Crusades how many

Next, Philip and Richard quarreled—and if one believes the court gossip of the time, they certainly had personal issues to work out—and Philip went back to France. Richard was left alone with his forces, not enough of an army to retake Jerusalem on its own but they continued anyway. When he reached the Middle East, Richard met Saladin and, after a bit of jousting and some general medieval male-bonding if one can trust the accounts from the day, they managed to forge an agreement to let Christians visit the Holy Lands without being hassled.

But making deals with Moslems was, to many in Europe, not the point of crusading. Richard's stock dropped precipitously, and on his way home, he was captured, not by any Moslem foe, but by Germans—in fact, his former ally Frederick Barbarossa's son—and was imprisoned and was held in exchange for the payment of an exorbitant sum. This , pounds, literally a "king's ransom," nearly bankrupted England and left John, Richard's brother, regent and successor, in deep debt and trouble.

The Crusades were now one for three. If crusading was to continue at all, it was going to need some serious restructuring. Having failed in so many respects, the Third Crusade entailed disappointments no one in Europe could ignore.

For one, it hadn't returned Jerusalem and the Holy Lands to Christian control. For another, it had led to bitter in-fighting within Europe—which ran directly counter to its Truce-of-God mission to repress wars on the home front and that was, at least in part, because it hadn't deflected the restless aggression of Europe's knights outside the West—by these standards, the Third Crusade might as well not have happened at all, which helps to explain why the Fourth Crusade followed so quickly on its heels.

Meanwhile, there were other changes afoot within the European community. In particular, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the papacy had found a strong advocate in Innocent III , the most effective pope in medieval history.

This young, intelligent pontiff had been trained in law and thus spoke the language of international diplomacy better than most political rulers in Europe, indeed as well as the best statesmen ever have. His ability to craft strategies promoting the interests of the Church and to put them into effect is unparalleled in Western history, so he gave the next crusade a professional appearance of a sort the Crusades had never enjoyed before.

Nevertheless, Europe would soon learn that amateurism really suited crusading better. Yet with Innocent spearheading the venture, it was bound to succeed somehow. The pontiff began by doing his history homework from which he devised a means to avoid the hazards which had scuttled the last two Crusades. What had drowned the most recent one was the division of leadership among three kings, and Innocent resolved to avoid that error by putting himself in charge alone.

What had foundered the Second Crusade was the treachery of the double-dealing Byzantines, so the decision was made to send the next wave of crusaders by sea, enabling them to avoid Byzantium completely—that the Fourth Crusade would eventually end up in downtown Constantinople is a rousing tribute to human folly, not an indictment of Innocent's plan—and if everything had gone the way he arranged it, it would have been a perfectly fine Crusade.

But the best-laid plans of popes and men. Innocent arranged to contract ships and supplies from the port city of Venice , by now a great sea-power, and it looked like smooth sailing—on paper, at least, which is what lawyer-popes tend to look at—but problems developed before this Crusade even got on board. All participants thought someone else was paying for the "rental" of the ships. So, when the crusaders began to arrive in Venice and were greeted with outstretched hands but no one had any money to offer, the deal nearly fell through.

There are more ways than one, however, for a large contingent of warriors to earn their passage across the sea. For instance, Zara , one of Venice's subject states on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, had recently revolted from the city's burgeoning maritime empire and, to avoid Venetian reprisal, the people of Zara had delivered their city into the Pope's warm and all-welcoming embrace.

Zara was now part of the Papal States, a growing "mutual fund" owned and managed by the Roman Church. In exchange for cash-on-delivery, the Venetians contracted with the crusaders to stop in at Zara on their way out east and force it back under Venice's thumb.

Such an agreement was certainly not part of Innocent's plan for this Crusade—that is, his goals did not include that the crusaders he'd assembled would strip his papacy of newly-won territory—and when he learned about their agreement with the Venetians, he withdrew his support of the Crusade, along with his funding.

And when that didn't stop them, he laid a writ of excommunication on them all—that is, he effectively ousted them from the Church , condemning their souls to perdition—but that, too, made exactly zero difference in their arrangements.

The crusaders sailed to Zara and duly delivered it back into Venetian hands. While lingering in the area, the crusaders came across a Byzantine exile, a pretender to the throne who had recently been exiled from Byzantium and who offered them a substantial sum if they would make him the emperor.

With the sanction of the Venetians who saw nothing but advantage in causing turmoil within Byzantium, their trading rival in the Mediterranean, the crusaders were again diverted from the Holy Lands. This time they headed in the direction of Constantinople. There, the crusaders' approach inspired considerable panic among the Byzantines, not an unreasonable reaction as this now well-funded, sea-borne assault force bore down on them.

The reigning Emperor, along with many others, fled the city. Thus, meeting no real resistance, the crusaders entered the capital and set their "Latin" nominee for Emperor on the throne, then turned around and headed for the Holy Lands at last—so far, this expedition could hardly be called a crusade, more a floating band of hitmen-for-hire—but now these Zara-siegers and Byzantine-kingmakers were at last on their way to becoming true crusaders and Moslem killers, for the moment anyway.

They had hardly left the harbor at Constantinople when their "Latin" pretender was murdered. After the news of his assassination reached them, the crusaders turned their ships around and headed back to secure the situation, if for nothing else, to fortify their supply lines.

Their earlier treacheries would now come back to haunt the Byzantines. When the crusaders found the city bolted tight against them, the stage was set for a siege and the odds were strongly in the Byzantines' favor. In all the centuries since its founding by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, Constantinople had never succumbed to an assault from the outside. But contrary to historical precedent, these crusading marauders who seemed determined to fight anyone but Moslems accomplished the seemingly impossible.

At long last the heavens failed Byzantium and its capital city fell to siege for the first time ever, and not at the hands of Moslems or Vikings or Mongols—not that all of those hadn't at some point tried to take Constantinople—but to the descendants of the Byzantines' closest relatives, western Europeans, the other heirs of Rome.

To put it another way, when Constantine's "New Rome" finally went down, the culprit was the original Rome. The resulting Sack of Constantinople in CE lasted three days, though its tremors are still felt today.

For one, the great library there was destroyed when the crusaders ransacked it, even stabling their horses inside—it's horrifying to think how much ancient learning and literature was lost in that catastrophe—it's almost certain the complete works of some ancient authors whose writings now exist only in tattered fragments, some entirely lost, were housed in this library once. Worse yet, the fire set in that dark year became a cataclysmic blaze two centuries later.

In CE, the Turks relit the flames of siege and took the city once and for all, exterminating Byzantium at long last. Thus, ironically, it was the Christian crusaders' siege of Constantinople that paved the way for the Moslems' eventual takeover of the entire area.

Constantinople is now Istanbul, part of the Islamic world. In besieging two cities—neither of which was Moslem at the time—the men of the Fourth Crusade clearly thought they had done enough.

Feeling no particular need to proceed on to the Holy Lands, they returned to Europe with their spoils of conquest, and given that they had briefly re-united East and West, healing momentarily the schism in the Church, Innocent III had little choice but to forgive and "re-communicate" these crusaders. So, they paraded in triumph, bearing the plunder of the East: gold, relics and all sorts of memorabilia, though very few books of learning.

In fact, remarkably little of any intellectual substance would come of the ransacked Byzantines. It was as if all Europe in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade was collectively wearing a souvenir t-shirt that read, "My uncle sacked Constantinople, and all I got was a big bronze horse. The next wave of crusading came soon after the Fourth Crusade which, like the Third, had depleted little of Europe's material resources or manpower.

A perceived success in hindsight, the siege of Constantinople reinvigorated Western Europeans' interest in religious warfare with the East. None of the subsequent crusades, however, resembled their immediate forebears much—certainly not in constituency or outcome—which should probably be counted as a blessing. Moreover, it was directed not against the Moslem East but at lands inside Europe, a dramatic shift in focus for something dubbed a Crusade. The ostensible aim of this campaign was to rid southern France of the Albigensians , a heretical sect who refused to recognize the authority of the Church—shades of the Gnostics!

But the days when the Crusades had to be excused as an extension of the "Truce of God" were by then long past—the Crusades were now accepted for what they'd always really been, military missions launched against the Church's, or at least the Pope's enemies—even so, the rewards were still the same. Namely, one could still earn a place in heaven not only by fighting "infidels" but now also one's neighbors in Europe.

This proved very attractive to many since it was much less risky to go on a Crusade close to home, as opposed to trekking hundreds of miles across hostile and sometimes barren lands to rescue Jerusalem from ungrateful heathens. As evidence of just how hard it was to mount a foreign expedition, no western army had even come near the holy city since Richard shook lances with Saladin.

Still, not even trying to head east seemed to many so far from the true spirit of crusading that Innocent's campaign against southern France was never numbered with the other Crusades. History and its own age agreed: this was not the "Fifth Crusade" but the "Albigensian Crusade," and that says it all.

What no Crusade since the Second had achieved, the mass exportation of European aggression and manpower outside the West, the Fifth Crusade CE at last accomplished. It killed thousands of disenfranchised Europe-born hotheads and bled off their pent-up hostility far away from their homeland, even though this expedition to the East was still not aimed squarely at the Holy Lands.

Sent by sea to Egypt instead—after all, ocean travel had been good to the men of the Fourth Crusade—these benighted knights landed on the shores of the Nile just at the time of its annual flood. Trapped in high waters, they met a collective watery death at the hands of the natives there. With this, the consequences of the ignorance which had embraced the West since the Fall of Rome were now fully apparent. For, if these crusaders had read their Herodotus, they would have known about the flooding of the Nile, but since virtually no one in Europe could read Greek, how could they have anticipated the perils they faced?

The Fifth Crusade stands alone as one of the best arguments ever for the practical merits of studying history—and the value of a liberal education. Like the Albigensian Crusade, the next European expedition to the East is not numbered either, this one also disqualified for being too far from the spirit of crusading.

Dubbed Frederick's Crusade CE because its leader was the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II , it was neither called for nor sanctioned by the papacy but was, in fact, an attempt to forge peaceable relations with the Middle East.

Even after Frederick managed to return Jerusalem to Christian control, the pope would not acknowledge it as a "Crusade"—if Innocent III had still been alive, he might have appreciated the emperor's ambassadorial finesse but Innocent had died by then—the problem was Frederick had achieved his objective not through force of war but by diplomacy, and negotiation was not the point of crusading, any more than promoting war within Europe was. Besides, Moslem forces retook Jerusalem soon thereafter, where it remained until very recently.

Louis, in fact, died leading the latter and in neither came anywhere near the Holy Lands. These crusades did little more than ensure the King's journey to canonization—his trip to Saint Louis , so to speak. So, when in CE the last Christian outpost in the Middle East, the port city of Acre , fell to Moslem forces, the Crusades were brought to an ignominious close. It was the papacy's veritable admission that crusading had failed, as if to say, "There's no point anymore in fighting for the Holy Lands.

The same door that closed the Crusades opened another path leading down one of the darkest stretches in European history. Artists from different traditions met in the city of Jerusalem, with, for example, Syrian goldworkers on the right of the market near the Holy Sepulcher, and Latin goldworkers on the left Conder Indeed, metalwork from this period sometimes combines an Islamic aesthetic with Christian subject matter Some pieces even bear an inscription indicating that they were made by an Islamic goldsmith for a Christian.

Precious works of art fashioned for the churches of Europe celebrated their links to the Holy Land The campaign was a dismal failure because the Muslims had regrouped. Let them go. By the end of the Third Crusade —92 , Crusader forces had gained Cyprus and the coastal city of Acre. Saladin guaranteed access to Jerusalem to European pilgrims and welcomed Jews back to the city as well. The Fourth Crusade With each crusade, relations between the Byzantines and the Western forces became more estranged.

The Fourth Crusade set out in with Egypt as its goal. In , the Byzantines regained the city. Later Crusades Successive crusades were launched to the Holy Land. The Seventh and Eighth Crusades, in In , Sultan Baibars captured Montfort Castle Calls for new crusades over the next centuries were increasingly ignored, despite the renown in which Crusaders and the Holy Land were held in legend Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters.

Burgoyne, Michael Hamilton. Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study. London: World of Islam Festival Trust, Conder, Claude R. Dandridge, Pete and Mark Wypyski. Folda, Jaroslav. The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, — Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, This may explain why they slaughtered fellow Christians in Constantinople during the first Crusade and took control of Edessa, which was not on the route to Jerusalem and did not contain any holy sites.

What were the different motives for the Crusades? Some reasons for going were: To obey the Pope's call to free the Holy city from the infidels and ensure access for pilgrims. St Bernaud of Clairvaux wrote in , Of mighty soldier, oh man of war, you now have something to fight for. If you win it will be glorious. If you die fighting for Jerusalem, you will win a place in heaven.