Postby HONDO74 » Sat Jun 02, 2018 10:27 am
The Crusades were fought to recover the Holy Land (as it was then known) from its Muslim conquerors.
If we use the Kingdom of Judea as a starting point, that became a tributary state to the Roman Empire in 63 BC after being conquered by Pompey. Shortly thereafter, it became a Roman province, which was further consolidated with Galilee into the province of Syrian Palestine. Thereafter it had been part of the Roman Empire continuously, also becoming Christianised following Emperor Constantine's consolidation of power. It remained Christian and (Eastern) Roman until falling to one of Mohammed's successors, the Caliph Omar.
This was the era of great Muslim aggression and expansion, now generally called the Muslim conquests. From the death of Mohammed until the Crusades, Muslim armies conquered most of the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent, parts of Asia Minor, the whole of North Africa, parts of the Maghreb, and the Iberian Peninsula, great swathes of these from the Eastern Roman Empire.
The Christians, of course, retook Jerusalem in 1099 to form the short-lived Kingdom of Jerusalem, as a way of vindicating their possessions. The Crusades would not have happened without the prior Muslim aggression.
We can date the start of the First Crusade precisely. In March of 1095, Pope Urban II received an ambassador from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos pleading for help against Muslim (Seljuk) Turks who had conquered most of Byzantine Anatolia in the eastern Mediterranean. The Seljuks were being pushed from east by Mongol hordes (they’re always “hordes,” aren’t they?)
On 27 November 1095 the Pope gave a speech which electrified his listeners. It was, in effect, a call to arms. summoning nobles and peasants alike to wrest the Holy Land, and eastern churches from control of the Turks.
they had one clear objective: re-taking Jerusalem. The city had last been under Christian governance in the year 638**. They did conquer it in a July 1099 assault, massacring most of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Accounts tell of city streets running red with blood of the citizenry.
The third and final wave of nobles arrived in 1101.
There would be eight more crusades, the last nearly 200 years later in 1271–1272. Together, they reopened the Mediterranean to commerce, enabling Genoa and Venice to flourish. They also unified the Latin Church under Popes made stronger by the crusades. The crusades produced thrilling stories of heroism, chivalry and piety. These tales fed medieval romance, philosophy and literature. In this way, the crusades reinforced the foundation of Western Civilization upon which so much of our present-day society rests.
Murph
.)