The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

Nine hundred years ago the Christians of Europe waged a series of holy wars, or crusades, against the Muslim world, battling for dominion of a region sacred to both faiths–the Holy Land. This bloody struggle raged for two centuries, reshaping the history of Islam and the West. In the course of these monumental expeditions, hundreds of thousands of crusaders travelled across the face of the known world to conquer and then defend an isolated swathe of territory centred on the hallowed city of Jerusalem.

We must ask who, in the end, won the war for the Holy Land and why,

Roman imperial rule had provided stability and affluence in the West until the late fourth century CE (Common Era). In the East the Roman Empire lived on until 1453, ruled from the great city of Constantinople, founded in 324 by Constantine the Great–the first emperor to convert to Christianity.

around the year 500 one of these groups, the Franks, established control over north-eastern Gaul, giving rise to a kingdom known as Francia (from which the modern nation of France took its name).

By 800, a descendant of these Franks, Charlemagne (768–814), had united such a huge swathe of territory–encompassing much of modern France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries–that he could lay claim to the long-dormant title of emperor of the West. Charlemagne and his successors, the Carolingians, presided over a short-lived period of renewed security, but their empire crumbled under the weight of succession disputes and repeated invasions by Scandinavian Vikings and eastern European Magyars. From the 850s onwards, Europe was again ripped apart by political fragmentation, warfare and unrest. The embattled kings of Germany still sought to claim the imperial title and a royal house in France survived in a desperately emasculated state. By the eleventh century Constantine and Charlemagne had passed into legend, the embodiments of a distant era. In the course of medieval

A central figure in this process was the pope in Rome. Christian tradition maintained that there were five great fathers–or patriarchs–of the Church spread across the Mediterranean world at Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. But the bishop of Rome–who came to call himself ‘papa’ (father) or pope–sought to claim pre-eminence among all these.

it would be a Roman pope who launched the crusades, prompting tens of thousands of Latins to take up arms and fight in the name of Christianity.

Pope Urban II (1088–99), could instigate the First Crusade.4 Urban’s call for a holy war found a willing audience across Europe, in large part because of the prevailing religious atmosphere in the Latin world.

Across the West, Christianity was an almost universally accepted faith and, in contrast to modern secularised European society, the eleventh century was a profoundly spiritual era.

By the eleventh century, one of the most popular forms of monastic life was that advocated by the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, in eastern France. The Cluniac movement grew to have some 2,000 dependent houses from England to Italy and enjoyed far-reaching influence, not least in helping to develop and advance the ideals of the Reform movement. Its power was reaching an apex in the 1090s, when Urban II, himself a former Cluniac monk, held the papal office.

In launching the crusades the papacy sought to recruit members of one social grouping above all others: the knights of Latin Europe. This military class was still at an early stage of development in the eleventh century. The fundamental characteristic of medieval knighthood was the ability to fight as a mounted warrior.

The most influential early Christian thinker to wrestle with these issues was the North African bishop St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE). His work laid the foundation upon which the papacy eventually built the notion of crusading. St Augustine argued that a war could be both lawful and justifiable if fought under strict conditions. His complex theories were later simplified to produce just three prerequisites of a Just War: proclamation by a ‘legitimate authority’, such as a king or bishop; a ‘just cause’, like defence against enemy attack or the recovery of lost territory; and prosecution with ‘right intention’, that is, with the least possible violence.

In the course of the early Middle Ages, Augustine’s work was judged to demonstrate that certain, unavoidable, forms of military conflict might be ‘justified’ and thus acceptable in the eyes of God. But fighting under these terms was still sinful. By contrast, a Christian holy war, such as a crusade, was believed to be one that God actively supported, capable of bringing spiritual benefit to its participants. The chasm separating these two forms of violence was only bridged after centuries of sporadic and incremental theological experimentation.

According to Muslim tradition, Islam was born in c. 610 CE when Muhammad–an illiterate, forty-year-old Arab native of Mecca (in modern Saudi Arabia)–began to experience a series of ‘revelations’ from Allah (God), relayed by the Archangel Gabriel. These ‘revelations’, regarded as the sacred and immutable words of God, were later set down in written form to become the Koran.

In 622 the Prophet was forced to flee to the nearby city of Medina, a journey which served as the starting date for the Muslim calendar, and he then waged a bloody and prolonged war of religion against Mecca, finally conquering the city shortly before his death in 632.

The religion founded by Muhammad–Islam, meaning submission to the will of God–had common roots with Judaism and Christianity.

In the context of crusading history, a critical stage in this whole process was the capture of Jerusalem in 638 from the Greek Christians of Byzantium.

This ancient city came to be revered as Islam’s third-holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. In part this was due to Islam’s Abrahamic heritage, but it was also dependent upon the belief that Muhammad had ascended to Heaven from Jerusalem during his ‘Night Journey’, and the associated tradition identifying the Holy City as the focus for the impending End of Days.

Islam had, from its earliest days, embraced warfare. Muhammad himself prosecuted a series of military campaigns while subjugating Mecca, and the explosive expansion of the Muslim world during the seventh and eighth centuries was fuelled by an avowed devotional obligation to spread Islamic rule. The union of faith and violence within the Muslim religion, therefore, was more rapid and natural than that which gradually developed in Latin Christianity.

So what did ignite the war between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land? In one sense the crusades were a reaction to an act of Islamic aggression–the Muslim conquest of sacred Jerusalem–but this had taken place in 638, and thus was hardly a fresh offence.

On a late November morning in the year 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe.

Urban declared that Christianity was in dire peril, threatened by invasion and appalling oppression. The Holy City of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Muslims–‘a people…alien to God’, bent upon ritual torture and unspeakable desecration. He called upon Latin Europe to rise up against this supposedly savage foe as ‘soldiers of Christ’, reclaiming the Holy Land and releasing eastern Christians from ‘servitude’. Enticed by the promise that this righteous struggle would purge their souls of sin, tens of thousands of men, women and children marched out of the West to wage war against the Muslim world in the First Crusade.1

By November the pope was ready to reveal his plans. Twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots congregated in Clermont for the largest clerical assembly of Urban’s pontificate. Then, after nine days of general ecclesiastical debate, the pope announced his intention to deliver a special sermon.

Fusing the ideals of warfare and pilgrimage, he unveiled an expedition that would forge a path to the Holy Land itself, there to win back possession of Jerusalem, the most hallowed site in the Christian cosmos.

Urban evoked the unparalleled sanctity of this city, this ‘navel of the world’, stating that it was ‘the [fountain] of all Christian teaching’, the place ‘in which Christ lived and suffered’.3

Urban’s genius was to construct the idea of ‘crusading’ within the framework of existing religious practice, thus ensuring that, in eleventh-century terms at least, the connection he established between warfare and salvation made clear, rational sense.

This monumental endeavour, laden with danger and the threat of intense suffering, would take its participants to the very gates of Jerusalem, Christendom’s premier pilgrimage destination.

Our best guess is that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians set off on the First Crusade, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were knights, perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 infantry troops and the remaining tens of thousands non-combatants, women and children.

What is certain is that the call to crusade elicited an extraordinary response, the scale of which stunned the medieval world. Not since the distant glories of Rome had military forces of this size been assembled.8

These five princes–Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Boulogne–played pivotal roles in the expedition to reclaim Jerusalem, leading three of the main Frankish armies and shaping the early history of the crusades.

The once fashionable myth that crusaders were self-serving, disinherited, land-hungry younger sons must be discarded. Crusading was instead an activity that could bring spiritual and material rewards, but was in the first instance both an intimidating and extremely costly activity. Devotion inspired Europe to crusade, and in the long years to come the First Crusaders proved time and again that their most powerful weapon was a shared sense of purpose and indestructible spiritual resolution.

Constantinople was a natural location for the diverse forces of the crusade to gather, given that it stood on the traditional pilgrim route to the Holy Land and that the Franks had travelled east with the express intention of aiding their Greek brethren.

Constantinople also was home to an unrivalled collection of sacred relics, including Christ’s crown of thorns, locks of the Virgin Mary’s hair, at least two heads of John the Baptist and the bones of virtually all the Apostles.

The main armies of the First Crusade started to gather on the shore of Asia Minor in February 1097, and over the following months their numbers gradually built up to perhaps 75,000, including some 7,500 fully armed, mounted knights and a further 35,000 lightly equipped infantry.

But a gargantuan task that would eclipse even these trials now stood before them: the siege of Antioch.

First and foremost, Antioch appears to have been the core target of the crusader-Byzantine alliance. Founded in the year 300 BCE by Antiochus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the city was ideally placed to tap into trans-Mediterranean trade. Famed as a vibrant crossroads between East and West, Antioch became the third city of the Roman world, a centre of commerce and culture.

Historians have long argued that at this point the course of Antioch’s second siege, indeed the fortunes of the entire crusade, were transformed by a single dramatic event. On 14 June a small group of Franks, led by a peasant visionary named Peter Bartholomew, began digging in the Basilica of St Peter. Bartholomew claimed that an apparition of the apostle St Andrew had revealed to him the resting place of an extraordinarily powerful spiritual weapon: the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the cross.

Peter Bartholomew’s ‘discovery’ certainly had some effect on crusader morale. To modern sensibilities the story of his visions might seem fantastical, his claim to have uncovered a genuine remnant of Christ’s own life fraudulent, even ludicrous. But to eleventh-century Franks, familiar with the concepts of saints, relics and miraculous intervention, Peter’s experiences rang true. Conditioned by a well-ordered system of belief, in which the saintly dead acted as God’s intercessors on Earth, channelling His power through sacred relics, most were willing to accept the authenticity of the Holy Lance.

The unearthing of the Lance was not the overwhelming catalyst to action, much less a focal turning point in the fortunes of the First Crusade.

By 28 June 1098 the crusaders were ready for battle. At dawn that day they began marching out of the city while clergy lining the walls offered prayers to God. Most believed that they were marching to their deaths.

After nearly three years, and a journey of some 2,000 miles, the crusaders had reached Jerusalem. This ancient city, Christendom’s sacred heart, pulsated with religion. For the Franks it was the holiest place on Earth, where Christ had suffered his Passion. Within its lofty walls stood the Holy Sepulchre, the church erected in the fourth century CE under the Roman Emperor Constantine to enclose the supposed sites of Golgotha and of Jesus’ Tomb. This one shrine encapsulated the very essence of Christianity: the Crucifixion, Redemption and Resurrection. The crusaders had marched east from Europe in their thousands to reclaim this church–many believing that if the earthly city of Jerusalem could be recaptured it would become one with the heavenly Jerusalem, a Christian paradise.

But across more than 3,000 years of history, Jerusalem had become immutably entwined with two other world religions: Judaism and Islam. These faiths also treasured the city, reserving particular reverence for the area known either as the Temple Mount, or Haram as-Sharif, a raised enclosure in its eastern reaches, containing the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque, and abutted by the Wailing Wall. To Muslims this was the city from which Muhammad made his ascent to heaven, the third-holiest site in the Islamic world. But it was also the seat of the Israelites, where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son and the two Temples were built.

The First Crusade now faced a seemingly insurmountable task–the conquest of one of the known world’s most fearsomely fortified cities. Even today, amid the urban sprawl of modern expansion, Jerusalem is able to convey the grandeur of its past, for at its centre lies the ‘Old City’, ringed by Ottoman walls closely resembling those that stood in the eleventh century. If one looks from the Mount of Olives in the east, stripping away the clutter and bustle of the twenty-first century, the great metropolis that confronted the Franks in 1099 comes into focus.

The crusaders’ assault on Jerusalem began at first light on 14 July 1099.

Soon after midday on 15 July 1099 the First Crusaders achieved their long-cherished dream–Jerusalem’s conquest. Surging through the streets in blood-hungry, ravening packs, they overran the Holy City. What little Muslim resistance remained melted away before them, but most Franks were in no mood to take prisoners.

After years of desperate suffering and struggle, the First Crusaders’ terrible work was done: Jerusalem was in Christian hands.41

The success of the First Crusade stunned Latin Christendom. For many, only the hand of God could explain the crusaders’ survival at Antioch and their ultimate triumph at Jerusalem.

The First Crusade brought Latin Christendom control of Jerusalem and of two great Syrian cities, Antioch and Edessa. In the wake of these astounding achievements, a new outpost of the western European world was born in the Near East, as the Franks expanded and consolidated their hold over the Levant.

In the Middle Ages, this region was sometimes referred to as ‘Outremer’, the land beyond the sea, while today the four major settlements that emerged in the first decades of the twelfth century–the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli–are frequently described as the ‘crusader states’.

One key feature of this collaboration was the management and cultivation of the cult associated with the Jerusalemite relic of the True Cross discovered by the First Crusaders in 1099. In the first years of the twelfth century the Cross became a totem of Latin power in the Levant. Borne by either the patriarch or one of his leading clergymen into a succession of battles against Islam, it quickly acquired a reputation for miraculous intervention; soon it was said that, in the presence of the Lord’s Cross, the Franks were invincible.