The Crusades: Four Hundred Years of War (Part One)
The Crusades are perhaps the defining idea of medieval Europe. Over more than four centuries they redefined its history, set it on a new course with a common, foreign enemy against whom the Christian countries could find common cause.
They changed Europe forever. Countries rose and fell in the shadow of these religious wars, Christian and Islamic alike. They bonded the Christian countries together but they also destroyed much of the old world of both the Near East and Europe, fanaticism and opportunism o both sides uniting to change the world into something new.
Those who took the cross and journeyed eastwards did so for many reasons. Some were devout, some bellicose, some found their hand forced against their will. The flower of chivalric Europe and the very dregs of society made the pilgrimage together to find something new for themselves in a world newly invented, far from home.
But the story of the Crusades is not the story of their origin. It is fair to say that, as an idea, they gained a momentum far beyond the vision of those who first came up with the concept. Along the way atrocities were committed in their name, genocides in the name of religion, and the greatest empire in European history was swept aside and lost.
The outflow of people from the countries of western Europe led to great changes back home, and those who returned were changed by the world they had found, in turn changing their homes. A new Europe arose from the old and it was the Crusades, as much as anything, which incited this change from the old ways to the new.
Depending on how you count them there were at least six, and perhaps as many as ten crusades. We can be sure when they started, almost to the day: it was in November 1095 that the first musterings were ordered, legitimized by new Papal doctrine allied to Christian necessity in the face of Islamic successes in the Near East and Anatolia.
For centuries from this point, much of the wealth and power of Europe was devoted to this undertaking, an outpouring which changed the social order. Commoners could become barons, younger sons could inherit ancestral estates. Everything, at home and abroad, was up for grabs.
Not bad for a tale which starts with a Pope with a bright idea and a couple of kings in search of good causes. But the real problems started not at the beginning of the First Crusade, but at the end. Nobody really expected the outcome, and nobody was really prepared for what came next.
Header Image: Combat between mounted Christian Knights and the Islamic Seljuks in the Second Crusade. Source: Unknown Author / Public Domain.
