The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (20 page)

THE CRUSADES

Death toll:
3 million
¹

Rank:
30

Type:
holy war

Broad dividing line:
West Christians (“Franks”) vs. Muslims (“Saracens”) vs. East Christians (“Greeks”)

Time frame:
1095–1291

Location:
Levant

Who usually gets the most blame:
definitely
not
Richard the Lionheart and Saladin

Truce of God

When Arab conquerors overran the Middle East in the seventh century, they ended up controlling the birthplace of the Christian faith. These new overlords usually let their Christian subjects live in peace and allowed Christian pilgrims easy access to their holy sites, but every now and then a new Muslim king or dynasty burning with an extra dose of fanaticism would launch a persecution. It got especially bad under Caliph (Arabic for “successor”) al-Hakim of Egypt, who harassed Christians and destroyed churches throughout his domain, including Christendom’s holiest shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in 1009. Even though subsequent caliphs returned to a policy of tolerance, new seeds of mistrust had been sown.
²

Then in 1071, a new team of empire-building Muslims, the Seljuk Turks, wiped out the B
yzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert, which opened up the remaining Byzantine provinces in Asia to conquest. The Byzantine emperor asked the West to save him, but it took many years of indifference before the West finally realized that letting all of Asia fall to the Turks would be a mistake. Meanwhile, the Turks moved south to take Palestine from the Egyptians. As the tide of battle rolled back and forth, Jerusalem changed hands a few times, with at least one massacre of the mostly Muslim ruling class of the city. Christian pilgrims from Europe found themselves caught in a dangerous war zone and returned home with tales of abuse at Muslim hands.

Through most of its early history, Christianity had frowned on war. Saint Augustine had established strict and nearly impossible criteria for declaring and fighting a just war. The church calendar forbade fighting on so many holy days that even officially approved combat was off limits for almost half the year. By the second millennium, the Roman Catholic Church had imposed so many limitations on war-making that it was difficult for the western European aristocracy to get a really good war going.

Not that they didn’t try. Some of the larger states, such as the German Empire, which had imposed rules of civilized behavior on the nobility, were weakening, leading to more and more local disputes being settled by force of arms. Too many unemployed sons of the nobility were wandering around Europe, brawling and fighting, killing each other and innocent bystanders.

Pope Urban II hoped to channel their energy into more acceptable activities, like killing infidels. With a stirring speech at the 1095 Council of Clermont, he encouraged the warrior class of Europe to take up the cross and plant it once again in the Holy Land. It seemed like a good task to keep all those spare knights busy, and it would guarantee the safety of pilgrims. Pope Urban assured them that anyone who took up a crusade would earn valuable spiritual b
onus points to boost their score on Judgment Day. The volunteers pledged to see it through to the end, or may God strike them dead.
³

First Crusade

Meanwhile, a wandering holy man, Peter the Hermit, was preaching directly to the people about the need to free the Holy Land from the Saracens. This People’s Crusade fired the imagination of Europe and attracted a massive following of men and women, soldiers and civilians, all sworn to free the Holy Land.

But first they decided to get rid of the infidels among them, so they rampaged through the Jewish communities in the Rhineland. A thousand Jews were killed or driven to suicide in Mainz. In Wor
ms, crusaders broke into the bishop’s palace and slaughtered 800 Jews who had been given refuge there. More Jews were massacred in Speir, Cologne, and Prague before the crusaders set out for the Holy Land.

As these mobs of armed pilgrims crossed Europe, they tended to commandeer supplies from the communities along their path, secure in the knowledge that God held their quest in the highest favor. The local people, however, had a different opinion and fights broke out. One large crusader band that was killing Jews and plundering supplies across Germany was wiped out by the king of Hungary as it crossed the border. Finally, the first wave of crusaders arrived outside Constantinople, and the Byzantine emperor quickly ferried them across the straits to Asia before they could cause any trouble.

The Turks, meanwhile, had been hearing frightening rumors that a vast horde from the west was bearing
down on them. The rumor became reality when the Byzantines dumped the People’s Crusade in Asia and pointed them toward the Saracens. The crusaders flowed forward, and soon surrounded Nicaea, a Greek city the Turks had recently taken. The Turkish sultan gathered his forces and set out to break the siege. They approached cautiously and skirmished tentatively. Finally, the full armies clashed, but it was not much of a battle. The inexperienced and incompetent mob of Franks was easily wiped out, leaving thousands dead on the field and tens of thousands more on route to the slave markets.
⁴

When the next wave of crusaders arrived, the Turks shrugged. They were still congratulating each other on how easy it had b
een to dispatch the first batch; however, the second wave comprised the more level-headed and prudent crusaders. The first wave had been overeager and unprepared. The second wave was neither. These were the ones who had stayed behind and put some effort into planning and preparation. They sharpened their swords, transferred their estates to competent caretakers, and loaded up on provisions. They put less faith in God and a stout heart, and more in horseflesh and steel.

After crossing into Asia, three columns of Franks converged on the Turks, who mistakenly put all of their effort into fighting the first column they came across, at Dorylaeum in July 1097. When the second column suddenly arrived on their flank, the Turks were surprised, tired, and running out of arrows. Then the third column showed up behind them, and the Turks were slaughtered and scattered in confusion. The sultan fled, abandoning his servants, treasury, and baggage train.
⁵

With the Turks broken, the Franks marched across Asia Minor, reclaiming the lost territory of the Byzantines and pushing toward Syria. There weren’t enough crusaders to totally surround the great city of Antioch, so they camped outside for several months trying to figure out what to do next. Eventually, scouts reported that a Saracen relief force was coming to break the siege, but then, at the last minute, the crusader spy network inside the city paid off. That night, assisted by a Christian Armenian resident of Antioch, a strike force scaled the walls, killed the sentries, and flung open the gates for the waiting army.
⁶

When the Turkish relief force arrived and found the crusaders inside the city, they surrounded the city for a siege of their own. But just as the crusaders lost all hope, they discovered, hidden under the floor of an ancient church, the actual
*
spearhead that had been thrust into Christ’s side at Calvary. Heartened by this powerful talisman, they sallied beyond the gates to fight the Turks.

The long march had killed most of the Franks’ horses, so now they fought on foot, which accidentally turned out to their advantage. Unlike their Saracen counterparts, European knights trained to fight both on horse and on foot, but the Turks had never come up against heavily armored foot soldiers before. Without big warhorses to hit, Turkish arrows had little effect, and when the crusaders closed in with the Saracen light infantry, they butchered the Muslims.
⁷

The First Crusade had never developed a strict command structure. It usually operated as a collection of allied armies voluntarily cooperating (or not) according to consensus, but Prince Bohemond of Taranto had been the practical commander of the crusaders so far.
⁸
Now Bohemond settled down to rule Antioch, while Count Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon led the Crusade south toward Jerusalem.

In December 1098, crusaders took the town of Ma’arra after a month-long siege and slaughtered some 20,000 Saracen captives. By now, with two years of hard marching behind them, the crusaders were exhausted and starving. They had lost most of their horses, and the countryside had been stripped of food. The hungriest crusaders followed the massacre at Ma’arra by roasting and feeding on the bodies of dead Muslims.
*
⁹

Finally, Jerusalem was besieged and captured in July 1099. The crusaders looted the city and killed 70,000 people in the streets—Muslims mostly, but also anyone who looked Muslim. Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue were burned inside. The chroniclers wrote of crusaders wading through blood as deep as their horses’ bridles—an exaggeration obviously, but we can certainly im
agine them splashing through sticky puddles of blood leaking from bodies in the streets.

Style of War

In history books, the Crusades are usually numbered as a sequence of distinct events, but they only looked like that from Europe. What we usually call the First or Seventh Crusade is really the first or seventh large wave of new recruits rounded up and marched out from Europe. This doesn’t mean that peace reigned in Palestine between officially designated Crusades. In Asia, war came and went on its own schedule based on local circumstances.

In both armies, the knights were a specialized minority who fought from horseback. Wrapped head to toe in light chai
n mail, they fought with a lance, sword, axe, or mace, bobbing and ducking behind a large shield that bore the brunt of the enemy’s blows. Each knight was at the head of a team of noncombatant support personnel—squires, pages, grooms—and supplemented by light infantry and archers.

The Seljuk Turks were recent arrivals from the steppe who fought mostly as mounted archers. The older nations of the
Mideast, such as the Fatimids of Egypt, fought much the same way as the Europeans. Neither style of fighting had a clear advantage. European knights were more heavily armored but slower than the Turks. European crossbows had a longer range but a slower rate of fire than the short bows of the Turks. On open ground, the Turks had the advantage, but at close quarters and in siegecraft the Franks did.

Some of the more dedicated crusaders formed into orders of fighting monks to escort and protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Headquartered in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount and the Amalfitan Hospital, these Templars and Hospitallers kept monastic vows of poverty and chastity, and then worked off all that pent-up energy by smiting the heathens. Because the Templars controlled movement to the Holy Land, they invented the letter of credit, whereby pilgrims would leave cash at an office of the order in Europe and carry a receipt to be redeemed at any other office of the order worldwide. As the only Europeans who understood the dark art of moving money around, the Templars acquired a sinister reputation.