Notes on the Crusades and Thoughts on Middle-Ages History

I've long thought the most interesting time in history is from the ancient Greeks and Romans, all the sword, shield and sandals warfare. Mostly I think that comes from the influence it has on male-directed pop culture: 300, Spartacus, The Lord of the Rings and other such testosterone-fueled cinematic joy-rides. That and video games of course, seeing as the variety of weapons and armour of the era mixed with close-quarters combat makes for good gaming (Warcraft, Diablo, For Honour, Mortal Combat, Soul Calibur, the list goes on for pages but you probably don't care). But as you read into it more you realize that the history of it rarely matches up with your hopes. I assume girls feel the same way when they discover not all princes are super hunky.

During the Second Crusade the knights would
dress their horses in cute costumes on Halloween. 

So what I'm saying is my thoughts have changed, and mostly it's because there are two main inherent problems. History pre-1700s is where you really hit the skids in terms of number of sources, which means you increasingly rely on either archaeological evidence or piecing together records. More often than not that leads to dry reading, and lends itself to a laundry-list style of events. Person A attacked City B, which angered Person B into attacking City A, so Person B allied with Person C. It leaves out some of the emotional impact of historical "characters", for lack of a better term. I just couldn't find myself having any vested interest in Isaac Dukas Comnenus of Cyprus the way I could, say, Winston Churchill. There's just not enough depth without a large amount of source material, and that goes beyond just people. While reading about the crusades, massive events were occurring but it's difficult to engage in them when the author either has to a) tell the story rather soullessly or b) make some hopeful leaps in guesswork on emotions of people at play, which is always a bit of a cheat.

The second problem is time. The crusades stretched across two hundred years. When taking that much time into account, it's hard to make any one battle seem of any great significance. The large-scale events are moreso movements that are gradually taking place, like shifts in ideology or politics, rather than hinging on any one single occurrence. Even the death of a king seems insignificant when he's one of thirty you just read about. Because of this I decided to axe the crusades as a full-fledged series, but rather have it as a few snippets of interesting stuff I picked up along the way.

I know what you're thinking. How will you ever recover? Well, I just don't know. Anyway, what's below is better than nothing.

First, a Brief Summary:

Muslims in the Middle East and Christians in Europe were fighting for the Holy Land (essentially, modern day Israel and Palestine) that was important to both sides' religions. They couldn't come to terms for how to split it up or share it, so they fought relentlessly for two hundred years vying for control. The crusades were massive migrations of soldiers from Europe intending to put it back into Christian hands.

What's all the fussin' and the fightin' really about?
How many wars are about anything other than material or status gain? The World Wars are a strong mix of both, the Cold War and all the proxy wars around it are essentially fights over "who's at the top of the heap and how to stay there," and even the War on Terror - while having a strong religious focus - still finds most of its root causes around economics (we're looking at you, oil). It's tough to name one in modern history, and that's what's difficult to grasp about the crusades. They're coming out of the Middle Ages, a time before the Renaissance era and the rise of humanism, where religion is the one and only.

Pictured here is one of the sieges. They appear to be raiding
three men in a tub, spawning the popular
"Rub-a-dub-dub" nursery rhyme.

What's interesting is that it sounds a little fishy. They were essentially helping to expand the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire partly to its former glory, and its main city of Constantinople also just happened to be incredibly rich. Of course, this means that a fair amount of money was changing hands. One has got to think that money is playing a pretty significant role, but, surprisingly, it just doesn't seem that way.

The main people leading the charge - the nobility of many European nations - had little need for additional funds. In fact, they would often have to raise money just to go. Crusading was incredibly expensive, having to purchase gear, transportation, food, and any other thing that comes with travel and war. So in addition to the standard risks of war, they also risked their wallets. Of course, the peasantry (the bulk of the army) had little money to lose, seeing as it's tough to misplace something you never had. Their reasoning was simply different; if they couldn't give money to the church, they would give it blood. But for both, at the core, the war was for the church and only the church.

Christians vs. Muslims. Is that all?

Here's what surprised me most while learning about the crusades. If either side got their crap together they would have won it no contest. For both the east and the west, Muslim and Christian, they bickered within their ranks so terribly that rarely could they get a full, cohesive fighting force, even going so far as to go to war with each other. Disagreements about territory, who would keep what, and even how and when to attack would cause disputes seemingly every time. I might be reaching, but it seems that so many of them were on too much of an ego trip from being hoity-toity nobility they couldn't find a way to compromise.

Often, it seemed more a contest of which army would slip and fall on their sword before reaching the enemy first. The Christians were plagued by petty squabbling, often on things as simple as scouting, meaning one army would separate from the rest believing a different route was superior only to find themselves surrounded and destroyed. Other times armies would refuse to fight - or even fight each other - over disputes of who would rule a city after it had been sacked. It sounds not at all that different from a kid picking up their soccer ball and going home because he didn't like the rules.

On the other end, the Muslims were facing many of the same problems. A consistent lack of cohesion and infighting prevented them from effectively mounting a solid defense. Honestly, considering it was two hundred years of off-and-on war, the biggest enemy seemed to be political backstabbing and trust issues. If only they could have had an office party to go play laser tag. Real team-building exercises.

Crusaders looked super-cool like in the movies, right? And they were all pious and chivalrous and had the jaw-lines of Superman?

Two members of the "Conehead" branch
of the Knights Templar.

Sort of.

There are a few things that ring true. The classic crusader look with the red cross on the white background on a metal-encased dude with a sword? That was real. However, it was also specific. Those were the Knights Templar, a particular caste of crusaders. The name itself sparks images of brave knights saving princesses, or some weird Da Vinci Code-esque movie where it turns out they were hiding a ton of gold. (Oof. I looked it up. That was more spot-on than I intended it to be.) But it's slightly different than that; most of the crusader orders (The Knights Templar, Teutonic Knights, etc.) are all originally charitable organizations or hospitals. In fact, the Knights Templar stem from a similar crusader group called the Hospitallers, the name meaning exactly what it sounds. The prevailing image of a Templar shouldn't necessarily be a buff dude in an armour bringing down some holy justice, but rather someone dishing out some 800-year-old form of Asprin.

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The information from this blog came from A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden.