The First Crusades (Part I)

[Music] in this lecture we're looking at the history of the Crusades and we're going to do so in two parts and this lecture is the first half of our exploration of the Christian pilgrimage holy war to Jerusalem and to the surrounding regions of the Middle East and we do have to say a word before we begin about the ongoing Legacy of the Crusades all the way down until today in the 21st century there are a few periods of time that have this level of investment at the popular level in terms of a sort of cultural memory as to what did or did not happen in the Crusades in particular in a post 911 world the Crusades are something that is discussed frequently not only at the level of everyday people like you or me but also at the level of politics in 2001 for example not long after the attacks of 911 President Clinton speaking at Georgetown placed the onus of the burden of why this happens why this level of violence is acceptable in certain faiths on what he called religious extremism and he didn't stop only at those extremists within the religion of Islam during his talk He also mentioned that the religious extremism of the Middle Ages had caused the Crusades and all the atrocities that followed other presidents have waged into this battle not least George W bush during the complexity of the Iraq War was not averse to using language of crusade and it drew criticism at the time but he used language that at least echoed the ongoing popular understanding of what happened in the Middle Ages during these crusading years more more recently President Obama speaking at a prayer breakfast urged those who identify as Christians to remain humble because we have read on our Ledger as well and we have atrocities in our background and the amount of conversation that erupted frankly in social media and other places on this subject was really quite striking and that's really only the tip of the iceburg just about anyone who is taught on the Crusades is usually not surprised when those who are attending a lecture let's say have a number of opinions as to just what went on back there usually laced within it particularly amongst Protestants is something of a latent anti-catholic stance the tendency is to blame the pope or to blame certain doctrines within the medieval system of the church well setting all that aside we're not going to try to address or answer all of the popular misconceptions that are out there we can't however signal just a couple that are worth correcting at this point just at the outset first and foremost the pope did not call The Crusade in an effort to conquer land there was no effort in the west initially to move armies vast numbers of troops at enormous expense in an effort to retake the holy land for the western church or for the papacy when the pope called for the Crusade he really only wanted an army of a few thousand to travel down there and to assist the Byzantine empire in their ongoing war and struggle to define the borders of their lands over against the selic Turks so what's going on here is not a land grab or a money grab it's not necessarily corrupt people initially saying that they are going to enact a war in an effort to steal money or land or any of these kinds of things per se in fact the initial pack the initial Crusader oath required that whatever lands were conquered if they had been formerly Byzantine lands that they would be handed back to the Byzantine emperor immediately secondly and most importantly this is the one that comes up more often than not the Crusades were not the first Sally of the war or the struggle between the Middle East and the Western World too often what I hear is that there was a Peaceable Islam off there in the margins of Asia Minor and on into the Iranian plateau and that bloodthirsty Christians went and attacked and stirred up the Hornets nest and that therefore all the hostilities between those who identify as Islam from these regions can trace the origin of their fight all the way back to this point actually the fight or the struggle between those who identified as Islam the califate and Etc had been going on for some time what happens with the Crusades rather is not so much the first attack or the first fight or war between those who are from Islam and those who are from the Christian world but rather the latest in a series of ongoing struggles that would define a millennia frankly all the way from the beginning there was an expansion of Islam sometimes by the sword sometimes not but in terms of its conquering of Christian lands very often it was by the sword and as we've seen when we looked at Al and Theo Spain the armies of Islam had marched all the way up into various parts of Southern France also if we keep a global perspective of Christianity the West is not the entirety of the church there is a Byzantine Church all the way out there on The Fringe at least in terms of The Fringe from the Vantage of Europe and the Byzantine world had over the centuries contracted and expanded its borders in a series of ongoing skirmishes between themselves and the caliphates that carried on the legacy of the Islamic faith so in many ways what we need to do is not so much ignore the Crusades or explain them personally Al as if they were a justifiable good thing but rather we need to actually take an historic position which is that for centuries from the beginning and frankly all the way down until as late as the 16th century European forces and Byzantine forces and forces of Islam would class with each other almost without ceasing so the Crusades were an enormously important part of this but it was not the only part of the story okay so what is a crusade well a crusade is some weird Frankenstein amalgam of a pilgrimage a holy war and Penance and what's going on here is as the Middle Ages we on a couple of things sort of sink up together that provokes within the first crusade in particular a series of convictions and principles that were to define the crusading era in other words when the pope calls for the crusade in the first case they really had no idea what that meant but rather as the First Crusade achieves some level of success and as it self-identifies as a crusade all the crusading spirit thereafter is rather a de facto definition of what they are doing rather than some great leap intellectually that caused them to go and do it well the doctrines in play the theological issues in play or that as the Crusade launched as the popular preachers went around and tried to Stoke up people to go on Crusade there emerged a doctrine of a plinary Indulgence and a plinary Indulgence is a full pardoning of all the Penance one owes for the sake of minor or even in some cases major sins now we're going to talk about the medieval understanding of Salvation in a later lecture so we're not going to go into all this right now but needless to say this is the first instance of this thing called a plinary Indulgence and it was intoxicating to those who heard about it here was the opportunity to bypass purgatory and go straight to heaven forgoing all the Penance that was required as a result of one sin next is this idea of pilgrimage now pilgrimage is quite old is quite ancient almost from the beginning Christians would go on these pilgrimages they'd go on these TRS to various locations usually associated with the Life of Christ these were considered to be for lack of a better word good works good penitential action by the Christian going to the places of the Holy Land in particular and experiencing personally the origins of the faith the last piece and the one that is harder to Define is this concept of holy war as we looked at in our lecture on Augustine and as we've noticed in our lecture on Knights and chivalry Europe really had a problem on its hands when it came to violence and War those who were trained to fight often found themselves being asked or being cajoled not to fight they felt a bit pinned in the church wanted to put an end to violence within the context of Europe itself also Augustine in his doctrine of the just War had laid out categories that would allow a Christian to determine or allow Christian Empire to determine at what point violence was possible now that is in contrast to the ancient Church which took a almost entirely pacifistic stance but as the years wore on after Augustin death the belief in a holy war was now pretty much Ironclad now what is the context of the actual calling of the First Crusade well out in the east in Asia Minor as the caliphates had risen and fallen and as there was division within the house of Islam between Sunni and Shiite Muslims there was often a lack of cohesion when it came to their attempt to gain lands that were owned predominantly by the Byzantine world at one point they expanded quite rapidly all the way up to the borders of Constantinople itself but by the beginning of the 11th century in particular by say roughly 11:25 the Byzantine Empire had reconquered and retaken the vast majority of its previously owned lands that is of course until the rise of the selic Turks now the Turks were a nomadic folk who had come down into the Arabic lands and over the course of a number of years had actually converted and become Muslim themselves well eventually they Rose the power and within the Turkish regimes there arose the selic Turks a particularly effective group at conquering lands and cities and distributing their empire across a vast array of land the other context within Christianity is that not long before the calling of the First Crusade East and West had finally had its Schism now we're going to look at the eastern western Schism in a later lecture but we at least seem to be aware of it just a matter of decades really about a generation before the first crusade launches the Byzantine world and the Catholic World had sundered and that rupturing between the Orthodox faith and the Catholic faith is still in effect today they are still separated well at the calling the First Crusade this was a relatively new thing and so at least in the collective memory of those who were still alive there was a natural tendency to believe that there ought to be some cohesion in the Christian Empire all the way back until Constantine who had founded the city of Constantinople the emperor had considered himself frankly to be the head of both East and West now as we've seen that is beginning to fracture the West really simply just stops taking notice of the Eastern world and with the result of the Schism between the two churches the division between East and West was growing more fixed well as the cic Turks take more and more land eventually the emperor of the Byzantine World Alexius the 1 reaches out for assistance he sends ambassadors and representatives out to the west to meet with Pope Urban II with a request that they send troops to help defend the borders of the Byzantine World from this new onslaught of the armies of the selic Turks well when the pope when Urban hears this and he hears the plight out in the East he decides to take action and of course all the stories we have of the Council of Claremont which is where the First Crusade is called are all really written down after the fact so it's a bit hard to distinguish myth from fact here but what we do know is that on November 27th 1095 Urban II mounted the pulpit at a council that had representatives there of both the church and the state meeting together for its own business Urban issued a sermon in which he laid out the plight of those suffering in the Holy Land he describes the Islamic selic Turk armies as being blood bloodthirsty Savages and he says that our Christian Brethren out in asiia minor need our help and our support he calls on them to mount an army and to enact holy war and go and free these lands so that is the call of the First Crusade November 27th what happens after that though is again the pope really believed that because it was a rescue attempt that it was a support Army that really only a few thousand might go and that he could incentivize this with a number of different ways and that he can Empower preachers in one particular Bishop to really Stoke up this desire frankly he didn't believe anyone was really going to go not many at least not without sufficient encouragement what happened though is Lay preachers those going about Europe trying to stoke up people to come to the Holy Land to go on Crusade actually had an enormous effect in particular the preaching of a plinary Indulgence the ability to move Beyond Purgatory fully initially after death and to enter into heaven perfectly really served almost as a manufactured Assurance of Faith now it wasn't promulgated as such but at the lay level the lay preachers running around really induced a number of people to believe that if they want salvation for their sins and who has more sins in this day and age than Knights well they can now apply their trade they can go to war it will now be a holy war they will not have to make restitution or justification for it the popee himself has called for it and more importantly they will get a plinary adance as well well as a result something in the neighborhood of 100,000 people mounted up and launched the first crusade in fact so excited were some that there was actually launched a non-military crusade initially and this was a band of Crusaders of lay folk frankly untrained people without really much in terms of arms or Weaponry at all certainly not any training and this popular group launches in April of 1096 which is important because the crusading Army had not agreed to head off into land in the Byzantine World until later that fall well off March all this troop of popular peasants and the sort of lay folk overly zealous of the desire for Crusade and they had marched their way down to the areas of hungry and this group this popular group was an enormous catastrophe the vast majority of them did this not because they were crazy per se though that's debatable but rather there was something at work in their minds about this being perhaps the end times there was a belief among some that they would Liberate the holy land that there would be a Christian King in the Middle East just prior to the coming of Christ there was also belief that vast numbers of people around the world would convert at one last swoop before the coming of antichrist and these folks do seem to believe that they are enacting some part part of the end times which in part explains their fervor and the rather silly idea that they would March off by themselves early for the Crusade I mean who arrives early for a crusade right particularly not with the army with you well later that year in 1096 the actual armies began to launch and they arrived in the area of the bosis there to help Alexius I first well immediately the problems began to emerge as to how the First Crusade was going to go for all of his gratitude that the crusading armies had arrived Alexius was more concerned that he recovered these lands and the monies that were owed to him he continues to fret and enforce a really overly zealous oath that all the Crusaders would to take which is that any lands taken were to be handed over immediately and by and large the Crusaders do there is one who doesn't later but it's a bit too complex to go into here well the crusading armies launch with both Byzantine forces and the crusading armies from the West they had down to the city of NAA which they take in a matter of months now taking a city in this day and age is usually not as it's depicted in the movies despite what Hollywood has told us virtually no one ever launched themselves at high walls with people with stones and sticks and arrows and all kinds of other things up on top they knew better kill all of your troops through some crazy volley of propelling their lives against the walls is not going to happen is a recipe for disaster is instead usually this was a Siege Warfare you would come you would attack you would surround a city and you would try to starve them out well NAA fell pretty quickly and the crusading Army heads down and they arrive at the city of Antioch which is right there on the curve just before you head south to Jerusalem well Antioch was a different matter it was a virtually impregnable City very high walls relatively strong fortifications within and a significant amount of supplies within that would allow them to withstand a Siege well The Siege dragged on for months and the problem with the siege is you only have so many supplies yourself you have to feed these armies you have to supply them you have to pay them on some level and if all you're doing is sitting around waiting for the guys inside to get hungry enough to come out while you're in for a long haul and the siege of Antioch is almost comic if it wasn't so tragic and so many lives were lost the Christian Army surround it the Byzantine and the Western rulers begin to get into a squabble at some point the Byzantine armies had withdrawn and gone back to Constantinople and a number of the western folks getting tired of this said forget the plary Indulgence I'll just do the penants and they Trek back to Europe well in the end they heard that there was a relieving Army as it's called from the Turks that were coming in order to break the siege and end the Crusade and if it weren't for the sake of deception someone on the inside of the city agreeing to open the the gates in The Still of the Night and let people in then it might very well have carried on for some time what happens is as The Siege breaks they find access to the city they go in and they Massacre anyone who's left in the city Antioch is now depopulated with the exception usually of women and children well just as they went into the city the relieving Army arrived and so the Christians now on the inside lock the gate and now they're being besieged I mean this is almost Mighty python sort of a round robin as to who's going to besiege whom well all seems to be lost at this point for the crusading armies however their Spirits were picked up because a man by the name of Peter Bartholomew one of these more millenarian or apocalyptic folks who had come along for the Crusade who he said through an ecstatic Vision had been led to discover buried beneath a church there in Antioch A Relic that is known today as the true Lance or the Lance the spear that pierced Christ's side while he was on the cross Now by and large those who were Knights those who were the nobility thought Peter was crazy Peter didn't think he was crazy though and the vast majority of the popular level folks thought he had actually discovered something that was a true relic of the faith and through that and frankly through sheer desperation eventually the armies in the city of Antioch have to Sally Forth and they do and they managed to break the Turkish armies who then flee so by this point technically if you go only by what Alexus the first has called for which is the relieving of the borders right up against Constantinople and the reconquering of Asia Minor for the Byzantine World well technically the Crusade is done now and this is the problem though no one defined what their final goal was when the Crusade launched Urban had mentioned in particular the city of Jerusalem in his sermon though of course none of the Crusaders were technically there at the time but Jerusalem was for most of the westerners the Ultimate Prize it was not the prize for the Byzantine world the Byzantine Empire and frankly Christendom as a whole had not held Jerusalem for 400 years it had been part of the Muslim empire for all those centuries but stoked by this holy war the Crusaders now believe that they could take Jerusalem and they believe that they were called to do so it's so down they March and in 1099 they assault Jerusalem and they take it they enter the city and they assault and murder some 3,000 folks within the city and they take it for the sake of the Christian Empire now again this is not in their minds taking lands that were not theirs they had enough of a memory of the ancient world to realize that by and large a lot of these areas while not wholesale Christian had been under the protection of the Roman Empire and since they believe that the Byzantine world and the Christian Western Empire were extensions of the Roman Empire they thought of these as their lands they thought they were freeing these lands not taking them by force now I don't mention that to justify what they did but rather to give you a sense of what they thought they were doing well after the taking of Jerusalem this is the end of the First Crusade as we call it and there are a number of Crusades again the crusading Spirit as it's called carries on long after this but this is the great First Crusade the very first one the one that launched so much of the crusading spirit going forward and a number of things emerged after the first crusade was finished first and foremost you have founded a couple of really unique groups that are the stuff of Legend when it comes to Dan Brown to Vinci Code levels of conspiracy theories you have the Knights Templar and the Knights hospitaler now both of these groups emerge as a result of the crusading spirit if they had been something of a holy war pilgrimage what began to happen is as they held these territories and as they broke these lands up into three or four Regional groups or Regional kingdoms there arose the need for protection of escorts of the ongoing crusading Spirit to protect those who were coming down now not in large numbers but in sufficient numbers and the need of protection from the Turkish bands and Raiders and armies all along the areas that they had now reconquered well the first to emerge are the Knights Templar as they're called today or the order of the temple now the Templars get their name because as they were in the city of Jerusalem they used as their headquarters a mosque that at the time was housed on the top of Temple Mount which is today where the Dome of the Rock is well the Templars used this as their base and because they were there headquartered up up on top of the Temple Mount they became known as the Knights of the temple another group the dots hospitaler were a group who were designed to protect those who were coming in to the holy lands for the sake of Pilgrimage by far the most successful and the most lucrative and the most influential group though were the Templars well part of the reason why the Templars are so well known in terms of this urban legend about them being so mysterious and having such secret knowledge of things is a result of a couple things the most important of which are the fact that they are a funky group they are monk Warriors some kind of ninja sword wearing tonsured crazy man and there had been nothing like this the idea of a monk someone of a monastic order who walks around armed of the teeth like Rambo is just something they never seen before in the Christian World also they were far off so they were not well known within Europe at least by and large and so just by the circumstance is they achieved this level of mysteriousness that other orders because they were based out of Europe did not have the major factor though is the desire to support financially the Knights Templar and their work in the Holy Land LED eventually to the Knights Templar gaining enormous wealth in land and other things within Europe itself at times people would die and leave Estates or money the Templars based churches would be built back in Europe in various cities if you go to the city of Cambridge today for example there is something called the Round Church a great example of ancient architecture there well during these years the Middle Ages this was at times a Templar church and so you combine the weirdness of the Templars with their money and their power which was independent of the natural structures of allegiance to the feudal system and the fact that they are in the Holy Land and you have a pretty ripe situation for a conspiracy theory which is frankly why all the way down until today the Templars have this kind of mysterious legend about them and in a later lecture we're actually going to see that it's actually the king of France who eventually exterminates them only contributing to the Legacy that they held some sort of secret knowledge or power that the kings of Europe are now trying to take beyond that though beyond the actual founding of these orders you have the ongoing problem of the West in particular trying to maintain financially and in terms of personnel lands that they had now taken by for it is an enormously expensive and timec consuming operation and overwhelmingly the populace the people in these lands in these cities were not Christian or if they were they were not Western Christian they were Byzantine and so what's going to begin to happen is the Turkish Army will come back and reconquer some of these lands and the crusading spirit has to be roked and more Crusades launched as a result in other words if the First Crusade had actually followed Alex Us's Wills in the oath and simply handed these lands back and fled back to Europe to enjoy The Libertine lifestyle of somebody with the plinary Indulgence well then the ongoing Crusader Spirit might very well have been quenched however now and for centuries the West will believe that these lands are now theirs and they will exert enormous energy and time and money and resources to maintain them or to attempt at times to reconquer them if they lose them only cementing and deepening the desire to go on crusade in Europe lastly the legacy of this first crusade is that the relationship between East and West between the Byzantine world and the Catholic world only grew weaker the West viewed the Byzantine Empire as duplicitous as promising to help and not helping as being only concerned about money and then turning their back when times got tight and so any opportunity for collaboration and goodwi which might have restored east and west or at least begun the process of the restoration now only solidified the distinguishing between east and west and as we'll see in our next lecture when we look at the ongoing evolution of the later Crusades what begins to happen is eventually East and West become [Music] enemies [Music] [Music]