The+Crusades

Back to Hist. 151 Page

Terms to know:

Alexius Comnenus Pope Gregory VII //Dictatus Papae// Henry IV Urban II Peace of Christ Christendom Sala al-Din

There were eight Crusades, but the first four are the ones that Historians see as most important in understanding the causes and effects of this centuries long clash in the Middle East. The First Crusade began in 1095, and the fourth ended in 1204. This is the period that I’ll be talking about here. The causes of the Crusades are numerous, as with any other historical event of this magnitude. We’ll narrow it down to four,though I hope you’ll be sure to make a mental note that there is more to it that this.

First, as the Catholic Church emerged from the control of Kings, particularly the dynasty founded by Otto I in the 10th century, Popes and church reformers were looking for ways to assert their independence, and their power. To be able to recruit and send an army to the Holy Land was one way to prove to kings that the Church was powerful in a material and secular way, as well as in terms of its spiritual mission – a way, if you will, to get the kings off the Popes’ backs. Second, the Church reformers saw in the Crusades an opportunity to complete their project of pacifying Europe by sending away large numbers of noble men whose only occupation seemed to be to fight each other and anyone else who stepped in their way. Third, those who went on the Crusades saw an opportunity to increase their wealth, gain property, and in the case of nobles, set up independent kingdoms or princedoms of their own. Fourth, the Church hoped to promote pilgrimage to Jerusalem by making the route safe and putting the city under the control of Christians – this, they hoped, would promote the popularity of the Catholic Church, just as pilgrimage within Europe was already increasing religious fervor. Ironically, the opportunity to meet these goals came in 1195 in the form of a message from **Alexius Comnenus**, then the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire, asking for some assistance in resisting incursions by Turkish warring bands.

Other events that enabled the Crusades included a Church-wide interest in reforming Catholic practice to coincide with new, and radical, Cluniac ideas. The monks at the Monastery of Cluny had, by 1095, been radical reformers in the Catholic Church for nearly a century already. They advocated a unified Catholic Church in which secular kings and princes had no say in who became bishops in the church, a more participative vision of Catholicism, reform of the informal practice of allowing secular clergy to marry, and reversal of the, at the time, control by secular kings of Church offices and acts. For the monks at Cluny, a strong Pope, who could assert not only his independence from the kings and aristocrats in Europe, but could also claim superiority to them in a political as well as spiritual sense was an important goal.


 * Pope Gregory VII** was a strict churchman who upheld in his own personal philosophy, and in his long service to popes before himself, some of the key convictions of members of the Cluniac reform movement. In 1073, the year he was elected pope, he issued the famous **//Dictatus Papae//**, in which he asserted the supremacy of the Pope over all earthly rulers. His steadfast opposition to the practice of lay investiture (a practice whereby a lay, or non-ordained, ruler of a territory would invest a priest with his office, or, more importantly, appoint bishops locally) led him into conflict with **Henry IV**, Holy Roman Emperor. In 1076, Henry had Gregory deposed at the Synod of Worms, and Gregory’s response was to excommunicate Henry and absolve his subjects of their responsibilities toward the king. This had the effect of sanctioning the attempts by many of the German princes to weaken Henry IV, and their activities and pronouncements for the Pope in the affair threatened to destabilize Henry’s empire. Eventually, Henry IV had to do penance before the Pope, and he was readmitted to the Church, but Gregory remained neutral as to whether his subjects were still absolved from obedience to him. The German Princes continued their political activities and set up a rival king, about which neither the Pope nor his representatives said anything – clearly, the situation was a difficult one. Eventually, Henry threatened Gregory with force, and Gregory had to leave Rome. Henry installed a new Pope, Clement III, as a kind of puppet, in 1084, and Gregory died in exile. His attempts to expand the power of the Pope, though, to the degree that the Pope could be thought of as God’s delegate on Earth, and thus ruler of all, were what was most at issue here, and explain to a great degree why a later Pope, Urban II, would be motivated to preach the First Crusade, at least in part, as a way to both raise an army (to show the nobles of Europe that the Pope could do such a thing) and to occupy Europe’s warrior and ruling classes with an exterior enemy in such a way that success would mean greater influence for the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, and greater power for the Pope within Europe.

The Church, led in 1095 by **Urban II**, also saw the First Crusade, at least, as an opportunity to pacify Europe by getting rid of its more violent elements. By this time the Church had been successful in limiting the endemic violence of many of the peoples in the former Western Roman Empire, partly through urging a re-evaluation of morals, and partly by extending the so-called “**Peace of Christ**” – a church rule whereby no fighting was allowed on Sundays and Holy Days. This Peace of Christ was eventually extended so that no violence was to be tolerated in Europe between Thursday and Monday each week, and during holy periods.

Alexius Comnenus’ letter, however, opened a new possibility. If the Pope were able to pacify Europe simply by getting the chief elements of violence away from the place – say, on a nice jaunt in the Middle East, where they could knock heads with people not part of the Catholic Church, and in the process could send home riches and open the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem for European pilgrims, his job would be significantly easier. And this is in fact what he did – preaching that it was “less wicked” to kill Muslims in battle than to kill each other. As Muslims were not Christian, but other Europeans were (legally had to be, unless they were Jewish) the enemy and his location were conveniently defined – and foreign.

This had the effect, also, of creating a common enemy by which the banners of a unified “**Christendom**” under the political patronage of the Pope as the mouthpiece of God, could be used to call all Europeans, if not to the crusade, then to a common purpose under a common leadership. Pope urban was, in fact, creating a kind of pan-European identity through the cultural components of Christianity and the common experience of war that would allow him to assert his political supremacy over kings and princes in Europe, as well as to show the kings and princes in Europe that he had the wherewithal to create a large and powerful army, and, simultaneously, empty Europe of its violent elements, thus promoting peace and unity within Charlemagne’s former territories.

This neat package could not likely have been constructed so easily or cheaply, if at all, without the subterfuge of the crusades against the Muslims as its rationale.

So, in 1095, Pope Urban II preached the first crusade, and promised both untold rewards to those who went, and, to those who began but turned back, excommunication and eternal damnation. He provided a blanket indulgence to participants in the crusade – essentially prior forgiveness for whatever sinful acts might be committed in the act of retaking the Holy Land (it had never been under the control of either Christians or Europeans before, so it really couldn’t be “re-taken”, but that was their terminology). These acts provided the one-two punch of commitment – once you agree to go and start to wear the red cross, you have to follow through or die trying – and the extra-legal status of crusaders, which, combined with the assertion that since Muslims were not Christians they were also not fully human, meant that crusaders could do just about anything to their enemy (in most cases unsuspecting enemy) without fear of divine reprisal or temporal legal consequences. The only thing they couldn’t do was turn back.

But, all the legal jargon aside, why did people, both noble and common, join the crusade? By all accounts, the Pope, and certainly Emperor Alexius Comnenus of the Byzantine Empire, got more than they had bargained for. Why did aristocrats agree to lead armies against people they had never seen before, in places they had barely imagined? Why did commoners follow those armies to the holy land?

The question of nobility seems to have less to do with religious zeal than with ambition and greed. Many of the aristocratic leaders of the Crusades were “on the make” – second sons of barons who would inherit little or nothing – or first sons, even sitting nobles whose fortunes had fallen, or who were looking to augment their landholdings with territory. The Pope promised that any property taken from the Muslims (then called the Saracens) on the journey to Jerusalem could be kept. These nobles wanted to conquer kingdoms, gain the income from trade and taxes, and improve their positions financially and politically.

The same was often true for commoners, though it is also true that commoners more than nobles made the journey for reasons of faith – pilgrimage – as well. Still, the idea, to a poor peasant who was renting land and barely surviving (which was true of most peasants in Europe at the time) that he could take his family and go on the crusade, grab some new land on the way, make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then come back to property in the Middle East that his family owned, rather than rented, was almost too good to pass up.

Given the fact that the Pope had also characterized the Crusade as a mission to make the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem safe for Christians (another subterfuge – Christians were not attacked statistically more than anyone else on this route, nor was there much violence at all, as the Turks were very good at keeping order), and that Europeans were used to going on Pilgrimages to various holy churches and shrines within Europe, during which they could escape the incessant labor of their daily lives, and perhaps be cured or specially blessed by a saint, it is no surprise that many common people saw a combined opportunity for pilgrimage to the holiest city in Christian tradition and the chance to acquire new property as very tempting. Many left with just the clothes on their backs, taking up the cross, as it were (a red cloth cross sewn to their garments to mark them as Crusaders) and left for the Holy Land without even water or a meal for the day.

These motivations, then, are what led Europeans to begin the First Crusade in 1095 (they did not reach Constantinople until 1098), and to do great violence to the Turks, and others they found along their way, in the process.

The surprise achieved by this ad hoc army is clear in the response of the Muslim nations who were affected by it. Europeans marched rather quickly through Anatolia, meeting some resistance here and there, and finding that their armor and weapons were often no match for the technology and fighting techniques of the Muslims, but generally overwhelming the smaller, local armies they met.

The responsibility eventually fell to a commander and prince from Egypt, **Sala al-Din** (the famous Saladin), who moved his army up through Jerusalem and met the Europeans on their way. Saladin fought well, but was eventually driven back before the Europeans, who set up several kingdoms (known collectively as the Crusader States) and conquered Jerusalem (where the first massacre they conducted, contrary to the Pope’s instructions, was not against Muslims or non-believers at all, but in a Christian Church, during Mass, where, according the Crusader accounts, huge numbers of people were slain and blood ran deep enough to cover shoes.

Eventually, Sala al-Din was able to retake Jerusalem, and the other Crusader Kingdoms fell to him and his successors one by one, until by 1204, the Crusader states no longer existed, and the Fourth Crusade, intended to relieve besieged Crusader castles in the Middle East and help restore the Crusader states, never made it beyond Constantinople, which they sacked, after first receiving a large bribe and transport from the city of Venice to destroy a Christian city that was Venice’s main rival in trade at the time.

Primarily, it seems clear, we should view the Crusades not as a religious movement, but as a political act – or series of acts – whose purpose was to cement the establishment of the roman Catholic Papacy as the primary temporal power in Europe, along with its spiritual supremacy. The Spiritual side of the Church both enabled the Crusades, and was strengthened, at least temporarily, by the rationale for war that Pope Urban II (extending Gregory VII’s policies) set forth. The goals: to unify Europe politically, rid Europe of its most violent and contentious elements who were an obstacle to that unification, and show the aristocracy of Europe that the pope had the ability to raise and army – a language that they understood far better than the arguments about religious doctrine.