Chapter 60. Holy War: The Crusades from Clermont to the Sack of Constantinople

The crusade was born where the two lines of the previous chapters met. A Byzantine emperor asked the West for help against the Seljuks, and a reforming papacy had recently claimed the right to decide which wars were holy. The movement that followed lasted two centuries. It created Latin states in Syria and Palestine and new military-religious orders. It ended its first great phase not at Jerusalem but in the sack of Christian Constantinople in 1204. The library holds several readings of these events. The collective French volume Cruciadele (Balard, Delort, Kaplan and others) gives a demographic and social explanation. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Jerusalem tells the story from the city’s point of view. Cătălin Negru’s history of the apocalypse stresses popular eschatology. Michael Kerrigan and Helen Ellerbe give critical “dark history” accounts. This chapter sets them side by side.

The appeal and the sermon

Negru gives the immediate cause: “The immediate cause of the First Crusade was the call for help of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I to Pope Urban II at the Council of Piacenza in 1095. The answer was beyond expectations: instead of a couple thousand organized knights, Jerusalem became the destination of a veritable migration of over 40,000 crusaders” [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, Part II]. Negru stresses that people understood the expedition in very different ways. “For some, including the pope, the crusade was a purely experimental military expedition, a gamble that could bring riches and political power. For others, gullible or religious fanatics, the crusade had a cosmic dimension”, tied to the end-time gathering of nations [#62383, Part II].

Montefiore credits the crusade to one man: “The crusade had been the idea of a single man. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a crowd of nobles and common people at Clermont, to demand the conquest of Jerusalem and the liberation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” In his account Urban saw his life’s mission as restoring “the power and reputation of the Catholic Church”: “He invented a new theory of holy war that would revive Christianity and the papacy, promising the remission of sins in exchange for the purifying liquidation of the infidels. It was an absolution without precedent, which gave birth to a Christian version of the Muslim jihad” [Montefiore, Ierusalim. Biografia unui oraş, #21867, “Papa Urban al II-lea: Aşa vrea Dumnezeu”]. The crowd answered “Deus le volt! God wills it!” Montefiore estimates that eighty thousand people became crusaders. He rejects the modern view, which he links to Hollywood and to reactions after the 2003 Iraq war, that the expeditions were only “a means of enrichment through atrocities”. In his view, “most of these warrior pilgrims were believers come to seek salvation on the ramparts of Jerusalem” [#21867].

The reference shelf records that the Council of Clermont (17–27 November 1095) dealt mostly with Cluniac reform and the Truce of God, and that Urban was responding to envoys Alexios I had sent to Piacenza. Five versions of the speech survive and “vary widely in their details”. The account of Fulcher of Chartres, who was present, is generally considered the most reliable. Urban’s own letter of December 1095 speaks of “a barbaric fury” laying waste the eastern churches and names Adhemar of Le Puy as leader [Wikipedia: Council of Clermont].

Freeman places the ideological groundwork earlier. Gregory VII had developed “the right of Christians to use warfare in the cause of their religion”, and “it was left to the papacy to decide what was a suitable war or not” [Freeman, The Reopening of the Western Mind, #64786]. Ellerbe stresses the papacy’s institutional gain. In the caption to her illustration of Urban preaching she writes: “While the ostensible purpose of the crusades was to rescue the holy land from the infidel, the crusades also helped unify Europeans under the banner of Christianity and avert criticism from the papacy” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, ch. 5, ill. 5.3].

The social engine: knights, peasants and frontiers

Robert Delort’s introduction to Cruciadele places the movement “in the demographic and social context of the Christian West of the eleventh century”. After the invasions of Saracens, Normans and Hungarians ended, the population grew: from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, he writes, England’s population tripled. Peasants were trying to escape their burdens. Knightly families could barely support too many sons on land divided ever more finely, and younger sons were left “no other choice than the Church or the profession of arms”. The crusades offered these “fighters without occupation” a chance at land and booty. Their departure may also have helped the Truce of God hold at home [Balard et al., Cruciadele, #17927, “Introducere”]. Delort also gives a military reason for Western success. The heavily armoured knight, set in a high saddle and charging on a strong horse, was “too little vulnerable to traditional weapons”, rarely killed and usually ransomed. The cost of re-equipping him fell on the peasants, who “came to wish, and probably to hope for, the young knight’s departure without return” [#17927, “Introducere”].

Delort describes the crusade to the east as one of several fronts. Germans fought pagans on the eastern frontier and Spaniards on the southern one. Burgundians, Aquitanians and Toulousains crossed the Pyrenees to begin the Reconquista. An Aquitanian army, “encouraged by the pope”, took Barbastro in 1064, and Castile recovered Toledo in 1085. In Sicily the Norman conquest began in 1060 under Roger, brother of Robert Guiscard, and by 1091 had expelled the Saracens and cleared the straits for Genoese and Pisan fleets. The Normans then looked east. Bohemond of Taranto seemed ready to march on Constantinople in 1085, and “among Western knights the idea circulated that the Greeks are rich, cunning and cowardly in battle” [#17927, “Introducere”]. Byzantium, weakened since Manzikert (1071), had to rely on Western mercenaries. Delort’s direct causes are “in essence religious and psychosocial”: pilgrimage as penance, intensified around the year 1000 by a “millenarian” fear of the end of the world [#17927, “Introducere”].

The march and the massacres

Kerrigan’s chapter “Sacred Slaughter: The Crusades” begins with the pogroms. Quoting the chronicler Albert of Aix: “This slaughter of Jews was done first by citizens of Cologne… they destroyed the houses and synagogues of the Jews and divided among themselves a very large amount of money.” Further massacres followed at Neuss, Speyer, Mainz and Worms, where over 800 Jews were killed [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131, ch. 3]. Kerrigan writes that Godfrey of Bouillon vowed not to set out until he had “avenged the blood of the crucified one with Jewish blood”. Montefiore likewise records that the first wave forced thousands of Jews to convert or killed them [#21867]. Kerrigan reports that Alexios I was “appalled” at the People’s Crusade and shipped it across the Bosporus, where Kilij Arslan destroyed it. In Kerrigan’s figures, of 100,000 who set out on the main expedition, 40,000 reached Antioch. That city fell on 3 June 1098, and “thousands of its inhabitants were slaughtered”, many of them Christians. At Ma’arra, Christian chroniclers such as Fulcher of Chartres and Radulph of Caen reported cannibalism: “many on our side, driven mad by the pains of starvation, cut chunks of meat from the buttocks of Saracen corpses” [#71131, ch. 3].

Jerusalem, July 1099

Cruciadele prints a crusader’s letter describing the final days: “On Wednesday and Thursday we struck hard at the city from all sides, but before rushing it and taking it, the bishops and priests, preaching, urged the people first to make, for the glory of God, a procession around the walls of Jerusalem, accompanied by prayers, alms and fasting. On Friday, at daybreak, we all rushed upon the city” [Balard et al., #17927]. The volume notes that the chroniclers attributed the “relatively easy” capture to the barefoot procession and compared it to the Israelites’ circuit of Jericho, presenting the crusaders as “a new chosen people” [#17927, ch. 8]. Montefiore gives the details: a procession on 8 July, the assault on Friday 15 July, Godfrey’s siege tower reaching the wall at midday, and Tancred’s men pursuing the population onto the Temple Mount. He quotes Raymond of Aguilers: “In the streets you saw only heaps of heads, hands and severed feet”, and blood in the Temple “up to the knees”. He then gives a figure of “ten thousand people, including numerous priests and ascetics” in his account of the slaughter [#21867, “Tancred: carnaj pe Muntele Templului”]. Kerrigan dates the breach to 13 July and quotes William of Tyre (“No one had ever heard of such a bloodbath among Pagan peoples”) and Fulcher (“our feet stained to our ankles in the blood of the slain… neither women nor children were spared”) [#71131, ch. 3]. Cruciadele‘s chronology and Montefiore both give 15 July for the capture [#17927, chronology].

The military orders

The conquest was followed by four crusader states: Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa and Tripoli. The new orders of armed monks guarded them. Greer writes: “The Order of Knights Templar, a great European order of knighthood, was not a secret society. Founded in 1118 by nine crusading knights, it became rich and influential. By the fourteenth century, its wealth had made it a tempting prize for greedy monarchs, and the defeat of the Christian side in the Crusades deprived the Knights Templar of its official reason for existence” [Greer, The Conspiracy Book, #88023]. Kerrigan explains how the Templars became a banking institution. Named after their house on the Temple Mount (“in fact a corner of the confiscated Al-Aqsa Mosque”), they protected pilgrims and developed a form of banking so that travellers need not carry gold. The resulting fortune “attract[ed] envious glances from Europe’s monarchies” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 4]. The order’s later legend began early. Gittins records the popular claim that “4 July was chosen as Independence Day to mark the date that the Knights Templar were driven from Jerusalem by Muslim armies”; the year is garbled in the library copy [Gittins, Secrets of the Lost Symbol, #62988]. The order’s suppression is left to Chapter 62 and its esoteric afterlife to Part 11.

Diminishing returns and new targets

Kerrigan summarises the later expeditions. Zengi retook Edessa in 1144, which prompted the failed Second Crusade (1145–49) preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, who “personally interven[ed] to try to prevent several German pogroms”. Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187. In the Third Crusade, after taking Acre in 1191, Richard I had 2,700 Muslim prisoners put to death [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 3]. Crusading also spread to other fronts. In the Baltic, the official start was Celestine III’s call of 1195, although Alexander III’s bull Non parum animus noster (1171) had already authorised war against the Estonians. The Teutonic Order “spearheaded these incursions and profited immensely” [Wikipedia: Northern Crusades]. In 1209 Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against the Cathars of southern France [Kerrigan, #71131, ch. 3]; Chapter 61 treats it in detail. Chapter 59 showed how later papal bulls extended the crusading licence to conquest overseas.

The Fourth Crusade and the sack of 1204

Cruciadele‘s chronology gives the sequence. “1202: The crusaders treat with the Venetians: they obtain a fleet in exchange for the promise to take part in the siege of Zara. Alexios (IV) Angelos asks the crusaders’ help to restore his father Isaac II to the throne of Constantinople.” In 1204 “Isaac II is dethroned again. The crusaders take possession of Constantinople (April). A Latin empire replaces the Byzantine one. Venice founds its own eastern empire” [Balard et al., #17927, chronology]. Michel Kaplan’s chapter “Devastarea Constantinopolului” begins: “On 12 April 1204, a Monday, after four days of assault, the crusaders enter Constantinople… amid a fire that destroys more than half the buildings, the victorious army sets out on a pillage and atrocities that far exceed those committed by Saladin in 1187 when he conquered Jerusalem” [#17927, ch. 18]. Kaplan explains the violence partly by the long wait between Zara and the first capture of the city in July 1203. He also sees in it “a profound enmity accumulated over many years”, and treats the religious differences invoked to excite the crowds as “in fact a pretext and an excuse” [#17927, ch. 18]. Elsewhere the volume concludes that the eastern Christians, spared the Turkish threat for a moment, were “struck by the conquest and devastation of Constantinople (1204)”, and that hatred “was born in [their] souls” [Balard et al., #17927].

Kerrigan quotes Niketas Choniates on the profanation of Hagia Sophia: the altar “broken up into bits and shared out among the soldiers”, mules led into the sanctuary, and “a certain harlot” seated “in the seat of the Patriarch, singing obscenely” [Kerrigan, #71131, “A Crusade against Christians”]. Kerrigan’s two accounts of the motive do not quite agree. In one, the crusaders, short of funds, diverted “to shake down the Emperor Alexius III”. In the other, the pretext was the ousting of Isaac II by his brother [#71131, ch. 3; “A Crusade against Christians”]. Babuş and Plaianu, read in Chapter 58, both treat these events as the point after which the schism of 1054 became a lived reality.

Key points

• The immediate cause was Alexios I’s appeal at Piacenza (1095). Negru says the response was “beyond expectations”: a migration of over 40,000 instead of a few thousand knights.
• Montefiore calls the crusade “the idea of a single man”. At Clermont on 27 November 1095 Urban II “invented a new theory of holy war” that offered remission of sins and, in Montefiore’s phrase, created “a Christian version of the Muslim jihad”.
• Delort (Cruciadele) explains the movement through population growth, surplus younger sons, peasant burdens, the superiority of the armoured knight and parallel wars in Spain and Sicily.
• The sources agree that the capture of Jerusalem in July 1099 ended in a massacre. They date it to 15 July (Balard, Montefiore) or 13 July (Kerrigan), and Montefiore cites a figure of ten thousand.
• Greer describes the Templars (1118, nine knights) as “not a secret society” whose wealth later tempted monarchs. Gittins records the Masonic-popular 4 July legend.
• Crusading extended to the Baltic (1171/1195) and to the Cathars (1209), and later, through papal bulls, to colonial conquest.
• The Fourth Crusade’s deal with Venice, the siege of Zara (1202) and the cause of Alexios IV led to the sack of 12 April 1204. Kaplan judges its atrocities worse than Saladin’s in 1187, and the sources treat it as what poisoned East–West relations.