The First Holy War
During the Crusades, East and West first met--on the battlefield
Peter's success was cited over and over again in the years to come. The defeats suffered by better-organized Crusades led many to believe that it was the humble who were destined to succeed, not the proud, rich military classes. In the end, these "People's Crusades" ended in disaster too. None ever reached the Holy Land, and most of the peasant Crusaders were either slaughtered as they plundered their way across Europe or disbanded before ever reaching a port. Without the resources to reach the Holy Land, most turned on more-convenient targets, namely Europe's Jewish communities. "[Why] are we going to seek out our profanity and to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him" was the rationale, as recorded by a Jewish eyewitness.
But persuading landed knights to take up the cross took more than antisemitic rants and vague stories of the Promised Land. Europe's warrior class, the fighting force Pope Urban II really wanted, had a lot to lose: Crusaders faced death, disease, or capture. There were also more-mundane risks. A knight's lands and title could be stolen in his absence. If his Crusade failed, the returning knight risked the scorn of those who blamed him for failing to do God's work. And the costs involved in crusading were a risk in themselves. King Louis IX of France (later to become St. Louis) set out in 1249 on crusade from a harbor he had specially constructed with an artificial canal and grand tower, stocked with plentiful supplies. He spent six times his annual revenue on the venture, which ended when he was captured and forced to pay a 400,000-pound ransom. "Most Crusaders engaged in a dangerous, unpleasant, unprofitable, and extremely expensive enterprise, and they do not seem to have expected anything else," says Riley-Smith.
Though most were military and financial fiascoes, the Crusades had a long-term impact on European civilization that went beyond finding an outlet for the violence of warring Christian kingdoms. "[The Crusades] made the Continent more cosmopolitan and gave Europeans a far greater awareness of the wider world. Like all wars, veterans came back and had seen things they never would have if they had stayed in their villages," says James Reston Jr., author of Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. The stories they brought back also sparked a creative blaze in Europe. Beginning in the 12th century, or around time of the First Crusade, literature and verse flowered in the form of memoir and song. Coming after the virtual silence that marked the Dark Ages, the proliferation of Crusader epics like the French Song of Roland is referred to by some scholars as the "12th-century Renaissance."
Many chose not to return at all, especially second and third sons with no chance of inheriting land back in Europe. Those who stayed created a cultural, military, and mercantile outpost in the Holy Land. The fortresses they built after the First Crusade were usually transplanted reflections of the European feudal system, but over time the "Latin kingdoms" in the Holy Land also served as a powerful integrating force. Contact with the libraries of the Arab world opened up new worlds for the isolated scholars of Europe, who gradually gained access to a wealth of ancient Greek texts that had been preserved for centuries in Arabic. "Violent interactions were paralleled by economic and conceptual exchanges," argues Georgetown's Voll. "In some ways the Crusades' positive intellectual dimensions outweigh the negative impact."
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