The Start of the Crusades: the Origins of the World’s Most Famous Religious Wars

Of the many campaigns during the Middle Ages, few are as remarkable or seemingly impossible to win at the start as the First Crusade (1095-99), and the true crowning achievement of that crusade, which resulted in two centuries of Western European Christian states in the Middle East and the permanent firing of the European imagination, was the conquest of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099 after three weeks of siege. That victorious siege came four years after the call for a crusade first went out, and had the Crusaders not taken Jerusalem, the First Crusade would not likely have been followed by any more and the campaign might have been no more than an historical footnote of what could have been.As it turned out, the siege of Jerusalem and the crusade as a whole says much about the first major clash of Western and Eastern military tactics after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as the power of faith and even fanaticism to motivate people beyond ordinary human endurance. For better and worse, the siege and fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders has become a fundamental piece in the current view of the West in that part of the world. Indeed, to this day, the First Crusade remains a polarizing event, even among modern historians. For some, the Crusaders were heroes and saints, and for others they were devils who disrupted the peaceful local sects of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, establishing an alien colony that heralded modern European imperialism. In fact, the First Crusade is a good example of why it is unwise to choose sides in history, because neither side was correct and the situation was highly complex.Though it went largely unremarked in the Islamic world at the time, the First Crusade has since become a contentious symbol of European imperialism in the Middle East. Debate over whether the Crusades can truly be perceived as an early example of European colonialism continues in medieval historiography, though the evidence for this is thin. The territory taken by the Franks from the Turks had previously belonged to Eastern Christians and had only recently been seized by the Turks themselves.The Crusader States were relatively small and weak, and while they tried to be a bulwark of Christianity in the Holy Land, the Crusader States were reconquered centuries before modern European colonialism began. Nonetheless, the Crusades and the Crusader States galvanized the Christians of Western Europe to expand their world. While it remains unclear how much that world expanded in practical terms such as trade, or how it affected later attitudes during the expansion to the New World and other regions, it definitely engaged the European mind in both positive and negative ways. As such, the crusades soon achieved near-mythic status in the European literature and remain among the most important events of the Middle Ages.At the same time, the Crusader States were not one homogenized region but actually several distinct territories that had their own unique histories and interests. In fact, many of them were founded a century apart, with the Kingdom of Antioch established in 1097 and the Duchy of Cyprus in 1191, and they stretched across the Near East and the Mediterranean. As such, each one had different political, religious, and economic characteristics. Some of the smaller ones were tributaries to the larger states, and while some states like Antioch and Constantinople had a land-based feudal order, others like Cyprus were wholly owned subsidiaries of the Venetian oligarchy.