The medieval papacy frequently attempted to use its spiritual power to exhort temporal lords to perform service for it, notably during the invasion of England by William ‘the Conqueror’ in 1066, an enterprise encouraged and blessed by the pope because the English Church was schismatic. But the era of what are generally regarded as the Crusades began in November 1095 when Pope Urban II (1088-99) proposed a military expedition to seize Jerusalem, distant by some 2, 486 miles (4, 000 km) from Clermont where he preached, in a land strange to most of his hearers with an unfamiliar climate and occupied by people of an alien religion who were implacably hostile. No king had promised to take command, no one had shown interest in conquest there, and all who went would have to fund themselves. It was ideological warfare in the purest sense—men should leave their riches, their wives, and their lands to free Jerusalem from the infidel to gain an indulgence—release from the burden of sin, and, if death should overcome them, immediate entry into the kingdom of heaven.
But the knights to whom he addressed his appeal were familiar with the notion of Holy War and the Crusade was preached to them in terms comprehensible to a landowning aristocracy, of recovery of wrongly taken land: Innocent III (1198-1216) compared the crusader's duty to that of a vassal going to aid his dispossessed lord. Moreover Urban seems always to have envisaged the founding of states in the Middle East and rightful gain was the natural consequence of righteous war. Religious enthusiasm was undoubtedly the driving force of the Crusade, but it was spiced by the hope of gain. In the end about 100, 000 joined the Crusade and about 60, 000 entered Asia Minor in 1097.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus had planted the idea of a crusade by asking Urban II for mercenaries because he saw in the break-up of the Seljuk Turk empire an opportunity to reconquer Asia Minor. This was why the Crusade entered the Middle East at a moment of acute political fragmentation. This in part explains its success, but even so its achievement in liberating Jerusalem in July 1099 was remarkable, because it defeated powerful enemies—the Seljuks of Rhum, the successor states of the Seljuks in Syria, and the Fatimid caliphate of Cairo—all of which were capable of fielding great armies and outnumbering the crusaders, who had lost many men crossing Asia Minor. Moreover many of the crusaders' horses had perished on the march, so that their vital cavalry force was quite small. Able leadership—especially in the person of Bohemond who was a fine soldier—effective unity, and an unquenchable spirit of righteousness explain their success. They also enjoyed the support of allies, notably the Byzantines and the Armenians, and sea power which was essential especially to the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem. It was the seizure of these cities, in which the crusaders showed a high degree of military skill, that laid the basis for Latin rule in the Holy Land. The establishment of Latin bridgeheads in the Middle East at Edessa, Antioch, Jerusalem, and later Tripoli was a remarkable achievement, however a quarrel with Byzantium meant that there was no land-bridge to Jerusalem and so the flow of pilgrims and settlers from the west was limited to those coming by sea. As a result the Latin colonies needed support in the form of further crusades—crusading became an established part of medieval life, but it was an obligation observed as much in the breach as in the performance and was episodic and dependent on other western preoccupations.
The First Crusade suffered from certain problems which were to dog many later crusades. Its leaders were only imperfectly united and while they managed to cling together for much of the journey, after the capture of Antioch in June of 1098 they quarrelled. The army, which captured Jerusalem, was deeply divided and subsequently failed to seize Ascalon because divisions in its ranks became known to the enemy. In the Crusade of 1101, the Second Crusade of 1147, the Third of 1189, the Fourth of 1204, and the Fifth of 1213 the leadership was rent by bitter divisions, while on the Crusade of Theobald of Blois and Richard of Cornwall the two leaders never met. St Louis led an almost entirely French crusade but his military judgement was defective. Moreover on a crusade all participants were in theory equal, and while in practice they took to the Middle East the social structure of the West, major leaders had to control substantial men who owed them nothing. On the Second Crusade Louis VII's army suffered severely at Mt Cadmus because of indiscipline in the vanguard while in 1204 the great barons who had contracted with the Venetians for a fleet found that many crusaders would simply not acknowledge any share in their obligation. The Fifth Crusade was bedevilled by the coming and going of whole contingents of participants.
The First Crusade received considerable help from the Byzantine empire, but after Alexius failed to come to their aid when they were threatened with destruction in Antioch in June 1098, the crusaders permitted Bohemond to keep the city and opened a breach with the Byzantines, who were cool towards the Crusades of 1101 and 1147 and downright hostile by the time of the Third Crusade, when the Germans who started out under Frederick ‘Barbarossa’ had to fight their way through the empire. Not the least of the aid the First Crusade received from the Byzantines was naval assistance and a base on Cyprus without which the Genoese and English fleets would have found it very difficult to operate. Estrangement from Byzantium made naval support even more vital—its lack was felt by the Second Crusade. The Third Crusade had a great fleet, and all subsequent crusades relied totally on sea power to reach the Middle East: the Fourth Crusade failed largely because its leaders lacked ships of their own. The maritime superiority of the Italian city states was the basic condition which made crusades possible: after the First Crusade the Latin footholds in the Middle East desperately needed to control the Levantine ports and by 1124 all except Ascalon had fallen with the aid of Italian fleets. The price extracted by the cities was extraterritorial rights for their citizens in the Holy Land and a virtual monopoly of the trade in luxuries.
But the most significant change affecting the Crusades was the revival of the Islamic spirit, almost dead at the time of the First Crusade, which awoke as it became apparent that Islam faced a long-term threat. This was fostered by important leaders like Zengi (d. 1146) who recaptured Edessa in 1144, Nur ad-Din (1146-74) who united Syria and Egypt, and Saladin (1174-93) who reconquered Jerusalem and almost extinguished the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Under the Ayyubids, Saladin's descendants, the divisions of Islam reappeared, particularly between Syria/Palestine on the one hand and Egypt on the other, and the Crusades of the 13th century tried to profit from this. Frederick II in 1229 exploited the divisions between Damascus and Egypt to negotiate the restoration of Jerusalem and much of the kingdom, and Theobald of Champagne did the same in 1240. However after the failure of St Louis's Crusade in 1249, the rise of the Mamelukes in Egypt and their ambitions in Syria made such exploitation impossible. The Mongol irruption into Syria in the 1250s offered the crusader kingdom the opportunity to play them off against the Mamelukes, but the Franks hesitated to ally with such terrible people and in 1260 the Mamelukes defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut. Ultimately the Mameluke creation of a regular army and their defeat of further Mongols attacks doomed the crusader states, whose last bastion of Acre fell to the Mameluke sultan, Khalil, in 1291.
In the conflict between Middle Eastern and western warfare neither side had any technological advantage. However, warfare in the Middle East took place in a very different environment to that of the West and Islamic armies adopted tactics which were radically different. The population of the Middle East is concentrated in a few areas with large relatively empty spaces between and the close-hedged and wooded country typical of Europe is rare. In these circumstances infantry were far more vulnerable and cavalry far more vital. Availability of water, only occasionally a factor in western warfare, was always important in the dry climate. In tactical terms it was axiomatic that combat was settled by close-quarter struggle, but Islamic armies paid far more attention to the approach to this climax. There were heavy cavalry in Islamic armies, although they were rarely as heavily mounted as western knights were by the end of the 12th century, but they possessed light cavalry who could surround heavier forces, and in particular Turkish horse archers whose fire could weaken the cohesion of enemy units. The First Crusade was fortunate in that the Seljuks of Asia Minor were not numerous and were crushed at Dorylaeum by sheer numbers. The Crusade of 1101 and the Second Crusade were savaged by hit and run attacks, and although Richard ‘the Lionheart’ controlled the Third well enough to combat them, these were unfamiliar tactics which placed a heavy premium on a strict discipline rare at this time in western Europe.
It was hardly surprising that the crusading expeditions coming from the West for a short period in the Middle East clung to their own pattern of war. By the end of the first Crusade it had become clear that this could be adapted to counter Islamic methods. As the crusader army approached Ascalon in 1099 it flung its foot forward to protect the knights from light cavalry attacks and this pattern, if enforced with sharp discipline, proved very effective. Richard kept his troops in hand, notably at Arsuf, and St Louis tried to do the same, but his knights chafed at discipline, producing defeats such as that at Gaza in 1239.
The rise of Islamic unity obliged crusaders to think seriously about strategy. During the Third Crusade Richard came to believe that it would be better to strike at Egypt, the centre of Saladin's power, and thus restore the kingdom. This was the destination of the Fourth Crusade before its diversion to Constantinople, of the Fifth Crusade in 1218-21, of St Louis in 1249, and was considered by Theobald of Champagne in 1239. Crusading in the 13th century produced markedly better organized and directed armies but they were relatively small. St Louis's army was 15, 000 strong, barely adequate for the conquest of Egypt.
The Franks of the Middle East had a clear understanding of the strategic possibilities of their situation. The principality of Antioch in the north strove to seize Aleppo. The kingdom of Jerusalem at various times favoured an attack on Damascus or expansion into Egypt. The problem was that the principalities pursued their own policies independently and sometimes in rivalry with one another so that only on rare occasions was there any Frankish strategy.
To achieve their ends the Franks of the Latin kingdom had a highly effective army amenable to discipline and capable of close co-operation between horse and foot. It achieved this because its men were constantly fighting and so developed a formidable coherence. The Franks remained loyal to essentially western fighting methods with the concerted charge of the knights as their main weapon, but they recognized that this had to be timed carefully. They developed the co-operation of cavalry and infantry very highly in the fighting march which enabled their armies to travel in the presence of hostile forces This technique involved archers backed by pikemen forming a screen around cavalry squadrons to keep enemy horse archers out of range. If enemy cavalry formations became drawn into close-quarter battle they would then offer a target for the Frankish speciality—the mass charge, which properly delivered, was almost irresistible. In addition the crusaders used light cavalry and horse archers in large numbers to harass the enemy, to scout, and to supplement the knights.
But the great problem for the Franks was lack of numbers because of their remoteness from Europe and the lack of a land route to the Middle East. Crusades were spasmodic and tended to come in response to disaster: the zenith of crusading came in the half-century after the collapse of the kingdom in 1187. In the 12th century a Frankish population of about 120, 000-150, 000 could put 600 knights and 5, 000 foot into the field. The military monastic orders of the Hospital and the Temple, sworn to war with Islam, had a devotion and discipline that made them formidable. They could between them field 6, 000 knights and an unknown number of foot. The army of the kingdom could also be supplemented by pilgrims and mercenaries.
It is often supposed that the numerous castles of the Holy Land were an attempt to compensate for lack of numbers, but although castles served as useful bases most were relatively small and built as centres of lordships and only a few served any strategic purpose: Shawbak and Kerak east of the Dead Sea were established to threaten communications between Egypt and Syria. As the threat to the kingdom grew, more emphasis was placed on castle development. Belvoir, built by the Hospital c.1168, was a concentric castle and at Jacob's Ford in 1178 the Temple began a similar structure which Saladin destroyed. In the 13th century the military monastic orders constructed some massive and advanced fortifications at Crac des Chevaliers, Marqab, and Athlit. The real anchorages of the 12th-century kingdom were the fortified cities where most of the Franks lived. The strength of the cities enabled them to adopt Fabian tactics when Saladin invaded in 1183. They raised an army but simply shadowed Saladin and refused battle, preventing any attack on the cities.
In 1187 Saladin appeared with a huge army of about 30, 000 and once again Fabian tactics were suggested, but King Guy was a new and controversial king who needed a victory and many of the barons must have been anxious to punish Saladin for his constant and destructive raiding of the kingdom. The army of the kingdom marched out to battle and was overwhelmed at the battle of Hattin on 3-4 July—partly by sheer numbers for they were less than 20, 000 strong. Such was the scale of the defeat that there were almost no troops left in the kingdom which, except for Tyre, fell to Saladin.
Despite the efforts of the Third Crusade the crusading kingdom never recovered from this disaster. After the death of Amalric II (1197-1205) the kingdom sought a powerful western ruler. John of Brienne succeeded but he was replaced by the Emperor Frederick II in 1225. He restored the kingdom by treaty with Egypt in 1229, but his absolutism drove the barons into armed resistance and his return to Sicily meant that he could not win. The civil war in Jerusalem prevented the kingdom from exploiting either his success or that of Theobald of Champagne in 1240. Party strife within the kingdom meant that consistent policies could not be pursued. In 1244 a golden opportunity appeared when open war broke out between Damascus and Egypt. Under Templar influence the Franks supported Damascus and a huge allied army, including about 1, 000 knights and 5, 000 infantry provided by the kingdom, confronted 15, 000 Egyptians on 17 October at Harbiyah north of Gaza. The crusaders, certain of victory, demanded an all-out attack and when it failed they were cut to pieces—it was a defeat on the scale of Hattin. From now on the kingdom was militarily so weak that its fate clearly lay in the hands of others. St Louis's sojourn in the Holy Land 1250-4 gave much-needed leadership but thereafter the kingdom was highly unstable with the barons ranged around the real powers of the city states and the military monastic orders who quarrelled among themselves.
The fall of Acre in 1291 was not the end of crusading and the recovery of Jerusalem continued to be a preoccupation within Christendom down to modern times, but it became less and less of a force in the politics of the Christian West. Crusading was never confined to the Holy Land: as early as 1114 a crusade was proclaimed to Spain and Innocent III launched one against the heretics of southern France. The conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade was welcomed in the West as the restoration of Orthodoxy and sustaining the Latin states of Greece who enjoyed the rewards of crusading. The conquest of the pagans of the Baltic and eastern Europe was one of the great triumphs of crusading. The Church recruited vigorously to support the tiny Christian settlements of the area. A number of military monastic orders were founded to carry the brunt of the fighting, notably the Sword-Brothers in Livonia. By the end of the 13th century the Teutonic Order moved the focus of its activities from the Holy Land to become a great political force leading the crusade and establishing a principality out of which grew Prussia. The Baltic Crusade attracted the aristocracy of Europe and succeeded in part because heavy cavalry and the crossbow were unknown to the Baltic peoples who lacked the resources and organization to sustain them. Moreover German trade, a major reason for interest in the area, provided shipping for the conquest.
The papal right to launch a crusade was undoubted, but failure in the Holy Land, manipulation of crusading for papal interests in Italy, and the problems of the papacy in the 14th century, undermined the whole movement. The Crusades ultimately failed in their primary theatre, the Middle East, but their history illustrates the remarkable durability and adaptability of European military methods.
Bibliography
- France, J., Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge, 1994).
- Housley, N., Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From Lyons to Alcázar (Oxford, 1992).
- Kennedy, H., Crusader Castles (Cambridge, 1994).
- Marshall, C., Warfare in the Latin East (Cambridge, 1992).
- Riley-Smith, J., The Crusades: A Short History (London, 1987).
- Smail, R. C., Crusading Warfare (Cambridge, 1956)
— John France
