Hi there my name’s John Green;
this is Crash Course World History,
and today we’re going to talk about the
Crusades.
Ohhh, Stan, do we have to talk about the Crusades?
I hate them...
Here’s the thing about the Crusades,
which were a series of military expeditions
from parts of Europe to the Eastern coast
of the Mediterranean.
The real reason they feature so prominently
in history is because we’ve endlessly romanticized
the story of the Crusades.
We’ve created this simple narrative with
characters to root for and root against,
and it’s all been endlessly idealized by
the likes of Sir Walter Scott.
An there are knights with swords and Lion
hearts...
NO, STAN. LIONHEARTS.
Thank you.
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Let’s start by saying that initially the
Crusades were not a “holy war”
on the part of Europeans against Islam, but
in important ways
the Crusades were driven by religious faith.
[non-litigious melody reminiscent of a totally
litigious melody plays]
Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Religion causes all
wars. Imagine no war—
I’m gonna cut you off right there before
you violate copyright,
Me-from-the-past.
But as usual, you’re wrong. Simple readings
of history are rarely sufficient.
By the way, when did my handwriting get so
much better?
I mean, if the Crusades had been brought on
by the lightning-fast rise of Islamic empires
and
a desire to keep in Christian hands the land
of Jesus,
then the Crusades would’ve started in the
8th century.
But early Islamic dynasties,
like the Umayyads and the Abbasids,
were perfectly happy with Christians and Jews
living among them,
as long as they paid a tax.
And plus the Christian pilgrimage business
was awesome for the Islamic Empire’s economy.
But then a new group of Muslims,
the Seljuk Turks,
moved into the region and they sacked the
holy cities and made it much more difficult
for Christians to make their pilgrimages.
And while they quickly realized their mistake,
it was already too late.
The Byzantines,
who’d had their literal-asses kicked at
the Battle of Manzikert in 1071,
felt the threat and called upon the west for
help.
So the first official crusade began with a
call to arms from Pope Urban II in 1095.
This was partly because Urban wanted to unite
Europe and he’d figured out the lesson the
rest of us learn from alien invasion movies:
The best way to get people to unite is to
give them a common enemy.
So Urban called on all the bickering knights
and nobility of Europe,
and he saideth unto his people:
“Let us go forth and help the Byzantines
because then maybe they will acknowledge my
awesomeness and get rid of their stupid Not
Having Me as Pope thing, and while we are
at it, let’s liberate Jerusalem!”
I’m paraphrasing, by the way.
Crusades were not primarily military operations;
they were pilgrimages.
Theologically, Christianity didn’t have
an idea of a holy war –
like, war might be just, but fighting wasn’t
something that got you into heaven.
But pilgrimage to a holy shrine could help
you out on that front,
so Urban had the key to pitch the Crusade
as a pilgrimage with a touch of warring on
the side.
I do the same thing to my kid every night:
I’m not feeding you dinner featuring animal
crackers.
I’m feeding you animal crackers featuring
a dinner.
Oh, it’s time for the open letter?
[slides through for chair switcheroo]
An Open Letter to Animal Crackers:
But first let’s see what’s in the Secret
Compartment today.
Oh, it’s animal crackers.
Thanks, Stan...
Hi there, Animal Crackers, it’s me, John
Green.
Thanks for being delicious, but let me throw
out a crazy idea here:
Maybe foods that are ALREADY DELICIOUS do
not need the added benefit of being PLEASINGLY
SHAPED.
I mean, why can’t I give my kid animal spinach
or animal sweet potato
or even animal cooked animal?
I mean, we can put a man on Mars but we can’t
make spinach shaped like an elephant?
What Stan? We haven’t put a man on Mars?
Stupid world, always disappointing me.
Best wishes,
John Green
One last myth to dispell:
The Crusades also were NOT an early example
of European colonization of the Middle East,
even if they did create some European-ish
kingdoms there for a while.
That much later, post-and-anti-colonialist
view that comes,
at least partially,
out of a Marxist interpretation of history.
In the case of the Crusades,
it was argued,
the knights who went adventuring in the Levant
were the second and third sons of wealthy
nobles who,
because of European inheritance rules,
had little to look forward to by staying in
Europe and lots to gain –
in terms of plunder –
by going to the East.
Cool theory, bro,
but it’s not true.
First, most of the people who responded to
the call to Crusade weren’t knights at all;
they were poor people.
And secondly, most of the nobles who did go
crusading were lords of estates,
not their wastrel kids.
But more importantly,
that analysis ignores religious motivations.
We’ve approached religions as historical
phenomena—
thinking about how, for instance,
the capricious environment of Mesopotamia
led to
a capricious cadre of Mesopotamian gods.
But just as the world shapes religion,
religion also shapes the world.
And some modern historians might ignore religious
motivations,
but medieval crusaders sure as hell didn’t.
I mean, when people came up with that idiom,
they clearly thought Hell was for sure.
To the Crusaders,
they were taking up arms to protect Christ
and his kingdom.
And what better way to show your devotion
to God
than putting a cross on your sleeve,
spending 5 to 6 times your annual income
to outfit yourself and all your horses,
and heading for the Holy Land?
So when these people cried out
“God Wills It!”
to explain their reasons for going,
we should do them the favor of believing them.
And the results of the First Crusade seemed
to indicate that God had willed it.
Following the lead of roving preachers with
names like Peter the Rabbit-
Peter the Hermit?
Stan; you’re always making history less
cool!
Fine, following preachers like Peter the Hermit,
thousands of peasants and nobles alike
volunteered for the First Crusade.
It got off to kind of a rough start because
pilgrims kept robbing those they encountered
on the way.
Plus, there was no real leader so they were
constant rivalries between nobles about who
could supply the most troops.
Notable among the notables were
Godfrey of Bouillon,
Bohemond of Taranto,
and Raymond of Toulouse.
But despite the rivalries,
and the disorganization the crusaders were
remarkably—
some would say miraculously—
successful.
By the time they arrived in the Levant they
were fighting not against the Seljuk Turks
but against Fatimid Egyptians,
who had captured the Holy Land from the Seljuks,
thereby making the Turks none too pleased
with the Egyptians.
At Antioch the Crusaders reversed a seemingly
hopeless situation when a peasant found a
spear that had pierced the side of Christ’s
side hidden under a church,
thereby raising morale enough to win the day.
And then they did the impossible:
They took Jerusalem, securing it for Christendom
and famously killing a lot of people in the
al-Asqa mosque.
Now the Crusaders succeeded in part because
the Turkish Muslims,
who were Sunnis,
did not step up to help the Egyptians,
who were Shia.
But that kind of complicated, intra-Islamic
rivalry
gets in the way of the awesome narrative:
The Christians just saw it as a miracle.
So by 1100CE European nobles held both
Antioch and Jerusalem
as Latin Christian kingdoms.
I say Latin to make the point that there were
lots of Christians living in these cities
before the Crusaders arrived,
they just weren’t Catholic- they were Orthodox,
a fact that will become relevant shortly.
We’re going to skip the second Crusade
because it bores me and move on to
the Third Crusade because it’s the famous
one.
Broadly speaking,
the third Crusade was a European response
to the emergence of a new Islamic power,
neither Turkish nor Abbasid:
the Egyptian (although he was really a Kurd)
Sultan al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf,
better known to the west as Saladin.
Saladin, having consolidating his power in
Egypt,
sought to expand by taking Damascus and,
eventually Jerusalem,
which he did successfully, because he was
an amazing general.
And then the loss of Jerusalem caused Pope
Gregory VIII
to call for a third crusade.
And
Frederick “I am going to drown anticlimactically
on the journey while trying to bathe in a
river” Barbarossa
of the not-holy, not-roman, and not-imperial
Holy Roman Empire.
Both Richard and Saladin were great generals
who earned the respect of their troops.
And while from the European perspective the
crusade was a failure because they didn’t
take Jerusalem,
it did radically change crusading forever
by making Egypt a target.
Richard understood that the best chance to
take Jerusalem involved first taking Egypt,
but he couldn’t convince any crusaders to
join him because Egypt had a lot
less religious value to Christians than Jerusalem.
So Richard was forced to call off the Crusade
early,
but if he had just hung around until Easter
of 1192,
he would’ve seen Saladin die.
And then Richard probably could have fulfilled
all his crusading dreams,
but then, you know,
we wouldn’t have needed the 4th Crusade.
Although crusading continued throughout the
14th century,
mostly with an emphasis on North Africa
and not the Holy Land,
the 4th Crusade is the last one we’ll focus
on,
because it was the Crazy One.
Let’s go to the thought bubble...
So a lot of people volunteered for the fourth
crusade—
more than 35,000—
and the generals didn’t want to march them
all the way across Anatolia,
because they knew from experience that it
was
A. dangerous and
B. hot,
so they decided to go by boat,
which necessitated the building of the largest
naval fleet Europe had seen since the Roman
Empire.
The Venetians built 500 ships,
but then only 11,000 Crusaders actually made
it down to Venice,
because, like, oh I meant to go
but I had a thing come up... etc.
There wasn’t enough money to pay for those
boats,
so the Venetians made the Crusaders a deal:
Help us capture the rebellious city of Zara,
and we’ll ferry you to Anatolia.
This was a smidge problematic,
Crusading-wise,
because Zara was a Christian city,
but the Crusaders agreed to help,
resulting in the Pope excommunicating both
them and the Venetians.
Then after the Crusaders failed to take Zara
and were still broke,
a would-be Byzantine emperor named Alexius
III
promised the Crusaders he would pay them
if they helped him out,
so the (excommunicated) Catholic Crusaders
fought
on behalf of the Orthodox Alexius,
who soon became emperor in Constantinople.
But it took Alexius a while to come up with
the money he’d promised the Crusaders,
so they were waiting around in Constantinople,
and then
Alexius was suddenly dethroned by t
he awesomely named Mourtzouphlus,
leaving the crusaders stuck in Constantinople
with no money.
Christian holy warriors couldn’t very well
sack the largest city in Christendom,
could they?
Well, it turns out they could.
And boy did they.
They took all the wealth they could find,
killed and raped Christians as they went,
stole the statues of horses that now adorn
St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice,
and retook exactly none of the Holy Land.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So you’d think this disaster would discredit
the whole notion of Crusading, Right?
No.
Instead, it legitimatized the idea that Crusading
didn’t have to be about pilgrimage:
that any enemies of the Catholic Church were
fair game.
Also, the fourth crusade pretty much doomed
the Byzantine Empire,
which never really recovered.
Constantinople,
a shadow of its former self,
was conquered by the Turks in 1453.
So ultimately the Crusades were a total failure
at establishing Christian kingdoms in the
Holy Land long term.
And with the coming of the Ottomans,
the region remained solidly Muslim,
as it is (mostly) is today.
And the Crusades didn’t really open up lines
of communication
between the Christian and Muslim worlds,
because those lines of communication were
already open.
Plus, most historians now agree that the Crusades
didn’t bring Europe out of the Middle Ages
by offering it contact with the superior intellectual
accomplishments of the Islamic world;
In fact,
they were a tremendous drain on Europe’s
resources.
For me,
the Crusades matter because they remind us
that the medieval world was fundamentally
different from ours.
The men and women who took up the cross
believed in the sacrality of their work
in a way that we often can’t conceive of
today.
And when we focus so much on the heroic narrative
or the anti-imperialist narrative,
or all the political in-fighting,
we can lose sight of what the Crusades
must have meant to the Crusaders.
How the journey from pilgrimage to holy war
transformed their faith and their lives.
And ultimately,
that exercise in empathy is
the coolest thing about studying history.
Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller,
our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.
Our graphics team is ThoughtBubble,
and the show is written by
my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer
and myself.
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Last week’s Phrase of the Week was:
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Thanks for watching.
I apologize to my prudish fans for leaving
both buttons unbuttoned
and as we say in my hometown,
don’t forget to Put A Bird On It.
Whoah!
Globe, globe, globe...
This page was last edited on 1 January 2024, at 02:13