The Seljuk Great Sulṭânate only briefly held its greatest power, but that was sufficient for the Turks to defeat the Romans at Manzikert (1071) and permanently penetrate the historic Christian heartland of Anatolia. ![]() While the popular impression now is that the Crusades came out of nowhere and were motivated by nothing more than hostility, intolerance, or greed, Pope Urban II was in fact responding to a plea for help. The Kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus, 1099-1498īattle of Montgisard, Saladin routed, fled back to Egypt, 1177 Battle of Jacob's Ford, loss of castle of Chastellet, 1179 ![]() Even the Crusader states in the Baltic are subject to biased hatchet jobs. These range from what is simply a silly movie to a painful and discrediting performance by art critic and historian Robert Hughes, who otherwise comes in for positive notice, as an insightful philosopher, in these pages. The sensible person would ask, "What in the world is going on?" Reviews of several recent distorted, tendentious, and ignorant treatments are included on this page, both in the text and in footnotes. A couple centuries of distractions, like the Black Death, would slow Europe down but soon European incursions, conquests, and colonies as far away as Indonesia and the Americas would make the Crusader kingdoms look like very small potatoes.Ĭurrently, what may be the matter of greatest interest about the Crusades are expressions of liberal guilt and self-hatred about them, assimilated to anachronistic modern narratives about " imperialism," "colonialism," and " Islamophobia." All of this is rarely illuminating about the Crusades themselves, which may be presented with ignorance, distortions, falsehoods, and self-righteous "virtue signaling" but it is all very illuminating about our contemporary politics and politicized culture, especially involving biases against Christianity, if not religion in general, anti-Semitism, and dishonest apologetics for militant and fundamentalist Islâm, whose crimes and reactionary attitudes, including the revival of slavery, often appear to be exempt from any general condemnations of religion (or even of slavery itself). It also knocked Constantinople out of the cultural, political, and moral preeminence that it had enjoyed since Germans overran the Western Roman Empire. As it was, the involvement in the East, military, commercial, and cultural, helped pull Western Europe out of the Dark Ages and back into world history. The Crusader kingdoms were a portent of what could happen the next time European power spilled over its borders. These states fall into two groups: (1) those recovered from Islâm, which was the purpose of the Crusades, and (2) those obtained at the expense of Romania, which had originally appealed for help against the Turks, but which was a tempting target both for its wealth and for its heterodoxy after the Schism of the Churches in 1054.Ĭrusader states can also include the lands of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights in the Baltic, which lasted until Prussia was secularized in 1525 and the last Grand Master of the Livonian Knights was made Duke of Courland by Poland in 1561, and the island of Malta, famously under the Hospitallers, the "Knights of Malta," until 1798. Outremer, "across the sea," means the states created and maintained by Crusaders and their descendants in the Middle East between 1098, during the First Crusade, and 1489, when Cyprus passed to Venice. Latin Emperors of Constantinople, 1204-1261.Teutonic and Livonian Knights, 1191-1525.The Norman Princes of Antioch, 1099-1287. ![]() The Kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus, 1099-1489.The Periphery of Francia:Ĭounts of Edessa, Princes of Antioch, Counts of Tripoli, Kings of Thessalonica, Dukes of Athens, Princes of Achaea, and the Grand Masters of the Military Monastic Orders Crusader States, Kings of Jerusalem & Cyprus, Templars, Hospitallers, Israel, etc.
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