The First Holy War
During the Crusades, East and West first met--on the battlefield
First contact. "The Crusades were an absolute failure, but they did integrate European travelers and traders into an ongoing world system," says Janet Abu-Lughod, author of Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Increased demand for Middle Eastern luxury items meant that Europeans had to come up with trade goods of their own, helping build industries like wool and textiles. "By stimulating an interest in the goods of the East, they had a double-back effect on the development of European economies." Even later failures may have hidden some positive benefits. The end of the Crusades and the Latin kingdoms meant the end of easy access to Asian trade goods, but not to demand. Some historians have speculated that the closing of the Middle East to European merchants in the 15th century accelerated the voyages of discovery that led to the New World.
But even the Europeans' increasing sophistication did little to redeem them in the eyes of the Muslims whose land they occupied and controlled. To the Arabs they were "illiterate barbarians, for whom physical force is a supreme virtue, their religion is a despised polytheism, their medicine a collection of superstitions," writes historian Joshua Prawer in The Crusaders' Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages. "Far from feeling inferior to the conqueror, the conquered regarded himself not only as his equal but by far his superior."
More than nine centuries after Urban II called the first Crusade, the legacy of misunderstanding and animosity is still with us today. In the West, many of the most lasting misperceptions of Islam stem from that time. In the Arab and Muslim world, the Crusades have made an unfortunate rhetorical comeback. "Such analogies are really not very helpful to understand the Crusades or present-day realities--they obscure rather than clarify," says Kedar. "People get so obsessed with . . . the past that they don't react to the reality but to the reflection." With that reflection distorted almost beyond recognition by rhetoric and misunderstanding, a clearer vision of the past has never been more important.
Routes of the Crusaders
Crusaders converged on the Holy Land by sea and land from all across Europe. Inspired by itinerant priests and papal pleas, they otern followed afe-old pilgrimage routes. Two of the most significant Crusades--the First in 1096 and the Third, launched in 1188, are typical of crusading's broad geographical sweep.
The call to arms
Clermont, 1095: Pope Urban II launches the First Crusade to take Jerusalem from Muslim control.
The goal: Jerusalem
Pope Urban's call is answered. The city is taken from Muslims by Crusaders in 1099.
[Map is not available.]
[Map labels: First Crusade]: London; Canterbury; Cologne; Trier; Paris; Vezelay; Poitiers; St.-Gilles; Barcelona; Genoa; Pisa; Rome; Naples; Belgrade; Durres; Salonika; Constantinople (Istanbul); Nicaea; Tarsus; Antioch; Tyre; Jaffa; Jerusalem
[Map labels: Third Crusade]: Dartmouth; Silves; Vezelay; Mainz; Genoa; Pisa; Rome; Naples; Brindisi; Vienna; Belgrade; Sofia; Philadelphia; Tarsus; Antioch; Tyre; Jerusalem
[Other map labels]: Worms; Prague; Budapest; Venice; Danube River; Smyrna; Alexandria; Mediterranean
[Map key] General routes: First Crusade; Third Crusade; Modern country borders
advertisement
