St. Constantine the Great

Chapter XIII

The Crusades

Clermont to 1204, told with the East at the centre

For most people the Crusades arrive twice: once as a line in an argument about religion and violence, and once as a joke — a cartoon knight, a red cross, two Latin words shouted in a comment thread. Neither version is any use, and the second is the worse of the two, because it is cheerful. The real history runs for two hundred years, involves at least four separate sets of motives, and contains the detail that the single most destructive crusade never reached the Holy Land at all. It sacked the largest Christian city in the world, and the Pope who called it condemned it in writing when he found out what had been done. A Protestant reader coming toward Orthodoxy has a particular reason to know this properly rather than in slogans. In the Christian East the Crusades are not a debating point about religion and war. They are the reason a schism that began as a quarrel between two bishops became, in the popular memory, unforgivable.

An army setting out — a nineteenth-century engraving

On 26 August 1071, near Manzikert in what is now eastern Turkey, the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan and taken alive. As a battle it was not annihilating; the Byzantine army lost a wing and its emperor, not its existence, and Alp Arslan released Romanos on terms. The catastrophe was what followed. Romanos came home to a coup, was blinded, and died; the empire spent the next ten years in civil war, and rival Byzantine claimants hired Turkish cavalry against each other and let them settle where they fought. By about 1081 Turkish groups held most of the Anatolian plateau, and Nicaea — the city of the first ecumenical council, a hundred miles from Constantinople — was the capital of a Seljuk sultanate. Anatolia was where the empire raised its soldiers and collected much of its tax. Losing it did not merely shrink Byzantium; it removed its capacity to defend itself.

Alexios I Komnenos took the throne in 1081, aged about twenty-four, and spent his reign fighting on three fronts at once: Norman invasions from Italy under Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond, Pecheneg incursions across the Danube, and the Turks in Asia. His method was the standard imperial one, older than the empire's Christianity: hire foreign fighting men, place them under imperial command, use them for a season, and pay them off. He had done exactly this with Western knights before, and there were Franks, Normans and Englishmen in his service. In March 1095, at the Council of Piacenza, envoys of Alexios appeared before Pope Urban II and asked him to encourage Western fighting men to come east and help defend the Christians of the East against the Turks.

The single most important thing to understand about 1095 is that what Alexios asked for and what arrived were not the same thing. He wanted disciplined contingents he could direct at the recovery of Anatolian territory, and he expected to command them. What came in 1096 and 1097 was an armed migration — tens of thousands of people, including non-combatants, moving under their own princes, with their own religious purpose, and with Jerusalem as the objective. Jerusalem had not been in Byzantine hands since the 630s. No emperor in 1095 was planning a campaign to retake it, and an army marching for Jerusalem was, from Constantinople's point of view, an army marching straight past the war that needed fighting. Anna Komnene, the emperor's daughter, describes her father's alarm at their arrival in the Alexiad, written in the 1140s; she is hostile to the Latins and writing with fifty years of hindsight and grievance, so she is not a neutral witness. But no serious historian thinks Alexios asked for what he got.

A letter survives, addressed to Count Robert of Flanders in the name of Alexios, full of lurid detail about Turkish atrocities and appeals to come and save the relics of the Saviour. It circulated widely in the West and is still quoted. Most scholars judge it either a forgery or a Western text heavily embroidered from something smaller, and it should not be used as evidence of what Alexios actually said.

Pilgrimage matters here, and it should be described carefully rather than used. Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem was ancient, continuous and legal under Muslim rule; pilgrims paid, and the arrangement worked for centuries. The great exception was the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 — a real event and a shattering one — but the church was rebuilt under his successors with Byzantine money, and by the middle of the eleventh century pilgrimage had resumed on a large scale; the German pilgrimage of 1064 and 1065 took thousands of people overland. What changed was the Seljuk conquest of Syria and Palestine in the 1070s and the disorder that came with it: the routes through Anatolia became genuinely dangerous, local authority became unpredictable, and pilgrims came home with stories. The honest statement is that conditions for pilgrims had worsened substantially, and that Western accounts of a systematic campaign to prevent Christian worship in Jerusalem were exaggerated.

As for why men went, the scholarship has moved a long way and the reader should know where. The older account, given its most influential form by Steven Runciman in the 1950s, treated crusading as a long act of intolerance and, materially, as a land grab by land-hungry younger sons. The economic reading has been substantially dismantled, chiefly by Jonathan Riley-Smith and those who followed him into the charter evidence: crusaders overwhelmingly mortgaged, sold or pledged property to go, which is what men do when they expect to spend a fortune rather than make one, and most of those who survived came home. The dominant reading now is that crusading was understood by its participants as an armed pilgrimage carrying a penitential indulgence — a way for men whose trade was violence to have that violence counted toward their salvation instead of against it. Christopher Tyerman is sceptical of any single explanation and stresses how much was improvised as it went. Peter Frankopan has argued, against the usual reading, that Alexios asked for far more than mercenaries and that the appeal from the East was more desperate and more central than most accounts allow. These are live arguments among serious people.

Both of the popular framings fail. This was not an unprovoked European invasion of a peaceful region: the region had been conquered repeatedly for four centuries and was being conquered again in the 1070s, and a Christian emperor did ask the West for soldiers. Nor was it a holy rescue: what the West sent was not what the East had requested, it went where the East had not asked it to go, and within three years it was keeping conquered territory for itself. Both of those things are true at the same time. Any account that keeps only one of them is not history but recruitment.

The Council of Clermont met in the Auvergne from 18 to 28 November 1095, and did a great deal of ordinary church business: the Truce of God, clerical celibacy, simony, the excommunication of the King of France over his marriage. On 27 November Urban II preached in an open field outside the town, because the crowd would not fit inside the cathedral. He called on armed men to go to the aid of the Christians of the East and to Jerusalem; he attached to the undertaking a remission of penance; he told them to sew a cross on their clothing; he set the following August as the departure. He was himself a Frenchman, formed at Cluny, and he spent the next months touring France preaching it in person, which is a fact worth more than the sermon, because it shows how much deliberate work went into something usually described as a spark. Almost everything else about what he said that day is uncertain.

Five narrative accounts of the sermon survive, and they are the reason we think we know what was said. The Gesta Francorum, anonymous, written around 1100 or 1101 by someone in the following of Bohemond of Taranto, gives the briefest and most indirect version. Fulcher of Chartres, in his Historia Hierosolymitana begun around 1101, was actually present at Clermont, and gives a short, sober, businesslike version. Baldric, Archbishop of Dol, wrote his around 1105. Robert the Monk, a Benedictine of Reims, states in his prologue that he was at Clermont, and wrote his Historia Iherosolimitana around 1107 — some scholars place it a decade later still, into the 1120s. Guibert of Nogent wrote his Dei gesta per Francos in 1107 or 1108. To these should be added something the chroniclers are not: Urban's own letter of December 1095 to the faithful of Flanders, which is the nearest thing we have to the pope's actual words on the subject, and which is markedly more restrained than any of the five.

None of these is a transcript. Nobody took shorthand in a field in the Auvergne. Four of the five were written after Jerusalem had fallen in July 1099, which means that every one of them is describing a sermon whose outcome the author already knew to have been an astonishing success, and is writing it up to match. They diverge in ways that are not small. Robert's Urban is a rhetorician who dwells at length on atrocity stories about the Turks. Baldric's is more liturgical and more concerned with the holiness of the places. Guibert's is apocalyptic, and connects Jerusalem to the coming of the Antichrist. Fulcher's, from the man who was demonstrably there, is the driest and reads most like the business of a church council. Historians accordingly treat these texts as excellent evidence for what the generation of 1100 believed the crusade had been called for — which is genuinely valuable, and is how the good scholarship uses them — and not as a record of what Urban said.

Deus vult

The cry is real, it is medieval, and it is genuinely attached to the First Crusade. It is also not quite where people think it is. The earliest of the five texts, the Gesta Francorum, records crusaders at Amalfi crying out together in the words Deus le volt — at the gathering of the army, not at Clermont. Robert the Monk is the one who puts the shout at Clermont and makes it the crowd's own spontaneous response to the sermon, and in Robert's telling Urban then takes it up and directs that this should be their war cry in battle, since the word had been given them by God. The form varies across the manuscripts and the chroniclers: Deus le volt, Deus lo vult, and the tidier classical corrections Deus hoc vult and Deus id vult. Heinrich Hagenmeyer argued that the vernacular forms with the Romance pronoun are likely the original, and that argument cuts in favour of authenticity, because it means we are probably hearing men who spoke a Romance language putting Latin in their own mouths, rather than a clerk composing a slogan at a desk.

So two things have to be said together. The phrase is not a later invention and not a film line; men on the First Crusade shouted something very like it, and at least one chronicler who claims to have been at Clermont says the pope made it the army's watchword. And we cannot know what was shouted in that field on 27 November 1095, or whether anything was, because the only man who reports it was writing at least a decade afterward and had every literary reason in the world to supply a crowd's roar at the climax of his scene. This is the ordinary condition of medieval evidence rather than a scandal. But a reader should know it before repeating the story as though someone had recorded it.

What the phrase has become since is a different matter and can be stated briefly. From the 2010s it was taken up online as a slogan by white nationalist, far-right and Christian-nationalist movements, spread through hashtags and memes, and has appeared in the material left behind by men who went on to commit mass shootings. Medievalists have objected, and have had to keep objecting. Two observations are enough. Whoever shouted it in 1096 had no concept of a Europe and no notion of a white race; he was a Frankish or Provençal or Norman Christian who expected to die on the road and hoped it would count for his soul. And the first people killed by the movement that shouted it were not Muslims. They were Jews in German towns, months before any crusader saw a Turkish army.

Before the princes were ready, the preaching had already moved people. Peter the Hermit, a charismatic preacher from Amiens who rode a donkey and reportedly ate no bread, gathered a following through northern France and the Rhineland in the spring of 1096; a knight called Walter Sans Avoir led another band. These groups, conventionally called the People's Crusade, numbered in the tens of thousands, were badly armed, had no supply system and no plan for feeding themselves, and caused fighting in Hungary and the Balkans as they went. Alexios received them at Constantinople in the summer, was appalled, and ferried them across the Bosporus in August largely to get them out of his city. In October they were destroyed at Civetot by the Seljuks of Nicaea. Peter himself survived because he had gone back to Constantinople to ask for help.

In May and June of 1096, bands associated with the same wave of preaching attacked the Jewish communities of the Rhineland. Count Emicho of Flonheim is the name most associated with it, and the towns are Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Metz and others. The demand was baptism or death. Hebrew chronicles written soon afterward — the narratives associated with Solomon bar Simson and with Eliezer bar Nathan — record fathers and mothers killing their own children and then themselves rather than see them forcibly baptised, an act remembered in Jewish tradition as kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of the Name. The numbers killed are not recoverable but ran into the thousands, and whole communities ceased to exist. Several bishops tried to stop it: the bishop of Speyer, the archbishop Ruthard of Mainz who sheltered Jews in his own palace, the archbishop of Cologne who dispersed them among villages. At Mainz the protection failed completely. Emicho held no commission from the pope, and the massacres were not part of Urban's programme; his own army never reached the Holy Land and broke up in Hungary.

There is no way of telling this that improves it. The first killing done by the First Crusade was the killing of unarmed Jewish families in German towns by men who had sewn crosses on their clothes, in a country that was not at war, against people who were not the enemy anyone had named. It set a pattern that recurred with every subsequent call to crusade — in the Rhineland again in 1146, in England in 1189 and 1190, at York — and it is the part of this history that Christians have least excuse for not knowing.

The princes came in separate contingents through the autumn of 1096 and the spring of 1097: Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne; Bohemond of Taranto, a Norman who had been fighting Alexios in the Balkans within the previous decade; Raymond IV of Toulouse, the richest of them; Robert of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, Stephen of Blois, Hugh of Vermandois. There was no commander. The papal legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, had spiritual authority and considerable personal weight, and no power to give an order. Alexios required each leader to swear fealty to him and to promise that any territory taken which had formerly belonged to the empire would be restored to it. Godfrey held out for a while and then swore first; most of the others followed. Raymond of Toulouse refused the full oath and gave a lesser undertaking not to harm the empire. That oath is the hinge on which everything later turns. To the Byzantines it was the entire legal basis of the cooperation; to most of the Franks it was an indignity extracted under duress by a man they already half suspected.

The campaign itself was a series of improbable successes. Nicaea was besieged from 14 May to 18 June 1097 and taken with Byzantine naval support — but Alexios negotiated its surrender directly with the garrison and took possession himself, which denied the army a sack and left it feeling cheated. It is a small grievance and an instructive one. At Dorylaeum on 1 July the sultan Kilij Arslan ambushed Bohemond's vanguard; it held long enough for the rest to arrive, and the Turkish army broke. Then came the crossing of the Anatolian plateau in high summer, which killed horses, baggage animals and men, and which the chroniclers describe with more horror than any battle.

Antioch was the crisis. The siege began on 20 October 1097 and lasted seven and a half months against walls that could not be stormed and a circuit too long to seal. The besiegers starved; Stephen of Blois deserted; men ate their horses, and at Ma'arrat al-Numan that December two Latin chroniclers report that some of them ate the dead — a claim which appears in no contemporary Muslim source and which the Latins made about themselves. The city fell on 3 June 1098 when an Armenian officer of the garrison named Firouz let Bohemond's men over a tower wall at night. Within days the crusaders inside were themselves besieged by a relief army under Kerbogha of Mosul, with no food and no way out.

At that point a poor Provençal pilgrim named Peter Bartholomew reported a series of visions in which St. Andrew told him that the lance which pierced the side of Christ was buried under the floor of the cathedral of St. Peter in Antioch. They dug, and something was found. The honest account has to include the rest of it: Adhemar of Le Puy, the papal legate, is recorded as doubting the relic; it was a Provençal discovery which served Raymond of Toulouse's faction against Bohemond's; and in April 1099, at Arqa, pressed to prove it, Peter Bartholomew walked through fire in a trial by ordeal and died of his injuries within days, after which the Lance lost its credit among the Normans. What is not in dispute is that on 28 June 1098 an army in that condition marched out of the gates behind that relic and broke Kerbogha's army, which by any military reckoning it had no business doing.

Bohemond then kept Antioch. He became its prince and did not restore it to the empire, in direct breach of the oath sworn at Constantinople. The crusader justification was that Alexios had abandoned them: he had marched toward them, met Stephen of Blois, who told him the army was already lost, and turned back at Philomelium. That is a real argument and should be given its weight — though Raymond of Toulouse, who was there, did not accept it and held that Antioch belonged to the emperor. Byzantium never acknowledged the Norman principality, and Antioch remained a running wound in Greek and Latin relations for a century.

Jerusalem was besieged from 7 June to 15 July 1099. It was held at that point not by the Seljuks whose advance had prompted the appeal but by Fatimid Egypt, which had retaken it the previous year — so the men who defended Jerusalem against the First Crusade were not the men it had been called to fight. The besiegers had almost no water and no timber until Genoese ships were broken up at Jaffa and carted inland. On 8 July, at the urging of a priest's vision, the whole army walked barefoot around the walls in procession while the garrison jeered from the top. On 15 July the northern wall was carried.

What followed has to be set out with the sources named, because this is where the numbers have done the most damage in both directions. The Gesta Francorum says that on the Temple Mount our men waded in blood up to their ankles. Raymond of Aguilers, a chaplain who was present, says that men rode in blood up to their knees and to the bridles of their horses. That second image is not a measurement; it is Revelation 14:20, where the blood from the winepress of the wrath of God comes up to the horses' bridles, and as a physical description of a paved esplanade it is impossible. Fulcher of Chartres gives ten thousand killed at the Temple. Ibn al-Athir, writing in Mosul more than a century later, gives seventy thousand killed in the Aqsa mosque alone, which exceeds any plausible figure for the entire population of the city. The Andalusian jurist Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, far closer to the event, gives three thousand. Modern work, including Benjamin Kedar's study of the whole body of sources, concludes that the massacre was extensive and that the high figures cannot be sustained.

And none of that makes it better. The most conservative reading available still has an army killing the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of a captured city over two or three days, burning the Jewish community inside its own synagogue, looting the Dome of the Rock, and clearing the streets of bodies for days afterward. What should disturb a Christian reader is not the arithmetic but the tone of the Latin accounts, which record it without shame, as the day on which the prophecies were fulfilled. The correction of the casualty figures is a duty of honesty, not a defence.

Out of it came four Latin states: the County of Edessa, taken by Baldwin of Boulogne in 1098; the Principality of Antioch under Bohemond; the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where Godfrey took the title Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre and his brother Baldwin was crowned king in 1100; and the County of Tripoli, completed in 1109. One feature of them belongs in this chapter in particular. In Jerusalem and in Antioch the crusaders installed Latin patriarchs over sees that already had Greek ones, and Orthodox bishops in the conquered territories were displaced, subordinated or sent into exile. The First Crusade did not merely fail to restore Byzantine territory to Byzantium. On a smaller scale, and a century early, it rehearsed what happened in 1204.

Edessa, the most exposed of the four states, fell to Zengi of Mosul on 24 December 1144. Pope Eugene III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores on 1 December 1145, reissuing it on 1 March 1146 once Louis VII of France had committed himself, and it is the first crusade bull in the full later sense: it defines the indulgence, protects the crusader's property and family in his absence, and suspends interest on his debts. The preaching was given to Bernard of Clairvaux, the most formidable religious voice in Europe, who preached it at Vézelay on 31 March 1146 to a crowd so large the platform had to be built in a field.

Bernard belongs in this chapter twice, and the second reason is the more important. When a Cistercian monk named Radulf began preaching in the Rhineland in 1146 and anti-Jewish violence started again in the same towns as 1096, Bernard travelled into Germany, confronted him, and had him sent back to his monastery; and he wrote, unambiguously, that the Jews were not to be persecuted or killed. He was not a modern man and his own letters contain language about Jews that no one should defend. But the same movement, within fifty years, produced Emicho of Flonheim and produced Bernard riding into Mainz to shut a preacher up, and a fair account has to carry both.

The campaign itself was a disaster without a single redeeming engagement in the East. Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France marched separately in 1147. Conrad's army was routed near Dorylaeum on 25 October 1147; the French were worn down crossing Anatolia and lost most of their infantry. Relations with the Emperor Manuel I Komnenos collapsed into mutual accusation: the Latins charged him with colluding with the Turks, having concluded a truce with them shortly before their arrival, while the Greeks saw two enormous undisciplined armies crossing their provinces and living off the country. The suspicion built up in the First Crusade hardened in the Second into something close to settled contempt on both sides. In June 1148 a council at Acre decided to attack not Edessa, which had prompted the whole enterprise, but Damascus — which was the nearest thing the Kingdom of Jerusalem had to a cooperative Muslim neighbour. The siege lasted from 23 to 28 July 1148, the army moved itself to a worse position on worse advice, Nur ad-Din approached, and it withdrew after five days. Meanwhile the same wave of preaching carried an English and Flemish fleet to help take Lisbon between July and October 1147, and sent German princes north against the pagan Wends. That is the first clear sign that the machinery could be pointed at anything.

The next generation brought the man the crusader states had no answer to. Saladin, a Kurdish officer in Nur ad-Din's service, made himself master of Egypt from 1169 and of Syria after Nur ad-Din's death in 1174, uniting the two fronts whose division the Latin states had survived on. On 4 July 1187 Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, marched the whole field army from the springs at Saffuriya across a waterless plateau to relieve Tiberias, and was destroyed at the Horns of Hattin. The relic of the True Cross was captured, the king was taken prisoner, the Templars and Hospitallers who survived the battle were executed, and Reynald of Châtillon was killed by Saladin personally. With the army gone the kingdom had nothing left to garrison its castles with, and it fell in months.

Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October 1187 on negotiated terms: ransoms, safe conduct, no general massacre. The contrast with 1099 is real, it was noticed at the time, and it should be stated without either triumph or embarrassment. It should also be stated accurately: Saladin was entirely capable of killing prisoners, as the military orders found after Hattin, and his reputation for clemency in the West is partly a construction of Western romance. But on the specific comparison of the two takings of Jerusalem, eighty-eight years apart, the Muslim commander behaved better than the Christian one, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The Third Crusade was the great expedition of the Western kings. Frederick Barbarossa drowned crossing the Saleph river in June 1190 and his army dissolved. Philip II of France and Richard I of England arrived in 1191; Acre, under Latin siege for nearly two years, fell on 12 July. The two kings then quarrelled over the spoils and over the kingship of Jerusalem, and Philip went home in August, which is the beginning of the English literary tradition that this was Richard's crusade.

On 20 August 1191, at Acre, Richard had roughly two thousand seven hundred Muslim prisoners taken outside the city and killed in full view of Saladin's army, because the agreed terms of the surrender — a large payment, the return of Christian prisoners, and the True Cross — had not been delivered on the agreed schedule. His defenders, then and now, argue that he could not feed them, could not spare men to guard them, and could not march south with them. The plain description is the execution of several thousand men who had surrendered on terms, ordered by the king who is the hero of the Anglophone version of this story, and Saladin killed his Christian prisoners in return. Both things belong in the same paragraph as the chivalry.

Richard beat Saladin at Arsuf on 7 September 1191, marched twice within sight of Jerusalem and twice turned back, having worked out that he could take the city and could not hold it. The Treaty of Jaffa was concluded on 2 September 1192: a three-year truce, the coastal strip from Tyre to Jaffa left in Christian hands, Jerusalem left to Saladin, and unarmed Christian pilgrims and merchants admitted to the city. That last clause is worth sitting with. Very nearly a hundred years of crusading had produced, by treaty, approximately the arrangement that had obtained before 1095: Muslim rule in Jerusalem, and Christian pilgrims allowed in to pray at the Holy Sepulchre.

Baldwin IV was born in the middle of 1161, the son of King Amalric I of Jerusalem and Agnes of Courtenay. His tutor was William, then archdeacon and later Archbishop of Tyre, who wrote the principal Latin chronicle of the kingdom. That accident of the sources is unusual and valuable: the illness of a medieval king is described for us by the man who taught him to read and who plainly loved him.

William's account of the discovery is one of the most affecting passages in the crusader chronicles, and it is worth describing precisely rather than dressing up. He writes that the boy was at play with his companions of noble birth, and that they were doing what children do — pinching and digging their nails into each other's arms and hands. The others cried out. Baldwin bore it without complaint, as though he felt nothing. William at first took this for a child's endurance and thought well of him for it. Then, as it kept happening, he examined him and understood that the boy's right arm and hand were insensible: he was not being brave, he could not feel the pain. William records that he recognised this as the beginning of a grave and incurable disease, and that he could not write about it without weeping. He was right. Wordings differ between translations, so this is given as a description of what the chronicle says rather than as a quotation.

What the sources call leprosy covered more than one condition, and the diagnosis in Baldwin's case is inference rather than record. The loss of sensation beginning in one limb, the progressive destruction of the hands and feet, the involvement of the eyes and the face, and the roughly twenty-year course from onset to death fit the lepromatous form of Hansen's disease, and that is what most modern writers conclude. No medieval source performs a diagnosis, and none should be quoted as if it had.

Amalric died on 11 July 1174, and Baldwin was crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on 15 July, four days later, at the age of thirteen. The kingdom knew he was ill and crowned him anyway, because the alternative was a regency fought over by factions. It also knew what the illness meant dynastically: a leper would not marry and would leave no child, so from the first day of the reign the succession was an open question, and every noble faction in Jerusalem organised itself around the answer. Miles of Plancy governed briefly and was murdered; Raymond III of Tripoli became regent; Baldwin declared himself of age in 1176, at fifteen, and began to rule.

Montgisard, 25 November 1177

Saladin came up from Egypt in November 1177 with a large force, and on being told that the Frankish field army was occupied in the north he allowed his troops to disperse and raid across the southern part of the kingdom. Baldwin, sixteen years old and recovering from a bout of malaria on top of everything else, came out from Ascalon with a very small army: the figures usually given are about three hundred and seventy-five knights, some eighty Templars brought up from Gaza, and a few thousand infantry and archers. The relic of the True Cross was carried with them. The sources say that Baldwin was helped down from his horse and knelt before the Cross to pray before the engagement, and that his hands were bandaged over his sores; he could barely hold a rein. They caught Saladin's army strung out and unprepared near Montgisard, and broke it. Saladin escaped capture narrowly and reached Cairo on 8 December with a small fraction of the men he had taken out.

Two caveats keep this honest and neither of them diminishes it. The Latin figures for Saladin's army — William of Tyre says twenty-six thousand — are certainly inflated, as almost all medieval troop numbers are, and the victory owed an enormous amount to surprise and to Saladin's own carelessness in letting his force scatter. And whether Baldwin personally fought in the press of the battle, as some accounts have it, cannot be established. What can be established is that a sixteen-year-old with advancing leprosy rode with his army, was on the field, and commanded the greatest single victory the Kingdom of Jerusalem won in the twelfth century. Montgisard did not destroy Saladin, who was back in the field within two years, but it delayed his unification of the fronts by the better part of a decade.

After that the disease and the war both went the other way. Baldwin was defeated at Marj Ayyun in June 1179 and lost the new castle at Jacob's Ford in August. The illness advanced through his hands, his feet, and his eyes. By 1183 he could not walk unsupported, could not use his hands, and was going blind, and he was carried in a litter. In late 1183, when Saladin besieged the castle of Kerak in the middle of a wedding feast, Baldwin had himself carried to the relief of it on a stretcher, and the approach of the army with the king in it was enough to lift the siege. He did the same again in 1184. A blind man in his early twenties, dying, had himself carried to a battlefield because his presence was the one thing his nobles would not argue with. The fact does not need any embroidery and should not be given any.

The succession consumed his last years. In 1180 he married his sister Sibylla to Guy de Lusignan, partly to forestall a move by Raymond of Tripoli and Bohemond of Antioch. In 1183 he made Guy bailli, that is regent, and then removed him within months, after Guy refused to give battle and handled the Kerak campaign badly. Baldwin then had Sibylla's five-year-old son by her first marriage crowned co-king as Baldwin V on 20 November 1183, tried to arrange that Raymond of Tripoli should govern for the child, and attempted to provide that if the boy died the succession should be settled not by the factions in Jerusalem but by the Pope, the Emperor, and the kings of France and England. He was trying, while dying, to disarm the quarrel he could see coming.

He died in the spring of 1185 — the chronicles place it between March and May, and 16 March is the date most often given — aged twenty-three or twenty-four. Baldwin V died in the summer of 1186. Sibylla and Guy took the crown, and in July 1187 Guy marched the army to Hattin. Two years and four months after Baldwin's death the kingdom he had held together was gone. The assessment is not sentimental: with a disease that took his hands, his sight and his feet, he kept Saladin off balance for eleven years, and his successors lost everything in eighteen months.

What the film invented

Most people who know Baldwin IV know him from Kingdom of Heaven, the 2005 film, and it is worth being exact about which parts are the screenwriter's. The silver mask is an invention. No source describes Baldwin wearing a mask of any kind, and the image now fixed to his name in popular memory came out of a costume department. The film's Baldwin is a serene philosopher-king; the chronicles' Baldwin is a young man of hard temper who dismissed his brother-in-law, moved to disinherit his own sister, and quarrelled fiercely with his barons. Raymond of Tripoli as a world-weary secular humanist is a modern construction. Balian of Ibelin's entire storyline is fiction: the real Balian was a great baron of the kingdom, married to the dowager queen Maria Komnene, and had no French village, no blacksmith's forge, and no crisis of unbelief. The film is not a reason to be interested in Baldwin. It is, for most readers, how they heard of him, and it is better to know where it stops.

One last point, which should be made carefully because it is often overstated. It is sometimes said that even his Muslim enemies revered him. The truth is more mixed and more interesting. Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, Saladin's own secretary, notes with something like bafflement that the Franks remained loyal to a leprous king and did not depose him. Other Muslim writers are not respectful at all: the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr refers to him with open contempt. The accurate statement is that Muslim sources treat him as a real and dangerous opponent and record his illness as a remarkable fact rather than as a punch line, and that Montgisard left an impression on the other side which lasted for years. That is a fair amount of dignity for a chronicle to grant an enemy, and it is what the sources actually give him.

Innocent III was elected in 1198 at the age of thirty-seven, the ablest lawyer to hold the papacy in centuries, and he called a new crusade almost immediately. The recruiting, done largely by the preacher Fulk of Neuilly, produced an army mostly from northern France, Champagne and Flanders. Theobald of Champagne was to lead it and died; Boniface of Montferrat took his place. Among the leaders were Baldwin of Flanders and Louis of Blois, and among the negotiators was Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who afterwards wrote one of the two Latin eyewitness narratives we depend on. The objective was Egypt, which was the militarily sensible target and which almost none of the rank and file were told.

In April 1201 the envoys signed a contract in Venice. The Venetians would build, crew and provision a fleet to carry thirty-three thousand five hundred men and four thousand five hundred horses, and would add fifty war galleys at their own expense, for eighty-five thousand marks of silver and half of all conquests. Venice then suspended most of its ordinary commerce for a year and a half to build it — a fact the Orthodox account of 1204 usually omits and should not. The flaw was that the number was a guess made by envoys with no way of knowing how many men would come. When the army gathered in the summer of 1202 it was perhaps a third of the projected size, because many had taken ship from other ports and many never came, and the price did not scale down with it. The barons stripped themselves of their plate and raised something like fifty-one thousand marks. They were roughly thirty-four thousand short, sitting on an island in the lagoon eating provisions they could not pay for.

The Venetian case deserves its full strength, because it is strong. The fleet had been built exactly as ordered, and Venice had lost a year and a half of trade to build it. Enrico Dandolo, the doge — old, blind and one of the most capable men in Europe — was not behaving unreasonably in expecting to be paid what had been agreed in writing. What he proposed was that the debt be worked off in service.

The service was Zara, on the Dalmatian coast, a city that had transferred its allegiance from Venice to King Emeric of Hungary. Zara was Catholic. Emeric had himself taken the cross. Innocent III forbade the attack in writing, and the letter was read aloud to the assembled army by the abbot Guy of Vaux-de-Cernay, who told the soldiers that they must not attack the city because it was a city of Christians and they were pilgrims. They attacked it anyway, from 10 to 24 November 1202, took it, sacked it, fought among themselves over the loot, and wintered in the ruins. A minority refused to take part and camped apart, among them Simon de Montfort the elder. Innocent excommunicated the entire army and the Venetians with it. In February 1203 he lifted the sentence on the non-Venetians, on the reasoning that they had been coerced by circumstances; he left it standing on the Venetians, and the leaders did not tell the army that the fleet it was sailing in remained under excommunication.

At Zara the army was met by a proposal. Alexios Angelos was the son of Isaac II, the Byzantine emperor who had been deposed and blinded by his own brother Alexios III. The young man offered, in return for being put on his father's throne: two hundred thousand marks of silver, provisions for the whole army, ten thousand Greek troops for the Egyptian campaign, the permanent maintenance of five hundred knights in the Holy Land, and — the offer aimed directly at Innocent — the submission of the Greek Church to Rome. It is essential to see what this was. It was Byzantine dynastic politics attempting to hire a Western army, which is precisely what Alexios I Komnenos had tried to do a century before. The invitation was genuine and it came from the Greek side. Innocent forbade an attack on Constantinople. The leaders went anyway, and Villehardouin's own narrative shows the army being argued into it repeatedly, each time as a short and profitable detour on the way to the real objective.

The fleet came before Constantinople in June 1203. The assault of 17 July carried a section of wall; Alexios III fled that night with as much of the treasury as he could load. Isaac II was brought out of prison and restored, and his son was crowned alongside him as Alexios IV. Then the arithmetic collapsed. The two hundred thousand marks did not exist and never had. Alexios IV raised part of the sum by melting down church plate and stripping the silver from icons, which destroyed whatever standing he had with his own people, and a great fire in August — the worst of several that year — burned a wide belt through the city and left tens of thousands homeless. In late January 1204 Alexios IV was overthrown by Alexios V Doukas, called Mourtzouphlos, and strangled in prison a few days later; the new emperor repudiated the debt entirely. The crusading army was now camped outside the walls of the largest city in Christendom with no employer, no money, no provisions, and an enemy in front of it.

The assault of 9 April failed. The assault of 12 April succeeded: Venetian ships came in on a north wind, men crossed from the flying bridges onto the towers, a gate was opened, and the Blachernae quarter fell. Alexios V fled during the night. On 13 April the city was theirs, and for three days, from 12 to 15 April 1204, they sacked it.

The chief eyewitness is Niketas Choniates, a senior imperial official and historian who lost his house in the sack and escaped the city on foot. He is not a naive partisan: his own history is unsparing about Byzantine misgovernment, corruption and cowardice, and he blames his own people for a great deal. What he describes in Hagia Sophia is the systematic dismantling of the Great Church for its metal. The silver iconostasis was broken up. The altar was smashed into pieces and divided. Mules and horses were brought into the sanctuary to carry the metal out, and some of them slipped on the marble and were cut down where they fell. And then the detail that has stayed in Orthodox memory for eight centuries.

They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church's holy vessels.Niketas Choniates, Historia, on the sack of April 1204 — a commonly cited English rendering

Choniates is quoted here in one of the standard English renderings; translations differ in wording and the Greek is more explicit about the songs than most versions make it. The substance — the breaking up of the sanctuary for its silver, the animals in the church, the woman set on the patriarch's throne, the drinking from the chalices — is what the passage says, and it is corroborated in outline by Latin sources who were on the winning side and saw no reason to hide any of it.

Those Latin sources matter, because they remove the possibility that this is Greek exaggeration. Villehardouin, a commander of the army, wrote that so much booty had never been taken from any city since the world was made. Robert of Clari, a poor knight from Picardy, complained not that the sack happened but that the great men kept the best of it and cheated the small men of their share. Gunther of Pairis, a German Cistercian, wrote a whole narrative celebrating his abbot's success in stealing relics during the sack, and treated it as a pious achievement. When the victors' own chroniclers are arguing over the division of the spoil and boasting about the relic theft, the question of whether it happened is closed.

The material losses are partly recoverable and partly not. The bronze statues of the Hippodrome, some of them ancient Greek work, were broken up and melted for coin, including a colossal Herakles attributed to Lysippos, made in the fourth century before Christ and destroyed for the value of its metal. The four gilt bronze horses were shipped to Venice with their heads sawn off to fit them aboard, and collars fitted afterwards to hide the joins; they were set on the front of San Marco, where copies stand today and the originals are kept inside. Relics went west in enormous quantity — fragments of the True Cross, the heads and arms and bones of saints, the great reliquaries of the imperial collection — distributed to churches in France, Flanders, Germany and Italy, where a great many of them still are. We know the scale of it chiefly from Western records, because the West is where the acquisitions were proudly written down. On books the honest statement is narrower than the usual one: the fires of 1203 and 1204 burned through whole districts, manuscripts were lost with the buildings, and the loss of Greek texts was serious — but the sources do not describe a single great library going up in flames, and no responsible figure can be given.

Then came the arrangement, which for this chapter matters more than the plunder. Baldwin of Flanders was crowned Emperor of Constantinople in Hagia Sophia on 16 May 1204. The empire was partitioned by treaty, and Venice took three-eighths of it along with the ports and islands it had wanted all along — which is what it had come for and what it kept for three centuries. The patriarchate was given to a Venetian, Thomas Morosini, elected by Venetian canons and confirmed by Innocent III, who held the see as Latin Patriarch from 1205 to 1211. The Orthodox patriarch went into exile and the Greek succession was continued at Nicaea from 1208. Across the conquered provinces Greek bishops were deposed, replaced or subordinated to Latin superiors.

That is the theological event inside the military one. Before 1204 the questions between East and West were arguments: the procession of the Holy Spirit and the addition of the filioque to the Creed, the nature and extent of the Roman primacy, unleavened bread, clerical marriage, the authority of councils. Educated men on both sides could and did debate them for a century and a half after 1054 while continuing to regard each other as Christians. After 1204 the Greek East did not need a theologian to explain what submission to Rome would look like, because it had been shown. A Latin bishop was sitting in the see of St. John Chrysostom, put there by an army that had broken up the altar of the Great Church for its silver.

And here the Catholic answer has to be given at its strongest, because it is substantial and any Orthodox account that suppresses it is not worth reading. Innocent III did not order this. He had forbidden the attack on Zara and excommunicated the army when it disobeyed. He had forbidden an attack on Constantinople. The diversion was arranged by lay commanders and a Venetian doge against his express instruction, for money, and the pretext was handed to them by a Byzantine claimant who wanted the throne. When Innocent learned what had actually been done, he wrote to his legate in terms as harsh as any Orthodox polemicist has ever managed: that men who were supposed to be seeking the things of Jesus Christ had turned their swords not against Saracens but against Christians, sparing neither religion nor age nor sex, committing fornication and adultery in public, and giving over matrons and virgins to the filth of the lowest soldiery; and he asked how the Greek Church could possibly be brought back to devotion to the Apostolic See when it had seen in the Latins nothing but perdition and the works of darkness, so that it now rightly detested them more than dogs.

The complication, which is also true, is that having condemned it he accepted it. Innocent confirmed the Latin patriarch, corresponded with the Latin emperor, and came to hope that the union he had never sought by these means could be made real now that it existed on paper. Historians disagree, reasonably, about how to weigh the fury against the acquiescence; both are in his register. What cannot be claimed by anyone is that the papacy planned the sack of Constantinople, and what cannot be claimed by anyone is that the papacy refused its fruits.

This is why the Christian East treats 1054 and 1204 so differently. The mutual excommunications of 1054 were exchanged between a papal legate and a patriarch, were limited in their terms, did not claim to sever the churches, and were not understood at the time to have done so; historians argue in good faith about whether the date means anything at all. 1204 requires no argument. An army wearing the cross took the city, killed inside its churches, broke up the altar of Hagia Sophia for the metal, set a prostitute on the patriarch's throne, carried the relics of the saints to Europe, and installed a Latin bishop in the see of Constantinople. The schism became a date on a calendar for scholars and a wound in the body for everyone else, and the wound is the thing that has actually been handed down.

The Greeks got the city back. On 25 July 1261 a small force under Alexios Strategopoulos entered Constantinople almost by accident while the Latin garrison was away on campaign, and Michael VIII Palaiologos made his formal entry in August. But what was recovered was a wreck. The old empire's territory was divided among Latin principalities and rival Greek successor states; the fleet was gone; the treasury was gone; Venice and Genoa held the commerce; whole districts of the capital were burnt over and never rebuilt, and the population never returned to anything like its former size. For the next two centuries the emperors defended Europe and left Asia Minor to be absorbed. The Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438 and 1439 both produced unions with Rome signed by emperors who needed Western troops to survive, and both were rejected by the Orthodox faithful, clergy and monks who had not forgotten what Latin help looked like. When the Ottomans took the city on 29 May 1453, they took a shell. The line from 1204 to 1453 is not an Orthodox slogan; it is the standard reading among Byzantinists, though they differ about how much weight it should carry against the later causes — the civil wars of the fourteenth century, the Black Death, the loss of Anatolia.

The later crusades to the East can be given in outline, because the pattern is set. The Fifth, from 1217 to 1221, took Damietta on the Nile, refused Egyptian terms that would have traded it for Jerusalem, marched upriver and was trapped by the flood. Frederick II, excommunicate at the time, went in 1228 and recovered Jerusalem by negotiation with the Sultan al-Kamil in 1229, which offended nearly everyone on both sides and worked for fifteen years. Louis IX of France went twice: in 1248, and was captured with his whole army in Egypt in 1250; and in 1270, and died of dysentery at Tunis. Acre, the last mainland city of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, fell on 18 May 1291, and that is conventionally the end, though crusading as an institution continued against the Ottomans for another three hundred years.

What deserves more space is where else the mechanism went, because it is the real indictment and it is not made by atheists on the internet; it is made by the documents. From 1209 to 1229 the Albigensian Crusade was preached by Innocent III against the Cathars of Languedoc, with the same indulgence attached that had been offered for Jerusalem, and became a war of conquest by northern French barons against southern Christian lords. At Béziers, on 22 July 1209, the city was taken and its population killed in the streets and in the churches. The famous line — kill them all, God will know his own — is attributed to the legate Arnaud Amalric by Caesarius of Heisterbach, a German Cistercian writing between about 1219 and 1223, who was never in Languedoc and who says only that the legate was reported to have said it; Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, the Cistercian who was actually there, does not mention it. The quotation is probably not authentic and should not be used as though it were. It is also not needed, because Amalric wrote to Innocent III himself in August 1209 and reported that his men had put nearly twenty thousand people to the sword without regard to rank or sex or age. The figure is certainly inflated. The boast was made to the Pope.

In the north the same instrument was turned on the pagan peoples of the Baltic. The Wendish campaign of 1147 was the beginning; the Livonian and Prussian crusades followed, and in the Teutonic Order's state crusading became a permanent institution of conquest, colonisation and baptism at the point of a sword for two hundred years. By the fifteenth century the Order was making war on Catholic Poland and newly Christian Lithuania, and the ordinary machinery of crusade indulgences was being used by popes against political enemies in Italy. An idea created to relieve pressure on Eastern Christians and open the road to the Holy Sepulchre became a general-purpose instrument, available against heretics, pagans, schismatics, Christian kings and, in 1204, the Orthodox Church.

The reckoning, such as it is

On 4 May 2001, in Athens, John Paul II spoke to Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and all Greece, who had opposed the visit. He said that some memories are especially painful and that some events of the distant past have left deep wounds in the minds and hearts of people to this day, and that he was thinking of the disastrous sack of the imperial city of Constantinople, which had for so long been the bastion of Christianity in the East. He said it was tragic that the assailants, who had set out to secure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, had turned against their own brothers in the faith, and that the fact that they were Latin Christians filled Catholics with deep regret. It is the first unambiguous papal apology for 1204 in eight hundred years, it was delivered in Greece to the Greek primate, and Christodoulos received it. In June 2004, when the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew came to Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, John Paul II said it again.

On 27 November 2004 John Paul II handed over to Patriarch Bartholomew, in a ceremony at St. Peter's, relics of St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John Chrysostom which had been in Rome for centuries and which the Orthodox understand to have been taken from Constantinople in 1204. They were carried to the Phanar and now rest in the patriarchal church of St. George. The papal letter written for the occasion speaks of purifying wounded memories and of strengthening the journey of reconciliation, and does not itself make the historical claim; there is a Catholic scholarly view that the Chrysostom relics reached Rome earlier and by a different route. The gesture was understood on both sides for what it was regardless of how the bones had travelled.

A second papal apology for 1204 is often attributed to Benedict XVI. It is not asserted here, because it cannot be verified. What is documented is that Benedict XVI visited the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar in November 2006 and signed a Common Declaration with Patriarch Bartholomew on 30 November, and that relations between the two sees have continued to warm under him and under Francis. The specific apologies for the Fourth Crusade on the record are John Paul II's, in 2001 and 2004.

What Orthodox Christians say about all this does not come to one answer, and it would be dishonest to supply one. There is a view, common among hierarchs engaged in dialogue, that the apology was sincere, was received, and settles the moral question between the churches, leaving the historical memory to be dealt with by education rather than grievance. There is a view, common among monastics and in a good deal of popular writing, that an apology which changes nothing about papal primacy, the filioque, or the position of the Eastern Catholic churches is a courtesy rather than a repentance, and that the offer of forgiveness for 1204 is not the same thing as the reunion of the Church. And there is, in some quarters, plain unforgiveness, sometimes expressed in language that no Christian should use. A reader should know that the range exists and that the middle of it is where most Orthodox actually live: they hold the memory, they do not think a Catholic they meet is responsible for it, and they are not willing to pretend the doctrinal questions were settled by a papal visit.

The Orthodox Church has no liturgical mechanism for corporately forgiving a dead army. What it has is smaller and is offered to everyone. On the eve of Great Lent, at Forgiveness Vespers, Orthodox Christians in a parish ask forgiveness of each other one at a time, face to face, bowing to each person in the room and saying the words out loud. It is domestic, unspectacular, and the only form of the thing the Church actually teaches. Whatever is to be done with 1204, it will be done in that register or not at all.

So the history does not close. The Crusades were not a Christian war against Islam that went wrong, and they were not a colonial project in armour; they were a two-hundred-year improvisation, begun for reasons that were partly real, carried out mostly by men who believed they were saving their souls, financed by men who were not, and turned in the end against the Eastern Christians it had been called to help. Rome has apologised for 1204 and the apology was accepted. Nothing has been undone by it. The relics of two saints came home in 2004. The four horses are still on the front of San Marco. Both of those things are true at once, and that is roughly where the matter stands.