Crusades

14th-century miniature of the Battle of Dorylaeum (1147), a Second Crusade battle, from the Estoire d'Eracles

The Crusades were a series of military campaigns launched by the papacy between 1095 and 1291 against Muslim rulers for the recovery and defence of the Holy Land, as part of a wider crusading movement. The First Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095—a call to arms for Christians to reconquer Jerusalem from the Muslims, with promises of spiritual reward. By this time, the papacy's position as head of the Catholic Church had strengthened, and earlier conflicts with secular rulers and wars on the frontiers of Western Christendom had prepared it for the direction of armed force in religious causes. The successes of the First Crusade led to the establishment of four Crusader states in the Levant, whose defence required further expeditions from Catholic Europe. The organisation of such large-scale campaigns demanded complex religious, social, and economic institutions, including crusade indulgences, military orders, and the taxation of clerical income. Over time, the crusading movement expanded to include campaigns against pagans, Christian dissidents, and other enemies of the papacy, promoted with similar spiritual rewards and continuing into the 18th century.

The Crusade of 1101, the earliest papally sanctioned expedition inspired by the First Crusade, ended in disastrous defeats. For several decades thereafter, only smaller expeditions reached the Holy Land, yet their role in consolidating and expanding the Crusader states was pivotal. The fall of Edessa, the capital of the first Crusader state, prompted the Second Crusade, which failed in 1148. Its failure reduced support for crusading across Latin Christendom, leaving the Crusader states unable to resist Saladin's expansion. Having united Egypt and Muslim Syria under his rule, Saladin destroyed their combined armies at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. The Crusader states survived largely owing to the Third Crusade, a major campaign against Saladin, though Jerusalem remained under Muslim control. Initially directed against Egypt, the Fourth Crusade was diverted to the Byzantine Empire, culminating in the Sack of Constantinople and the establishment of the Latin Empire in 1204. The Fifth Crusade again targeted Egypt but failed to conquer it in 1219–21. By this period, crusade indulgences could also be obtained through other campaigns—such as the Iberian, Albigensian, and Northern Crusades—thereby diminishing enthusiasm for expeditions in the eastern Mediterranean.

Jerusalem was regained through negotiation during the Sixth Crusade in 1229, and in 1239–41 the Barons' Crusade restored much of the territory the Crusader states had lost. However, the Sack of Jerusalem by Muslim freebooters soon ended Crusader rule in the Holy City. Louis IX of France launched two major campaigns—the Seventh Crusade against Egypt in 1248–51 and the Eighth Crusade against Tunis in 1270—both of which ended in failure. In place of the large-scale passagium generale, the smaller passagium particulare became the predominant form of crusading campaigns in the late 13th century. The Crusader states, however, were unable to withstand the advance of the Mamluks. Having reunited Egypt and Muslim Syria by 1260, they went on to attack the Crusader states, capturing the Crusaders' last mainland strongholds in 1291. Although plans for the reconquest of the Holy Land continued to be made in the following decades, only the Alexandrian Crusade briefly revived crusading activity in the region in 1365.

Terminology

The Crusades were military campaigns undertaken by Western Christians to reclaim the Holy Land, or Palestine, from Muslim control between the 11th and 13th centuries. Launched by the papacy with promises of spiritual reward, they were occasionally accompanied by unauthorised movements—driven by popular zeal—commonly referred to as popular crusades. In scholarly usage, the term is frequently applied more broadly to include papally authorised conflicts in other regions, conducted within the wider framework of the crusading movement, including the Iberian, Northern and Albigensian Crusades.

Terminology evolved gradually, primarily reflecting the close association between the Crusades and Christian pilgrimage. Early usage favoured terms denoting mobility—iter ('journey'), expeditio ('expedition'), passagium ('passage')—typically accompanied by references to the intended destination, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Other early expressions invoked the cross (crux), and by around 1250, canon lawyers were distinguishing between campaigns in the Holy Land—crux transmarina ('the cross overseas')—and those within Europe—crux cismarina ('the cross this side of the sea'). Participants, who traditionally sewed a cross onto their garments, came to be known as crucesignati ('those signed with the cross').

Vernacular terminology reflected the ritual of "taking the cross". The earliest attested form, crozada, appeared in Spain in 1212. The Middle English croiserie, derived from Old French, emerged in the 13th–14th centuries, later supplanted by forms such as croisade and crusado, both influenced by Spanish through French. The modern term crusade was established by 1706. The medievalist Thomas Asbridge notes that the term's conventional use by historians imposes "a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity" on the earliest crusading efforts.

Background

Sites linked to Jesus's ministry became popular pilgrimage destinations in Roman Palestine. Christian emperors built churches at these locations, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, marking Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem. In 395, the Roman Empire split into eastern and western halves. The Western Roman Empire had fragmented into smaller kingdoms by 476, while the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire persisted, though it lost vast territories to the rising Islamic Caliphate in the 7th century. Jerusalem fell to Caliph Umar in 638. Islamic expansion, motivated by jihad (holy war), reached Western Europe with the Muslim conquest of much of the Iberian Peninsula after 711. Christians under Muslim rule were dhimmi—legally protected but socially subordinate. Islam's ideological unity fractured over disputes about leadership. The Shi'a believed authority belonged to the descendants of Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali, while the Sunni majority rejected the Alids' hereditary claim. By the mid-10th century, three rival caliphates had emerged: the Umayyads in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), the Shi'ite Fatimids in Egypt, and the Abbasids in the Middle East.

To Muslim observers, such as Ibn Khordadbeh, the remote and less developed Western Europe was merely a source of slaves and raw materials. However, between c. 950 and c. 1070, drought and cold spells across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia led to famine and migration. Interfaith tensions escalated, culminating in the temporary destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. From the 1040s, nomadic Turkomans disrupted the Middle East. In 1055, their leader Tughril I of the Seljuk clan assumed authority within the Abbasid Caliphate with Caliph Al-Qa'im's consent. Tughril's nephew Alp Arslan crushed the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, opening Anatolia to Turkoman migration. The Seljuk Empire emerged as a loose federation of provinces ruled by Seljuk princes, Turkoman warlords and Arab emirs. As Byzantine control collapsed, Armenian and Greek strongmen took over frontier cities and fortresses.

From the mid-9th century, central authority in Western Europe weakened, and local lords gained power, commanding heavily armoured knights and holding castles. Their territorial disputes made warfare a regular feature across regions. To protect church property and unarmed groups, church leaders launched the Peace of God movement, threatening offenders with excommunication. As sins permeated daily life, Christians feared damnation. Sinners were expected to confess and undertake priestly prescribed penance. Thousands made the penitential journey to Jerusalem, though attacks on pilgrims became increasingly frequent.

From c. 1000, the Medieval Warm Period favoured Western Europe, spurring economic and population growth. Within a century, Italian merchants supplanted their Muslim and Jewish rivals as the leading force in Mediterranean trade. In 1031, al-Andalus fragmented into taifas—smaller kingdoms—that could not resist the Reconquista—the expansion of the northern Christian states—prompting intervention by the radical Almoravids from the Maghreb. In southern Italy, Norman warriors from northern France founded principalities and completed the conquest of Muslim Sicily by 1091.

In the mid-11th century, clerics promoting the "liberty of the Church" rose to power in Rome, banning simony and clerical marriage. The popes, regarded as successors to Saint Peter in Rome, claimed supremacy over Christendom, but Eastern Christian leaders rejected this. Combined with long-standing liturgical and theological differences, this led to mutual excommunications in 1054 and ultimately the division between the Catholic West and Orthodox East. Reformist clerics' rejection of lay control triggered the Investiture Controversy with secular powers. Popes had already courted allies by offering spiritual rewards, and the Controversy revived interest in the theology of just war, first articulated by Augustine in the 5th century. Theologians, under Pope Gregory VII's auspices, concluded that dying in a just war equated to martyrdom. Still, the idea of penitential warfare drew sharp criticism from anti-papal figures like Sigebert of Gembloux.

First Crusade

By the late 11th century, the development of Christian just war theory, increasing aristocratic piety, and the popularity of penitential journeys to the Holy Land created a context for armed pilgrimages. Strengthened by the church reforms, the papacy was well positioned to channel anxiety over sin and hopes of remission into a papally orchestrated war. In 1074, Gregory VII was the first pope to plan a campaign against the Turkomans, though it was never launched. In March 1095, his successor, Urban II, received envoys from Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who requested military aid at the Council of Piacenza.

By this time, the Seljuk Empire had descended into civil war following the deaths of Vizier Nizam al-Mulk and Sultan Malik-Shah I in 1092. Malik-Shah's brother Tutush I contested the succession of Malik-Shah's son Berkyaruq. Although Tutush was killed in battle in 1095, his sons Ridwan and Duqaq, seized control of the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus, respectively, while Tutush's former mamluk (slave soldier), Yaghi-Siyan, maintained his rule over Antioch. In Anatolia, the breakaway Seljuk prince Kilij Arslan I founded the independent Sultanate of Rum, while an autonomous Turkoman clan, the Danishmendids, seized control of the north.

Meanwhile, Fatimid Egypt faced its own succession crisis after the deaths of Caliph al-Mustansir and his vizier al-Jamali. Al-Jamali's son and successor al-Afdal Shahanshah installed al-Mustansir's youngest son al-Musta'li as caliph bypassing the eldest son Nizar. Although Nizar was murdered, his supporters rejected al-Musta'li's legitimacy and established a new branch of radical Shi'a Islam—the Nizaris, also known as the Assassins.

Council of Clermont and its aftermath

In July 1095, Pope Urban began a tour of France, negotiating with local elites, and ending with the Council of Clermont. Here, on 27 November, he announced a military campaign against the Turkomans. According to most accounts, he urged military support for eastern Christians, promising spiritual rewards, and condemning knightly violence. Accounts differ on whether he promised reduced penance or full remission of sin. Urban's appeal reportedly prompted the crowd to cry Deus vult! ('God wills it!'). The ritual of "taking the cross" was introduced on the spot, with Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy setting the precedent. He was soon appointed papal legate.

Urban held further councils in France, and set 15 August—two weeks after the harvest began—as the campaign's start date. His message spread mainly through those present at Clermont, leaving much of Western Europe unaware of the crusade. He also urged Catalan counts not to join, granting them equal spiritual rewards for fighting the Almoravids, marking an early instance of crusading in Iberia.

People's Crusade

Pope Urban sought to restrict enlistment to trained warriors, but popular enthusiasm proved uncontrollable. The charismatic Peter the Hermit preached in regions Urban had avoided, reportedly bearing a heavenly letter urging the expulsion of "pagans" from the Holy Land. He attracted thousands of peasants and townsfolk, alongside some nobles such as Walter Sans Avoir. In Germany, the preachers Folkmar and Gottschalk assembled similar groups.

Several contingents departed before the harvest, from March 1096. Walter and Peter each led forces of 10,000–15,000. While travelling, Peter threatened Jewish communities in pursuit of provisions. King Coloman of Hungary granted market access, but during their passage the host, by then c. 20,000 people, plundered the border town of Zemun. Entering Byzantine territory in June, their continued looting provoked imperial raids, causing severe losses. Meanwhile, Folkmar and Gottschalk's 15,000-strong host was destroyed by Coloman on Hungary's western frontier in July. A parallel rising under the Swabian count Emicho launched the anti-Jewish Rhineland massacres in western Germany, beginning at Speyer on 3 May 1096. Despite episcopal efforts at protection, his force spread anti-semitic violence until Hungarian troops dispersed it in mid-July.

Walter reached Constantinople on 20 July, Peter on 1 August. Distrustful of their disorder, Emperor Alexios shipped them across the Bosporus to Anatolia. Germans captured the Seljuk fortress of Xerigordos, but it was retaken by the Turkomans on 29 September. Kilij Arslan destroyed the crusaders at Civetot on 21 October; Peter survived with a few followers.

Princes' Crusade

No crowned ruler joined the First Crusade, largely because of tensions with the Church. The first major noble to depart was Hugh of Vermandois, brother of King Philip I of France. Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, set off in August 1096, followed by Bohemond of Taranto, a veteran of anti-Byzantine campaigns, in October, and Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, who led the largest force. Other leaders included Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy; Stephen of Blois; and Robert II of Flanders. Their armies, as the historian Thomas Madden notes, were "a curious mix of rich and poor, saints and sinners", motivated by both faith and gain. As a knight's participation could cost four years' income, it was often financed through loans or donations; the less wealthy joined noble retinues.

At Constantinople, tensions with the Byzantines resulted in skirmishes. Emperor Alexios demanded oaths from the crusader leaders to return former Byzantine lands before allowing passage into Anatolia. The crusading host numbered 60,000–100,000, including 30,000 non-combatants and up to 7,000 knights. Exploiting Seljuk distractions, the crusaders and Byzantines captured Nicaea in June 1097 and advanced toward Antioch, once a Byzantine provincial capital in Syria. They repelled Kilij Arslan's lightly armoured cavalry at the Battle of Dorylaeum.

After a gruelling march, c. 40,000 crusaders reached Antioch and began the city's prolonged siege in October 1097. During this time, Baldwin of Boulogne—Godfrey's brother—left with 100 knights and, with Armenian support, seized fortresses and the city of Edessa, founding the first Crusader state, the County of Edessa, in March 1098. The Seljuk general Kerbogha assembled a 40,000-strong army in Iraq, but arrived in June after Bohemond had secured Antioch through collusion with a guard. The crusaders massacred the Muslim inhabitants and some of the native Christians. Despite famine, disease, and desertion, they—encouraged by the mystic Peter Bartholomew—defeated Kerbogha at the Battle of Antioch on 28 June 1098.

The march on Jerusalem was halted due to intense summer heat and a plague that claimed Adhemar of Le Puy's life. In the Byzantines' absence, Bohemond persuaded the other leaders to recognise his rule over Antioch, establishing a new Crusader state, the Principality of Antioch. The crusade resumed under pressure from the common soldiers in November. After massacring the defenders of Ma'arra, the crusaders were granted safe passage by local Muslim rulers. They reached Jerusalem, then held by a Fatimid governor, on 7 June 1099. The siege stalled until Genoese craftsmen arrived with supplies. Their siege towers enabled the crusaders to conquer the city on 15 July. Over the next two days, they slaughtered the population and looted the city. Godfrey was elected Jerusalem's first Western ruler, while Arnulf of Chocques, a Norman priest, was named the first Latin patriarch. Meanwhile, al-Afdal mobilised c. 20,000 Egyptian troops to retake the city, but the crusaders—roughly 9,000 infantry and 1,200 knights—defeated his army at the Battle of Ascalon on 12 August. With their vow fulfilled, most crusaders returned home, leaving Godfrey with just 300 knights and 2,000 foot soldiers.

Conquest, consolidation and defence

The historian Malcolm Barber notes that the Crusader states' creation "committed western Europeans to crusading for the foreseeable future". In the century after the First Crusade, the resurgence of Muslim unity shaped Middle Eastern history. During the first half of this period, the Franks sought Western military aid only four times; between 1149 and 1186, they made at least sixteen such appeals.

Aftermath of the First Crusade

The Italian merchant republics pledged naval aid for the crusade but needed time to prepare. The Pisan fleet of 120 ships arrived under Archbishop Daimbert in September 1099. As papal legate, he deposed Arnulf and was installed patriarch on Christmas Day, with Godfrey and Bohemond doing homage to him. Meanwhile, Tancred, Bohemond's nephew, completed the conquest of Galilee.

Vitale I Michiel, Doge of Venice, soon arrived with over 200 ships. After Godfrey's unexpected death on 18 July 1100, the Venetians helped Tancred take Haifa. Daimbert, seeking to make Jerusalem an ecclesiastical lordship, lost support when Bohemond was captured by the Danishmendid Gazi Gümüshtigin in August. Meanwhile, Godfrey's followers invited Baldwin of Boulogne to succeed him. Before going to Jerusalem, Baldwin granted Edessa to his cousin Baldwin of Bourcq, then seized Jerusalem and forced Daimbert to crown him king on Christmas Day. Within nine months, he captured Arsuf and Caesarea with Genoese aid, and defeated a superior Egyptian force at the First Battle of Ramla.

Crusade of 1101

After Antioch's capture, crusader leaders wrote to senior Catholic clerics urging them to rally oath-breakers. In December 1100, Pope Urban's successor Paschal II launched a new crusade. Nicknamed the "Crusade of the Faint-Hearted", it included deserters such as Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois. The first contingent, led by Anselm, Archbishop of Milan and Albert of Biandrate, left Lombardy in September 1100. The Lombards reportedly aimed at Baghdad or Egypt, and even attacked the Blachernae Palace in Constantinople before being ferried to Anatolia in early 1101.

They were soon joined by French and German forces led by William IX of Aquitaine, William II of Nevers, Welf I of Bavaria, the widowed Marchioness Ida of Austria, and Archbishop Thiemo of Salzburg. Reaching Constantinople in June, they met Raymond of Saint-Gilles. Ignoring his and Stephen's warnings, the Lombards pressed to free Bohemond. Joined by other crusaders, they advanced into eastern Anatolia, but were crushed at the Battle of Mersivan in August by a coalition of Turkoman rulers. William of Nevers' army, heading south, was almost destroyed at Heraclea, where a third mainly German force was also routed. Ida vanished, later giving rise to tales she became mother of the powerful Turkoman ruler Zengi.

The failure of the 1101 Crusade shattered crusader invincibility, with Westerners chiefly blaming Byzantines. Few survived. William of Aquitaine, Welf, and Stephen regrouped at Antioch, aiding Raymond and Genoese allies in capturing Tortosa. Some, including Stephen, reached the Holy Land, where he died at the Second Battle of Ramla on 17 May 1102. On that occasion Egyptians caught the crusaders by surprise, but survivors redeemed themselves at the Battle of Jaffa ten days later.

Bohemond's crusade

Bohemond of Antioch secured his release by ransom, exploiting Danishmendid–Seljuk conflict. He supported Baldwin II of Edessa in an attack on Harran, but in May 1104, Jikirmish, atabeg (governor) of Mosul, defeated them at the Battle of Harran. Jikirmish's victory allowed Ridwan to retake border fortresses, while the Byzantines expelled Antiochene garrisons from Cilicia.

Seeking support in the West, Bohemond left Tancred in charge of Antioch in autumn 1104. Pope Paschal named Bishop Bruno of Segni as papal legate to promote a crusade for Jerusalem in France. Though highly regarded, Bohemond drew only lesser nobles like Hugh of Le Puiset and Robert of Vieux-Pont to take the cross. He then chose to invade the Byzantine Empire from Italy, accusing the Byzantines of heresy. In October 1107, he besieged the fortress of Dyrrachium, but Alexios had reinforced its defences, allied with Venetians, and, with Turkoman mercenaries, blockaded Bohemond's army. Bohemond had to withdraw and accept Byzantine suzerainty over Antioch in the 1108 Treaty of Devol, but Tancred did not implement the treaty.

Coastal towns

King Baldwin I of Jerusalem expanded his realm to secure defence and attract knights with rewards. Naval aid for coastal conquests came from Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians, compensated with trade privileges. He captured Acre in 1104 and Beirut and Sidon in 1110. Sigurd I of Norway, the first crowned monarch on crusade, assisted at Sidon. Baldwin's position was strengthened by Duqaq of Damascus's death. Though Duqaq's successor, Toghtekin joined an Egyptian invasion, the Muslim coalition was defeated at the Third Battle of Ramla in 1105. Around the same time, the Damascene scholar Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami urged Muslim unity in jihad against the Franks.

Raymond of Saint Gilles began the Siege of Tripoli in 1103 but died within two years. A dispute between his son Bertrand of Toulouse and cousin William Jordan was resolved by King Baldwin at the Council of Tripoli. Soon after, Frankish forces with Genoese aid seized the city in July 1109. William Jordan was killed, leaving Bertrand sole ruler of the County of Tripoli.

Tripoli's fall alarmed the Muslim world. The Seljuk sultan Muhammad I Tapar ordered Mawdud, atabeg of Mosul to invade, but his campaigns of 1110–13 failed amid desertions. In 1115 his successor Aqsunqur also failed at Edessa. That year Toghtekin sheltered his kinsman Ilghazi, angering the Sultan. Toghtekin allied with Tancred's successor in Antioch, Roger, who defeated the Sultan's army at the Battle of Sarmin on 14 September 1115. Meanwhile, Ridwan's death in 1113 sparked a succession crisis in Aleppo, enabling Roger to exact tribute from the city.

Venetian Crusade

Baldwin I of Jerusalem died of illness during a campaign against Egypt on 2 April 1118. He was succeeded by Baldwin of Bourcq, who ceded Edessa to his kinsman Joscelin I. Facing Roger of Antioch's repeated demands for tribute, the Aleppans appealed to Ilghazi, who with Toghtekin's aid invaded Antiochene lands. They defeated Roger at the Battle of the Field of Blood on 28 June 1119, where some 700 knights and 3,000 infantry perished along with Roger. Antioch was saved by Baldwin II of Jerusalem, who became regent for the absent Bohemond II, son of Bohemond I.

Amid famine and military disaster, Jerusalem's leaders met at the Council of Nablus in 1120, issuing decrees against sexual offences such as sodomy and relations with Muslims. Patriarch Warmund approved Hugues de Payens' knightly confraternity, whose members vowed poverty, chastity, obedience, and protection of pilgrims. This marked the birth of the military orders. Baldwin II installed them in the former Al-Aqsa Mosque, identified by the Franks as Solomon's Temple, whence their name Knights Templar.

Seeking aid, Baldwin II sent envoys to the West. Pope Paschal urged the Venetian doge Domenico Michiel to lead a naval expedition. As regent Baldwin prioritised Antioch's defence, though it was unpopular in Jerusalem. After Ilghazi's death, his nephew Belek Ghazi captured Joscelin and, in April 1123, Baldwin himself. In his absence Patriarch Warmund concluded the Pactum Warmundi with Venice, securing the conquest of Tyre on 7 July 1124. Baldwin returned to Jerusalem in April 1125.

Crusade of 1129

Aqsunqur united Aleppo and Mosul, recovering much territory from the Franks before his assassination in 1126. That year Bohemond II assumed power in Antioch, but his conflict with Joscelin I of Edessa prevented him from exploiting unrest in Aleppo. In 1127 the Turkoman commander Zengi became atabeg of Mosul.

In preparation for a major offensive against Damascus, Baldwin II of Jerusalem sent envoys to Europe to raise troops and arrange the marriage of his heir, Melisende. Her betrothal to Fulk V of Anjou included the promise of joint succession. In May 1128 Toghtekin of Damascus died, succeeded by his son Buri, while Zengi reunited Aleppo with Mosul.

Fulk arrived in May 1129 and married Melisende. Though lacking papal sanction, the Crusade of 1129 drew some 60,000 warriors. The Franks invaded Damascene territory in November, but a sortie routed their foragers. On hearing of this, the main force withdrew, perhaps also driven by a violent storm.

Internal conflicts

In February 1130 Bohemond II of Antioch was killed in a skirmish. His widow Alice—daughter of Baldwin II of Jerusalem—sought power with Zengi's support, but Baldwin assumed the regency for her daughter by Bohemond, Constance. When Baldwin died on 21 August 1131, Fulk and Melisende succeeded him in Jerusalem, while Fulk secured the regency in Antioch by defeating Alice's allies Pons of Tripoli and Joscelin II of Edessa. Muslim pressure mounted: Zengi plundered Antioch and Edessa, and Buri's successor, Ismail of Damascus raided Jerusalemite and Tripolitan lands, causing Pons's death.

In 1136, Fulk arranged Constance's marriage to the French Raymond of Poitiers. The next year Raymond did homage to Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos, but John's campaigns against Aleppo and Shaizar failed. Zengi took Homs, but his assault on Damascus was repelled by the city's new ruler Unur allied with Fulk. Fulk died in a hunting accident on 10 November 1143. His reign saw the Hospitallers evolve from a nursing confraternity into a military order. The widowed Melisende resisted sharing power with their son Baldwin III.

Second Crusade

In the early 1140s Zengi sought dominance over Muslim rivals, notably the Artuqids in Iraq. Kara Arslan, an Artuqid prince, sought aid from Joscelin II of Edessa, offering land in exchange. Joscelin accepted, provoking Zengi to besiege Edessa. When the city fell on 26 December 1144, most of its Frankish population was killed or enslaved. Zengi was assassinated in 1146, but when Joscelin briefly regained Edessa, Zengi's son Nur al-Din expelled him and the Turkomans massacred fleeing Christians. Nur al-Din destroyed the city's fortifications, making its reconquest futile. He secured a marriage alliance with Unur of Damascus.

News of Edessa's fall reached Pope Eugenius III through Bishop Hugh of Jabala and Armenian clergy. He responded with the bull Quantum praedecessores on 1 December 1145, granting remission of sins, protection of property, and debt suspension to those who took the cross—establishing the model for later crusade bulls. Louis VII of France, troubled by guilt over a massacre in a church, declared his intention to lead a crusade. At Vézelay in 1146 the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux persuaded many French nobles to join.

Bernard went on preaching across France and Germany. In the Rhineland, anti-semitic pogroms incited by the monk Radulf ended only after Bernard recalled him. In a Christmas sermon Bernard persuaded Conrad III of Germany to take the cross at Speyer. When Saxon lords resisted abandoning war against the pagan Wends, he convinced Pope Eugenius to issue the bull Divina dispensatione in April 1147, extending crusade indulgences to the Wendish campaign, later seen as the first Northern Crusade. The Pope also named Iberia as a crusading target. A critic to the Wendish campaign, Helmold of Bosau later described the Second Crusade as fought in three theatres—the Holy Land, the Baltic and Iberia. Despite leadership by nobles such as the Saxon duke Henry the Lion, the crusaders failed against the Wendish prince Niklot.

The crusaders departed for the Holy Land in May and June 1147. A distinctive feature was the prominent presence of women: Louis VII was joined by his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine and her household, while regulations for the crusader fleet mention wives. The fleet of 150 ships carried about 10,000 crusaders from northwestern Europe. They aided Afonso I of Portugal in his successful Siege of Lisbon in October 1147 and Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona in capturing Tortosa in December 1148, but only a small contingent reached the Holy Land.

The German army, with many pilgrims, retraced the First Crusade's route through Hungary and the Balkans. Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, fearing attack, made peace with Mesud I, Sultan of Rum. Roger II of Sicily invaded the Balkans, heightening Byzantine suspicion of a coordinated western action. After clashes at Constantinople, the Germans crossed into Anatolia without waiting for the French. On 25 October 1147 Mesud's forces crushed them at the Battle of Dorylaeum; many died, but Conrad, wounded, escaped into Byzantine territory.

The French reached Constantinople in October 1147. Clashes followed, and Bishop Godefroy of Langres urged Louis VII to seize the city, but he advanced into Anatolia. The crusaders endured shortages, desertions and raids while wintering at Ephesus. At Antalya Louis and his knights sailed for Syria on Byzantine ships; most left behind perished, deserted or were enslaved.

Louis reached Antioch on 19 March 1148. Raymond of Poitiers urged an attack on Aleppo and Shaizar, but Louis pressed on to Jerusalem, despite Eleanor—Raymond's niece—supporting her uncle. At Acre he joined Conrad, who had arrived by sea from Constantinople. The Council of Acre resolved to besiege Damascus, beginning on 24 July. Though Conrad repelled attacks, Damascene raids and news of Nur al-Din's approaching reinforcements soon forced the crusaders to abandon the siege. A plan to attack Ascalon, the last Fatimid port, also collapsed, and the crusaders withdrew from the Holy Land. The failure gravely weakened crusading fervour in Europe. Conrad blamed Jerusalem's leaders, while others, including Bernard of Clairvaux, accused the Byzantines.

Towards Muslim unity in the Levant

Muslim forces pressed the northern Crusader states. Raymond of Poitiers was killed at the Battle of Inab on 29 June 1149; Nur al-Din seized Antiochene fortresses and destroyed Tortosa, while the Artuqids and Seljuks of Rum attacked the ruined County of Edessa. Joscelin II of Edessa was captured, and in 1150 his wife Beatrice sold the remnants of his county to Byzantium. Unur's death ended the Aleppo–Damascus alliance, as his successor Abaq allied with the Franks.

In 1151 Assassins murdered Raymond II of Tripoli and his son Raymond III succeeded him. The following year, Baldwin III of Jerusalem deposed his mother Melisende. He captured Ascalon in 1153, completing the conquest of the coast. He arranged the marriage of the French crusader Raynald of Châtillon to Constance of Antioch. Between 1154 and 1157, Nur al-Din blockaded Damascus, forced Abaq to withdraw, and took Shaizar, uniting Muslim Syria. The Franks failed to retake Shaizar despite the support of Thierry of Flanders, a veteran of the Second Crusade. In 1159 Emperor Manuel I invaded Syria, halting Nur al-Din's advance, but Raynald was captured by Turkomans in 1160/61.

The childless Baldwin III died of illness on 10 February 1163. His brother Amalric's succession was made conditional on the annulment of his marriage to Agnes of Courtenay. Their children, Sibylla and Baldwin, nevertheless were recognised as legitimate. In Antioch, Bohemond III, son of Constance and Raymond of Poitiers, took power and expelled his mother.

Under Amalric, the wealthy but divided Egypt became the main battleground with Nur al-Din. Between 1163 and 1169, Amalric launched five campaigns, but Nur al-Din's forces blocked his conquest. In early 1169, the Fatimid caliph al-Adid appointed Nur al-Din's Kurdish general Shirkuh as vizier; on his death, his nephew Saladin succeeded him. Amalric renewed the Byzantine alliance, but their joint invasion of Egypt failed. In September 1171, Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate, but soon quarrelled with Nur al-Din. In response to Amalric's appeals, Louis VII of France imposed a levy—one penny on every pound of property and income—for the Holy Land over five years. His initiative was soon matched by Henry II of England.

In 1174, Nur al-Din and Amalric both died, leaving underage heirs: as-Salih and the leper Baldwin IV. In his final years, Nur al-Din had made the conquest of Jerusalem the chief aim of jihad, inspiring a new Muslim literary genre, the Merits of Jerusalem. The struggle for his legacy was won by Saladin, who took Damascus in 1174, Aleppo in 1183, and compelled the Zengid ruler of Mosul, Izz al-Din, to submit in 1186. As early as 1176, the Abbasid caliph al-Mustadi urged Saladin to renew the jihad against the Franks, but he instead fought his Muslim rivals. Once he secured much of the Near East, however, he needed a new target to furnish his troops with plunder.

Jerusalem's leaders sought Western support by marrying Baldwin's heir Sibylla to William of Montferrat, a kinsman of German and French royalty, but he died in 1177. That year Philip I of Flanders led a futile armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and a Byzantine–Frankish invasion of Egypt failed amid disputes over its future. Before his death Baldwin designated Sibylla's posthumous son by William, Baldwin V his successor. On the child's death in 1186, Sibylla and her second husband Guy of Lusignan seized power with the support of leading figures, including Raynald of Châtillon, by then lord of Transjordan. Their rival, Raymond III, allied with Saladin, granting his troops free passage through Galilee.

Fall and recovery

Disillusioned by the failure of the Second Crusade, Western rulers were unwilling to launch another expedition to the Holy Land, despite the threat from Saladin. Criticism of crusading intensified, recorded in the 1187 Military Affairs by the historian Ralph Niger, who questioned the efficacy of crusading indulgences without corresponding spiritual renewal. In this climate only a major defeat in the East could revive crusading zeal. The Byzantine Empire, a traditional ally of Jerusalem, was destabilised by coups in 1183 and 1185, while the massacre of Italian merchants deepened its isolation from the West. In 1185 Emperor Isaac II Angelos concluded an anti-Seljuk alliance with Saladin, recognising his claim to Syria except Antioch.

Third Crusade

Despite a truce signed in 1185 still in force, Raynald of Châtillon attacked a Muslim caravan in Transjordan in early 1187, prompting Saladin to muster troops across his empire. Guy of Jerusalem and Raymond III of Tripoli were reconciled, but the Jerusalemite field army, exhausted by a long march, was crushed at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187. Raymond fled while others were killed or captured. Saladin executed Raynald, the Templars and Hospitallers, but spared other leaders including Guy. The kingdom lay defenceless—after a 12-day siege the city of Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin on 2 October. Tyre resisted under the newly arrived crusader Conrad of Montferrat, who sent Archbishop Joscius west for aid. Saladin's siege of Tyre was lifted on 1 January 1188. The first reports of the disaster reached Italy through Genoese merchants. William II of Sicily dispatched c. 50 ships and 200 knights, and his fleet's support strengthened the defence of Antioch, Tripoli, and Tyre. Raymond III died of illness, and the County of Tripoli was seized by Bohemond IV, son of Bohemond III of Antioch.

Pope Gregory VIII launched the new crusade with the bull Audita tremendi on 29 October 1187. The English prince Richard was the first to take the cross. Pope Gregory appointed Joscius of Tyre to preach in France and Henry of Albano in Germany. On 22 January 1189 Joscius reconciled Philip II of France and Henry II of England at Gisors, where both kings and many nobles took the cross. Troubadours such as Conon of Béthune also spread the message of the bull. To fund the crusade, the "Saladin tithe"—a levy of 10% on income and movable goods—was imposed in England and France. On 27 March 1188 Emperor Frederick I swore his oath at the Curia Christi ('Court of Christ') in Mainz. The English, French, and part of the German host chose the sea route, but Frederick resolved to march overland.

Frederick set out in May 1189 with c. 15,000 troops. By then Frankish control was reduced to Tyre, Antioch, Tripoli, and the fortresses of Beaufort, Margat, and Krak des Chevaliers. Saladin had freed Guy in May 1188, but Conrad barred him from Tyre. Gathering c. 9,000 men, Guy laid siege to Acre in August 1189 with Pisan naval support, his army reinforced by arriving western contingents. Fearing a German–Seljuk alliance, Emperor Isaac II denied Frederick safe passage. Frederick retaliated by attacking Byzantine towns, forcing Isaac in March 1190 to allow transport into Anatolia on Genoese and Pisan ships. Despite Turkoman raids and scarce supplies, the Germans briefly took Konya, capital of Rum, but the crusade collapsed when Frederick drowned in the river Saleph on 10 June 1190. His son Frederick of Swabia failed to sustain morale: many deserted or died, and only remnants reached Acre in October.

Franco-English tensions persisted until Henry II's death in July 1189. Richard I succeeded and swiftly prepared for the crusade, raising further funds by exacting a taillage from the Jews. He met with Philip II at Vézelay on 4 July 1190 before departing. Richard's host numbered c. 17,000, while the French force was smaller, as many had already left under Henry II of Champagne. Richard hired ships in Marseille, Philip in Genoa, and both sailed to Sicily. There Richard seized Messina, compelling the new Sicilian king Tancred of Lecce to pay a substantial sum. From Sicily the French sailed directly to Acre, arriving on 20 April. A storm drove several English ships onto Cyprus, where the local Byzantine ruler Isaac Komnenos seized the wrecks and captives. Richard conquered the island before reaching Acre on 6 June 1191.

Meanwhile, the long siege caused a deadly plague at Acre, killing Queen Sibylla. As Guy's kingship relied on her, her death voided his claim. Supported by French and German crusaders and the papal legate Ubaldo of Pisa, Conrad married Sibylla's half-sister Isabella on 24 November 1190. Guy refused to abdicate and sought Richard's backing. The siege intensified with the arrival of two royal armies, and on 12 July 1191 the defenders surrendered without Saladin's approval, under safe-conduct terms. Richard's and Philip's banners rose on Acre's walls, but when Leopold V of Austria raised his flag, Richard tore it down. Stricken by illness, Philip II soon withdrew from the crusade. Acre's surrender required Saladin to free 1,600 Frankish prisoners and return the True Cross within a month; when he failed, Richard ordered 2,700–3,000 Muslim captives executed. From Acre, Richard advanced south, defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf, and secured Jaffa.

News that Richard's brother John was attempting to seize England reached the Holy Land, prompting Richard to plan his return. On 20 April 1192 he recognised Conrad's claim to the remnant Kingdom of Jerusalem and granted Cyprus to Guy as compensation. Conrad was assassinated eight days later, and his pregnant widow Isabella soon married Henry of Champagne, a kinsman of both the French and English kings. In June Richard advanced towards Jerusalem, but the crusaders halted at Bayt Nuba, 13 miles (21 km) away, fearing defeat, and withdrew to the coast. Saladin counterattacked at Jaffa, but Richard relieved the town. Peace talks begun the previous year led to the Treaty of Jaffa on 2 September, a three-year truce confirming Frankish control of the coast between Tyre and Jaffa and allowing Christian pilgrims access to the holy sites of Palestine. Richard left Palestine on 9 October 1192 but was captured in Austria by Leopold V. In 1193 he was handed to Emperor Henry VI, who freed him for a ransom of 100,000 marks.

Crusade of 1197

Saladin died of illness on 4 March 1193. His empire soon collapsed, as his eldest son and designated heir, al-Afdal, proved unable to restrain the ambitions of his many Ayyubid kinsmen. Of these, Saladin's brother al-Adil was the most astute, securing control of Damascus in 1196.

The Third Crusade, with its heavy naval use, set a model for later expeditions: sea travel limited non-combatants and eased army supply. Though no campaign matched its scale, new plans arose. Emperor Henry VI, after taking the Kingdom of Sicily from Tancred, revived Norman ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean. He took the cross in April 1195, and Pope Celestine III authorised preaching a new crusade in Germany. By then Leo I of Cilician Armenia and Aimery of Lusignan, Guy's successor in Cyprus, had recognised Henry's suzerainty.

Henry planned to recruit 3,000 mercenaries and demanded tribute from the new Byzantine emperor Alexios III Angelos to fund the venture. Alexios levied the heavy Alamanikon ('German tax'), raising over 7,000 pounds of silver, but payment ended when Henry died of illness on 28 September 1197. Earlier, the ailing emperor had named his marshal Henry of Kalden, and the imperial chancellor Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim to lead the crusade. German forces sailed from southern Italian ports between March and September. That same month al-Adil captured Jaffa, but the crusaders took Botrun, Sidon and Beirut before abandoning the campaign when Henry's death reached Palestine in February 1198.

During the crusade, Aimery of Cyprus and Leo I of Cilicia Armenia were crowned kings by imperial envoys. After marrying the widowed Isabella I of Jerusalem, Aimery was also crowned king of Jerusalem in January 1198. He soon prolonged the truce with the Ayyubids until 1204. The same year the German nursing confraternity that had run a hospital at Acre since the Third Crusade assumed military functions, forming the Teutonic Knights.

Fourth Crusade

Pope Celestine III died in 1198 and was succeeded by Innocent III, a learned theologian and jurist. That year he proclaimed a new crusade, but the Anglo–French war and the German throne dispute between Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick blocked any large-scale campaign. Markward von Annweiler, a veteran of the Third Crusade, rejected Innocent's claim to act as regent in Sicily for the child Frederick, son of Emperor Henry VI. Innocent accused him of endangering the Holy Land and extended crusading indulgence to those fighting him, though only Walter of Brienne, a French claimant to southern Italian fiefs, joined this first "political crusade".

Innocent pressed on with plans for a crusade to the Holy Land. He sent his legate Peter Capuano to mediate peace between England and France, but talks ended when Richard I died in April 1199. By then Innocent had tasked the preacher Fulk of Neuilly with promoting the crusade in France. To fund it, he imposed a 2.5% extraordinary levy on clerical income. Theobald III of Champagne was the first to take the cross on 28 November, followed by his cousin Louis of Blois and, in February 1200, his brother-in-law Baldwin IX of Flanders. They secretly agreed to strike Egypt first, concealing the plan to avoid rank-and-file opposition. Six envoys, including Geoffrey of Villehardouin—later the crusade's chronicler—were appointed to hire a fleet. They agreed with Doge Enrico Dandolo that Venice would build, by June 1202, a fleet for 33,500 crusaders for 85,000 marks (over 20 tons of silver). After Theobald's unexpected death in May 1201, Boniface of Montferrat, linked to royal houses in East and West, became leader.

The crusade faltered when only a third of the expected force gathered at Venice; many embarked elsewhere or failed to keep their vows. The Venetians had invested heavily but the crusaders could not pay the agreed sum. To recover losses, Dandolo proposed attacking Zara, a Christian city in Dalmatia under King Emeric of Hungary, himself a sworn crusader. Despite papal prohibition and protests from some, including Simon de Montfort, the leaders agreed and captured Zara for Venice in November 1202.

While wintering there, Alexios Angelos, son of the deposed Emperor Isaac II, offered to reunite the Byzantine Church with Rome, pay 200,000 marks, and supply 10,000 troops if restored to Constantinople. Though only recently absolved for attacking a Christian city, the leaders accepted and diverted the expedition, prompting several hundred dissenters to quit or sail directly to the Holy Land. The army reached Constantinople in June 1203 and began the siege. Their first assault in July forced Emperor Alexios III to flee; Isaac II was restored and his son crowned co-emperor as Alexios IV. Alexios raised only 100,000 marks and promised more if the crusaders stayed until March, which a parlament, attended by both commanders and knights, accepted. As he failed to pay, the crusaders began plundering. Losing support, Alexios IV and Isaac were deposed by the aristocrat Alexios Doukas, crowned Alexios V in February 1204.

Lacking supplies, the crusader leaders resolved to attack Constantinople after agreeing on how to divide its spoils and partition the empire. Their first assault failed, but clergy kept morale with sermons branding the Byzantines schismatics "worse than the Jews". The second attack, on 12 April, succeeded and the Sack of Constantinople lasted for days. The crusaders massacred thousands, desecrated holy sites and seized the city's movable wealth. Relics were taken in great numbers to Western churches. The brutality shocked contemporaries, including the Pope and the Muslim scholar Ibn al-Athir. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates contrasted Saladin's clemency in Jerusalem with the crusaders' slaughter of Orthodox Christians in Constantinople.

A committee of six Venetian and six French crusaders elected Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin Emperor. Boniface of Montferrat received Macedonia and Thessaly, founding the Kingdom of Thessalonica; his vassals created the Duchy of Athens in Attica and the Principality of Achaea in the Peloponnese. Venice gained many Aegean islands, including Crete, and thereafter a Venetian cleric was appointed as Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. Frankish control of former Byzantine lands proved precarious. Baldwin died in Bulgarian captivity after defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 1205, and Boniface was killed fighting Bulgarians in 1207. Greek resistance centred on three Byzantine successor states: Epirus, Nicaea, and Trebizond. From the Crusader states' view, the Fourth Crusade was almost a failure: only about a fifth of those who took the cross around 1200 reached the Holy Land—enabling Aimery of Jerusalem to extend the 1198 truce for six years in 1204—while most participants in Constantinople's sack returned home without going east.

Towards a new Levantine crusade

After the Fourth Crusade's collapse, Pope Innocent III considered a new eastern campaign. Yet large-scale plans had little chance amid the prolonged German throne dispute and renewed war between France and England. The Crusader states faced no immediate danger because of divisions within the Ayyubids. In 1212 John of Brienne, the new king of Jerusalem, concluded a five-year truce with al-Adil, by then ruler of Egypt and Damascus, and soon asked Innocent to call a crusade once it expired. John had gained the throne by marrying Queen Isabella's daughter and heir, Maria of Montferrat; after his wife's death, he reigned with their infant daughter, Isabella II.

The medievalist Andrew Jotischky sees Innocent's crusade policy as "pragmatic reactions to problems". One challenge was Catharism, a dualist religious movement in southern France. He launched the Albigensian Crusade against them in 1208, denouncing the Cathars as "more evil" than Muslims.

Popular zeal for crusading persisted, though recent failures drew criticism of noble-led campaigns and expeditions. Petition processions for Iberian Christians resisting the Muslim revivalist Almohads and preaching against the Cathars stirred fervour in central France and the Rhineland in the early 1210s. In 1212 this produced popular movements later called the "Children's Crusade". Sources conflict and mix myth with moral tales, but agree the participants were children and youths seeking to retake Jerusalem, but none reached the Holy Land.

Fifth Crusade

Unlike in the Levant, crusading in Europe was succeeding. In Iberia the Reconquista struck a decisive blow to the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in July 1212. That year Simon de Montfort, now leader of the Albigensian Crusade, completed the conquest of much of southern France. These victories, with the spontaneous zeal of the Children's Crusade, let Pope Innocent III plan a new Levantine crusade. He proclaimed it in the bull Quia maior, citing a new Muslim fort on Mount Tabor as pretext. According to Madden, this "impressive document represents the full maturation of the crusading idea". The Fourth Crusade had shown the ruinous effect of poor organisation, and Innocent concluded only papal direction could ensure success. He also broke with the tradition of appealing solely to the military class and granted full indulgence to those who funded a warrior's journey if unable to go themselves, and partial indulgence to donors.

The expedition's terms were set at the Fourth Lateran Council in November 1215. Crusaders were to gather at Brindisi or Messina in southern Italy by 1 June 1217, when the 1212 truce ended. A 5% levy on clerical income across Europe for three years was imposed, and Innocent pledged 30,000 pounds of silver. The appeal failed in France, preoccupied with the Albigensian Crusade, but found support elsewhere. Andrew II of Hungary and Leopold VI of Austria took the cross. Frederick II, Innocent's protégé in the German throne dispute, also vowed to join though had not yet defeated Otto of Brunswick Oliver of Paderborn, a crusade preacher, toured the Low Countries recounting visions such as three crosses in the sky, while Jacques de Vitry won over Genoese patricians through their wives. During preparations Innocent died on 16 July 1216, but his successor, Honorius III, carried on his policy. For the first time in crusading history, the crusade was also preached in the Crusader states and in Cyprus.

Hungarian and Austrian crusaders embarked at the Dalmatian port of Spalato on Venetian ships rather than the more distant southern Italian harbours. By late September they reached Acre, where John of Brienne, Hugh I of Cyprus, and Bohemond IV of Antioch joined them. After a failed siege of Mount Tabor, Andrew II deemed his vow fulfilled and, with most Hungarians, withdrew. Frisian, German, and Italian forces then joined, and in May 1218 the army advanced on Damietta, a thriving Nile Delta port. The city's subsequent siege saw a shifting host as Western contingents arrived and others departed. John of Brienne was chosen commander but soon challenged by the papal legate Pelagius.

In late August the crusaders seized the Tower of the Chain, guarding the Delta. Al-Adil reportedly died of shock; his son al-Kamil offered to restore the pre-1187 borders of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (excluding Transjordan) for withdrawal. On learning of the offer, al-Kamil's brother al-Mu'azzam dismantled Jerusalem's walls, but the crusaders rejected the offer as the kingdom was indefensible without the fortresses over the Jordan. In August 1219, the mystic Francis of Assisi met al-Kamil, seeking to convert him to Christianity unsuccessfully. Prophecies promised victory and aid from the mythical Prester John, fuelled by distorted reports of the Mongol conquests in Central Asia.

Damietta fell to the crusaders in November 1219, but its possession soon sparked renewed conflict between John of Brienne and Pelagius. A year later Frederick reaffirmed his crusading vow at his imperial coronation in Rome. The first German forces arrived under Louis I of Bavaria in 1221. That July, ignoring Frederick's orders, Louis and Pelagius advanced towards Cairo, but al-Kamil, aided by his brothers al-Muʿazzam and al-Ashraf, forced a northward retreat. With the Nile in flood, he opened the sluices, flooding their route. Trapped, the crusaders accepted terms: Damietta was surrendered for safe conduct and an eight-year truce. Al-Kamil re-entered the city in September as the crusaders withdrew. The sudden collapse shocked Western Christendom. Many blamed Pelagius for the disastrous final campaign, while others—including returning crusaders and Honorius—condemned Frederick for failing to honour his vow.

Sixth Crusade

By 1218 Frederick II had secured his authority in Germany, but the union of Sicily with the Holy Roman Empire under his rule threatened the papacy. Yet, relations with Pope Honorius III stayed cordial, aided by mediators such as Hermann of Salza, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and Thomas of Capua, head of the papal penitentiary. Frederick renewed his crusading vow in May 1223, setting June 1225 for departure, and agreed to marry Isabella II of Jerusalem in the presence of her father, John of Brienne. With little response to the crusade call, he renewed the vow again in March 1225, pledging under threat of excommunication to depart in August 1227. In November 1225 he married Isabella and exacted oaths of fealty from the barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem despite earlier assurances that he would allow John to rule.

In 1226 tensions between al-Kamil and al-Mu'azzam grew so severe that al-Kamil sent an envoy to Frederick, offering Jerusalem's return to the Christians for aid against his rival. In March 1227 Pope Honorius died and the energetic Gregory IX succeeded him. He soon clashed with Frederick over papal rights in Sicily, though preparations for the crusade continued. To win Lombard support Frederick used force, yet many eagerly joined, including the German noble Louis IV of Thuringia, the Italian aristocrat Thomas of Acerra, and the English bishop Peter des Roches. Several crusaders sailed from Brindisi on 15 August 1227. Frederick followed on 8 September with c. 800 knights and 10,000 infantry but fell ill and returned to southern Italy. Enraged, Pope Gregory excommunicated him before the end of the month. Learning of Frederick's illness and excommunication, many crusaders in the Holy Land abandoned the campaign; the rest repaired coastal fortifications. They also seized Sidon and built Montfort Castle near Acre after al-Mu'azzam died in November 1227.

Disregarding papal demands to seek absolution before resuming the crusade, Frederick resolved to lead an expedition to the Holy Land. As Isabella died shortly after giving birth to their son, Conrad, he departed only in late June 1228. Reaching Cyprus, an imperial fief, he deposed John of Ibelin, regent for the underage King Henry I, and demanded fealty from Bohemond IV of Antioch and Tripoli, who refused. Frederick landed at Acre on 7 September. As the Hospitallers, the Templars, and devout crusaders would not follow an excommunicated leader, he used intermediaries to issue orders. He renewed talks with al-Kamil, displaying tolerance toward Islam and notable learning. On 18 February 1229 the Treaty of Jaffa ceded Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other key cities to the Christians, while preserving the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, and the al-Aqsa Mosque as Muslim places of worship; it also established a ten-year truce, excluding Antioch, Tripoli, and the Hospitaller and Templar lands. Though gaining more than any earlier crusade, the treaty drew sharp criticism. Visiting Jerusalem, Frederick entered Muslim shrines and on 18 May crowned himself king in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Meanwhile, with papal backing, John of Brienne invaded southern Italy, compelling Frederick to abandon his eastern campaign in May. He landed at Brindisi in June and, by the end of October, had driven his former father-in-law back into papal territory.

Barons' Crusade

By Emperor Frederick II's return from his eastern campaign, the Treaty of Paris had ended the Albigensian Crusades on 12 April 1229. The period also saw crusader successes in Iberia: James I of Aragon conquered the Balearic Islands and Valencia by 1238, while Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236 after a successful siege. In the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights assumed command of the crusade against the pagan Prussians in 1230. Pope Gregory IX meanwhile launched the Drenther and Stedinger Crusades against peasant rebels and the Bosnian Crusade against dissident Christians.

Frederick reconciled with the papacy in May 1230. The following year Frederick appointed Richard Filangieri as bailli (deputy) in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Supported by the Teutonic Knights, Pisans, and some local nobles, Filangieri seized Tyre, but most Jerusalemite barons, led by John of Ibelin and backed by the Genoese and Henry I of Cyprus, resisted. Upon John's death in 1236, his son Balian of Beirut assumed command of the resistance.

Pope Gregory called for a new crusade in separate encyclicals to the English and French in 1234. The expedition was to depart for the Holy Land when the 1229 truce expired in 1239. He ordered taxation of clerical income and promoted commuting crusading vows for cash. He also proposed the establishment of a garrison in Palestine, to be maintained for ten years and financed by lay contributions in return for partial crusade indulgences. Mendicant friars preached the crusade, but bishops held the funds, which were distributed by papal authorisation to aristocrats who had taken the cross. In France, Theobald IV of Champagne (also king of Navarre), Hugh IV of Burgundy, and Peter of Dreux were among the nobles who joined. Most had earlier rebelled against Blanche of Castile, regent for King Louis IX of France, and by taking the cross gained church protection. Louis aided them with gifts, loans, and authorised them to fight under the royal banner. In England, several nobles hostile to royal authority enlisted, including Richard of Cornwall—one of Europe's wealthiest men—and his brother-in-law Gilbert Marshal; the army also attracted former enemies such as Simon de Montfort and Richard Siward.

In the late 1230s the Crusader states faced little threat from their Muslim neighbours. After al-Kamil's death in 1238, a two-year struggle followed before his son Ayyub secured Egypt. He recruited new mamluk troops, stationed on a Nile island, forming the Bahri ("river") mamluks. By contrast, the Latin Empire came under pressure from a Bulgarian–Nicaean alliance. Pope Gregory tried to divert crusaders to Constantinople, but only a few—among them Humbert V de Beaujeu and Thomas of Marle—agreed. By their arrival in 1239, the anti-Latin coalition had collapsed, and the crusaders mounted only minor raids in Thrace.

The French crusaders offered command to Frederick II, who promised that he or his son Conrad would join. Yet his bid to assert power in Lombardy led to renewed conflict with Pope Gregory, who excommunicated him in March 1239. The French reached Acre that September. Leadership was divided, and in November an Egyptian force routed a contingent at the Battle of Gaza. The defeat emboldened Dawud, Ayyubid emir of Damascus, to sack Jerusalem and dismantle its walls. The divided Ayyubids failed to exploit success; Ismail of Damascus, Ayyub's uncle, even offered to cede Beaufort, Tiberias, and Saphet, then held by Dawud. It is unclear if the offer was accepted, as Theobald of Champagne and Peter of Dreux abandoned the crusade after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in September 1241.

The English force, c. 600–800 knights and additional troops, arrived in October 1240. Richard of Cornwall, Frederick II's brother-in-law, sided with the pro-imperialist faction in Jerusalem, favouring alliance with Egypt over Damascus. Ayyub, via his ally Dawud, offered to restore Jerusalem to the Franks and release the prisoners taken at Gaza. Richard accepted the proposal, which also upheld Ismail's earlier concessions, expanding the kingdom to its widest extent since 1187. With the agreement secured, the crusade ended in May 1241.

Fall of the Crusader states

The final phase of the Levantine Crusades was marked by Mongol intervention in Middle Eastern politics and the restoration of Muslim unity. Earlier, the Mongols had invaded Hungary and Poland, prompting Pope Gregory IX in June 1241 to call for a crusade against them, but the German host soon dispersed. The invasion ended unexpectedly later that year when the Great Khan, Ögödei, died, compelling the Mongols to withdraw.

Seventh Crusade

In his letters, Emperor Frederick II portrayed Richard of Cornwall as acting on his behalf in concluding the treaty with Ayyub. In 1242 the Templars, Frederick's foes, plundered Nablus in defiance of the treaty, provoking an Egyptian counterattack. The following year Frederick's son, Conrad—the absent king of Jerusalem—came of age, ending his father's claim to the regency. The barons appointed Conrad's heir presumptive, Alice of Champagne, as regent and seized Tyre, seat of Frederick's lieutenant, Filangieri. This break with Frederick gave Ayyub a pretext to reject papal proposals to renew the truce of 1229.

The Mongols secured their position in Middle Eastern politics by defeating Kaykhusraw II, Sultan of Rum, at the Battle of Köse Dağ in June 1243. The Seljuks of Rum, the Ayyubids of Aleppo, and the Cilician Armenians soon accepted Mongol suzerainty, while Bohemond V of Antioch refused and warned Emperor Frederick and the newly elected Pope Innocent IV of the growing threat. Meanwhile, Ayyub of Egypt allied with fugitive Khwarazmian soldiers who had settled in Anatolia and Iraq. His rival, Ismail of Damascus, aligned with the Franks and sent forces to Gaza, prompting some 10,000 Khwarazmian horsemen to join Ayyub. Advancing south, they massacred thousands of Christians and sacked Jerusalem in July 1244. Shortly after, they joined the Egyptian army and crushed the Damascene–Frankish force at the Battle of La Forbie on 17 October. Thousands of Frankish troops were killed, leaving the kingdom virtually defenceless.

Reports of Jerusalem's sack had scarcely reached Europe when Louis IX of France took the cross in December 1244. Recently recovered from severe illness, he was, according to contemporary accounts, inspired by a visionary experience to make the vow. Within two months Pope Innocent issued a new crusading bull and tasked Cardinal Odo of Châteauroux with preaching the crusade in France. Promising spiritual rewards, Odo urged the nobility to emulate the heroism of their forebears in the First and Third Crusades. Among the earliest to take the cross were Louis's brothers Robert of Artois, Alphonse of Poitiers, and Charles of Anjou. Elsewhere in Europe support was weaker: Henry III of England, recently defeated by Louis, barred Bishop Galeran of Beirut from preaching in his realm, while Haakon IV of Norway declined Louis's invitation despite having earlier taken the cross.

Exiled in Lyon following his conflict with Emperor Frederick, Pope Innocent convened the First Council of Lyon in summer 1245 to plan a new crusade and address the state of the Latin Empire and the Mongol threat. Funds came from indulgence sales, donations, and a clerical tax; Louis added royal taxes and enforced Jewish contributions, totalling over 1,500,000 livres tournois in official accounts. At the council Frederick was deposed, but Louis forbade preaching a crusade against him in France. Meanwhile, war in the Levant continued: Ayyub expelled Ismail from Damascus in late 1245 and seized Galilee from the Franks in 1246. That year Alice died and was succeeded as regent by her son Henry I of Cyprus.

In preparation for the crusade, Louis stockpiled food and wine in Cyprus, largely imported from Apulia with Emperor Frederick's approval. The fleet was supplied by Genoa and Marseilles, with extra ships built even in distant Scottish ports. It assembled at the new harbour of Aigues-Mortes, where thousands of volunteers—archers and foot soldiers—sought to enlist, but Louis refused them. The fleet sailed on 25 August 1248. The crusaders wintered in Cyprus, where plague killed many, though reinforcements, including Geoffrey II of Achaea with 400 knights, strengthened their ranks. They left Cyprus on 30 May 1249 and captured Damietta a week later. By then Ayyub was in poor health, yet the crusaders delayed advancing for months, fearing the Nile floods and awaiting reinforcements. They moved towards Cairo only days before Ayyub died on 23 November 1249. His death was concealed as envoys summoned his heir Turanshah from Iraq.

Egyptians blocked the crusaders from crossing the Nile to Al Mansurah, a key garrison town, with Greek fire. On 6 February 1251 Robert of Artois led a surprise assault across a ford. The Egyptian commander Fakhr al-Din was killed, but Robert's forces were trapped in Al Mansurah's narrow streets and almost all were slain despite Louis's attempt to aid them. On 24 February Turanshah took power, blockading the crusaders' camp and unleashing famine and plague. Too weakened to retreat to Damietta, Louis surrendered on 6 April. Turanshah ordered the slaughter of the poor and sick but released the rest, including Louis, for 800,000 bezants and Damietta's surrender. Before this could be completed, he was assassinated by the Bakhri mamluks, who feared replacement by his own followers. With their backing Shajar al-Durr, Ayyub's widow, assumed power, while Turanshah's treaty remained in force. With Templar help, half the ransom (400,000 bezants) was paid, and Damietta evacuated before Louis and much of his army sailed for Acre on 6 May. The rest was secured by hostages.

When news of Louis's defeat reached France, a charismatic preacher known as the "master of Hungary" proclaimed a new crusade. Claiming to bear a letter from the Virgin Mary to shepherds, he rallied followers from northern France and Flanders to free the Holy Land. This movement, later called the Shepherds' Crusade, attacked Jews in central France before royal forces dispersed it in June 1250. After the Egyptian defeat, most French crusaders, including Louis's surviving brothers, abandoned the campaign, but Louis remained in Palestine with c. 1,000 troops. He rebuilt Caesarea, Jaffa and Sidon, and fortified Acre's suburb using revenue from a crusader tax on the French clergy. Though Louis held no legal claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, still nominally ruled by the absent Conrad, his authority went unchallenged. After Emperor Frederick II died in December 1250, Conrad succeeded him in Sicily and Germany but was soon targeted by the political crusade proclaimed against his father.

Amid struggles between mamluk factions and Ayyubid princes, Louis opened negotiations with the Egyptian leaders in early 1252. They pledged to free hostages and restore much of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but the pact failed that April when they made peace with An-Nasir, Ayyubid ruler of Aleppo and Damascus. As unrest grew in France, Louis resolved to return. Before leaving the Holy Land on 24 April 1254, he secured a ten-year truce with An-Nasir and left a garrison of 100 knights at Acre under the distinguished soldier Geoffrey of Sergines.

Mamluks, Mongols and Ghibellines

Shortly after Louis IX left Egypt for Acre, Shajar al-Durr married the Bahri commander Aybak, who became the first Mamluk sultan, founding a regime that ruled Egypt for over 250 years. Unlike the hereditary Ayyubids, the Mamluks chose rulers from the military elite and vigorously waged jihad to expel the Franks from the Levant. In the 1250s the Bahri commander Baybars was exiled amid factional rivalries, while his rival Qutuz seized power in Egypt.

Louis's return to France in 1254 left a power vacuum in Jerusalem. The regent Henry I had been succeeded by his infant son Hugh II in Cyprus the previous year. Soon after Louis's departure King Conrad died; his two-year-old son Conradin, though residing in Bavaria, was recognised as king of Jerusalem. In 1255 Jerusalemite barons agreed a ten-year truce with Egypt, but next year rivalry between Venice and Genoa sparked the War of Saint Sabas, dividing merchant communities, military orders and the aristocracy in the Crusader states. In 1258 the child Hugh II was named regent for Conradin, with his mother Plaisance of Antioch acting for him.

As some Mongols followed the Eastern Syriac (Nestorian) Church, hopes of alliance led popes and Louis IX to send envoys to the Great Khans, who instead demanded submission. In 1258 Hulegu, the Mongol il khan, sacked Baghdad and ended the Abbasid Caliphate. Bohemond VI of Antioch–Tripoli accepted Mongol suzerainty and joined their army to seize Damascus in 1260. Jerusalem's leaders, distrusting the Mongols, persuaded Pope Alexander IV to excommunicate Bohemond and proclaim an anti-Mongol crusade. Qutuz executed Hulegu's envoys, prompting a Mongol advance under the Christian commander Kitbuqa. Qutuz and Baybars reconciled and routed the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260; they then occupied Muslim Syria. Baybars murdered Qutuz in October and assumed power in Egypt.

Baybars allied with Hulegu's rival Berke Khan of the Golden Horde and from 1261 raided the Crusader states. He sacked Saint Symeon in 1262, destroyed the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth and Acre's suburbs in 1263. After Hulegu's death in 1265 he launched a systematic conquest: seizing and razing Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf, capturing Safed, and taking Jaffa, Beaufort and Antioch by 1268. His campaigns often included massacres of Christians.

Meanwhile, as the historian Jean Richard notes, "those who wanted to earn the crusade indulgence did not lack opportunities" in Europe. The papacy, regarding Emperor Frederick II's heirs as its main foes, used crusade proclamations to tax clerical revenues. After King Conrad's death his half-brother Manfred of Sicily became the target of a crusade. In northern Italy the Ghibelline (anti-papal) brothers Ezzelino and Alberico da Romano were crushed. The Nicaean reconquest of Constantinople prompted a crusade against Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, but the exiled Latin emperor Baldwin II did not gain support. Only small contingents reached the Holy Land, among them French troops under Olivier de Termes, who replaced Geoffrey of Sergines in 1264, and Odo of Nevers with fifty knights in 1265.

In 1264 Pope Urban IV granted Sicily to Charles of Anjou, who secured it by defeating Manfred at the Battle of Benevento in February 1266. Conradin—Manfred's nephew—tried to recover southern Italy but was crushed by a crusade at the Battle of Tagliacozzo in August 1268 and executed. Two rivals then claimed the throne of Jerusalem: Hugh III, successor to Hugh II in Cyprus, and his aunt Maria of Antioch. The Jerusalemite barons backed Hugh, but Maria maintained her claim.

Eighth Crusade

Baybars's conquests revived crusading zeal in Europe. Pope Urban IV called a new crusade in 1265, but planning advanced mainly under his successor Clement IV after Charles of Anjou's triumph in southern Italy. Clement first proposed a passagium particulare—a modest, quickly raised force—to sail by April 1267, but delayed when Louis IX of France again took the cross on 25 March 1267. Abaqa, the new Mongol il khan, offered alliance against the Mamluks, but war with his rival Baraq Khan hindered any Levantine campaign.

Funding came from a three-year, 10% clerical levy, legacies, indulgence sales and plunder from Jewish bankers. Louis financed vassals with gifts and loans. He persuaded the English crown prince Edward to take the cross despite Henry III's objections, and won James I of Aragon's pledge by diplomacy. Louis's leadership strengthened during the long sede vacante after Clement's death in November 1268. He hired Genoese ships and mediated peace between Genoa and Venice. James sailed first from Barcelona on 4 September 1269, but a storm scattered his fleet and he soon abandoned the crusade. His two illegitimate sons, Fernando Sánchez and Pedro Fernández, reached Acre with fewer than 200 knights that October. They joined the French garrison, but were ambushed by Baybars.

Over 10,000 French crusaders sailed from Aigues-Mortes on 2 July 1270. Louis chose to attack Tunis, capital of the new Hafsid Caliphate in North Africa. Some historians, including Peter Lock, attribute this to his brother Charles of Anjou, while others, such as Christopher Tyerman, see it as Louis's own plan to secure a base for invading Egypt. The crusaders reached North Africa on 18 July and captured Carthage, but plague ravaged the camp. Louis died on 25 August, the day Charles arrived. Charles assumed command and on 1 November made peace with the Caliph Muhammad: the crusaders withdrew for 210,000 gold ounces and rights to Christian worship and proselytism. English crusaders landed at Tunis as the French departed on 10 November. The fleets regrouped at Trapani, but a storm wrecked most ships.

Philip III of France, Louis's successor, and Charles abandoned the crusade, but the English continued with Frisians and other small groups. These sailed to Acre, while the English wintered in Sicily, reaching Acre only on 9 May 1271. Meanwhile, Baybars seized Chastel Blanc from the Templars and Krak des Chevaliers and Gibelacar from the Hospitallers. Edward mounted no major operations; in June Baybars took Montfort Castle, the Franks' last inland stronghold, from the Teutonic Knights. On 12 May 1272 Baybars accepted an almost eleven-year truce, and Edward—now king of England—sailed from Acre in late September.

Final crusades in the Holy Land

The Italian cardinal Tedaldo Visconti was at Acre when elected pope as Gregory X. Convinced of a divine mission to recover the Holy Land, he worked with Philip III of France to send small knightly expeditions as a prelude to a major crusade. In 1272–1273 he commissioned reports for an ecumenical council. One, the Collectio scandalis Ecclesiae ('Collection of Church Abuses') by a Franciscan, condemned clerical taxation, redemption of crusader vows and secular feuds. The Dominican Humbert of Romans urged preaching as Christianity's principal means of conversion but upheld crusading as a duty to defend the faithful. The Franciscan Fidentius of Padua deemed crusades essential against Muslim obstinacy; the Dominican William of Tripoli preferred peaceful proselytism.

The Second Council of Lyon opened on 7 May 1274. Gregory X proclaimed a new crusade, setting 1278 as the departure date and funding it by taxing clerical income for six years. The plan drew criticism: the troubadour Folquet de Lunel accused the pope of seeking to divert crusading zeal against Christian foes. Threatened by Charles of Anjou's ambitions, Emperor Michael VIII acknowledged papal supremacy but failed to enforce church union at home. Gregory ordered Charles to renew his truce with Byzantium, and talks began on Byzantine participation in the crusade. In 1275 Philip III, the new German king Rudolf of Habsburg and his rival Ottokar II of Bohemia took the cross, but preparations collapsed with Gregory's death next year. Yet the crusade tax remained in force.

The subsequent period, as the historian Norman Housley observes, "was dominated by the ambitions of Charles of Anjou". In 1277 Charles purchased Maria of Antioch's claim to Jerusalem. Her rival Hugh III had withdrawn to Cyprus, and the barons of Jerusalem did homage to Charles. In 1279 the Bahri veteran Qalawun seized power in Mamluk Egypt. Facing revolts and a Mongol invasion of Syria, he renewed the truce with the Crusader states in 1281. That year Charles, backed by Pope Martin IV after Michael VIII failed to implement the 1274 church union, pursued an anti-Byzantine policy. Martin granted crusade indulgences for Charles's planned campaign, but the Sicilian Vespers—a popular uprising—forced him to recall his troops in 1282. As Peter III of Aragon backed the rebels, Martin proclaimed a crusade against Aragon, diverting funds raised for the Holy Land.

The withdrawal of Charles's troops let Hugh III recover Tyre and Beirut. Meanwhile, Qalawun defeated the Mongols at the Second Battle of Homs and resumed jihad against the Franks, seizing the Hospitallers' last fortress, Margat, taking Latakia and capturing Tripoli by 1289. Tripoli's fall shocked the West. Pope Nicholas IV sent 4,000 livres tournois and 13 galleys to Acre; Edward I of England dispatched troops to strengthen its defences. A new crusade was preached, prompting a passagium particulare of 3,540 Italian infantry. In August 1290 they attacked Muslims at Acre despite the truce. In retaliation Qalawun's son, Khalil, besieged and took Acre on 28 May 1291. The last Frankish mainland strongholds soon fell, the final, Château Pèlerin, surrendering on 14 August. The conquests brought massacres and enslavement, with only a few escaping to Cyprus.

Aftermath

The fall of the Frankish East caused dismay rather than shock in the West and Western Christians mostly blamed the Franks' alleged immorality. Pope Nicholas IV appealed to Edward I of England to lead a new crusade and imposed a tax to fund it, but the Gascon War with Philip IV of France ended English plans in 1294. Schemes to recover the Holy Land inspired treatises: Fidentius of Padua and Charles II of Naples urged a blockade of Egypt; James of Molay, Templar Grand Master, called for a large crusade; and the Armenian prince-turned-monk Hayton of Corycus proposed a two-stage expedition.

Amid frequent wars among Catholic powers, the crusade declined into a mainly political instrument. In 1297 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed crusades against his enemies, the Colonna cardinals and Frederick III of Sicily. His taxation of clergy provoked conflict with France, leading to the Pope's seizure by French troops in 1303. French influence grew, and the papal court moved to Avignon. In 1307 French officers arrested all Templars on charges of corruption and heresy; Pope Clement V could not prevent the dissolution of their Order in 1312. The Templar trials prompted new crusade plans, notably by the French William of Nogaret and Pierre Dubois. In 1314 Philip IV took the cross with his sons and son-in-law Edward II of England, but his death next year ended the plan. Philip VI of France, the first Valois king, revived Levantine crusade proposals, but the Hundred Years' War stopped preparations in 1336. The final crusade for the Holy Land, the Alexandrian Crusade, was led by Peter I of Cyprus: in October 1365 crusaders sacked the Egyptian port of Alexandria but withdrew after a week.

Elsewhere crusading endured. In 1391, Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy proposed a new Crusade. In 1396, a French and Burgundian army joined the Kingdom of Hungary in an invasion of the Ottoman Empire. The crusading army was crushed at Nicopolis.

In Iberia, crusading ended in 1492 with the fall of the Muslim Emirate of Granada to Castile and Aragon. In the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights waged anti-pagan wars, drawing crusaders from France, Germany and England until the 1410s. After the Reformation the papacy occasionally granted indulgences against Protestants, but more often Catholic powers formed papally sponsored Holy Leagues against the Ottoman Empire into the 17th century.

Legacy

The Crusades created national mythologies, tales of heroism, and a few place names. Historical parallelism and the tradition of drawing inspiration from the Middle Ages have become keystones of political Islam encouraging ideas of a modern jihad and a centuries-long struggle against Christian states, while secular Arab nationalism highlights the role of Western imperialism. Modern Muslim thinkers, politicians and historians have drawn parallels between the crusades and political developments such as the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Right-wing circles in the western world have drawn opposing parallels, considering Christianity to be under an Islamic religious and demographic threat that is analogous to the situation at the time of the crusades. Crusader symbols and anti-Islamic rhetoric are presented as an appropriate response. These symbols and rhetoric are used to provide a religious justification and inspiration for a struggle against a religious enemy.

Historiography

The historiography of the Crusades is concerned with their "history of the histories" during the Crusader period. The subject is a complex one, with overviews provided in Select Bibliography of the Crusades, Modern Historiography, and Crusades (Bibliography and Sources). The histories describing the Crusades are broadly of three types: (1) The primary sources of the Crusades, which include works written in the medieval period, generally by participants in the Crusade or written contemporaneously with the event, letters and documents in archives, and archaeological studies; (2) secondary sources, beginning with early consolidated works in the 16th century and continuing to modern times; and (3) tertiary sources, primarily encyclopedias, bibliographies and genealogies.

Primary sources

The primary sources for the Crusades are generally presented in the individual articles on each Crusade and summarised in the list of sources for the Crusades. For the First Crusade, this includes the original Latin chronicles, including the Gesta Francorum, works by Albert of Aachen and Fulcher of Chartres, the Alexiad by Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, the Complete Work of History by Muslim historian Ali ibn al-Athir, and the Chronicle of Armenian historian Matthew of Edessa. Many of these and related texts are found in the collections Recueil des historiens des croisades (RHC) and Crusade Texts in Translation. The work of William of Tyre, Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum, and its continuations by later historians complete the foundational work of the traditional Crusade. Some of these works also provide insight into the later Crusades and Crusader states. Other works include:

• Eyewitness accounts of the Second Crusade by Odo of Deuil and Otto of Freising. The Arab view from Damascus is provided by ibn al-Qalanisi.
• Works on the Third Crusade such as Libellus de Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum expeditione, the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, and the works of Crusaders Tageno and Roger of Howden, and the narratives of Richard of Devizes, Ralph de Diceto, Ralph of Coggeshall and Arnold of Lübeck. The Arabic works by al-Isfahani and al-Maqdisi as well as the biography of Saladin by Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad are also of interest.
• The Fourth Crusade is described in the Devastatio Constantinopolitana and works of Geoffrey of Villehardouin, in his chronicle De la Conquête de Constantinople, Robert de Clari and Gunther of Pairis. The view of Byzantium is provided by Niketas Choniates and the Arab perspective is given by Abū Shāma and Abu'l-Fida.
• The history of the Fifth and Sixth Crusades is well represented in the works of Jacques de Vitry, Oliver of Paderborn and Roger of Wendover, and the Arabic works of Badr al-Din al-Ayni.
• Key sources for the later Crusades include Gestes des Chiprois, Jean de Joinville's Life of Saint Louis, as well as works by Guillaume de Nangis, Matthew Paris, Fidentius of Padua and al-Makrizi.

After the fall of Acre, the crusades continued through the 16th century. Principal references on this subject are the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades and Norman Housley's The Later Crusades, 1274–1580: From Lyons to Alcazar. Complete bibliographies are also given in these works.

Secondary sources

The secondary sources of the Crusades began in the 16th century, with one of the first uses of the term crusades by 17th-century French historian Louis Maimbourg in his Histoire des Croisades pour la délivrance de la Terre Sainte. Other works of the 18th century include Voltaire's Histoire des Croisades, and Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, excerpted as The Crusades, A.D. 1095–1261. This edition also includes an essay on chivalry by Walter Scott, whose works helped popularize the Crusades. Early in the 19th century, the monumental Histoire des Croisades was published by the French historian Joseph François Michaud, a major new narrative based on original sources.

These histories have provided evolving views of the Crusades as discussed in detail in the Historiography writeup in Crusading movement. Modern works that serve as secondary source material are listed in the Bibliography section below.

Tertiary sources

Three such works are: Louis Bréhier's multiple works on the Crusades in the Catholic Encyclopedia; the works of Ernest Barker in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition), later expanded into a separate publication; and The Crusades: An Encyclopedia (2006), edited by historian Alan V. Murray.

See also

• After the First Crusade, 1099–1146
• Between the Crusades, 1149–1189
• Bibliography of the Crusades: modern works
• Chronologies of the Crusades
• Criticism of crusading
• Historians and histories of the Crusades
• History of Christianity
• A History of the Crusades: list of contributions
• History of the Knights Hospitaller in the Levant
• History of the Knights Templar
• Military history of the Crusader states
• Women in the Crusades

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

The Crusades were expeditions undertaken, in fulfilment of a solemn vow, to deliver the Holy Places from Mohammedan tyranny.

The origin of the word may be traced to the cross made of cloth and worn as a badge on the outer garment of those who took part in these enterprises. Medieval writers use the terms crux (pro cruce transmarina, Charter of 1284, cited by Du Cange s.v. crux), croisement (Joinville), croiserie (Monstrelet), etc. Since the Middle Ages the meaning of the word crusade has been extended to include all wars undertaken in pursuance of a vow, and directed against infidels, i.e. against Mohammedans, pagans, heretics, or those under the ban of excommunication. The wars waged by the Spaniards against the Moors constituted a continual crusade from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; in the north of Europe crusades were organized against the Prussians and Lithuanians; the extermination of the Albigensian heresy was due to a crusade, and, in the thirteenth century the popes preached crusades against John Lackland and Frederick II. But modern literature has abused the word by applying it to all wars of a religious character, as, for instance, the expedition of Heraclius against the Persians in the seventh century and the conquest of Saxony by Charlemagne.

The idea of the crusade corresponds to a political conception which was realized in Christendom only from the eleventh to the fifteenth century; this supposes a union of all peoples and sovereigns under the direction of the popes. All crusades were announced by preaching. After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church. Crusaders were also granted indulgences and temporal privileges, such as exemption from civil jurisdiction, inviolability of persons or lands, etc. Of all these wars undertaken in the name of Christendom, the most important were the Eastern Crusades, which are the only ones treated in this article.

Division

It has been customary to describe the Crusades as eight in number:

• the first, 1095-1101;

• the second, headed by Louis VII, 1145-47;

• the third, conducted by Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 1188-92;

• the fourth, during which Constantinople was taken, 1204;

• the fifth, which included the conquest of Damietta, 1217;

• the sixth, in which Frederick II took part (1228-29); also Thibaud de Champagne and Richard of Cornwall (1239);

• the seventh, led by St. Louis, 1249-52;

• the eighth, also under St. Louis, 1270.

This division is arbitrary and excludes many important expeditions, among them those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In reality the Crusades continued until the end of the seventeenth century, the crusade of Lepanto occurring in 1571, that of Hungary in 1664, and the crusade of the Duke of Burgundy to Candia, in 1669. A more scientific division is based on the history of the Christian settlements in the East; therefore the subject will be considered in the following order:

I. Origin of the Crusades; II. Foundation of Christian states in the East; III. First destruction of the Christian states (1144-87); IV. Attempts to restore the Christian states and the crusade against Saint-Jean d'Acre (1192-98); V. The crusade against Constantinople (1204); VI. The thirteenth-century crusades (1217-52); VII. Final loss of the Christian colonies of the East (1254-91); VIII. The fourteenth-century crusade and the Ottoman invasion; IX. The crusade in the fifteenth century; X. Modifications and survival of the idea of the crusade.

I. Origin of the Crusades

The origin of the Crusades is directly traceable to the moral and political condition of Western Christendom in the eleventh century. At that time Europe was divided into numerous states whose sovereigns were absorbed in tedious and petty territorial disputes while the emperor, in theory the temporal head of Christendom, was wasting his strength in the quarrel over Investitures. The popes alone had maintained a just estimate of Christian unity; they realized to what extent the interests of Europe were threatened by the Byzantine Empire and the Mohammedan tribes, and they alone had a foreign policy whose traditions were formed under Leo IX and Gregory VII. The reform effected in the Church and the papacy through the influence of the monks of Cluny had increased the prestige of the Roman pontiff in the eyes of all Christian nations; hence none but the pope could inaugurate the international movement that culminated in the Crusades. But despite his eminent authority the pope could never have persuaded the Western peoples to arm themselves for the conquest of the Holy Land had not the immemorial relations between Syria and the West favoured his design. Europeans listened to the voice of Urban II because their own inclination and historic traditions impelled them towards the Holy Sepulchre.

From the end of the fifth century there had been no break in their intercourse with the Orient. In the early Christian period colonies of Syrians had introduced the religious ideas, art, and culture of the East into the large cities of Gaul and Italy. The Western Christians in turn journeyed in large numbers to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, either to visit the Holy Places or to follow the ascetic life among the monks of the Thebaid or Sinai. There is still extant the itinerary of a pilgrimage from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, dated 333; in 385 St. Jerome and St. Paula founded the first Latin monasteries at Bethlehem. Even the Barbarian invasion did not seem to dampen the ardour for pilgrimages to the East. The Itinerary of St. Silvia (Etheria) shows the organization of these expeditions, which were directed by clerics and escorted by armed troops. In the year 600, St. Gregory the Great had a hospice erected in Jerusalem for the accommodation of pilgrims, sent alms to the monks of Mount Sinai ("Vita Gregorii" in "Acta SS.", March 11, 132), and, although the deplorable condition of Eastern Christendom after the Arab invasion rendered this intercourse more difficult, it did not by any means cease.

As early as the eighth century Anglo-Saxons underwent the greatest hardships to visit Jerusalem. The journey of St. Willibald, Bishop of Eichstädt, took seven years (722-29) and furnishes an idea of the varied and severe trials to which pilgrims were subject (Itiner. Latina, 1, 241-283). After their conquest of the West, the Carolingians endeavoured to improve the condition of the Latins settled in the East; in 762 Pepin the Short entered into negotiations with the Caliph of Bagdad. In Rome, on 30 November, 800, the very day on which Leo III invoked the arbitration of Charlemagne, ambassadors from Haroun al-Raschid delivered to the King of the Franks the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, the banner of Jersualem, and some precious relics (Einhard, "Annales", ad an. 800, in "Mon. Germ. Hist.: Script.", I, 187); this was an acknowledgment of the Frankish protectorate over the Christians of Jerusalem. That churches and monasteries were built at Charlemagne's expense is attested by a sort of a census of the monasteries of Jerusalem dated 808 ("Commemoratio de Casis Dei" in "Itiner. Hieros.", I, 209). In 870, at the time of the pilgrimage of Bernard the Monk (Itiner. Hierosol., I, 314), these institutions were still very prosperous, and it has been abundantly proved that alms were sent regularly from the West to the Holy Land. In the tenth century, just when the political and social order of Europe was most troubled, knights, bishops, and abbots, actuated by devotion and a taste for adventure, were wont to visit Jerusalem and pray at the Holy Sepulchre without being molested by the Mohammedans. Suddenly, in 1009, Hakem, the Fatimite Caliph of Egypt, in a fit of madness ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and all the Christian establishments in Jerusalem. For years thereafter Christians were cruelly persecuted. (See the recital of an eyewitness, Iahja of Antioch, in Schlumberger's "Epopée byzantine", II, 442.) In 1027 the Frankish protectorate was overthrown and replaced by that of the Byzantine emperors, to whose diplomacy was due the reconstruction of the Holy Sepulchre. The Christian quarter was even surrounded by a wall, and some Amalfi merchants, vassals of the Greek emperors, built hospices in Jerusalem for pilgrims, e.g. the Hospital of St. John, cradle of the Order of Hospitallers.

Instead of diminishing, the enthusiasm of Western Christians for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem seemed rather to increase during the eleventh century. Not only princes, bishops, and knights, but even men and women of the humbler classes undertook the holy journey (Radulphus Glaber, IV, vi). Whole armies of pilgrims traversed Europe, and in the valley of the Danube hospices were established where they could replenish their provisions. In 1026 Richard, Abbot of Saint-Vannes, led 700 pilgrims into Palestine at the expense of Richard II, Duke of Normandy. In 1065 over 12,000 Germans who had crossed Europe under the command of Günther, Bishop of Bamberg, while on their way through Palestine had to seek shelter in a ruined fortress, where they defended themselves against a troop of Bedouins (Lambert of Hersfeld, in "Mon. Germ. Hist.: Script.", V, 168). Thus it is evident that at the close of the eleventh century the route to Palestine was familiar enough to Western Christians who looked upon the Holy Sepulchre as the most venerable of relics and were ready to brave any peril in order to visit it. The memory of Charlemagne's protectorate still lived, and a trace of it is to be found in the medieval legend of this emperor's journey to Palestine (Gaston Paris in "Romania", 1880, p. 23).

The rise of the Seljukian Turks, however, compromised the safety of pilgrims and even threatened the independence of the Byzantine Empire and of all Christendom. In 1070 Jerusalem was taken, and in 1091 Diogenes, the Greek emperor, was defeated and made captive at Mantzikert. Asia Minor and all of Syria became the prey of the Turks. Antioch succumbed in 1084, and by 1092 not one of the great metropolitan sees of Asia remained in the possession of the Christians. Although separated from the communion of Rome since the schism of Michael Cærularius (1054), the emperors of Constantinople implored the assistance of the popes; in 1073 letters were exchanged on the subject between Michael VII and Gregory VII. The pope seriously contemplated leading a force of 50,000 men to the East in order to re-establish Christian unity, repulse the Turks, and rescue the Holy Sepulchre. But the idea of the crusade constituted only a part of this magnificent plan. (The letters of Gregory VII are in P.L., CXLVIII, 300, 325, 329, 386; cf. Riant's critical discussion in Archives de l'Orient Latin, I, 56.) The conflict over the Investitures in 1076 compelled the pope to abandon his projects; the Emperors Nicephorus Botaniates and Alexius Comnenus were unfavourable to a religious union with Rome; finally war broke out between the Byzantine Empire and the Normans of the Two Sicilies.

It was Pope Urban II who took up the plans of Gregory VII and gave them more definite shape. A letter from Alexius Comnenus to Robert, Count of Flanders, recorded by the chroniclers, Guibert de Nogent ("Historiens Occidentaux des Croisades", ed. by the Académie des Inscriptions, IV, 13l) and Hugues de Fleury (in "Mon. Germ. Hist.: Script.", IX, 392), seems to imply that the crusade was instigated by the Byzantine emperor, but this has been proved false (Chalandon, Essai sur le règne d'Alexis Comnène, appendix), Alexius having merely sought to enroll five hundred Flemish knights in the imperial army (Anna Comnena, Alexiad., VII, iv). The honour of initiating the crusade has also been attributed to Peter the Hermit, a recluse of Picardy, who, after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and a vision in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, went to Urban II and was commissioned by him to preach the crusade. However, though eyewitnesses of the crusade mention his preaching, they do not ascribe to him the all-important rôle assigned him later by various chroniclers, e.g. Albert of Aix and especially William of Tyre. (See Hagenmeyer, Peter der Eremite Leipzig, 1879.) The idea of the crusade is chiefly attributed to Pope Urban II (1095), and the motives that actuated him are clearly set forth by his contemporaries: "On beholding the enormous injury that all, clergy or people, brought upon the Christian Faith... at the news that the Rumanian provinces had been taken from the Christians by the Turks, moved with compassion and impelled by the love of God, he crossed the mountains and descended into Gaul" (Foucher de Chartres, I, in "Histoire des Crois.", III, 321). Of course it is possible that in order to swell his forces, Alexius Comnenus solicited assistance in the West; however, it was not he but the pope who agitated the great movement which filled the Greeks with anxiety and terror.

II. Foundation of Christian States in the East

After travelling through Burgundy and the south of France, Urban II convoked a council at Clermont-Ferrand, in Auvergne. It was attended by fourteen archbishops, 250 bishops, and 400 abbots; moreover a great number of knights and men of all conditions came and encamped on the plain of Chantoin, to the east of Clermont, 18-28 November, 1095. On 27 November, the pope himself addressed the assembled multitudes, exhorting them to go forth and rescue the Holy Sepulchre. Amid wonderful enthusiasm and cries of "God wills it!" all rushed towards the pontiff to pledge themselves by vow to depart for the Holy Land and receive the cross of red material to be worn on the shoulder. At the same time the pope sent letters to all Christian nations, and the movement made rapid headway throughout Europe. Preachers of the crusade appeared everywhere, and on all sides sprang up disorganized, undisciplined, penniless hordes, almost destitute of equipment, who, surging eastward through the valley of the Danube, plundered as they went along and murdered the Jews in the German cities. One of these bands, headed by Folkmar, a German cleric, was slaughtered by the Hungarians. Peter the Hermit, however, and the German knight, Walter the Pennyless (Gautier Sans Avoir), finally reached Constantinople with their disorganized troops. To save the city from plunder Alexius Comnenus ordered them to be conveyed across the Bosporus (August, 1096); in Asia Minor they turned to pillage and were nearly all slain by the Turks. Meanwhile the regular crusade was being organized in the West and, according to a well-conceived plan, the four principal armies were to meet at Constantinople.

• Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine at the head of the people of Lorraine, the Germans, and the French from the north, followed the valley of the Danube, crossed Hungary, and arrived at Constantinople, 23 December, 1096.

• Hugh of Vermandois, brother of King Philip I of France, Robert Courte-Heuse, Duke of Normandy, and Count Stephen of Blois, led bands of French and Normans across the Alps and set sail from the ports of Apulia for Dyrrachium (Durazzo), whence they took the "Via Egnatia" to Constantinople and assembled there in May, 1097.

• The French from the south, under the leadership of Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, and of Adhemar of Monteil, Bishop of Puy and papal legate, began to fight their way through the longitudinal valleys of the Eastern Alps and, after bloody conflicts with the Slavonians, reached Constantinople at the end of April, 1097.

• Lastly, the Normans of Southern Italy, won over by the enthusiasm of the bands of crusaders that passed through their country, embarked for Epirus under the command of Bohemond and Tancred, one being the eldest son, the other the nephew, of Robert Guiscard. Crossing the Byzantine Empire, they succeeded in reaching Constantinople, 26 April, 1097.

The appearance of the crusading armies at Constantinople raised the greatest trouble, and helped to bring about in the future irremediable misunderstandings between the Greeks and the Latin Christians. The unsolicited invasion of the latter alarmed Alexius, who tried to prevent the concentration of all these forces at Constantinople by transporting to Asia Minor each Western army in the order of its arrival; moreover, he endeavoured to extort from the leaders of the crusade a promise that they would restore to the Greek Empire the lands they were about to conquer. After resisting the imperial entreaties throughout the winter, Godfrey of Bouillon, hemmed in at Pera, at length consented to take the oath of fealty. Bohemond, Robert Courte-Heuse, Stephen of Blois, and the other crusading chiefs unhesitatingly assumed the same obligation; Raymond of St-Gilles, however, remained obdurate.

Transported into Asia Minor, the crusaders laid siege to the city of Nicæa, but Alexius negotiated with the Turks, had the city delivered to him, and prohibited the crusaders from entering it (1 June, 1097). After their victory over the Turks at the battle of Dorylæum on 1 July, 1097, the Christians entered upon the high plateaux of Asia Minor. Constantly harrassed by a relentless enemy, overcome by the excessive heat, and sinking under the weight of their leathern armour covered with iron scales, their sufferings were wellnigh intolerable. In September, 1097, Tancred and Baldwin, brothers of Godfrey of Bouillon, left the bulk of the army and entered Armenian territory. At Tarsus a feud almost broke out between them, but fortunately they became reconciled. Tancred took possession of the towns of Cilicia, whilst Baldwin, summoned by the Armenians, crossed the Euphrates in October, 1097, and, after marrying an Armenian princess, was proclaimed Lord of Edessa. Meanwhile the crusaders, revictualled by the Armenians of the Taurus region, made their way into Syria and on 20 October, 1097, reached the fortified city of Antioch, which was protected by a wall flanked with 450 towers, stocked by the Ameer Jagi-Sian with immense quantities of provisions. Thanks to the assistance of carpenters and engineers who belonged to a Genoese fleet that had arrived at the mouth of the Orontes, the crusaders were enabled to construct battering-machines and to begin the siege of the city. Eventually Bohemond negotiated with a Turkish chief who surrendered one of the towers, and on the night of 2 June, 1098, the crusaders took Antioch by storm. The very next day they were in turn besieged within the city by the army of Kerbûga, Ameer of Mosul. Plague and famine cruelly decimated their ranks, and many of them, among others Stephen of Blois, escaped under cover of night. The army was on the verge of giving way to discouragement when its spirits were suddenly revived by the discovery of the Holy Lance, resulting from the dream of a Provençal priest named Pierre Barthélemy. On 28 June, 1098, Kerbûga's army was effectually repulsed, but, instead of marching on Jerusalem without delay, the chiefs spent several months in a quarrel due to the rivalry of Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Bohemond, both of whom claimed the right to Antioch. It was not until April, 1099, that the march towards Jerusalem was begun, Bohemond remaining in possession of Antioch while Raymond seized on Tripoli. On 7 June the crusaders began the siege of Jerusalem. Their predicament would have been serious, indeed, had not another Genoese fleet arrived at Jaffa and, as at Antioch, furnished the engineers necessary for a siege. After a general procession which the crusaders made barefooted around the city walls amid the insults and incantations of Mohammedan sorcerers, the attack began 14 July, 1099. Next day the Christians entered Jerusalem from all sides and slew its inhabitants regardless of age or sex. Having accomplished their pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, the knights chose as lord of the new conquest Godfrey of Bouillon, who called himself "Defender of the Holy Sepulchre". They had then to repulse an Egyptian army, which was defeated at Ascalon, 12 August, 1099. Their position was nevertheless very insecure. Alexius Comnenus threatened the principality of Antioch, and in 1100 Bohemond himself was made prisoner by the Turks, while most of the cities on the coast were still under Mohammedan control. Before his death, 29 July, 1099, Urban II once more proclaimed the crusade. In 1101 three expeditions crossed Europe under the leadership of Count Stephen of Blois, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, and Welf IV, Duke of Bavaria. All three managed to reach Asia Minor, but were massacred by the Turks. On his release from prison Bohemond attacked the Byzantine Empire, but was surrounded by the imperial army and forced to acknowledge himself the vassal of Alexius. On Bohemond's death, however, in 1111, Tancred refused to live up to the treaty and retained Antioch. Godfrey of Bouillon died at Jerusalem 18 July, 1100. His brother and successor, Baldwin of Edessa, was crowned King of Jerusalem in the Basilica of Bethlehem, 25 December, 1100. In 1112, with the aid of Norwegians under Sigurd Jorsalafari and the support of Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian fleets, Baldwin I began the conquest of the ports of Syria, which was completed in 1124 by the capture of Tyre. Ascalon alone kept an Egyptian garrison until 1153.

At this period the Christian states formed an extensive and unbroken territory between the Euphrates and the Egyptian frontier, and included four almost independent principalities: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Countship of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the Countship of Rohez (Edessa). These small states were, so to speak, the common property of all Christendom and, as such, were subordinate to the authority of the pope. Moreover, the French knights and Italian merchants established in the newly conquered cities soon gained the upper hand. The authority of the sovereigns of these different principalities was restricted by the fief-holders, vassals, and under-vassals who constituted the Court of Lieges, or Supreme Court. This assembly had entire control in legislative matters; no statute or law could be established without its consent; no baron could be deprived of his fief without its decision; its jurisdiction extended over all, even the king, and it controlled also the succession to the throne. A "Court of the Burgesses" had similar jurisdiction over the citizens. Each fief had a like tribunal composed of knights and citizens, and in the ports there were police and mercantile courts (see ASSIZES OF JERUSALEM). The authority of the Church also helped to limit the power of the king; the four metropolitan sees of Tyre, Cæsarea, Bessan, and Petra were subject to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, similarly seven suffragan sees and a great many abbeys, among them Mount Sion, Mount Olivet, the Temple, Josaphat, and the Holy Sepulchre. Through rich and frequent donations the clergy became the largest property-holders in the kingdom; they also received from the crusaders important estates situated in Europe. In spite of the aforesaid restrictions, in the twelfth century the King of Jerusalem had a large income. The customs duties established in the ports and administered by natives, the tolls exacted from caravans, and the monopoly of certain industries were a fruitful source of revenue. From a military point of view all vassals owed the king unlimited service as to time, though he was obliged to compensate them, but to fill the ranks of the army it was necessary to enroll natives who received a life annuity (fief de soudée). In this way was recruited the light cavalry of the "Turcoples", armed in Saracenic style. Altogether these forces barely exceeded 20,000 men, and yet the powerful vassals who commanded them were almost independent of the king. So it was that the great need of regular troops for the defence of the Christian dominions brought about the creation of a unique institution, the religious orders of knighthood, viz.: the Hospitallers, who at first did duty in the Hospital of St. John founded by the aforesaid merchants of Amalfi, and were then organized into a militia by Gérard du Puy that they might fight the Saracens (1113); and the Templars, nine of whom in 1118 gathered around Hugues de Payens and received the Rule of St. Bernard. These members, whether knights drawn from the nobility, bailiffs, clerks, or chaplains, pronounced the three monastic vows but it was chiefly to the war against the Saracens that they pledged themselves. Being favoured with many spiritual and temporal privileges, they easily gained recruits from among the younger sons of feudal houses and acquired both in Palestine and in Europe considerable property. Their castles, built at the principal strategic points, Margat, Le Crac, and Tortosa, were strong citadels protected by several concentric enclosures. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem these military orders virtually formed two independent commonwealths. Finally, in the cities, the public power was divided between the native citizens and the Italian colonists, Genoese, Venetians, Pisans, and also the Marseillais who, in exchange for their services, were given supreme power in certain districts wherein small self-governing communities had their consuls, their churches, and on the outskirts their farm-land, used for the cultivation of cotton and sugar-cane. The Syrian ports were regularly visited by Italian fleets which obtained there the spices and silks brought by caravans from the Far East. Thus, during the first half of the twelfth century the Christian states of the East were completely organized, and even eclipsed in wealth and prosperity most of the Western states.

III. First Destruction of the Christian States (1144-87)

Many dangers, unfortunately, threatened this prosperity. On the south were the Caliphs of Egypt, on the east the Seljuk Ameers of Damascus, Hamah and Aleppo, and on the north the Byzantine emperors, eager to realize the project of Alexius Comnenus and bring the Latin states under their power. Moreover, in the presence of so many enemies the Christian states lacked cohesion and discipline. The help they received from the West was too scattered and intermittent. Nevertheless these Western knights, isolated amid Mohammedans and forced, because of the torrid climate, to lead a life far different from that to which they had been accustomed at home, displayed admirable bravery and energy in their efforts to save the Christian colonies. In 1137 John Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, appeared before Antioch with an army, and compelled Prince Raymond to do him homage. On the death of this potentate (1143), Raymond endeavoured to shake off the irksome yoke and invaded Byzantine territory, but was hemmed in by the imperial army and compelled (1144) to humble himself at Constantinople before the Emperor Manuel. The Principality of Edessa, completely isolated from the other Christian states, could not withstand the attacks of Imad-ed-Din, the prince, or atabek, of Mosul, who forced its garrison to capitulate 25 December, 1144. After the assassination of Imad-ed-Din, his son Nour-ed-Din continued hostilities against the Christian states. At news of this, Louis VII of France, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and a great number of knights, moved by the exhortations of St. Bernard, enlisted under the cross (Assembly of Vézelay, 31 March, 1146). The Abbot of Clairvaux became the apostle of the crusade and conceived the idea of urging all Europe to attack the infidels simultaneously in Syria, in Spain, and beyond the Elbe. At first he met with strong opposition in Germany. Eventually Emperor Conrad III acceded to his wish and adopted the standard of the cross at the Diet of Spires, 25 December, 1146. However, there was no such enthusiasm as had prevailed in 1095. Just as the crusaders started on their march, King Roger of Sicily attacked the Byzantine Empire, but his expedition merely checked the progress of Nour-ed-Din's invasion. The sufferings endured by the crusaders while crossing Asia Minor prevented them from advancing on Edessa. They contented themselves with besieging Damascus, but were obliged to retreat at the end of a few weeks (July, 1148). This defeat caused great dissatisfaction in the West; moreover, the conflicts between the Greeks and the crusaders only confirmed the general opinion that the Byzantine Empire was the chief obstacle to the success of the Crusades. Nevertheless, Manuel Comnenus endeavoured to strengthen the bonds that united the Byzantine Empire to the Italian principalities. In 1161 he married Mary of Antioch, and in 1167 gave the hand of one of his nieces to Amalric, King of Jerusalem. This alliance resulted in thwarting the progress of Nour-ed-Din, who, having become master of Damascus in 1154, refrained thenceforth from attacking the Christian dominions.

King Amalric profited by this respite to interpose in the affairs of Egypt, as the only remaining representatives of the Fatimite dynasty were children, and two rival viziers were disputing the supreme power amid conditions of absolute anarchy. One of these disputants, Shawer, being exiled from Egypt, took refuge with Nour-ed-Din, who sent his best general, Shírkúh, to reinstate him. After his conquest of Cairo, Shírkúh endeavoured to bring Shawer into disfavour with the caliph; Amalric, taking advantage of this, allied himself with Shawer. On two occasions, in 1164 and 1167, he forced Shírkúh to evacuate Egypt; a body of Frankish knights was stationed at one of the gates of Cairo, and Egypt paid a tribute of 100,000 dinárs to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1168 Amalric made another attempt to conquer Egypt, but failed. After ordering the assassination of Shawer, Shírkúh had himself proclaimed Grand Vizier. At his death on 3 March, 1169, he was succeeded by his nephew, Salah-ed-Dîn (Saladin). During that year Amalric, aided by a Byzantine fleet, invaded Egypt once more, but was defeated at Damietta. Saladin retained full sway in Egypt and appointed no successor to the last Fatimite caliph, who died in 1171. Moreover, Nour-ed-Din died in 1174, and, while his sons and nephews disputed the inheritance, Saladin took possession of Damascus and conquered all Mesopotamia except Mosul. Thus, when Amalric died in 1173, leaving the royal power to Baldwin IV, "the Leprous", a child of thirteen, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was threatened on all sides. At the same time two factions, led respectively by Guy de Lusignan, brother-in-iaw of the king, and Raymond, Count of Tripoli, contended for the supremacy. Baldwin IV died in 1184, and was soon followed to the grave by his nephew Baldwin V. Despite lively opposition, Guy de Lusignan was crowned king, 20 July, 1186. Though the struggle against Saladin was already under way, it was unfortunately conducted without order or discipline. Notwithstanding the truce concluded with Saladin, Renaud de Châtillon, a powerful feudatory and lord of the trans-Jordanic region, which included the fief of Montréal, the great castle of Karak, and Aïlet, a port on the Red Sea, sought to divert the enemy's attention by attacking the holy cities of the Mohammedans. Oarless vessels were brought to Aïlet on the backs of camels in 1182, and a fleet of five galleys traversed the Red Sea for a whole year, ravaging the coasts as far as Aden; a body of knights even attempted to seize Medina. In the end this fleet was destroyed by Saladin's, and, to the great joy of the Mohammedans, the Frankish prisoners were put to death at Mecca. Attacked in his castle at Karak, Renaud twice repulsed Saladin's forces (1184-86). A truce was then signed, but Renaud broke it again and carried off a caravan in which was the sultan's own sister. In his exasperation Saladin invaded the Kingdom of Jerusalem and, although Guy de Lusignan gathered all his forces to repel the attack, on 4 July, 1187, Saladin's army annihilated that of the Christians on the shores of Lake Tiberias. The king, the grand master of the Temple, Renaud de Châtillon, and the most powerful men in the realm were made prisoners. After slaying Renaud with his own hand, Saladin marched on Jerusalem. The city capitulated 17 September, and Tyre, Antioch, and Tripoli were the only places in Syria that remained to the Christians.

IV. Attempts to Restore the Christian States and the Crusade Against Saint-Jean D'Acre

The news of these events caused great consternation in Christendom, and Pope Gregory VIII strove to put a stop to all dissensions among the Christian princes. On 21 January, 1188, Philip Augustus, King of France, and Henry II, Plantagenet, became reconciled at Gisors and took the cross. On 27 March, at the Diet of Mainz, Frederick Barbarossa and a great number of German knights made a vow to defend the Christian cause in Palestine. In Italy, Pisa made peace with Genoa, Venice with the King of Hungary, and William of Sicily with the Byzantine Empire. Moreover, a Scandinavian fleet consisting of 12,000 warriors sailed around the shores of Europe, when passing Portugal, it helped to capture Alvor from the Mohammedans. Enthusiasm for the crusade was again wrought up to a high pitch; but, on the other hand, diplomacy and royal and princely schemes became increasingly important in its organization. Frederick Barbarossa entered into negotiations with Isaac Angelus, Emperor of Constantinople, with the Sultan of Iconium, and even with Saladin himself. It was, moreover, the first time that all the Mohammedan forces were united under a single leader; Saladin, while the holy war was being preached, organized against the Christians something like a counter-crusade. Frederick Barbarossa, who was first ready for the enterprise, and to whom chroniclers attribute an army of 100,000 men, left Ratisbon, 11 May, 1189. After crossing Hungary he took the Balkan passes by assault and tried to outflank the hostile movements of Isaac Angelus by attacking Constantinople. Finally, after the sack of Adrianople, Isaac Angelus surrendered, and between 21 and 30 March, 1190, the Germans succeeded in crossing the Strait of Gallipoli. As usual, the march across Asia Minor was most arduous. With a view to replenishing provisions, the army took Iconium by assault. On their arrival in the Taurus region, Frederick Barbarossa tried to cross the Selef (Kalykadnos) on horseback and was drowned. Thereupon many German princes returned to Europe; the others, under the emperor's son, Frederick of Swabia, reached Antioch and proceeded thence to Saint-Jean d'Acre. It was before this city that finally all the crusading troops assembled. In June, 1189, King Guy de Lusignan, who had been released from captivity, appeared there with the remnant of the Christian army, and, in September of the same year, the Scandinavian fleet arrived, followed by the English and Flemish fleets, commanded respectively by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jacques d'Avesnes. This heroic siege lasted two years. In the spring of each year reinforcements arrived from the West, and a veritable Christian city sprang up outside the walls of Acre. But the winters were disastrous to the crusaders, whose ranks were decimated by disease brought on by the inclemency of the rainy season and lack of food. Saladin came to the assistance of the city, and communicated with it by means of carrier pigeons. Missile-hurtling machines (pierrières), worked by powerful machinery, were used by the crusaders to demolish the walls of Acre, but the Mohammedans also had strong artillery. This famous siege had already lasted two years when Philip Augustus, King of France, and Richard Coeur de Lion, King of England, arrived on the scene. After long deliberation they had left Vézelay together, 4 July, 1190. Richard embarked at Marseilles, Philip at Genoa, and they met at Messina. During a sojourn in this place, lasting until March, 1191, they almost quarrelled, but finally concluded a treaty of peace. While Philip was landing at Acre, Richard was shipwrecked on the coast of Cyprus, then independent under Isaac Comnenus. With the aid of Guy de Lusignan, Richard conquered this island. The arrival of the Kings of France and England before Acre brought about the capitulation of the city, 13 July 1191. Soon, however, the quarrel of the French and English kings broke out again, and Philip Augustus left Palestine, 28 July. Richard was now leader of the crusade, and, to punish Saladin for the non-fulfilment of the treaty conditions within the time specified, had the Mohammedan hostages put to death. Next, an attack on Jerusalem was meditated, but, after beguiling the Christians by negotiations, Saladin brought numerous troops from Egypt. The enterprise failed, and Richard compensated himself for these reverses by brilliant but useless exploits which made his name legendary among the Mohammedans. Before his departure he sold the Island of Cyprus, first to the Templars, who were unable to settle there, and then to Guy de Lusignan, who renounced the Kingdom of Jerusalem in favour of Conrad of Montferrat (1192).

After a last expedition to defend Jaffa against Saladin, Richard declared a truce and embarked for Europe, 9 October, 1192, but did not reach his English realm until he had undergone a humiliating captivity at the hands of the Duke of Austria, who avenged in this way the insults offered him before Saint-Jean d'Acre.

While Capetians and Plantagenets, oblivious of the Holy War, were settling at home their territorial disputes, Emperor Henry VI, son of Barbarossa, took in hand the supreme direction of Christian politics in the East. Crowned King of the Two Sicilies, 25 December, 1194, he took the cross at Bari, 31 May, 1195, and made ready an expedition which, he thought, would recover Jerusalem and wrest Constantinople from the usurper Alexius III. Eager to exercise his imperial authority he made Amaury de Lusignan King of Cyprus and Leo II King of Armenia. In September, 1197, the German crusaders started for the East. They landed at Saint-Jean d'Acre and marched on Jerusalem, but were detained before the little town of Tibnin from November, 1197, to February 1198. On raising the siege, they learned that Henry VI had died, 28 September, at Messina, where he had gathered the fleet that was to convey him to Constantinople. The Germans signed a truce with the Saracens, but their future influence in Palestine was assured by the creation of the Order of the Teutonic Knights. In 1143, a German pilgrim had founded a hospital for his fellow-countrymen; the religious who served it moved to Acre and, in 1198, were organized in imitation of the plan of the Hospitallers, their rule being approved by Innocent III in 1199.

V. The Crusade Against Constantinople (1204)

In the many attempts made to establish the Christian states the efforts of the crusaders had been directed solely toward the object for which the Holy War had been instituted; the crusade against Constantinople shows the first deviation from the original purpose. For those who strove to gain their ends by taking the direction of the crusades out of the pope's hands, this new movement was, of course, a triumph, but for Christendom it was a source of perplexity. Scarcely had Innocent III been elected pope, in January, 1198, when he inaugurated a policy in the East which he was to follow throughout his pontificate. He subordinated all else to the recapture of Jerusalem and the reconquest of the Holy Land. In his first Encyclicals he summoned all Christians to join the crusade and even negotiated with Alexius III, the Byzantine emperor, trying to persuade him to re-enter the Roman communion and use his troops for the liberation of Palestine. Peter of Capua, the papal legate, brought about a truce between Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion, January, 1199, and popular preachers, among others the parish priest Foulques of Neuilly, attracted large crowds. During a tournament at Ecry-sur-Aisne, 28 November, 1199, Count Thibaud de Champagne and a great many knights took the cross; in southern Germany, Martin, Abbot of Pairis, near Colmar, won many to the crusade. It would seem, however, that, from the outset, the pope lost control of this enterprise. Without even consulting Innocent III, the French knights, who had elected Thibaud de Champagne as their leader, decided to attack the Mohammedans in Egypt and in March, 1201, concluded with the Republic of Venice a contract for the transportation of troops on the Mediterranean. On the death of Thibaud the crusaders chose as his successor Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, and cousin of Philip of Swabia, then in open conflict with the pope. Just at this time the son of Isaac Angelus, the dethroned Emperor of Constantinople, sought refuge in the West and asked Innocent III and his own brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia, to reinstate him on the imperial throne. The question has been raised whether it was pre-arranged between Philip and Boniface of Montferrat to turn the crusade towards Constantinople, and a passage in the "Gesta Innocentii" (83, in P. L., CCXIV, CXXXII) indicates that the idea was not new to Boniface of Montferrat when, in the spring of 1202, he made it known to the pope. Meanwhile the crusaders assembled at Venice could not pay the amount called for by their contract, so, by way of exchange, the Venetians suggested that they help recover the city of Zara in Dalmatia. The knights accepted the proposal, and, after a few days' siege, the city capitulated, November, 1202. But it was in vain that Innocent III urged the crusaders to set out for Palestine. Having obtained absolution for the capture of Zara, and despite the opposition of Simon of Montfort and a part of the army, on 24 May, 1203, the leaders ordered a march on Constantinople. They had concluded with Alexius, the Byzantine pretender, a treaty whereby he promised to have the Greeks return to the Roman communion, give the crusaders 200,000 marks, and participate in the Holy War. On 23 June the crusaders' fleet appeared before Constantinople; on 7 July they took possession of a suburb of Galata and forced their way into the Golden Horn; on 17 July they simultaneously attacked the sea walls and land walls of the Blachernæ. The troops of Alexius III made an unsuccessful sally, and the usurper fled, whereupon Isaac Angelus was released from prison and permitted to share the imperial dignity with his son, Alexius IV. But even had the latter been sincere he would have been powerless to keep the promises made to the crusaders. After some months of tedious waiting, those of their number cantoned at Galata lost patience with the Greeks, who not only refused to live up to their agreement, but likewise treated them with open hostility. On 5 February, 1204, Alexius IV and Isaac Angelus were deposed by a revolution, and Alexius Murzuphla, a usurper, undertook the defence of Constantinople against the Latin crusaders who were preparing to besiege Constantinople a second time. By a treaty concluded in March, 1204, between the Venetians and the crusading chiefs, it was pre-arranged to share the spoils of the Greek Empire. On 12 April, 1204, Constantinople was carried by storm, and the next day the ruthless plundering of its churches and palaces was begun. The masterpieces of antiquity, piled up in public places and in the Hippodrome, were utterly destroyed. Clerics and knights, in their eagerness to acquire famous and priceless relics, took part in the sack of the churches.

The Venetians received half the booty; the portion of each crusader was determined according to his rank of baron, knight, or bailiff, and most of the churches of the West were enriched with ornaments stripped from those of Constantinople. On 9 May, 1204, an electoral college, formed of prominent crusaders and Venetians, assembled to elect an emperor. Dandolo, Doge of Venice, refused the honour, and Boniface of Montferrat was not considered. In the end, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was elected and solemnly crowned in St. Sophia. Constantinople and the empire were divided among the emperor, the Venetians, and the chief crusaders; the Marquis of Montferrat received Thessalonica and Macedonia, with the title of king; Henry of Flanders became Lord of Adramyttion; Louis of Blois was made Duke of Nicæa, and fiefs were bestowed upon six hundred knights. Meanwhile, the Venetians reserved to themselves the ports of Thrace, the Peloponnesus, and the islands. Thomas Morosini, a Venetian priest, was elected patriarch.

At the news of these most extraordinary events, in which he had had no hand, Innocent III bowed as in submission to the designs of Providence and, in the interests of Christendom, determined to make the best of the new conquest. His chief aim was to suppress the Greek schism and to place the forces of the new Latin Empire at the service of the crusade. Unfortunately, the Latin Empire of Constantinople was in too precarious a condition to furnish any material support to the papal policy. The emperor was unable to impose his authority upon the barons. At Nicæa, not far from Constantinople, the former Byzantine Government gathered the remnant of its authority and its followers. Theodore Lascaris was proclaimed emperor. In Europe, Joannitsa, Tsar of the Wallachians and Bulgarians, invaded Thrace and destroyed the army of the crusaders before Adrianople, 14 April, 1205. During the battle the Emperor Baldwin fell. His brother and successor, Henry of Flanders, devoted his reign (1206-16) to interminable conflicts with the Bulgarians, the Lombards of Thessalonica, and the Greeks of Asia Minor. Nevertheless, he succeeded in strengthening the Latin conquest, forming an alliance with the Bulgarians, and establishing his authority even over the feudatories of Morea (Parliament of Ravennika, 1209); however, far from leading a crusade into Palestine, he had to solicit Western help, and was obliged to sign treaties with Theodore Lascaris and even with the Sultan of Iconium. The Greeks were not reconciled to the Church of Rome; most of their bishops abandoned their sees and took refuge at Nicæa, leaving their churches to the Latin bishops named to replace them. Greek convents were replaced by Cistercian monasteries, commanderies of Templars and Hospitallers, and chapters of canons. With a few exceptions, however, the native population remained hostile and looked upon the Latin conquerors as foreigners. Having failed in all his attempts to induce the barons of the Latin Empire to undertake an expedition against Palestine, and understanding at last the cause of failure of the crusade in 1204, Innocent III resolved (1207) to organize a new crusade and to take no further notice of Constantinople. Circumstances, however, were unfavourable. Instead of concentrating the forces of Christendom against the Mohammedans, the pope himself disbanded them by proclaiming (1209) a crusade against the Albigenses in the south of France, and against the Almohades of Spain (1213), the pagans of Prussia, and John Lackland of England. At the same time there occurred outbursts of mystical emotion similar to those which had preceded the first crusade. In 1212 a young shepherd of Vendôme and a youth from Cologne gathered thousands of children whom they proposed to lead to the conquest of Palestine. The movement spread through France and Italy. This "Children's Crusade" at length reached Brindisi, where merchants sold a number of the children as slaves to the Moors, while nearly all the rest died of hunger and exhaustion. In 1213 Innocent III had a crusade preached throughout Europe and sent Cardinal Pelagius to the East to effect, if possible, the return of the Greeks to the fold of Roman unity. On 25 July, 1215, Frederick II, after his victory over Otto of Brunswick, took the cross at the tomb of Charlemagne at Aachen. On 11 November, 1215, Innocent III opened the Fourth Lateran Council with an exhortation to all the faithful to join the crusade, the departure being set for 1217. At the time of his death (1216) Pope Innocent felt that a great movement had been started.

VI. The Thirteenth-Century Crusades (1217-52)

In Europe, however, the preaching of the crusade met with great opposition. Temporal princes were strongly averse to losing jurisdiction over their subjects who took part in the crusades. Absorbed in political schemes, they were unwilling to send so far away the military forces on which they depended. As early as December, 1216, Frederick II was granted a first delay in the fulfilment of his vow. The crusade as preached in the thirteenth century was no longer the great enthusiastic movement of 1095, but rather a series of irregular and desultory enterprises. Andrew II, King of Hungary, and Casimir, Duke of Pomerania, set sail from Venice and Spalato, while an army of Scandinavians made a tour of Europe. The crusaders landed at Saint-Jean d'Acre in 1217, but confined themselves to incursions on Mussulman territory, whereupon Andrew of Hungary returned to Europe. Receiving reinforcements in the spring of 1218, John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem, resolved to make an attack on the Holy Land by way of Egypt. The crusaders accordingly landed at Damietta in May, 1218, and, after a siege marked by many deeds of heroism, took the city by storm, 5 November, 1219. Instead of profiting by this victory, they spent over a year in idle quarrels, and it was not until May 1221, that they set out for Cairo. Surrounded by the Saracens at Mansurah, 24 July, the Christian army was routed. John of Brienne was compelled to purchase a retreat by the surrender of Damietta to the Saracens. Meanwhile Emperor Frederick II, who was to be the leader of the crusade, had remained in Europe and continued to importune the pope for new postponements of his departure. On 9 November, 1225, he married Isabelle of Brienne, heiress to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the ceremony taking place at Brindisi. Completely ignoring his father-in-law, he assumed the title of King of Jerusalem. In 1227, however, he had not yet left for Palestine. Gregory IX, elected pope 19 March, 1227, summoned Frederick to fulfil his vow. Finally, 8 September, the emperor embarked but soon turned back; therefore, on 29 September, the pope excommunicated him. Nevertheless, Frederick set sail again 18 June, 1228, but instead of leading a crusade he played a game of diplomacy. He won over Malek-el-Khamil, the Sultan of Egypt, who was at war with the Prince of Damascus, and concluded a treaty with him at Jaffa, February, 1229, according to the terms of which Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth were restored to the Christians. On 18 March, 1229, without any religious ceremony, Frederick assumed the royal crown of Jerusalem in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Returning to Europe, he became reconciled to Gregory IX, August, 1230. The pontiff ratified the Treaty of Jaffa, and Frederick sent knights into Syria to take possession of the cities and compel all feudatories to do him homage. A struggle occurred between Richard Filangieri, the emperor's marshal, and the barons of Palestine, whose leader was Jean d'Ibelin, Lord of Beirut. Filangieri vainly attempted to obtain possession of the Island of Cyprus. and, when Conrad, son of Frederick II and Isabelle of Brienne, came of age in 1243, the High Court, described above, named as regent Alix of Champagne, Queen of Cyprus. In this way German power was abolished in Palestine.

In the meantime Count Thibaud IV of Champagne had been leading a fruitless crusade in Syria (1239). Similarly the Duke of Burgundy and Richard of Cornwall, brother of the King of England, who had undertaken to recover Ascalon, concluded a truce with Egypt (1241). Europe was now threatened with a most grievous disaster. After conquering Russia, the Mongols under Jenghiz Khan appeared in 1241 on the frontiers of Poland, routed the army of the Duke of Silesia at Liegnitz, annihilated that of Bela, King of Hungary, and reached the Adriatic. Palestine felt the consequences of this invasion. The Mongols had destroyed the Mussulman Empire of Kharizm in Central Asia. Fleeing before their conquerors, 10,000 Kharizmians offered their services to the Sultan of Egypt, meanwhile seizing Jerusalem as they passed by, in September, 1244. The news of this catastrophe created a great stir in Europe, and at the Council of Lyons (June-July, 1245) Pope Innocent IV proclaimed a crusade, but the lack of harmony between him and the Emperor Frederick II foredoomed the pontiff to disappointment. Save for Louis IX, King of France, who took the cross in December, 1244, no one showed any willingness to lead an expedition to Palestine. On being informed that the Mongols were well-disposed towards Christianity, Innocent IV sent them Giovanni di Pianocarpini, a Franciscan, and Nicolas Ascelin, a Dominican, as ambassadors. Pianocarpini was in Karakorum 8 April, 1246, the day of the election of the great khan, but nothing came of this first attempt at an alliance with the Mongols against the Mohammedans. However, when St. Louis, who left Paris 12 June, 1248, had reached the Island of Cyprus, he received there a friendly embassy from the great khan and, in return, sent him two Dominicans. Encouraged, perhaps, by this alliance, the King of France decided to attack Egypt. On 7 June, 1249, he took Damietta, but it was only six months later that he marched on Cairo. On 19 December, his advance-guard, commanded by his brother, Robert of Artois, began imprudently to fight in the streets of Mansurah and were destroyed. The king himself was cut off from communication with Damietta and made prisoner 5 April, 1250. At the same time, the Ajoubite dynasty founded by Saladin was overthrown by the Mameluke militia, whose ameers took possession of Egypt. St. Louis negotiated with the latter and was set at liberty on condition of surrendering Damietta and paying a ransom of a million gold bezants. He remained in Palestine until 1254; bargained with the Egyptian ameers for the deliverance of prisoners; improved the equipment of the strongholds of the kingdom, Saint-Jean d'Acre, Cæsarea, Jaffa, and Sidon; and sent Friar William of Rubruquis as ambassador to the great khan. Then, at the news of the death of his mother, Blanche of Castile, who had been acting as regent, he returned to France. Since the crusade against Saint-Jean d'Acre, a new Frankish state, the Kingdom of Cyprus, had been formed in the Mediterranean opposite Syria and became a valuable point of support for the crusades. By lavish distribution of lands and franchises, Guy de Lusignan succeeded in attracting to the island colonists, knights, men-at-arms, and civilians; his successors established a government modelled after that of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The king's power was restricted by that of the High Court, composed of all the knights, vassals, or under-vassals, with its seat at Nicosia. However, the fiefs were less extensive than in Palestine, and the feudatories could inherit only in a direct line. The Island of Cyprus was soon populated with French colonists who succeeded in winning over the Greeks, upon whom they even imposed their language. Churches built in the French style and fortified castles appeared on all sides. The Cathedral of St. Sophia in Nicosia, erected between 1217 and 1251, was almost a copy of a church in Champagne. Finally, commercial activity became a pronounced characteristic of the cities of Cyprus, and Famagusta developed into one of the busiest of Mediterranean ports.

VII. Final Loss of the Christian Colonies of the East (1254-91)

No longer aided by funds from the West, and rent by internal disorders, the Christian colonies owed their temporary salvation to the changes in Mussulman policy and the intervention of the Mongols. The Venetians drove the Genoese from Saint-Jean d'Acre and treated the city as conquered territory; in a battle where Christians fought against Christians, and in which Hospitallers were pitted against Templars, 20,000 men perished. In revenge the Genoese allied themselves with Michael Palæologus, Emperor of Nicæa, whose general, Alexius Strategopulos, had now no trouble in entering Constantinople and overthrowing the Latin Emperor, Baldwin II, 25 July, 1261. The conquest of the Caliphate of Bagdad by the Mongols (1258) and their invasion of Syria, where they seized Aleppo and Damascus, terrified both Christians and Mohammedans; but the Mameluke ameer, Bibars the Arbelester, defeated the Mongols and wrested Syria from them in September, 1260. Proclaimed sultan in consequence of a conspiracy, in 1260, Bibars began a merciless war on the remaining Christian states. In 1263 he destroyed the church at Nazareth; in 1265 took Cæsarea and Jaffa, and finally captured Antioch (May, 1268). The question of a crusade was always being agitated in the West, but except among men of a religious turn of mind, like St. Louis, there was no longer any earnestness in the matter among European princes. They looked upon a crusade as a political instrument, to be used only when it served their own interests. To prevent the preaching of a crusade against Constantinople, Michael Palæologus promised the pope to work for the union of the Churches; but Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis, whom the conquest of the Two Sicilies had rendered one of the most powerful princes of Christendom, undertook to carry out for his own benefit the Eastern designs hitherto cherished by the Hohenstaufen. While Mary of Antioch, granddaughter of Amaury II, bequeathed him the rights she claimed to have to the crown of Jerusalem, he signed the treaty of Viterbo with Baldwin II (27 May, 1267), which assured him eventually the inheritance of Constantinople. In no wise troubled by these diplomatic combinations, St. Louis thought only of the crusade. In a parliament held at Paris, 24 March, 1267, he and his three sons took the cross, but, despite his example, many knights resisted the exhortations of the preacher Humbert de Romans. On hearing the reports of the missionaries, Louis resolved to land at Tunis, whose prince he hoped to convert to Christianity. It has been asserted that St. Louis was led to Tunis by Charles of Anjou, but instead of encouraging his brother's ambition the saint endeavoured to thwart it. Charles had tried to take advantage of the vacancy of the Holy See between 1268 and 1271 in order to attack Constantinople, the negotiations of the popes with Michael Palæologus for religious union having heretofore prevented him. St. Louis received the embassy of the Greek emperor very graciously and ordered Charles of Anjou to join him at Tunis. The crusaders, among whom was Prince Edward of England, landed at Carthage 17 July, 1270, but the plague broke out in their camp, and on 25 August, St. Louis himself was carried off by the scourge. Charles of Anjou then concluded a treaty with the Mohammedans, and the crusaders reimbarked. Prince Edward alone, determined to fulfil his vow, and set out for Saint-Jean d'Acre; however, after a few razzias on Saracenic territory, he concluded a truce with Bibars.

The field was now clear for Charles of Anjou, but the election of Gregory X, who was favourable to the crusade, again frustrated his plans. While the emissaries of the King of the Two Sicilies traversed the Balkan peninsula, the new pope was awaiting the union of the Western and Eastern Churches, which event was solemnly proclaimed at the Council of Lyons, 6 July, 1274; Michael Palæologus himself promised to take the cross. On 1 May, 1275, Gregory X effected a truce between this sovereign and Charles of Anjou. In the meantime Philip III, King of France, the King of England, and the King of Aragon made a vow to go to the Holy Land. Unfortunately the death of Gregory X brought these plans to nought, and Charles of Anjou resumed his scheming. In 1277 he sent into Syria Roger of San Severino, who succeeded in planting his banner on the castle of Acre and in 1278 took possession of the principality of Achaia in the name of his daughter-in-law Isabelle de Villehardouin. Michael Palæologus had not been able to effect the union of the Greek clergy with Rome, and in 1281 Pope Martin IV excommunicated him. Having signed an alliance with Venice, Charles of Anjou prepared to attack Constantinople, and his expedition was set for April, 1283. On 30 March, 1282, however, the revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers occurred, and once more his projects were defeated. In order to subdue his own rebellious subjects and to wage war against the King of Aragon, Charles was at last compelled to abandon his designs on the East. Meanwhile Michael Palæologus remained master of Constantinople, and the Holy Land was left defenceless. In 1280 the Mongols attempted once more to invade Syria, but were repulsed by the Egyptians at the battle of Hims; in 1286 the inhabitants of Saint-Jean d'Acre expelled Charles of Anjou's seneschal and called to their aid Henry II, King of Cyprus. Kelaoun, the successor of Bibars, now broke the truce which he had concluded with the Christians, and seized Margat, the stronghold of the Hospitallers. Tripoli surrendered in 1289, and on 5 April, 1291, Malek-Aschraf, son and successor of Kelaoun, appeared before Saint-Jean d'Acre with 120,000 men. The 25,000 Christians who defended the city were not even under one supreme commander; nevertheless they resisted with heroic valour, filled breaches in the wall with stakes and bags of cotton and wool, and communicated by sea with King Henry II, who brought them help from Cyprus. However, 28 May, the Mohammedans made a general attack and penetrated into the town, and its defenders fled in their ships. The strongest opposition was offered by the Templars, the garrison of whose fortress held out ten days longer, only to be completely annihilated. In July, 1291, the last Christian towns in Syria capitulated, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem ceased to exist.

VIII. The Fourteenth Century Crusade and the Ottoman Invasion

The loss of Saint-Jean d'Acre did not lead the princes of Europe to organize a new crusade. Men's minds were indeed, as usual, directed towards the East, but in the first years of the fourteenth century the idea of a crusade inspired principally the works of theorists who saw in it the best means of reforming Christendom. The treatise by Pierre Dubois, law-officer of the crown at Coutances, "De Recuperatione Terræ Sanctæ" (Langlois, ed., Paris, 1891), seems like the work of a dreamer, yet some of its views are truly modern. The establishment of peace between Christian princes by means of a tribunal of arbitration, the idea of making a French prince hereditary emperor, the secularization of the Patrimony of St. Peter, the consolidation of the Orders of the Hospitallers and Templars, the creation of a disciplined army the different corps of which were to have a special uniform, the creation of schools for the study of Oriental languages, and the intermarriage of Christian maidens with Saracens were the principal ideas it propounded (1307). On the other hand the writings of men of greater activity and wider experience suggested more practical methods for effecting the conquest of the East. Persuaded that Christian defeat in the Orient was largely due to the mercantile relations which the Italian cities Venice and Genoa continued to hold with the Mohammedans, these authors sought the establishment of a commercial blockade which, within a few years, would prove the ruin of Egypt and cause it to fall under Christian control. For this purpose it was recommended that a large fleet be fitted out at the expense of Christian princes and made to do police duty on the Mediterranean so as to prevent smuggling. These were the projects set forth in the memoirs of Fidentius of Padua, a Franciscan (about 1291, Bibliothèque Nationale, Latin MSS., 7247); in those of King Charles II of Naples (1293, Bib. Nat., Frankish MSS., 6049); Jacques de Molay (1307, Baluze, ed., Vitæ paparum Avenion., II, 176-185); Henry II, King of Cyprus (Mas-Latrie, ed., Histoire de Chypre, II, 118); Guillaume d'Adam, Archbishop of Sultanieh (1310, Kohler, ed., Collect. Hist. of the Crusades, Armenian Documents, II); and Marino Sanudo, the Venetian (Bongars, ed., Secreta fidelium Crucis, II). The consolidation of the military orders was also urged by Charles II. Many other memoirs, especially that of Hayton, King of Armenia (1307, ed. Armenian Documents, I), considered an alliance between the Christians and the Mongols of Persia indispensable to success. In fact, from the end of the thirteenth century many missionaries had penetrated into the Mongolian Empire; in Persia, as well as in China, their propaganda flourished. St. Francis of Assisi, and Raymond Lully had hoped to substitute for the warlike crusade a peaceable conversion of the Mohammedans to Christianity. Raymond Lully, born at Palma, on the Island of Majorca, in 1235, began (1275) his "Great Art", which, by means of a universal method for the study of Oriental languages, would equip missionaries to enter into controversies with the Mohammedan doctors. In the same year he prevailed upon the King of Majorca to found the College of the Blessed Trinity at Miramar, where the Friars Minor could learn the Oriental languages. He himself translated catechetical treatises into Arabic and, after spending his life travelling in Europe trying to win over to his ideas popes and kings, suffered martyrdom at Bougie, where he had begun his work of evangelization (1314). Among the Mohammedans this propaganda encountered insurmountable difficulties, whereas the Mongols, some of whom were still members of the Nestorian Church, received it willingly. During the pontificate of John XXII (1316-34) permanent Dominican and Franciscan missions were established in Persia, China, Tatary and Turkestan, and in 1318 the Archbishopric of Sultanieh was created in Persia. In China Giovanni de Monte Corvino, created Archbishop of Cambaluc (Peking), organized the religious hierarchy, founded monasteries, and converted to Christianity men of note, possibly the great khan himself. The account of the journey of Blessed Orderic de Pordenone (Cordier, ed.) across Asia, between 1304 and 1330, shows us that Christianity had gained a foothold in Persia, India, Central Asia, and Southern China.

By thus leading up to an alliance between Mongols and Christians against the Mohammedans, the crusade had produced the desired effect; early in the fourteenth century the future development of Christianity in the East seemed assured. Unfortunately, however, the internal changes which occurred in the West, the weakening of the political influence of the popes, the indifference of temporal princes to what did not directly affect their territorial interests rendered unavailing all efforts towards the re-establishment of Christian power in the East. The popes endeavoured to insure the blockade of Egypt by prohibiting commercial intercourse with the infidels and by organizing a squadron for the prevention of smuggling, but the Venetians and Genoese defiantly sent their vessels to Alexandria and sold slaves and military stores to the Mamelukes. Moreover, the consolidation of the military orders could not be effected. By causing the suppression of the Templars at the Council of Vienne in 1311, King Philip the Fair dealt a cruel blow to the crusade; instead of giving to the Hospitallers the immense wealth of the Templars, he confiscated it. The Teutonic Order having established itself in Prussia in 1228, there remained in the East only the Hospitallers. After the capture of Saint-Jean d'Acre, Henry II, King of Cyprus, had offered them shelter at Limasol, but there they found themselves in very straitened circumstances. In 1310 they seized the Island of Rhodes, which had become a den of pirates, and took it as their permanent abode. Finally, the contemplated alliance with the Mongols was never fully realized. It was in vain that Argoun, Khan of Persia, sent the Nestorian monk, Raban Sauma, as ambassador to the pope and the princes of the West (1285-88); his offers elicited but vague replies. On 23 December, 1299, Cazan, successor to Argoun, inflicted a defeat upon the Christians at Hims, and captured Damascus, but he could not hold his conquests, and died in 1304 just as he was preparing for a new expedition. The princes of the West assumed the cross in order to appropriate to their own use the tithes which, for the defrayal of crusade expenses, they had levied upon the property of the clergy. For these sovereigns the crusade had no longer any but a fiscal interest. In 1336 King Philip VI of France, whom the pope had appointed leader of the crusade, collected a fleet at Marseilles and was preparing to go to the East when the news of the projects of Edward III caused him to return to Paris. War then broke out between France and England, and proved an insurmountable obstacle to the success of any crusade just when the combined forces of all Christendom would have been none too powerful to resist the new storm gathering in the East. From the close of the thirteenth century a band of Ottoman Turks, driven out of Central Asia by Mongol invasions, had founded a military state in Asia Minor and now threatened to invade Europe. They captured Ephesus in 1308, and in 1326 Othman, their sultan, established his residence at Broussa (Prusa) in Bithynia under Ourkhan, moreover, they organized the regular foot-guards of janizaries against whom the undisciplined troops of Western knights could not hold out. The Turks entered Nicomedia in 1328 and Nicæa in 1330; when they threatened the Emperors of Constantinople, the latter renewed negotiations with the popes with a view towards the reconciliation of the Greek and Roman Churches, for which purpose Barlaam was sent as ambassador to Avignon, in 1339. At the same time the Egyptian Mamelukes destroyed the port of Lajazzo, commercial centre of the Kingdom of Armenia Minor, where the remnants of the Christian colonies had sought refuge after the taking of Saint-Jean d'Acre (1337). The commercial welfare of the Venetians themselves was threatened; with their support Pope Clement VI in 1344 succeeded in reorganizing the maritime league whose operations had been prevented by the war between France and England. Genoa, the Hospitallers, and the King of Cyprus all sent their contingents, and, on 28 October, 1344, the crusaders seized Smyrna, which was confided to the care of the Hospitallers. In 1345 reinforcements under Humbert, Dauphin of Viennois, appeared in the Archipelago, but the new leader of the crusade was utterly disqualified for the work assigned him; unable to withstand the piracy of the Turkish ameers, the Christians concluded a truce with them in 1348. In 1356 the Ottomans captured Gallipoli and intercepted the route to Constantinople.

The cause of the crusade then found an unexpected defender in Peter I, King of Cyprus, who, called upon by the Armenians, succeeded in surprising and storming the city of Adalia on the Cilician coast in 1361. Urged by his chancellor, Philip de Méziéres, and Pierre Thomas, the papal legate, Peter I undertook a voyage to the West (1362-65) in the hope of reviving the enthusiasm of the Christian princes. Pope Urban V extended him a magnificent welcome, as did also John the Good, King of France, who took the cross at Avignon, 20 March, 1363; the latter's example was followed by King Edward III, the Black Prince, Emperor Charles IV, and Casimir, King of Poland. Everywhere King Peter was tendered fair promises, but when, in June, 1365, he embarked at Venice he was accompanied by hardly any but his own forces. After rallying the fleet of the Hospitallers, he appeared unexpectedly before the Old Port of Alexandria, landed without resistance, and plundered the city for two days, but at the approach of an Egyptian army his soldiers forced him to retreat, 9-16 October, 1365. Again in 1367 he pillaged the ports of Syria, Tripoli, Tortosa, Laodicea, and Jaffa, thus destroying the commerce of Egypt. Later, in another voyage to the West, he made a supreme effort to interest the princes in the crusade, but on his return to Cyprus he was assassinated, as the result of a conspiracy. Meanwhile the Ottomans continued their progress in Europe, taking Philippopolis in 1363 and, in 1365, capturing Adrianople, which became the capital of the sultans. At the solicitation of Pope Urban V, Amadeus VII, Count of Savoy, took the cross and on 15 August, 1366, his fleet seized Gallipoli; then, after rescuing the Greek emperor, John V, held captive by the Bulgarians, he returned to the West. In spite of the heroism displayed during these expeditions, the efforts made by the crusaders were too intermittent to be productive of enduring results. Philippe de Méziéres, a friend and admirer of Pierre de Lusignan, eager to seek a remedy for the ills of Christendom, dreamed of founding a new militia, the Order of the Passion, an organization whose character was to be at once clerical and military, and whose members, although married, were to lead an almost monastic life and consecrate themselves to the conquest of the Holy Land. Being well received by Charles V, Philippe de Méziéres established himself at Paris and propagated his ideas among the French nobility. In 1390 Louis II, Duke of Bourbon, took the cross, and at the instigation of the Genoese went to besiege el-Mahadia, an African city on the coast of Tunis. In 1392 Charles VI, who had signed a treaty of peace with England, appeared to have been won over to the crusade project just before he became deranged. But the time for expeditions to the Holy Land was now passed, and henceforth Christian Europe was forced to defend itself against Ottoman invasions. In 1369 John V, Palæologus, went to Rome and abjured the schism; thereafter the popes worked valiantly for the preservation of the remnants of the Byzantine Empire and the Christian states in the Balkans. Having become master of Servia at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Sultan Bajazet imposed his sovereignty upon John V and secured possession of Philadelphia, the last Greek city in Asia Minor. Sigismund, King of Hungary, alarmed at the progress of the Turks, sent an embassy to Charles VI, and a large number of French lords, among them the Count of Nevers, son of the Duke of Burgundy, enlisted under the standard of the cross and, in July 1396, were joined at Buda by English and German knights. The crusaders invaded Servia, but despite their prodigies of valeur Bajazet completely routed them before Nicopolis, 25 September, 1396. The Count of Nevers and a great many lords became Bajazet's prisoners and were released only on condition of enormous ransoms. Notwithstanding this defeat, due to the misguided ardour of the crusaders, a new expedition left Aiguesmortes in June, 1399, under the command of the Marshal Boucicault and succeeded in breaking the blockade which the Turks had established around Constantinople. Moreover, between 1400 and 1402, John Palæologus made another voyage to the West in quest of reinforcements.

IX. The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century

An unlooked-for event, the invasion by Timur and the Mongols, saved Constantinople for the time being. They annihilated Bajazet's army at Ancyra, 20 July, 1402, and, dividing the Ottoman Empire among several princes, reduced it to a state of vassalage. The Western rulers, Henry III, King of Castile, and Charles VI, King of France, sent ambassadors to Timur (see the account by Ruy Gonçales de Clavijo, Madrid, 1779), but the circumstances were not favourable, as they had been in the thirteenth century. The national revolt of the Chinese that overthrew the Mongol dynasty in 1368 had resulted in the destruction of the Christian missions in Farther Asia; in Central Asia the Mongols had been converted to Mohammedanism, and Timur showed his hostility to the Christians by taking Smyrna from the Hospitallers. Marshal Boucicault took advantage of the dejection into which the Mongol invasion had thrown the Mohammedan powers to sack the ports of Syria, Tripoli, Beirut, and Sidon in 1403, but he was unable to retain his conquests; while Timur, on the other hand, thought only of obtaining possession of China and returned to Samarkand, where he died in 1405. The civil wars that broke out among the Ottoman princes gave the Byzantine emperors a few years' respite, but Murad II, having re-established the Turkish power, besieged Constantinople from June to September in 1422, and John VIII, Palæologus, was compelled to pay him tribute. In 1430 Murad took Thessalonica from the Venetians, forced the wall of the Hexamilion, which had been erected by Manuel to protect the Peloponnesus, and subdued Servia. The idea of the crusade was always popular in the West, and, on his death-bed, Henry V of England regretted that he had not taken Jerusalem. In her letters to Bedford, the regent, and to the Duke of Burgundy, Joan of Arc alluded to the union of Christendom against the Saracens, and the popular belief expressed in the poetry of Christine de Pisan was that, after having delivered France, the Maid of Orleans would lead Charles VII to the Holy Land. But this was only a dream, and the civil wars in France, the crusade against the Hussites, and the Council of Constance, prevented any action from being taken against the Turks. However, in 1421 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent Gilbert de Lannoy, and in 1432, Bertrand de la Brocquière, to the East as secret emissaries to gather information that might be of value for a future crusade. At the same time negotiations for the religious union which would facilitate the crusade were resumed between the Byzantine emperors and the popes. Emperor John VIII came in person to attend the council convoked by Pope Eugene IV at Ferrara, in 1438. Thanks to the good will of Bessarion and of Isidore of Kiev, the two Greek prelates whom the pope had elevated to the cardinalate, the council, which was transferred to Florence, established harmony on all points, and on 6 July, 1439, the reconciliation was solemnly proclaimed. The reunion was received in bad part by the Greeks and did not induce the Western princes to take the cross. Adventurers of all nationalities enrolled themselves under the command of Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini and went to Hungary to join the armies of János Hunyady, Waywode of Transylvania, who had just repulsed the Turks at Hermanstadt, of Wladislaus Jagello, King of Poland, and of George Brankovitch, Prince of Servia. Having defeated the Turks at Nish, 3 November, 1443, the allies were enabled to conquer Servia, owing to the defection of the Albanians under George Castriota (Scanderbeg), their national commander. Murad signed a ten years' truce and abdicated the throne, 15 July, 1444, but Giuliano Cesarini, the papal legate, did not favour peace and wished to push forward to Constantinople. At his instigation the crusaders broke the truce and invaded Bulgaria, whereupon Murad again took command, crossed the Bosporus on Genoese galleys, and destroyed the Christian army at Varna, 10 November, 1444. This defeat left Constantinople defenceless. In 1446 Murad succeeded in conquering Morea, and when, two years later, János Hunyady tried to go to the assistance of Constantinople he was beaten at Kosovo. Scanderbeg alone managed to maintain his independence in Epirus and, in 1449, repelled a Turkish invasion. Mohammed II, who succeeded Murad in 1451, was preparing to besiege Constantinople when, 12 December, 1452, Emperor Constantine XII decided to proclaim the union of the Churches in the presence of the papal legates.

The expected crusade, however, did not take place; and when, in March, 1453, the armed forces of Mohammed II, numbering 160,000, completely surrounded Constantinople, the Greeks had only 5000 soldiers and 2000 Western knights, commanded by Giustiniani of Genoa. Notwithstanding this serious disadvantage, the city held out against the enemy for two months, but on the night of 28 May, 1453, Mohammed II ordered a general assault, and after a desperate conflict, in which Emperor Constantine XII perished, the Turks entered the city from all sides and perpetrated a frightful slaughter. Mohammed II rode over heaps of corpses to the church of St. Sophia, entered it on horseback, and turned it into a mosque.

The capture of "New Rome" was the most appalling calamity sustained by Christendom since the taking of Saint-Jean d'Acre. However, the agitation which the news of this event caused in Europe was more apparent than genuine. Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, gave an allegorical entertainment at Lille in which solicited the help of knights who pronounced the most extravagant vows before God and a pheasant (sur le faisan). Æneas Sylvius, Bishop of Siena, and St. John Capistran, the Franciscan, preached the crusade in Germany and Hungary; the Diets of Ratisbon and Frankfort promised assistance, and a league was formed between Venice, Florence, and the Duke of Milan, but nothing came of it. Pope Callistus III succeeded in collecting a fleet of sixteen galleys, which, under the command of the Patriarch of Aquileia, guarded the Archipelago. However, the defeat of the Turks before Belgrade in 1457, due to the bravery of János Hunyady, and the bloody conquest of the Peloponnesus in 1460 seemed finally to revive Christendom from its torpor. Æneas Sylvius, now pope under the name of Pius II, multiplied his exhortations, declaring that he himself would conduct the crusade, and towards the close of 1463 bands of crusaders began to assemble at Ancona. The Doge of Venice had yielded to the pope's entreaties, whereas the Duke of Burgundy was satisfied with sending 2000 men. But when, in June, 1464, the pope went to Ancona to assume command of the expedition, he fell sick and died, whereupon most of the crusaders, being unarmed, destitute of ammunition, and threatened with starvation, returned to their own countries. The Venetians were the only ones who invaded the Peloponnesus and sacked Athens, but they looked upon the crusade merely as a means of advancing their commercial interests. Under Sixtus IV they had the presumption to utilize the papal fleet for the seizure of merchandise stored at Smyrna and Adalia; they likewise purchased the claims of Catherine Cornaro to the Kingdom of Cyprus. Finally, in 1480, Mohammed II directed a triple attack against Europe. In Hungary Matthias Corvinus withstood the Turkish invasion, and the Knights of Rhodes, conducted by Pierre d'Aubusson, defended themselves victoriously, but the Turks succeeded in gaining possession of Otranto and threatened Italy with conquest. At an assembly held at Rome and presided over by Sixtus IV, ambassadors from the Christian princes again promised help; but the condition of Christendom would have been critical indeed had not the death of Mohammed II occasioned the evacuation of Otranto, while the power of the Turks was impaired for several years by civil wars among Mohammed's sons. At the time of Charles VIII's expedition into Italy (1492) there was again talk of a crusade; according to the plans of the King of France, the conquest of Naples was to be followed by that of Constantinople and the East. For this reason Pope Alexander VI delivered to him Prince Djem, son of Mahommed II and pretender to the throne, who had taken refuge with the Hospitallers. When Alexander VI joined Venice and Maximilian in a league against Charles VIII, the official object of the alliance was the crusade, but it had become impossible to take such projects as seriously meant. The leagues for the crusade were no longer anything but political combinations, and the preaching of the Holy War seemed to the people nothing but a means of raising money. Before his death, Emperor Maximilian took the cross at Metz with due solemnity, but these demonstrations could lead to no satisfactory results. The new conditions that now controlled Christendom rendered a crusade impossible.

X. Modifications and Survival of the Idea of the Crusade

From the sixteenth century European policy was swayed exclusively by state interests; hence to statesmen the idea of a crusade seemed antiquated. Egypt and Jerusalem having been conquered by Sultan Selim, in 1517, Pope Leo X made a supreme effort to re-establish the peace essential to the organization of a crusade. The King of France and Emperor Charles V promised their co-operation; the King of Portugal was to besiege Constantinople with 300 ships, and the pope himself was to conduct the expedition. Just at this time trouble broke out between Francis I and Charles V; these plans therefore failed completely. The leaders of the Reformation were unfavourable to the crusade, and Luther declared that it was a sin to make war upon the Turks because God had made them His instruments in punishing the sins of His people. Therefore, although the idea of the crusade was not wholly lost sight of, it took a new form and adapted itself to the new conditions. The Conquistadores, who ever since the fifteenth century had been going forth to discover new lands, considered themselves the auxiliaries of the crusade. The Infante Don Henrique, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and Albuquerque wore the cross on their breast and, when seeking the means of doubling Africa or of reaching Asia by routes from the East, thought of attacking the Mohammedans in the rear; besides, they calculated on the alliance of a fabulous sovereign said to be a Christian, Prester John. The popes, moreover, strongly encouraged these expeditions. On the other hand, among the Powers of Europe the House of Austria, which was mistress of Hungary, where it was directly threatened by the Turks, and which had supreme control of the Mediterranean, realized that it would be to its advantage to maintain a certain interest in the crusade. Until the end of the seventeenth century, when a diet of the German princes was held at Ratisbon, the question of war against the Turks was frequently agitated, and Luther himself, modifying his first opinion, exhorted the German nobility to defend Christendom (1528-29). The war in Hungary always partook of the character of a crusade and, on different occasions, the French nobles enlisted under the imperial banner. Thus the Duke of Mercoeur was authorized by Henry IV to enter the Hungarian service. In 1664 Louis XIV, eager to extend his influence in Europe, sent the emperor a contingent which, under the command of the Count of Coligny, repulsed the Turks in the battle of St. Gothard. But such demonstrations were of no importance because, from the time of Francis I, the kings of France, to maintain the balance of power in Europe against the House of Austria, had not hesitated to enter into treaties of alliance with the Turks. When, in 1683, Kara Mustapha advanced on Vienna with 30,000 Turks or Tatars, Louis XIV made no move, and it was to John Sobieski, King of Poland, that the emperor owed his safety. This was the supreme effort made by the Turks in the West. Overwhelmed by the victories of Prince Eugene at the close of the seventeenth century, they became thenceforth a passive power.

On the Mediterranean, Genoa and Venice beheld their commercial monopoly destroyed in the sixteenth century by the discovery of new continents and of new water-routes to the Indies, while their political power was absorbed by the House of Austria. Without allowing the crusaders to deter them from their continental enterprises, the Hapsburgs dreamed of gaining control of the Mediterranean by checking the Barbary pirates and arresting the progress of the Turks. When, in 1571, the Island of Cyprus was threatened by the Ottomans, who cruelly massacred the garrisons of Famagusta and Nicosia, these towns having surrendered on stipulated terms, Pope Pius V succeeded in forming a league of maritime powers against Sultan Selim, and secured the co-operation of Philip II by granting him the right to tithes for the crusade, while he himself equipped some galleys. On 7 October, 1571, a Christian fleet of 200 galleys, carrying 50,000 men under the command of Don Juan of Austria, met the Ottoman fleet in the Straits of Lepanto, destroyed it completely, and liberated thousands of Christians. This expedition was in the nature of a crusade. The pope, considering that the victory had saved Christendom, by way of commemorating it instituted the feast of the Holy Rosary, which is celebrated on the first Sunday of October. But the allies pushed their advantages no further. When, in the seventeenth century, France superseded Spain as the great Mediterranean power, she strove, despite the treaties that bound her to the Turks, to defend the last remnants of Christian power in the East. In 1669 Louis XIV sent the Duke of Beaufort with a fleet of 7000 men to the defence of Candia, a Venetian province, but, notwithstanding some brilliant sallies, he succeeded in putting off its capture for a few weeks only. However, the diplomatic action of the kings of France in regard to Eastern Christians who were Turkish subjects was more efficacious. The regime of "Capitulations", established under Francis I in 1536, renewed under Louis XIV in 1673, and Louis XV in 1740, ensured Catholics religious freedom and the jurisdiction of the French ambassador at Constantinople; all Western pilgrims were allowed access to Jerusalem and to the Holy Sepulchre, which was confided to the care of the Friars Minor. Such was the modus vivendi finally established between Christendom and the Mohammedan world.

Notwithstanding these changes it may be said that, until the seventeenth century, the imagination of Western Christendom was still haunted by the idea of the Crusades. Even the least chimerical of statesmen, such as Père Joseph de Tremblay, the confidential friend of Richelieu, at times cherished such hopes, while the plan set forth in the memorial which Leibniz addressed (1672) to Louis XIV on the conquest of Egypt was that of a regular crusade. Lastly, there remained as the respectable relic of a glorious past the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, which was founded in the eleventh century and continued to exist until the French Revolution. Despite the valiant efforts of their grand master, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, the Turks had driven them from Rhodes in 1522, and they had taken refuge in Italy. In 1530 Charles V presented them with the Isle of Malta, admirably situated from a strategic point of view, whence they might exercise surveillance over the Mediterranean. They were obliged to promise to give up Malta on the recovery of Rhodes, and also to make war upon the Barbary pirates. In 1565 the Knights of Malta withstood a furious attack by the Turks. They also maintained a squadron able to put to flight the Barbary pirates. Recruited from among the younger sons of the noblest families of Europe, they owned immense estates in France as well as in Italy, and when the French Revolution broke out, the order quickly lost ground. The property it held in France was confiscated in 1790, and when, in 1798, the Directory undertook an expedition to Egypt, Bonaparte, in passing, seized the Isle of Malta, whose knights had themselves under the protection of the Czar, Paul I. The city of Valetta surrendered at the first summons, and the order disbanded; however, in 1826 it was reorganized in Rome as a charitable association.

The history of the Crusades is therefore intimately connected with that of the popes and the Church. These Holy Wars were essentially a papal enterprise. The idea of quelling all dissensions among Christians, of uniting them under the same standard and sending them forth against the Mohammedans, was conceived in the eleventh century, that is to say, at a time when there were as yet no organized states in Europe, and when the pope was the only potentate in a position to know and understand the common interests of Christendom. At this time the Turks threatened to invade Europe, and the Byzantine Empire seemed unable to withstand the enemies by whom it was surrounded. Urban II then took advantage of the veneration in which the holy places were held by the Christians of the West and entreated the latter to direct their combined forces against the Mohammedans and, by a bold attack, check their progress. The result of this effort was the establishment of the Christian states in Syria. While the authority of the popes remained undisputed in Europe, they were in a position to furnish these Christian colonies the help they required; but when this authority was shaken by dissensions between the priesthood and the empire, the crusading army lost the unity of command so essential to success. The maritime powers of Italy, whose assistance was indispensable to the Christian armies, thought only of using the Crusades for political and economic ends. Other princes, first the Hohenstaufen and afterwards Charles of Anjou, followed this precedent, the crusade of 1204 being the first open rebellion against the pontifical will. Finally, when, at the close of the Middle Ages, all idea of the Christian monarchy had been definitively cast aside, when state policy was the sole influence that actuated the Powers of Europe, the crusade seemed a respectable but troublesome survival. In the fifteenth century Europe permitted the Turks to seize Constantinople, and princes were far less concerned about their departure for the East than about finding a way out of the fulfilment of their vow as crusaders without losing the good opinion of the public. Thereafter all attempts at a crusade partook of the nature of political schemes.

Notwithstanding their final overthrow, the Crusades hold a very important place in the history of the world. Essentially the work of the popes, these Holy Wars first of all helped to strengthen pontifical authority; they afforded the popes an opportunity to interfere in the wars between Christian princes, while the temporal and spiritual privileges which they conferred upon crusaders virtually made the latter their subjects. At the same time this was the principal reason why so many civil rulers refused to join the Crusades. It must be said that the advantages thus acquired by the popes were for the common safety of Christendom. From the outset the Crusades were defensive wars and checked the advance of the Mohammedans who, for two centuries, concentrated their forces in a struggle against the Christian settlements in Syria; hence Europe is largely indebted to the Crusades for the maintenance of its independence. Besides, the Crusades brought about results of which the popes had never dreamed, and which were perhaps the most, important of all. They re-established traffic between the East and West, which, after having been suspended for several centuries, was then resumed with even greater energy; they were the means of bringing from the depths of their respective provinces and introducing into the most civilized Asiatic countries Western knights, to whom a new world was thus revealed, and who returned to their native land filled with novel ideas; they were instrumental in extending the commerce of the Indies, of which the Italian cities long held the monopoly, and the products of which transformed the material life of the West. Moreover, as early as the end of the twelfth century, the development of general culture in the West was the direct result of these Holy Wars. Finally, it is with the Crusades that we must couple the origin of the geographical explorations made by Marco Polo and Orderic of Pordenone, the Italians who brought to Europe the knowledge of continental Asia and China. At a still later date, it was the spirit of the true crusader that animated Christopher Columbus when he undertook his perilous voyage to the then unknown America, and Vasco de Gama when he set out in quest of India. If, indeed, the Christian civilization of Europe has become universal culture, in the highest sense, the glory redounds, in no small measure, to the Crusades.

See also BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES.

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• MacEvitt, Christopher (2008). The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance. The Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-2083-4.
• Madden, Thomas F. (2013). The Concise History of the Crusades. Critical Issues in World and International History (Third ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-4422-1575-7.
• Markowski, Michael (1984). "Crucesignatus: Its Origins and Early Usage". Journal of Medieval History. 10 (3): 157–165. doi:10.1016/0304-4181(84)90032-0. ISSN 0304-4181.
• Mayer, Hans Eberhard (2009) [1965]. The Crusades. Translated by John Gillingham (Second ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-873097-2.
• Nicholson, Helen (2004). The Crusades. Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-32685-1.
• Onions, C. T.; Friedrichsen, G. W. S; Bruchfield, R. W., eds. (1966). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-861112-7.
• Phillips, Jonathan (2010). Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8459-5078-1.
• Phillips, Jonathan (2014) [2002]. The Crusades, 1095–1204. Seminar Studies (Second ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4058-7293-5.
• Poly, Jean-Pierre (1997). "Europe in the Year 1000". In Fossier, Robert (ed.). 950–1250. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Vol. II. Translated by Stuart Airlie; Robyn Marsack. Cambridge University Press. pp. 17–79. ISBN 978-0-521-26645-1.
• Richard, Jean C. (1999). The Crusades, c. 1071–c. 1291. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-62566-1.
• Rouche, Michael (1989). "Autopsy of the West: The Early Fifth Century". In Fossier, Robert (ed.). 350–950. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Vol. I. Translated by Jonet Sondheimer. Cambridge University Press. pp. 17–51. ISBN 978-0-521-26644-4.
• Sheffler, David L. (2015). "Myths of Innocence: The Making of the Children Crusade". In Andrea, Alfred J; Holt, Andrew (eds.). Seven Myths of the Crusades. Hackett Publishing Company. pp. 91–105. ISBN 978-1-62466-403-8.
• Tibble, Steve (2020) [2018]. The Crusader Armies. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-25322-1.
• Tyerman, Christopher (2007) [2006]. God's War: A History of the Crusades. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-1402-6980-2.
• Tyerman, Christopher (2019). The World of the Crusades. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21739-1.

Further reading

• Boas, Adrian J., ed. (2016). The Crusader World. The Routledge Worlds. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-82494-1.
• Bull, Marcus (2009). "Crusade and Conquest". In Rubin, Miri; Simmons, Walter (eds.). Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100–c. 1500. The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. IV. Cambridge University Press. pp. 340–342. ISBN 978-0-521-81106-4.
• Latham, Andrew A. (2012). Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-87184-6.
• Riley-Smith, Jonathan, ed. (2002) [1995]. The Oxford History of the Crusades. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-415-82494-1.