First Crusade

Examples of First Crusade in the following topics:

• The First Crusade

  • The First Crusade (1095–1099) was a military expedition by Roman Catholic Europe to regain the Holy Lands taken in Muslim conquests, ultimately resulting in the recapture of Jerusalem in 1099.
  • The First Crusade (1095–1099) was the first of a number of crusades that attempted to recapture the Holy Lands, called by Pope Urban II in 1095.
  • During the crusade, knights, peasants and serfs from many regions of Western Europe travelled over land and by sea, first to Constantinople and then on towards Jerusalem.
  • The Crusader armies crossed over into Asia Minor during the first half of 1097, where they were joined by Peter the Hermit and the remainder of his little army.
  • The first objective of their campaign was Nicaea, previously a city under Byzantine rule, but which had become the capital of the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum under Kilij Arslan I.

• The Second Crusade

  • The Second Crusade (1147–1149) was the second major crusade launched against Islam by Catholic Europe, started in response to the fall of the County of Edessa founded in the First Crusade; it was largely a failure for the Europeans.
  • The county had been founded during the First Crusade (1096–1099) by King Baldwin of Boulogne in 1098.
  • While it was the first Crusader state to be founded, it was also the first to fall.
  • The Second Crusade was announced by Pope Eugene III, and was the first of the crusades to be led by European kings, namely Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, with help from a number of other European nobles.
  • Many of the French nobles distrusted the land route, which would take them through the Byzantine Empire, the reputation of which still suffered from the accounts of the First Crusaders.

• The Fourth Crusade

  • The First Crusade arose after a call to arms in a 1095 sermon by Pope Urban II.
  • As a result of the First Crusade, four primary crusader states were created: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Tripoli.
  • On a popular level, the First Crusade unleashed a wave of impassioned, pious Catholic fury which was expressed in the massacres of Jews that accompanied the crusades and the violent treatment of the "schismatic" Orthodox Christians of the east.
  • On 23 June 1203 the main crusader fleet reached Constantinople.
  • After the failure of the Fourth Crusade to hold Constantinople or reach Jerusalem, Innocent III also launched the first crusade against heretics, the Albigensian Crusade, against the Cathars in France and the County of Toulouse.

• The Third Crusade

  • At the time of the First Crusade, the Middle East was severely divided by warring rulers.
  • The Siege of Acre was one of the first confrontations of the Third Crusade and a key victory for the Crusaders and a serious defeat for Saladin, who had hoped to destroy the whole of the Crusader kingdom.
  • The motivations and results of the Third Crusade differed from the First in several ways.
  • In addition, unlike the First Crusade, in the Second and Third Crusades kings led Crusaders into battle.
  • The Siege of Acre was the first major confrontation of the Third Crusade

• The Crusades

  • The origin of the Crusades in general, and particularly that of the First Crusade, is widely debated among historians.
  • The confusion is partially due to the numerous armies in the first crusade, and their lack of direct unity.
  • Historians have argued that the desire to impose Roman church authority in the east may have been one of the goals of the crusade, although Urban II, who launched the First Crusade, never refers to such a goal in his letters on crusading.
  • While the Crusades had causes deeply rooted in the social and political situations of 11th-century Europe, the event actually triggering the First Crusade was a request for assistance from Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos.
  • Combining the idea of pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of waging a holy war against infidels, Urban received an enthusiastic response to his speeches and soon after began collecting military forces to begin the First Crusade.

• Crisis and Fragmentation

  • But for the first time, the Byzantines would have to look west for help, to their estranged fellow Christians in Western Europe.
  • To the Byzantines the crusaders were dirty, uneducated brutes.
  • The Byzantines and crusaders agreed that whatever formerly Byzantine lands the crusaders recaptured from the Turks would be returned to Byzantine control.
  • The crusaders parceled out Byzantine lands among themselves.
  • The capture of Jerusalem in 1099 CE marked the success of Western Europe's First Crusade against the Muslims.

• Italian Trade Cities

  • The Crusades had built lasting trade links to the Levant, and the Fourth Crusade had done much to destroy the Byzantine Roman Empire as a commercial rival to the Venetians and Genoese.
  • The trade routes of the Italian states linked with those of established Mediterranean ports and eventually the Hanseatic League of the Baltic and northern regions of Europe to create a network economy in Europe for the first time since the 4th century.
  • Italy first felt the changes in Europe from the 11th to the 13th centuries.
  • The recovery of lost Greek texts, which had been preserved by Arab scholars, following the Crusader conquest of the Byzantine heartlands, revitalized medieval philosophy in the Renaissance of the 12th century.

• The Last Byzantine Dynasty

  • Following the Fourth Crusade, the Byzantine Empire had fractured into the Greek successor-states of Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond, with a multitude of Frankish and Latin possessions occupying the remainder, nominally subject to the Latin Emperors at Constantinople.
  • Massive construction projects were completed in Constantinople to repair the damages of the Fourth Crusade, but none of these initiatives was of any comfort to the farmers in Asia Minor, suffering raids from fanatical ghazis.
  • Nonetheless, a significant and increasing number of Greeks began travelling to Italy, first temporarily to Italian colonies such as Crete or Cyprus before returning to Byzantium, then as the Empire began to fail horribly, in more permanent manner.
  • A gold Byzantine coin, called the hyperpyron (which replaced the earlier solidus), depicting the first emperor of the Byzantine Palaiologan Dynasty, Michael VIII.

• The Investiture Controversy

  • The Gregorian reformers knew this would not be possible so long as the emperor maintained the ability to appoint the pope, so their first step was to forcibly gain the papacy from the control of the emperor.
  • They used religious reasons to continue the rebellion started at the First Battle of Langensalza in 1075, and for seizure of royal holdings.
  • It brought to an end the first phase of the power struggle between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors and has been interpreted as containing within itself the germ of nation-based sovereignty that would one day be confirmed in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648); in part this was an unforeseen result of strategic maneuvering between the Church and the European sovereigns over political control within their domains.
  • Marshalling for public opinion engaged lay people in religious affairs increasing lay piety, setting the stage for the Crusades and the great religious vitality of the 12th century.
  • The church would Crusade against the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick II.

• The English Protectorate

  • The first was "healing and settling" the nation after the chaos of the civil wars and the regicide. 
  • The first Protectorate parliament met in September 1654, and after some initial gestures approving appointments previously made by Cromwell, began to work on a moderate program of constitutional reform.
  • The fifteen major generals and deputy major generals—called "godly governors"—were central not only to national security, but Cromwell's moral crusade.
  • The First Anglo-Dutch War, which had broken out in 1652, against the Dutch Republic, was eventually won in 1654.
  • The extent to which Cromwell, who was in direct command for the first year of the campaign, was responsible for brutal atrocities in Ireland is debated to this day.