The Crusades: East, West and the Record

The Crusades are usually argued about as a quarrel between the West and Islam. In one telling, Christian Europe launched an unprovoked assault on a peaceful Muslim world. In the other, brave knights rescued the Holy Land from Muslim aggression. Both stories leave out a third party: the Christians of the East, the Orthodox of Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople, in whose name the first crusade was preached and who often suffered most from what followed.

This site gives a short answer in What about the Crusades and the Inquisition?, and the Fourth Crusade has its own article, The Sack of Constantinople (1204). This article goes deeper into the first two centuries, from Clermont in 1095 to the fall of Acre in 1291, and reads them from the East.

In brief

The Crusades did not come out of nowhere. In the 630s Arab Muslim armies took Damascus and Jerusalem; in 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; in 1071 the Seljuk Turks defeated and captured a Byzantine emperor at Manzikert, and Antioch fell in 1084. Emperor Alexios I asked the West for help, and in November 1095 Pope Urban II called the knights of France to aid "your brethren who live in the east" and promised remission of sins. What came was larger and harder to control than anything Alexios had asked for. The First Crusade massacred Jews in the Rhineland and the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099. Within a year it had also replaced the Orthodox patriarchs of Jerusalem and Antioch with Latin ones, and later crusades turned against Orthodox Christians themselves, above all in 1204. The Orthodox Church never taught that killing in war remits sins and never accepted a second, Latin hierarchy in her ancient sees. The honest verdict is neither the anti-Western myth nor the romantic one.

Thesis: The Crusades answered real Muslim conquests, but they were fought on a theology of holy war the Orthodox Church never accepted, and for the Christians of the East they brought deliverance, subjection and betrayal in turn.

Before the Crusades: conquest and pressure

The Holy Land had been ruled by Christian emperors for three centuries when Arab armies reached it. In the 630s they took Damascus, defeated the Roman army and laid siege to Jerusalem for four months. The patriarch St Sophronius finally negotiated a surrender to Caliph Umar on terms: according to the Catholic Encyclopedia's account, the Christians were to keep their churches and no one was to be forced to accept Islam.¹ For the next four centuries the Christians of Syria and Palestine lived under Muslim rule, with periods of tolerance and periods of persecution, as the site's article How Did Christianity Survive Under Islamic Rule? describes.

Two later blows mattered most for the West. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and of other Christian buildings in Jerusalem. Then the Seljuk Turks arrived: in 1071 the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was "defeated and made captive at Mantzikert," Asia Minor was overrun, Antioch fell in 1084, and by 1092, in the Catholic Encyclopedia's words, "not one of the great metropolitan sees of Asia remained in the possession of the Christians."² These were wars of conquest by the armies of a new religion against Christian lands. The site's article on jihad in classical Islamic law explains the doctrine behind them. Any account that begins in 1095 begins in the middle.

Alexios, Urban and Clermont

Around 1095 the emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent envoys to the pope asking for military help against the Turks.³ How much he asked for is debated. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 argued that he sought only to recruit some hundreds of western knights into his own army.⁴ What he received was a mass movement of armies he did not command.

On 27 November 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II preached to a great crowd in the open air. No text of the speech survives. We have several accounts by men who were present or close to events. They were written down afterwards, Robert the Monk's around 1110, and they differ.⁵ In Fulcher of Chartres's version the pope speaks of the eastern Christians: "your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help," for "the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania," and he promises: "All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins." Robert the Monk puts the stress on Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre and the glory of the Franks, and has the crowd cry out, "It is the will of God! It is the will of God!"⁶ Urban's own letter of December 1095 speaks of the call "to free the churches of the East" and of the expedition "as a preparation for the remission of all their sins."⁷

Alexios's daughter, the historian Anna Komnene, saw the result with alarm: "the whole of the West and all the barbarian tribes which dwell between the further side of the Adriatic and the pillars of Heracles, had all migrated in a body and were marching into Asia." Some leaders, she wrote, "such as Bohemund and men of like mind, who had long cherished a desire for the Roman Empire," used the preaching as a pretext.⁸

The First Crusade: deliverance and massacre

The crusade began with a crime. In the spring of 1096 bands of crusaders in the Rhineland turned on the Jews. Albert of Aachen, a Christian chronicler, writes that they "slaughtered them without mercy, especially in the Kingdom of Lorraine, asserting it to be the beginning of their expedition and their duty against the enemies of the Christian faith."⁹ There is no defending this, and the Church must not try.

In Asia Minor the crusade at first kept its oath to Alexios and handed back to imperial officials the large territories it took in 1097.¹⁰ Antioch fell to the crusaders on the night of 2 June 1098.¹¹ On 15 July 1099 they stormed Jerusalem. Their own chroniclers describe what followed. The anonymous Gesta Francorum says "the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles." Raymond of Aguilers writes that "men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins," and adds: "Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers." Fulcher of Chartres says that in the Temple area "almost ten thousand were killed" and that "neither women nor children were spared."¹²

{{very-strong: The capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 was followed by a massacre of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, described by the crusaders' own chroniclers.}}

{{debated: Historians disagree about the size of the Jerusalem massacre and whether it exceeded the killing at other cities the crusade took.}} Ibn al-Athir, writing more than a century later, says that in the al-Aqsa Mosque "the Franks slaughtered more than 70,000 people."¹³ Konrad Hirschler, studying the Arabic chronicles, concludes that contemporary Arabic texts "leave no doubt that a massacre did take place" but do not show it was larger than at Antioch or Ma'arra, and that Ibn al-Athir's account is "of limited value for a historical reconstruction." Benjamin Kedar, working mainly from the Latin sources, concluded that "the massacre in Jerusalem was considerably more extensive than in other towns."¹⁴ Ibn al-Athir's 70,000 cannot be relied on. That a massacre took place is certain.

The Orthodox patriarchs replaced

For Orthodox readers, what happened to the Church of the East matters as much as what happened on the battlefield. Bernard Hamilton's study of the Latin Church in the crusader states tells it carefully, and it begins well. When the crusade took Antioch, the Orthodox patriarch John IV was in the city; the Turkish governor had suspended him from the walls in an iron cage during the siege. The papal legate, Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy, restored him to his cathedral and recognized his authority over all the clergy of his patriarchate, "Latin as well as Greek." Adhémar also worked with the exiled Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Symeon II, and the two issued a joint letter from the camp.¹⁵

Adhémar died on 1 August 1098, and the policy died with him. In September the crusade's leaders wrote to the pope: "we have beaten the Turks and the heathen, but we do not know how to defeat the heretics, the Greeks and Armenians and Syrian Jacobites." Hamilton calls this "a blueprint for the Latinisation of the Orthodox churches in Syria."¹⁶

When Jerusalem fell, Symeon II had just died in exile in Cyprus. The crusaders did not consult the Orthodox clergy of the Holy Sepulchre. They chose a Latin patriarch, Arnulf of Chocques, and Hamilton records that one of his first acts was to expel the Eastern Christians from the Holy Sepulchre and give it entirely to Latin clergy. At Christmas 1099 Arnulf was removed and the papal legate, Daimbert of Pisa, was chosen in his place; he soon consecrated Latin bishops for sees inside the patriarchate of Antioch. In the summer of 1100, after war broke out between Bohemond and Alexios, John IV left Antioch. The Franks called it an abdication; John's own account shows that he considered himself expelled. Bohemond installed a Latin patriarch, Bernard of Valence. Even the Latin historian William of Tyre called John "a true confessor of Christ."¹⁷

{{strong: Within about a year of taking Jerusalem, the crusaders had put Latin patriarchs in the places of the Orthodox patriarchs of both Jerusalem and Antioch.}}

The Byzantine Church refused to recognize these appointments and kept naming Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch who lived in Constantinople. One of them, Athanasius, was restored in Antioch in 1165 under imperial pressure, while the Latin patriarch withdrew and anathematized the Franks who accepted him; Athanasius died in an earthquake in 1170, and the Latin returned.¹⁸ Under Frankish law, Hamilton notes, an Orthodox Christian "might only enjoy legal equality with the Franks if he became a Christian of the Latin rite." When Saladin besieged Jerusalem in 1187, part of the Orthodox community plotted to open the gates to him.¹⁹

The First Council of Nicaea had ruled, in its eighth canon (on clergy returning from the Novatian schism), that there must not "be two bishops in the city."²⁰ To set Latin patriarchs over the apostolic sees of Antioch and Jerusalem was a grave wrong against that canon and against the Orthodox faithful, and the Orthodox Church has always regarded it so. Honesty also requires saying that the picture was not uniform. Hamilton notes that the Syriac Orthodox (non-Chalcedonian) chronicler Michael the Syrian was on good terms with the Latins and distrusted the Orthodox, who were, in Hamilton's judgment, "far less tolerant" of his church than the Franks were.²¹

Later crusades, briefly

Edessa fell to the atabeg of Mosul on 25 December 1144, prompting the Second Crusade. Saladin destroyed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem near Lake Tiberias, at Hattin, on 4 July 1187 and took Jerusalem later that year. The Third Crusade, led by Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart, did not recover the city; in 1229 the emperor Frederick II regained it by treaty rather than war. Louis IX of France led crusades in 1248-1254 and 1270, and in 1291 the last crusader towns in Syria fell.²²

Long before 1204 the crusading idea had been turned against Orthodox Christians. In 1107 Bohemond, having sought the backing of Pope Paschal II, launched a crusade against the Byzantine empire itself, and was defeated.²³ In 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, and the Venetians installed one of their own, Thomas Morosini, as Latin patriarch in Hagia Sophia.²⁴ The full story is told in The Sack of Constantinople (1204); in 2001 Pope John Paul II spoke of "the disastrous sack of the imperial city of Constantinople, which was for so long the bastion of Christianity in the East."²⁵ In the north, the Orthodox Church remembers St Alexander Nevsky for defeating the Swedes in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Chud in 1242; his Life, as the Orthodox Church in America publishes it, describes the knights as having come "with the blessing of the Roman Pope." That is the Church's memory in a hagiographical text, not a neutral chronicle, but it shows how crusading looked from Orthodox Rus.²⁶

Holy war and the remission of sins

The deepest difference between the crusading West and the Orthodox East was theological. Urban II offered the remission of sins to those who took the cross, and later popes developed the crusade indulgence. The site's article on indulgences traces how that system grew. The Orthodox Church has never accepted indulgences, and she has never taught that killing in war, however just the cause, wins forgiveness.

Her canons point the other way. St Basil the Great wrote that the Fathers did not count killing in war as murder, "I presume from their wish to make concession to men fighting on behalf of chastity and true religion," and yet he advised that "those whose hands are not clean only abstain from communion for three years."²⁷ When the tenth-century emperor Nikephoros Phokas, a great soldier, promised that soldiers who died in battle would be proclaimed martyrs, the chronicler Skylitzes reports that Patriarch Polyeuktos refused, citing Basil's canon.²⁸ Anna Komnene was shocked to see Latin priests bear arms: "the rules concerning priests are not the same among the Latins as they are with us."²⁹

{{moderate: The Byzantine Church refused an emperor's proposal that soldiers killed in battle be proclaimed martyrs, on the basis of St Basil's canon.}}

In the Orthodox view, war may be a tragic necessity for defending the innocent. It is never a sacrament, never a penance, and never a path to salvation.

Modern myths in both directions

One modern myth says the Crusades were unprovoked Western aggression against a peaceful Islamic world and the first chapter of European colonialism. The four centuries of conquest described above refute the first half, and historians have shown how the memory of the Crusades grew over time. Hirschler argues that the fall of Jerusalem was remembered on a large scale only decades afterward.³⁰ The historian Thomas Madden goes further, arguing in 2001 that "It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades" in the age of European colonialism.³¹

The opposite myth says the Crusades were noble wars of defence and nothing more. In another essay Madden writes that "the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars." The East's experience does not fit that sentence: the Rhineland, Jerusalem in 1099, the Latin patriarchs, Bohemond's war on Byzantium and the sack of 1204 were not defence. At the other pole stands the Byzantinist Steven Runciman, who closed his history by calling the Holy War "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost."³² Runciman wrote as a historian of Byzantium, and his verdict is as sweeping in one direction as Madden's is in the other, but he saw what the defensive reading leaves out.

Objections and replies

"The Crusades were simply self-defence against jihad."

They answered real conquests, and Urban preached aid to the East. But self-defence does not explain the massacre of Jews, the deposition of Orthodox patriarchs, or crusades against Christian Constantinople.

"Orthodox resentment is ingratitude. The crusaders helped Byzantium."

The First Crusade did return large parts of Asia Minor to the empire, and that deserves to be remembered. Byzantium also made mistakes: Hamilton judges Alexios's retreat in June 1098, which left the crusaders at Antioch to fight alone, "understandable, but in the long term ill-judged."³³ Gratitude for real help and grief at real betrayal can stand together.

"The Crusades are the root of Muslim hostility to the West today."

The Muslim conquests came first, and the modern grievance owes much to later memory and to the colonial era. The Crusades are a reason for Christian repentance, not an explanation of everything since.

"Rome has apologized, so why bring it up?"

Because the history is still told badly in both directions. The International Theological Commission, preparing for the jubilee of 2000, itself named "the Crusades or the Inquisition" (see The Inquisition: Myths and Records) when it asked how the Church should judge the faults of the past, and it warned against both an apologetics that justifies everything and blame that history cannot support.³⁴ Telling the record accurately honours that warning.

What we can say confidently

• Muslim armies had conquered Syria and Palestine in the seventh century, and the Seljuks had overrun most of Byzantine Asia Minor by the 1090s.
• Urban II preached the crusade at Clermont on 27 November 1095 and promised remission of sins; the surviving versions of his speech differ.
• The First Crusade massacred Rhineland Jews in 1096 and the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099.
• Latin patriarchs replaced the Orthodox in Jerusalem (1099) and Antioch (1100), against the wishes of the Orthodox and the canons.
• Crusades were later directed against Orthodox Christians, in 1107 and 1204.
• The Orthodox Church never accepted holy war, indulgences, or martyr status for soldiers.

What remains disputed

• What Alexios actually asked for in 1095, and what Urban said at Clermont.
• The death toll in Jerusalem in 1099, and whether it exceeded other sieges of the crusade.
• How far crusaders were moved by piety, penance, land or plunder; motives varied from man to man.
• How far modern Muslim memory of the Crusades is ancient and how far it was revived in the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

The Crusades were not a single crime or a single glory. They began as a response to real conquests and to a real appeal from Eastern Christians, and they carried the faith and courage of many ordinary people. They also carried a theology of holy war and a conviction that the Latin Church was the whole Church, and those two errors turned the rescue of the East into its subjection. The Orthodox Church remembers both the martyrs of the Muslim conquests and the patriarchs driven from their thrones by fellow Christians. Her answer is the one her Fathers gave: Christ is defended by holiness, not by the sword, and His Church is one in faith with her bishops, not by one see's command. Her call to Muslims, then and now, is to faith in Christ, the eternal Son of God, crucified and risen, and to holy baptism, offered by witness and never by the sword. These are hard words for Rome and for the Muslim world alike. They are offered in charity, and they are true.

Notes

1. Adrian Fortescue, "Jerusalem (A.D. 71-1099)," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08355a.htm.
2. Louis Bréhier, "Crusades," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1908), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04543c.htm.
3. Paul Halsall, introduction to "Urban II: Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095: Six Versions of the Speech," Internet Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/urban2-5vers.asp.
4. Bréhier, "Crusades" (see note 2), citing Anna Komnene, Alexiad 7.
5. Halsall, "Six Versions" (see note 3); Bréhier, "Crusades" (see note 2) for the date; for Robert's date (c. 1110), Damien Kempf, interview on the Kempf-Bull edition of Robert's Historia Iherosolimitana (2013), https://www.medievalists.net/2013/08/interview-with-damien-kempf-on-robert-the-monks-historia-iherosolimitana/.
6. Fulcher of Chartres, trans. Thatcher and McNeal; Robert the Monk, trans. Munro; both in "Six Versions" (see note 3) and "Urban II: Speech at Clermont 1095 (Robert the Monk version)," https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/urban2a.asp.
7. Urban II, Letter of Instruction to the Crusaders, December 1095, trans. August C. Krey, The First Crusade (Princeton, 1921), pp. 42-43, in "Six Versions" (see note 3).
8. Anna Komnene, Alexiad 10, trans. Elizabeth A. S. Dawes (London, 1928), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/AnnaComnena-Alexiad10.asp.
9. Albert of Aachen, in "Albert of Aix and Ekkehard of Aura: Emico and the Slaughter of the Rhineland Jews," Internet Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/1096jews.asp.
10. Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980), pp. 5-8.
11. Bréhier, "Crusades" (see note 2).
12. "The Siege and Capture of Jerusalem: Collected Accounts," Internet Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/cde-jlem.asp (Gesta Francorum, Raymond of Aguilers and Fulcher of Chartres, trans. Krey).
13. Ibn al-Athir, in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, as reproduced by Martha Carlin, "Muslim Accounts of the Conquest of Jerusalem," https://sites.uwm.edu/carlin/?p=1017.
14. Konrad Hirschler, "The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative," Crusades 13 (2014), introduction at https://www.medievalists.net/2013/05/the-jerusalem-conquest-of-4921099-in-the-medieval-arabic-historiography-of-the-crusades-from-regional-plurality-to-islamic-narrative/, quoting B. Z. Kedar, "The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades," Crusades 3 (2004), pp. 15-75.
15. Hamilton, Latin Church (see note 10), pp. 6-8.
16. Hamilton, Latin Church, p. 9, translating the princes' letter of 11 September 1098 from Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe.
17. Hamilton, Latin Church, pp. 12-17, quoting William of Tyre 6.23. Hamilton notes that Arnulf was probably never consecrated and that his election was not confirmed.
18. Hamilton, Latin Church, chapter "The Orthodox, 1098-1187," pp. 172-176.
19. Hamilton, Latin Church, pp. 186-187.
20. First Council of Nicaea (325), canon 8, trans. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm.
21. Hamilton, Latin Church, p. 176.
22. Bréhier, "Crusades" (see note 2); Hamilton, Latin Church, for the name Hattin.
23. Hamilton, Latin Church, p. 173.
24. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1954), on 1204.
25. John Paul II, Address to Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, 4 May 2001, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2001/may/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20010504_archbishop-athens.html.
26. Orthodox Church in America, "Repose of Saint Alexander Nevsky," Lives of the Saints, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2026/11/23/103377-repose-of-saint-alexander-nevsky.
27. Basil the Great, Letter 188, canon 13, trans. Jackson, NPNF2 vol. 8, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202188.htm.
28. Rosemary Morris, "The Two Faces of Nikephoros Phokas," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988), pp. 83-115, with n. 16, citing Skylitzes, Synopsis 273-275.
29. Anna Komnene, Alexiad 10 (see note 8).
30. Hirschler, "Jerusalem Conquest" (see note 14).
31. Thomas F. Madden, "Crusade Propaganda," National Review Online, November 2001, https://www.nationalreview.com/2001/11/crusade-propaganda-thomas-f-madden/ (also quoted in an end note to the next essay).
32. Thomas F. Madden, "The Real History of the Crusades," Catholic Education Resource Center, https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/common-misconceptions/the-real-history-of-the-crusades.html; Runciman, History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (see note 24), "The Summing-Up."
33. Hamilton, Latin Church, p. 17.
34. International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past (December 1999), https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000307_memory-reconc-itc_en.html.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Krey, August C., ed. The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants. Princeton, 1921. (Gesta Francorum, Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres, Urban II's letter; via the Internet Medieval Sourcebook.)
• Fulcher of Chartres and Robert the Monk on the Council of Clermont, trans. Thatcher and McNeal (1905) and Munro (1895), Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
• Albert of Aachen on the Rhineland massacres, Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
• Anna Komnene. The Alexiad. Trans. Elizabeth A. S. Dawes. London: Kegan Paul, 1928.
• Ibn al-Athir, in Francesco Gabrieli, ed., Arab Historians of the Crusades.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Basil the Great. Letter 188 (canonical letter to Amphilochius), NPNF2 vol. 8.
• First Council of Nicaea, canons, NPNF2 vol. 14.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Repose of Saint Alexander Nevsky." Lives of the Saints.

Other scholarship

• Hamilton, Bernard. The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church. London: Variorum, 1980.
• Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
• Hirschler, Konrad. "The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades." Crusades 13 (2014).
• Kedar, Benjamin Z. "The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades." Crusades 3 (2004): 15-75. (Cited through Hirschler.)
• Morris, Rosemary. "The Two Faces of Nikephoros Phokas." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988): 83-115.
• Madden, Thomas F. "Crusade Propaganda." National Review Online, November 2001.
• Madden, Thomas F. "The Real History of the Crusades." Catholic Education Resource Center.

Sources from the Catholic tradition

• Bréhier, Louis. "Crusades." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4. 1908.
• Fortescue, Adrian. "Jerusalem (A.D. 71-1099)." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8. 1910.
• John Paul II. Address to Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, 4 May 2001.
• International Theological Commission. Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past. 1999.