tangerine's dream

Posted by Dr Eleanor Janega

https://going-medieval.com/2025/07/09/on-crusades-or-how-not-to-identify-with-losers/

http://going-medieval.com/?p=8863

I think about Crusades a lot because that’s my job. I also think about them a lot because, well, there were a lot of them – which is pretty wild when you consider they didn’t exist as a phenomenon until the high medieval period and yet they still managed to do way too many of them.

Why did it take so long to come up with the concept of a Crusade? I mean, in a mostly Christian society largely led by dudes on horses with big sticks, why didn’t anyone try this stuff on sooner? Well as I will never tire of telling you, for quite a few centuries the papacy didn’t actually have very much power. For a great part of the early medieval period, popes were busy hanging out in various graveyards in Rome arguing with the other guys who claimed they were pope too, and occasionally getting beaten up in the streets. But they were a plucky bunch, and one of the things they managed to do over time is write a bunch of books about how fancy and important they were. This helped them to slowly consolidate power, so by the time you hit the eleventh century they were actually pretty influential people.

A good way to think about the medieval Church is as a sort of legal structure and series of courts that also has some services attached on the front. So in a lot of ways they acted something like a state does now. They took tithes, which were like taxes, and in theory made sure that in return the basic pastoral care needs were met. They also were involved in high level politics across Christendom – weighing in on controversies, advising kings and emperors, and basically making big calls.

So they are … kinda like rulers? I mean they do rule a complex state apparatus? And one of the things that people who rule do, often to the detriment of society as a whole, is they engage in warfare. So when the Church reached the dizzying heights of medieval power they almost immediately began to call for war. Like, a lot.

When we use the term ‘Crusade’ most people are going to think about Europeans venturing to the Holy Land, and that’s fair enough because that’s exactly what the first Crusade was. But there are so so many Crusades to look at across the medieval period. You can choose the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth crusades to the Levant or Asia Minor, obviously. But also there’s the Albigensian Crusade against the various good men and women in Languedoc.[1] Or how about the Crusades against the non-Christians in the Baltic region, prosecuted more specifically by the Teutonic Order, who were invented just for this purpose?[2] As a Bohemia specialist, I, of course, spend a bunch of time thinking about the Crusades called against the Hussites.[3]

That’s so many Crusades to think about, against so many groups of people, and across centuries on centuries. So when we say ‘Crusades’ is there any way to really think about any of these groups as a contiguous whole? I would say yes, because pretty uniformly every single one of these Crusades were fought by a baffling assortment of losers who were totally ineffectual.

What do I mean by that? Well, exactly what I said, thanks. It’s not really ambiguous.

But for some reason people have largely managed to ignore the fact that all of these Crusades were absolute miserable flops that didn’t manage to do a whole lot more than get a bunch of random people killed.

Take the First Crusade, for example. It was called because the good people in Eastern Rome had lost a lot of land what with the sudden incursion of Seljuks to the Levant. Constantinople were unhappy about this because they had lost a lot of taxable land, and so they came up with the smart idea to go talk the Christians out west into helping them out. The Seljuk take-over had disrupted ordinary pilgrimage routes and so the Greeks figured that the Westerners might help because they would want to make sure they can visit Jerusalem again. Constantinople were right on that one, and all of a sudden people began flooding East.[4] Trouble is a lot of them were, in the opinions of Eastern Rome the wrong sort of people. These were the ordinary individuals who got riled up by preaching of individuals like Peter the Hermit (c. 1050 – 1118 or 1131) and figured that they wouldn’t mind fighting a holy war. Trouble with them is the main thing they did was kill a bunch of Europe’s Jewish population on the way East, starve, and then immediately get massacred the minute Constantinople pushed them over to Asia Minor and into enemy territory.

Now you can make an argument that the actual knights – a vanishingly small segment of the European population – who went on the first crusade were ‘successful’ but like, IDK most of them mostly died of dysentery in a ditch in Syria. They sort of trip over their dicks and manage to get hold of Jerusalem, but a lot of them had got bored by that point anyway and set up shop in Edessa and refused to go any further. From the standpoint of Constantinople who asked for all of this, the entire thing was a failure because mostly just some Norman guys were living over there now. And yes, some new kingdoms and counties etc were set up, but if the Crusade was so fucking successful why doesn’t everyone in Jerusalem speak Norman French now? Why did a second Crusade need to be called? Because they were terrible at actually running kingdoms in the Middle East, that’s fucking why.

The Second Crusade meanwhile was a total disaster that mostly just managed to break up the marriage of the king and queen of France.[5] Great job everyone. The Third Crusade?[6] Got Frederick Barbarossa (1122-1190) drowned in a river. Fourth Crusade?[7] It sacked Constantinople, the theoretical bastion of Christendom in the East. The Fifth Crusade?[8] Basically, just the sad trombone noise being played at Crusaders in Egypt. The Sixth Crusade?[9] Basically a wedding and a holiday that Frederick II (1194-1250) didn’t really want to go on. So yeah, just a series of losing endeavours that were necessary because the First Crusade was also a losing endeavour and nobody knew what they were doing.

So yeah some people were pretty willing to admit that maybe this whole Crusades in the Holy Land thing was pretty stupid. But the idea of holy war was out of the bag now and a lot of people were getting into it. I mean, why go all the way to the East when you could just fight some non-Christians at home and maybe take some land that you had hope of actually keeping? This led to the call for the Northern Crusades in 1195 where Pope Celestine III (c. 1105-1198) felt that there were far too many of what he called ‘pagans’ up in Northern Europe and thought he would send in some Germans to do something about it. This led to the rise of the afore-mentioned Teutonic Knights who did a good line in building brick castles and occupying territory, but a worse job of actually making locals really love Christianity.[10] As a result the Northern Crusades dragged on until the fifteenth century when eventually the last non-Christians were converted officially because of some political marriages. Not exactly an advertisement for the enduring power and usefulness of Christian violence.

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To be fair, by this time there had been one ‘successful’ Crusade though – the thirteenth-century’s Albigensian Crusade. Here the French crown noticed that down in Languedoc a lot of people were kinda frustrated with what they considered the worldliness of the Church and had a new DIY kind of Christianity going on. They also weren’t French. They spoke Occitan, and were generally vassals of the Angevin Empire. The French crown didn’t love that, but also didn’t feel like declaring war on England so they cooked up an excuse against the Good Men and Women of Languedoc who they called the Cathars and absolutely massacred a group of Christians and stole their land. Yay? Great stuff. Not at all gross. But I guess you can call it a success if you are a weird freak.

This would be a high point for Crusades in Europe though, as the next big one to get called was the Crusades against the Hussites, my favourite little guys. I hardly need to tell you again, that all five (count ‘em five) of them were huge disasters. Hussites 4 Life.  Žižka ‘til I die. Etc etc.

There’s plenty more minor Crusades where this came from, whether it was against peasants who had the temerity to think of themselves as people, or Bosnians who had their own sorts of Christianity, or just, you know Alexandria. Again, most of these failed, although yeah I guess the Church sure did show those peasants in Stedinger. Eventually. After first being defeated.

So yeah, the major thing that the Crusades were good at doing was getting a bunch of random rich dudes to go die somewhere other than their own bed, and for that I guess I have to like them. However, if we are relating to them as some form of romantic or successful enterprises then it’s just a bit off.

This is something I have been thinking about a lot more recently, because I have just finished doing a big (11 part!) series on the First Crusade, Welcome to the Crusades, alongside my intrepid We’re Not So Different co-host Luke, and with the good gentlemen of American Prestige. The thing that really sticks out when you spend a lot of time mired in the granular details, especially when you are working with a specialist in Islamic history, is just how silly and ultimately wasteful a lot of this stuff is. Like yeah, I love a good story of about a fake Holy Lance, and how the person who claimed it was real ended up dying of burns after being burnt severely during a trial by fire. Yes. It’s amusing. However, maybe, just maybe it would have been a better use of time and life if …. Peter Bartholomew (d. 1099) just didn’t… do… that. It would be better if everyone who died in the Civetot massacre just stayed home. And you know, I bet you anything that Emperor Alexios I Komnenos wished he had never invited Europe’s foremost landless failsons East, thereby weakening the Eastern Roman Empire further, and never actually getting any of his lands back in the bargain. It’s all just so stupid.

So why have I told you all of this? Or spent my precious hours on this beautiful planet thinking about these fools and their follies. Well, we’re in a strange time when people are really desperate to tell stories about where we came from, and the greatness we can call upon in times of need. This has led some people to think wistfully about crusaders and how they were big burly knights who had great bulging biceps and did manly things with swords, and to begin to pretend that they – some guy in Missouri – is like them. ALSO they are not thinking about it in a gay way. They swear. And like, I get it, things are really horrible right now and everyone wants some escapism.  But, uh, if what you want to pretend in this hour of darkness is that you are a Crusader then I have to wonder why even in your wildest imagination you are still a weird loser.  

You know if I was gonna pretend to be someone cool from the medieval past it would be like … huh … I was gonna say Frederick II, who technically went on Crusade and hated it the whole time because he thought it was a stupid waste of time when he wanted to be taking long baths with his several many side pieces. Legends only. Yeah feel free to pretend to be him. Take up hawking or something. IDK.

It’s not that it isn’t fun to think about crusaders. Clearly I spend a bunch of time doing that. It’s that it’s fun to think about them because it’s actually hilarious to watch rich boys fail and get sad, not because Crusaders are cool or useful or good at anything. The more you know about the medieval world the less you fall for the weird stories people tell about it. So I very much invite you to join the medievalist team, learn more about the Crusades, and stop romanticising losers.

You can check out all 11 (!) episodes of Welcome to the Crusades now. It’s really good.

[1] A great book on the Albigensian Crusade is Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[2] On the Northern Crusades try Alan V. Murray, Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150-1500, (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
[3] On the Hussites I like Howard Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution, (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004).
[4] A really interesting book about who went on Crusade is Conor Kostick, The social structure of the First Crusade, (Boston: Brill, 2008).
[5] On the Second Crusade and why it sucks, check out David Nicolle, The Second Crusade 1148: Disaster Outside Damascus, (London: Bloomsbury USA, 2009).
[6] A longer list of everyone who went over to fail in the Holy Land can be found in, Stephen Bennett,  Elite Participation in the Third Crusade, (London: Boydell Press, 2021).
[7] Jonathan P. Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople,  (London: Pimlico, 2005).
[8] The Fifth Crusade sucked so much that no one ever writes about it, but a good volume is Joseph P. Donovan, Pelagius and the Fifth Crusade, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated, 2016).
[9] Again, not a lot of Sixth Crusade literature, but the interesting stuff is Frederick II anyway. Check out Richard D. Bressler, Frederick II: The Wonder of the World, (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2010).
[10] If you are interested in the Teutonic order I recommend David Nicolle, Teutonic Knight: 1190–1561, (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

For more on not romanticising the past, see:

You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn
On what we choose to remember

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© Eleanor Janega, 2025

https://going-medieval.com/2025/07/09/on-crusades-or-how-not-to-identify-with-losers/

http://going-medieval.com/?p=8863