Sommaire pour The Crusades de Inside History Collection

On 1st July 1097, on a hill outside Dorylaeum in present-day Turkey, the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan watched as his warriors were slaughtered by an army of Christians. The sultan had expected to face an undisciplined army of peasants, but the Crusaders in their heavy armour were like human fortresses on the battlefield. The Christians’ blades made short work of the sultan’s elite marksmen. Panicked by the sight, Kilij Arslan leapt on his horse and galloped away to safety. Contemporary historian Ibn al-Qalanisi wrote: “The Franks cut the Turkish army to pieces. They killed, pillaged and took many prisoners, who were sold into slavery.” FEAR SOON SPREAD The Crusaders had been on the move for about a year. Their numbers had halved since leaving Western Europe, but the army, now…

At the start of 1096, disturbing news reached the Jewish population of the German Rhineland. Letters and visitors unanimously reported that French Christians were mobilising a campaign to drive the Muslims from Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The volunteers were inflamed by a great hatred, not only of Muslims, but of all other faiths. The Jews of Rouen had suffered the consequences when a group of Christians forced them into a church where they were given the choice of being baptised or killed. The German Jews had better be prepared because something awful was afoot, warned the French Jews. Horrified, many German Jews devoted themselves to prayer and fasting, says the Mainz Anonymous, an almost contemporaneous chronicle written in Hebrew by an unknown author. After that, German Jews could only…

On 17th May 1102, the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin I, got a nasty surprise. With 500 warriors, he had set out to meet a Muslim army that threatened his newly formed Crusader state. According to intelligence, his 500 knights and foot soldiers would be enough to defeat the Muslims, but Baldwin soon found out that his spies had been sorely mistaken. Near the town of Ramla, 45 kilometres from Jerusalem, he was attacked by a thousand-strong force of Sudanese archers, and Arabs and Berbers on horseback. The king was surrounded, and one by one his men were cut down. Desperate, Baldwin sought safety in the massive, fortified tower he had built on the site two years earlier. Here he hid until he could ride out under cover of night for…

On 16th May 1204, Count Baldwin IX of Flanders was proclaimed Emperor Baldwin I of the Byzantine Empire in its capital Constantinople. He was crowned in the city’s mighty cathedral, Hagia Sophia – continuing a tradition that stretched back seven hundred years. The new ruler donned a robe bearing the imperial coat of arms, the double-headed eagle, as he was blessed by bishops amid colourful mosaic friezes of the Virgin Mary. Just a month earlier, the new emperor’s forces had captured and plundered Constantinople. They had robbed churches of their treasures and raped and sacked their fellow Christians en route to holy war in Egypt. The Fourth Crusade never got beyond the Byzantine capital. The Crusaders settled in the city after conquering Constantinople, and it marked the beginning of the…

One August day in 1099, a large crowd of refugees snaked through the streets of Baghdad and into the palace of Caliph Al-Mustazhir Billah. With trembling voices, they recounted the terrifying experiences they’d been subject to during the Christian conquest of the Holy Land. Some had witnessed the massacre of Jerusalem’s inhabitants when the Christians razed the city a month earlier. They described how their family and friends had been hunted down and eventually slaughtered by the Europeans. Together they urged the caliph to drive out the invaders, and swore revenge on the infidels who had taken their land, desecrated their shrines and killed their loved ones. MUSLIMS INVADED EUROPE The Crusade and the attack on Jerusalem were the culmination of tensions that had grown over four to five centuries…

During Easter 1248, the nobleman Jean de Joinville gathered his vassals at his estate in France. That week, Joinville’s son had been born, and the group, which included the richest men in the region, danced, ate and enjoyed themselves. But on the Friday, the mood became serious. Jean de Joinville called his people together and announced that he intended to go on a Crusade with the king. He also earnestly asked everyone to tell him if he had made any mistakes or done anyone any wrong, so that he could make amends before he left. Jean de Joinville did not want to be burdened by quarrels with anyone when, under the leadership of King Louis IX, he set out on the Seventh Crusade. He knew that the road to the…

In the late afternoon of 18th March 1314, the citizens of Paris witnessed one of the cruellest scenes of the Middle Ages. On the Île aux Juifs – an island in the Seine – two men were burned as heretics. As the fire engulfed their bodies, one shouted loudly and clearly that he was innocent before dying with his hands stretched out towards Notre Dame Cathedral. The execution of the Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and his closest aide marked the tragic end of the order’s eventful history. During almost two centuries the order of warrior monks had celebrated triumphs so great that its dramatic fall would have been unthinkable only a few decades earlier. The history of the Knights Templar began when two French knights in Jerusalem, Hugues…

The sailors could sense something was wrong when they sailed into the Crusader city of Acre in the summer of 1187. The Muslim commander Saladin had been attacking Christian possessions in the Holy Land for some time, and the crew of the northern Italian merchant ship feared that the Muslims had now conquered Acre. The men’s suspicions were confirmed when a boat carrying armed Arabs slid alongside their vessel. Conrad, a nobleman aboard the merchant ship, asked everyone to keep quiet and let him do the talking. Speaking in cool businesslike terms, he told the Arab soldiers that the ship was a cargo vessel bringing goods from Genoa and that he wanted to broker a trade agreement with Saladin. Having set out his terms, Conrad asked the guards to fire…

JUDAISM ■ Around 2000 BC, God ordered Abraham to migrate to a “promised land”, Canaan, where he would be the father of “the chosen people” of Israel. According to the Bible, in 957 BC, King Solomon built the First Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where al-Aqsa Mosque now stands. Romans destroyed the Second Temple in AD 70. The remains are known today as the Wailing Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. RITUALS Passover is the most important Jewish holiday. Unleavened bread and bitter herbs are eaten. On Shabbat, the Jews’ weekly day of rest, they traditionally eat challah. It is a sweet bread baked without butter or milk. At the Passover meal, called Seder, Jews read the Haggadah, which tells of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. CHRISTIANITY ■ Christianity sees itself as the new covenant between humans and God,…

When Pope Urban II addressed a crowd in the French city of Clermont on 27th November 1095, he painted a horrific picture of Muslim crimes against Christians: innocents had been tortured and their intestines pulled out while they still lived, women had been raped and babies hurled on to stone floors. The Pope’s words shocked the thousands in attendance, and his call to go to war against the Muslims was met with cheers. No sooner had Urban II finished speaking than the first Crusader came forward. “The bishop of Le Puy, a man of great repute and the highest nobility, went up to the lord pope with a smiling face and on bended knee begged and beseeched his permission and blessing to make the journey,” one eyewitness recounted. The bishop’s…

On 17th July 1099, Crusaders gathered in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Still wearing their blood-splattered garments from the previous days’ massacre of the city’s Muslims and Jews, they clapped their hands, sang and thanked God for their victory over the unbelievers. “This is the day which the Lord has made; we shall rejoice and be glad in it,” wrote the chronicler Raymond of Aguilers. After the service, the Crusaders walked solemnly in procession through the city. Bodies and severed limbs still lay scattered in the streets, and the stench of death hung in the air between empty houses. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem offered riches and trading opportunities on a scale of which the Crusaders had scarcely dared dream. Before long, the Holy City was a…

All was lost. Dizzy and gasping for air, Guy, king of the Holy City, defender of Christianity, sat in a tent in the middle of nowhere. His knights and footmen had been crushed or put to flight in the mountains around the village of Hattin in what is now part of Israel. The defeat on 4th July 1187 had been partly self-inflicted, for Guy’s forces had not brought enough food or water for their expedition. Without sufficient provisions, they were easy prey to Saladin’s exhaustion strategy, and now a humiliated King Guy of Jerusalem sat in the Arab commander’s tent. Saladin handed him a cup of cold water, which Guy drank eagerly. Like his kingdom, he now lived on borrowed time, at the mercy of the Arabs. The defeat at…

At sunrise on 14th January 1208, Pierre de Castelnau’s life came to an abrupt end. As papal envoy, he was travelling through Languedoc in southern France to deal with the local priests, who were suspected of heresy. On the banks of the Rhône, he suddenly heard a horse galloping up behind him. Before the emissary could react, a lance pierced his back. Mortally wounded, the cleric tumbled off his mule and into the mud of the riverbank. The men in his entourage helped him up and sat with him as his life ebbed away. At the news of his envoy’s death, Pope Innocent III grasped the wick of a burning candle and extinguished the flame while uttering a curse. Shortly before his death, Pierre had met with Raymond, Count of…