Christians were furious when the Muslim Fatimid caliph al-Hakim destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Jesus' tomb) in 1009. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Pope Urban II had received an appeal from the Eastern emperor, Alexius I Comenus, to come to his aid in defending against the Seljuk Turks who were threatening from the east. Urban saw a crusade as an opportunity to reunite the eastern and western branches of Christianity and to bolster his own extremely weak authority within Europe itself, torn apart by the struggle between popes and emperors over who had the right to make religious appointments (the "Investiture Controversies"). Urban promised all who joined the crusade "plenary indulgence," full absolution of their sins. Throughout the Crusades, the European invaders benefited often from the disunity of the Arabs.
1096 - 1099 Large numbers of peasants with some knights among them formed three armies, the vanguard led by Walter the Penniless, and made their way toward Jerusalem massacring Jews in the Rhineland as they went. Eight hundred Jews were murdered in Worms. More than a thousand Jews died in Mainz and were buried in mass graves. In all, five thousand Jews were killed in the Rhineland. Walter's army was stopped by Muslim forces in Dorylaeum in Asia Minor. The second and third armies moved on toward Jerusalem.
1098 A Christian state was established in Edessa by the Crusader king, Baldwin I. In December of this year, Crusader forces led by Raymond de Saint Gilles, Count of Toulousse, and Bohemond, the Frankish governor of Antioch massacred the entire population of the Syrian town of Ma'arra al-Numan (10,000 people). The starving Crusaders cannibalized some of their victims. The Frankish chronicler Radulph of Caen reported, In Ma'arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled. (in Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild (News York: Schocken Books, 1984), 39). A line from another Crusader chronicler and soldier who fought at Ma'arra, Albert of Aix, convinced many Arabs from those times to the present that the Franks cannibalized not out of hunger but out of dogmatic fanaticism: Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens (Muslims); they also ate dogs! (Maalouf, 40). Reports circulated of Frankish Crusaders roaming the countryside around the town boasting of having chewed the flesh of Saracens.
1099 The Crusaders reached Jerusalem. Philip Hitti describes what happened next:
On June 7th, 1099, some forty thousand Crusaders, of whom about twenty thousand were effective troops, stood before the gates of Jerusalem. The Egyptian garrison may be estimated roundly at about one thousand. Hoping the walls would fall as those of Jericho had done, the Crusaders first marched barefoot around the city, blowing their horns. A month's siege proved more effective (Philip Hitti, History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present, 10th edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970), 639.
On July 15, the walls were breached. Some Jews were burned alive in their synagogues. The historian Ibn al-Athir wrote, Heaps of heads and hands and feet were to be seen throughout the streets and squares of the city (ibid).
Seventy thousand reportedly were slaughtered at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Surviving Jews and Muslims were expelled from the city. The Crusaders converted the Dome of the Rock into a church, and the al-Aqsa Mosque into a palace for the Crusaders kings which they called the "Temple of Solomon."
1147 - 1148 The Second Crusade, in response to the Muslim resurgence in Asia Minor, culminated in disastrous defeat. This crusade had been organized by St. Bernard of Clairvaux at the instigation of Pope Eugenius III and King Louis VII.
1187 Salah al-Din (Saladin) recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. On July 4, he defeated the Crusaders at the Horns of Hittin in the Galilee. The Crusaders, in full armor at the height of a ferocious Middle Eastern summer, were perhaps beaten as much by heat and thirst as by the army that opposed them.
1189 - 1192 The Third Crusade: Three armies led by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Philip Augustus of France, and King Richard I "The Lionhearted" ("Coer de Lion ") of England set out for the holy land. Frederick accidentally drowned in Cilicia, and quarrels between Philip and Richard crippled the expedition. Akko was recovered but not Jerusalem. Unlike Salah al-Din, who demonstrated compassion for the conquered, Richard after accepting the surrender of the inhabitants of Akko and after pledging that he would not harm them, proceeded to massacre them all, including women and children.
1202 - 1204 The Fourth Crusade: The army, mostly French, was diverted from its mission into plundering expeditions in Hungary and Asia Minor culminating in the capture and looting of Constantinople. It was the trade-minded Venetians who steered the Crusaders away from attacking Muslim Egypt. Of the Muslims, one Venetian diplomat said, "Being merchants we cannot live without them." For Venice, commerce trumped religion and politics (see William Dalrymple, "The Venetian Treasure House," New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007, 29).
1212 The Fifth Crusade: The so-called "Children's Crusade" included thousands of children who straggled their way as far as Italy before being captured and sold into slavery.
1228 - 1229 The Sixth Crusade: Emperor Frederick II secured a treaty whereby Christians were allowed to rule Jerusalem and Christian holy places in Bethlehem and Nazareth for ten years. The treaty included safe passage to the coast guaranteed by the sultan of Egypt.
1244 Jerusalem was retaken from the Crusaders by the Mamluks.
1248 - 1254 The Seventh Crusade, directed against Egypt, was repelled by the Mamluks. On their way to Egypt, the Crusaders recaptured Seville from the Muslims (Moors).
1270 The Eighth Crusade began, led by Louis IX of France. Louis died of plague in Carthage and his army succumbed to disease and heat.
1291 An army of 1,600 European peasant Crusaders sent by Pope Nicholas IV landed at Akko and began massacring the inhabitants, Christians as well as Muslims and Jews. In the same year, the Mamluks took Akko, expelled the Crusaders, and reestablished Muslim control. This was the end of the Crusades.
Did the Crusades really end in the thirteenth century? Arabs didn't think so. Arab historian of the crusades Amin Malouf writes, "...The political and religious leaders of the Arab world constantly refer to Saladin, to the fall of Jerusalem and its recapture. In the popular mind, and in some official discourse too, Israel is regarded as a new Crusader state." (Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, trans. by Jon Rothschild (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 265.) When Yasser Arafat returned from the failed Camp David II talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and American President Bill Clinton in July, 2000, he was given a hero's welcome in Gaza and dubbed the new "Salah al-Din" (Saladin) because he had made no concessions to Israel, a country many Arabs considered the new "crusading" power in the region. The al-Aqsa intifada ("uprising") broke out just weeks later.
Islamist writer Fahmy Huweidi noted that Israel itself seemed to recognize, at least in a tacit way, that it fit the mold of a crusading power. He was responding to Israeli attempts to soften its image and discourage the formation of negative attitudes toward Israel (especially in the minds of young Arabs) by pressing for changes in history curricula in some parts of the Arab world. Huweidi charged that this was tantamount to an Israeli attempt to rewrite history. Israelis had advocated deletions of Quranic passages dealing with Israel along with passages on jihad against infidel aggressors and wanted pivotal events like Salah al-Din's defeat of the Crusaders at Hittin downplayed. Writing in an Arabic weekly news magazine, Huweidi said, "With such a strong resemblance between what Christians did to Arabs in the Crusades and Israel’s own behavior in Palestine now, it is not strange to find Israel attempting to alter and rewrite the history of the Crusades in order to drive a wedge in the minds of the new generation of Arabs between Israel’s own current practices and those of the Christian Crusaders and thus to prevent comparisons from being drawn." (Fahmy Huweidi, "al-Hurub al-Salibiyya fi-l ‘eyoon al-Israeliyya," al-Majalla, July 1-6, 2000, translation by Ted Thornton). (See also "Wars of Words and Images")