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At Clermont in November 1095, the French legate Adhémar of Le Puy sat in the front rank of a vast outdoor congregation and listened while Pope Urban II called for a Latin Christian army to march east to liberate the Church of Jerusalem. The five surviving accounts of the speech — by Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Baldric of Bourgueil, and the anonymous authors of the Gesta Francorum and the Historia belli sacri — disagree on almost every detail, but agree that the response was a single, sustained cry of Deus lo vult (“God wills it”). The next three centuries saw that cry answered eight times in the Holy Land proper, several more times in Iberia and the Baltic, and once, in 1204, against the Christian city of Constantinople. The result, in the words of the historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, was “the most remarkable and most ambitious of all the Latin Church’s attempts to bring all of human life under the control of a single institution.” The reading on this site follows Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A Short History (1987) and Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War (2006) — both standard works — and Steven Runciman’s three-volume History of the Crusades (1951–54) where the narrative is wanted in the older, more literary form.
The five clusters attached to this pillar examine the most consequential episodes: the First Crusade (1096–1099, the foundation of the Crusader States), the Knights Templar (the order that became medieval Europe’s first international bank), the Reconquista (the long Christian campaign against al-Andalus), the Teutonic Knights (the crusading frontier in the Baltic), and the Fourth Crusade (the sack of Constantinople, 1204).
Origins: The Call to Crusade
The call to crusade issued by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 was one of the most consequential acts of the medieval papacy. The pope responded to a request from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for military assistance against the Seljuk Turks, who had overrun much of Anatolia and threatened the Byzantine Empire itself. But Urban’s call was far more ambitious than a mere request for mercenary assistance. He proclaimed a pilgrimage armed with the cross, a journey to the Holy Land undertaken in penance for sins and motivated by love of God.
The pope’s speech at Clermont, as recorded in several later accounts, painted a vivid picture of Christian suffering in the Holy Land, called on the warriors of Europe to take up arms in defense of their fellow Christians, and promised those who died on the expedition the remission of their sins — a spiritual benefit known as the indulgence. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Preachers traveled across Europe, calling on knights, peasants, and even children to take the cross. The famous phrase “Deus lo vult” — “God wills it” — became the rallying cry of the First Crusade.
The First Crusade set out in 1096, gathering strength as it moved through Europe and into Asia Minor. It was marked by a series of extraordinary military victories: the Siege of Nicaea, the Battle of Dorylaeum, the capture of Antioch in 1098 after a long and brutal siege, and finally the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 after a six-week siege. The fall of Jerusalem was marked by a terrible massacre of the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, an act of violence that has been a source of controversy and shame ever since.
The success of the First Crusade was followed by the establishment of the Crusader States in the Levant: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. These Latin Christian states would exist, in various forms, for nearly two centuries, and they became the setting for a remarkable experiment in cross-cultural exchange and conflict.
The Crusader States: Latin Kingdoms in the East
The Crusader States were not merely military outposts. They were complex political entities with their own institutions, laws, and cultures. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the most important of the four, was governed by a king and a high court composed of the great lords, the heads of the military orders, and the patriarch of Jerusalem. The legal code of the kingdom, known as the Assizes of Jerusalem, was a sophisticated body of law that combined Frankish, Byzantine, and Islamic elements, and it became one of the most important legal compilations of the medieval period.
The Crusader States were multi-ethnic and multi-religious. The Latin Christian settlers — Franks, Normans, Provençals, Italians, Germans — were a small minority ruling over a population that was overwhelmingly native, including Greek Orthodox Christians, Syrian Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Franks (as the Crusaders were collectively called) were a tiny elite ruling over a much larger and culturally richer population, and the survival of the Crusader States depended on their ability to negotiate, accommodate, and at times exploit the complex relationships between these groups.
The Italian maritime republics — Venice, Genoa, and Pisa — played a major role in the Crusader States. They provided the ships that transported pilgrims, soldiers, and supplies across the Mediterranean, and they established trading posts and quarters in the major cities of the Levant. In return for their services, they received commercial privileges that allowed them to dominate the trade of the eastern Mediterranean. The rivalry between these Italian cities, especially between Venice and Genoa, was a major factor in the politics of the Crusader States and would eventually contribute to the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade.
The military religious orders — the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, and later the Teutonic Knights — emerged as a distinct force in the Crusader States. These orders combined the religious vows of monks with the military duties of knights, and they became the standing armies of the Crusader States, defending the borders, garrisoning the great castles, and fighting alongside the secular lords. The Templars, founded around 1119, were particularly notable for their discipline, their wealth, and their role in the development of early banking.
The Course of the Crusades
The First Crusade was followed by a long series of subsequent expeditions, each of which was proclaimed by the pope and motivated by the same mixture of religious devotion, feudal ambition, and political calculation. The Second Crusade (1147–1149), called by Pope Eugene III and preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, was a response to the fall of the County of Edessa in 1144. It ended in failure, marked by the unsuccessful Siege of Damascus and the loss of much of the army in Asia Minor.
The Third Crusade (1189–1192) was launched in response to the dramatic conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187. Saladin, the Kurdish founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, had united much of the Muslim Near East and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin. The Third Crusade, led by three of the most powerful rulers of Europe — Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, King Richard I “the Lionheart” of England, and King Philip II Augustus of France — recovered several coastal cities, including Acre, but failed to retake Jerusalem. The crusade was cut short by the death of Frederick Barbarossa in 1190 and by the mutual suspicions of the European leaders.
The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) is one of the most controversial episodes in the history of the Crusades. Called by Pope Innocent III to recapture Jerusalem, it was diverted by the financial demands of the Venetian Republic, which had agreed to transport the army. After failing to pay the agreed sum, the Crusaders agreed to attack the Christian city of Zara (now Zadar) on behalf of Venice, a move that earned them the pope’s excommunication. The Crusade was then diverted to Constantinople, where the Crusaders, in a complex series of political maneuverings, ended up sacking the great Christian capital of the East in 1204. The Latin Empire of Constantinople that was established would last less than sixty years, and the trauma of the sack permanently weakened the Byzantine Empire, which never recovered.
The Children’s Crusade of 1212 was a tragic episode in which thousands of young people, responding to the preaching of charismatic leaders in France and Germany, set out for the Holy Land. Most never made it beyond the borders of their home countries; many were sold into slavery, and many died of disease and hunger. The episode has been the subject of much historical and literary treatment, but it remains poorly understood.
The Fifth Crusade (1217–1221) attempted to attack Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power, and briefly captured the port of Damietta before being forced to withdraw. The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229), led by Emperor Frederick II, achieved the return of Jerusalem through diplomacy rather than warfare, a remarkable feat that earned Frederick the enmity of the papacy, which excommunicated him. The Seventh Crusade (1248–1254) and the Eighth Crusade (1270) were both led by King Louis IX of France (St. Louis); the Seventh ended in the king’s capture in Egypt, the Eighth in his death before Tunis. The Ninth Crusade (1271–1272), led by Edward, Prince of England, marked the end of serious Crusading efforts in the East.
The fall of Acre in 1291 to the Mamluk Sultanate, which had succeeded the Ayyubids in 1250, marked the end of the Crusader States and the failure of the Crusading movement. Acre had been the last major Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land, and its fall effectively ended the dream of a Latin Christian presence in the East.
The Reconquista
Parallel to the Crusades in the East was the long campaign in the Iberian Peninsula known as the Reconquista — the Christian reconquest of territories that had been under Muslim rule since the early eighth century. The process was gradual and uneven, marked by both advances and reverses, and it extended over nearly eight centuries.
The Umayyad conquest of Spain in 711 had brought most of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule, leaving only a small Christian kingdom in the north, centered on the kingdom of Asturias. The Kingdom of León, the Kingdom of Castile, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of Aragon, and eventually the Kingdom of Portugal gradually expanded at the expense of the Muslim states of the south, which were collectively known as Al-Andalus.
The Reconquista was a long and complex process. It was marked by the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, a decisive victory for the combined forces of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre that opened the way for the conquest of Andalusia. It was also marked by the rise of great Christian military heroes, most notably Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, whose conquest of Valencia in 1094 and whose later career as a semi-independent ruler became the subject of one of the great epic poems of medieval Spain.
The military religious orders also played a major role in the Reconquista. The Order of Santiago, the Order of Calatrava, and the Order of Alcántara were founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to defend the Christian frontiers and to participate in the campaigns against Al-Andalus. These orders were modeled on the Templars and Hospitallers, and they became powerful landholders and political actors in the Christian kingdoms of Spain.
The Reconquista culminated in 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile completed the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim state in the peninsula. The same year, the Alhambra Decree expelled the Jews from Spain, marking the consolidation of Catholic Spain and the beginning of a new era in the peninsula’s history.
The Reconquista was not a simple story of Christian-Muslim conflict. It was a complex process in which alliances shifted, cultures mingled, and identities were negotiated. The Christian kingdoms of Spain drew on Islamic administrative, scientific, and artistic traditions, and the Mozarabic Christians who lived under Muslim rule preserved their own distinctive culture. The Jewish communities of Spain, particularly in Al-Andalus and later in Christian Castile, played a major role in the cultural and economic life of the peninsula until their expulsion in 1492.
The Teutonic Knights and the Northern Crusades
While the Crusades in the East and the Reconquista in Spain attracted the most attention, a third major theater of Crusading activity developed in the Baltic region. The Northern Crusades were a series of campaigns launched by the German and Polish nobility, with the support of the papacy, to convert the pagan peoples of the Baltic — Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns — to Christianity and to bring them under the authority of Christian rulers.
The Teutonic Knights, a German military religious order founded in 1190 during the Siege of Acre, took a leading role in the Northern Crusades. The order was originally established to care for German pilgrims in the Holy Land, but it gradually shifted its focus to the Baltic, where it embarked on a long campaign of conquest and conversion. In 1226, the Polish duke Konrad I of Masovia invited the Teutonic Knights to come to Prussia to combat the pagan Prussian tribes; the knights accepted, and over the next several decades, they conquered and Christianized the region, establishing a monastic state that would last until 1525.
The Lithuanians proved more difficult to convert. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the last pagan state in Europe, and it successfully resisted the Teutonic Knights for centuries. The Battle of Grunwald (or Tannenberg) in 1410, in which a combined Polish-Lithuanian army decisively defeated the Teutonic Order, marked the beginning of the order’s decline. The Reformation and the conversion of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights to Lutheranism in 1525, when he secularized the order’s territories and became the Duke of Prussia, effectively ended the order as a military religious power.
The Northern Crusades had a significant impact on the development of the Baltic region. They brought Christianity to the region, established a network of towns and bishoprics, and integrated the Baltic into the wider European economic and political system. They also produced a long tradition of frontier warfare and shaped the political and cultural development of Poland, Lithuania, and the German states for centuries.
The Military Religious Orders
The military religious orders were one of the most distinctive institutions of the Crusading age. These orders combined the religious vows of monks — poverty, chastity, and obedience — with the military duties of knights, and they played a major role in the defense of the Crusader States and the conduct of the Crusades.
The Knights Hospitaller (Order of St. John of Jerusalem) was founded around 1099 by Blessed Gerard Thom as a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem. It gradually developed a military role, becoming a major military force in the Crusader States. After the fall of Acre in 1291, the Hospitallers moved first to Cyprus and then to Rhodes and finally to Malta, where they became a major naval power in the Mediterranean. The order survived into the modern period, with a focus on medical and charitable work.
The Knights Templar were founded around 1119 by a small group of French knights, led by Hugues de Payens, who vowed to protect pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land. The order was recognized by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and by the pope, and it grew rapidly in wealth and power, becoming a major military force in the Crusader States. The Templars developed an early form of banking, providing financial services to pilgrims, kings, and the Crusader States. Their wealth and their independence eventually aroused the suspicion of the French king Philip IV, who in 1307 initiated the famous trial and suppression of the order. The Templars were officially dissolved in 1312, and the last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in 1314.
The Teutonic Knights were the third major military order. Founded in the Holy Land, they later moved their focus to the Baltic, where they played a major role in the Northern Crusades and the Christianization of Prussia and Livonia. The order was eventually secularized in 1525, but its legacy remained important in the Baltic region for centuries.
The military orders were not only military institutions; they were also major economic and political actors. They owned vast estates across Europe, raised their own armies, built great castles, and engaged in trade, banking, and diplomacy. They were exempt from the authority of local bishops and governed by their own masters, accountable only to the pope. Their combination of religious authority, military power, and economic independence made them powerful but also controversial, and they were a source of constant tension with secular rulers and the local clergy.
The Economic and Cultural Impact of the Crusades
The Crusades had a profound impact on the economy of medieval Europe. The need to transport large armies across long distances stimulated the development of shipping and the growth of the Italian maritime republics. The Crusader States became markets for European goods and sources of luxury products, including spices, silks, and other items from the East. The Italian merchants established trading networks that spanned the Mediterranean, and the banking services provided by the Templars and Hospitallers were an important step in the development of European finance.
The Crusades also had a significant impact on culture. The experience of the Holy Land and the encounter with Byzantine and Islamic civilization stimulated European interest in the wider world. Crusader literature, including the chansons de geste and the chronicles of the Crusades, was a major literary genre of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The encounter with the East contributed to the development of new forms of art and architecture, and the Crusader castles of the Levant were among the most impressive fortifications of the age.
The knowledge of geography that Europeans gained from the Crusades contributed to the later development of cartography and exploration. The accounts of travelers such as Benjamin of Tudela and John of Mandeville (the latter a largely fictional work) introduced European readers to the wider world. The maps produced in the wake of the Crusades were among the most sophisticated of the medieval period.
The Legacy of the Crusades
The legacy of the Crusades is complex and contested. To some historians, the Crusades were a manifestation of medieval Christianity’s militant intolerance, a precedent for European colonialism, and a source of enduring hostility between the Christian and Islamic worlds. To others, they were a defining expression of medieval Europe’s sense of identity, a long experiment in cross-cultural contact, and a major factor in the development of European commerce, learning, and political institutions.
The popular memory of the Crusades has been shaped by both the realities of the medieval experience and the imaginative reconstructions of later centuries. The Knights Templar, in particular, have become the subject of extensive modern mythology, with legends about hidden treasure, secret rituals, and the survival of the order in various forms. While these legends have little historical basis, they testify to the enduring fascination that the Crusades continue to exercise on the modern imagination.
In the Muslim world, the Crusades have a different and more direct legacy. The Arabic term al-Hurub al-Salibiyya (the Wars of the Cross) is used to refer to the entire period of the Crusades, and the memory of the Crusades remains a powerful element in the modern political discourse of the Middle East. The figure of Saladin, in particular, has been transformed in modern Arab and Islamic memory from a Kurdish warlord into a symbol of resistance to Western imperialism.
The scholarly assessment of the Crusades has changed significantly over the past century. Earlier historians, influenced by the nationalism of the nineteenth century, often saw the Crusades as a manifestation of European vigor and righteousness. More recent scholarship has stressed the complexity of the Crusading movement, the diversity of the motivations and experiences of the Crusaders, and the significance of the encounter with the wider world. The Crusades are now generally seen as a defining episode in the history of medieval Europe and the medieval Mediterranean, with profound and lasting consequences for both the Christian and the Islamic worlds.
To understand the Crusades is to understand one of the most important and most controversial episodes in medieval history. The articles that follow examine the major events, figures, and themes of the Crusades in greater depth, providing a detailed picture of one of the defining movements of the medieval period.
Sources
Principal sources used in this article:
- Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (Hodder & Stoughton, 1987).
- Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Allen Lane, 2006) — the modern replacement one-volume history.
Further reading:
- Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1951–54) — three volumes; dated but still cited for narrative.
- Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History (Oxford, 2004).
- Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of the Crusades (Oxford, 1995).
For a recent single-volume synthesis with full scholarly apparatus, see the relevant chapter of Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2014).