Council Of Clermont

Paradoxically, the Crusades Enlarge the Life and Culture of Western Europe

In A.D. 69, the Jews rose in revolt against the domination of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who sent his son Titus to put down the uprising and to inflict such punishment upon the rebels that they would be dissuaded from becoming troublesome again for many years to come. Titus laid siege to Jerusalem, and after a long struggle, in September, A.D. 70, the great city surrendered. The punishment which Titus chose for the Jews was the sacking of their capital; but more terrible still, he ordered the destruction of the Temple, the most sacred place of their ancient religion.

But by this time there were other sacred places also in Jerusalem. They were the sacred places of a very new religion. They included a little hill called Calvary and a tomb. On Calvary the founder of the religion had been crucified, in the tomb his body had been laid and from it had disappeared three days later. When forty more days had passed, some of the followers of the teacher had watched him ascend into Heaven, and when yet another forty days had gone by, a number of these same men had gathered in an upper room in a house in Jerusalem, and there the holy spirit of their resurrected Master had come to them. In that moment the first Christian Church had come into existence, and James the Apostle had been appointed its first Bishop. Since then, through persecutions and other upheavals, there had always been a Church in Jerusalem, and whatever disaster might overtake the city there would always be one.

By degrees the Christian faith had spread throughout the Roman Empire. It had resisted the vicious attacks of many Emperors, until, almost a quarter of a millennium after the destruction of the Temple, the Emperor Constantine the Great in A.D. 312 had accepted Christianity himself, and thirteen years later had made it the official religion of his Empire.

Constantine’s mother, Helena, who had been converted many years before her son, at once went to Jerusalem and there over the place of the Crucifixion and the Holy Sepulchre she had built a great basilica. From this time Christian pilgrims began to make their way to the city to pray at the Holy Places.

The Emperor before Constantine had decided that the Empire was too large a unit for one man to govern satisfactorily and had divided it into two parts. All the territories west of the Adriatic had become known as the Empire of the West, and had been ruled by an Emperor nominally from Rome, though he usually lived either in Milan or Ravenna; while all the territories east of the Adriatic had become the Empire of the East, ruled by its own Emperor. Constantine had started out as the Emperor of the West, but when his colleague of the East had continued his persecution of the Christians he had made war on him, defeated him, and become the sole ruler of the united Empire. After his death, the Empire had once more become divided, and the Empire of the West had gone into a sharp decline; and with the defeat of the Emperor by the Goths at Adrianople in 375, had practically ceased to exist. The Empire of the East had continued to flourish, however, and the Emperor in Constantinople was by far the most powerful monarch in the known world, his closest rival being the Emperor of heathen Persia on his eastern frontier.

In 610 the Persians invaded the Empire of the East, and in 614, with the help of the Jewish community within the city, had captured Jerusalem. Sixty-five thousand Christians were massacred, and the thirty thousand survivors had been sold into slavery.

The Persians burned the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and carried off the True Cross as a trophy. In 630, after many years of fierce fighting, the Emperor Heraclius defeated them and compelled them to return the True Cross.

The war, however, had caused appalling devastation throughout the Empire from the Bosphorus to Mesopotamia, and Persia was equally weakened.

While this had been happening, in 622, Mohammed had begun to preach among the Arabs, and had founded Islam, which by the time of his death ten years later was the dominant religion in Arabia. Under Mohammed’s successor, the Moslems set out to conquer the world, and they met with surprising success.

Both the Empire in the East and the Persians were too worn out to undertake another campaign, and as a result, in 638, the Moslem Caliph Omar captured Jerusalem. By little more than half a century later they had conquered the whole of the coastline of northern Africa, all of southern Spain, the Persian Empire and the lands to the east as far as India.

They had reached the walls of Constantinople, also, but In the face of disaster the Eastern Empire had rallied, and the eastern frontier of Christendom was fixed in Asia Minor. Though the Caliph was now the most powerful ruler in the world, the Emperor in the East was still the strongest Christian ruler.

Through all these upheavals the Church in Jerusalem had survived. Mohammed had laid down that all conquered peoples were to be offered two alternatives, conversion to Islam or death. Exempted from this law, for that is what it amounted to, were the Jews, the Zoroastrians and the Christians; that is, the people who worshipped one God. But the favoured had to pay highly for their exemption in the way of heavy taxes and certain prohibitions. For example, they might not carry weapons or ride horses; they must refrain from attempting to convert Moslems and they might not intermarry with Moslem women.

On the other hand, the Christian Holy Places were left untouched and in their possession, though they were not allowed to build new churches. If any disputes arose among the Christians, their own priests were to deliver judgment, and if their congregations caused the Moslem authorities any trouble, the priests were held responsible and executed.

The Christians of Syria and Palestine still looked upon the Emperor in the East as the head of their Church, and as his power as a secular ruler was respected by the Caliph he was able to prevent unreasonable measures being imposed upon the Christians in Moslem territory. Pilgrims continued to visit Jerusalem, and were in fact welcomed for the revenue they brought into the country.

When the crowning of Charlemagne by the Pope in 800 created a new Empire in the West, the Emperor in the East objected strongly. To persuade him not to make war, Charlemagne formed an alliance with the great Caliph Haroun al-Raschid, who recognized him as the protector of the pilgrims to Jerusalem from the lands of his Empire. By the middle of the tenth century, the single Caliphate had been replaced by a Caliph in Baghdad who held sway over Mesopotamia and the East, and a Caliph in Cairo who ruled over Palestine and Africa. In 1004, Hakim, the Caliph of Cairo, suddenly turned against the Christians and decided to annihilate them. He ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be destroyed, but when he shortly afterwards declared himself to be God, it was clear that he had become mad, and he was deposed. His successor permitted the Emperor in the East to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and restore the other Holy Places which had also suffered.

By the middle of the eleventh century, the number of pilgrims had greatly increased as more and more of Europe accepted Christianity, and about this time a nomad tribe who lived in the southern steppes of Russia appeared in Asia Minor. These uncouth Turks had recently been converted to Islam, and though they were strong enough to overthrow the Caliph of Baghdad had they so desired, they were overawed by the superior culture they found in Mesopotamia, and instead preferred to become his subjects. This did not prevent them from making expeditions against the Empire of the East.

As time went by these Turkish raids became more and more serious, and eventually the Emperor Romanus Diogenes decided that he must carry the war against the Turkish Sultan. The two sides met in battle at Manzikert on the eastern frontier of the Empire, in August, 1071. The outcome was a disaster of the first order for the Empire; Romanus was taken prisoner and his armies scattered.

From this catastrophe the Empire never recovered. The regular army had been destroyed and every surviving officer of high rank claimed the imperial title. The chaos created by the struggles of the many claimants produced most suitable conditions for action by the Turks. Turkish bands entered Asia Minor and roamed the country unimpeded, burning and pillaging the richest part of the Empire. For a time the fortified cities held out, but as their garrisons were no longer recognizing the authority of Constantinople, where almost every day an Emperor rose and fell, ail were eventually overcome.

Some of the pretenders hired Turkish troops to fight for them against their rivals. One of them sent his Turkish soldiers against Nicaea, and when they had taken it they decided to remain in possession of it themselves. Another Turkish leader captured Smyrna and began to build a fleet. In 1085, the Armenian governor of Antioch, one of the centres of the Empire, sold the city to the Turks, while other Turkish chieftains seized the fortresses of Cilicia.

The same process was taking place also in Syria, where every city was governed by an Arab or Turkish chief. All were in a state of war with each other. Jerusalem was being competently administered by the Egyptian Caliph, but pilgrims could no longer reach the Holy Places.

It was this lack of unity among the Turks which at last struck the Emperor Alexius of the East as a favourable factor for the Empire, one which, if he had the necessary troops and arms, could greatly the principal object of passing sentence on Henry IV, and it was while the Council was sitting that there arrived ambassadors from the Emperor in the East with the suggestion that now was the time for an offensive to be launched against the Turks. Alexius explained that he was quite prepared to undertake this offensive himself, but he lacked the necessary troops, and particularly cavalry. Remembering the formidable reputation of the Norman knights in this role, he asked Urban II to proclaim to the Council that if the Norman knights would take service in the Eastern Imperial Army they would be fighting in the service of God.

The proposal appealed to Urban, and he promised to put it forward at the first favourable opportunity. This did not occur until some months later, when he was holding a Council at Clermont, in France. No important western king was present at this Council. Henry IV was the Pope’s enemy; William Rufus of England was only a Christian when he believed himself to be dying; Philip of France was under papal displeasure for his treatment of his queen; and the Spanish rulers were busy fighting the Moors.

In a great speech, Urban put before the Council the proposal for a Holy War against the Turks, with the ultimate objective of liberating the Holy Places from their control. First he pointed out that the Turks constituted a danger to the West, for when they had the entire East in their hands they would be bound to embark on a conquest of the West. But it was when he described the oppression of the Church in Jerusalem and the sufferings of the pilgrims to the Holy Places that he caught the enthusiasm of the Council, and when he sat down all the members and spectators present gave a great cry: “It is the will of God!”

The following day the bishops formulated the rules for the expedition. Volunteers would wear a cross of coloured cloth on their tunics, and from this they were to be known as Crucesignati, Crusaders. While the knights were crusading, the bishops would protect their property. They would take a vow to fight their way to Jerusalem; if they got there or were killed in the effort, all their sins would be forgiven them; if they turned back, they would be excommunicated. The volunteers were to collect in Constantinople, and must be ready to set out from there on the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, 1096.

An expedition of this kind was something quite new, and the preparations for it required great effort, but when the appointed time came no fewer than thirty thousand knights and their followers gathered in Constantinople.

This first Crusade was a badly organized affair, and as a result the whole force was shattered by the Turks at Nicaea. This did not, however, dampen the enthusiasm for the Holy War, and in 1097 a better, well-organized army was assembled, again at Constantinople. It penetrated Asia Minor, captured Edessa and Antioch, which fell, after a long siege, in 1098; and laid siege to and stormed Jerusalem in 1099.

Godfrey de Bouillon became first King of Jerusalem, and the Latin Kingdom, or Kingdom of Jerusalem, was established from Jerusalem to Edessa. The crown was elective and the army of occupation virtually consisted of changing bands of warrior pilgrims. Prominent among the defenders were the half-monastic, half-military Orders of the Knights Hospitallers and Knights Templars.

In 1144 the Turks recaptured Edessa. This led, in the following year, to the Second Crusade, headed by Louis VII of France and the Emperor Conrad III. It was a disastrous failure.

In 1186 the Sultan Salah-ed-Din, a Seljuk Turk, who had gained supremacy over the Moslems of Egypt and Syria, inflicted a great defeat on the Christians at the Battle of Tiberias, and in 1187 captured Jerusalem. This roused Western Europe to unite in the Third Crusade in 1189. Frederick Barbarossa led a great army into Asia Minor, but after his death his force disintegrated. The other Christian princes, notably Philip Augustus of France and Richard I of England, attacked Palestine by sea and captured the port of Acre. But the Crusade ended with a treaty in 1192 which secured nothing more than safe access to the Christian Holy Places by Christian pilgrims.

Between 1202 and 1270, four other Crusades were organized. None was in any sense an effort of united Christendom, and when, in 1270, Louis IX of France and Edward, Prince of Wales, shortly to become Edward I, decided that the conquest of Egypt and Palestine was not a practicable proposition and retired in 1272, thus closing the Seventh (and last) Crusade, nothing more substantial had been obtained than a ten-year truce.

Apart from what may be termed their romantic interest, the chivalry of the crusading knights, the sacred cause which genuinely inspired many of them and the magnificent panoply with which they went to war, all of which contrasted greatly with the barbarianism of the warriors of former times, and apart from their complete failure as an attempt to bring the East into subjection to the West, the Crusades have an importance in history.

They maintained contact between East and West when the East more than the West was the seat of culture. Acquaintance with Eastern intellectual ideas enlarged the mental horizons of many Crusaders and assisted in preparing the way for the Renaissance. They introduced to Europe new foods, especially exotic fruits, new plants, clothing materials and tools, while the creation of the Latin Kingdom also opened up intercourse and commercial relations with people who were a permanent barrier between Europe and India and China.

Thus, though they failed in their primary objectives, they had an important if indirect bearing on the development of Europe over the next two or three centuries, through the influence they had on European culture.