Crusades history and the Holy City
For almost 200 years during the Middle Ages, Christian Crusades wrested control of the Palestine region from the Selçuk Turks through a series of military incursions made up of Christian armies largely from Western Europe. The control that the Christian Crusades exerted over the Holy Land was tenuous at best. What were the Crusades? Why were the Crusades important? Today, when we answer this question, it is often the images of Crusades history from Hollywood that we have in mind: glorious and righteous warriors in the form of gallant knights leading the Christian Crusades, anointed by God to save the Holy Land from the infidel.
What were the Crusades, really? In truth, the Christian Crusades were more of a series of invasions that took place in fits and starts by all manner of Europeans—young, old, poor (and poorly trained)—in addition to the occasional land-holding knight. Crusades history has acquired a bit of a romantic glow in our modern times, a glow that is far from the gritty, bloody reality.
The armies of the Christian Crusades were only able to hold Jerusalem for about 90 years—a shorter period than other regions in Crusades history. So even though Crusades history in Jerusalem is relatively brief, the architecture of the city contains lasting evidence of the Christian Crusades.
What were the Crusades’ impact on the architecture of the Holy City? Why were the Crusades important? Below, Jack Meinhardt outlines the answer to this question in “When Crusader Kings Ruled Jerusalem.” He explains that some of the most famous churches in Jerusalem were built during the Christian Crusades by Crusaders wishing to memorialize sites they believed to have great Christian significance. The Crusades history of Jerusalem is evident in such churches as St. Anne’s, the Church of the Tomb of the Virgin and of course the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was rebuilt during the Christian Crusades on the site where St. Helen is said to have built the original in the 4th century.
Crusades history may not be as obvious in Jerusalem as it is in Acre, the beautiful city to the northwest of Jerusalem, but it is obvious that the Christian Crusades in Jerusalem’s history made their mark not only in architecture, but also in romantic legend.
What were the Crusades’ impact on the architecture of Jerusalem? Read below to find out.
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It was one of the most romantic, chaotic, cruel, passionate, bizarre and dramatic episodes in history. In the 12th and 13th centuries A.D., a continual stream of European armies, mustered mostly in present-day France and Germany, marched out to destroy the infidel. Crusaders attacked non-Christians in northern and eastern Europe; they conducted bloody pogroms against Jews and “heretical” Christians in their own territories; they campaigned to push Muslims off the Iberian peninsula and out of North Africa; and, most important of all, they conquered Palestine, ruling the Holy Land from their citadel in Jerusalem.
Easily the most successful of these campaigns was the First Crusade (1096–1099). Palestine had been in Muslim hands since the seventh century, when Persians and then Arabs wrested it from the Christian Byzantine Empire. In the mid-11th century, Seljuk Turks from beyond the Caspian Sea invaded the Near East, converted to Islam and subdued the reigning Arab power, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. They then pressed north and west, seizing most of Byzantine Anatolia. The Seljuk advance meant that Christian influence in the East was considerably diminished. It also meant that pilgrimage routes, long protected by the Byzantines and friendly Arab rulers, were closed down: Christians could no longer walk where Jesus had walked.
The Byzantine emperor Alexius I appealed to the West for help. In 1095 Pope Urban II responded; in a speech delivered at Clermont, in central France, he called for a crusade to save the Christian East from Islam. Seljuk Turks, Urban reportedly said, were disemboweling Christians and dumping the bloody viscera on church altars and baptismal fonts. Those who joined this crusade, or “took the cross,” the pope announced, would have their sins absolved, for God himself desired that Christianity recover Jerusalem.
The Fihrist, and the scholarship it represents, is one of the shining positives that emerged from the Crusades. Learn more in Bible History Daily >>
The First Crusade, like most of the later ones, was led by European noble and royal families, who raised funds and armies from their estates. (Even the official, pope-sponsored crusades, however, were joined by ragtag groups of women, children, paupers, priests and elderly penitents.) One army, for example, was led by three brothers with possessions in Lorraine—Eustace, Baldwin and Godfrey; Godfrey and Baldwin would become the first rulers of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Other Crusaders were the king of France’s brother, Hugh of Vermandois, and William the Conqueror’s son, Robert of Normandy. A Norman family that had settled in southern Italy sent Tancred, who was the first to lead Crusader troops into Jerusalem and onto the Temple Mount.
These armies marched overland to Constantinople, where Emperor Alexius I ferried them across the Bosphorus into Asia. They then crossed Anatolia and laid siege to Antioch, which fell in 1098—becoming the first crusader colony in the Near East.
Most of the Crusader forces continued south, facing little resistance as they moved down the Levantine coast. On July 15, 1099, after a two-week siege of Jerusalem, Tancred broke through the city’s northern wall, near Herod’s Gate. The city’s Muslim rulers surrendered without a fight. The next morning, however, Jerusalem became a killing field as the conquerors slaughtered nearly every Muslim in the city and burned down a synagogue in which Jews had sought refuge. “With drawn swords our men ran through the city not sparing anyone, even those begging for mercy,” wrote Fulcher of Chartres, who served as Baldwin’s chaplain. “They desired that this place, so long contaminated by the superstition of the pagan inhabitants, should be cleansed from their contagion.”
The Crusaders elected Godfrey as their first leader. Upon Godfrey’s death in 1100, they named his brother Baldwin as the first king of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (which, in its brief tenure, would have four more kings named Baldwin). In the following decades, the new Crusader kingdom secured the main coastal cities of the Levant: Caesarea (1101), Haifa and Acre (1104), Beirut and Sidon (1110), and Tyre (1124). King Baldwin I (1100–1118) took territories in the Transjordan and built a series of fortresses from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. King Baldwin III (1152–1163) captured Ashkelon from the Egyptian Fatimid dynasty, which was using the city’s port to conduct raids against the Crusader kingdom. By the mid-12th century, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem controlled the territories of present-day Israel, western Jordan and southern Lebanon. In addition, the Crusaders had set up states in Edessa, Antioch and Tripoli. The entire Levant was now a European colony.
On the holy city of Jerusalem itself, the Crusaders left little mark. At first, their activities were concentrated on the Temple Mount (see “The Holiest Ground in the World”). From indigenous Near Eastern Christians, the Crusaders learned that the Temple Mount was associated with such biblical events as the presentation of Christ in the Temple (Luke 2:22–38) and Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:11–17). The Crusaders immediately converted the Muslim Dome of the Rock—which, they were told, rested on the site of the Jewish Temple mentioned in the Gospels—into a Christian church, which they called the Templum Domini. They later covered the massive rock inside the building (see photo of Templum Domini in “The Holiest Ground in the World”) with elaborate marble casing, to serve as an altar; they also filled the building’s niches with sacred carvings, erected an intricate iron grille around the building’s inner octagon, and placed an iron cross on top of the dome.
Crusader kings first took up residence in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the southern end of the Temple Mount; but in 1118 they abandoned the mosque for the newly rebuilt citadel, south of the Tower of David. Al-Aqsa then became the residence of the Templar Knights—an order first created to protect pilgrim routes and later transformed into an elite fighting force.
Outside the Temple Mount, the Crusaders built a covered market, a new city gate (Tanners’ Gate), a hospital (run by the Knights of the Order of St. John, also known as the Hospitallers, who, like the Templars, were first founded to care for pilgrims but later became a military force) and various other buildings.
What the Crusaders really built, however, were churches, a number of which still survive in excellent condition. East of the city, on the Mount of Olives, they built the Church of the Tomb of the Virgin over an earlier Byzantine structure, which, according to tradition, contained the tomb of Mary. In this church the Crusaders placed the tomb of Queen Melisende (1131–1152), the daughter of Baldwin II. Just north of the northeast corner of the Temple Mount, they erected the splendid Romanesque Church of St. Anne. The Crusaders’ most enduring architectural legacy, however, is their rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (see photo of Church of the Holy Sepulchre in “The Holiest Ground in the World”), on the foundations of the fourth-century A.D. church built by Constantine, supposedly over Jesus’ tomb.
Crusader rule in Jerusalem lasted a mere 90 years. In 1187 the sultan Saladin, who had unified Egyptian and Syrian territories into the Abbasid caliphate, defeated the army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, west of the Sea of Galilee, and took control of Jerusalem. For two brief periods in the 13th century, between 1229 and 1244, Crusaders regained control of Jerusalem—but only by treaty with the Muslim Ayyubids (a new caliphate formed by Saladin’s successors), who refused to allow Christians to visit the sacred Temple Mount.
After Saladin’s conquest, the Latin kings ruled from the coastal cities of Tyre and Acre, not from Jerusalem. Their holdings consisted of a thin strip along the Mediterranean, which expanded during Crusades (altogether there were seven official crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, along with countless smaller ones) and contracted as the Crusaders returned home. In the late 13th century, a new force arose in Egypt, the Mamluks, a class of fierce slave warriors who wrested power from the Ayyubids. The Mamluk sultan Baybars campaigned up the Levantine coast, regaining Crusader possessions. The last Crusader outpost, the city of Acre, fell in 1291, putting an end to the European presence in Palestine.
“When Crusader Kings Ruled Jerusalem” by Jack Meinhardt originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 2000. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in October 2013.
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Those crusades all happened during the period of time that Jesus described in his parable of the wheat and the weeds, as we can read at Matthew 13: 24 to 30. Those crusades all happened during the time that the weeds of apostate teachings were dominating the so-called Christian Church. The church of the time was as un-Christlike in its conduct as it was possible to be because of all those pagan practices and beliefs that it had absorbed during the 200 to 300 years after Christ had established the true Christian Congregation under the oversight of the 12 apostles.
It was these false teachings that Jesus warned about and that the apostles wrote about during the first century. They described that period of time as a time when false teachers and false prophets and a great apostasy would become established. The true Christian faith all but disappeared during the centuries that those events transpired. They were overrun, nearly buried, by the weeds of apostate teachings. The Protestant Churches proved by their conduct that they were no better than the Catholic Church against which they were protesting.
Here’s the craziest part of the whole thing… Jesus was not Jewish, nor was he born in Jerusalem, Bethlehem or Nazareth. All people had to do was learn his native language of Aramaic, which is an old Lebanese dialect, to know the truth.
Jesus was born in the district of Phoenicia, of lower Galilee, in Lebanon. His whole family, the Omram’s, were from the tiny village of Qana, Lebanon. The Bible hints as to who Jesus was and how he lived if you simply translate his words.
It say’s that Jesus greeted and departed with people using the everyday phrase “Peace be upon you or Peace be with you” which In his native language of Aramaic, is pronounced, “Asalamualykum.” Mathew 26:39 also say’s Jesus prayed on his face. The notion that Aramaic and Hebrew are similar isn’t nowhere near true. Aramaic is an Arabic dialect, not Hebrew. Jews do not use the phrase “Asalamualykum” nor pray on their face. That’s only common among Muslims.
Jesus looked, spoke, lived, ate and worshiped like a Muslim, not a Jew. The history were taught claims Islam didn’t exist at that time, but history taught in America is almost always wrong, or tainted. If Jesus lived as a Muslim, then either Islam existed or he created it. Everything we know about Jesus in America is BS.
His birthday, place of birth, ethnicity, and even his images are all wrong. He wasn’t born on December 25, it was April 17th. His father wasn’t an invisible man, it was his mothers first cousin. Even the whole story of his crucifixion is most likely fabricated. He had sisters, one likely older, and we never hear about them. I believe the Christian crusaders knew the truth and either them or the Jews (or both) twisted the truth for their own gain and benefit.
Claiming Jesus was Jewish was probably nothing more than a way to sell the ridiculous “God’s chosen people” claim. If you really want to know what Jews think of Mary and Jesus, just read the Talmud. They call Mary a whore and Jesus a fraud who is burning in his own excrement. They hated Jesus, and vice versa. Even had a price on his head which caused him to many long back roads which were days out of his way just to get to his destinations.
Old Aramaic is still spoken in some of the small historical villages in Lebanon.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to contest all of your points, but would like to note that there were no Muslims until the 6th Century CE, after the birth of Mohammad at the earliest. Absent time-travel, Jesus was not a Muslim. (Aramaic is known to have been the common language of the Israelites at that time, which doesn’t preclude Jesus from being Lebanese, though you’ve presented no evidence to support your claim..)
At best, all three Abrahamic religions share common aspirations, and positive values, from the Golden rule of “treat thy neighbor as thyself” a pursuit of justice and many others.
By recounting only the cruelty and intolerance of “infidel” presence of the Crusaders in the name of Christianity,without contrasting and comparing it to the manner in which Islamic fighters originally wrested these same lands from their Christian and Jewish inhabitants, you provide a slanted view. This has been happening often in modern American culture.
What people who discuss the crusades often forget is that (1) the first ‘crusades’ were by the Muslim armies hundreds of years before (and after) the Christian crusades and (2) the Crusades often resulted in both Christiansand Muslim armies calling upon each other for help with the paradoxical result that you see Christian/Muslim armies fighting other Christian/Muslim armies (proving that these were not simply ‘religious crusades but also wars for power (as most wars are).
Fourth Papal Crusade, 1204 AD, Papal Rome’s sin against Constantinople, Shame.
There was so much more to the “Crusades” than what is written about and/or is publicized by the Hollywood crowd…
To begin.., it is said that “Armies march on their stomachs…” meaning that armies on the march must be fed daily.., and fed a lot as they burn huge amounts of calories…! as do the livestock that march along with them… Where does all that food (and water and wine), come from..? Armies must travel by foot and so they tramp across wide areas on their way to their destination…. Whatever villages, farms, orchards and other food producing areas are in their way get ravished and stripped of whatever “edibles” are available..! Anything of value is taken as “booty” by the army on the march and women and young girls are fair game..! Young men are “conscripted” to carry loads of supplies needed along the way, to tend to livestock that went along, and to perform any number of tasks, below the level of the haughty Knights…!!! There is so much more to the “Crusades” that we never hear about…….
It is believed that the Crusades were caused by economical reasons more than religious zeal. European leaders were facing unrest due to poverty in their regions. Religion became a good motive to distract them and turn their eyes towards East. It is true that there was much destruction, and looting on the route to Jerusalem due to the hungry primitive people were manipulated by religion. Byzantium was ransacked and never recovered.
I’m tired of people saying it was just because it wasn’t just
First…. it was not an invasion… it was a response to the 500 invasions into Christian cities and nations. Secondly, Rose… they had NO idea of what archaeology was in those days and they weren’t looking to disprove a lie being taught now.
Without the Decalogue and/or the Beatitudes, to restrain them, humans turn into brutish beasts.
In response to Dennis, the Crusaders lasted 200 years “span”. The caliphate has been going on for 1400 years.
I agree with Dennis! Man’s inhumanity to man. Will it ever stop?
Hmmm, the article failed to mention how the crusaders put the Orthodox bishops out of their churches and cathedrals. Installed their own patriarchs and treated the indigenous Christians shamefully. In fairness it should be mentioned in the article.
I consider the Crusades as Christianity’s version of Daesh (a.k.a. ISIS/ISIL).
Between the destruction of Jerusalem by Hadrian in 135 A.D. and the return of Jerusalem to Jewish sovereignty in 1967 A.D. (Daniel 8:14), there is nothing of biblical significance (i.e., specific events mentioned in the Bible) that happened in Jerusalem except its prophesied spiritual desolation. The Crusades were a totally secular event.
http://www.prophecysociety.org/?p=400
Jesus taught his disciples to ‘love their enemies,’ not to hate and kill them.—Matthew 5:43-45.
History Written in Blood.Terrorism With Roots in Christendom
Beginning in 1095 and continuing for two centuries, crusader armies repeatedly crossed between Europe and the Middle East. Opposing them were Muslim forces from Asia and North Africa. The issue was control of Jerusalem, and each side tried to gain the advantage. In their many battles, those “holy warriors” hacked one another to pieces. They also used their swords and battle-axes on mere bystanders. William of Tyre, a 12th-century clergyman, described the crusaders’ entry into Jerusalem in the year 1099:
“They went together through the streets with their swords and spears in hand. All them that they met they slew and smote right down, men, women, and children, sparing none. . . . They slew so many in the streets that there were heaps of dead bodies, and one might not go nor pass but upon them that so lay dead. . . . There was so much blood shed that the channels and gutters ran all with blood, and all the streets of the town were covered with dead men.”
Learning From First-Century Christians:http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200271477
I really dont think we should Be calling them Christian Crusades, maybe Catholic as at that time in History everyone (except the remnant of Christs true church) was under the Pope. and he called the shots. The protesting Church was not founded then. Am I right?
“Palestine had been in Muslim hands since the seventh century, when Persians and then Arabs wrested it from the Christian Byzantine Empire.”
The Persians weren’t Muslim, they were Zoroastrian.
On another point, I have a question, though.
“but only by treaty with the Muslim Ayyubids who refused to allow Christians to visit the sacred Temple Mount.”
Do we know why exactly they wouldn’t let them up?
[…] a western point of view, the Christian Crusades have a glorified and righteous history: countless films and books recount how the shining knights […]
Nice article. Read the book: “Holy Blood Holy Grail”. Much better historical information can be found in Paris.
It would seem that during this occupation we would have some evidence of Solomon or David. After all Christians had 100 years or so to dig. Freemasonry claims its origins from the mysteries it collected while in control of Jerusalem.
The following is an English translation of the first few sentences in a book about the fine art of bricklaying, published in French back in 1766 titled;
Les Plus Secrets Mysteres des Hauts Grades de La Maçonnerie Dévoilé ou le Vrai Rose-Croix;
Traduit de L’anglois;
suivi
Du Noachite,
Traduit de L’allemand
A Jérusalem
HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF MASONRY
This Order was instituted by Godfrey of Bouillon, in Palestine in 1330, after the decadence of the Christian Armies, and was not communicated to the French Masons of that time, and after to a very small number, some as rewards, some as returned obligations for services to several of our English and Scottish Knights, of which the true Masonry is pulled. Their chief Lodge is situated on the Mountain of Heredon, where the first Lodge was held in Europe, and that exists in all its splendor. The general Counsel always holds itself there, and this is the seat of the big supreme unalterable Master. This Mountain is situated between the west & the North of Scotland, to sixty thousand of Edinburgh.
There are secrets in Masonry that never were known among the French, and that were not reported to the Apprentices, Fellows and Masters, these ranks were done for the general Masons, ranks that were done for the generality of the Masons, & that appeared in public under the title of the Maçons Trahis, & Autres. These high Ranks develop you for the true goal of Masonry, and the true secrets that never were told, not facts something else, this that follows.
The Saracens having seized the Holy Places, called Palestine, where happened all the mysteries of our Order . . . . . .
We’re all Noachite’s
Shalom,
Rose