HISTORY

Crusades

Crusades

Dominance of the Catholic Church led to the Crusades

After the death of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, in 814 and the following fall down of his kingdom, Christian Europe was under assault and on the protective. Magyars, nomadic people from Asia, pillaged eastern and central Europe until the 10th century. Beginning about 800, several centuries of Viking raids disturbed life in northern Europe and even endangered Mediterranean cities. But the greatest threat came from the forces of Islam, militant and successful in the centuries following the death of their leader, Muhammad, in 632. By the 8th century, Islamic forces had conquered North Africa, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and most of Spain. Islamic armies established bases in Italy, greatly condensed the size and power of the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire) and besieged its capital, Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire, which had conserved much of the classical civilization of the Greeks and had protected the eastern Mediterranean from assaults from all sides, was scarcely able to hold off the enemy. Islam posed the threat of a opponent culture and religion, which neither the Vikings nor the Magyars had done.

In the 11th century the equilibrium of power began to swing toward the West. The church became more centralized and stronger from a reform association to end the practice whereby kings installed important clergy, such as bishops, in office.

Success and Crusades

Palestine, the historic region on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea (presently controlled by Israel), was at the center of trade routes linking three continents—Asia, Europe, and Africa. Adherents of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions consider it a Holy Land; the city of Jerusalem in particular has sacred sites central to the belief systems of all three religions. In addition to the ancient local peoples—such as the Canaanites (related to the Phoenicians), Philistines, and Israelites—Palestine had been occupied at times by Hittites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. It fell to the Arab Muslims in CE 638. Yet the region remained relatively open—a center of commerce and religious and intellectual activity until the late 11th century when the Seljuk Turks became the dominant Islamic people in Asia Minor (the Anatolian Peninsula) and took control of Jerusalem. Their harassment of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem and their aggressive stance toward Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), became a concern to Christian leaders. Alexius I Comnenus, the Byzantine emperor, appealed to the West for help defending against invaders. Soon afterward, in 1095, Pope Urban II gave a speech at the Council of Clermont in France encouraging aid to Byzantium against the Islamic threat.

Wandering preachers, such as Peter the Hermit (Peter of Amiens), helped spread the message of a "holy war." Some of those who would become involved over the next years did so for the sake of territorial and economic interests in addition to religious ideals. The prosperity and growing populations in Europe at that time prompted a looking outward to distant lands with curiosity, ...