First Crusade

10 Key excerpts on "First Crusade"

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  Neglected Heroes

  Leadership and War in the Early Medieval Period

  • Terry L. Gore(Author)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Six The First Crusade: The Road to Jerusalem and the Quest for Salvation, a .d . 1097-1099 In our own time, God has instituted a holy manner of warfare ... a new way of winning salvation. Gilbert of Nogent In the twenty-nine-year period between 1066 and 1095, western Europe under- went serious expansionism not only by the Normans but also by the noble houses of France, Germany, and Spain. In the midst of the feudal wars that raged through- out Christendom, the power of the Church was challenged by the powerful succes- sors to Charlemagne—the holy Roman emperors—seeking to expand both their secular as well as spiritual influence. Feudal rulers increasingly took sides in the power struggles between emperor and pope. Caught in the middle of this confusing contest for loyalties was the warrior. He had to choose whether to fight for his leader or warlord, as had been the soldier’s decision for thousands of years, or to ignore the secular leadership and follow the spiritual head of the Church. Pope Urban II’s call for a crusade in 1095 not only was a blessing to the warrior, solving the dilemma of decision; it also convinced the warriors who flocked to the banners that they were under, as Zoe Oldenbourg wrote, “divine protection, and this gave [the crusade] a mystical, even magical significance.”1 The call for a crusade not only benefited the political stability of western Eu- rope; it also tapped into the psyche of the Medieval warrior and built upon the mystique of the Germanic sense of honor, duty, and the goodness of war. The warriors in 1066 had fought for honor, glory, and material rewards due the victor. The soldiers of the First Crusade would fight for the salvation of their souls as well. There are a number of contemporary and near-contemporary sources for the First Crusade, mostly dealing with the Latin perspective, including the Gesta Francorum, augmented by the writings of Albert of Aix, Ekkehard of Aura, William of

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  The Crusades

  A Beginner's Guide

  • Andrew Jotischky(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  ‌ 1 ‌ What were the Crusades? Toward the end of the first decade of the twelfth century, a monk from northern France sat down to write an account of the First Crusade, which had captured Jerusalem from the Seljuq Turks in 1099. He was looking back over the events of ten years before, in which a force of perhaps 60,000 mostly French, Flemish, Normans, Germans and Italians, including fighting men and unarmed pilgrims, men and women, had travelled from western Europe across the Balkans and modern-day Turkey into Syria, and south to Jerusalem. Only a fraction of the original force survived the three-year odyssey, but the remnants, battered by the climate, the hazards of travel and shortages of food and fodder for their horses, seized the city of Jerusalem amid scenes of slaughter in July 1099. The monk, Robert of Rheims, struggled to find a similar phenomenon with which to compare the First Crusade. In the end, he decided that it was, simply, the most important event in human history since the birth of Jesus Christ. There are very few historical phenomena that are as susceptible to re-invention as the Crusades. The term has been used and re-used so many times since its original coining that it has come to have a much wider application than originally intended. For much of the twentieth century, in the Western world, ‘crusade’ was used metaphorically in public discourse and invariably in contexts where some moral virtue was to be associated in the reader’s mind with the act of crusading. One of the most famous is Crusade in Europe, the title used by General Dwight D. Eisenhower for his account of the D-Day invasion in 1944. But ‘crusade’ has also been used to describe campaigns for the public good in non-military spheres: we have become used to reading in newspapers about crusades against crime, against drugs, even litter

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  Godfrey of Bouillon

  Duke of Lower Lotharingia, Ruler of Latin Jerusalem, c.1060-1100

  • Simon John(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  3  The coming of the First Crusade, 1095–1096

  Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade

  The origins of the First Crusade have been much discussed in modern scholarship. It is therefore necessary only to sketch a few details here. In March 1095, at the council of Piacenza, an embassy from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos (1081–1118) reached Pope Urban II and reported on the situation in the Near East.1 These messengers informed those present at Piacenza that the powers of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt were divided and weakened. They beseeched the pope to send military assistance there to help recover some of the Byzantine territory which had been lost in the late eleventh century.2 The Byzantine assessment of the Near East was accurate. In the mid-1090s, the Shi’ites of Fatimid Egypt were firmly divided from the predominantly Sunni powers of Palestine, which in theory was part of the Abbasid Caliphate centred upon Baghdad. Moreover, the political map of Palestine itself was extremely fragmented. Asia Minor had slipped out of Baghdad’s ambit into the hands of local rulers.3

  The Byzantine appeal seems to have prompted Urban to instigate a plan he had already been formulating. In August 1095, he crossed the Alps and embarked on a year-long tour of southern and central France (as a result of a dispute with King Philip I of France (1059–1108), he only travelled as far north as Le Mans). He was the first reigning pope to visit France for half a century. During his time there, he visited a number of towns, consecrated churches, and held several reforming councils. He also passed legislation aimed at extending the Peace of God to the areas he visited.4 On the penultimate day of the council he held at Clermont (18–28 November 1095), Urban called for an armed expedition to go to the East to free the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the other holy places from Muslim hands, and bring aid to the Christians who lived there. The pope apparently framed the enterprise as a pilgrimage to the Holy City, and instructed participants to distinguish themselves by adopting the sign of the cross. He told participants to depart on the feast of the Assumption (15 August) 1096, so that their journey east would coincide with the gathering of the harvest at the end of summer.5

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  The Crusades: A History

  • Jonathan Riley-Smith(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  2 The birth of the crusading movement: The preaching of the First Crusade The casus belli In the first week of March 1095 an embassy sent by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I made an appearance at a church council at Piacenza in northern Italy, presided over by Pope Urban II. It asked for help against the Turks, whose advance across Asia Minor had brought them within striking distance of Constantinople (Istanbul). This appeal set off the chain of events that led to the First Crusade. The Christians had lost North Africa, Palestine, Syria and most of Spain to the Muslims three and a half centuries before. The frontier between Christendom and Islam had then stabilized until the Byzantine (or Greek) emperors, ruling from Constantinople what remained of the eastern Roman empire, went on to the offensive in the second half of the tenth century. The ancient cities of Tarsus and Antioch (Antakya) had been retaken and the Byzantine frontier had advanced into northern Syria. A violent shock had been felt throughout the Islamic world: 600 volunteers had arrived in Mosul from Khorasan, 1,200 miles away, in 963; they were followed three years later by a further 20,000 men. The Christian victories had coincided with internal developments that were to transform the western Islamic scene. The authority of the Sunni ‘Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad had atrophied and they themselves had fallen under the control of Shi‘ite princes, whom the Sunnis regarded as heretics. In 969 Egypt had been occupied almost without opposition by another Shi‘ite dynasty, the Fatimids, and a rival caliphate had been established. The Fatimids had struggled to wrest Palestine and Syria from the ‘Abbasids, but in the 1060s and 1070s they had to give way to Turks who, taking advantage of 17 years of internal disorder in Egypt, drove them out of most of their Syrian possessions and left them with only a shaky hold on parts of Palestine.

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  Fighting for the Cross

  • Jaroslav Pelikan(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  These letters show clearly that he was under a lot of pressure, trying to shape the crusade that was evolving, above all to address basic questions about who should take part in and preside over it. Pilgrimage or war? The First Crusade's volatile character Urban Us problem wasn't just coping with the extraordinary scale of the response; almost certainly he himself wasn't sure of what he had created. His preaching was like a chemistry experiment that created an inherently unstable compound. He had called for an armed pilgrimage, and it's certain that most of those who went on the First Crusade saw themselves first and foremost as pilgrims to Jerusalem. They'd made vows to worship at Jerusalem's sacred shrines, and they were carrying out one of Christianity's most ancient and popular devotional practices, earning forgiveness of sins through the public demonstration of sorrow, or penitence. But the military task facing these pilgrims was novel and extraordinary. The 'cross-bearers' (crucesignati) were marching to Palestine through the territory of the Byzantine empire, whose European lands extended from the Adriatic Sea to Constantinople. It's possible that the arrival of envoys sent by Constantinople's ruler Alexios I, appealing for western military help, triggered in Urban's mind the idea of launching the expedition. The crusaders could certainly rely on Alexios for friendly support and guidance. But most of the territory that Alexios's predecessors had ruled for centuries in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and northern Syria had recently been overrun by the Seljuq Turks, so hard fighting could be expected along the entire route leading from Constantinople to Jerusalem. Above all, the imposing Syrian fortress-city of Antioch would have to be recaptured from the Turks. CRUSADING IN THE EAST, 1095-1291 3 1 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the spiritual focus for all crusaders and for many their military objective as well.

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  The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives

  • Carole Hillenbrand(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER TWO

  The First Crusade and the Muslims’ Initial Reactions to the Coming of the Franks

  When the Franks – may God frustrate them – extended their control over what they had conquered of the lands of Islam and it turned out well for them that the troops and the kings of Islam were preoccupied with fighting each other, at that time opinions were divided among the Muslims, desires differed and wealth was squandered.1 (Ibn al-Athir)

  Introduction

  THIS CHAPTER examines the state of the Muslim Near East in the 1090s on the eve of the First Crusade (colour plate 11 ). It then looks at what the Islamic sources say about the main sweep of events which brought the Crusaders to the walls of Jerusalem and at the subsequent establishment of Crusader states in the Levant. The rest of the chapter considers the political effects of the First Crusade and the emotional impact of the Frankish invasion. This was very great indeed, for the First Crusade hit the Muslim world like a bolt from the blue. What is more, the timing of this devastating attack from such an unexpected quarter could not have been more auspicious for the Europeans.

  For the record, the Islamic sources call the European Christians the ‘Franks’ (al-ifranj). The equivalent Arabic term for ‘Crusaders’ (al-salibiyyun – those who take up arms in the service of the Cross) – is a later usage which dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Interestingly enough, the etymology of both terms, Crusaders (from the Latin crux (cross)) and salibiyyun (from the Arabic salib (cross)), stresses the centrality of the symbolism of the Cross underlying the European military campaigns which came to be known as the Crusades (in modern Arabic called ‘the Crusading wars’ (al-hurub al-salibiyya)). Indeed for the western European Christians, a crusade was believed to be ‘Christ’s own enterprise, legitimised by his own personal mandate’.2

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  Franks and Saracens

  Reality and Fantasy in the Crusades

  • Avner Falk(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chroniques de Chastellain by the Burgundian historian Georges Chastellain (died 1475).

  There are many theories on the religious, political, economic, social, and other causes of the First Crusade. Some scholars still think that it originated in the events that happened at the beginning of the eleventh century under the “mad” Fatimid caliph Abu-Ali al- Mansur al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (985-1021). This caliph ascended the throne in 996, at age eleven. He reportedly ordered all the dogs in his realm killed because he could not stand their barking. He began to persecute the Christians, whom the Arabs called “the people of the book”, along with the Jews, in his lands, and in 1009 he destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was under his rule. This “mad” caliph reportedly forced the Jews and the Christians to wear black hats, and then he forced the Christians to wear a wooden cross some 20 by 20 inches in size, and the Jews to wear a wooden calf, to remind them of their sin of the Golden Calf as depicted in their Bible (Exodus, 32:4). However, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was repaired by al-Hakim’s successor, with the help of the Byzantines, and most modern scholars discount his “crimes” against the Christians as a real original cause of the Crusades.

  The migrations of Muslim tribes from Central Asia into west Asia and Europe, especially the Seljuk Turkish migrations, in the second half of the eleventh century, and their conquests of eastern Anatolia, posed a big threat to the Byzantine Empire, the “Roman Empire of the East” and the major Christian power in the “Orient” (meaning the Middle East), whose capital was Constantinople. As we have seen, the Seljuk Turks were named after their mythical or eponymous leader, Seljuk or Selguk, son of Dukak Timuryaligh, an eminent member of a major tribe of Oghuz Turks. The Seljuks split off from the bulk of the Tokuz-Oghuz group, a confederacy of clans between the Aral and Caspian Seas, and set up camp on the right bank of the lower Syr Darya River, in the direction of Jend, near Kyzylorda in present day Kazakhstan, where they were converted to Islam.

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  The Crusades

  Islamic Perspectives

  • Carole Hillenbrand(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  Thus there is much similarity between many of the Muslim accounts of the First Crusade which date from different periods and many of them relate the events with-out comment or interpretation. The excerpts given here have been chosen because they say something of special interest which makes them stand out from the usual narratives. The Islamic chroniclers do not seem to link the arrival of the western Europeans with the distant event of al-Hakim’s destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre nor with the appeals by Byzantium to Europe for help against the Turkish threat on its eastern borders. Nor do the Muslim THE CRUSADES: ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVES 50 Figure 2.16 Mosque of al-Hakim, perspectival view, 380–403/990–1013, Cairo, Egypt MUSLIMS’ REACTIONS TO THE First Crusade 51 sources present sophisticated analyses of historical events – their horizons are narrowly Islamic – but some of them at least drop revealing hints. The earliest surviving sources – Ibn al-Qalanisi and al-Æ Azimi – both write about the coming of the First Crusade, but Ibn al-Qalanisi does not say why the Franks have come. Instead, he just launches straight into the story. 50 Moreover, al-Æ Azimi, as already noted, is the only writer to mention as an immediate casus belli that Christian pilgrims were prevented from visiting Jerusalem in the year 486/1093–4 and he links this event with the Crusaders coming to the Levant. Al-Æ Azimi’s chronicle has survived in very fragmentary form: his work often looks like draft notes for (or from) a longer history. Despite the brevity of his account, he implies that there is a pattern of Crusader movement southwards which extends from Spain through North Africa to the Levant. He sees the link between the fall of Toledo to the Christians of Muslim Spain in 461/1068 , 51 the taking of al-Mahdiyya in North Africa by the Normans of Sicily in 479/1086 , 52 and the coming of the Crusaders to the Levant.

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  Encountering Islam on the First Crusade

  • Nicholas Morton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  108 106 As John France commented, ‘the papacy of the eleventh century had a wide view of the world a remarkable grasp of history which differentiated its outlook sharply from that of the generality of the European elites’. J. France, ‘Byzantium in western chronicles before the First Crusade’, Knighthoods of Christ: Essays on the history of the Crusades and the Knights Templar presented to Malcolm Barber (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 8. 107 ‘Fragmentum historiae Andegavensis’, pp. 233–238. 108 Translation from ‘Urban to the faithful in Flanders, December 1095’ in: Chronicles of the First Crusade, pp. 24–25; Kb, p. 136; Papsturkunden in Spanien, pp. 287–288; ‘Papsturkunden in Florenz’, p. 313. Urban II 95 The following year in October 1096, Count Robert II of Flanders, when on the point of setting out for the east, made the following declaration in a document settling local affairs in Flanders: I, therefore, by the inspiration of divine admonition, promulgated by the authority of the apostolic seat, travelling to Jerusalem for the liberation of the church of God, which is continually oppressed by wild peoples . . . have determined on this decree. 109 This charter resonates with the language of Urban’s letter: referencing the same goals; speaking of the campaign as a ‘liberation’ and describ- ing the savagery of the campaign’s enemy. 110 Consequently, in Robert’s case at least, Urban’s ambitions and objectives had been received, inter- nalised, and translated into action with little blurring. As Riley-Smith has shown, other charters mirrored Urban’s language, using terms that reflect the penitential nature of this journey and its status as a pilgrimage. 111 In many cases, the participants seem to have understood and retained the main messages communicated through Urban’s propaganda. Even so, whilst the charters reference the pope’s major objectives and language, there is a change in emphasis.

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  The Crusades

  An Encyclopedia [4 volumes]

  • Alan V. Murray(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Timothy Reuter (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 109–122. RileySmith, Jonathan, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: Athlone, 1986). Arabic Sources Although many Arabic sources dating from the period of the crusades have survived to the modern day, there are a number of important texts that have been lost over time. Of those that have survived, a considerable number have been edited and published, but many are still extant only in manuscript form. Translations of the Arabic sources are even fewer, making it difficult for scholars who do not read Arabic to make effective use of this material. In addition, as with any primary source, one must always attempt to understand the motivations of the authors of the Arabic sources and how these might affect their writing. A further complication (and here one must acknowledge that the applicability of the term crusade to the Christian reconquest of Spain is debatable) is the fact that the Christian concept of crusade was one that was alien to medieval Muslims, and in many cases the Europeans invading Muslim territory were viewed as being merely one among many groups of enemies. Few Muslims truly understood the motives of the Christians invading their territories, and most often they ascribed their enemies' actions to greed for booty. As a result, few Muslim works give detailed consideration to the crusading phenomenon. Accounts of the actions of the Christian enemy often form part of larger narratives of events, mentioned only in an occasional fashion and sometimes lacking details that might be considered important by modern scholars. Genres A number of genres of Arabic writing existed during the crusading period. Most of the authors of the texts that make up these genres were Muslims (and it is on their works in particular that this entry focuses); however, it is important to note that there are also Arabic works written by Christian and Jewish writers, some of which are mentioned below.

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