The High Middle Ages:

The Crusades and the East

Part of the dynamism of the High Middle Ages was manifested in the crusades. These crusades were officially initiated by the Church in an effort to spread Christianity, principally at the expense of Islam. The earliest crusades, which were the most successful, contributed to the long-term reconquest of Spain by Christian forces and the establishment of Christian control in the Holy Land for much of the twelfth century. The crusades increased contact between Western Europeans and the other two inheritors of the Roman world, Islam and Byzantium. At this time Byzantium was beginning a long period of decline that would culminate with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Islam was no longer the expansivce power it had once been, but it remained a formidable opponent with considerable resources.

The documents in this chapter emphasize three themes: the crusades, the interaction between these three civilizations occasioned by the crusades, and the importance of Byzantium. First, how did the papacy justify the crusades? How does this justification compare with other factors motivating Europeans to join these crusades? What do the crusades reveal about medieval society and institutions during these centuries? Second, what were the reactions of the Byzantines

to the crusades and to the Europeans? How did Muslims view Western Europeans and their customs? How did Europeans relate to Byzantines and Muslims? Of what significance to the balance of power among these three civilizations were the crusades? Finally, what were some of Byzantium's main accomplishments? What was the significance of the final fall of Constantinople?

An examination of these materials will broaden our picture of the High Middle Ages. Some of the developments emphasized here and in the preceding chapter will come to greater fruition in the thirteenth century, as will be seen in the next chapter.

The Great Significance of the Crusades

Henri Pirenne

In term of rescuing Jerusalem from Islamic hands, the crusades were at best only temporarily successful. But as part of a European expansion reflecting a new strength in comparison to competing civilizations, the first crusade had great significance. More than most historians, Henri Pirenne has focused on the broad connections between Islam and medieval Europe. In the following selection he stresses the importance of the first crusade and related events of the eleventh century.

Consider: The significance of the first crusade for the balance of power between Christianity and Islam.

Before the counter-attack of Christianity, Islam thus gave way little by little. The launching of the First Crusade (1096) marked its definite recoil. In 1097 a Genoese fleet sailed towards Antioch, bringing to the Crusaders reinforcements and supplies. Two years later Pisa sent out vessels "under the orders of the Pope" to deliver Jerusalem. From that time on the whole Mediterranean was opened, or rather reopened, to western shipping. As in the Roman era, communications were reestablished from one end to the other of that essentially European sea.

The Empire of Islam, in so far as the sea was concerned, came to an end. To be sure, the political and religious results of the Crusade were ephemeral. The kingdom of Jerusalem and the principalities of Edessa and Antioch were reconquered by the Muslims in the twelfth century. But the sea remained in the hands of the Christians. They were the ones who held undisputed economic mastery over it. All the shipping in the ports of the Levant came gradually under their control. Their commercial establishments multiplied with surprising rapidity in the ports of Syria, Egypt and the isles of the Ionian Sea. The conquest of Corsica (1091), of Sardinia (1022) and of Sicily (1058-1090) took away from the Saracens the bases of operations which, since the ninth century, had enabled them to keep the west in a state of blockade. The ships of Genoa and Pisa kept the sea routes open. They patronized the markets of the east, whither came the products of Asia, both by caravan and by the ships of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and frequented in their turn the great port of Byzantium. The capture of Amalfi by the Normans (1073), in putting an end to the commerce of that city, freed them from her rivalry.

The Meaning of the Middle

Ages: The Crusades Minimized

Norman E Cantor

Not all historians agree that the crusades were of great significance. In recent years historians have tended to deemphasize their importance. This is exemplified in the following selection by Nonnan Cantor

Consider: What, according to Cantor, was most important about the crusades; how this interpretation differs from Pirenne's.

Historians used to believe that the Crusades reopened the Mediterranean to east-west trade after centuries of isolation and thus made a critical contribution to the economic and intellectual development of Europe. It is true that the Crusades were inspired in part by commercial motives: from the middle of the tenth century, Venetian and Genoese merchants had aspired to take over certain commercial ventures from the Arabs and Byzantines and to acquire new ports in the eastern Mediterranean. The Crusades helped the Italian merchants in both ambitions, but that does not imply that they opened up the Mediterranean-east-west trade had never completely disappeared, and in the ninth and tenth centuries, long before the Crusades, it was growing fast spurred on by the growth of the Italian cities.

It is true that the Christian world absorbed a great deal of Muslim philosophy, medicine, science, and literature in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, but the Crusades did not contribute to this phenomenon-indeed, they probably inhibited it by stirring up religious fanaticism and hatred of Muslims. The intellectual exchange between Christians and Muslims did not take place among soldiers on a battlefield but in the cosmopolitan centers of southern Europe (especially those in Spain and Sicily) where Christians and Muslims lived side by side.

The tangible, institutional impact of the Crusades on the development of Europe was very slight: the institution of monarchy was affected almost not at all, and even the Church (apart from a slight rise in papal prestige) was not much affected by the Crusades in the twelfth century. Eventually two different kinds of crusading movements developed: external Crusades, directed mainly against Arabs, and internal Crusades against enemies within Christendom. The latter-the crusading ideal turned inward-had enormous impact upon the development of European civilization, but this was not fully realized until the thirteenth century.

The most important legacy of the crusading movement was the sanctification of violence in pursuit of ideological ends. This was not a new concept, but it took on new force when the pope and the flower of Christian chivalry acted it out in holy wars. The underlying concept outlived its religious origin, and eventually it was absorbed in the institution of monarchy. When the European kings grew more powerful, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they secularized the concept of justifiable violence and extended it into the political sphere. The defense of the realm and its head became a moral duty, and the state gradually replaced the Church as a holy cause.

The Byzantine Empire:

Defeat, Decline, and Resilience

Robert Browning

In 1453 Constantinople fell, providing historians with a convenient date for the end of the longlasting Byzantine Empire. However, by that date the Byzantine Empire was only a shadow of what it had been three centuries earlier In the following selection Robert Browning argues that we must look back to 1204 to explain why the Byzantine Empire collapsed. He goes on to analyze the importance of its long though weakened existence after that date for the Western world in general.

Consider: Why the Latin invasion of 1204 was so important; why the long existence of the Byzantine Empire might have been so important to the Western world.

If the historian is asked why the Byzantine Empire, after more than a thousand years of vigorous life, collapsed so ignominiously, he will doubtless reply that there was no single reason. Factors of many kinds were at work, from improvements in seagoing ships to climatic changes in central Asia, from the growing independence of landed proprietors to debasement of the coinage in order to increase the money supply. If there was a single fatal blow, it was struck in 1204 when the territory of the empire still stretched from the Adriatic to the gates of Syria, and not in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the rulers of a vast, enveloping empire as an over-ripe fruit falls from a tree. It was the power vacuum created by the Latin invasion which enabled the orthodox Slav states of the Balkans to strike out on a course of their own, freed from the field of force of Byzantium, and in the end condemned them to fall one by one to the Ottoman conqueror. Rivalry and intrigue replaced the firm and traditional political leadership which might have enabled the Balkan world, with its immense manpower and its largely common culture, to offer effective resistance. . .  .

The capture of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 and the establishment of Latin rule over the ruins of the Byzantine Empire brought with them the destruction of those institutions within which Byzantine art, letters, and thought flourished. There was no longer an emperor and a court to provide patronage. The Church still survived, but much of its wealth was now in western hands and its hierarchy scattered and impoverished. Many monasteries, however, continued to provide, albeit on a reduced scale, the conditions for the execution of works of art and the copying of manuscripts. The cultivated metropolitan milieu by which and for which so much of the literature and art of the twelfth century had been produced existed no longer. Its members had fled as refugees to one or another of the regions still outside Latin control, or had sunk into obscurity. . .

There was no longer any career in the bureaucracy of Church or state awaiting those with a classical literary education. The imperial factories had vanished in the general debacle, and their silk weavers, mosaicists, goldsmiths, and other craftsmen were scattered to the four winds, unable to pass on their centuries-old skills to a following generation.

Fortunately, Byzantine society and Byzantine culture remained in being until the western world was mature enough to want to learn from them. What they learned was not a dead body of doctrine or an artistic iconography, but rather the living and developing tradition of a society which carried a great cultural heritage without being overburdened or paralyzed by it.

Chapter Questions

I . What role did the crusades play in struggles for power between secular and religious authorities both within Europe and between Europe and competing civilizations?

2. How might the crusades have been perceived by the following twelfth-century figures: a pope, a Frankish aristocrat, a Muslim scholar, and a Byzantine prince?

3. In what ways might one argue that the crusades were of great historical significance? In what ways might one argue that the crusades were of little historical significance?