Lecture 22: The Crusades: From Jerusalem to the Sack of Constantinople

The lecture, section by section

1. Clermont, 1095

   The spark came from the east: Seljuk Turks pressed to the doorstep of Constantinople, taking even Nicaea nearby, and the emperor Alexius, forty years after the schism, swallowed his pride and appealed for help, not to any king, but to the pope, the one man in Europe who could summon a continent. At the Council of Clermont in 1095 Urban II preached the crusade to roaring enthusiasm, and lay preachers like Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless carried the fire to the common people, with the pope's promise ringing behind it: die on crusade and go straight to heaven, purgatory bypassed.

2. The shape of two centuries

   Historians count seven major crusades, sometimes split into nine, running from 1095 to the fall of Acre, the last crusader stronghold, in 1291. Busenitz simplifies the whole era into three movements: roughly fifty years of victory, fifty years of defeat, and a final century of demoralized hanging on, a shape he compares to a more recent long war that also ended in dismal withdrawal.

3. The Peasants' Crusade

   The first wave was not an army but a mob: some twenty thousand untrained peasants, stirred by the preaching and with little to lose in a world where crusading death meant instant heaven, marched to Constantinople. Alexius, who had asked for trained knights, found beggars at his gates, sent them onward, and they were annihilated or enslaved almost immediately.

4. The Princes' Crusade and the fall of Jerusalem

   The real expedition followed: lords and knights, Godfrey of Bouillon foremost among them, whose common enemy conveniently paused Europe's endless infighting. They retook Nicaea, besieged Antioch for nearly a year until a deserted post let them in, and in the summer of 1099 took Jerusalem in about a month. The crusader's own account tells the rest: the city crammed with the dead, bodies piled like pyramids, a slaughter, he boasts, such as no one had ever seen. Busenitz is direct about the aim: the Crusades sought the conquest and annihilation of Muslims, not their conversion, and Jews were slaughtered along the way under the Christ-killer libel, wounds between these communities that have never fully closed.

5. Relics and superstition

   The era's piety shows in the siege of Antioch, where a soldier's vision of Saint Andrew conveniently located the Holy Lance, the spear of John 19, buried a thousand years, and the discovery electrified the army. Busenitz draws the sober inference: a great many of the relics in later Roman tradition were 'discovered' in exactly this period, a millennium after Christ, by armies hungry for signs, which is also the soil from which the Holy Grail legends grew.

6. Crusader kingdoms and warrior monks

   Victory produced five crusader states, Jerusalem under Godfrey, Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and Armenian Cilicia, and fifty years of reopened pilgrimage. To guard the roads arose the military orders: the Knights Templar, headquartered on the reputed site of Solomon's temple, and their rivals the Hospitallers of St. John, hospital builders as well as soldiers, joined later by the Teutonic Knights, who fought the mostly forgotten, because successful, northern crusades along the Baltic. The Templars' fabled wealth had a mundane source: they invented a deposit-here, withdraw-there banking network for pilgrims, medieval Europe's first ATM, and conspiracy legends grew where interest income actually lay.

7. Bernard and the Templar ideal

   Bernard of Clairvaux embodies the era's contradiction: a writer of genuine devotional warmth whom even Calvin quotes approvingly, and simultaneously the great preacher of the Second Crusade and founding advocate of the Templars. His portrait of the order is all discipline: no chess or dice, no hunting or falconry, no jesters or dirty songs, hair cropped, bodies unwashed and sun-tanned under mail, and an oath to accept every combat regardless of odds, refuse ransom, give no quarter, and die for the holy places. Monks with swords: church history had never seen the combination before.

8. Defeat: the Second and Third Crusades

   Edessa fell first, and the Second Crusade, now led by crowned kings, Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France, broke apart at Damascus in humiliating withdrawal, which Muslim observers read, mirror-like, as God's judgment on the Christians. Then came Saladin, who swept the crusader states away. The Third Crusade fielded the era's most famous names, Frederick Barbarossa, whose army of a hundred thousand lost heart when he drowned crossing a river, Richard the Lionheart, and Philip Augustus of France, and it failed: by 1190 Jerusalem and nearly everything else was gone, with little but Armenian Cilicia left standing.

9. The Fourth Crusade: Christians sack Constantinople

   The low point came in 1204. Innocent III's crusade planned to strike Egypt by sea, but the soldiers could not pay for ships, and a Byzantine claimant, Alexius Angelus, offered the money in exchange for restoring him to power in Constantinople. Restored, he could not pay; his people, furious at the western army on their doorstep, murdered him for a usurper who refused payment outright; and the crusaders stormed the city on April 12, 1204. The Greek historian Vryonis describes three days of murder, rape, and looting on a scale the Goths and Vandals never matched, Europe's greatest city and museum stripped, its treasures carried to Venice, the Hagia Sophia desecrated, an invader enthroned on the patriarch's seat singing coarse songs over the church's holy vessels. The Greeks concluded the Turks themselves would have been gentler. A movement launched in 1095 to save eastern Christendom had, by 1204, broken it, hastening the decline that ended at Turkish hands in 1453: in Vryonis's summary, the crusading movement resulted ultimately in the victory of Islam, the exact opposite of its intention.

10. The Children's Crusade, and the lesson

    A few years later came the strangest episode of all, historical at its core though wrapped in legend: thousands of children and teenagers marched south expecting God to part the Mediterranean as he had parted the sea for Moses. At Marseilles the water did not move; many trudged home; and by one account seven ships offered passage and delivered their young passengers to Arab slavers, some vessels sinking on the way. Busenitz closes with the era's standing lesson: the Crusades are what happens when the kingdom of Christ is confused with the kingdoms of this world, a confusion not confined to the Middle Ages, and one every politically minded church must guard against still.

1. The crusaders fought 'for the honor of Christ' while disobeying nearly everything he taught. How does a believer test whether zeal for God's honor has quietly become something else?

2. Bernard wrote devotional treasures and preached a catastrophe. What do we do with teachers whose legacies are genuinely mixed?

3. Where do you see the kingdom-confusion the lecture warns about, Christ's kingdom merged with political or national causes, in our own day, and what does resisting it look like?