Unintended consequences
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades
Chapter III
The Crusade
Causes and Conditions
Conquest by Islam of Sicily 902. Gradual Christian reconquest of Iberia starting 10th century. Sicily reclaimed my Normans 1091. Sardinia recaptured by Pisa 1016. Genoa raids the more developed coast of Africa.
p191 ...from the middle of the 11th century, the Christian Occident was assuming, in a series of detached efforts, the offensive against Islam. But this offensive had nothing in common with a religious war...
...
...[the Crusade] was purely and exclusively religious. In this respect it was intimately related... to the great wave of Christian fervor of which the War of Investitures was another manifestation. [and] by the fact that the Pope, who instigated and waged this war, was also the instigator and organizer of the Crusade.
...Their objective was the Holy Places, and Sepulcher of Christ in Jerusalem. This had been in the hands of the Musulmans ever since the 9th century, but no one had paid much attention to the fact.
...
Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantium, appeals to Pope Urban II for help as he is being hard pressed by the Seldjuk Turks. The Crusade is proclaimed at Clermont November 27th, 1095.]
p192 The Crusade was essentially the work of the Papacy; as regards both its universal character and its religious nature. It was undertaken not by the States, nor yet by the people, but by the Papacy; its motive was wholly spiritual, divorced from any temporal preoccupation: the conquest of the Holy Places. Only those who set forth without the spirit of lucre in their hearts could share in the indulgences granted by the Pope. Not until the first wars of the French Revolution did history again show combatants so completely careless of any other consideration than devotion to an ideal.
With the benefit of hindsight, this is ironic and tragic. One could begin the Crusade in that spirit but one couldn't arrive at the destination without learning the basics of logistics, and logistics require money. Crusaders had to begin the process of monetizing their self-sufficient world before they could follow their spirit to the Holy Lands.
And I think that last sentence may be shortchanging the participants in some of Europe's religious wars, but he's probably right in excluding the Americans and their little "Revolution."
But religious enthusiasm, and the authority of the Pope, could not of themselves have promoted so vast an undertaking if the social conditions of Europe had not rendered it possible... A century earlier the thing would have been impossible, as it would have been a century later... the true Crusade, the parent of all the others, was the First, and this was essentially the child of the age.
p193 To begin with, there were as yet no States. The nations had no governments which could command them. Christianity was not yet politically divided...
Further, there was a military class which was ready to set forth at any moment: the Order of Chivalry. The army was in being; it had only to be mustered... And it was an army that cost nothing, since it was endowed, from father to son, by the fiefs. [So long as it stayed home or could live off the land.] There was no need to collect money for the Holy War. It was enough to appoint the leaders and lay down the routes to be followed. [But see logistics above.] Regarded from this point of view, the Crusade was essentially the one great feudal war, in which the Western feudality acted in a body... No king took part in this Crusade. The curious thing is that nobody gave a thought to the kings, to say nothing of the Emperor, who was the enemy of the Pope.
...the Crusade recruited its troops mainly from... France, England, the Low Countries and Norman Italy. Considered from this point of view it was above all an expedition... of the Roman chivalry.
...the Crusaders were by no means as numerous as is generally supposed. At the very most they numbered some tens of thousands...
2. The Conquest of Jerusalem
p194 The expedition was carefully prepared under the direction of the Pope... The excitatoria who were then dispatched throughout Christendom vaunted, in one breath, the quantity of relics to be found in Asia Minor, the charm and luxury of its customs and the beauty of its women...
p195 If the Pope had hoped to bring the Greek Church into the Roman fold by means of the Crusade he was assuredly disillusioned. When the Westerners and the Greeks came into contact the antipathy between them was increased... After battles and fatigues... what was left of the army appeared at last before the walls of Jerusalem on June 7th, 1099. On July 15th the city was taken by assault, and rivers of blood were shed in the name of the God of peace and love...
The result of the conquest was the establishment of petty Christian States: the kingdom of Jerusalem, of which Godfry of Bouillon was elected sovereign... the principality of Edessa, whose inhabitants had given the title of count to Baldin, brother of Godfrey... and the principality of Antioch, of which Bohemund of Tarento made himself prince after taking the city in 1098. All these were organized in accordance with feudal law... They were colonies that did not answer to any of the requirements of colonies... While the spirit of lucre was far from absent from the minds of all those who took part in the Crusade, not a single Crusader had any thought of commerce. They were actuated only by the religious ideal. But the immediate result was a commercial one. The Christians' military base, which had thus been established in the East, had of course to be revictualled. Venice, Pisa, and Genoa at once undertook the task.The Crusader principalities became the objective of their fleets. The eastern Mediterranean was now in communication with the West. From this time forward Christian navigation underwent an incessant development. Those who derived the greatest profit from the Crusades were the middle classes of the Italian seaports. But their purpose had not been commercial. Their truest manifestation was the alliance of the military with the religious spirit in the Orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers.
p196 As Christian establishments, the possessions of the Crusaders were extremely difficult to defend. Edessa fell not later than 1143... In 1187 Saladin, Sultan of Egypt, conquered Jerusalem, and it was not again recaptured.
I read somewhere that finding forage for the heavy cavalry favored by the Europeans was a huge problem in the Holy Lands. One that could not really be solved.
And so the great movement of the Crusades had hardly any final result, beyond the greater activity and more rapid movement of trade on the Mediterranean...
...They did not repulse Islam, they did not recover the Greek Church... On the other hand, they were of considerable importance in a domain which was totally opposed to the spirit which had inspired them: for their true result was the development of Italian maritime commerce, and, from the time of the Forth Crusade, the establishment of the colonial empire of Venice and Genoa in the Levant....
p197 The Crusades... had yet one more consequence of a religious order. From the time of the First Crusade the Holy War was substituted for the evangelization of the non-Christian world. Henceforth it would be employed against heretics also. The heresy of the Albigenses, and later, that of the Hussites, were extirpated by means of Holy War. As for the pagans, the methods employed against the Wends, the Prussians and the Lithuanians were characteristic of the age: the infidel had no longer to be converted, but exterminated.
And this brings us back to Book 5, and the Formation of the Bourgeoisie. (See 232.)
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