the Second Crusade (1146–8) survive in a single manuscript each. Without them, our view of that remarkable event would be entirely different. Most of the evidence that once existed for the history of the crusades has been lost. Conversely, what does survive inevitably favours certain perspectives over others for which less evidence has survived. The story of the most familiar episode of all, the First Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem (1095–9), is based on a remarkably narrow twelfth-century historiographical tradition which may, but equally may not, reveal what was of greater or lesser importance at the time. Thus any modern historical account can only be to some degree tentative. If the requirements of the narrative obscure the delicacy of the interpretive choices reached here, this in no way suggests they were easy, simple, straightforward, necessarily incontrovertible or even conclusive. They merely represent what the author, to the best of his understanding, now thinks.
The crusades were and are controversial and contentious far beyond the academic community. More than any other incident of medieval European history they have entered the sphere of public history, where the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image and identity. Many groups and nations find their memory awkward, even distressing. The massacres of Palestinian Muslims and Jews at Jerusalem in 1099 or of Greeks at Constantinople in 1204; the butchery of Rhineland Jews in 1096 or 1146, or English Jews in 1190; the defeats of Latin Christians by great Islamic leaders, Saladin and Baibars; the expulsion of western conquerors from the mainland of western Asia in 1291; the long triumphs of the Christians in Iberia, of the Germans in the eastern Baltic or the Turks in Asia Minor, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean; all these aspects of crusading history have left a residue of resentment, pain, anger, guilt and pride, depending on which legacy, if any, modern observers wish to claim for themselves. Therefore, for any historian the perspective taken is of importance. Yet to look at a subject from a particular vantage point is to adopt a position in order to more clearly inspect the view. It does not mean taking sides.
My perspective is western European. This accords best with my own research experience. More importantly, it matches the origins, development, continuance and nature of the phenomenon. Although having an impact far beyond western Europe, the crusade as an ideal and human activity began and remained rooted in western European culture. By adopting this stance in no way implies approval of crusading. It does not ignore the sources generated by the opponents and victims of crusading. Nor does it privilege the value or importance of the experience of western Europeans over others involved, as will be apparent in what follows. However, it is a necessary device to see the subject clearly through the fog of ignorance, obscurity, the passage of time and the complexity of surviving sources. A history of the crusades could be very different in structure if composed from the viewpoint of medieval Syrian, Egyptian or Andalusian Muslims, or European or Near Eastern Jews, or Balts, Livs or Prussians. However, the essential contours of the subject would, if observed dispassionately, look much the same, because this study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgement, an exploration of an important episode of world history of enormous imaginative as well as intellectual fascination, not a confessional apologia or witness statement in some cosmic law suit. Readers will decide whether the view is worth the journey.
In the eleventh century of the Christian Era, the region between the Atlantic, the Sahara Desert, the Persian Gulf, the rivers of western Russia and the Arctic Circle lived in the shadow of two great empires, Rome and the Baghdad caliphate, and accommodated two world religions, Christianity and Islam. The legacy of the classical Roman empire still determined cultural assumptions even outside the attenuated rump of the eastern Roman empire that survived as a comparatively modest but still powerful Greek-speaking empire situated between the Danube and the Taurus mountains, based on Constantinople, known to modern historians as Byzantium. In western Europe north of the Pyrenees, where Roman imperial rule had vanished five centuries before, the image of Rome, in law, art, architecture, learning and the Latin language, persisted, even in places between the Rhine and Elbe where the legions had never established their grip. The rulers of Germany claimed to be the heirs of the western Roman emperors, direct successors to the Caesars. To the east of Byzantium, the Near East, Egypt, the southern Mediterranean coastlands and most of the Iberian peninsula preserved the inheritance of the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, which had established an empire centred on the caliph (Commander of the Faithful, political heir of the Prophet) of Baghdad from the mid-eighth century.
Cultural divisions were reinforced and defined by religion; Christianity in Byzantium and western Europe from northern Iberia to the Elbe, Ireland to the Hungarian plain; Islam to the east and south, in western Asia, north Africa and the southern Mediterranean. Neither religious block was united. In the later tenth century, the traditional authority of the caliph of Baghdad had been usurped in Egypt by a caliph adhering to the minority Shi’ite Islamic tradition that had separated from the majority, orthodox Sunni tradition in the late seventh century over the spiritual legitimacy of the successors of the Prophet. In Spain, the Muslim community owed allegiance to an indigenous caliphate, based at Cordoba, until its disintegration and fragmentation in the early eleventh century. In Christian territories, although a sharper separation of powers existed between religious and secular authority than in Islamic states, two main distinctive forms of Christianity had developed since the later Roman empire; the Greek Orthodox tradition based on the Byzantine empire and a Latin tradition theoretically centred on the papacy in Rome but largely driven by the twin forces of local, aristocracy-led churches and a network of monasteries. In both Christianity and Islam, apparently monolithic belief systems concealed within them infinite local variety and tensions born of social, linguistic, ethnic, cultural and geographic diversity and distance. There were few non-Christians in lands ruled by Christians, although Jewish communities were spreading from the tenth century north of the Alps, especially to France and the Rhineland. By contrast, every Muslim region contained non-Muslim inhabitants, often in large numbers, mainly those Islamic law called the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, the latter from a range of local sects and confessional traditions deriving from late Roman theological interpretations different from either Latin or Greek orthodoxies.
In central areas of this Afro-Eurasian region, those of Christian and Muslim observance and rule, the religious and political structures rested on settled agrarian economies and populations. Byzantium and the Islamic states shared a flourishing commercial system that supported gold currencies and towns, while in Christian western Europe, by 1000 urbanization – or, in the perspective of the Roman empire, reurbanization – had only recently begun to accelerate along the major trade routes north of the Alps: the North Sea and north-west Mediterranean coasts, the Rhine, Rhone, Seine, Loire, Thames. In Italy towns and cities had survived more robustly since the collapse of the late Roman economy and civilization, even if on a far smaller scale than further east. The economic imbalance was reflected in the size of cities in the eleventh century. In the eastern Mediterranean, the great metropolis cities boasted populations of hundreds of thousands – Baghdad perhaps half a million; Old Cairo slightly less; Constantinople perhaps 600,000 at most. In Muslim Spain, 100,000 people may have lived in Cordoba, although some estimates make it much more. By contrast, the largest western Christian cities – Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Cologne – hovered around 30–40,000. Paris and London in 1100, sustained by a largely rural hinterland, probably counted about 20,000 each, the equivalent of rather third-rate cities in the Near East or less. Elsewhere in northern Europe, cities were even smaller, while some important towns could muster only a very few thousand inhabitants. One of the striking features of the following two centuries lay in the massive growth in western urban populations, but even by 1300 cities such as Paris, pushing towards 100,000, still barely competed with the great entrepots of the eastern Mediterranean.
Even with heightened economic and commercial activity in western Europe, the imbalance of trade remained evident, the west having to rely on an often limited silver coinage as the wealth flowed eastward and southward, gold, much of it from west Africa, never reaching or staying in large enough quantities to sustain currencies beyond the Pyrenees, Alps or Danube. International trade revolved around luxury items, notably spices and finished textiles such as silk from the east and slaves, fur, timber and some metals from the west and north. Local exchange, primarily of foodstuffs but also certain basic living materials, such as wool and woollen cloth, provided the main engine of regional commerce in the rural economies. The mosaic of local economies varied widely across the region: cereals, wheat in the more southerly areas, rye and oats further north; wine in the south, beer in the north; sugar cane in Syria; olives around the Mediterranean; fishing everywhere along the enormously long shores of Afro- Eurasia. The growth of towns in Europe between the Alps and the Atlantic indicated an acceleration in such commercialization, a process that acted as a liberating dimension for large sections of the peasant communities who were mainly tied to the land by law, hierarchy, custom, coercion and economic necessity. In market places, transactions may have been taxed and regulated but they tended to operate outside bonds of tenure. Slavery, once
