3 Results Of The Crusades

Jun 25, 2018 The crusades, a series of European holy wars waged from the 11th to the 13th century, had an enormous impact on the European economy. The long term effects of the crusades included the establishment of lending institutions across the continent, standardized methods of taxation and an increase in European trade. Start studying Results of the Crusades. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

1. Results Of The Crusades
2. What Were The 3 Results Of The Crusades
3. The Third Crusade Results

Introduction
The First Crusades
The Second Crusades
The Third Crusades & After
Significance of the Crusades
The Eight Crusades

Introduction

The Crusades were a series of military expeditions conducted by European Christians in the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th centuries to conquer the land of Israel from the Muslims or to repel their counterattacks.

The explicit cause was the reports received from Jerusalem concerning the maltreatment of Christian pilgrims and the way their access to the Holy Places was obstructed. In many of these reports, the malevolence of the Jews was also stressed, so that from the beginning the ground was prepared for including the Jews in the freshly stimulated animosity against the unbelievers: indeed, at the period of the analogous expeditions of French knights to assist the Spanish Christians against the Moors (c. 1065), the Jews of Narbonne and elsewhere had been attacked notwithstanding the admonitions of Pope Alexander II. It was originally intended that the crusaders should concern themselves solely with the success of their expedition overseas, without intervening in the affairs of the Christian countries of Europe. However, precisely because the crusaders ignored this stipulation, the Crusade was partially deflected from its initial course, with tragic consequences for the Jews of Europe.

For 200 years, Palestine was dominated by the Crusaders, who, following an appeal by Pope Urban II, came from Europe to recover the Holy Land from the infidels. In July 1099, after a five-week siege, the knights of the First Crusade and their rabble army captured Jerusalem, massacring most of the city’s non-Christian inhabitants. Barricaded in their synagogues, the Jews defended their quarter, only to be burnt to death or sold into slavery. During the next few decades, the Crusaders extended their power over the rest of the country, through treaties and agreements, but mostly by bloody military victories. The Latin Kingdom of the Crusaders was that of a conquering minority confined mainly to fortified cities and castles.

When the Crusaders opened transportation routes from Europe, pilgrimages to the Holy Land became popular and, at the same time, increasing numbers of Jews sought to return to their homeland. Documents of the period indicate that 300 rabbis from France and England arrived in a group, with some settling in Acro (Akko), others in Jerusalem.

Historian Bernard Lewis observed that the Crusades are sometimes characterized as “an unwarranted act of aggression a peaceful Muslim world,” but that was not the case.

After the overthrow of the Crusaders by a Muslim army under Saladin (1187), the Jews were again accorded a certain measure of freedom, including the right to live in Jerusalem. Although the Crusaders regained a foothold in the country after Saladin’s death (1193), their presence was limited to a network of fortified castles. Crusader authority in the Land ended after a final defeat (1291) by the Mamluks, a Muslim military class which had come to power in Egypt.

The First Crusade

The Crusade was preached by Pope Urban II at Clermont-Ferrand (subsequently referred to as Har Afel, “the mount of gloom,” by Jewish chroniclers of the Crusades) on Nov. 27, 1095, at the close of a council which had convened there. Those who obeyed the call affixed crosses to their outer garments, thus the name croisés, crociati, or crusaders. The Jews termed them to’im (“[misguided] wanderers”). At the outset, nothing in the proclamation of Urban II seemed to threaten the Jews, but it would appear that the Jews in France sensed danger, since they sent emissaries to the Rhine communities to warn them of the possible threat. The first group of crusaders gathered in France on their way to Germany. They may already have attacked some Jewish communities on their way, possibly in Rouen, and more certainly in Lorraine. It was already clear that the crusaders, or at least some of them, were gathering in the Rhine valley to follow the traditional route to the Orient along the Rhine and Danube rivers. The community of Mainz was more troubled about the French communities and thought that those in the Rhineland had no reason for concern on their own account. However, their sense of security was soon to be brutally shaken shortly after the first muster of the crusaders and before the Jewish communities of Germany could take whatever precautions were open to them. The sight of the wealthy Rhenish communities acted as an incentive to the crusaders, who decided to punish “the murderers of Christ” wherever they passed, before their encounter with their official enemies, the Muslims. Soon it was rumored that Godfrey of Bouillon himself had vowed that he would not set out for the Crusade until he had avenged the crucifixion by spilling the blood of the Jews, declaring that he could not tolerate that even one man calling himself a Jew should continue to live.

The first bands of crusaders arrived outside Cologne on April 12, 1096. For a month they left the Jews in peace, perhaps because the Jews of France had given Peter the Hermit a letter asking the Jewish communities he passed through on his journey to supply him and his followers with all the food they required, in exchange for Peter’s undertaking to use his influence in their favor. However, the swelling throng of crusaders, which surpassed all expectations, and the religious frenzy preceding the departure of the army rapidly induced a change of mood which rendered the influence of Peter the Hermit ineffectual. Aware of the inherent danger in the situation, the leaders of the Mainz community hastily dispatched a delegation to Emperor Henry IV, who wrote immediately to the princes, bishops, and counts of the empire to forbid them to harm the Jews. Godfrey himself replied that he had never had any such intention. For their greater security, the communities of Cologne and Mainz each presented him with a gift of 500 pieces of silver, and he promised to leave them in peace, which he did.

Meanwhile, the Crusade had evolved into a ponderous machine made up of various elements: the greater nobility, the lesser nobles such as Count Emicho of Leiningen, and the people. It was the last element which proved particularly receptive to the anti-Jewish slogans spreading rapidly among its ranks and it was less amenable to discipline. Although the bishops and prominent nobles were generally opposed to such ideas, they had no wish to see Christians fight Christians over the Jews. Frequently their assistance to the attacked Jews was passive at the most. It was in the region where the crusaders assembled that violence broke out, in the weeks between Passover and Shavuot. The rioting continued until Tammuz (June–July).

On the eighth of Iyyar (May 3, 1096), the crusaders surrounded the synagogue of Speyer; unable to break into it, they attacked any Jews they could find outside the synagogue, killing eleven of them. One of the victims, a woman, preferring death to conversion, the only choice left open by the crusaders, inaugurated the tradition of freely accepted martyrdom. Kiddush ha-Shem, martyrdom for the glory of God, thus became the exemplary answer of Jews threatened in their life and faith by the crusaders.

On the 23^rd of Iyyar (May 18, 1096) Worms suffered a similar fate. The crusaders first massacred the Jews who had remained in their houses, then, eight days later, those who had sought an illusory refuge in the bishop’s castle. The victims numbered about 800; only a few accepted conversion and survived, the great majority choosing to be killed or suicide rather than apostasy. Hearing of the massacre, the Jews of Mainz asked for the bishop’s protection, paying him 400 pieces of silver to this end. When the crusaders, led by Emicho, arrived outside the town on the third of Sivan (May 27, 1096), the burghers hastened to open the gates. The Jews took up arms under the leadership of Kalonymus b. Meshullam. Weakened through fasting, for they had hoped to avert the disaster through exemplary piety, the Jews had to retreat to the bishop’s castle; however, the latter could do nothing for them, as he himself had to flee before the combined assault of crusaders and burghers. After a brief struggle, a wholesale massacre ensued. More than 1,000 Jews met their deaths, either at the enemy’s hands or their own. Those who managed to escape were overtaken; almost no one survived. A comparable disaster occurred in Cologne, where the community was attacked on the sixth of Sivan (May 30, 1096). The bishop dispersed the town’s Jews to hide them in nearby localities: at Neuss, Wevelinghofen, Eller, Xanten, Mehr, Kerpen, Geldern, and Ellen. The crusaders located them and a bloodbath followed. At Trier the bishop could not protect his Jews, as he himself had to go into hiding, and he consequently advised them to become Christians. The great majority refused, preferring suicide. At Regensburg, all the Jews were dragged to the Danube where they were flung into the water and forced to accept baptism. At Metz, Prague, and throughout Bohemia , one massacre followed another. These came to an end when Emicho’s crusaders were decisively halted and crushed by the Hungarians, who, incensed by their excesses when they poured through the country, had risen against them. Seeing in this the hand of God, the Jews promptly set about reconstructing their ruined communities. There had been more than 5,000 victims.

The Jews who had been baptized under duress generally continued to practice Judaism in secret. As early as 1097, Emperor Henry IV allowed them openly to return to their former faith, an action which was strongly condemned by the antipope Clement III. Henry also ordered in May 1098 an inquiry into the manner of disposal of the property of massacred Jews in Mainz thus provoking the displeasure of the local bishop. In about 1100, Jews returned to Mainz, but their position was not yet quite secure, and the Jews of the upper town could scarcely communicate with those in the lower. In 1103, Henry IV and the imperial lords finally proclaimed a truce which, among other things, guaranteed the peace of the Jews.

Meanwhile, the crusaders had reached Jerusalem (June 7, 1099), and the siege had begun. The city was captured on July 15, with Godfrey entering it through the Jewish quarter, where inhabitants defended themselves alongside their Muslim neighbors, finally seeking refuge in the synagogues, which were set on fire by the attackers. A terrible massacre ensued; the survivors were sold as slaves; some being later redeemed by Jewish communities in Italy. The Jewish community of Jerusalem came to an end and was not reconstituted for many years, but the Jewish centers in Galilee went unscathed. However, the great community of Ramleh dispersed, as did that of Jaffa, so that, overall, the Jewish community in the Holy Land was greatly diminished.

The Second Crusade

On the loss of Edessa by the crusaders (1144) the West became troubled over the fate of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and a new Crusade to save it was preached by Pope Eugene III. The popes attempted to encourage the crusaders at the Jews’ expense. Innocent III in 1198 ordered that no interest should be chargeable during the absence of crusaders on debts they incurred to the Jews and that anything already received should be returned. Since the return of a crusader was problematical, this restriction when it was observed implied at best the immobility of Jewish capital over prolonged periods, at worst the possibility of total confiscation (which was to become more widespread with the extension from the 13^th century of the term “Crusade” to any campaign in any part of the world in which the popes might be politically interested). Naturally, this caused great difficulties to their Jewish creditors. In one way or another, as soon as the Second Crusade was announced, the clouds began to gather once more over the Jews of Europe. As early as the summer of 1146, a Cistercian monk, Radulph, while preaching the Crusade, violently attacked the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, exhorting the crusaders to avenge themselves on “those who had crucified Jesus” before setting out to fight the Muslims. The spiritual leader of the Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux, pointed out the theological error in his arguments, strictly forbidding any excess against the Jews, who were to be neither killed nor expelled. Although the anti-Jewish riots had begun before his intervention, he succeeded in preventing them from spreading so that, in the final count, they were far less extensive than those in the First Crusade. The persecution began in Elul (August–September). A few isolated Jews were put to death. At Cologne, the Jews bought the protection of the bishop and managed to find refuge in the fortress of Walkenburg. The bishop even went as far as having the leader of a mob blinded for killing a number of Jews. There were few victims at Worms and at Mainz, but more than 20 at Wuerzburg. Scores of Jews sought refuge in the castles and the mountains. In Bohemia, about 150 lost their lives, and victims were equally numerous in Halle and Carinthia. As in the First Crusade, the community of France suffered less than the Rhineland communities. Jacob b. Meir Tam was set upon a group of crusaders, who stabbed him in five places in memory of the wounds suffered by Jesus, but he succeeded in escaping with the help of a knight with whom he was acquainted. In England, the Jews were left in peace. Everywhere, Jews who had been converted by force were allowed to return to Judaism undisturbed. By the next summer, order had been restored, and the Jewish communities had everywhere recovered.

In the Holy Land, the Second Crusade had concluded with the conquest of Ashkelon by the crusaders. Benjamin of Tudela and Pethahiah of Regensburg, who visited the crusading kingdom around 1160 and 1180 respectively, found well-established Jewish communities in Ashkelon, Ramleh, Caesarea, Tiberias, Acre, among other localities, with scattered individuals living elsewhere: it seems that the Jewish settlement of Jerusalem was restricted to a handful of individuals, though a few years later Judah Alḥarizi (1216) found a prosperous community there. The Samaritans seem to have remained undisturbed in Nablus as well as Ashkelon and Caesarea. It would therefore appear that the warriors of the Second Crusade left the Jewish communities relatively undisturbed.

Meanwhile the Latin Kingdom had begun to crumble under the blows of its enemies. When Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, the Jews of Europe suffered the consequences of this defeat. It had already become habitual to harass the Jews whenever a Crusade was in the offing. In 1182, Emperor Frederick I took the Jews of the empire under his protection, receiving, as was customary, substantial payment for his pains. As soon as the news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe, he forbade all anti-Jewish sermons and renewed his promise of protection. At the beginning of 1188, a tragedy was narrowly averted in Mainz. Drawing a lesson from experience, the Jews of Mainz, Speyer, Strasbourg, Worms, Wuerzburg, and elsewhere left their towns to seek refuge in the nearby fortified castles. The few Jews who remained at Mainz owed their lives to the Diet which had convened there; and during the proceedings the emperor and his son forbade on direst penalties any interference with the Jews, threatening death to anyone who killed a Jew. These warnings were echoed by the bishops, who threatened excommunication for those who persecuted Jews. All this had cost the Jews of the empire huge sums, and, more than ever before, they became dependent on the favors and the passing whims of their masters.

The Third Crusade and After

In England, the Third Crusade had the most savage repercussions. England had taken little interest and no part in the first two Crusades, but her zeal was none the less intense when Richard the Lion-hearted decided to take part in person in the third. In January, the first abuses struck the port of Lynn, where the bulk of the Jewish community was massacred. The same occurred in Norwich and Stamford. At Lincoln, the Jews were saved through the intervention of royal agents. The worst outrage took place in York, where several local nobles, in heavy debt to the Jews, seized the opportunity to rid themselves of their burden. When attacked, the Jews took refuge in the Castle Keep, which the guard had opened for them; those who remained in the town were slaughtered. On their refusal to allow access to the keep, the Jews were besieged. On March 16, on the eve of Passover, the rabbi, Yom Tov b. Isaac of Joigny, realizing that all hope was lost, asked his brethren to choose suicide rather than submit to baptism. First setting fire to their possessions, one after the other killed himself. More than 150 died in this way, and the few survivors were murdered by the mob, who also destroyed the register of debts to the Jews. In Bury St. Edmunds 57 Jews were put to death. As the king was out of the country, where he neither could nor cared to intervene too vigorously, the perpetrators of the massacres also left England for the Crusade. There is little doubt that the Jews in England lost faith in the prospect of their continued survival in the West. The emigration in 1211 of 300 rabbis from Western Europe to the Holy Land may be connected with this general disillusionment. As the enthusiasm of the masses waned, the Jews in Western Europe were little troubled during the 13^th-century Crusades. However, it appears that there was a massacre in central France around 1236 during the preparations for a Crusade; in fact, Pope Gregory IX accused the crusaders of having slaughtered over 2,500 Jews.

Yet, at the very moment when the great wave of Crusades was ebbing, the Jewish community in France suffered most acutely from a popular Crusade, that of the Pastoureaux (1320). Forty thousand of these “shepherds,” aged on an average around 16 and without any clearly designated leader, marched through France from north to south. Although Pope John XXII excommunicated all who set forth on this unauthorized march, this did not hinder the new crusaders from hurling themselves at the Jews in the manner of their predecessors. Their savagery was especially marked south of the River Loire, where they destroyed some 120 communities. Hoping to be protected there by the authorities, numbers of isolated Jews and small communities took refuge in the larger towns. Five hundred who had sought safety in the town of Verdun sur-Garonne found death there. At Toulouse there were 115 victims. In the Comtat Venaissin, a direct papal dependency, there were many cases of forced conversion; the subsequent attempt to return to Judaism provoked the prompt intervention of the Inquisition. Meanwhile, the very abuses of the Pastoureaux aroused a violent reaction on the part of the Christian authorities: the governor of Carcassonne even had some of the ringleaders executed. Those who had crossed the Pyrenees into Spain were routed by James II of Aragon and forced to disperse. Nevertheless, this uprising had struck a savage blow at the Jewish communities in the Midi and northern Spain.

The long era of the Crusades undoubtedly marked a turning point in the history of the Jews in medieval Western Europe. The Church herself was forced to reexamine and define her position of the problem posed by the large-scale persecution of the Jews. Clearly the situation of the Jews prior to the Crusades was not always free from danger: the animosity of the Christians toward the Jews was nothing new and the Crusades did not lead to any reappraisal of Christian doctrine. However, it was probably in the wake of the First Crusade that Pope Calixtus II (1119–24) promulgated the bullSicut Judaeis, which was renewed after the Second and Third Crusades and on at least five other occasions between 1199 and 1250. It stipulated that although no new privileges should be granted to the Jews, they should not be deprived of a single one of the rights secured to them. Christians should take special care not to endanger the lives of Jews, not to baptize them by force, and not to desecrate their cemeteries. Naturally, papal protection was not extended to Jews who plotted against the Christian faith. It was sufficient for the Church to protect them from the excesses of the crusaders, especially since the latter, from the moment they took up the standard of the cross, were themselves placed under the jurisdiction of the Church. The Jews therefore requested the popes to intervene on their behalf. Thus, Innocent III ordered the French bishops to take particular care that the crusaders did not harm the Jews. As mentioned, Gregory IX later (1236) accused the crusaders of conspiring to murder the Jews: such a crime committed in the name of sanctity could not be allowed to go unpunished. However, it would appear these directives were in vain, although it is difficult to assess with any precision the measures relating to the Jews.

The Significance of the Crusades

In the memory of the Jews, the Crusades became the symbol of the opposition between Christianity and Judaism, and the tension aroused by the persecutions was far more severe than that which had existed since the origins of Christianity. The debate ceased to be a theological one, to the extent that this had ever been the case. The Christians saw the Jews as the implacable enemies of their faith and in this climate the blood libel became widespread. From the 12^th century comes the first expression of the idea of a Jewish plot against the Christian world: it was alleged that the Jews had to sacrifice one Christian each year, and held an annual council to decide the site of the sacrifice and the name of the victim. At Blois in 1171, all members of the Jewish community were burned at the stake following such an accusation, and from the 13^th century similar charges were raised in Germany.

The Jewish community found a source of inspiration in the memory of the martyrs. There being no hope of immediate vengeance, the massacre of the innocents was glorified and compared to the sacrifice of Isaac. The suicide of the martyrs was seen as a collective act for the sanctification of the Divine Name. Rather than a bitter memory of cruel affliction, it became an example of true piety and submission to the will of God. For the succeeding generations the martyrs were an object of admiration and even of envy, for they had been the generation whom God had put to the test and they had proved themselves worthy. A man of true faith could achieve no more than to be their equal. It therefore became important for the Jews to cherish the memory of their sacrifice, to retell it, and to be inspired by it. A number of piyyutim on the subject were incorporated in the liturgy, especially for the Ninth of Av. It became customary in Western communities which had been closest to the massacres to recite the prayer of the martyrs, Av ha-Raḥamim, on the Sabbath before Shavuot and, especially, to remember their sacrifice in the fast of the Ninth of Av, which had fallen during the time of the massacres. The period of the counting of the omer acquired an especially sorrowful significance.

It was probably this era that gave rise to the custom, originating in Mainz, of reciting in public the deeds of the martyrs on the anniversary of their sacrifice, and recording their names and dates in a Memorbuch, which was kept in the synagogue. The most widely known martyrs and the most severely affected communities and regions figured in the Memorbuecher of all communities and not only locally. The martyrs became a symbol for the whole people, not just for their own communities; more than simply an object of pride, they became a common ideal in which the whole Jewish community, despite all its humiliations, could find inspiration. Their martyrdom was transformed into victory, for they had defied torture, finding in their faith the necessary strength for preferring death to apostasy. They had chosen death rather than conversion, even though the latter need probably have been only temporary. In their martyrdom lay the very justification of the sufferings of the Jewish people. Spiritual power proved the strongest force of all, and the martyrs were seen as a demonstration of the absolute truth of Judaism.

Yet in fact the massacres attendant on the Crusades were far from being the worst persecutions which befell the Jews. The communities destroyed in the Rhine valley were quickly reestablished: Worms, Speyer, Mainz, Cologne, and Treves rapidly regained their former importance. The Jewish community in the kingdom of France proper, or at least in the north, hardly suffered throughout the course of the era. Italy and Spain were almost untouched. In England, the royal authorities speedily put an end to local disorders. There is nothing to suggest that during this period the Jews in Western Europe lost their sense of security in the localities where they were living: no great exodus took place in 1096 or in 1146. The majority of those converted by force, at least until the Crusade of the Pastoureaux, were able easily to return to Judaism. The actual number of Jews in Western Europe increased in this era and several communities became larger and more populous. For Jewish scholarship, the 12^th century was one of the most glorious in the West: it was the age of the Tosafists, renowned throughout France and Germany. Personal relationships between Jews and Christians apparently changed little; it was only at the beginning of the 13^th century that they took a new turn. The Crusades themselves did not play a decisive role in the evolution of the condition of the Jews in Europe. Placed in a larger context, they are only an element in the whole, though a far from negligible one.

At all events, the Crusades revealed the physical danger in which the Jewish communities stood and the impotence of their ecclesiastical protectors to defend them. On the outbreak of an actual attack, they pushed the Jews into the arms of the only powers capable of protecting them: duke, king, or emperor, and these secular protectors considered that they had a duty to protect the Jews only to the extent that they derived some benefit from them. The Crusades also encouraged the Jews to move to the fortified cities, where they would be less vulnerable in the event of an attack. The reactions on Jewish economic life were in their way disastrous. The former unique position of the Jews as intermediaries between East and West was undermined; henceforth, it was commonplace for western merchants to travel backward and forward between the two worlds, while at the same time the stimulation of religious fanaticism made the path of the Jewish merchant more dangerous. Hence it was the Crusades which marked the end of the heyday – at one time quasi-monopoly – of the international Jewish merchant. At the same time, they gave a stimulus ipso facto to the economic degradation of the Jew and his transformation, so far as Western Europe was concerned, into the recognized moneylender of the Christian world (see moneylending). Partly this was due to the imperative necessity of finding a new outlet for their capital; partly to the increased demands on the part of the crusaders for ready cash to equip themselves and to carry with them on their travels. From now on therefore the Jewish moneylender became the typical Jewish figure of the Western European scene.

The Crusades and their attendant degradation were firmly imprinted on the historic consciousness of the Jews. This period became singled out in the popular mind as the start of, and explanation for the misfortunes of the Jews, although in fact the excesses were only symptomatic of a process which had already been set in motion earlier. The Crusades marked in various ways a turning point in the history of the Western world, and this was reflected also in Jewish history. Indeed, it is from this point only that the history of the Jews in the Rhineland and Central Europe may be said to acquire continuity: whereas before the general picture has had to be constructed from scattered fragments and documents, henceforth the record is more or less sustained and complete. As in the case to some extent with general historiography, it is only at this period, with the remarkably graphic and moving records of the Rhineland massacres in 1096, that consistent Jewish historiography, or at least chronography, begins to be preserved, even though there are fragmentary records written earlier. The history that now unfolded was predominantly a tragic one. Whereas in European Jewish history before this date episodes of violence and persecution are occasionally known, there now began a period of intermittently recurring massacre and persecution which colored European Jewish experience for centuries to come. The heightened religiosity of the age resulted in the sharpening of the system of anti-Jewish discrimination and of Jewish humiliation, culminating in the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The chronicles of Solomon b. Samson, Eliezer b. Nathan of Mainz, Ephraim b. Jacob of Bonn, Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, and many other whose names are not known, described the events of the Crusades, the scenes of the massacres, and the martyrs. They are also to be regarded as basic sources from which statistical accounts of the Crusades must start. Through capturing these events they magnified their significance, but thereby furnished an ideal of conduct which was constantly recalled whenever severe persecutions befell the Jews.

The Eight Crusades

The First Crusade: 1096-1099

• Alexus Comnenus asked for mercenaries to defend Constantinople. Instead he received perhaps 12,000 commoners intent on liberating Jerusalem. The European nobility marched on Jerusalem.

The Second Crusade: 1147-1149

• Originally preached by Bernard of Clairvaux. Only a few Greek islands were taken.

The Third Crusade: 1189-1192

• Led by Frederick Barbarosa, Richard I of England and Philip II of France. Results in a truce which gives Christians access to Jerusalem and the Holy Places.

The Fourth Crusade: 1202-1204

• Instead of marching on Jerusalem, this crusade was diverted to Constantinople. The city remained in Latin hands until 1261.

The Albigensian Crusade: 1208

• Preached by Pope Innocent III against the Albigensian heretics in southern France.

The Children's Crusade: 1212

• Preached by Stephan of Vendome and by Nicholas of Koln. One group reached Marseilles and was sold into slavery; the other turned back.

The Fifth Crusade: 1218-1221

• An attack on Egypt.

The Sixth Crusade: 1228-1229

• Led by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor. He negotiated a treaty which led to Christian control of several important holy sites, including Jerusalem. Jerusalem was retaken by Muslim mercenaries in 1244.

The Seventh Crusade: 1248-1254

• Led by King Louis IX of France (Saint Louis). He captured the Egyptian city of Damietta, but was himself taken captive in the battle for Cairo. He was eventually ransomed.

The Eighth Crusade: 1270

• An unsuccessful attack on Tunis.

Bibliography

Graetz, Hist, index; Baron, Social², index; A.M. Habermann, Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve-Ẓarefat (1946); Prawer, Ẓalbanim; Germ Jud, 1 (1963); S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the 13^th Century (1966²), index; Roth, England; H. Liebeschuetz, in: jjs, 10 (1959), 97–111 incl. bibl. notes; S. Runciman, History of the Crusades, (3 vols., 1951–54); J. Katz, in: Sefer… Y. Baer (1961); idem, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (1969), 67–92; Baer in: Sefer Assaf, 110–26; S.D. Goitein, Mikhtavim me-Ereẓ Yisrael mi-Tekufat ha-Ẓalbanim; Neubauer-Stern, Hebraeische Berichte ueber die Judenverfolgung waehrend der Kreuzzuege (1892); Salfeld, Martyrol; N. Golb, in: PAAJR, 34 (1966), 1–63; M.N. Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela; Hacker, in: Zion (1966); M. Benvenisti, Crusaders in the Holy Land (1970). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Prawer, The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1988).

Sources:Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
Israeli Foreign Ministry and the WebChronology Project

Sometimes the story goes like this: The Catholic Church attacked the Holy Land in 1095 and relations between Christians and Muslims have been poisoned ever since. This simplistic interpretation is not only false, it misses the real significance of the Crusades. They reacquainted Europe with her past, helped bring her out of the so-called Dark Ages and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history, the High Middle Ages, which laid the foundation for transforming epochs like the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. They also led to the thought of one of Catholicism’s greatest philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is well known in the seventh and eighth centuries Muslim armies swept across the Middle East, North Africa and even into Spain. By 750 AD, this Muslim empire replaced the Roman Empire as the dominant power in this region of the world. But what is less well-know is how the Muslims embraced the Greco-Roman culture they encountered. Conquest brings disparate civilizations together. Specifically, conquering Alexandria, Egypt, once the intellectual center of Hellenistic Greece, meant Muslim intellectuals had broad access to the greatest works of the classical world. They studied Hippocrates and Galen, translated them into Arabic, provoking advances in Muslin medicine. They translated Pythagoras and Euclid, leading to progress in Muslim math. Algebra and Algorithm are Muslim words, deriving from the titles of the works of one of Islam’s great mathematicians, Muhammad in Musa al-Khwarizmi, the greatest Muslim mathematician of the Middle Ages. They preserved the writings of Archimedes and Ptolemy, the father of map-making. The title of his famous work, The Almagest, comes from the Arabic word al-majesti.

The most important thinker Arabs encountered was Aristotle. Not all of Aristotle’s works were lost to the West after the fall of Rome, but many were. Most importantly his cosmology had fallen out of favor in the Christian West. Thanks to St. Augustine, Plato remained a highly reputable pagan philosopher, certainly more so in Church eyes than Aristotle because Plato believed in the immortality of the soul and posited the existence of an eternal, perfect realm, or idea. Aristotle loved the material world too much for most Church Fathers. He even believed in an infinite world without a creator. But he was beloved by Muslims, earning titles like The Wise Man and First Teacher. His scientific and empirical thought was transfused across the Muslim Empire in Arabic translations by Muslim philosophers like al-Kindi and al-Farabi, or as the Muslims called him, The Second Teacher. A Golden Age in Muslim intellectual history bloomed. By the turn of the first millennium, Muslim medicine, Muslim science and Muslim mathematics were the most advanced in the world.

The Crusades (and the accompanying Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula) changed all of this. For two hundred years, Christian soldiers voyaged eastward and into Spain, ostensibly attempting to free these areas from Muslim control, but in reality, opening Christian Europe to Muslim works. Or more precisely, they reacquainted Europe with her own culture heritage. After Muslim preservation, the works described above were translated from Arabic into the dominant European language, now Latin. Literally thousands of manuscripts appeared, quite an impressive number before the printing press. Abelard of Bath (b.1075), for example, completed translations of al-Khwarizmi and Euclid from Arabic into Latin. Gerard of Cremona (b.1114) translated dozens of works, including Ptolemy’s Algamest. And Averroes (b. 1126) remains an important figure in the history of Western thought for his popularization of Aristotle. This was a turning point in Western intellectual history because it ignited what historians have labeled as a “Twelve Century Renaissance” during which time the works of the above authors were recovered, translated and studied. It may not be as famous as the subsequent fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance centered in Florence, Italy, but it laid the foundation for the latter. Europe was about to become a center for science, math and philosophy once again.

Specific examples include Robert Grosseteste (b.1175), Roger Bacon (b.1214) (not too be confused with Francis Bacon) and Leonardo Fibonacci (b.1170). Grosseteste was an Oxford don who trained Franciscans in the rigors of university theology. Deeply influenced by Aristotle, Grosseteste studied math, astronomy, and light. Furthermore, he may have been the first Christian European to engage in serious experimentation in six hundred years. His most famous disciple was Bacon, a Franciscan himself. He experimented with gunpowder, explained how it should be manufactured and noted its potential on the battlefield. Bacon believed knowledge of nature promoted technological development, five centuries before the Scientific and subsequent Industrial Revolution. He and Grosseteste are the fathers of the English scientific tradition that culminated in the works of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

Fibonacci was one of the great mathematicians of the Middle Ages. His father was part of the burgeoning Italian merchant class that emerged during the Crusades. More traveling led to more roads, thereby promoting trade. A thriving economic system linked North Africa and the Middle East with India and China, but to a large degree, Europe lay on the periphery, at least until the Crusades. Fibonacci actually traveled around North Africa (a phenomena less frequent before the Crusades), studied Muslim mathematicians like the aforementioned al-Khwarizmi and made important contributions to European mathematics. Partially thanks to Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (1202), we no longer use Roman numerals, but the more efficient and precise Arabic-Hindu numbering system that includes the decimal point.

But it was the newly recovered Aristotle that created the most intellectual ferment in the wake of the Crusades. His ultimate acceptance required his ideas be fused with Catholicism, especially his emphasis on logic, which many believed threatened the Catholic emphasis on faith. The first to attempt systemization was Peter Abelard, who may have been the greatest genius of the twelve century, as well as its most controversial figure. He was always armed with texts of Aristotle, some of which had recently been translated from Arabic to Latin. Abelard was probably the most qualified yet least able to reintroduce Aristotle to the Western world. He was a clergyman, but it was not in his nature to follow the rules.

In his most famous work, Sic et Non, Abelard tried to show how Aristotelian logic could be applied to religious issues by taking dozens of contradictory statements from Church fathers. He studied ideas of Church fathers—such as whether Jews had committed a mortal sin when they surrendered Jesus to the Romans—and demonstrated disagreements among them. Some said yes, some said no. Abelard insisted these were merely intellectual exercises, but to his critics, he was intentionally showing inconsistencies. They were probably right. Few in history have antagonized like Abelard and he had many enemies in many places. (His illicit and famous affair with Heloise only underscores this.) He was even briefly excommunicated from the Church and his works were banned. Furthermore, Abelard’s efforts on behalf of Aristotle scandalized many faithful. This debacle meant the synthesis of Aristotle with Christianity would have to wait another one-hundred years.

Enter Catholicism’s greatest philosopher of the second millennium, St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas refused to believe that faith and reason were two irreconcilable fields of inquiry. Although Aquinas explicitly condemned some of Aristotle’s positions, such as his belief in an infinite world, Aquinas’ epistemological method combined Aristotelian logic and his emphasis on the material world: Aquinas reasoned that everything, including the physical world, must have a first cause or creator, for how can anything exist without a first cause? He used logic to refute atheism. He engages in natural theology, or the study of God through reason and observation, not just faith: “The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature and perfection the perfectible.” (Thomas Aquinas, SummaTheologica, Article 2, Reply to objection 1.) Religious truths can be discovered from observation, even without Scripture or faith. Theology and philosophy are united. Even though Aquinas never would have classified himself as an Aristotelian, without Aristotle, there never would have been Aquinas.

Moreover, following Aristotle, Aquinas saw no problem with accumulating wealth. The poor man is no holier than the rich man if the latter uses his wealth to help others. Refuting the deeply ascetic Franciscans, the Dominican Doctor contends that poverty by itself is not a virtue. To some degree, Aquinas is merely responding to the nascent capitalism in post-Crusades Europe. By the thirteenth century, a scientific-materialism has entered the Western intellectual and cultural tradition. It has never left.

Results Of The Crusades

Intellectual revitalization is the real significance of the Crusades. Fields like science, mathematics and philosophy made more progress in the twelve and thirteenth centuries than in the preceding six centuries combined. The Black Death momentarily curbed intellectual growth in the fourteenth century, but by the fifteenth century, Europe was poised to become the world’s dominant civilization.

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