Read The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land for Free Online

eve of the crusades
     
    A charged and vexatious question remains: did the Muslim world provoke the crusades, or were these Latin holy wars acts of aggression? This fundamental enquiry requires an assessment of the overall degree of threat posed to the Christian West by Islam in the eleventh century. In one sense, Muslims were pressing on the borders of Europe. To the east, Asia Minor had served for generations as a battleground between Islam and the Byzantine Empire; and Muslim armies had made repeated attempts to conquer Christendom’s greatest metropolis–Constantinople. To the south-west, Muslims continued to rule vast tracts of the Iberian Peninsula and might one day push north again, beyond the Pyrenees. In reality, however, Europe was by no means engaged in an urgent struggle for survival on the eve of the crusades. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors in Iberia and the Turks in Asia Minor shared a common religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose.
    In fact, after the first forceful surge of Islamic expansion, the interaction between neighbouring Christian and Muslim polities had been relatively unremarkable; characterised, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and others of coexistence. There is little or no evidence to suggest that these two world religions were somehow locked in an inevitable and perpetual ‘clash of civilisations’. From the tenth century onwards, for example, Islam and Byzantium developed a tense, sometimes quarrelsome respect for one another, but their relationship was no more fraught with conflict than that between the Greeks and their Slavic or Latin neighbours to the west.
    This is not to suggest that the world was filled with utopian peace and harmony. The Byzantines were only too happy to exploit any signs of Muslim weakness. Thus, in 969, while the Abbasid world fragmented, Greek troops pushed eastwards, recapturing much of Asia Minor and recovering the strategically significant city of Antioch. And with the advent of the Seljuq Turks, Byzantium faced renewed military pressure. In 1071, the Seljuqs crushed an imperial army at the Battle of Manzikert (in eastern Asia Minor), and though historians no longer consider this to have been an utterly cataclysmic reversal for the Greeks, it still was a stinging setback that presaged notable Turkish gains in Anatolia. Fifteen years later, the Seljuqs also recovered Antioch.
    Meanwhile, in Spain and Portugal, Christians had begun to reconquer territory from the Moors, and in 1085 the Iberian Latins achieved a deeply symbolic victory, seizing control of Toledo, the ancient Christian capital of Spain. Nevertheless, at this stage, the Latins’ gradual southward expansion seems to have been driven by political and economic stimuli and not religious ideology. The conflict in Iberia did become more heated after 1086, when a fanatical Islamic sect known as the Almoravids invaded Spain from North Africa, supplanting surviving indigenous Moorish power in the peninsula. This new regime reinvigorated Muslim resistance, scoring a number of notable military victories against the Christians of the north. But Almoravid aggression cannot really be said to have sparked the crusades, because the Latin holy wars launched at the end of the eleventh century were directed towards the Levant, not Iberia.
    So what did ignite the war between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land? In one sense the crusades were a reaction to an act of Islamic aggression–the Muslim conquest of sacred Jerusalem–but this had taken place in 638, and thus was hardly a fresh offence. At the start of the eleventh century, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thought to enclose the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, had been partially demolished by the volatile Fatimid ruler known to history as the Mad Caliph Hakim. His subsequent persecution of the local Christian population lasted for more than a