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Starvard University · The Crusades
An eyewitness tells how a holy war went badly wrong: follow the Crusades from the sermon that launched them to the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and hear the story told from Christian, Muslim, and Byzantine sides.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
In 1095 a pope called on the knights of Europe to march thousands of miles and rescue the holy city of Jerusalem. What followed was two centuries of war, heroism, greed, and disaster, including a crusade that never reached its target and instead sacked the greatest Christian city on earth. An eyewitness who helped cause it tells the story.
The Crusades were armed pilgrimages launched from Latin Christian Europe between 1095 and 1291, aimed first at Jerusalem and the lands where Jesus had lived. Tens of thousands walked and rode east, most of them not knights but ordinary people: farmers, craftspeople, women, and children, driven by faith, hope of land, fear of judgment, and plain adventure. They built fragile little states on the coast of Syria and Palestine that lasted, against the odds, for nearly two hundred years.
This course leans on two famous books, and both need a health warning we will repeat in the lessons. Geoffroi de Villehardouin was a senior leader of the Fourth Crusade who helped divert it to Constantinople and then wrote his chronicle partly to defend that decision. Edward Gibbon, writing his Decline and Fall in the 1700s, was a brilliant historian with a famous dislike of religion, and his contempt for crusading faith colors every page. Used together, with their biases in plain view, they make the history unforgettable.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
In November 1095, Pope Urban II preached a sermon at Clermont in France that changed the world. The Byzantine emperor Alexios I had asked the West for soldiers: Turkish armies had overrun most of Asia Minor after the disaster of Manzikert in 1071, and Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem reported robbery and insult on the road. Urban answer was far bigger than a rescue force. He called the knights of Europe to stop fighting each other, take the cross, and march east as armed pilgrims to free the Holy Sepulchre, the church of Jesus tomb, offering forgiveness of sins to all who went in a right spirit.
The response astonished even the pope. The cry attributed to the crowd, God wills it, spread across France, Germany, and Italy, and tens of thousands sewed the cross onto their clothing. Their motives were as mixed as humanity: genuine devotion and fear of hell, certainly; also younger sons with no land to inherit, debtors and adventurers, families hoping for farms in a warmer country, and whole villages following their lord or their preacher. The first wave, the so called People Crusade led by Peter the Hermit, set off with more faith than food and was mostly destroyed in Asia Minor within the year.
One dark chapter belongs in this first lesson, because honesty about the Crusades starts at home. As some crusading bands crossed the Rhineland in 1096, they turned on the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, communities that had lived there for centuries, and murdered thousands who would not accept forced baptism. Bishops tried to shelter their Jewish neighbors and mostly failed. The armies had not even left Europe, and already the movement showed its double face: a summons to sacrifice and devotion that could ignite, in the same hearts, plunder and religious hatred.
Lesson 2
The main armies, led by princes like Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, and Raymond of Toulouse, gathered at Constantinople and crossed into a land their maps barely knew. What they endured defies easy summary: a victory at Dorylaeum, a desert march where men drank the blood of their horses, and then the eight month siege of Antioch, starving outside its walls while a relief army approached, until a vision of the Holy Lance buried in the cathedral rallied them to a desperate, victorious sally. By the time they turned south in 1099, the survivors were a hardened remnant of the host that had set out.
Jerusalem fell on 15 July 1099 after a five week siege, and what followed must be stated plainly, because the Christian chroniclers themselves recorded it with pride that shocks modern readers. The crusaders stormed the walls and massacred the city Muslim and Jewish inhabitants in enormous numbers, in the mosques, in the streets, and in homes. Raymond of Aguilers, a priest who was there, wrote of crusaders riding in blood in the Temple court. Historians still argue over the exact numbers, but not over the event: the conquest of the holy city was sealed with a slaughter of the people who lived in it.
Then, almost incredibly, the victors settled down to stay. Godfrey became ruler of Jerusalem, refusing, the story says, a crown of gold where Christ had worn thorns; his brother Baldwin took the royal title after him. A string of crusader states, Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, and Edessa, hugged the coast, supplied by Italian fleets and defended by castles and, in time, by the military religious orders, the Templars and Hospitallers. The First Crusade had achieved its stated goal. The price, paid mostly by other people, is the subject Lesson 7 will weigh from all sides.
Lesson 3
A century after the conquest, the crusader states faced the opponent they had never before met: a united Muslim world under one gifted ruler. Salah al Din, known to the West as Saladin, a Kurdish soldier who rose to rule Egypt and then Syria, patiently built the alliance the divided crusader kingdoms could not match. In July 1187, at the Horns of Hattin above Galilee, he trapped the army of Jerusalem in a waterless camp, destroyed it almost completely, and took the king and the relic of the True Cross captive. Town after town then surrendered to him, and in October he came to Jerusalem itself.
What Saladin did there deserves the comparison this course insists on. The city, crowded with refugees, could not be held, and its defenders negotiated. Saladin granted a surrender by ransom: those who could pay a fixed sum walked free, his own officials quietly paid for many who could not, and his brother released hundreds more as a gift. Thousands of the poorest were still sold into slavery, which the sources do not hide, but there was no massacre, no blood in the streets of the kind 1099 had seen. The Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem behaved with a deliberate, public mercy, and Christian writers themselves noticed the contrast even as they grieved the loss.
The Third Crusade brought Europe greatest soldier king east to answer him: Richard I of England, the Lionheart. Richard retook Acre, beat Saladin in battle at Arsuf, and twice marched to within sight of Jerusalem, twice judging, rightly, that he could take the city but not hold it. The two men never met, yet they exchanged gifts, doctors, and compliments across the lines, and in 1192 they settled the Treaty of Jaffa: the coast stayed crusader, Jerusalem stayed in Muslim hands, and Christian pilgrims could visit the holy places unarmed. It was a soldiers peace between worthy enemies, and neither side got what it had prayed for.
Lesson 4
In 1198 a new pope, Innocent III, called another crusade to recover Jerusalem, this time striking through Egypt. The French barons who took the cross sent six envoys to find shipping, and among them was the man whose book guides this whole course: Geoffroi de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, a seasoned soldier and negotiator. Read him as you would any participant memoir. He was there, he knew the councils from inside, and he also helped make the decisions that ruined the expedition, which gives his calm, reasonable chronicle a second purpose: it is a defense brief, smoothing every wrong turn into necessity. Even Gibbon, our other guide, treats the diversion as a conspiracy of Venice and the leaders, and the truth needs both accounts held against each other.
The envoys bargain, struck at Venice in 1201, was magnificent and reckless. Venice would build and crew a fleet to carry some 33,500 men and their horses across the sea, provision them for a year, and add fifty war galleys of its own, all for 85,000 marks of silver, with conquered lands to be shared. The Venetians suspended the commerce of their whole city to build it. No crusading host had ever bought transport on this scale, and the contract assumed an army that existed mostly on parchment.
When the muster came in the summer of 1202, barely a third of the expected crusaders appeared at Venice. Many had sailed from other ports or drifted home. The fleet stood ready, the finest in the Mediterranean, and the crusaders camped on the Lido could pay only part of what they owed, even after the leaders emptied their own purses and borrowed heavily. An unpaid bill of tens of thousands of marks hung over an army of the cross, in a city that had staked its fortune on being paid. Villehardouin tells this faithfully, and from here his story becomes the tale of how a debt quietly captured a holy war.
Lesson 5
Venice doge was Enrico Dandolo, by tradition near ninety and blind, and by any account one of the shrewdest men alive. He proposed a way for the crusaders to work off their debt: help Venice retake the port of Zara, down the Adriatic coast, a Christian city that had rebelled against Venetian rule and accepted the King of Hungary protection. The army knew what this meant. Innocent III had forbidden any attack on Christian lands, and a papal letter of prohibition reached the camp; some crusaders, sickened, deserted rather than obey. The majority, hungry, indebted, and far from home, voted to sail, and in November 1202 the cross took Zara by storm for Venice.
The pope excommunicated the whole expedition. Then, at Zara, the road bent a second time. Envoys arrived from a young Byzantine prince, Alexios Angelos, whose father, the emperor Isaac II, had been deposed and blinded by his own brother. Alexios offered the crusaders a fortune: 200,000 marks, provisions for the army, ten thousand Byzantine soldiers for the Holy Land, a standing force thereafter, and the submission of the Greek church to Rome, if the fleet would first sail to Constantinople and restore his father. To an army drowning in debt, it sounded like providence. Villehardouin presents the offer as too good to refuse, and he had himself helped negotiate the terms.
Consider what had happened, step by reasonable step. A crusade under excommunication, having already sacked one Christian city, now agreed to sail a thousand miles in the wrong direction to settle a Byzantine family quarrel, financed by promises from a prince with no treasury of his own. Venice gained at every stage, and Dandolo, whose city nursed old grievances against Constantinople and had everything to gain from its humbling, encouraged each step. When the fleet reached the great city in June 1203 and its citizens showed no wish to be rescued, the expedition had run out of honest options, and everyone in the councils knew it.
Lesson 6
The first act at Constantinople seemed to vindicate the diversion. The crusaders stormed a section of the sea walls, the usurping emperor fled by night, and blind old Isaac II was brought from prison and crowned again, with his son Alexios IV beside him. But the restored rulers could not pay what had been promised: the treasury was empty, every tax to fill it enraged the city, and the crusaders, camped outside the walls, turned from rescuers to occupiers in Greek eyes. Fires set during street fighting burned whole districts. In January 1204 the city rose, Isaac died, Alexios IV was strangled, and a new emperor, Alexios V, closed the gates and prepared to fight the Latins in earnest.
In April 1204 the crusaders and Venetians, having first agreed in writing how to divide an empire they had not yet conquered, including the election of a Latin emperor and the partition of lands and treasure, assaulted the Golden Horn walls from their ships. On 13 April the city fell. Then came three days of sack that Villehardouin decorates and Greek historians describe with horror: churches stripped, the great altar of Hagia Sophia broken up for its gold, relics seized as prizes, inhabitants robbed, raped, and murdered in their own capital by soldiers of the cross. Of the plunder divided afterward, Villehardouin writes, with satisfaction: "Well may you be assured that the spoil was very great." The bronze horses that still stand at St Mark in Venice arrived in those ships.
A Latin emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, was crowned, and the Byzantine Empire was carved into a patchwork of Latin lordships, while Greek successor states gathered in exile at Nicaea, Epirus, and Trebizond. In 1261 a Greek emperor from Nicaea took Constantinople back, but the city and empire never recovered their former strength, and the wound of 1204 between Greek East and Latin West has never fully closed. A crusade launched to unite Christians against Islam had destroyed the greatest Christian power in the East, and it had done so, step by defensible step, exactly as our eyewitness shows us, if we read him against the grain.
Lesson 7
Begin with the Christian West own telling, because it explains why people marched at all. For Latin Christians the Crusades were pilgrimage and penance: Christ own country was, as they saw it, occupied, his empty tomb guarded by unbelievers, and eastern Christians had begged for help. Chroniclers of the First Crusade write as men inside a miracle, crediting God with every victory and reading the massacre of Jerusalem as judgment. That sincerity was real, and students should grant it before they criticize it. So was the courage. But the same sources casually record the Rhineland pogroms, the sack of Zara, and the butchery of 1099, and a faith that could sanctify those deeds carried a blindness its victims paid for.
From the Muslim side, the story looks almost unrecognizably different. The newcomers, the Franj, arrived in a Muslim world that was politically divided and at first barely understood them: one more set of mercenaries and raiders at the edge of Syria, in lands ruled from Baghdad and Cairo. The horror of 1099, in which the population of Jerusalem was slaughtered after surrender terms had been discussed, became a lasting memory, told and retold. Slowly, leaders like Zengi, Nur al Din, and finally Saladin rebuilt a response around the idea of jihad, and Saladin took care that his own recovery of Jerusalem in 1187 be remembered for mercy: ransoms set low, many freed without payment, churches protected by terms. Whether from conviction, policy, or both, he understood that the contrast itself was a rebuke his enemies chroniclers would have to record.
The Byzantine view is the one Western retellings skip, and it may be the most instructive. The emperors at Constantinople had asked for a few thousand disciplined mercenaries and received instead vast, unruly pilgrim armies whose leaders swore oaths and broke them, carved out principalities from imperial territory, and treated Greek Christians as soft, scheming, and barely Christian. Princess Anna Komnene, writing the empire side of the First Crusade, saw the crusaders as a flood her father had to channel with diplomacy and bribes. For Byzantines, then, 1204 was not a shocking betrayal from nowhere but the final proof of what the Latins had always intended: fellow Christians arrived as allies and stayed as conquerors. Any honest account of the Crusades has to hold all three of these stories at once, because every one of them is true from where its tellers stood.
Lesson 8
The crusader states did not last. Acre, the last mainland stronghold, fell in 1291, almost exactly two centuries after Clermont, and the great castles, Krak des Chevaliers and a hundred others, passed to new owners. Judged by their stated aim, the Crusades failed: Jerusalem spent most of the era in Muslim hands, and the expeditions of kings consumed fortunes and lives on a staggering scale. Yet the traffic the crusades opened did not close. Italian fleets bound the Mediterranean tighter, sugar, silk working, glass, and new foods and words moved west, and Europeans acquired a permanent, if distorted, knowledge that a wider world existed beyond their shores.
Other legacies are harder. The idea of holy war, once preached, proved reusable: it was turned against heretics in France, pagans in the Baltic, and eventually against fellow Christians and political enemies of popes, while the military orders grew into rich international corporations. The sack of 1204 deepened the schism between Catholic and Orthodox worlds so durably that when a pope finally expressed sorrow for it in our own century, Greek Christians received the gesture as news eight hundred years old and still tender. In the Middle East, memories of the Franj were revived in the colonial age and are still argued over, often by people using the past as a weapon for the present.
Which returns us to our two guides, and why this course gave you both with their warning labels attached. Gibbon, writing in the age of Enlightenment, treats the Crusades as an eruption of fanaticism and famously cannot hide his contempt for the religion that inspired them; his irony is glorious and his fairness is not. Villehardouin, the insider, is fair in exactly the opposite way, honest about events and quietly dishonest about motives, including his own. That is the real skill this course hopes you keep: read the eyewitness against the skeptic, ask who is speaking and what they need you to believe, and the Middle Ages will start telling you the truth.
Sources
This course is taught from two great books, both free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. One is an eyewitness chronicle by a leader of the Fourth Crusade, written partly in his own defense; the other is the crusading chapters of Gibbon vast history, written with a famous dislike of religion. Read both with their biases in mind, as the lessons do.
Graduation
You have marched from Clermont to Jerusalem, stood with Saladin and Richard under the walls, watched a debt capture a crusade, and seen Constantinople fall to soldiers of the cross. More importantly, you have heard the story told three ways and learned to interrogate the tellers. That is real historical thinking, and it travels well beyond the Middle Ages. Congratulations.
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