Importance of the Crusades

Alsina González
Specialist journalist and researcher

If it were necessary to establish a time within History in which it is established as the period of greatest power of the Catholic ChurchUndoubtedly, this period would be the Middle Ages, which began at the end of the V with the fall of the Roman empire from the west, and gave way to the Holy Roman-Germanic Empire, precisely because the maximum power was in competition between popes and emperors.

Although it might seem that the confrontation between Christians and Muslims has been going on since the Prophet Muhammad began preaching about him, the truth is that the relationship between both religions it could have been more or less good, but it did not turn sour until the crusades began and all the fundamentalism and savage acts that accompanied.

The crusades consisted of a series of military campaigns by Christian kingdoms (that is, whose monarchs owed allegiance to the papacy or the church). Eastern Orthodox) against the kingdoms of the Muslim confession, mainly to conquer (recover, in the Christian terminology of the time) Jerusalem and the saints places.

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Despite the fact that the “official” crusades are generally considered to be those that were launched from the papacy to “recover” the holy land, previous confrontations between kingdoms of both worlds can be considered as such, such as the so-called "Reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula by part of the Christian kingdoms (Catalan Counties, Aragon -later the Catalan-Aragonese Crown when the monarchies of both were merged-, Navarre, Castile, Leon, Portugal...).

Also the resistance of the kingdoms of Eastern Europe, such as Hungary, against the Ottoman invaders (of Christian confession) had overtones of a crusade as a confrontation between religions.

Another crusade is the one that the knights of the Teutonic Order undertook to conquer the lands of the Prussians. origins, coming to conquer a large portion of land that would remain north of present-day Poland, covering part of Lithuania. Clashes with Poland, another Christian kingdom, wore down the order until it disappeared.

However, reality is always more complicated, and in these campaigns religion is used as an excuse by some to respond to a desire for political or economic power.

In this article we will focus on the crusades whose objective was to "recover" the Holy Land for Christians, a conquest if we look at it from the prism of the Muslim world.

The first crusade was called in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to a plea for help from Byzantine Emperor Alexios II.

Urban II promised the forgiveness of all sins to those who came to defend the Christian kingdoms of the East and Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem from the threat of the Turks.

Those who first responded to the papal appeal were humble people, who traveled on foot to across Europe, forming a turbo that caused riots, robberies and other incidents, wherever passed. Upon reaching Turkish territory, they were annihilated due to their military inexperience, scant weapons, and even worse preparation for battle.

At the same time, knights and feudal lords of various European kingdoms such as France, the Holy Empire, the various kingdoms of the Italian Peninsula, England, etc., were preparing their hosts to form what would be the crusade military.

This crusade, known as "that of the princes", promised to return all the conquered lands to the hands of the Byzantine Empire, a promise that the nobles that formed it finally broke.

Once in Asian territory, they took advantage of the disunity of the Muslim side, to seize various Anatolian territories that, effectively, they returned to Byzantium, but when Baldwin (future king of Jerusalem) arrived in Edessa and managed to crown himself king of that city, he did not transfer sovereignty to the Byzantines, but converted the kingdom into the County of edessa.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crusader army headed towards Antioch, a city that it besieged not without suffering serious hardships, and that ended up conquering, causing a great slaughter of its inhabitants and subjecting the city to pillage.

This will be a constant in this first crusade: more than perfect Christian knights with all that this entails, the crusaders They behaved like real murderous freaks, pillaging and killing both Muslims and Christians of various kinds. confessions.

In Antioch they also claimed to have found a relic of the Spear of destiny.

In 1099 the siege and capture of Jerusalem took place, an episode marked by the great violence applied by the crusaders.

Conquered thanks to a last-minute Genoese help, when the crusader warriors entered the city they entered a slaughter without respecting anyone or anything. Some witnesses came to affirm that the rivers of blood that circulated through the streets reached the ankles of the people...

Godfrey of Bouillon was the first king of Jerusalem, thus fulfilling the word given by the crusaders to recover the holy places, although violating his oath towards the Byzantine Empire by creating the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land and not returning the conquered territories to the crown from Byzantium.

From here, the new Christian kingdoms began a period of consolidation. Many of the knights who had fought in this crusade returned to Europe to resume their lives, while others arrived to exploit the emerging opportunities.

The Second Crusade was launched in 1145 after the fall of County of Edessa, the first Crusader kingdom created.

Numerous European knights responded, whose first stopover point on their journey to the east was the Iberian Peninsula, helping the Portuguese troops to conquer Lisbon.

Crusaders from central Europe, whom the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I seized to cross into Asia as soon as they arrived in Byzantium, headed for Byzantium by land. Once in Asia, the contingent was divided in two and each of the resulting parties was massacred.

The French fared no better, arriving at the very places where the Germans had been defeated a few days later, and they found themselves, sooner or later for the same purpose, either dead from starvation or from diseases.

With what troops they could mass in Jerusalem, the Crusaders chose to attack and besiege Damascus. But here they would run into the last of his shoe in the figure of Nur ad-Din, a Muslim gentleman governor of Mosul to whom the city of Damascus ended up paying homage. With him the seeds of the Muslim resurgence would be planted and the recapture of Jerusalem in the name of the crescent would begin to be seriously considered.

After the unsuccessful siege of Damascus, the crusaders would gain some territories from Egypt.

The most famous of all the crusades, due to the characters that would take part in it, was the third.

In 1187, and taking advantage of the disunity of the Christian kingdoms of the East, as well as the scant attention that their Christian relatives offered them, the sultan from Syria and Egypt (territories that he had managed to unify under his command) Salah ad-Din (known in Spanish as Saladin), had conquered Jerusalem.

The lack of vision of Guido de Lusignan, king consort of Jerusalem who made the decision to confronting the powerful hosts of Saladin in the open field, led to the defeat of the Horns of Hattin.

Unlike the massacre carried out by the Christians in 1099, the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin's troops was bloodless.

The motivation of the third crusade is the "liberation", again, of the Holy City.

The capture of the city shocked a Europe that did not make the introspection necessary to analyze exactly what had happened or realize his neglect in helping the Christian kingdoms of the East. In 1189, Pope Gregory VIII called for a new crusade.

The most relevant characters in this crusade were Federico I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor Romano-Germanic, Philip II Augustus of France, and Richard I of England, better known as "Richard the Heart". of Lion".

Federico drowned while bathing in the Salef River (present-day Turkey), thereby causing his troops to return to his home territories.

The French reached the Asian shores first, participating in the siege of Acre, which the English joined later. After conquering the city, Felipe II returned to France, leaving Ricardo I alone in the breach.

Although in Western European popular history, Ricardo has been seen as a great gentleman (remember, if not, his role in the films dedicated to the figure of Robin Hood), the reality is that Ricardo behaved like a barbarian, and after the capture of Acre he had thousands of prisoners murdered without much consideration. Muslims.

Instead, his opponent, Saladin, was recognized as a virtuous knight in both the Muslim and Christian camps, with signs of admiration by the Christian chroniclers of the time for his behavior towards his enemies on the battlefield.

Ricardo dismissed the capture of Jerusalem for logistical reasons, seeking a pact with Saladin that would open access to the Holy City for Christian pilgrims.

They did not know it at the time, perhaps they were unconsciously aware of it, but Christendom would not put feet in Jerusalem as an administrative power until many centuries later, except for a brief period of time between 1228 and 1244.

The fourth crusade, promulgated by Pope Innocent III in 1199, was aimed at attacking Egypt. However, the Venetian intervention changed its course.

The Venetians were interested in attacking Hungary, so they reached a deal with the crusaders: these The latter could not pay the full amount of their transportation, so they agreed to work as mercenaries for the venetians.

His first destination was to recapture Zara, a city on the Dalmatian coast, which had recently been taken from the Venetians by the Hungarians. Hungary was a Christian kingdom, so the Pope was quick to excommunicate the Crusaders.

His next destination would be Byzantium: a pretender to the imperial throne (approved by Venice, by the way) proposed to the crusaders to recover the throne for him. The crusaders marched to Greek lands, attacking several cities and reaching Byzantium in 1203. They were able to besiege the city but eventually reached an agreement with the defenders that allowed their pretender to rule jointly with the deposed emperor's father.

However, the new co-emperor could not meet the promised payments to the Crusaders, which led to a new siege of Byzantium by the latter in 1204.

When the crusaders managed to penetrate the walls of Byzantium, the scenes that occurred were the same as in 1099 in Jerusalem.

If someone wonders how this could happen against those who were, theoretically, co-religionist Christians, say that the Eastern Christians had ceased to owe allegiance to the papacy, in the first great schism of the Christianity, and between both confessions there was a sectarian hatred (as in Islam between Shiites and Sunnis).

The fourth crusade ended here, without even “smelling” the Holy Land, and marked a decline in the crusades that would cause them to fade away.

In 1291, Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, fell into Muslim hands, although the Christians they would temporarily regain control of Jerusalem in 1228 and until 1244, as I have mentioned with anteriority.

The actions that would be undertaken from here under the generic name of "crusade" would hardly reach the Holy Land.

Thus, Egypt and Tunisia were targets, which, although officially responding to an indirect attack on the Holy Places, rather corresponded to the interests of the Christian states.

The crusades, more than a reconquest as Western historiography has wanted to see for a long time, was a process of conquest.

And, furthermore, carried out with great brutality, in such a way that it changed the relationship between the Christian and Muslim religions (which both sides had been able to cope more or less well) poisoning her completely, both by one and the other side.