How does the crusades affect us today

It evolved into a Frankish-Norman expedition to capture Jerusalem, which had changed hands four times in the preceding three decades.

So were the crusades really about controlling land? By the late 14th century, crusades focused on halting the Ottoman advance into the Balkans — suggesting that the crusades were about defence against an apparently unstoppable enemy. We could compare the crusades to Nato, since crusades involved the co-operation of many nations in an operation of mutual benefit. But these comparisons quickly break down under scrutiny. It would be truer to say that we still live with many of the developments encouraged by the crusades: systems of state taxation, magnificent castles, and the kind of services performed by the likes of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, now the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which undertakes charitable work around the world.

In the modern era, western nations have often looked back with enthusiasm to the crusades, and crusading language has been used by many politicians and movements to justify their actions.

In the 19th century, European powers used pseudo-crusading and para-crusading rhetoric to justify their imperial and colonial wars. In the 20th century, crusades were depicted in political cartoons during the First World War. More recently, certain American movements — for the abolition of slavery, the war against Mormon polygamy, the prohibition of alcohol, and the civil rights movement headed by Martin Luther King — have been cited as examples of modern crusades.

Yet almost all medieval crusades except the first were ultimately failures, unsuccessful in retaking Jerusalem or maintaining the crusader states. For that reason, and others, the crusades continue to affect how the east views the west today. Yet many Muslims do not view the crusades, which they believe they won, as markedly special events, since Islam and Christianity have frequently been at odds since the seventh century — long before the First Crusade — Hence the crusades are, rather, just one expression of a long-standing rivalry between east and west, Muslim and Christian.

It is that legacy with which we are still living today. Rebecca Rist is professor in medieval history at the University of Reading, and author of Papacy and Crusading in Europe, — Continuum, Confronted with the message, propagated by both the European and Anglophone extreme right and Islamic jihadist groups, that we live in an age of renewed conflict between Islam and the west, many people may understandably conclude that we have inherited an ancient legacy of holy war.

We have — though not in the way that many imagine. The legacy of the crusades today is not due to the continuity over time of any medieval crusading institution. After all, the crusade indulgence offered by the church — a central element of the architecture of these holy wars — had effectively disappeared by the 17th century.

What did medieval Muslims think of Europeans? SM: The broad Muslim perception of Europeans was as cross-eyed barbarians. There is a story about crusader medicine, that they blood-let in order to let the demons out. The people who knew the crusaders gave a much more refined understanding, but the positive narratives were not widely disseminated.

PC: Muslim travelers had a hierarchical world view. In the center was the Islamic world. Europe was considered cold and dark and surrounded in mist. In ancient medieval ethnography, geography was destiny.

It was believed the Franks were hairy, pale and from the dark and unwashed North. What do specific accounts say? He left first-hand accounts of France, Italy and Germany, among other places. We learn, for example, of lushness of the land in Bordeaux, feasting practices in Germany, even whaling practices near Ireland. For all these, he was pleased by the land, but appalled by the people he met. SM: Those who lived with the crusaders at close range sometimes gave a subtler picture.

A diplomat named Usama ibn Munqidh went to crusader territories and befriended the leaders. He writes about visiting a court, and being very impressed with it.

Jerusalem was one of the holiest places in the eastern Mediterranean—for Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. What did Muslims think of Templar knights? They also saw them as principled, fanatically loyal and unwaveringly fierce. On the other side, Usama Ibn Munqidh tells the story of a Frank, recently arrived to the Holy Land, who harassed him about how he was praying when he was in a Templar chapel.

And the Templars apologized and helped Usama. Hosting him to pray was part of a diplomatic code. The combined Muslim forces dealt a humiliating defeat to the Crusaders, decisively ending the Second Crusade. In , Saladin began a major campaign against the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. His troops virtually destroyed the Christian army at the battle of Hattin, taking back the important city along with a large amount of territory.

From the recaptured city of Jaffa, Richard reestablished Christian control over some of the region and approached Jerusalem, though he refused to lay siege to the city. In September , Richard and Saladin signed a peace treaty that reestablished the Kingdom of Jerusalem though without the city of Jerusalem and ended the Third Crusade. In response, the Crusaders declared war on Constantinople, and the Fourth Crusade ended with the devastating Fall of Constantinople , marked by a bloody conquest, looting and near-destruction of the magnificent Byzantine capital later that year.

Throughout the remainder of the 13th century, a variety of Crusades aimed not so much to topple Muslim forces in the Holy Land but to combat any and all of those seen as enemies of the Christian faith.

The Albigensian Crusade aimed to root out the heretical Cathari or Albigensian sect of Christianity in France, while the Baltic Crusades sought to subdue pagans in Transylvania. The movement never reached the Holy Land. In , in what became known as the Sixth Crusade, Emperor Frederick II achieved the peaceful transfer of Jerusalem to Crusader control through negotiation with al-Kamil. The peace treaty expired a decade later, and Muslims easily regained control of Jerusalem.

This battle, known as the Seventh Crusade, was a failure for Louis. As the Crusaders struggled, a new dynasty, known as the Mamluks, descended from former slaves of the Islamic Empire, took power in Egypt. In , Mamluk forces in Palestine managed to halt the advance of the Mongols, an invading force led by Genghis Khan and his descendants, which had emerged as a potential ally for the Christians in the region. Under the ruthless Sultan Baybars, the Mamluks demolished Antioch in In response, Louis organized the Eighth Crusade in The initial goal was to aid the remaining Crusader states in Syria, but the mission was redirected to Tunis, where Louis died.

Edward I of England took on another expedition in This battle, which is often grouped with the Eighth Crusade but is sometimes referred to as the Ninth Crusade, accomplished very little and was considered the last significant crusade to the Holy Land.

In , one of the only remaining Crusader cities, Acre, fell to the Muslim Mamluks. As Western Christians invented a new identity for themselves, Jews became the demonic "other. The image of the Jew as the child-slayer revealed an almost Oedipal Christian fear of the parent faith. When Hitler started his modern crusade against European Jewry, the ground had been prepared by a millennium of Christian anti-Semitism.

Crusading also made Islam the ideological enemy of the West. When the first Crusaders captured Jerusalem in July , they slaughtered some 30, of the city's Jewish and Muslim inhabitants in two days. At the Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest place in the Islamic world, an exultant witness reported that the blood reached the horses' knees.

There was, however, a residual unease. When the Muslim ruler Saladin recaptured Jerusalem and restored the Holy City to Islam in without shedding a single drop of blood, he was depicted in European folklore as having been secretly baptized. This was, perhaps, a tacit acknowledgment that Saladin's conduct in victory had been far more "Christian" than that of the Crusaders in The Crusades also permanently damaged relations with the Greek Orthodox Church.

Western Christians had long resented what they perceived as a superior attitude on the part of the Eastern Christians. That many Crusaders hated their Orthodox brethren more than the Muslims was made disgracefully evident in , when the Fourth Crusade abandoned its assault on the Islamic world and turned its venom instead on the Christian city of Constantinople -- an attack the Eastern Christians have never forgiven.

The hostility between the two churches is particularly evident in the history of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem. For centuries, Eastern and Western clergy have fought over control of the church, which was built by 12th-century Crusaders.

In the 17th century, tensions escalated to the point where the Ottoman Turks, who governed Jerusalem at the time, had to entrust the church key to a Muslim family because the Western Christians and the Orthodox kept locking each other out. Even today this Muslim family still holds the keys, seeing to it that each sect gets control of the church for a few hours every day.