Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

Of all the events of the medieval period, it is surely the Crusades which provoke the strongest reaction and continue to have the greatest political impact today. To some, they denote a sense of adventure and a noble quest or the actions of people motivated by sincere religious conviction, while to others they were a forerunner of the colonial period and the oppression of indigenous populations by western Europeans. What these viewpoints have in common, however, is that they view the Crusades primarily as a period of violence intensified by religious fervour, which both drove and resulted from the military conflict. However, a more careful examination of the two hundred years of the crusading period reveals that conflict was in fact rare. Battles were risky and armies were expensive. Instead, for most of the era a mutual accommodation was found between the various groups. This is rarely discussed in modern accounts of the Crusades, yet it is a crucial aspect of them for it demonstrates how, even in times of supposedly the most fervent religious conflict, people usually merely got on with their lives. The purpose of this book is to explore this underexamined aspect of the Crusades in order to demonstrate that they not only resulted in violent conflict, but also produced some of the most tolerant and multicultural spaces of the whole medieval period.

The History of the Crusades

It was on November 27, 1095 that, according to traditional scholarship, it all began. A speech, one of the most significant and influential in history, outside the French town of Clermont was its catalyst. There, the Pope, Urban II, exhorted the people of Western (“Latin”) Europe to leave their homes, travel to the Holy Land, and take control of the Christian holy sites, and particularly Jerusalem, from the Muslims. The effect was electric. Tens of thousands of people heeded the call and in 1096 joined the armies heading east under the banner of the Cross. These armies marched through the Christian Byzantine Empire and then Muslim lands in Anatolia, fighting off the Turks who tried to stop them. Having arrived in northern Syria, in October 1097 they besieged the great city of Antioch, which was notable as having been one of the four main centres of the Church and the place where the followers of Christ were first called Christians.