which lasted into the 1380s. The order tried unsuccessfully to conquer Orthodox Russia.

The Fourth Crusade 1202 to 1004: the Sack of Constantinople

1199 Pope Innocent III began preaching the Fourth Crusade in France, England, and Germany. The two military leaders Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice and German King Philip of Swabia had their own political agendas and when the enterprise turned out not be able to pay the Venetian fleet, they decided to conquer and loot Constantinople instead.

1202 They seized the Christian city of Zara prompting Innocent to excommunicate them.

1203 Easter – the army set sail for Byzantium.

1204 The army entered Constantinople and enacted the complicated plot to put Prince Alexius IV on the throne. Alexius had promised wild amounts of money in return but turned out to be unable to pay. Alexius was murdered in a palace coup; the blind old emperor died; the coup plotter announced himself emperor. All this made it easier for the Latins and their Catholic leaders to give the go-ahead for a devastating sack of the city, which spread out of control to unbridled looting, massacring, churches pillaged and thousands murdered in the streets.

1205 Bulgars defeated the crusaders and remaining Greeks at Adrianople. The devastation of Byzantium permanently weakened the Eastern Empire, didn’t bring its church under Latin rule, as the Pope dreamed, and probably benefited Venice most, which seized control of commerce in the empire.

The Albigensian Crusade 1208 to 1229

1208 launched to eliminate the Cathars of Occitania (present-day southern France) lasted for decades and led to Northern French domination of the South. In July 1208 the crusaders took Béziers and massacred every man, woman and child. When soldiers asked the Abbot how they could avoid killing ‘true’ believers, he replied:

‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’

Mindset of terrorists throughout the ages.

[1221 Pope Honorius III asked King Andrew II to put down heretics in Bosnia. Hungarian forces answered further papal calls in

1234 and 1241. This campaign ended with the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241.]

The Fifth Crusade 1213 to 1221

1215 Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215. It was at this mass assembly of bishops and cardinals that ‘heresy’ was defined, ‘inquisition’ formalised, Jews were ordered to wear special clothing and Innocent announced his new crusade.

1216 Innocent III dies.

1217 Duke Leopold VI and Andrew II arrived in Acre but failed to assert their power and left.

1219 The remaining forces besieged Damietta in Egypt and captured it in November 1219. But further plans were blocked by the Arab leader Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil and the crusaders were forced to surrender and hand back Damietta.

The Sixth Crusade b.1228

1228 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, after being repeatedly threatened and eventually excommunicated by Innocent’s successor, Pope Honorius III, for his delays, finally landed at Acre.

1229 RESTORATION OF JERUSALEM – However, both sides being reluctant to fight, Frederick agreed a peace treaty with Al-Kamil which allowed Latin Christians to rule most of Jerusalem and a strip of land along the coast, with the Muslims controlling their sacred areas in Jerusalem. Frederick had himself crowned in the Holy Sepulchre and declared himself the mouthpiece of God. Frederick returned home to find the Pope had organised armies to invade his realm.

1238 Frederick tried to extend his lands into northern Italy and Pope Gregory declared a crusade against him. ‘The Holy War was now being preached not against the ‘infidel’, not even against a heretic – no such charge was made against Frederick – but against a political enemy of the Pope.’ (Crusades p.181) Crusade had become degraded to a purely secular concept.

1239 A force led by King Theobald I of Navarre arrived in Acre in September. Defeated in battle in November, Theobald negotiated another treaty with the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil.

1244 The Destruction OF Jerusalem

The Ayyubids invited Khwarazmian forces whose empire had been destroyed by Genghiz Khan’s Mongols, to reconquer the city. It fell July 15, 1244 and the Khwarezmians completely razed Jerusalem to the ground, leaving it in ruins.
1244 An Arab force led by al-Salih Ayyub seized Jerusalem.

The Seventh Crusade 1248 to 1254

1245 to 1250 King Louis IX of France organized a vast army, set sail in 1248 and landed in Egypt in June 1249. In a series of battles they were defeated, and in 1250 Louis was captured and ransomed for 800,000 bezants, and a ten-year truce agreed.

1254 Louis withdrew to Acre, now the only Crusader territory of any significance, which he built up again until his money ran out in 1254 and he had to return to France.

[1256 The Venetians were evicted from Tyre, prompting the War of Saint Sabas over territory in Acre claimed by Genoa and Venice. The war dragged on for a decade during which both Christian sides allied with Muslim forces and most fortified buildings in Acre were destroyed.

1266 Louis IX’s brother Charles seized Sicily and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean with a view to restoring the Latin empire by reconquering Byzantium.]

The Eighth Crusade 1270

1265 The ferocious Mameluk Sultan Baibars ibn-Abdullah had captured Caesarea, Nazareth, Haifa, Safed, Toron, and Arsuf.

1268 Baibars captures Antioch and massacres its entire population.

1270 These events inspire King Louis IX of France to sail to Tunis with a large fleet and impressive army. However it was the height of the Saharan summer, the army was devastated by disease and Louis died. Thus ended the last major attempt to take the Holy Land.

The Ninth Crusade 1272

1270 The future Edward I of England had travelled with Louis. He sailed with his forces to Acre in May 1271. His forces were small and he was unable to alter the existing peace treaties between Baibars and King Hugh of Jerusalem.

1272 Edward learned of his father’s death.

1274 Edward I returns to England to take up his crown.

1277 The fearsome Baibars dies.

The last crusade

1281 Election of a French pope, Martin IV who threw himself behind the campaigns of French king Charles I. His ships were at Sicily when the Emperor of Byzantium conspired to provoke the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, an uprising during which the crusader fleet was abandoned and burnt.

1287 King Charles I dies, allowing Henry II of Cyprus to reclaim Jerusalem.

These kinds of struggles are typical of the endless disunity and conflict among the Roman Christians which continually undermined efforts to hold the Holy Land. In this two hundred year period the papacy, far from creating the kind of total control over Christendom which Innocent and Urban dreamed of, had become just one among a hectic throng of nationalist kings and princes all fighting each other. The papacy had lost all its moral authority. Thus:

1284 The Crusade of Aragon was called by Pope Martin against Peter III of Aragon, Peter supporting anti-Angevin forces in Sicily, Martin supporting Charles of Anjou.

1298 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a crusade against Frederick III of Sicily (Peter’s younger brother).

The end of the Crusader states

1291 A group of pilgrims from Acre was attacked by Muslim forces and in retaliations killed some innocent Muslim merchants. The Sultan demanded compensation from the king of Acre and, when none came, used it as a pretext to besiege and then capture the city. Men, women and children were massacred: prisoners were beheaded. Acre had been the last independent Crusader state in the Holy Land and its fall signified that – The Crusades had ended.

Non-Holy Land ‘crusades’

1365 The Alexandrian Crusade Peter I of Cyprus captured and sacked Alexandria for mainly commercial reasons, killing as many Christians as Muslims and Jews.

1390 The Mahdian Crusade Louis II led a ten-week campaign against Muslim pirates in North Africa. After a siege the crusaders signed a ten-year truce.

1396 Crusade against the Ottomans led by Sigismund of Luxemburg, king of Hungary which was defeated by the Ottomans in the Battle of Nicopolis.

1420s The Hussite Crusades military action against the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia from 1420 to about 1431. Crusades were declared five times during that period: in 1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, and 1431.

1440s Crusade against the Ottomans Polish-Hungarian King Władysław Warneńczyk invaded recently conquered Ottoman territory, reaching Belgrade in January 1444. Negotiated a truce with Sultan Murad II. The Ottomans won a decisive victory at the Battle of Varna on 10 November, and the crusaders withdrew. This left Constantinople exposed and it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

John Hunyadi and Giovanni da Capistrano organized a 1456 crusade to lift the Ottomon siege of Belgrade.
1487 Pope Innocent VIII called for a crusade against the Waldensians in the south of France but little military activity followed and it had no effect…

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2 Comments

by Simon on December 4, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Christianity, History, Middle Ages, War

Tagged A Chronology of The Crusades, Acre, Adrianople, Afonso I, Al-Kamil, al-Salih Ayyub, Albrecht von Buxthoeven, Alexios, Alexius IV, Andrew II, Antioch, Ayyubids, Baibars ibn-Abdullah, Baldwin II, Baldwin IV, Baldwin of Edessa, Baldwin V, Battle of Dorylaeum, Battle of Hattin, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bishop Berthold of Hanover, Byzantium, Cathars, Charles I, Charles of Anjou, Church of the Nativity Bethlehem, Conrad III, Constantinople, Count Fulk of Anjou, crusades, Cyprus, Damascus, Damietta, Doge Enrico Dandolo, Duke Leopold VI, Edessa, Edward I, Franks, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick I, Frederick III of Sicily, Genghiz Khan, Genoa, Great Seljuk Empire, Guy of Lusignan, Henry II of Cyprus, Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Imad ad-Din Zengi, infidel, Jerusalem, Khwarezmians, Kilij Arslan, King Hugh of Jerusalem, King Louis IX, King Philip of Swabia, Konrad of Masovia, Latins, Leopold of Austria, Louis IX, Louis VII, Mameluk, Mesud I, Muhammed, Occitania, Ottomon Empire, Peter III of Aragon, Peter the Hermit, Philip II, Pope Boniface VIII, Pope Celestine III, Pope Eugenius III, Pope Gregory, Pope Gregory IX, Pope Gregory VIII, Pope Honorius III, Pope Innocent II, Pope Innocent III, Pope Innocent VIII, Pope Martin IV, Pope Urban II, Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Sultan Al-Kamil, Sultan Murad II, Teutonic Knights, The Albigensian Crusade, The Eighth Crusade, The Fifth Crusade, The First Crusade, The Fourth Crusade, The Great Schism, The Livonian Knights, The Ninth Crusade, The Second Crusade, The Seventh Crusade, The Sixth Crusade, The Teutonic Knights, Theobald I of Navarre, Tripoli, Tunis, Tyre, Venice, York, Zara

Posted by Simon on December 4, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/a-chronology-of-the-crusades/

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The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (2) by Michael Haag (2012)

Haag’s key points

The Seljuk Turks add to the chaos

Muslim destruction of Christian shrines, churches and towns

The Reconquista

Crusades wicked, Reconquista, OK?

The West

The Knights Templar

Saladin

Steven Runciman’s negative interpretation of the crusades

Reflections

The fall of the Templars

Maps

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The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (1) by Michael Haag (2012)

The Knights Templar

Deep history, revisionist history

Haag presents the entire crusading enterprise in a radically revisionist light

Jerusalem not a Muslim holy city

Saladin not a Muslim hero

Summary of Haag’s argument

The vital role of Constantinople

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The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)

The Frankish expansion

Questions and theories

Other aspects of medieval colonisation

New worlds and the New World

Conclusion

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A Chronology of the Crusades

Muhammed

The Great Schism

The First Crusade 1096 to 1099

The Second Crusade 1145 to 1149

The Wendish Crusade

Saladin

The Third Crusade 1189 to 1192

The German Crusade

The North European Crusade

The Fourth Crusade 1202 to 1004: the Sack of Constantinople

The Albigensian Crusade 1208 to 1229

The Fifth Crusade 1213 to 1221

The Sixth Crusade b.1228

1244 The Destruction OF Jerusalem

The Seventh Crusade 1248 to 1254

The Eighth Crusade 1270

The Ninth Crusade 1272

The last crusade

The end of the Crusader states

Non-Holy Land ‘crusades’

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