Adamant wrote on Feb 8
th, 2012 at 2:34pm:
Why would you want to quote a second rate hack as historical fact, when it is only an erroneous opinion. You could have at least gone to WIKI.
Much of what you read about the crusades is OPINION regardless of who presents it as history because many facts are lost to historians.
But you wanted WIKI so here's some pertinent snippets about the Crusades:
The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Most historians agree that
the Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another. The rapid fall of Visigothic Spain remains even more mysterious.
the first crusades unleashed a wave of impassioned, personally felt pious Christian fury that was
expressed in the massacres of JEWS that accompanied the movement of the Crusader mobs through Europe,
as well as the violent treatment of "schismatic" Orthodox Christians of the east.First Crusade 1095–1099
In 1095 Pope Urban II called upon all Christians to join a war against the Turks, promising those who died in the endeavour would receive immediate remission of their sins.
The official crusader armies set off from France and Italy on the 15th August 1096, at Constantinople they received a wary welcome from the Byzantine Emperor. Pledging to restore lost territories to the empire, the main army, mostly French and Norman knights under the leader Godfrey of Bouillon (1060–1100), Baldwin of Flanders, Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Normandy, Bohemond of Taranto, marched south through Anatolia. They captured Antioch (June 3, 1098) and finally Jerusalem (July 15, 1099) in savage battles. They created four crusader states along the Syrian and Palestinian coast.
Campaigns
The Crusader armies fought the Turks. The Siege of Antioch began in October 1097 and endured until June 1098. Once inside the city,
as was standard military practice when an enemy had refused to surrender the Crusaders massacred the Muslim inhabitants, destroyed mosques and pillaged the city. However, a large Muslim relief army under Kerbogha immediately besieged the victorious Crusaders within Antioch. A successful break-out on 28th June defeated Kerbogha's army . The starving crusader army marched south, reaching Jerusalem on 7 June 1099 with only a fraction of their original forces.
Siege of Jerusalem 1099
The Jews and Muslims fought together to defend Jerusalem against the invading Franks. They were unsuccessful and on 15 July 1099 the crusaders entered the city.
They proceeded to massacre the remaining Jewish and Muslim civilians and pillaged or destroyed mosques and the city itself. One historian has written that the "isolation, alienation and fear" felt by
the Franks so far from home helps to explain the atrocities they committed, including the cannibalism which was recorded after the Siege of Ma'arra in 1098. As a result of the First Crusade, several small
Crusader states were created, notably the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem at most 120,000 Franks (predominantly French-speaking Western Christians) ruled over 350,000 Muslims, Jews, and native Eastern Christians who had remained since the Arab occupation began in 638 AD.
Second Crusade 1147–1149
After a period of relative peace in which Christians and Muslims co-existed in the Holy Land, Muslims conquered the town of Edessa. A new crusade was called for by various preachers. French and South German armies, under the Kings Louis VII and Conrad III respectively, marched to Jerusalem in 1147 but failed to win any major victories, launching a failed pre-emptive siege of Damascus, an independent city that would soon fall into the hands of the main enemy of the Crusaders. On the other side of the Mediterranean, however, the Second Crusade met with great success as a group of Northern European Crusaders stopped in Portugal, allied with the King, Afonso I of Portugal, and retook Lisbon from the Muslims in 1147. A detachment from this group of crusaders helped conquer the city of Tortosa the following year. In the Holy Land by 1150, both the kings of France and Germany had returned to their countries without any result. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who in his preachings had encouraged the Second Crusade, was upset with the amount of misdirected violence and slaughter of the Jewish population of the Rhineland..
And on it goes ....
Third Crusade 1187–1192
Fourth Crusade 1202–1204
Children's Crusade 1212 The chronicles report a spontaneous youth movement in France and Germany in 1212 attracting large numbers of peasant teenagers and young people (some under 15yrs). They were convinced they could succeed where older and more sinful crusaders had failed:
Many parish priests and parents encouraged such religious fervor and urged them on. The pope and bishops opposed the attempt but failed to stop it entirely. A band of several thousand youths and young men set out for Italy. About a third survived the march over the Alps and got as far as Genoa; another group came to Marseilles. The luckier ones eventually managed to get safely home, but many others were sold as slaves in Marseilles.
On to the ......
Fifth Crusade 1217–1221
Sixth Crusade 1228–1229
Seventh Crusade 1248–1254
Eighth Crusade 1270
Ninth Crusade 1271–1272
The Ninth Crusade was deemed a failure and ended the Crusades in the Middle East.
In their later years, faced with the threat of the Egyptian Mamluks, the Crusaders' hopes rested with a
Franco-Mongol alliance
.
The Mongols
were thought to be sympathetic to Christianity, and the Frankish princes engineering their invasions of the Middle East on several occasions. The Mongols successfully attacked as far south as Damascus on these campaigns. The Mamluks, led by Baibars, eventually made good their pledge to cleanse the entire Middle East of the Franks. With the fall of Antioch (1268), Tripoli (1289), and Acre (1291). those Christians unable to leave the cities were massacred or enslaved and the last traces of Christian rule in the Levant disappeared.
Aftermath
The island of Ruad, three kilometers from the Syrian shore, was occupied for several years by the Knights Templar but was ultimately lost to the Mamluks in the Siege of Ruad on September 26, 1302. The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which was not itself a crusader state, and was not Latin Christian, but was closely associated with the crusader states and was ruled by the Latin Christian Lusignan dynasty for its last 34 years, survived until 1375. Other echoes of the crusader states survived for longer, but well away from the Holy Land itself. The Knights of St John carved out a new territory based on the Aegean island of Rhodes, which they ruled until 1522. Cyprus remained under the rule of the House of Lusignan until 1474-89, and subsequently that of Venice until 1570. By this time the Knights of St John had moved to Malta – even further from the Holy Land – which they ruled until 1798.