Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous R

Cons — Described by a contemporary as womanish and witless.

Doge Enrico Dandolo — leader of Venice who wasn’t afraid of sack­ing and pillaging to recover his debts.

Skinny — To spread his own influence he ordered that Venetian coins bear his face on one side and on the other a likeness of the second most important person in his world, Jesus.

Props — Kept his focus on one thing, a successful crusade. Maybe two things… making money for Venice.

Pros — Was over ninety years old and blind but still rode into battle to lead the Fourth Crusade.

Cons — Led them everywhere but their destination.

THE GENERAL SITUATION

Jerusalem. Oh, Jerusalem! The small city has the fortune — or is it the misfortune — of being situated at the heart of three major religions. The Jews housed the Temple of Solomon and the Ten Commandments there. Then it became the site of Jesus’s Crucifixion. And a few centuries later it was the place where Muhammad ascended to heaven.

Being wanted by three groups of people has turned the city into a battleground for much of its history. Fueled with religious fervor following Muhammad’s death in AD 632, Arab armies thundered out of the Arabian Peninsula and captured large swaths of the known world, including Jerusa­lem. Over the next few hundred years they controlled the Holy City while freely allowing European Christians to make pilgrimages to the cherished site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Jews had been scattered by the Romans, and the few left in town apparently posed no threat to anyone or anything.

This peaceful coexistence was shattered in the eleventh century when Turks from Central Asia stormed into the Middle East and grabbed large chunks of territory from the reeling Byzantine Empire (made up of the remnants of the eastern part of the Roman Empire). The Byzantines were based in the glorious city of Constantinople (modern day Is­tanbul), which served as a barrier between the Arabs in the Middle East and the Western Europeans, thus allowing the Europeans to focus much of their medieval energy on killing one another.

The Turks also conquered Jerusalem from the Arabs in 1071. Instead of continuing the Arab policy of allowing the Christians free passage, the Turks ambushed the travelers, throwing them into slavery. The Christians had lost access to their beloved Jerusalem. The Turks had blundered onto the third rail of the nascent international monotheistic scrum over the city.

Tapping into this anger in 1095, an angry Pope Urban II declared that the Christian world must capture Jerusalem, thus creating the First Crusade. The pope declared the Cru­sade was not only necessary but actually requested by God. He coined a catchy slogan for the venture, “God Wills It,” and even came up with a logo, a cross sewn onto the shoulders of the crusaders’ clothes. To motivate his troops the pope offered every crusader absolution of their sins, in essence a go-di-rectly-to-heaven ticket upon death. In the Middle Ages, where vast realms of knowledge remained untouched by the geniuses of the age and the average human’s life was a constant dodg­ing of an apparently vengeful God, this was a Big One. Eternal happiness, as in forever, was like money in the bank.

In 1097 the crusaders set out, an army of knights on horseback, soldiers on foot, and a vast train of workers to schlep heavy items for thousands of miles. Despite hunger, thirst, disease, and a six-week siege, it worked. Jerusalem fell on July 15, 1099. To celebrate the conquest of the land of the King of Peace, the conquerors raped and killed everyone left alive in the city. Mission accomplished.

The crusaders divided their conquered territory into four regions, fought like caged animals over who would control them, and waged a never-ending series of wars against the Muslims. The crusaders were bolstered by a steady flow of Christians looking for new opportunities and European royals seeking fortune and adventure away from their al­ready royalty-saturated homelands. A Second Crusade poured in yet more troops. Despite a persistent manpower shortage, the Christians hung on to Jerusalem, the jewel of the Holy Land, ruled over by kings, including some children and even a leper or two. It wasn’t enough. Various Islamic peoples united under a fearless leader, Saladin, a great Christian killer. His victories culminated in 1187 with the capture of Jerusalem. Mission unaccomplished. A Third Crusade led by the king of England, Richard the Lionhearted, tangled with Saladin but came up short. Richard returned home to vent his frustration on the more beatable French.

The next pope to catch the crusader bug was Innocent III, who took his seat in 1198 and immediately turned his eye toward rescuing the Holy Land from the Muslims, again. He knew he would need all the help he could get.

But things out east were a mess everywhere, not just in Muslim-occupied Jerusalem. The Byzantine Empire was head­quartered in Constantinople, known to the Greeks as the new Rome. Despite being Christians, the Greeks had significant theological differences with the pope, which resulted in their 1054 mass excommunication, referred to as the Great Schism. Needless to say, that put a damper on the relationship be­tween the Eastern Orthodox Greeks and the Roman Catho­lics. The Crusades didn’t resolve their differences, even though the Greeks provided some help with the first one.

The Greeks had been content to spend most of their time fighting among themselves since the emperor’s death in 1180. Various noble families fought to seize control of the presti­gious and powerful emperor’s crown, considered to be one of the two most powerful of the Christian world. Out of the fighting emerged the Angelos family. Isaac II ruled as em­peror from 1185 to 1195 when his older brother, Alexius, perhaps tired of Isaac’s fondness for jocular dwarves, gouged out Isaac’s eyes and threw him into prison. Alexius took the throne and held Isaac and his teenage son, Prince Alexius, in prison.

In 1201 the young Prince Alexius escaped, with the help of some Italian merchants, by hiding in a barrel. He headed to Germany to enlist the help of his brother-in-law, the king of Germany, to retake the contentious Greek throne. As mo­mentum built for a new Crusade, Prince Alexius was touring Europe looking for anyone who would give him a ride back to his throne in Constantinople. Meanwhile, back in Rome, as the thirteenth century was just gearing up, Pope Innocent III was settling into office, looking to get the new century off to a good start with a nice religious war.

As unlikely as it seemed, their two quests would cross paths with devastating and unintended results.

WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “DEBT BOMB”

Enthusiasm for Pope Innocent’s Crusade lagged until No­vember 1199 at a tournament of knights in the Champagne region of France: two young, popular, and very rich members of the French royal elite took up the cross and joined the Crusade. After Count Thibault of Champagne and his cousin Count Louis of Blois declared their intentions to march onto Jerusalem, others quickly joined up. Some were inspired by the desire to serve Jesus, some by their family’s heritage in leading former Crusades, while others undoubtedly knew that nobody gets the hot babes like a knight back from a Crusade. A third count, Count Baldwin of Flanders, who was Thibault’s brother-in- law, joined the mission early in 1200.

Baldwin’s family had fought in the three previous Cru­sades, so the twenty-eight-year-old count looked on crusad­ing as a family rite of passage. The three young nobles took the reins to recruit and lead the new, improved Crusade. God was sure to be on their side since the plan featured as many as 35,000 crusaders, the same size army that had successfully conquered Jerusalem in the First Crusade. The pope admon­ished the army to conquer based solely on their faith in Christ and not have their pure feelings sullied by vanity, greed, or pride. As it turned out, however, most of the cru­saders’ decisions for the next five years were guided by vanity, greed, or pride (and sometimes all three).

Throughout the spring of 1200 the three nobles carefully planned the expedition. They met with former crusaders-turned-crusading-consultants to learn the best routes to the Holy Land, rallied other French nobles to the