Crusades
On the 27th of November 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II stood before a crowd in France and called Christians to march east and take Jerusalem from Muslim rule. The crowd reportedly cried out Deus vult, meaning God wills it. With that, a movement began that would send armies across the Mediterranean for nearly two centuries. The Crusades were military campaigns launched by the papacy between 1095 and 1291, fought for the recovery and defence of the Holy Land. But what made men leave home for a journey that could cost four years of income? Why did a war meant for trained knights pull in peasants, children, and kings? And how did a campaign aimed at Jerusalem end with Christians sacking a Christian city? The answers run through famine and faith, ransom and betrayal, and a slow unraveling that ended on a mainland shore in 1291.
Around 1250, canon lawyers drew a careful line between two kinds of holy war. They called campaigns in the Holy Land crux transmarina, the cross overseas, and those fought within Europe crux cismarina, the cross this side of the sea. The vocabulary tells you how slowly the idea took shape. Early writers reached for words of movement: iter, a journey; expeditio, an expedition; passagium, a passage. They paired these with the destination, often the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Participants sewed a cross onto their clothing, and from that ritual came their name. They were called crucesignati, those signed with the cross. The earliest vernacular form, crozada, appeared in Spain in 1212. Middle English produced croiserie in the 13th and 14th centuries, later giving way to forms like croisade and crusado. The modern word crusade itself was only settled by 1706.
The medievalist Thomas Asbridge has warned that the familiar label can mislead. He writes that the term imposes a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity on the earliest crusading efforts. Scholars today stretch the word further than the Holy Land alone, applying it to papally sanctioned wars in Iberia, in the Baltic north, and against the Cathars of southern France.
In 638, Jerusalem fell to Caliph Umar, and the city that drew Christian pilgrims passed into Islamic hands. Sites tied to Jesus had become destinations under Roman Palestine, and Christian emperors had built churches there. Yet by the 7th century the Islamic Caliphate had stripped vast territories from the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. Christians living under Muslim rule became dhimmi, protected by law but socially subordinate.
Between roughly 950 and 1070, drought and cold spells swept North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, bringing famine and migration. Interfaith tension sharpened, and in 1009 the Holy Sepulchre itself was temporarily destroyed. From the 1040s, nomadic Turkomans disrupted the region. In 1071, the Seljuk leader Alp Arslan crushed the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, opening Anatolia to Turkoman settlement.
Western Europe was changing too. From around the year 1000, the Medieval Warm Period spurred population and economic growth. Italian merchants overtook their rivals to dominate Mediterranean trade. The popes in Rome, claiming to succeed Saint Peter, asserted supremacy over Christendom, a claim Eastern Christian leaders rejected. Mutual excommunications in 1054 split the Catholic West from the Orthodox East. Under Pope Gregory VII, theologians concluded that dying in a just war was the same as martyrdom, an idea drawn from Augustine in the 5th century.
Pope Urban tried to limit enlistment to trained warriors, but the enthusiasm he unleashed could not be contained. The charismatic Peter the Hermit preached in regions Urban had avoided, reportedly carrying a heavenly letter that demanded the expulsion of pagans from the Holy Land. He drew thousands of peasants and townsfolk, along with some nobles like Walter Sans Avoir.
In Germany, the preachers Folkmar and Gottschalk gathered their own followings, and a rising under the Swabian count Emicho turned murderous. Beginning at Speyer on the 3rd of May 1096, Emicho's force carried out the anti-Jewish Rhineland massacres, spreading violence until Hungarian troops dispersed it that July. Peter himself threatened Jewish communities for provisions as he travelled, and his swelling host plundered the border town of Zemun.
The end was swift and brutal. Emperor Alexios, distrustful of the disorder, shipped these crowds across the Bosporus to Anatolia. Germans took the Seljuk fortress of Xerigordos, only for the Turkomans to retake it on the 29th of September. On the 21st of October, Kilij Arslan destroyed the crusaders at Civetot. Peter survived with a few followers, while the bulk of the People's Crusade lay dead before the trained armies had even reached the East.
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 set off in August 1096, followed by Bohemond of Taranto and by Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who led the largest force. The historian Thomas Madden describes these armies as a curious mix of rich and poor, saints and sinners, driven by both faith and gain.
At Constantinople, Emperor Alexios demanded oaths that the leaders would return former Byzantine lands before he let them cross. The crusading host numbered between 60,000 and 100,000, including 30,000 non-combatants and up to 7,000 knights. They captured Nicaea in June 1097, repelled Kilij Arslan at Dorylaeum, and reached Antioch, beginning a long siege in October 1097. During that siege, Baldwin of Boulogne broke away with 100 knights and, with Armenian support, seized Edessa, founding the first Crusader state in March 1098.
The Seljuk general Kerbogha arrived with a 40,000-strong army, but came too late; Bohemond had already taken Antioch through collusion with a guard. Encouraged by the mystic Peter Bartholomew, the starving crusaders defeated Kerbogha on the 28th of June 1098. They reached Jerusalem on the 7th of June 1099, and Genoese siege towers let them storm the city on the 15th of July. Over two days they slaughtered the population. Godfrey was elected the city's first Western ruler, and at the Battle of Ascalon on the 12th of August, a force of roughly 9,000 infantry and 1,200 knights defeated an Egyptian army. With their vow fulfilled, most went home, leaving Godfrey with just 300 knights and 2,000 foot soldiers.
The historian Malcolm Barber observed that creating the Crusader states committed western Europeans to crusading for the foreseeable future. The numbers bear this out. In the first half of the century after the First Crusade, the Franks sought Western military aid only four times. Between 1149 and 1186, they made at least sixteen such appeals.
King Baldwin I of Jerusalem expanded his realm to draw knights and secure defence, leaning on naval aid from Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians who took trade privileges in return. He captured Acre in 1104, then Beirut and Sidon in 1110, helped at Sidon by Sigurd I of Norway, the first crowned monarch to go on crusade. Raymond of Saint-Gilles began the Siege of Tripoli in 1103 but died within two years, and the County of Tripoli was secured only in July 1109.
The defence demanded new institutions. At the Council of Nablus in 1120, Patriarch Warmund approved Hugues de Payens' confraternity of knights, who vowed poverty, chastity, obedience, and the protection of pilgrims. Housed in the former Al-Aqsa Mosque, which the Franks called Solomon's Temple, they became the Knights Templar. This marked the birth of the military orders. The organisation of such campaigns also demanded crusade indulgences and the taxation of clerical income, machinery that would outlast the Holy Land itself.
By 1174, a single figure was reuniting the Muslim Near East. Saladin took Damascus that year, Aleppo in 1183, and compelled the Zengid ruler of Mosul to submit in 1186. Nur al-Din, in his final years, had made the conquest of Jerusalem the chief aim of jihad, inspiring a new literary genre, the Merits of Jerusalem. Saladin inherited that ambition once he secured his rear.
The collapse came fast. Despite a truce signed in 1185, Raynald of Châtillon attacked a Muslim caravan in early 1187, and Saladin mustered his empire. On the 4th of July 1187, he crushed the Jerusalemite field army at the Battle of Hattin. He executed Raynald along with the Templars and Hospitallers, but spared other leaders, including Guy. After a twelve-day siege, Jerusalem surrendered on the 2nd of October.
The loss revived crusading zeal in the West. Pope Gregory VIII issued the bull Audita tremendi on the 29th of October 1187, and the English prince Richard was the first to take the cross. To fund the effort, England and France imposed the Saladin tithe, a levy of 10 percent on income and movable goods. Emperor Frederick I set out overland in May 1189 with around 15,000 troops, but drowned in the river Saleph on the 10th of June 1190, and his crusade collapsed.
Richard I, now king, conquered Cyprus on his way and reached Acre on the 6th of June 1191. The defenders surrendered on the 12th of July. When Leopold V of Austria raised his flag on the walls, Richard tore it down, a slight that would later cost him. After Saladin failed to meet the surrender terms, Richard ordered between 2,700 and 3,000 Muslim captives executed. He defeated Saladin at Arsuf, secured Jaffa, and on the 2nd of September agreed the Treaty of Jaffa, a three-year truce confirming Frankish control of the coast between Tyre and Jaffa. Jerusalem stayed in Muslim hands. Leaving on the 9th of October 1192, Richard was captured in Austria by Leopold and freed only for a ransom of 100,000 marks.
Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice agreed to build, by June 1202, a fleet for 33,500 crusaders in exchange for 85,000 marks, over twenty tons of silver. The problem was that only a third of the expected force gathered at Venice, and the crusaders could not pay. To recover his investment, Dandolo proposed they capture Zara, a Christian city in Dalmatia held by a sworn crusader, King Emeric of Hungary. Despite papal prohibition and the protests of figures like Simon de Montfort, they took Zara in November 1202.
While wintering there, Alexios Angelos, son of a deposed Byzantine emperor, made an offer. He promised to reunite the Byzantine Church with Rome, pay 200,000 marks, and supply 10,000 troops if the crusaders restored him to Constantinople. They accepted and diverted the whole expedition, prompting several hundred dissenters to quit. The army reached Constantinople in June 1203 and began a siege. When the restored Alexios IV could not pay what he had promised, the crusaders turned on the city.
The second assault, on the 12th of April 1204, succeeded, and the Sack of Constantinople lasted for days. The crusaders massacred thousands, desecrated holy sites, and stripped the city of its movable wealth, carrying relics back to Western churches. The Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates contrasted Saladin's clemency in Jerusalem with this slaughter of Orthodox Christians. A committee of six Venetians and six Frenchmen elected Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin Emperor, establishing the Latin Empire. From the Crusader states' view, the campaign was almost a failure; only about a fifth of those who took the cross around 1200 ever reached the Holy Land.
Damietta, a thriving port in the Nile Delta, became the prize of the Fifth Crusade. Pope Innocent III had proclaimed it in the bull Quia maior, and Madden calls that document the full maturation of the crusading idea. Crusaders were to gather in southern Italy by the 1st of June 1217. In May 1218 the army advanced on Damietta, and in August 1219 the mystic Francis of Assisi crossed the lines to meet the Egyptian ruler al-Kamil, seeking to convert him to Christianity. He failed.
The Egyptians offered a remarkable bargain. Al-Kamil proposed restoring the pre-1187 borders of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, excluding Transjordan, in return for withdrawal. The crusaders rejected it, judging the kingdom indefensible without the fortresses over the Jordan. Damietta fell in November 1219, but in July 1221 a push toward Cairo ended in catastrophe. With the Nile in flood, al-Kamil opened the sluices and trapped the army. The crusaders surrendered Damietta for safe conduct and an eight-year truce.
What force could not win, diplomacy briefly did. Emperor Frederick II, excommunicated and leading the Sixth Crusade, renewed talks with al-Kamil, showing tolerance toward Islam and notable learning. On the 18th of February 1229, the Treaty of Jaffa ceded Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other cities to the Christians, while leaving the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, and the al-Aqsa Mosque as Muslim places of worship. Frederick crowned himself king in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the 18th of May. The Barons' Crusade of 1239 to 1241 then expanded the kingdom to its widest extent since 1187, when Richard of Cornwall accepted an Ayyubid offer to restore Jerusalem and release prisoners taken at the Battle of Gaza.
In July 1244, some 10,000 Khwarazmian horsemen, allied with Ayyub of Egypt, massacred thousands of Christians and sacked Jerusalem. They then joined the Egyptian army and crushed the Damascene-Frankish force at the Battle of La Forbie on the 17th of October, leaving the kingdom virtually defenceless. Reports of this had barely reached Europe when Louis IX of France took the cross in December 1244, said to have been moved by a visionary experience after recovering from severe illness.
Louis launched two major campaigns, the Seventh Crusade against Egypt in 1248 to 1251 and the Eighth Crusade against Tunis in 1270. Both ended in failure. By this period, the great mass expeditions known as the passagium generale were giving way to the smaller passagium particulare, which became the dominant form of crusading in the late 13th century. Crusade indulgences could now be earned in Iberia, against the Cathars, or in the Baltic, which drew enthusiasm away from the eastern Mediterranean.
The end was set in motion by the Mongols and by a new Muslim power. Having reunited Egypt and Muslim Syria by 1260, the Mamluks turned on the Crusader states and captured the last mainland strongholds in 1291. Plans to retake the Holy Land continued for decades, but only the Alexandrian Crusade briefly revived crusading in the region, in 1365. The wider movement did not die there; campaigns against pagans, dissidents, and other enemies of the papacy carried similar spiritual rewards onward into the 18th century.
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Common questions
What were the Crusades and when did they take place?
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. They were part of a wider crusading movement that promised spiritual rewards to participants.
Who started the First Crusade and how?
Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont on the 27th of November 1095, calling Christians to reconquer Jerusalem from the Muslims. His appeal reportedly prompted the crowd to cry Deus vult, meaning God wills it.
Why did the Fourth Crusade sack Constantinople?
The Fourth Crusade was diverted to Constantinople after the crusaders could not pay Venice for their fleet and accepted an offer from Alexios Angelos to restore him to the Byzantine throne. When payment failed, they stormed the city on the 12th of April 1204, leading to the Sack of Constantinople and the Latin Empire.
Who was Saladin and what did he do at the Battle of Hattin?
Saladin united Egypt and Muslim Syria, taking Damascus in 1174 and Aleppo in 1183. On the 4th of July 1187 he crushed the Jerusalemite army at the Battle of Hattin, and after a twelve-day siege Jerusalem surrendered to him on the 2nd of October 1187.
How did the Crusades end?
The Mamluks, having reunited Egypt and Muslim Syria by 1260, attacked the Crusader states and captured the Crusaders' last mainland strongholds in 1291. Plans for reconquest continued, but only the Alexandrian Crusade briefly revived crusading in the region in 1365.
What were the military orders that came out of the Crusades?
The military orders began at the Council of Nablus in 1120, when Patriarch Warmund approved Hugues de Payens' confraternity of knights who vowed poverty, chastity, obedience, and protection of pilgrims. Housed in the former Al-Aqsa Mosque, called Solomon's Temple by the Franks, they became the Knights Templar.
Where does the word crusade come from?
The terminology evolved from words of movement like iter, expeditio, and passagium, reflecting the link between the Crusades and pilgrimage. Participants who sewed a cross onto their garments were called crucesignati, the earliest vernacular form crozada appeared in Spain in 1212, and the modern term crusade was established by 1706.
All sources
13 references cited across the entry
- 1CRUSADEHarperCollins Publishers — 2025
- 2JournalThe New Crusaders: Contemporary Extreme Right Symbolism and RhetoricAriel Koch — 2017
- 4BookHistorical Dictionary of the CrusadesCorliss K. Slack — Scarecrow Press — 2013
- 12BookThe CrusadesErnest Barker — Oxford University Press, London — 1923
- 13BookThe Crusades: An EncyclopediaAlan V. Murray — ABC-CLIO — 2006