First Crusade
The First Crusade was launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II at Clermont, France with the objective of regaining control of Jerusalem and the Holy land from the Muslims, and also of giving military assistance to the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuk Turks.
It succeeded in establishing the "Crusader States" of Edessa, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Tripoli in Palestine and Syria.
Origins
The origins of the crusades in general and the First Crusade in particular stem from events earlier in Middle Ages. The breakdown of the Carolingian empire in previous centuries, combined with the relative stability of European borders after the Christianization of the Vikings and Magyars, meant that there was an entire class of warriors who now had very little to do but fight amongst themselves and terrorize the peasant population. The Catholic Church tried to stem this violence with the Peace and Truce of God movements, forbidding violence against certain people at certain times of the year. This was somewhat successful, but trained warriors always needed an outlet for their violence.
One such outlet was the Reconquista in Spain, which at least occupied Spanish knights, as well as some mercenaries from elsewhere in Europe. In 1063, Pope Alexander II had given papal blessing to Spanish Christians in their wars against the Muslims, granting both a papal standard (the vexillum sancti Petri) and an indulgence to those who were killed in battle.
Also popular in the 11th century, for knights as much as non-knights, was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Although pilgrimages were briefly interrupted by the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009, but it was soon rebuilt and pilgrimages were common throughout the rest of the century. Indeed there was a rather large pilgrimage to Jerusalem originating in Germany in 1064.
In 1071 the Byzantine Empire was defeated by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert, and three years later Pope Gregory VII called on the milites Christi to help protect their fellow Christians from the Muslim Seljuks. The milites Christi, the "knights of Christ, also referred to as fideles sancti Petri, the "faithful of St. Peter," would be those knights who agreed to serve the papacy directly, in an expedition to the east, possibly all the way to Jerusalem, led by Gregory himself.
These plans were quickly dropped, as Gregory was already occupied by a bitter conflict with Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over the investiture controversy and other Gregorian reforms. Nevertheless, in the 1080s, Anselm of Lucca wrote for Gregory the Collectio Canonum, a compilation of religious writings justifying holy war, heavily based on the writings of Augustine of Hippo. This compilation was very influential on the thinking of Gregory and his successors towards a war against the Muslims.
Urban II, who was pope from 1088 to 1099, was the next to take up the idea of a Crusade to capture the Holy Land. Aside from the Reconquista in Spain, the borders Islamic territory in Europe were being pushed back elsewhere: the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard had conquered the "toe of Italy," Calabria, in 1057 and was holding what had traditionally been Byzantine territory against the Muslims of Sicily; and Pisa, Genoa and Catalonia were all actively fighting Islamic strongholds in Majorca and Sardinia, freeing the coasts of Italy and Catalonia from Muslim raids.
Because of these ongoing wars, the idea of a war against the Muslims was not implausible to the European nations. Muslims occupied the centre of the Christian universe, Jerusalem, which, along with the surrounding land, was considered one giant relic, the place where Christ had been born, had lived, and had died. It was Urban who took the ideas formed by his predecessors and disseminated them to the general public.
The Council of Clermont
In March of 1095 the Byzantine emperor Alexius I sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza to ask Urban for aid against the Muslim Turks who were encroaching on Christian Byzantine territory in Asia Minor. The emperor's request met with a favourable response from Urban because it was his hope to heal the Great Schism of 40 years prior and re-unite the Church by helping Alexius in his time of need.
At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban gave a speech to a large assembled audience of French nobles and clergy. He summoned the audience to wrest control of Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims. France, he said, was overcrowded and the land of Canaan was overflowing with milk and honey. He spoke of the problem of noble violence and the solution was to turn swords to God's own service. He spoke of rewards both on earth and in heaven. The crowd was stirred to frenzied enthusiasm with cries of "Deus le volt!" ("God wills it!").
It is among the most important speeches in European history. There are many versions of the speech on record, but all were written after Jerusalem had been captured, and it is difficult to know what was actually said and what was created in the aftermath of the successful crusade. However, it is clear that the response to the speech was much larger than expected. For the rest of 1095 and into 1096, Urban spread the message throughout France, and urged his bishops and legates to preach in their own dioceses elsewhere in France, Germany, and Italy as well. Urban tried to forbid certain people (including women, monks, and the sick) from joining the crusade, but found this to be nearly impossible. In the end the majority of those who took up the call were not knights, but peasants who were not wealthy and had little in the way of fighting skills.
The pilgrims
Although it is called the First Crusade, no one saw themselves as a "crusader." The term crusade is an early 12th century term that first appears in Latin over 100 years after the "first" crusade. The first crusaders did not see themselves as crusaders, since the term had not yet been invented, nor as the first, since they did not know there would be more. They saw themselves simply as pilgrims (peregrinatores) on a journey (iter), and were referred to as such in contemporary accounts.
To understand why the crusade was so popular, it is helpful to understand the motivations of those who went. Two medieval roles, holy warrior and pilgrim, were merged into one. Like a holy warrior in a holy war, one would carry a weapon and fight for the Church with all its spiritual benefits, including the privilege of an indulgence or martyrdom if one died in battle. Like a pilgrim on a pilgrimage, one would have the right to hospitality and personal protection of self and property by the Church. The benefits of the indulgence were therefore two-fold, both for fighting as a warrior of the Church and for travelling as a pilgrim. Thus, an indulgence would be granted regardless of whether one lived or died. In addition, there were feudal obligations, as many crusaders went because they were commanded by their lord and had no choice. There were also family obligations, with many people joining the crusade in order to support relatives who had also taken the crusading vow. All of these motivated different people for different reasons and contributed to the popularity of the crusade.
Spiritual versus earthly rewards
Crusaders were promised by Urban of not only spiritual but also material benefit, but current research suggests spiritual rather than material gain was the primary aim of most crusaders. Older scholarship stated that the bulk of the participants were likely younger sons of nobles who were dispossessed of land and influence by the practise of primogeniture, as well as poorer knights who were looking for a new life in the wealthy east. More recent research by Jonathan Riley-Smith instead shows that the crusade was an immensely expensive undertaking, affordable only to those knights who were already fairly wealthy, such as Hugh and Robert, who were relatives of the French and English royal families, and Raymond, who ruled much of southern France. Even then, these wealthy knights had to sell much of their land to relatives or the church before they could afford to participate. Their relatives, too, often had to impoverish themselves in order to raise money for the crusade. As Riley-Smith says, "there is really no evidence to support the proposition that the crusade was an opportunity for spare sons to make themselves scarce in order to relieve their families of burdens."
As an example of spirtual over earthly motivation, Godfrey and Baldwin settled previous quarrels with the church by bequeathing their land to local clergy. The charters denoting these transactions were written by clergymen, not the knights themselves, and seem to idealize the knights as pious men seeking only to fulfill a vow of pilgrimage.
Further, poorer knights (minores, as opposed to the greater knights, the principes) could go on crusade only if they expected to survive off of almsgiving, or if they could enter the service of a wealthier knight, as was the case with Tancred, who agreed to serve his uncle Bohemund. Later crusades would be organized by wealthy kings and emperors, or would be supported by special crusade taxes.
Accompanying the knights were many poor men (pauperes) who could afford basic clothing and perhaps an old weapon. Peter the Hermit, who joined the Princes' Crusade at Constantinople, was considered responsible for their well-being, and they were able to organize themselves into small groups, perhaps akin to military companies, often led by an impoverished knight. One of the largest of these groups, consisting of the survivors of the People's Crusade, named itself the "Tafurs."
The "People's Crusade"
The People's Crusade is also known as the Popular Crusade, Peasants' Crusade, or the Paupers' Crusade.
Urban planned the departure of the crusade for August 15, 1096, but months before this a number of "armies" set out early. The peasant population had been afflicted by drought, famine, and plague for many years before 1096, and some of them seem to have envisioned the crusade as an escape from these hardships. Coincidentally, there were also a number of meteorological occurrences beginning in 1095 that seemed to be a divine blessing for the movement – a meteor shower, aurorae, a lunar eclipse, and a comet, among other events. An outbreak of ergotism, which usually led to mass pilgrimages anyway, had also occurred just before the Council of Clermont. Millenarianism, the belief that the end of the world was imminent, popular in the early 11th century, experienced a resurgence in popularity. The response was beyond expectations: while Urban might have expected a few thousand knights, he ended up with a migration numbering up to 100,000 mostly unskilled fighters including women and children.
In the midst of this the charismatic monk Peter the Hermit of Amiens vigorously preached the crusade throughout northern France. He claimed to have been appointed to preach by Christ himself (and supposedly had a divine letter to prove it), and it is likely that some of his followers thought he, not Urban, was the true originator of the crusading idea. It is often believed that Peter's army was a band of illiterate, incompetent peasants who had no idea where they were going, and who believed that every city of any size they encountered on their way was Jerusalem itself. While the majority were unskilled in fighting, there were some well-trained minor knights leading them, such as the future chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, and Walter the Penniless, who, as his name suggests, was an impoverished knight with no lord and no vassals, but was nonetheless experienced in warfare.
Their march was not without difficulty, but they did know exactly where they were going; centuries of pilgrimages ensured that almost everyone knew just how far away Jerusalem was. On their way down the Danube, Peter's followers looted Hungarian territory and were attacked by the Hungarians, the Slavs, and even a Byzantine army near Nis. Many were killed but they arrived largely intact at Constantinople in August. Alexius, not knowing what else to do with such an unusual army, quickly ferried them across the Bosporus. It is debated whether he sent them away without Byzantine guides knowing full well that they would be slaughtered by the Turks, or whether they insisted on continuing into Asia despite his warnings.
In Constantinople Peter's followers had joined with separate crusades of Germans and Italians, but after crossing into Asia Minor they began to quarrel and the three armies went their separate ways. Most of the People's Crusade was massacred upon entering Seljuk territory. Peter survived, however, and would later join the main Crusader army. Another army of Bohemians and Saxons did not make it past Hungary before splitting up.
The "German Crusade"
The First Crusade ignited a long tradition of organized violence against Jews in European culture. While anti-Semitism had always existed in Europe, the First Crusade marks the first mass organized violence against Jewish communities. Setting off in the early summer of 1096, a German army of around 10,000 soldiers led by Gottschalk, Volkmar, and Emich of Leiningen, proceeding northward in the opposite direction of Jerusalem through the Rhine valley, began what is known as "the first Holocaust", or pogrom.
The preaching of the crusade inspired further anti-Semitism. The Christian conquest of Jerusalem and the establishment of a Christian emperor there would supposedly instigate the End Times, during which the Jews were supposed to convert to Christianity. In parts of France and Germany, Jews were perceived as just as much of an enemy as Muslims: they were thought to be responsible for the crucifixion, and they were more immediately visible than the far-away Muslims. Many people wondered why they should travel thousands of miles to fight non-believers when there were already non-believers closer to home.
The crusaders moved north through the Rhine valley into well known Jewish communities such as Cologne, and then southward. Jewish communities were given the option of converting to Christianity or be slaughtered. Most would not convert and as news of the mass killings spread many Jewish communities commited mass suicides in horrific scenes. Thousands of Jews were massacred, despite attempts by local clergy and secular authorities to shelter them. The massacres were justified by the claim that Urban's speech at Clermont promised the crusaders would not be punished by God for killing non-Christians of any sort, not just Muslims. The crusaders were also motivated by money and loot to help finance their journey. It is worth noting that the killing of Jews was never intended by the Papacy, and was condemned and prevented, with various success, in future Crusades.
The "Princes' Crusade"
The Princes' Crusade is also known as the Barons' Crusade.
The First Crusade did not end with the disaster of the People's Crusade. The Princes' Crusade set out later in 1096 in a more orderly manner, led by various nobles with bands of knights from different regions of Europe. The three most significant of these were the papal legate Adhemar of Le Puy, Raymond IV of Toulouse, who represented the knights of southern France, and Bohemund of Taranto, representing the Normans of southern Italy. Other contingents were Lorrainers under the brothers Godfrey of Bouillon, Eustace and Baldwin of Boulogne; Flemings under Count Robert II of Flanders; northern French under Robert of Normandy (older brother of King William II of England), Stephen of Blois, and Hugh of Vermandois (younger brother of King Philip I of France, who was forbidden from participating as he was under excommunication); and Bohemund's nephew Tancred of Hauteville.
The march to Jerusalem
Leaving Europe around the appointed time in August, the various armies took different paths to Constantinople and gathered outside its city walls in December of 1096, arriving two months after the annihilation of the People's Crusade by the Turks. They arrived with little food and expected provisions and help from Alexius I. Alexius was understandably suspicious after his experiences with the People's Crusade, and also because the knights included his old Norman enemy Bohemund. In return for food, Alexius I requested the leaders to swear fealty to him and promise to return to the Byzantine Empire any land recovered from the Turks. Without food or provisions they eventually had no choice but to take the oath, though not until all sides had agreed to various compromises, and only after warfare had almost broken out in the city.
Alexius agreed to send out a Byzantine army to accompany the crusaders through Asia Minor. Their first objective was Nicaea, an old Byzantine city, but now the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rüm under Kilij Arslan I. The city was subjected to a lengthy siege, which was somewhat ineffectual as the crusaders could not blockade the lake on which the city was situated, and from which it could be provisioned. Alexius, fearing the crusaders would sack the city and destroy the wealth it would bring the Byzantine empire, secretly negotiated the surrender of the city without the crusaders knowledge; the crusaders awoke on the morning of June 19, 1097 to see Byzantine standards flying from the walls. To add insult to treachery, the crusaders were not allowed to enter the city except in small escorted bands, so deeply did Alexius distrust them. This caused a further rift between the Byzantines and the crusaders. The crusaders now began the journey to Jerusalem. One crusader wrote home, stating he believed it would take 5 weeks. In fact, the journey would take 2 years.
The crusaders, still accompanied by some Byzantine troops, marched on towards Dorylaeum, where Bohemund was surrounded by Kilij Arslan. On July 1 Godfrey broke through the Turkish lines, but he too was surrounded, and the two crusader armies were saved only by the timely appearance of the troops led by the legate Adhemar, who defeated the Turks and looted their camp. Kilij Arslan withdrew and the crusaders marched almost unopposed through Asia Minor towards Antioch, except for a battle in September in which they again defeated the Turks.
The march through Asia was unpleasant. It was the middle of summer and the crusaders had very little food and water; many men died, as did many horses, without which a knight was no more than an ordinary foot-soldier. Christians, in Asia as in Europe, sometimes gave them gifts of food and money, but more often the crusaders looted and pillaged whenever the opportunity presented itself. Individual leaders continued to dispute the overall leadership, although none of them were powerful enough to take command; still, Raymond and Adhemar were generally recognized as the leaders. After passing through the Cilician Gates, Baldwin of Boulogne set off on his own towards the Armenian lands around the Euphrates. In Edessa early in 1098, he was adopted as heir by King Thoros, a Greek Orthodox ruler who was disliked by his Armenian subjects. Thoros was soon assassinated and Baldwin became the new ruler, thus creating the County of Edessa, the first of the Crusader states.
Siege of Antioch
The Crusader army, meanwhile, marched on to Antioch, which lay about half way between Constantinople and Jerusalem. They arrived in October, 1097 and set siege which lasted almost 8 months. Antioch was such a large city the crusaders did not have enough troops to fully surround it and thus it was able to stay partially supplied.
As the seige dragged on, Tatizius, the general in command of the Byzantine troops who were still with the crusaders, suddenly left in February of 1098. Tatizius later claimed that Bohemund had told him the other crusaders were plotting to kill him. Just after Tatizius left, Bohemund announced to the other crusaders he had enough treachery from the Byzantines and he would take his knights home unless he was allowed to keep Antioch when it was captured. Knowing fully that Bohemund had designs on taking the city for himself, the crusaders did not give in to his blackmail.
The seige continued, and in May 1098 a Muslim army from Mosul under the command of Kerbogha approached Antioch to relieve the seige. The crusaders were now caught between the walls of the city and the approaching army and needed to get into the city quickly for protection. Bohemond secretly established contact with a former Christian guard in the city, named Firuz, who had a grudge with his Muslim lord, and bribed him to open the gates. He then approached the other crusaders and offered to let them in, through Firuz, if they would agree to let him have the city. Faced with a desperate situation they had no choice and gave in to his demands.
In June 1098 the Crusaders entered the city and killed most of the inhabitants. Their situation was still difficult; after eight months of seige the city was devoid of food, and only a few days later the Muslims arrived laying seige to the former besiegers. As they bagan to starve they hoped the Byzantines would rescue them. However, just before they had broken the seige some crusaders had fled the field, including Stephen of Blois. On the way back to Constantinople, Stephen met Alexius, who was travelling east to assist with the original siege; Stephen convinced the emperor that there was no hope and Alexius thus returned home.
At this point a minor monk by the name of Peter Bartholomew claimed he had a divine vision that the Holy Lance was inside the city. He told Raymond where to dig to find it, and when Raymond came up empty, Peter went into the pit, reached down, and produced a spear point. Many did not believe Peter, including Bohemund, but Raymond did, and took it as a divine sign that they would survive and thus prepared for a final fight rather than surrender. On June 28, 1098, the crusaders emerged from the city gate. Although the Muslims could have attacked them in smaller groups as they emerged, they decided to wait and face them in a pitched battle. Once outside the city walls, however, the crusaders were able to organize themselves and were able to rout the Muslims. According to legend, an army of Christian saints, including the martyrs who had been killed at Nicaea, Dorylaeum, and elsewhere, helped defeat the Turks outside the city. In fact, the Muslim leaders were fragmented by infighting and were unable to organize an effective combined defense.
Bohemund argued that Alexius had deserted the crusade and thus invalidated all of their oaths to him. Bohemund asserted his claim to Antioch, but not everyone agreed, and the crusade was delayed for the rest of the year while the nobles argued amongst themselves. It is a common historiographical assumption that the Franks of northern France, the Provencals of southern France, and the Normans of southern Italy considered themselves separate "nations" and that each wanted to increase its status. This may have had something to do with the disputes, but personal ambition is more likely to blame. Meanwhile a plague (perhaps typhus) broke out, killing many, including the legate Adhemar. There were now even fewer horses than before, and Muslims peasants refused to give them food. The minor knights and soldiers became restless and threatened to continue to Jerusalem without their squabbling leaders. Finally, at the beginning of 1099 the march was renewed, leaving Bohemund behind as the first Prince of Antioch.
Siege of Jerusalem
Main article: Siege of Jerusalem
Proceeding down the coast of the Mediterranean, the crusaders encountered little resistance, as local rulers preferred to make peace with them and give them supplies rather than fight. On May 7 the crusaders reached Jerusalem, which had been recaptured from the Seljuks by the Fatimids of Egypt only a few years before. Many Crusaders cried on seeing the city they had journeyed so long to reach.
As with Antioch the crusaders put the city to a lengthy siege, in which the crusaders themselves probably suffered more than the citizens of the city, due to the lack of food and water around Jerusalem. Of the estimated 7,000 knights who took part in the Princes's Crusade, only about 1,500 remained. Faced with a seemingly impossible task, their spirits were raised when a priest by the name of Peter Desiderius claimed to have a divine vision instructing them to fast and then march in a barefoot procession around the city walls, after which the city would fall in nine days, following the Biblical example of Joshua at the siege of Jericho. On July 8, 1099 they made the barefoot walk. Meanwhile siege engines were constructed and seven days later on July 15, the crusaders were able to break the seige and enter the city. Almost every inhabitant of Jerusalem was killed. Muslims, Jews, and even eastern Christians were all massacred. Many Muslims sought shelter in Solomon's Temple (known today as Al-Aqsa Mosque), where, according to an exaggerated account in the anonymous chronicle Gesta Francorum, "...the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles..." Tancred claimed the Temple quarter for himself and offered protection to some of the Muslims there, but he could not prevent their deaths at the hands of his fellow crusaders.
In the days following the massacre, Godfrey of Bouillon was made Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri (Protector of the Holy Sepulchre), refusing to be named king in the city where Christ had died. In the last action of the crusade, he led an army which defeated an invading Fatimid army at Ascalon. Godfrey died in July, 1100, and was succeeded by his brother, Baldwin of Edessa, who took the title of "King of Jerusalem". Baldwin and his successors, Baldwin II (d. 1131), and Fulk (d. 1143), extended the boundaries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem through successful warfare.
The "Crusade of 1101" and the establishment of the kingdom
Having captured Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the crusading vow was now fulfilled. However, there were many who had gone home before reaching Jerusalem, and many who had never left Europe at all. When the success of the crusade became known, these people were mocked and scorned by their families and threatened with excommunication by the clergy. There were also many crusaders who had remained with the crusade all the way to Jerusalem also went home; according to Fulcher of Chartres there were only a few hundred knights left in the newfound kingdom in 1100. In 1101 another crusade set out, including Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois, both of whom had returned home before reaching Jerusalem. This crusade was mostly annihilated in Asia Minor by the Seljuks (both Stephen and Hugh were killed), but the survivors helped reinforce the kingdom when they arrived in Jerusalem. In the following years assistance was also provided by Italian merchants who established themselves in the Syrian ports, and from the religious and military orders of the Knights Templars and the Knights of St. John which were created during Baldwin I's reign.
The First Crusade marks the emergence of a self-confident, aggressive and expansionist Latin society, as newly-achieved stability in the West left a warrior aristocracy in search of new conquests and patrimony. The new prosperity of major towns also meant that money was available to equip expeditions. The seaborne towns, in particular Venice and Genoa, were interested in extending trade. The Pope saw the Crusades as a way to assert Catholic influence as a unifying force, with war as a religious mission. This was a new attitude to religion: it brought religious discipline, previously applicable to monks, to soldiery—-the new concept of a religious warrior and the chivalric ethos.
Selected sources
Primary sources
- Albert of Aix, Historia Hierosolymitana
- Anna Comnena, The Alexiad
- Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana
- Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (anonymous)
- Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere
Secondary sources
- Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Exchange, 950-1350. Princeton University Press, 1993
- P.M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517. Longman, 1986.
- Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades. Trans. by John Gillingham. Oxford University Press, 1972 (orig. pub. 1965).
- Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
- Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of the Crusades. Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Steven Runciman, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131, Cambridge University Press, 1951.
- Kenneth Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades. Madison, 1969-1989 (available online).