The Crusades
The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, a Christian city, instead of liberating Jerusalem
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The Fourth Crusade never reached Jerusalem. It never even turned south. In twelve hundred and four it sacked Constantinople, the largest Christian city in the world, and looted it for three days.
And the First Crusade started killing eight hundred miles from Jerusalem, in the Rhine valley, in the spring before it crossed into Asia. The people it killed there were not Muslims.
Two centuries of war are filed under a single word, and a great deal of what the word covers was aimed at other Christians, and at Jews, and at nobody in the Holy Land at all.
Scene 1God wills it
The twenty seventh of November, ten ninety five. A field outside Clermont, in central France, because no church is big enough.
Pope Urban the Second tells the crowd that the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is in the hands of the Seljuk Turks, and that the men in front of him should go and take it back.
The crowd answers with two words. Deus vult. God wills it.
What he had been asked for, by the emperor in Constantinople, was mercenaries. A few thousand professional soldiers, on contract, to help push the Turks back out of Anatolia.
What he launched was something nobody could steer.
Scene 2Speyer, Worms, Mainz
The first crusader violence happens in the spring of ten ninety six, in German cities on the Rhine, before any army has left Europe.
A minor count named Emicho leads an unofficial crusade through the Rhineland with an argument his followers find airtight. Why march two thousand miles to avenge the death of Christ, when the people we hold responsible for it live here?
In Speyer the bishop takes the Jewish community inside his own palace. Nine are caught outside and killed. In Worms the bishop tries the same thing and the crusaders break down his gates.
In Mainz, in May, more than a thousand Jews are killed in a single day.
Some communities, cornered, chose what the Hebrew sources call sanctification of the name. Rather than accept forced baptism, parents killed their children and then themselves.
Scene 3The fifteenth of July, ten ninety nine
Four years later the armies are at the walls of Jerusalem, and they get over them.
What follows is three days. This is a Latin chronicler travelling with the army, writing about his own side, with approval.
· Gesta Francorum · c. 1101
“They were killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles.”
And this is Ibn al-Athir, a Muslim historian in Mosul, writing a century later from the accounts that reached him.
· Al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh · c. 1231
“The population of the holy city was put to the sword, and the Franks spent a week massacring Muslims. In the Masjid al-Aqsa the Franks slaughtered more than seventy thousand people.”
Modern estimates put the dead between forty and seventy thousand, which is close to everyone who lived there. The synagogue where the city's Jews had taken refuge was burned with them inside.
Then the crusaders took off their shoes and walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to give thanks.
Scene 4Eighty eight years later
They held it for eighty eight years, and lost it in an afternoon.
On the fourth of July, eleven eighty seven, at Hattin, above the Sea of Galilee, Saladin destroyed the entire field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Twenty thousand men killed or taken, the king among them.
Jerusalem surrendered in October. And Saladin did not do what had been done in ten ninety nine.
He set a ransom. Ten dinars for a man, five for a woman, one for a child. Those who could not pay were enslaved, about fifteen thousand of them, and his own brother bought a thousand of those and set them free as a gift.
The comparison between the two conquests has been doing political work in both directions ever since.
Scene 5The wrong city
The Fourth Crusade sails in twelve hundred and two, deep in debt to Venice for ships it cannot pay for.
Venice proposes the army work off the debt. First by taking a Christian port on the Adriatic for Venice, which gets the whole expedition excommunicated. Then, with a claimant to the Byzantine throne offering money it does not have, by sailing on Constantinople.
In April twelve hundred and four they take the city and sack it for three days. The relics go to churches across western Europe, where many of them still are.
Nicetas Choniates was a Byzantine official who watched it and got out.
· Annals · c. 1206
“Even the Saracens are merciful and kind compared with these men who bear the Cross of Christ on their shoulders.”
Five accounts
Five accounts, and the first thing to notice is that the two sides in the title are only two of them.
vanquishedLatin Christian / Crusader
The Latin crusaders
The first is the crusaders' own, and the modern version of it is not the one you expect.
For a long time the assumption was that these were younger sons with no land, going east to get some. The records do not support it. Crusading was catastrophically expensive. Men mortgaged estates, sold rights, and beggared their families to go, and the great majority came home poorer, if they came home.
What Urban offered was not land. It was an indulgence, remission of the penance owed for sin, for anyone who went in the right spirit. To a man who believed that literally, the arithmetic was obvious.
And they built real states on it. Four of them, defended by the new military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers, and financed by Venice, Genoa and Pisa, who took commercial privileges in every port as their price.
A French speaking aristocracy governing Arabic speaking Muslims, Christians and Jews, for two hundred years, which is a colony however it described itself.
Read the full account
Narrative
The call came on November 27, 1095. Pope Urban II, standing on a wooden platform outside the cathedral at Clermont, told the assembled clergy and nobles that the holy places of Christendom were in the hands of infidels. He offered a bargain that reshaped European history: any man who took the cross (sewing a cloth cross onto his garment) would receive remission of all sins. The crowd roared "Deus vult!" Peter the Hermit carried the message across northern France and the Rhineland. Within months, tens of thousands had taken the cross.
The First Crusade was a military miracle by the standards of its participants. A ragged coalition of French, Norman, Flemish, and Provencal armies (somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 fighting men plus a larger number of noncombatants) marched 3,000 miles overland from Europe to Jerusalem. They crossed the Byzantine Empire (whose Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had requested help against the Seljuks but had not expected an independent army), besieged Antioch for eight months (October 1097-June 1098), survived starvation and plague, and captured Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. Fulcher of Chartres, who accompanied the expedition, described the joy of the crusaders entering the Holy Sepulchre: "Oh, what a day! What gladness! What a new thing to behold!"
The violence that accompanied the capture was, in the crusader narrative, the righteous wrath of Christian warriors purging the holy city of infidels. The Gesta Francorum described blood running ankle-deep without apparent distress. The massacre was understood as God's judgment, not a moral failure. Raymond of Aguilers, the chaplain of Count Raymond of Toulouse, wrote that the crusaders "wept with joy and happiness" amid the killing. The theological framework of the Crusade (holy war, spiritual reward, the recovery of Christ's patrimony) made the violence not merely acceptable but salvific. To kill for God was to be saved.
The crusader states that followed, the Kingdom of Jerusalem under Baldwin I, the principalities and counties along the Levantine coast, were understood as Christian territory restored, not conquered. The military orders (Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights) fused monasticism with warfare, creating a warrior-monk ideal that defined crusading identity. Bernard of Clairvaux's In Praise of the New Knighthood (c. 1136) described a Templar knight who "kills not for gain or glory but for Christ."
The loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 was experienced as a divine punishment for the crusaders' sins, not as evidence that the entire enterprise was misguided. The Third Crusade under Richard the Lionheart, who captured Acre, defeated Saladin at Arsuf, and negotiated pilgrim access to Jerusalem, was understood as partial redemption. Richard became the crusader archetype: brave, pious, chivalrous (though his execution of 2,700 Muslim prisoners complicates the image). The later Crusades, including the disastrous Fourth Crusade and the diplomatically successful but theologically troubling Sixth Crusade (Frederick II negotiated Jerusalem's return in 1229 without fighting), reflected an enterprise that persisted in imagination long after it failed in reality.
The Latin Christian narrative emphasizes faith, sacrifice, and the defense of holy places. It frames the violence as contextual (brutal but consistent with medieval warfare) and the enterprise as spiritually motivated even when it served political and commercial interests. This narrative dominated Western historiography until the 20th century and still shapes popular culture through films, novels, and the Templar mythology.
Arguments
- The Crusade was a defensive response to Muslim aggression; the Seljuk Turks had conquered Anatolia and threatened Constantinople
- Spiritual motivation was genuine. Tens of thousands died on crusade, including many who gained nothing materially
- Violence at Jerusalem was consistent with medieval siege warfare norms, not unique to crusaders
- Crusader states represented the restoration of Christian territory, not colonial conquest
Sources
- Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (Deeds of the Franks)
- A History of the Crusades (3 volumes)
- God's War: A New History of the Crusades
victorMuslim / Ayyubid-Mamluk
The Muslim world
The second account starts with a fact that complicates the whole story. The initial response was not a holy war. It was confusion, and division.
The Seljuk empire was fragmenting. Local rulers made and broke alliances with the newcomers, sometimes against other Muslim rulers, for decades.
Saladin, a Kurd who had made himself sultan of Egypt and Syria, spent as much of his career unifying Muslim territory as fighting Franks, because the first was the precondition for the second.
And the Franks were not only enemies. Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian nobleman who spent decades among them, wrote a book of observations that is by turns furious, condescending and warm. He kept Frankish friends. He also recorded this.
“Among the Franks, God damn them, there are none more wretched than the knights. They are the great ones and the fighters, but everyone else is merely a servant to them.”
Read the full account
Narrative
When the Franks took Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, the Islamic world barely noticed. The Seljuk sultanate had fragmented into rival city-states. The Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo had lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks only the year before and initially attempted to negotiate with the crusaders rather than fight them. The Muslim sources that recorded the fall of Jerusalem (primarily Ibn al-Athir, writing from Mosul over a century later) described the massacre in graphic terms but embedded it in a narrative of Muslim disunity and complacency. The catastrophe at Jerusalem was not the work of a superior civilization. It was the consequence of Muslim rulers fighting each other instead of the invaders.
The concept of jihad as counter-crusade developed gradually. Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul, captured the County of Edessa in 1144, the first crusader state to fall. His son Nur al-Din built a coalition of Syrian cities and framed the struggle explicitly as jihad, commissioning a minbar (pulpit) for the al-Aqsa Mosque that he intended to install when Jerusalem was recaptured. He died in 1174 without achieving this goal. It was Saladin (Nur al-Din's Kurdish general, who had seized power in Egypt and united it with Syria) who carried the minbar to Jerusalem.
The Battle of Hattin on July 4, 1187, was the decisive engagement. Saladin lured the crusader army (20,000 knights and infantry, the largest force the Kingdom of Jerusalem had ever fielded) into a waterless march across the Galilee. At the Horns of Hattin, dehydrated and surrounded, the crusaders collapsed. King Guy was captured. The fragment of the True Cross was taken. Within three months, Saladin had captured every crusader city except Tyre. On October 2, 1187, he entered Jerusalem.
Saladin's conduct at Jerusalem defined his legacy. He permitted the Frankish population to ransom themselves. He posted guards at churches to prevent looting. He restored the al-Aqsa Mosque to Islamic worship. The contrast with the crusaders' behavior in 1099, which Saladin and his court explicitly referenced, was deliberate and calculated. Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, Saladin's secretary, wrote that his master's mercy proved Islam's moral superiority. Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad, Saladin's biographer, recorded that the sultan wept when he saw the poverty of the Frankish refugees, and his brother al-Adil freed a thousand captives as a charitable act.
The Muslim narrative is not one of perpetual victimhood. After the initial shock of the First Crusade, Muslim states adapted, unified, and ultimately prevailed. The Ayyubid dynasty under Saladin recaptured Jerusalem. The Mamluks, slave-soldiers who had seized power in Egypt, destroyed the remaining crusader states methodically: Antioch fell in 1268, Tripoli in 1289, Acre in 1291. Sultan Baybars, who took Antioch, reportedly wrote to its ruler: "You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs' tombs overturned." The Mamluks accomplished what Saladin had not: the complete expulsion of the Franks.
In modern Arab political discourse, the Crusades serve as a template for understanding Western intervention in the Middle East. The parallel is explicit and recurring. When General Henri Gouraud entered Damascus in 1920 to enforce the French mandate, he reportedly stood at Saladin's tomb and declared: "Saladin, we have returned." Whether or not the quote is apocryphal, it captures a widely held perception: that Western military presence in the Levant, from the Crusades to the British Mandate to the Iraq War, follows a continuous logic of conquest framed in moral language.
Arguments
- The First Crusade's success was a product of Muslim disunity, not Frankish superiority
- Saladin's restraint at Jerusalem (1187), contrasted with the crusaders' massacre (1099), demonstrates Islamic moral framework
- The Crusades ended in total Muslim victory: every crusader state was destroyed by 1291
- Western military intervention in the modern Middle East is understood through the template of the Crusades
Sources
- Al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh (The Complete History)
- The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin
- The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
bystanderByzantine
Byzantium
The third account is the one that asked for this and could not stop it.
The Byzantine emperor Alexios had lost most of Anatolia to the Turks a generation earlier. He wrote west asking for soldiers he could pay and command. What arrived first was an unarmed mob, and then armies under lords who refused to take his orders and wanted his territory.
His daughter Anna Comnena wrote the history, which makes her one of very few women writing history anywhere in the medieval world. She found the Franks unwashed, greedy, oath breaking and dangerous, and she said so at length.
Her central example was a Norman prince who had attacked the empire before, swore to hand Antioch back to Alexios when it fell, took it in ten ninety eight, and kept it.
A century later the Fourth Crusade finished the argument. The empire never recovered from twelve hundred and four, and the city fell for good in fourteen fifty three, to the Ottomans.
Read the full account
Narrative
Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had asked Pope Urban II for help. He wanted mercenaries: professional soldiers to reinforce the Byzantine army against the Seljuk Turks, who had conquered most of Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. What he got was an uncontrollable mob followed by independent armies led by ambitious Western lords who refused to recognize Byzantine authority, demanded supplies, and coveted Byzantine territory.
Anna Comnena, Alexios's daughter and one of the medieval world's few female historians, described the First Crusade in her Alexiad (c. 1148) with a mixture of horror and contempt. She portrayed the crusaders as uncouth, unwashed, treacherous, and driven less by piety than by greed. Of Bohemond of Taranto, the Norman prince who had previously attacked the Byzantine Empire, she wrote that "his ambition was always the same: to carve out a kingdom for himself." When the crusaders captured Antioch in 1098, Bohemond kept it for himself rather than returning it to Alexios, as he had sworn to do. The Principality of Antioch, built on oathbreaking, confirmed Anna's assessment of Frankish character.
The Byzantine relationship with the crusaders deteriorated through each successive expedition. The Second Crusade (1147-1149) brought armies under Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France through Byzantine territory. Byzantine guides were accused of leading the crusaders into Turkish ambushes, a charge that may reflect genuine Byzantine ambivalence about Western armies in their territory. Manuel I Komnenos, Alexios's grandson, allied with the crusader states when convenient but fought them when they threatened Byzantine interests.
The catastrophe came on April 12-13, 1204. The Fourth Crusade, launched to recapture Jerusalem, instead besieged and sacked Constantinople. The immediate cause was a dynastic dispute: the deposed Byzantine emperor Isaac II's son Alexios promised the crusaders 200,000 silver marks and 10,000 soldiers if they restored his father. When the restored emperor could not pay, the crusaders attacked. Enrico Dandolo, the blind, ninety-year-old Doge of Venice, had his own motives: Venice wanted to eliminate its Byzantine commercial rival and secure monopoly access to eastern Mediterranean trade.
Nicetas Choniates, a Byzantine senator and historian who fled the city during the sack, left the definitive account. He described crusaders looting the Hagia Sophia, smashing icons, drinking from sacred vessels, and placing a prostitute on the patriarchal throne to sing bawdy songs. The city's libraries were burned. Bronze and gold statues that had stood since antiquity were melted down for coin. The bronze horses of the Hippodrome, dating to the 4th century, were shipped to Venice. Relics were scattered across Europe; the head of John the Baptist ended up in Amiens, fragments of the True Cross in a dozen cathedrals. The crusaders established a "Latin Empire" in Constantinople that lasted until 1261, when the Byzantines recaptured the city, but the restored empire controlled only fragments of its former territory.
For Byzantium, the Crusades were a catastrophe inflicted by supposed allies. The empire that had withstood Persian, Arab, and Turkish invasions for 800 years was fatally wounded not by Muslims but by Latin Christians who had sworn to defend Christendom. The weakened state that the Palaiologos dynasty recovered in 1261 was a rump, unable to resist the Ottoman advance. When Constantinople fell to Mehmed II on May 29, 1453, the walls and defenses that had protected the city for a millennium had already been compromised: in 1204, by men wearing the Cross.
In Greek national memory, 1204 remains a wound. The Orthodox-Catholic schism, formalized in 1054 but driven deeper by the Fourth Crusade, has never fully healed. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and Pope Francis have made gestures of reconciliation, but the theological and political division that the sack of Constantinople entrenched was never closed.
Arguments
- Alexios I requested mercenaries against the Seljuks; he did not request independent crusading armies with their own territorial ambitions
- The Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople (1204) was the central trauma. Christians destroyed the greatest Christian city
- Byzantium's fall to the Ottomans in 1453 was made possible by the damage inflicted in 1204
- The Orthodox-Catholic schism was deepened, not created, by the Crusades; it persists into the 2020s
Sources
- The Alexiad
- O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates
- Byzantium and the Crusades
revisionistModern Academic / Postcolonial
The modern historians
The fourth account is about what later centuries did with all of this.
In eighteen twenty five Walter Scott wrote Richard the Lionheart and Saladin as chivalric equals, and Europe liked that version enormously. France published a vast collection of crusade sources as a monument to French achievement in the east. When France took its mandate over Syria and Lebanon after the First World War, over ground that had been the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch, its administrators said the connection out loud.
Then Steven Runciman, who read Latin, Greek and Arabic, wrote the first major English history that used all three, and ended it by calling the whole enterprise a long act of intolerance in the name of God.
And the correction to Runciman came from inside the field. Jonathan Riley-Smith went through the charters and the debts and found the piety was real, which does not excuse anything, but does mean the cynical reading was also a story people wanted.
Read the full account
Narrative
The dominant 19th- and early 20th-century Western narrative presented the Crusades as a romantic episode of Christian heroism. Walter Scott's The Talisman (1825) cast Richard the Lionheart and Saladin as chivalric equals. The Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres published the Recueil des historiens des croisades (1841-1906), a massive collection of crusade sources, as a monument to French cultural achievement in the Orient. French colonial administrators in the Levant explicitly linked their mandate (1920-1946) to the crusader legacy. The French Mandate territory of Syria and Lebanon overlapped with the former County of Tripoli and Principality of Antioch.
Modern academic historiography, beginning with Steven Runciman's three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951-1954), dismantled the romantic narrative. Runciman, a British historian who read Arabic, Greek, and Latin sources, concluded that the Crusades were "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost." His work was the first major English-language history to incorporate Muslim and Byzantine perspectives alongside Latin ones. Jonathan Riley-Smith, in a corrective to Runciman, argued in The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (1997) that genuine piety, not land hunger or commercial ambition, was the primary motivation for most crusaders, who spent fortunes and risked death on an enterprise that offered no reliable material reward.
The postcolonial reading, advanced by scholars such as Edward Said and amplified by Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1984), frames the Crusades as a prototype of European colonialism. The parallels are structural: a Western military force, motivated by a civilizing ideology (Christianity then, liberal democracy or humanitarianism later), establishes territorial control over a non-Western population, extracts resources, imposes its legal and cultural systems, and recruits local collaborators. The crusader states (a French-speaking aristocracy ruling Arabic-speaking subjects, defended by fortified castles, supplied by maritime trade) resemble later colonial outposts in structure if not in scale.
The colonial parallel has limits. Crusader settlers did not extract commodities for a European market the way colonial economies did. The crusader states were destinations, not economic peripheries. Many crusaders stayed and intermarried; the "poulains" (locally born Franks) were culturally hybrid, speaking Arabic, wearing eastern dress, and adopting local customs. Usama ibn Munqidh distinguished between newly arrived crusaders (whom he found barbaric) and long-settled Franks (with whom he had friendships). The binary of colonizer and colonized, useful as an analytical frame, flattens the complexity of 196 years of coexistence, conflict, trade, and cultural exchange.
The gender dimension of the Crusades has received sustained attention since the 1990s. Eleanor of Aquitaine accompanied Louis VII on the Second Crusade (1147-1149), and her presence was blamed by contemporaries for the expedition's failure, a charge that reveals more about medieval attitudes toward women than about Eleanor's actual influence. Women in the crusader states held property, managed estates during their husbands' absences, and occasionally exercised political authority: Queen Melisende of Jerusalem ruled as regent (1131-1152) and resisted her son Baldwin III's attempts to sideline her. On the Muslim side, women participated in the defense of cities (Ibn al-Athir recorded women fighting on the walls during the siege of Acre) and managed religious endowments (waqf) that sustained the counter-crusade infrastructure.
The Crusades left a vocabulary that persists. In Arabic, "Salibi" (crusader) is used to describe Western military intervention. In English, "crusade" retains its association with righteous cause, a usage that ignores the violence embedded in the original. The Crusades are not over in the sense that matters: the frameworks they established for understanding conflict between "the West" and "the Islamic world" continue to structure political discourse, military rhetoric, and popular imagination on both sides.
Arguments
- 19th-century romantic and nationalist narratives have been dismantled by multi-source historiography
- The Crusades function as a prototype of European colonialism (similar structures, similar justifying ideologies)
- Genuine religious motivation coexisted with territorial, commercial, and dynastic ambitions; the binary of 'pious' vs. 'cynical' is false
- The crusading vocabulary ('crusade,' 'Salibi') persists in modern political and military rhetoric
Sources
- A History of the Crusades (3 volumes)
- The First Crusaders, 1095-1131
- The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
vanquishedJewish Communities / Rhineland Massacres
The Rhineland
The fifth account has the fewest survivors and no strategic importance at all, which is exactly why it keeps falling out.
A Latin chronicler recorded Emicho's followers explaining themselves, and recorded it without any apparent discomfort: we are going a long way to take vengeance, and here among us live the people whose forefathers killed him.
The Hebrew account written a generation later names communities, families and individual deaths, because that was the point of writing it.
What ten ninety six established was not a single atrocity. It was a pattern. Every subsequent crusade preaching in Europe was followed by attacks on Jewish communities, and the accusation that had been improvised in the Rhineland hardened into a permanent fixture of European life.
Read the full account
Narrative
The Crusades reached the Jewish communities of the Rhine Valley before the first crusader army crossed into Anatolia. In the spring of 1096, Count Emicho of Flonheim led a popular crusade through the Rhineland with a theological logic his followers considered airtight: why march to Jerusalem to avenge Christ's death when the people they held responsible were living in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz? A Latin chronicler, Albert of Aix, recorded their reasoning without irony: "We are going to march a long way to seek the sanctuary and to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites. Lo and behold, there live among us Jews whose forefathers slew him and crucified him."
The Jewish chronicle of Solomon bar Simson, written in the 1140s, is the primary Hebrew account of what followed. In Speyer, the bishop sheltered Jews inside his palace; Emicho's followers killed nine outside the walls. In Worms, the bishop tried the same; crusaders broke down his gates. In Mainz in May 1096, Emicho's army killed more than 1,000 Jews in a single day. Some communities practiced kiddush hashem (ritual self-slaughter) to avoid forced baptism. Parents killed their children. Entire families burned their own houses. The Mainz Memorbuch, the liturgical memorial book read aloud in synagogues on Shabbat, lists the names of the dead.
Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade on July 15, 1099. The Jewish population of the city, who had fought alongside the Fatimid garrison, was rounded up and driven into the main synagogue. The crusaders set it on fire. The Jewish community of Jerusalem, which had existed continuously since the city's Roman-era refounding as Aelia Capitolina, was extinguished. Under Fatimid rule, Jews had been permitted to live in Jerusalem as dhimmis with restricted but defined rights. Under crusader rule, they were banned entirely. When Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary, a meticulous 12th-century Jewish travelogue of the Levant, documented Jewish communities living under Muslim rule in Tyre, Acre, and Ascalon, but not in crusader Jerusalem itself.
The blood libel, the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in Passover ritual, first appeared in Norwich, England, in 1144, during the buildup to the Second Crusade. The accusation had no precedent in earlier Christian anti-Jewish polemic; it emerged in the same decades when crusade preaching made violent anti-Jewish sentiment socially legible. The pattern repeated: each new crusade call generated Rhineland-style pogroms. The Third Crusade's launch in 1190 triggered massacres in York, Lynn, Norwich, and Stamford. In York, 150 Jews barricaded themselves in Clifford's Tower; when the tower burned, survivors who came out under promised protection were killed. England expelled its entire Jewish population in 1290, partially financed by debts crusaders owed to Jewish moneylenders they would no longer have to repay.
The Crusades' effect on Jewish life in Europe was structural, not episodic. The theological framework that made Jews targets (collective guilt for Christ's death, heretical pollution of Christian space) was energized by crusade preaching and then institutionalized. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), summoned by Innocent III at the height of the crusading era, mandated that Jews wear identifying clothing, prohibited them from public office, and confined them to segregated neighborhoods. The ghetto system that defined Jewish life in Christian Europe for five centuries was a product of the crusading age.
Arguments
- The Rhineland Massacres (1096) killed thousands of Jews before the First Crusade reached the Holy Land. Jews were the first victims of crusade violence
- Jerusalem''s Jewish community was destroyed in 1099; Jews were banned from the city under crusader rule and permitted to return only under Saladin (1187)
- The blood libel emerged during the crusading era, in 1144 England; crusade preaching made anti-Jewish violence socially legible across Europe
- The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) institutionalized the legal segregation of Jews in Christian Europe, a direct product of the crusading era''s theological logic
Sources
- Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson
- The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela
- The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades
- Crusdaes as Catastrophe — The Rhineland Massacres in Jewish Memory
The turn
And here is what each of them cannot account for.
The crusaders' account explains why men went. It does not explain what they did when they arrived, and it cannot explain the Fourth Crusade at all, which is why it usually skips it.
From the record
Massacre of Jewish communities in the Rhineland (1096) by crusaders before they reached the Holy LandCommercial and territorial motivations of younger sons without inheritanceFourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, Christians destroying Christendom's greatest cityForced conversion and exploitation of local Christian populations (Maronites, Armenians, Orthodox) who predated the crusadersThe Muslim account leans on the comparison between ten ninety nine and eleven eighty seven, and that comparison is true. It also compresses two centuries into two days, and it quietly passes over the decades when Muslim rulers allied with Franks against each other.
From the record
Saladin's enslavement of 15,000 Franks who could not pay ransom at JerusalemIntra-Muslim warfare that killed more Muslims than the Crusades did (Saladin's wars against fellow Muslims to unify Syria and Egypt)Periods of pragmatic Frankish-Muslim coexistence, trade, and allianceMuslim rulers who allied with crusaders against other Muslim rivalsThe Byzantine account is written fifty years after the fact by a daughter defending her father, about a disaster that began with her father's own request.
From the record
Byzantine diplomatic duplicity in playing crusaders and Turks against each otherByzantine mistreatment of Western merchants and settlers in ConstantinopleThe restored Byzantine Empire's own internal weakness and dynastic instabilityModern Academic / Postcolonial
The modern account is two arguments pretending to be one. Whether the Crusades were sincere and whether they were justified are different questions, and Runciman's verdict is a moral judgement wearing the clothes of a history.
From the record
The degree to which postcolonial framing projects modern categories onto medieval realitiesMuslim internal debates about the Crusades (whether they were a central or peripheral concern)The extent of genuine cultural exchange and mutual influence between Latin and Muslim societiesJewish Communities / Rhineland Massacres
And the Rhineland account is left out of the other four because it changes nothing about who held Jerusalem. That is the whole reason it has to be included.
From the record
Jewish economic roles as moneylenders to crusaders, a source of both dependency and hostilityInstances of Christian clergy protecting Jewish communities during the massacresJewish theological interpretations of the Crusades as divine punishment or messianic precursor
Close
Acre, the last crusader city, fell in twelve ninety one. Two hundred and ninety six years later Constantinople was Ottoman, and the Latin states were a memory that had lasted less time than the argument about them has.
The word is still live ammunition. An American president used it about a war in September two thousand and one and had to stop using it within days.
The relics taken out of Constantinople in twelve hundred and four are still in churches in Venice and France.
And in Mainz, in the memorial book, the names of the people killed in May ten ninety six are still read aloud in synagogue, nine hundred and thirty years later.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 196 yrsCouncil of Clermont 1095 to…
- Killed
- 1-3Mestimated across all campaigns; Jerusalem 1099…
- Displaced
- Populations of the Levant, Anatolia…
- Place
- Multiple (Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, Constantinople)
Key figures
- Pope Urban IICalled the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, November 27, 10951035 to 1099
- Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub)Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, recaptured Jerusalem on October 2, 1187, after destroying the crusader army at Hattin
- Richard I of England (the Lionheart)Led the Third Crusade (1189-1192), captured Acre, fought Saladin to a stalemate, executed 2,700 Muslim prisoners at Acre
- Anna ComnenaByzantine princess, author of the Alexiad (c. 1148), the primary Byzantine account of the First Crusade; one of the medieval world's few female historians1083 to 1153
- Usama ibn MunqidhMuslim nobleman and warrior of Shaizar, author of the Book of Contemplation, a firsthand memoir of Frankish-Muslim coexistence and conflict1095 to 1188
- Enrico DandoloDoge of Venice, age 90+ and blind, diverted the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople in 1204 to advance Venetian commercial interests1107 to 1205
Primary sources
· Gesta Francorum (Deeds of the Franks) · c. 1101
“They were killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles.”
· Al-Kamil fi'l-Tarikh (The Complete History) · c. 1231
“The population of the holy city was put to the sword, and the Franks spent a week massacring Muslims. In the Masjid al-Aqsa the Franks slaughtered more than 70,000 people.”
· O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates · c. 1206
“Even the Saracens are merciful and kind compared with these men who bear the Cross of Christ on their shoulders.”
· Kitab al-I'tibar (The Book of Contemplation) · c. 1183
“Among the Franks — God damn them — there are none more wretched than the knights. They are the great ones and the fighters, but everyone else is merely a servant to them.”
Threads
- The Fall of ConstantinopleA 21-year-old sultan hired a cannon maker the emperor couldn’t pay. Then someone left a gate unlocked.
- The Rise of IslamWithin 100 years of the first revelation, Islam stretched from Spain to the borders of China. The Byzantine and Sassanid empires were gone.
- The Ottoman EmpireThe empire lasted 623 years. The men who carved it up needed six.