CRUSADES

CRUSADES. A Western Christian military and religious movement lasting two hundred years, from 1095 in Clermont, France, to the fall of Acre in Palestine in 1291. Ironically, originally called for by Pope Urban I in the hope of aiding Byzantium (q.v.) and thus bringing the latter into union with the Roman Church (q.v.), the mass movement that resulted ended by having the opposite effect.

The Crusades did much for Western Europe. They fostered trade and stimulated intellectual life, immensely broadening the horizons of the formerly provincial cultures of the north. Ideas, manuscripts, scholars, tradesmen, and soldiers all traveled as a result. Religiously, however, the Crusades marked and sealed the schism (q.v.) between Christian West and East, and also left a legacy of hatred and resentment in the Muslim world from which it was primarily the Eastern Christians who were to suffer.

The First Crusade (1095–99) established an independent kingdom at Jerusalem, and duchies and counties in the rest of the Levant, including Antioch and Edessa (qq.v.). In Jerusalem and Antioch particularly, Latin hierarchs were appointed in place of the former Greek incumbents. The parallel hierarchy was the first clear sign of the schism’s reality. Gathering mistrust and mutual hatred between the Western soldiers and the Byzantines culminated in the Fourth Crusade, 1204, which took and sacked the imperial capital, Constantinople (q.v.), and set up an “empire” that disregarded the indigenous culture and ruled in the imperial city from 1204 to 1261, and that further survived in pockets of Western (especially Venetian) rule until the 16th c. Even today one can see Byzantine ecclesiastical art treasures in the St. Mark’s collection of Venice-as reshaped collages that ignore their original form and function.

So great was popular hatred of the West as a result of this forced occupation that the later attempts of the Reunion Councils (q.v.) were doomed from the start. The choice between Ottoman Turks and Western Europe was clear by the end of Byzantium (q.v.), and the Greeks chose the Turks as less threatening to their inheritance. A very similar phenomenon and choice, between the Teutonic Knights (a crusading order) and the Tartars, was exercised by Russia (q.v.) during the 13th c. (See Alexander Nevskii; Novgorodian Tradition.)