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

by Thomas Asbridge

most of western Christendom’s lay nobility enjoyed similar well-established connections with monasteries, and this had a marked effect upon the speed at which crusade enthusiasm spread across Europe after 1095. Partly, this was because the vow undertaken by knights committing to the holy war mirrored that taken by monks–a similarity that seemed to confirm the efficacy of fighting for God. More important still was the fact that the papacy, with its links to religious houses like Cluny, relied upon the monasteries of the Latin West to help spread and support the call to crusade.

At first sight, Christianity does appear to be a pacifistic faith. The New Testament Gospels record many occasions when Jesus seemed to reject or prohibit violence: from his warning that he who lived by violence would die by violence, to the Sermon on the Mount’s exhortation to turn the other cheek in response to a blow. The Old Testament also appears to offer clear guidance on the question of violence, with the Mosaic Commandment: ‘Thou shall not kill.’ In the course of the first millennium CE, however, Christian theologians pondering the union between their faith and the military empire of Rome began to question whether scripture really did offer such a decisive condemnation of warfare. The Old Testament certainly seemed equivocal, because as a history of the Hebrews’ desperate struggle for survival, it described a series of holy wars sanctioned by God. This suggested that, under the right circumstances, even vengeful or aggressive warfare might be permissible; and in the New Testament, Jesus had said that he came to bring not peace but a sword, and had used a whip of cords to beat moneylenders out of the Temple.

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.

During the second half of the eleventh century, Latin Christianity began to edge ever closer towards the acceptance of holy war. In the early stages of the Reform movement, the papacy began to perceive the need for a military arm with which to reinforce its agenda and manifest its will. This prompted a succession of popes to experiment with the sponsoring of warfare, calling upon Christian supporters to defend the Church in return for vaguely expressed forms of spiritual reward. It was under the forceful guidance of Pope Gregory VII that the doctrine and application of sacred violence jumped ahead. Intent upon recruiting a papal army that owed its allegiance to Rome, he set about reinterpreting Christian tradition. For centuries theologians had characterised the internal, spiritual battle that devoted Christians waged against sin as the ‘warfare of Christ’, and monks were sometimes described as the ‘soldiers of Christ’. Gregory twisted this idea to suit his purpose, proclaiming that all lay society had one overriding obligation: to defend the Latin Church as ‘soldiers of Christ’ through actual physical warfare.

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.

For the next five hundred years the heart of Sunni Islam lay, not in Syria or the Holy Land, but in Iraq and Iran.

By the late eleventh century, the Abbasids and Fatimids regarded each other as avowed foes. Thus, by the time of the crusades, Islam was riven by an elemental schism–one that prevented the Muslim rulers of Egypt and Iraq from offering any form of coordinated or concerted resistance to Christian invasion.

the battleground in the war for the Holy Land–cannot be spoken of as a Muslim world. The relatively tolerant approach to subjugation adopted during the early Arab-Islamic conquests meant that, even centuries later, the Levant still contained a very high proportion of indigenous Christians–from Greeks and Armenians to Syrians and Copts–as well as pockets of Jewish population. Nomadic communities of Bedouins also continued to range widely across the East–migrant Arabic-speaking Muslims, who had few fixed allegiances. This long-established pattern of settlement was overlaid by a numerically inferior Muslim ruling elite, itself made up of Arabs, some Persians and the newly arrived Turks. The Near East, therefore, was little more than a fractured patchwork of disparate social and devotional groupings, and not a purebred Islamic stronghold.

when Latin crusading armies arrived in the Near East to wage what essentially were frontier wars, they were not actually invading the heartlands of Islam. Instead, they were fighting for control of a land that, in some respects, was also a Muslim frontier, one peopled by an assortment of Christians, Jews and Muslims who, over the centuries, had become acculturated to the experience of conquest by an external force, be it at the hands of Byzantines and Persians, or Arabs and Turks.

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.

Jurists posited a formal division of the world into two spheres–the Dar al-Islam, or ‘House of Peace’ (the area within which Muslim rule and law prevailed); and the Dar al-harb, or ‘House of War’ (the rest of the world). The express purpose of the jihad was to wage a relentless holy war in the Dar al-harb, until such time as all mankind had accepted Islam, or submitted to Muslim rule. No permanent peace treaties with non-Muslim enemies were permissible, and any temporary truces could last no more than ten years.

By the eleventh century, the rulers of Sunni Baghdad were far more interested in using jihad to promote Islamic orthodoxy by battling ‘heretic’ Shi‘ites than they were in launching holy wars against Christendom. The suggestion that Islam should engage in an unending struggle to enlarge its borders and subjugate non-Muslims held little currency; so too did the idea of unifying in defence of the Islamic faith and its territories. When the Christian crusades began, the ideological impulse of devotional warfare thus lay dormant within the body of Islam, but the essential framework remained in place.

By 1095 Muslims and Christians had been waging war against one another for centuries; no matter how far it was in the past, Islam undoubtedly had seized Christian territory, including Jerusalem; and Christians living in and visiting the Holy Land may have been subjected to persecution. On the other hand, the immediate context in which the crusades were launched gave no obvious clue that a titanic transnational war of religion was either imminent or inevitable. Islam was not about to initiate a grand offensive against the West. Nor were the Muslim rulers of the Near East engaging in acts akin to ethnic cleansing, or subjecting religious minority groups to widespread and sustained oppression. There may at times have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbours, and perhaps there were outbreaks of intolerance in the Levant, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish all this from the endemic political, military and social struggles of the age.

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. In 1095, Latin Christians were accustomed to the idea that punishment owed through sinfulness might be cancelled out by confession and the performance of penitential activities, like prayer, fasting or pilgrimage. At Clermont, Urban fused the familiar notion of a salvific expedition with the more audacious concept of fighting for God, urging ‘everyone of no matter what class…knight or foot-soldier, rich or poor’ to join what was to be, in essence, an armed pilgrimage. 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. As such, it promised to be an experience imbued with overwhelming redemptive potency; functioning as a ‘super’ penance, capable of scouring the spirit of any transgression.

Contemporaries generally termed this ‘crusade’ simply an iter (journey) or peregrinatio (pilgrimage). It was not until the close of the twelfth century that more specific terminology developed, in the form of the word crucesignatus (one signed with the cross) for a ‘crusader’, and the eventual adoption of the French term croisade, which roughly translates as ‘the way of the cross’. For the sake of convention and clarity, historians have adopted the term ‘crusade’ for the Christian holy wars launched from 1095 onwards, but we should be aware that this lends a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity to the early ‘crusades’.6

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

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.

Capitalising upon the tremors of fear that shook the Sunni Seljuq world after Kerbogha’s defeat at Antioch, al-Afdal had seized Jerusalem from the Turks in August 1098. This radical transformation in the balance of Near Eastern power prompted the crusader princes to seek a negotiated settlement with the Fatimids, offering a partition of conquered territory in return for rights to the Holy City. But talks collapsed when the Egyptians bluntly refused to relinquish Jerusalem.

One crusader joyfully reported: With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers one could see marvellous works. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were running to and fro over corpses.

Neither Latin nor Arabic sources shy away from recording the dreadful horror of this sack, the one side glorying in victory, the other appalled by its raw savagery. In the decades that followed Near Eastern Islam came to regard the Latin atrocities at Jerusalem as an act of crusader barbarity and defilement, demanding of urgent vengeance. By the thirteenth century, the Iraqi Muslim Ibn al-Athir estimated the number of Muslim dead at 70,000. Modern historians long regarded this figure to be an exaggeration, but generally accepted that Latin estimates in excess of 10,000 might be accurate. However, recent research has uncovered close contemporary Hebrew testimony which indicates that casualties may not have exceeded 3,000, and that large numbers of prisoners were taken when Jerusalem fell. This suggests that, even in the Middle Ages, the image of the crusaders’ brutality in 1099 was subject to hyperbole and manipulation on both sides of the divide.

Even so, we must still acknowledge the terrible inhumanity of the crusaders’ sadistic butchery. Certainly, some of Jerusalem’s inhabitants were spared; Iftikhar ad-Daulah for one took sanctuary in the Tower of David and later negotiated terms of release from Raymond of Toulouse. But the Frankish massacre was not simply a feral outburst of bottled rage; it was a prolonged, callous campaign of killing that lasted at least two days and it left the city awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the city walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned. Even six months later a Latin visiting Palestine for the first time commented that the Holy City still reeked of death and decay.

The other unassailable truth of Jerusalem’s conquest is that the crusaders were not simply driven by a desire for blood or plunder; they were also empowered by heartfelt piety and the authentic belief that they were doing God’s work. Thus that first, ghastly day of sack and slaughter concluded with an act of worship. In a moment which perfectly encapsulated the crusade’s extraordinary fusion of violence and faith, dusk on 15 July 1099 saw the Latins gather to give tearful thanks to their God. A Latin contemporary rejoiced in recounting that, ‘going to the Sepulchre of the Lord and his glorious Temple, the clerics and also the laity, singing a new song unto the Lord in a high-sounding voice of exultation, and making offerings and most humble supplications, j...

It certainly is striking that Christian accounts made no attempt to limit the number of ‘infidels’ killed when Jerusalem fell–if anything, they gloried in the event. They also revelled in the scene of carnage at the Aqsa mosque. The Gesta Francorum noted that the crusaders were left wading up to their ankles in blood by the work of butchery. However, another ‘eyewitness’, Raymond of Aguilers, expanded on this image. Lifting a scriptural quote from the New Testament Book of Revelation, he declared that the Franks ‘rode in [enemy] blood to the knees and bridles of their horses’. This more extreme image gained wide acceptance and was repeated by numerous western European histories and chronicles in the course of the twelfth century.46

For most people living in western Europe in the early twelfth century, this new type of devotional warfare had no finite identity and was still subject to continual, organic development. As far as they were concerned, crusades did not need to be directed against Muslims, and many readily accepted the idea of waging a holy war against Alexius Comnenus once he had been deemed the enemy of Latin Christendom.

If holy war truly was the work of God, sanctioned and empowered by His divine will, then how could defeat be explained? The answer was sin–success for Islam in the war for dominion of the Levant was a punishment, mandated in Heaven, for Christian transgression. The sinner, or scapegoat, at the Field of Blood was deemed to be Prince Roger, now branded as an adulterer and a usurper. In the future, the notion of sin as a cause of defeat would gain ever wider currency, and other individuals and groups would be targeted to explain the vagaries of war.77

For those who believe in the inevitability of a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a global conflagration between Islam and the West, the crusades and the societies they begat can serve as grim proof of mankind’s innate propensity to savagery, bigotry and tyrannical repression of an enemy ‘other’. Alternatively, the evidence of transcultural fusion and peaceful coexistence in Outremer can be harnessed to underpin the ideal of convivencia (literally ‘living together’), to suggest that peoples of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds can live together in relative harmony.

in the Latin East, the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims, but between Franks (that is to say, Latin Christians) and non-Franks (be they eastern Christian, Jewish or Muslim). This second group of subjected indigenous peoples was made up mostly of peasants and some merchants.

one might expect the opening decades of the twelfth century to have been marked by a flood of ‘crusading’ activity, as western Europe rushed to embrace this extension of Christian holy war and to defend Outremer. This was not the case. The memory of the First Crusade certainly burned brightly, but the years leading to 1144 witnessed only a sporadic clutch of small-scale crusades. In part this was because many regarded the First Crusade as a singularly astonishing event that was essentially unrepeatable. Drawing upon centuries of hindsight, later historians identified the mass armed pilgrimage stimulated by Pope Urban II’s preaching in 1095 as the first of an ongoing succession of crusades and, thus, as the start of a crusading movement. But this ‘future’ was by no means apparent in the early twelfth century and the idea of crusading had yet to coalesce.

For all these references to the ‘remission of sins’ awarded to the First Crusaders, the actual formulation of the spiritual rewards being offered remained vague and equivocal. Questions that might trouble theologians and even warriors–Would participation remit all sins or only those confessed? Was martyrdom guaranteed to all those who died on crusade?–had yet to be answered definitively. It was Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and supporter of the Templars, who dealt with one of the thorniest theological consequences of crusading. With the preaching of the First Crusade, the papacy had, in a sense, unwittingly opened Pandora’s Box. The call for a crusading army to manifest God’s divine will on earth might suggest that God actually needed man, and therefore could not be truly omnipotent–a train of thought that obviously had explosive potential. Bernard countered this problem with typical intellectual agility. He argued that God only pretended to be in need as an act of charity, deliberately engineering the threat to the Holy Land so that Christians could have another chance to tap into this new mode of spiritual purification. In one step the abbot defended the idea of crusading and promoted its devotional efficacy. Bernard would play a central role in the promulgation of the Second Crusade, but in the first instance the work of launching the expedition was undertaken by others.

The document is perhaps of even more elemental importance to crusade history because of its afterlife. The medieval papal curia was, by its nature, an institution that treasured retrospection. When wishing to formulate a decision or frame a pronouncement, Roman officials always looked to precedent. In this context, Quantum praedecessores became the benchmark for crusading, presenting an official memory of what Pope Urban II had supposedly preached in 1095 and enshrining certain ideas about the nature of the First Crusade itself. Into the second half of the twelfth century and beyond, the encyclical served to define the scope, identity and practice of crusading because future popes used the document as an exemplar. Many drew upon its style, format and substance; some simply reissued it unaltered.

Over the centuries, great weight has been attached to this ‘peaceful’ occupation, and two interconnected notions have gained widespread currency. These events are seen to demonstrate a striking difference between Islam and Latin Christianity, because the First Crusade’s conquest in 1099 involved a brutal massacre, whereas the Ayyubids’ moment of triumph seems to reveal a capacity for temperance and human compassion. It has also been widely suggested that Saladin was only too conscious of the comparison with the First Crusade, being aware of what a negotiated surrender might mean for the image of Islam, for contemporary perceptions of his own career and for the mark he would leave upon history.77 The problem with these views is that they are not supported by the most important contemporary testimony. Two strands of evidence are vital–the account written by Imad al-Din, Saladin’s secretary, who arrived in Jerusalem on 3 October 1187; and a letter from Saladin to the caliph in Baghdad, dating from shortly after Jerusalem’s surrender. The point is not that this material should be trusted simply because it was authored by those closest to events, but rather that it offers an insight into how the sultan himself conceived of and wished to present what happened at the Holy City that autumn. Both sources indicate that, by the end of September 1187, Saladin intended to sack Jerusalem. According to Imad al-Din, the sultan told Balian at their initial meeting: ‘You will receive neithe...

The fate of the Holy Sepulchre was debated intensely, with some advocating its total destruction. More moderate voices prevailed, arguing that Christian pilgrims would still continue to revere the site even if the building were razed to the ground, and Saladin was reminded that Umar, Jerusalem’s first Muslim conqueror, had left the church untouched.

Whereas previously crusaders had been variously dubbed pilgrims, travellers or soldiers of Christ, now, for the first time, documents began to describe them as crucesignatus (one signed by the cross)–the word that ultimately led to the terms ‘crusader’ and ‘crusade’.

At the same time, the crusaders were preparing for a frontal ground assault, making renewed attempts to fill sections of Acre’s dry moat so that they could gain access to the walls. With the Franks throwing dead horses and even human remains into the ditch, the Muslim garrison was left with the desperate task of trying to empty the channel faster than the Latins could fill it. One Muslim witness described how the defenders were split into three groups: one ‘going down to the moat and cutting up corpses and horses to make them easy to carry’, another transporting this grisly burden to the sea and a third defending against Christian attack.

In time, the massacre took its place alongside other crusader atrocities, like the sack of Jerusalem in 1099, as a crime that did not, in reality, spark an unquenchable firestorm of hatred, but could be readily recalled in the interests of promoting jihad.

From the start, crusade enthusiasm had been underpinned by the fact that almost all Latins felt an overwhelming need to seek redemption for their sins. But in the course of the twelfth century, attitudes towards penitential and devotional practice evolved, and new ideas about what a ‘good Christian life’ might actually entail began to percolate through the West. One gradual change saw an increased emphasis on interior forms of spirituality, over external manifestations of piety. For the first time in the Middle Ages, what one truly thought, felt and believed was becoming as, or even more, important than what one said and did in public. In a parallel and related development, Man’s relationship with God and Christ came to be seen in more personal and direct, ‘internalised’ terms. These notions possessed the potential to overturn the established frameworks of medieval religion.

Innocent also possessed a clear vision of what he wished to achieve with this absolute power–the recovery of Jerusalem. He seems to have felt an earnest and authentic attachment to the Holy City; much of his pontificate would be dedicated, one way or another, to securing its reconquest. But like many of his generation in the West, the new pope had been dispirited by the Third Crusade’s limited achievements. In his mind, the expedition’s failure to retake Jerusalem could be traced to two overriding causes, and he had solutions for each. God evidently was allowing the Franks to be defeated in the Levant as punishment for the manifest sins of all Latin Christendom. Therefore, the work of reform and purification in the West must be redoubled. Europe had to be brought–by force if necessary–to a new state of perfection: unified spiritually and politically under the righteous authority of Rome; purged of the dreadful, corrupting taint of heresy. And the faithful must be shepherded towards lives of virtue; given every possible opportunity to atone for their transgressions, so that they might find a path to salvation. By these means, the Latin world could be cleansed so that the Lord might lift Christianity to victory in the war for the Holy Land. Pope Innocent also believed that the practice of crusading itself should urgently be amended, and seems to have concluded that functional measures would lead to spiritual rejuvenation.

Innocent’s indulgence also carefully distanced the purificational force of holy war from the physical works of Man: it was no longer suggested that the suffering and hardship endured on campaign itself served to salve the soul; instead, the spiritual benefits gained through the indulgence were presented as a gift, mercifully granted by God as just reward for acts of merit. This was a subtle shift, but one that laid to rest some of the theological difficulties raised by crusading (such as God’s relationship to Man). This formulation of the indulgence became the established ‘gold standard’ within the Latin Church, enduring virtually unchanged throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.

Innocent also tried to create a new financial system that placed the onus for crusade funding on the Church. This included a one-fortieth tax on almost all aspects of ecclesiastical income for one year and a ten per cent levy on papal revenue. The new pope set up donation chests in churches across Europe, into which lay parishioners were expected to place alms in support of the war effort. Crucially, the pope suggested that these monetary gifts, in and of themselves, would bring benefactors an indulgence similar to that enjoyed by actual crusaders. Over time, this notion would remould crusade ideology, and have far-reaching consequences for the whole history of the Roman Church.

Dandalo possessed a shrewd appreciation of warfare and politics, and was driven by an absolute determination to further Venetian interests. He now offered to commute the crusaders’ debt and to commit his own troops to join the Levantine war, so long as the crusade first helped Venice to defeat its enemies. In agreeing to this deal, the Fourth Crusade drifted from the path to the Holy Land. Within months the expedition had sacked the Christian city of Zara on the Dalmatian coast, Venice’s political and economic rival. Innocent was dismayed when he heard about this affront and reacted by excommunicating the entire crusade.

In 1209, he launched the so-called Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics in south-eastern France, but the campaigns that followed proved to be shockingly brutal and largely ineffective, being subject to the self-serving acquisitiveness of northern French participants.

In the ‘Children’s Crusade’ that followed, two boys, a young French shepherd from Vendôme named Stephen of Cloyes and one Nicholas of Cologne, apparently raised hordes of young followers, promising that God would oversee their journey to the Levant and then lend them the miraculous power to overthrow Islam, recapture Jerusalem and recover the True Cross. As innocents, they claimed, children would be able to fulfil God’s divine purpose in a manner impossible for adults sullied by the taint of sin. Little reliable evidence survives regarding the fate of these ‘crusaders’, but for contemporaries then living in France, Germany and Italy–Innocent III included–their uprising served as a salutary reminder that the call of the cross could still move the hearts and minds of the masses.5

Now, he refined and extended that notion. Innocent hoped many thousands would enrol in his new campaign, but he announced that anyone taking the cross who proved unable to fight in person could readily redeem their crusading vow by making a cash payment and still receive a religious reward. This extraordinary reform may have been well intentioned–designed to bring the crusade both financial and military resources, and to extend the redemptive power of holy war to a wider audience, but it established an extremely dangerous precedent. The idea that spiritual merit could be bought with money spawned the development of a comprehensive system of indulgences, perhaps the most widely criticised feature of later medieval Latin Catholicism and a key factor in the emergence of the Reformation. These looming long-term consequences were not apparent in 1213, but, even so, Innocent’s innovation elicited scandalised criticism among some contemporaries and, in the course of the thirteenth century, led to grave abuses of the crusade movement.

In summer 1219 the revered living saint Francis of Assisi–advocate of the mendicant principles of extreme poverty and ecstatic evangelism–arrived in the Christian camp. He had made his way to Egypt in the tattered rags of a holy man, believing that he could bring peace to the world (and success for the crusade) by converting the Muslims to Christianity. Crossing the lines of conflict under terms of parley, St Francis implored the bewildered Egyptian troops to lead him to al-Kamil. Taking him for a mad but harmless beggar, they agreed. In the bizarre audience that followed, al-Kamil politely refused Francis’ offer to demonstrate the power of the Christian God by walking through fire, and the saint eventually went home empty-handed.

On 18 February 1229, Frederick agreed terms with the Ayyubid sultan. In return for a ten-year truce and Frederick’s military protection against all enemies, even Christians, al-Kamil surrendered Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, together with a corridor of land linking the Holy City with the coast. Muslims were to retain access to the Haram as-Sharif, with their own qadi to supervise this sacred area, but otherwise they were to abandon the city. For the first time in forty years the Holy Sepulchre would again be in Christian hands–an excommunicate emperor had achieved what no crusader since 1187 could, and all without spilling a single drop of blood.

the barely contained animosity between Frederick II and Gregory IX resurfaced once more in 1239. The emperor was again excommunicated and, this time, the pope called for a fully fledged crusade against his Hohenstaufen opponent–now defamed as an enemy of Christendom and ally of Islam. Another crusade against the emperor was announced in 1244 and this led to open warfare that rumbled on until Frederick II’s death in December 1250. Resolute in its desire to uphold and advance the strength of the Church, the papacy had finally embraced the idea of wielding the weapon of holy war against its political enemies. Similar calls to arms would follow for decades, even centuries, to come. These prompted some outcry, occasionally even vociferous condemnation, but nonetheless many willing recruits took the cross–content to fight on Latin soil against fellow Christians in return for an indulgence. Of all the criticisms levelled at the papacy by contemporaries for this dilution of the ‘crusading ideal’, the most telling was the frequent complaint that the true battlefield in the holy war lay in the East. It is certainly true that, over time, Rome’s redirection of crusade armies–both within western Europe and to other theatres of conflict in Iberia, the Baltic and the faltering state of Latin Romania–served further to isolate and enfeeble Frankish Outremer.

To begin with, the crusades were, at the very least, as much acts of Christian aggression as wars of defence. It is certainly true that Islam had initiated its own unprovoked surge of invasion and expansion in the seventh century, but the mercurial vigour of this onslaught had long since slackened. The First Crusade was not launched in response to an overwhelming and impending threat, nor was it the immediate result of any catastrophic loss. Jerusalem, the campaign’s averred goal, had been conquered by Muslims some four centuries earlier–hardly a recent injury. The accusations of widespread or systematic abuse of Christian subjects or pilgrims by the Islamic overlords of the Levant also appear to have had little basis in fact. After the First Crusade’s seemingly miraculous success and the foundation of the crusader states, the war for the Holy Land was perpetuated by cycles of violence, vengeance and reconquest, in which Christians and Muslims alike perpetrated acts of savage brutality.

From 1095 onwards, Latin Christians wholeheartedly accepted the idea that crusading was a permissible and efficacious form of devotion. There is virtually no sign of concern over the union of violence and religion among medieval contemporaries. And even when criticism of the crusading movement gathered pace, the questions raised related to issues such as wavering commitment and finance, not the basic principle that God would support and reward wars fought in his name.2

For both Islam and the West, perhaps the most striking transformation wrought by the crusades related to trade. Levantine Muslims already maintained some commercial contacts with Europe before the First Crusade through Italian seaborne merchants, but the volume and importance of this economic interaction were revolutionised in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely as a result of the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean. The crusades and the presence of the crusader states reconfigured Mediterranean trade routes–perhaps most powerfully after Constantinople’s conquest in 1204–and played a critical role in solidifying the power of the Italian mercantile cities of Venice, Pisa and Genoa. Europe’s adoption of Arabic numerals can also be dated to around 1200 and likely resulted from trade with Islam, though this cannot definitively be connected to contact with the ‘crusader’ world.

The crusades, in reality, are a potent, alarming and, in the early twenty-first century, distinctly dangerous example of the potential for history to be appropriated, misrepresented and manipulated. They also prove that a constructed past can still create its own reality, for the crusades have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion.