Summary Of Crusade

summary of crusade according Encyclopaedia Britanica

any of a series of European military expeditions, often counted at eight although numbering many more than that, which were directed against Muslim control of Jerusalem and the Christian shrine of the Holy Sepulchre and that took place from 1095 to 1270.During the 11th century, feudal Europe underwent revivals of both expansive commerce and religion. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and other holy places in the East became increasingly popular. At the same time, the Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople (now Istanbul), was being threatened by the rising power of the Seljuq Turks. The Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus turned to Europe, specifically to the pope of the Roman church, for aid.At the church council meeting at Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II called for a Christian army to aid Alexius and to recapture the Holy Sepulchre. Armies were raised by such knights as Hugh of Vermandois, Bohemond, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, and Robert of Flanders. Smaller, generally ill-organized bands were collected by sundry lesser warriors, adventurers, and zealots. Over the next two years they assembled in and around Constantinople and prepared to march south across what today is Turkey. After a long siege they captured the heavily fortified town of Antioch in 1098. On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem fell to the crusaders, and its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were slaughtered. In the following decades the crusaders gained control of a narrow strip of the Palestine coast and established the kingdom of Jerusalem, the county of Tripoli, the principality of Antioch, and the county of Edessa, the so-called crusader states, under various European rulers.In 1144 the Seljuq ruler Zangi, who had established a strong Muslim state at Mosul, captured the city of Edessa from the crusaders. When news of Edessa's fall reached Europe, Pope Eugenius III called for the Second Crusade. During this Crusade, armies led by Emperor Conrad III of Germany and King Louis VII of France joined forces in Jerusalem in the spring of 1148 and with 50,000 men struck north at Damascus. They began a siege at Damascus but were forced to retreat by an army led by Zangi's successor, Nureddin, and the Second Crusade ended in humiliating failure. Nureddin occupied Damascus in 1154, and his nephew Saladin gained control of all of Egypt in 1169 and occupied Aleppo in 1183, thus encircling the crusader states. In 1187 Saladin destroyed most of Jerusalem's army in a battle at Hattin near the Sea of Galilee and on October 2 captured Jerusalem and most of the other European strongholds.Shocked by the fall of Jerusalem, Pope Gregory VIII called for the Third Crusade. The largest crusader army yet assembled set out under the command of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in May 1189, but Frederick's death by drowning a year later saved Saladin from having to confront him. In 1191 Richard I the Lion-Heart of England conquered the Byzantine province of Cyprus and then joined Phillip II Augustus of France in the siege of Acre. In July Acre fell and its inhabitants were slaughtered. After failing to reach Jerusalem, in 1192 Richard I negotiated a five-year peace treaty with Saladin that permitted European pilgrims access to holy shrines.The Fourth Crusade, called in 1198 by Pope Innocent III to strike against Egypt, took a bizarre course. The crusader army was unable to pay for ships and outfitting obtained from Venice and so agreed to assist the Venetians in capturing the city of Zara, in Hungary (now Zadar, Croatia), and then moving against Constantinople. Constantinople fell on April 13, 1204, and the crusaders sacked the city. The crusaders and Venetians then established the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which was to last a little over 60 years. Although the crusaders were repudiated by Pope Innocent III, the Fourth Crusade destroyed any hope of alliance between the Byzantine and Latin churches. It also mortally wounded the Byzantine Empire.A wave of revived crusading fervour in Europe produced the pathetic Children's Crusade of 1212, in which thousands of children were lost or sold into slavery. Three years later Innocent III called for another strike at the Muslim world. The Fifth Crusade, manned chiefly by French and German crusaders, captured Damietta, near the Nile, in 1219. Floods stopped a march on Cairo, and the crusade ended indecisively with an eight-year truce. This was the last crusade organized directly by the papacy. On the Sixth Crusade, Emperor Frederick II of Germany, who had been excommunicated for his many delays in setting out, negotiated in 1229 a treaty which returned Jerusalem to the Europeans for 10 years. In 1244, forced west by the advancing Mongols, the Khwarezmian Turks sacked Jerusalem with Egyptian help. King Louis IX of France launched another crusade in 1248, but the Seventh Crusade, like the Fifth, failed in Egypt. King Louis led the last of the numbered crusades, the Eighth, 22 years later, but shortly after landing in Tunis, most of the army, and Louis, died of disease.Although ill-starred expeditions continued to be launched, even into the 15th century, the era of the Crusades had come to an end. After the Mamluks of Egypt succeeded in driving back the Mongols from Syria, the Mamluk sultan Baybars I dealt harshly with the crusaders, many of whom had formed alliances with the Mongols. In 1268 the Mamluks captured Antioch and slaughtered all its inhabitants. Tripoli fell in 1289, and Acre, the last Latin outpost on the mainland, fell in 1291._