The First Holy War
During the Crusades, East and West first met--on the battlefield
Christian soldiers. From their beginnings in 1095, the Crusades inspired more passion than anyone expected. The First Crusade was preceded by droughts and famine and heralded by meteor showers. The idea of an expedition to reclaim Jerusalem from the unbelievers seized the imagination of people from all social classes. Led by deeply religious knights like Godfrey of Bouillon and Tancred, armies of "Latin" Christians (followers of the Church of Rome) from France, Germany, England, and elsewhere marched through what is now Hungary to Constantinople, the great center of Christianity in the East.
When the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, they looked like one undifferentiated barbaric mess to their Muslim foes, who called them all Franks. But the unsophisticated Franks were tough. In 1099 they surrounded Jerusalem, assaulting the well-defended city for weeks. Finally, Godfrey and Tancred broke through, and the Crusaders poured in. Bloodthirsty after their fiercely fought siege, they swarmed over the walls and set upon the city's inhabitants--Muslim, Jewish, and even Christian. Later they boasted of wading through the city's holy sites knee deep in blood. Their brutality horrified the Muslim world. "Amongst the Moslems, who had been ready hitherto to accept the Franks as another factor in the tangled politics of the time, there was henceforward a clear determination that the Franks must be driven out," writes British historian Steven Runciman. "When later, wiser Latins in the East sought to find some basis on which Christian and Moslem could work together, the memory of the massacre stood always in the way."
It took almost a century before a leader strong enough to unite the Muslim Middle East appeared. When Saladin finally retook Jerusalem, it was Christendom's turn to be shocked. The archbishop of Tyre, a Christian stronghold north of Jerusalem, hurried west to Italy on a black-sailed ship with news of Jerusalem's fall, along with letters begging for help--and a crude drawing of an Arab beating a bloodied Jesus. Chroniclers say that when Pope Urban III learned of Saladin's victory, he died of grief. His successor, Gregory VIII, sent messengers to spread the word of a new Crusade to wrest back the holy city. "Every person of ordinary discretion is well able to appreciate both the greatness of the danger and the fierceness of the barbarians who thirst for Christian blood," he wrote. "The goal of those who profane the holy places is nothing short of sweeping away the name of God." Echoing Urban II, the pope promised salvation through violence: He would "acquit before God all the sins of those who would bear the sign of the cross to go recover the Promised Land, provided that they had confessed and were truly penitent," wrote contemporary chronicler William of Tyre.
The pope's message of salvation and the opportunity for earthly glory drew the most powerful kings of Europe--like the young Richard the Lion-Hearted, who sailed east leading armies of knights and peasants. Expeditions like Richard's would be repeated on a smaller scale over and over again for almost five centuries, from 1095, when the First Crusade was declared, to 1578, when the last true Crusade was launched against Turks in Morocco. Though historians used to write of eight distinct Crusades, scholars today argue that "Crusades were going to the Holy Land all the time during the 200 years that the Franks were able to hold onto their states in the Middle East," as author Karen Armstrong writes in Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World. "Long after they lost these states it was not uncommon for kings and barons to take the cross and vow to march on Jerusalem." Many scholars now also believe that crusading eventually spanned the entire continent of Europe, as the church used it to fight "heretical" Christians and convert pagans at sword point.
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