The First Crusade: Part 1

I have a theory that if a Catholic studies the Crusades, not only will he or she have mastered the highlights of medieval Christianity but also come to greater understanding of realities in our Church life of 2025. I remember that my sixth-grade text in Catholic school featured one chapter on the Crusades which was mostly comprised of contemporary sketches of Christian knights protected by more metal armor than a 1959 Buick Electra. The accompanying narrative described our knights as undertaking retribution against the heathen Muslims, who came into being around 622 B.C. in Arabia and within a century was swallowing France until Charles Martel, “the Hammer of Heretics,” reversed the Islamic surge at Tours in 732. The goal of Crusaders was winning back the custody of the Holy Lands, particularly Jerusalem, where the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus had taken place. Historians refer to the Holy Land as the psychological center of Christianity in the medieval era...  
 
Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as simple as that. I suppose that if my sixth grade teacher had tried to explain how the Bishop of Rome traveled to France in 1095 to strengthen the authority of his office and create a warlike enthusiasm for a religious war in the Middle East and reunite the Western Roman/Latin Church with the Eastern Christian Church in Constantinople, well, I guess I would have given up any future studies on the Crusading Era. But in 2005 I slipped a copy of The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips, published earlier that year, in my vacation suitcase and devoured the book voraciously in the northern New Hampshire mountains. Phillips is a remarkable scholar of that era—and I slowly began to grasp what complex issues were raised in this series of wars. [Incidentally, I wrote one of my early reviews for Amazon on Philips’ book. I was still developing a style, and let’s leave it at that.]
 
It is hard to know where to begin a series of posts about the Crusades. I will introduce some texts which you will find eminently readable and precise in the where, why, and how this series of campaigns unfolded. It’s complicated, but worth exploring. If you know anything about the Crusades, you know that the “opposition” was Islam. So, let’s begin with the clash of beliefs.
 
THE RISE OF ISLAM:
 
Christianity, from its origins in Jerusalem, worked four centuries to formulate its most important doctrines on the Holy Trinity: One God in three personae, to use the Greek phrasing—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The identity of Jesus was professed as truly man and truly God, two natures functioning in one personality. This is the language of the Nicene Creed. We say the creed every week, though the miraculous truths contained in the formula should probably puzzle us more than they do. The Creed is, after all, a profession of faith. We cannot prove what Nicaea hath wrought.
 
This Christian formulary was not universally accepted, and by the seventh century a holy man in Saudi Arabia came to believe that the divine had inspired him to bring to the world a new theology and a new book of revelation. The man, of course, was Mohammed, and his book was the Quran. Mohammed’s preaching enthused many who followed him because his description of the divine was simpler and accessible to many. He defined his creed with the principle that God—Allah in his theology—was one. There was no trinity, nor was there a godman like Jesus. As a matter of doctrine, Islam unites religion and government. The best-selling introductory summary of Islamic faith and life I came across is Introduction to Islam: Beliefs and Practices in Historical Perspective [2015] by Carole Hillenbrand. It is a pricey book, even used, but it is not necessary for the Café series of blogs on the Crusades over the next few weeks. But I do think it is a helpful idea to familiarize oneself with today’s second largest religion in the world at some point in your reading.
 
Islam saw its mission as bringing the entire world into submission to Allah, with common worship and a public/private ethic. Because of its nature, Islam would send forth from Mecca not missionaries, as was the Christian practice, but soldiers who would subjugate entire populations to the embrace of Allah and the revelation of the Quran. Wikipedia provides a decent summary of Islamic expansion to the present day—including inside American prisons. In most cases “subjugation” did not involve violence. In fact, the tenets left by Mohammed seemed to be welcomed in many parts of the world, most notably in North Africa, which had been a Christian region—home to St. Augustine, among others. By the 700’s Islamic forces crossed Gibraltar from Africa and pushed as far north as Tours in France. In Tours Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, repulsed Islamic advances and eventually forced the invaders from France. Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, were still expelling Muslims [and Jews] for another seven centuries. Christopher Columbus’ 1492 departure for the Americas were delayed until all non-Catholics had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.
     
 
MEANWHILE, IN THE CHRISTIAN WEST….
 
From its earliest days Christianity had been a pacifist religion. Jesus himself had stated how “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” and to Peter in the Garden, “Put thy sword back into its scabbard.” In fairness, Christianity came to be during a period known as the Pax Romana or “Roman Peace.” By 312 A.D., however, when the Emperor Constantine extended favored status to Christians in the Roman Empire, the Church became more engaged in the empire’s civil life, including its militarism. Likewise, the Emperor Constantine engaged in religious affairs, summoning all bishops to the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the council which gave us our most basic doctrines of faith. [The Bishop of Rome did not attend.]  Later historians would look upon this shift as the beginning of Caesaropapism, the mixing of the emperor’s absolute civil authority with Christianity’s highest authority in faith, the Bishop of Rome and/or the Patriarch of Constantinople [now Istanbul], a point of some contention for centuries.
 
The Western Roman Empire began to fall, in large part because Constantine and his successors elected to move the seat of the Empire to Constantinople. In 410 A.D. the city of Rome itself was occupied by a barbarian army and its aggressive leader, the Visigoth Alaric. A few decades later Attila the Hun threatened Rome but was persuaded [or bribed] not to destroy the city by the future St. Leo the Great, then bishop of Rome. The disorder of the Dark Ages in the West, not surprisingly, turned the attention of Christian thinkers and moralists to what would later be called “just war theory,” a debate about morally permissible acts of war that, to tell the truth, continues to this day.
 
The name most associated with just war principles is St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274], known as the “Angelic Doctor” and the greatest theologian Christianity has ever produced, though some hold out for St. Augustine. But I need to note here that Aquinas was doing his best work after the major Crusades had run their course, and the political landscape of Eastern and Western Europe after the Crusades tended toward nation-building and different sorts of military arrangements after the Crusade era.
 
If you can find a map of Europe in 1095, the first thing you will notice is the abundance of “little kingdoms.” The territory we know today as France is discernible, though it was composed of fiefdoms led by knights. Collectively, knighthood was the highest social rank a man could hope to achieve, and in truth it was nearly impossible to achieve this rank without family ties and wealth. A knight would typically swear fealty to a local lord or bishop, and historians tell us that most knights never traveled more than sixty miles from their estates. Except on rare occasions, fighting was generally a local skirmish, usually involving property disputes. Major conflicts, such as the Battle of Hastings in 1066, were rare. Wikipedia’s description of Hastings is self-explanatory as to why wholesale warfare was rare. The death toll on this English countryside conflict ran as high as 25,000, an enormous loss of population in an already thinly scattered demographic.
 
In the eleventh century leading to the First Crusade, the weaponry shaped the tactics and the fighting man. In 1095, when the First Crusade was summoned, a typical knight in time-appropriate preparedness would have made an enormous financial outlay. Knights fought on horseback, though the size of the horse available then was a pony. The horse was the single most expensive item of a knight’s armaments, because a second beast was usually required to carry the equipment and subsistence of the knight and his attendant[s]. A knight’s primary offensive weapon was his sword, another highly expensive investment. Foot soldiers, who were not of the knightly class, used battle axes and daggers, and archers the bow and arrow. Interestingly, the crossbow was operational in the eleventh century, but its use was debated. “Because the crossbow enabled foot soldiers to slay knights who had been raised and trained for war, it upset the structure of medieval warfare.” [Second Lateran Council 1139] An early crossbow could penetrate wood up to seven centimeters.
 
SO WHY THE CALL FOR A CRUSADE?
 
Again, the sixth-grade history books provided for us kids a plausible answer: to restore Christian control to the Holy Lands and make possible pilgrimages to the sites of Christ’s saving death and resurrection. True enough in retrospect, but how many Christians in 800, 900, or 1000 A.D. had the means or opportunity to travel the 2000 miles from the French coast to Jerusalem? What about the Muslims? Weren’t they holding vast numbers of Christians hostages from their military exploits of the 600’s and 700’s?
 
Several things to consider here. First, Western Europe was not a united entity; large regions of Europe still awaited catechizing. Secondly, Western Christianity was barely able to put a unified military force in the field in 1095, the beginning of the First Crusade, and most of these troops were Franks, France being the healthiest entity at that time in communion with Rome. Third, five centuries had passed between Mohammed and the call for the First Crusade. In that extended period, lands conquered by Islamic forces had probably adopted the religious observance of the Quran. There is evidence that some Christian communities were permitted to continue meeting so long as there was no effort to evangelize. The exception was in the Eastern Christian region close to Constantinople itself, where Islamic forces were seeking valuable land and access to trade routes. Constantinople was the governing seat of the Eastern Roman Empire; its capture would have been a tour de force, and it is known that the Eastern emperors had sought the help of the Christian West throughout the 1000’s to keep this from happening. The historic city of Nicaea, near Constantinople, was held by Turkish Moslems in 1095.
 
So, what was the spark that ignited an improbable and zealous push to march to Jerusalem and recover the holy sites? Certainly, one cannot overlook the reformer-monk Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope [St.] Gregory VII from 1073-1085. He is most remembered for his titanic battles with the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Henry II, to establish the supreme power of the papacy. Gregory did not tolerate “Caesaropapism.” He did not believe in the “Caesaro” half of the equation, nor in royalty appointing local bishops, a practice referred to as “investiture.” Most of Gregory’s reign was involved in the “Investiture Controversy."
​ ​
But Gregory’s successor, Urban II [r. 1088-1089], himself a reformer in the mold of Pope Gregory, was a better strategist. He was able to bring a variety of causes together into one mammoth project, i.e., the retaking of the Holy Land. First, he understood that only a pope could summon such a venture, and if successful, Urban would have cemented the Chair of Peter as the final authority wherever Christianity was observed; Caesaropapism would die. Second, the papacy had received several requests from the Patriarchs of Constantinople for military assistance in resisting the Muslims in Asia Minor. At the very least, if Urban called for a Crusade, the Turkish Muslim armies would be diverted to fight the Western Christian armies progressing toward Constantinople on the way to Jerusalem. But beyond that, military aid from the Roman Church would, in Urban’s thinking, mellow differences between the two branches of Christianity and open the door to Church reunion. [Some historians believe that Urban hoped the Eastern Emperor would take command of the First Crusade army as it passed Constantinople; Urban, in fact, never named a supreme commander for the Western Christian army.]
 
But Urban’s greatest feat was presenting a potential military crusade as a Faith revival. The biggest factor of medieval life that we fail to appreciate today is the fear of damnation. Asbridge notes that most knights lived in a sort of perpetual depression—desiring to be saved despite their sinful deeds. Urban decided that, when making the call for the First Crusade, he would institute a full remission of the punishment of sins and the promise of eternal life for those who engaged in the war. One AI application puts it this way:
 
The Crusades, initiated by Pope Urban II in 1095, were presented as a religious mission to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control. In his call to arms, Urban II emphasized the spiritual rewards awaiting those who took part in the Crusades. He promised eternal salvation and the forgiveness of sins for all who joined the fight, which was a compelling incentive for many Christians at the time. This promise was particularly significant in a medieval context, where the fear of sin and the desire for salvation were central to the lives of believers.
 
Thus, by transforming a military crusade into a gateway to heaven for those knights who “took the cross,” the symbolic badge of commitment to the cause, Urban was ready to take to the road—to France, anyway—to preach and recruit for this epic event in medieval history.

Incidentally, a Plenary or full indulgence can be obtained today. EWTN's website lists the required steps.