The First Crusade Outline
Launched by Pope Urban II in 1095.
Ultimately captured Jerusalem in 1099.
I added some color and
emphasized some city and river names here and there.
The geography is pretty
hard to decipher.
Background for the First Crusade:
Western Roman Empire fell Sept. 4, 476
when it was conquered by northern Germanic tribes, Òbarbarians.Ó
In 614 Jerusalem taken by Sassanid forces
(pre-Islamic Persians). Extremely
bloody. Thousands of Christians were
killed.
In 629 Byzantine Empire retakes
Jerusalem.
622 – Isalm is born.
638 – Jerusalem taken by Islamic
forces. Jews finally allowed back
in the city. [Recall they had been
banned since Constantine.]
Christians also protected under this new rulership.
Late 600s – Dome of the Rock is
constructed in Jerusalem.
Great Schism: 1054- Western Latin Church
and Eastern Greek Church split apart and act more or less independently. A general feeling of hostility between
the two churches.
In 1071/77 Jerusalem was conquered by
Seljuk Turks. Christians, who had been relatively safe under previous
Arab/Islamic rule, were now persecuted. Reports of Christian pilgrims being
harassed and killed by Turks reach the West. This instigates Pope Urban II's call to action. Furthermore, Constantinople, the center
of Eastern Christiandom, felt threatened by the encroaching Turkish
forces. [See map below. The Turks
were right up on the edge of Constantinople by the late 11th century.]
Late 11th Century: Constantinople, the
center of Byzantine power, is dominated by Western (Latin) naval trade,
primarily by Italians from the city-states of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. In 1182
a popular uprising against these extremely rich and powerful foreigners
(schizmatics to their mind) led to a masacre which was extremely brutal. Many
were killed and mutilated, many sold to the Turks as slaves, and many fled. An
estimated population of 50,000 or 60,000 Italians was reduced to ca.
4,000. Needless to say, the
already bad relations between Eastern and Western Christiandom were made even
worse.
1095 – Pope Urban II (the Western
Pope) called upon the nobility of Western Europe to recapture Jerusalem, and as
a sideline, help out his Eastern Christian counterparts, although helping the
Byzaninte Empire was not a particular popular cause in the West.
The more detailed story of the First
Crusade
Jerusalem was under (Turkish-Sunni)
Muslim rule in the 11th century. Christian pilgrims continued to go to Jerusalem even though it
was ruled by what they considered to be infidels (unfaithfuls). There was actually an extensive network
stretching from the West all the way to Jerusalem to aid in pilgrimages and the
Muslim leaders did not in general hinder these pilgrims. But there were some skirmishes here and
there.
As early as 1074 there was some talk in
the West of mounting a military action in conjunction with Byzantine forces
from Constantinople to conquer Jerusalem for Christendom. This didnÕt get anybody too excited. But some religious zealots starting
telling stories of Muslim atrocities against innocent Christian pilgrims. These stories were probably
exaggeration or simply fictions, but they started to generate some interest in
the West.
At this point in history the Christian
church was split into two major camps: the Orthodox in the East and the Roman
Catholics in the West. Relations between the two sides was not great, but not
terrible. This Catholic-Orthodox
Schism in the Church occurred in 1054.
In the Islamic world there was a lot of infighting between rival leaders
and groups. Sunni and ShiÕa
divisions evident. They didnÕt see
much of a threat from the West, which at this point in history was is pretty
sorry shape. For the Islamic
world, the greater threat was from all the infighting and civil war.
In March of 1095, the Emperor of
Byzantium, Alexius I Comnenus, asked for assistance from Pope Urban II (in the
West) to fight the Muslim Turks who virtually surrounded Constantinople. Urban may have thought that a reconciliation
between the two Churches was possible if he gave assistance, and that this
might lead to making him the leader of both the West and the East. Urban started preaching around France
promoting the idea of a Holy Crusade to free Jerusalem from the Muslims and to
help the Christian Byzantine Empire, their brothers in faith. He was mainly addressing the nobles of
France – knights and the rich land owners who could afford to have a
horse or two and armour and weapons and servants, all of which were
prohibitively expensive. A common
serf had absolutely no access to these things.
The nobles of the West were in bad
shape. They were constantly
fighting each other. Part of the
problem was that first sons inherited everything while second and third sons
didnÕt get anything except for support roles to their oldest brothers. [Warning: this theory of 'second tier'
nobles is no longer considered the whole story, but for this write-up I'll
continue with that theme. Just
realize that it is only a part of the story.] These Ôsecond tierÕ nobles were trouble and were a bloody
violent bunch. The pope was aware that something had to be done to stop all the
violence amongst the noble class.
Urban suggested that instead of fighting and stealing from each other, they
should go to the East and fight and kill Muslims in the Holy Land. This would not only be a spiritually
beneficial thing to do (Urban suggested) but it would also direct the violent
natures of the nobles somewhere else onto foreign people. The nobles could do a holy service and
win some booty as well.
Urban proposed a novel idea - he combined
the holy and peaceful act of pilgrimage to the Holy Land with the violent
concept of a Holy War. This way a
restless noble could get rich, get land, get booty, kill infidels, save the
Holy Land, and find the peace and salvation of God and Jesus Christ all at the
same time. Urban and his underlings preached this idea throughout France,
Italy, and Germany.
-The actual term
ÒCrusadeÓ or ÒcrusaderÓ did not come into use until about 100 years after the 1st
Crusade. During the 1st
"Crusade" the term used was peregrinus
or peregrinator, ÒpilgrimÓ on a pilgrimage
or journey, peregrinatio or iter.
Here is what a crusader could hope to
receive when he combined this idea of pilgrimage to Jerusalem (the Holy Land)
with the Holy War concept.
-Legal benefits afforded to the pilgrim
status. Debts and pending legal
actions all put on hold. If you
had a land dispute with a neighbor or owed somebody a ton of money, it was put
into limbo.
-Crusaders could earn Òplenary
indulgence,Ó which was a get-out-of-purgatory-free card of sorts.
-Normally the spiritual benefits of a
peaceful pilgrimage only came about if you actually made it to Jerusalem. If you died on the way, too bad. But a Holy Warrior got the spiritual
benefits no matter where he died. Thus, death at any point was good. What a deal! Even if you fail you win.
-And of course, a big incentive –
booty: land, money, commercial goods in general, power.
Some other reasons why a Crusade made
sense to some people:
In this era many people believed that the
second coming of Jesus was near and that in order for this to happen the Holy
Land (and the world in general) had to be purified, meaning that everybody had
to be either Christian or dead. This was often referred to as the ÒLast
Days.Ó The Crusades, as a concept,
fit with this belief perfectly.
The Crusades were a holy mission to convert or kill non-Christians.
Though violence was generally frowned
upon in the Church, this new Crusade movement redefined the rules of war and
violence by making the issue not about the behavior of the Christian aggressor,
but about the alien nature of the enemy.
The Muslim was considered in a sense not to be human and therefore
normal rules of conduct for fighting them did not apply. There were no ethical or moral problems
with the extreme brutality that characterized the Christian crusaders against
the Muslims. The Byzantine Christians,
on the other hand, did not buy into this theory and tended to be much more humain
in their battles with the Turks/Muslims.
So Urban II and his minions preached this
new form of violent pilgrimage hoping to enlist Western knights (nobles) to the
cause. Unexpectedly, he got a large
response from the poor, people with little to no means for mounting a major
offensive in a land nearly 2000 miles away. The common people got really fired
up over this idea of Crusade. This was a big problem. Common people donÕt make
good soldiers. They have no weapons, no armour, no assistants, no entourage, no
supplies, no horses or wagons, no money, no food. They have no way of getting
to Constantinople except for walking and carrying what they could on their
backs. This was not what Urban II
had in mind.
Pope Urban II
officially launched the 1st Crusade on Nov. 27, 1095. People didnÕt leave for the East on
that date, but the Crusade was penciled in on the calendar. [See Urban II's
call for crusade in other readings.]
Recap of the big
reasons:
- The Byzantines needed assistance to
beat up the Turks. The Byzantines were very weak at this point. Also there was some hope for a
Catholic-Byzantine reconciliation: The Pope hoped to make up with the East and
get the upper hand over Byzantium after Great Schism.
-The Pope hoped to focus Noble/Knight
violence elsewhere. [The peace and
truce of God movement associated with this. A movement inspired by the idea of Holy War.]
Some Crusade
trivia:
-Crusaders often performed some sort of
ritual upon taking up the cross for Holy War. Many had a cross burned/branded onto their foreheads. Others
simply wore a cloth cross as part of their wardrobe.
-the cost of being a knight: equipment,
supplies, horse, and servants has been estimated to be about 5 times a
noblemanÕs annual income. Their
families often endured much suffering to raise the money required. Most who
survived the Crusade and returned to the West returned without much booty, thus
the investment in general had a pretty poor return.
-7000 knights, 35,000 infantry, and
between 20k and 60k non-combatants (servants, assistants, roadies, etc.) left for the East. =Totaling: 62,000 to 102,000.
There were two distinct parts of the 1st
Crusade: the PeopleÕs Crusade and the NobleÕs Crusade
The PeopleÕs Crusade;
1st part of the First Crusade. The Òpoor peopleÓ Crusade unofficially led by a charismatic
itinerant preacher and vagabond named Peter the Hermit.
-A severe drought had afflicted France
and Central Europe in the years leading up to 1096, there was widespread
famine. Adding insult to injury,
there were large scale outbreaks of ergotism (an illness caused by moldy rye
that for some caused ÔtrippingÕ) and plague. The stories of a plentiful and bountiful East would have
been very appealing to the poor in these conditions.
-May 21, 1096 the first wave
started heading East. Thousands
followed for the next few months.
The basic plan was to meet up at Constantinople.
-About 15,000 men, women, and
children headed off to the East, mostly on foot with few if any supplies. A few nobles were among this bunch, but
it was overwhelmingly made up of poor people, an assortment of criminals, and
other types not ready for combat.
Imagine trying to organize these giant roving camps who were continually
hungry. They moved across the landscape like a dark cloud of destruction and
violence, negotiating from local inhabitants for food in some places and in
many other places simply stealing it and fighting with the landowners and local
peasants, killing and injuring many along the way.
- Urban II and Byzantine Emperor did not
have this in mind. They expected a
few hundred knights to go, not thousands of unprepared poor people with no
equipment or supplies.
-The Crusades initially got traction and
recruitment by characterizing the mission as a Holy War/Pilgrimage [think jihad for Christians]. Combining the passive concept of
pilgrimage with the concept of religious purification through war had very bad
consequences. All non-Christians,
as a result, were dehumanized. Any
non-Christian was therefore categorized as an infidel and extermination or
conversion of the infidel was an objective of the Crusade. This fit in well with the idea of a
popular belief called ÒMillenarianism.Ó
This Millennium craze, an End of Days cult [mentioned above], was
looking forward to the Apocalypse as a goal and dictated that the world must be
cleansed of non-believers before JesusÕ second coming. Add this frenzied and passionate belief
onto a bunch of hungry and desperate people attempting to walk 3000 km to
Jerusalem with no supplies, and it spells trouble.
-Many bands from this Popular (Peoples)
Crusade went North before heading East. They went into the Rhine Valley (Germany)
in order to kill or ÒconvertÓ Jews and steal their stuff to supply their trip
East. They justified their actions as necessary to purify Europe and unify it
entirely as Christian territory so that they could then conquer Jerusalem and
fulfill the Millenarian (End of Days) scheme which required a pure Christian
world. Before the Crusades, the
Jews and the Christians tended get along relatively well. Jews tended to live in their own towns
or communities but were generally respected as fellow human beings who
worshiped the same God as the God of Christianity. Local leaders tended to
protected Jews and Christians alike.
But the PeopleÕs crusaders no longer respected this social structure. Hunger drove them to steal food and
supplies and religious fervor gave them a reason to focus their wrath upon
Jews. The Church disapproved, but
could do little to stop them. The
stories are horrific and tragic.
One account of the atrocities performed by a crusader named Count Emicho
is as follows: (The story teller is Jewish.)
ÒThey (EmichoÕs men) took a Ôtrampled
corpseÕ of theirs, which had been buried 30 days previously, and carried it
through the city, saying, ÔBehold what the Jews have done to our comrade. They
[the Jews] took a gentile [a Christian] and boiled him in water. They then
poured the water into our wells in order to kill us.ÕÓ
[In other words, the crusaders claimed
that the Jews had cooked a Christian and poured the broth into Christian
wells.] The idea was to incite the local Christian population to violence
against Jews. It worked. Some Jews
were able to get protection from the local bishop (Bishop of Worms) but many
others were slaughtered and their bodies dragged through the streets. One particularly grisly incident was a
fellow named Isaac who was dragged around the streets by a rope around his
neck. He did not die and was asked if he would convert to Christianity. He couldnÕt talk since he had been
severely strangled. He signaled
with his finger that he wanted his head to be chopped off. The crusaders did what he asked of
them.
Some
Jews, when they heard about the approaching crusaders massacred each other (no
doubt thinking of Masada) so as to beat the crusaders to the kill. Many local bishops tried to save their
local Jews but the crusaders were ruthless and even attacked Christian
sanctuaries where Jews were seeking refuge. [pp. 83-89 in Asbridge] Thousands of Jews in Europe died as a
result of the Crusades.
-The PeopleÕs crusaders then raped and
pillaged their way to Constantinople.
Heavy damage was done in Byzantine-led Hungary and the Balkans (Albania,
the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Eastern Turkey, Croatia, Greece) where the
locals (Christians) defended themselves by killing a large percentage
(estimates of about 25%) of the crusaders. The PeopleÕs crusaders were
essentially a mob of murderers and crazed religious fanatics. They were desperate and had very little
fear. God was on their sideÉ or so
they believed. For the crusaders
salvation was inevitable unless they ran away. If they lived to fight on they were blessed by God, and if
they died while trying they were blessed by God. Win-win in their minds.
-They arrived in Constantinople in
August, much earlier than expected to the annoyance of the Byzantines. [They walked 3000 km (1850 miles) in
about 3 months! ThatÕs from NYC to about Denver or Salt Lake City!] Once in the
vicinity of Constantinople the Peoples crusaders were thuggish and robbed and
fought with the locals like they had done all the way across Eastern Europe.
-There are two versions of the story that
happened next
-The
Byzantine version of what happened:
The Popular crusaders, against the advise of Alexius I Comnenus (The
Byzantine Emperor), crossed the Bosporus into Muslim
territory to take on the Turks and were routed (annihilated). [See map below.]
-Western
version: Alexius I Comnenus,
pissed off at the unruly crusaders who were terrorizing his city and
surrounding lands, tricked them
into going into Asia Minor (crossing the Bosporus) suggesting that they would
be safe there and that they would receive assistance. The same resultÉ they
were annihilated by the Turks.
-Either story has most of the Peoples
Crusade getting massacred by the well organized Turks. There were, however, many survivors who later caused more
trouble. Peter the Hermit survived.
The BaronsÕ or NobleÕs Crusade – The Actual Knights and Armored Warriors
– The First Crusade - part II
The Latins
(crusaders) were divided into factions: Some of the factional leaders wereÉ
-Raymond of
Saint-Gilles- Highly religious and powerful, old than others
-Bohemond-
driven by money and power issues; the manipulative leader at Antioch
Éand a host of
other nobles from the West.
Aug. 15, 1096 was set as the official departure date.
The Barons (Nobles) traveled to Constantinople by land and by sea. Once in Constantinople
they met with the Emperor.
Alexius
I Comnenus (The Byzantine Emperor), demanded an oath of loyalty from the Barons
to Byzantine interests. Without
such an oath he was unwilling to help the crusaders. He insisted that any city
captured by the crusaders that had recently been Byzantine property, was to be
returned to Byzantine control and not looted and pillaged. Bohemond was one of
the only who agreed initially, but he clearly was never going to keep his word.
In general the Barons refused this arrangement at first,É until Alexius cut off
their food supply, they then fell into line with Alexius.
This is a
Map of the Byzantine Empire at 1092. Notice that
Nicaea and
Antioch are not under Byzantine influence.
Spring
1097- The
Baron crusaders set off from Constantinople to Nicaea with Byzantine soldiers.
Siege of Nicaea; May 1097
(Note: Franks = crusaders=Latins)
Nicaea had been in Byzantine control
until 1077, but now it was under Muslim rule.
- The idea was to lay siege to Nicaea and
drive the Turks out.
-However it was very difficult to cut off
supplies to the Turks in Nicaea due to the geography. It was on a lake and it
was next to impossible to keep smugglers and traders from getting in and
out.
Image derived
from Google Earth.
-Alexius had his men build boats to seal
off water access.
-Alexius also brokered a surrender
surreptitiously with the Nicaeans so that Byzantine soldiers, not the overly brutal
crusaders, gained control of the city.
To the surprise of the crusaders, one morning (June 19, 1097) they woke up to see Byzantine flags
flying within the city.
-Byzantine treatment of Nicaean prisoners
was lenient. Over the years the
Byzantines and the Turks had developed their own rules of battle and war and
they did not tend to brutalize each other. (Sort of a Òdo unto othersÉ Ò strategy). This angered the crusaders to no
end. They were hoping to take
Nicaea for themselves and loot it.
The Byzantine forces restricted Nicaean access to the crusaders only
allowing them to enter the city under guard and in small numbers. This made the bad blood between the
allies even worse. (allies = crusaders and the Byzantine forces from
Constantinople).
Crusaders anticipated that at the current
pace they would make Jerusalem in about 5 weeks. (It took another 2 years.)
The Siege of Nicaea (of Nicene Creed fame),
From "Histoire d'Outre Mer" Guillaume de
Tyr. Reproduction from "Croisades", Claude Lebedel. 13th Century
Look at this closely and figure out what is going on.
Yes, the crusaders are launching heads into the city
using a catapult.
Siege of Antioch; Oct. 20, 1097 through June 3, 1098.
[9-month siege]-
[Second Siege lasted from June 4 –
June 25.]
Notice the river in the
foreground and the steep
mountain in the back
with the fortification walls.
-Antioch was too big for the crusaders to
surround effectively. It was built
between a river and a huge and very steep mountain at the top of which was a
fortress. Extensive ramparts and
fortified walls surrounded the entire city. The city had been well supplied and was ready for a long
siege. The siege lasted 9-months.
-Byzantine soldiers left the crusaders
for this siege perhaps due to rumors the Byzantine commander was going to be
assassinated by Latin leaders.
This rumor may have been started by Bohemond (one of the Crusade
leaders) who was busy devising ways take Antioch for himself and wanted the Byzantine
forces out of the way. The
crusaders were now even more convinced that the Byzantines were wimps. (Keep in
mind that the Byzantine forces were not crusaders. They were not fighting for God or 
the second coming of Jesus or for penance
or forgiveness or religious purification or even for extensive booty. They were fighting to get back cities
and land taken from them by the Turks. They were a professional army doing a
professional job. Many of them had wives and families back in Constantinople.
The crusaders probably seemed crazy to these hardened professionals. The
crusaders knew no bounds in brutality and had less to lose overall. If they died in battle, they were still
winners in Christ. If a Byzantine soldier died in battle, he just died.]
- Example of crusader atrocity: The
crusaders dig up Muslim cemetery and tear up the bodies and send body parts to
various Islamic leaders. The
people within the city, who included families and the elderly, not just
military types, were terrified by the behaviour of the crusaders. They had never heard of such
atrocities. The crusaders were
gaining the reputation of being completely beyond the boundaries of civilized
behavior.
-The Muslim forces quickly learned the
brutal terror tactics of the crusaders and counter by capturing and burning to
death some crusaders, their screams of pain audible to their comrades outside
the walls of Antioch. They also rounded up Christians, Greeks, Syrians, and
Armenians who lived in the city, and catapulted their heads at the crusaders. They also periodically hung the
Orthodox patriarch of the city by his feet over the walls of the city and beat
his feet with rods for the crusaders to see. Another story tells of a crusader
found by Muslim forces Òplaying diceÓ with a young woman in an orchard near the
city. He was beheaded on the spot
and she was repeatedly raped and killed.
Their heads were launched into the crusader camp the next day. The
stakes were raised. It became
clear to both sides that surrender was not a good option since being a captive
probably meant torture and death.
-The crusaders took the port city of St.
Simeon in mid November and got a few shiploads of supplies from Europe and even
some postal service. But by late
November their supplies were running short and winter was coming. Ships tend not to sail in the winter so
supplies were unlikely. They were in the mountains of Syria/Turkey. It snows there and they were hungry and
cold. About 20% died over the winter. 100,000 crusaders left from
Europe. Only about 30,000 remained
at the siege of Antioch. But these
were the survivors, the fittest of the bunch. (Combat selection in Darwinian terms.) Supplies started to come in at the port
in March.
-Sin was frowned upon, especially theft,
cheating, and Òfornication or
adultery.Ó It is not clear if fornication
includes man-on-man or just man-on-woman.
IÕm guessing both were prevalent in the crusader camp.
-Desertion was also a problem. Even Peter the Hermit, the leader of
the PeopleÕs Crusade who had joined up with the Nobles, deserted in early 1098. He was quickly found and brought back
and forced to swear an oath of loyalty.
The men were angry about being hungry while the horses owned by the
nobles were getting better treatment.
-Meanwhile, Bohemond (one of the Crusade
commanders) has big plans for himself. He blackmails the other crusaders; he
says that he and his contingent will leave unless he is given Antioch after
victory. This proposal is
initially refused. (Who does he
think he is? É Achilles?)
-After many months of siege, word arrives
that a Muslim army of 35,000 men led by the dreaded Kerbogha approaches to
relieve the Muslim inhabitants of Antioch and will arrive soon.
-Bohemond finds a weakness in the
defenses of Antioch. He finds an inhabitant within Antioch willing to betray
his comrades for money and passage to safety. He bribes this man (Firuz) and
sets up plans to get his men into the city. Bohemond then informs the other crusaders about this new
situation. He again blackmails
them, threatening to leave (with his plan) if the other Latin leaders will not
give him Antioch upon their victory. Because a Muslim army is closing in on
them and Bohemond has a good plan, other commanders agree to BohemondÕs
demands. A bit like the story of
the Trojan Horse, the crusaders are secretly let into the city at night and
they infiltrate the defenses (accidentally hacking FiruzÕs brother to death in
the process) and let in more crusaders at a gate. The skirmishes emboldened the Christian population of
Antioch to join in the melee and they opened other gates for the
crusaders. Sadly, it was dark and
the crusaders were crazed. They
killed everybody they could vaguely see, including many of the Christians who
let them in. They killed pretty
much everybody. Very very very
brutal. Blood bath.
-The very next day, June 4, 1098, the
Muslim relief army arrives and besieges Antioch, the crusaders now penned up
inside. This is the ultimate
strange turn of events. The
crusaders were very weary after 9 months of besieging Antioch. They had very few
supplies and the Byzantine army had left them and was not supplying them. They had been feeding themselves mostly
by attacking nearby towns and stealing from farmers. Antioch itself was totally
drained by the time the crusaders got inside and pillaged it. When they finally breach the defenses
of Antioch and storm the city, the very next day they are themselves besieged
inside a totally ruined city covered with thousands of corpses and no food. [Imagine all the nasty stuff they
probably did while beseiging to any water source that may have been remotely
accessible.]
-Meanwhile, in besieged Antioch. The crusaders are desperate. They are literally eating leather and
drinking blood that they drain from their pack animals. Out of nowhere, a lowly
fellow named Peter Bartholomew, a poor commoner in the crusader ranks, has
avision that the Holy Lance that pierced Jesus on the Cross was somewhere in
Antioch. Bartholomew convinces
people to go looking for this lance and start digging around. Somehow, a ÒlanceÓ is found by
Bartholomew in a trench and this is considered an ominous sign of good
fortune. It is probably just a
scrap of metal, but they all rally behind it as the ÒHoly Lance.Ó Bohemond considers it to be total b.s.,
there was supposedly a lance in Constantinople too, but Raymond of Saint-Gilles
(another crusader commander) is very impressed.
-With this newfound religious inspiration
they make a daring escape attack on June 25, 1098. The crusaders, at this point
only numbering about 20k break the Muslim army which numbered perhaps 100k. In
fact, the large number of Muslim forces may have worked against them. They lost their formation and retreated
into themselves and were routed.
Maintaining order and holding formation was absolutely paramount in this
type of combat. The crusaders got
tons of booty from this miraculous victory. Being the pious soldiers that they aspired to be, they
bragged about not raping the women they found, they just killed them.
-aside: Even while all of this is going
on, crusaders could travel in the Muslim lands relatively easily and even be
entertained at times by Muslim hosts.
This is perhaps due to the infighting that was going on in these areas.
[p. 198]
-Crusader trivia: At this point in the
Crusade there were only about 100 horses.
Horses were scarce. Many
died, some were eaten. Many
knights actually rode donkeys and mules.
Also, what horses they did have were not quite the animals that we
generally consider to be a war horse.
Horses of the period tended to be more like ponies. They were very small.
Side story of the lance; After the great success at Antioch,
Peter Bartholomew (the Holy Lance discoverer) becomes the popular spiritual
leader of the crusaders. Apparently Peter was an unstable fellow with delusions
of grandeur. He continued to have
visions and claimed to have been visited by Jesus on several occasions. He made weirder and weirder
pronouncements as time went on. On
April 5, 1099 he was told by Jesus, St. Peter and St. Andrew to get rid of all
of the sinners amongst the crusaders.
He was told to assemble all of the crusader army and have them line up
in 5 rows as if for a military engagement. The first three rows would be the pure ones and the last two
rows would be the sinners. Peter
was ready to execute these sinners, a full 40% of the army. This plan of Peter BartholomewÕs
clearly did not sit well with anyone.
He had gone off the deep end.
An up-and-comer named Arnulf of Chocques publicly challenged Peter and
the validity of the ÒHoly Lance.Ó
Peter was un-phased and volunteered to prove the authenticity of the
Lance. He volunteered to undergo a
trial by fire.
Trial by fire was a popular
way to determine truth at the time.
The theory goes like this- If you can walk through a tunnel of fire and
live, God has endorsed your position, even if you are badly injured. Peter walks through a blazing 13Õ
corridor of olive branches while holding the lance. He is burnt to a crisp and dies several agonizing days
later. But one of the leaders, Raymond
of Saint-Gilles, keeps the lance for himself, just in case.
On to
JerusalemÉ
-After several months of rest in Antioch
and innumerable skirmishes and a few important battlesÉ off to Jerusalem.
-In the meantime, Jerusalem had actually
been conquered, but not by the Byzantine army or the crusaders, it was
conquered by the Egyptian ShiÕa Fatimids in August of 1098. The Fatimids had very good relations
with the crusaders and had met with them in relation to the siege of
Antioch. The Fatimid leader al-Afdal
offered the crusaders peaceful visitation rights to Jerusalem. The crusaders refused this offer. They wanted Jerusalem for themselves. This rather friendly alliance between
the Egyptians (Fatimids) and the Latins (crusaders) was over. The
enemy of my enemy was no longer my friend, they were now my enemy.
-The Fatimids and the Seljuq Turks did
not like one another at all. This
division probably explains the successes of the crusaders more than anything
else. The crusaders came at a time
when the overall Islamic world was too busy fighting internally to effectively
deal with a bunch of lunatics from the West.
-Most knights at this point had died or
gone home. Of the original 7000
knights or so, only 1200 reached the walls of Jerusalem.
-The crusaders realized that they had to
attack Jerusalem as soon as possible, before the Fatimid forces got their
defenses organized. The Siege of
Jerusalem started June 1099 and they breached the walls in July.
-Religious vision #2- Another Peter,
Peter Desiderius, has a prophetic vision.
He claimed that if the crusaders circumambulated
(walked around) the city of Jerusalem in their bare feet the city would fall in
9 days.
-After fasting, the crusaders followed DesideriusÕ
instructions and, oddly enough, while marching along they were not attacked by
the Muslim Jerusalemites.
Why? I can only speculate. [Perhaps they
just looked to strange. Or perhaps
the Fatimids were unsure if the crusaders were going to attack and did not want
to make the first moveÉ?]
-On July 15 1099 they entered the city
and massacred almost the entire population including fellow Christians, Jews,
and of course Muslims.
-Jerusalem was held by Westerners until
Saladin retook it about a century later in 1187. Unlike the crusaders, Saladin took Jerusalem in a fashion
similar to Muhammad taking Mecca, without much violence. He also did not make a policy of
expelling or executing Jews and Christians who happened to be living in
Jerusalem.
This short highlight reel from the
First Crusade is by no means complete.
There were many more battles and atrocities and sieges and religious
visions and weapons and siege towers and hunger and treachery. I put this together so that you all
could get a taste of some of the good bits. Daniel Newsome
Much of this
information was derived fromÉ
Asbridge, Thomas
S. The
First Crusade: A New History.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Page numbers in
the outline refer to this book.
This map
shows the Byzantine Empire about a century later, after the 4th
Crusade.
At the time
of the 1st Crusade Nicaea, Antioch, and Jerusalem
were all
controlled by the Turks (Muslim forces).
This map shows the
layout of the area at the time of the 1st Crusade (1096-1099). I
have underlined a few of the significant places and terms in red. Here
is a list of underlined things on this map: Constantinople, Nicaea (hard to
read), Antioch, Jerusalem, Fatimite, and Seljuk Turks. The crusaders all entered this map from
the upper left-hand side.
Here is a list
of all of the crusades: ListOfCrusades.htm