Crusades Flashcards

Section 2: The Crusades

Main Ideas

• The Pope called on Crusaders to invade the Holy Land.
• Despite some initial success, the later Crusades failed.
• The Crusades changed Europe forever.

Crusaders Invade the Holy Land

• The Crusades were a long series of wars between Christians and Muslims in Southwest Asia.
• The Crusades were fought over control of Palestine, a region in Southwest Asia.
• Europeans called Palestine the Holy Land because it was the region where Jesus had lived, preached, and died.

Causes of the Crusades

• For many years, the Holy Land had been ruled by Muslims, but in the late 1000s it began to be ruled by a group known as the Seljuk Turks.
• Christian pilgrims claimed that the Seljuk Turks were attacking them on their pilgrimages and preventing Christian pilgrimages from taking place.
• The Seljuk Turks also raided the Byzantine Empire.
• The Byzantine emperor, fearing an attack on Constantinople, asked Pope Urban II of the Roman Catholic Church for help.
• Despite the Byzantines being Orthodox Christians and not Catholic, the pope agreed to call on Christians to fight against the Turks.

The First Crusade

• Some of the first to answer Pope Urban II’s call to arms were peasants who left Europe for the Holy Land in 1096.
• This initial crusade by peasants was known as the People’s Crusade.
• About 5000 peasants traveled on foot, attacking Jews along the way.
• The first untrained and poorly armed peasant crusaders were killed by Turkish troops before they even reached the Holy Land.
• The more formally organized, noble/knight crusaders reached Jerusalem in 1099 and took Jerusalem.
• After the Europeans took Jerusalem, they set up four small kingdoms in the Holy Land.
• The rulers of these kingdoms set up lord and vassal systems and traded with people back in Europe.

Later Crusades Fail

• The kingdoms set up by the crusaders did not last long– within 50 years the Muslims began to take land back from the Christians.
• French and German kings set off in 1147 to retake land from the Muslims.
• Poor planning and heavy losses on the journey to the Holy Land led to the Christians’ total defeat in the Second Crusade.
• The Third Crusade began after the Muslims retook Jerusalem in 1189.
• The rulers of England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire led their armies to fight for Jerusalem, but the German king died, and the French king left.
• Only King Richard I of England stayed in the Holy Land.
• King Richard’s main opponent in the Third Crusade was Saladin, the leader of the Muslim forces.
• Even crusaders respected Saladin’s kindness and bravery. The Muslim forces also respected King Richard as an honorable opponent.
• Richard captured a few towns and won protection for Christian pilgrims but still returned home with Jerusalem in Muslim hands.
• In 1201, French knights arrived in Venice ready to sail to the Holy Land to begin a Fourth Crusade.
• Having run out of money to pay for the voyage, the knights agreed to conquer the city of Zara (a rival trade city) for the Venetians.
• Later the knights also attacked and brought destruction to Constantinople, the Christian city the crusades had originally began to protect.
• Other minor crusades followed, but none were successful, and by 1291 Muslim armies had taken back all of the Holy Land.