History UsefulNotes / TheCrusades

* PerfectlyArrangedMarriage: Baudouin II de Jérusalem and Morphia of Melitene. Their marriage was arranged to solidify an alliance, but it turned out happily and Baudouin refused to divorce Morphia even though she'd failed to give him a son.

* EveryoneIsRelated: That or they were vassals of some kind.
* TheEvilPrince: Alexios III Angelos. Exiled by the AxCrazy Andronikos I, he spent several years wandering around the Crusader and Muslim states in the Middle East before being recalled to Constantinople by his brother, Isaakios II, who had deposed Andronikos and become emperor. Isaakios adored Alexios, heaped him with honors, and refused to hear a bad word spoken about him. Alexios repaid his brother by ambushing him, putting his eyes out, imprisoning him, and commandeering his throne.
* {{Fanon}}:
** The idea that Renaud de Châtillon ever raped Saladin's sister. Renaud was without a doubt a sadistic bastard, but no contemporary sources, even the Muslim ones which could be expected to cast him in the worst possible light, ever accuse him of raping Saladin's sister. It is known that Renaud raided some of Saladin's caravans and held the merchants hostage, and that in response Saladin sent troops to watch over his sister as she returned from her pilgrimage to Mecca. The two events seem to have become conflated with rape added on top.
** The story that Eleanor of Aquitaine and her ladies dressed as Amazons was probably the result of Victorian historians misreading the account of Niketas Choniates. Chionates' accounts only mentions rumors of "masculine" German and French women among the armies of the Second Crusade being led by one who dressed in gold.

** The story that Eleanor of Aquitaine dressed as an Amazon was invented several hundred years after the fact.

** Imre and András II of Hungary. Innocent III wanted them to go on Crusade or crush the Bosnians, but instead they spent their time plotting against each other, so Innocent III acknowledged Kaloyan as the king of Bulgaria, attempted to give him a shiny crown, and told him to invade Hungary. They only reconciled when Imre was on his deathbed.

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: After being overthrown, Andronikos I was tortured to death for several days by the citizens of Constantinople.

* CainAndAbel: The Komnenoi Imperial Family basically slaughtered itself into near-extinction, but a direct example of this trope were Alexios III and Isaakios II.
** Averted by their arch-nemeses: [[SiblingsInCrime Ivan Asen I, Teodor-Kalopetar, and Kaloyan of Bulgaria]].

** Eustache III, comte de Boulogne; Godefroy de Bouillon; and Baudouin de Boulogne, who went on the First Crusade and claimed Jerusalem and Edessa, were fearless warriors and unshakably loyal to each other, the latter being rare at the time. Their late father, Eustache II, had fought alongside [[HouseOfNormandy William the Conqueror]] at the Battle of Hastings and was credited with having personally killed Harold Godwinson, so maybe it was InTheBlood.

**

** Averted by their arch-nemeses: [[SiblingsInCrime Ivan Asen I, Teodor-Kalopetar, and Kaloyan of Bulgaria]]. So long as the three brothers were together, they were almost unstoppable. The Byzantines tried multiple times to get the brothers to turn on one another, to no avail. Apparently, a trio of part-Bulgar, part-Kuman barbarian warlords could understand filial devotion, even if the Byzantine Emperor himself could not.

** Subverted by their arch-nemeses: Ivan Asen I, Teodor-Kalopetar, and Kaloyan of Bulgaria. So long as the three brothers were together, they were almost unstoppable. The Byzantines tried multiple times to get the brothers to turn on one another, to no avail. Apparently, a trio of part-Bulgar, part-Kuman barbarian warlords could understand filial devotion, even if the Byzantine Emperor himself could not.

** The Aleramici brothers, sons of Guglielmo V of Montferrat. The eldest, Guglielmo Longsword, married Sybille of Jerusalem and proved to be a capable military leader before dying of malaria. The youngest, Raineri, married Theodora Komnēnē and co-led a faction with her against Marie of Antioch. The second elder, Corrado, married Theodora Angelina (sister of Isaakios II Angelos) and [[CurbstompBattle curbstomped]] a rebel army and beheaded its leader before heading to the Crusader states [[BigDamnHero just in time]] to save Tyre from being besieged by Saladin]].

** TheLancer: Bohémond de Hauteville, leader of the Normans and constant rival to Raymond

** Marie of Antioch served as regent for her son, Alexios II.
** Chroniclers often portrayed Maria Komnēnē, the second wife of Amaury of Jerusalem, this way.

* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: Kaloyan the Greek-slayer
* NauseaFuel: The accounts of cannibalism during the Siege of Ma'arra. The massacres of prisoners on both sides during siege of Acre. The constant disease outbreaks (specifically dysentery).

* OldManMarryingAChild: Andronikos I Komnenos married Agnes of France when he was around 65 and she was 12. Even though it wasn't uncommon for girls to marry men old enough to be their fathers, this vast age gap caused much {{Squick}} from observers.

* EyeScream: Whenever a Byzantine emperor was overthrown, he had his eyes gouged out.

** Marie de Courtenay, a daughter of the would-be Latin Emperor Pierre de Courtenay and his wife, Yolande de Flandre (sister of the deceased Latin Emperors Baldwin I and Henry). Sent as a peace offering to her family's enemy, Theodoros Laskaris, emperor of Nikaia, Marie convinced him to make peace with the Latin Empire at a time when it was at its most vulnerable. When her husband died in 1221, Marie went to join her brother, Robert, now the emperor in Constantinople. Robert died in 1228, leaving Marie as "Empress Regent" for their eleven-year-old brother, Baudouin II. Marie, who was herself still only about twenty-five years old, ruled ably for eight months until her own death.

* EnemyMine: Most of the Christians (French, Greeks, German, English...) and Muslims (Syrians, Turks, Egyptians...) did not like each other, but had to band together to fight the other side. Played best by the Hashashin, Muslim fanatics that even allied at some point with the Crusaders to fight off Saladin.
** In 1109, two powerful Muslim lords, Chavli of Mosul and Radwan of Aleppo, quarreled. At the same time, Tancred of the Galilee and Baudouin de Rethel (future king of Jerusalem) were at each other's throats. So Tancred and Radwan teamed up to take on their co-religionists, Chavli and Baldwin (who had assistance from Joscelin de Courtenay). The Tancred/Radwan team won the day.

** SixthRanger: Godefroy de Bouillon, would become the Hero after Jerusalem was captured

** Also the MagnificentBastard Enrico Dandolo, doge of Venice, who was 90 and completely blind when he pointed the Fourth Crusade like a missile at the Byzantine Empire.

** Holy Roman Emperor Friederich II, a reluctant Crusader king who took Jerusalem without a fight, despite being excommunicated twice. He put the crown on Jerusalem on his own head because the Catholic authorities refused to participate in the coronation.

** Isaakios Komnenos of Cyprus (a foe of Richard the Lion-Hearted). While the Byzantine Empire was in chaos thanks to Andronikos I usurping the throne, Issakios had himself crowned king of Cyprus and then went on a spree of RapeAndPillageAndBurn.

* TheChessmaster: Bohemond's primary contribution to the First Crusade, and how he wrung as much power out of his conquests as possible while still technically obeying his oath.

** Byzantium--aka ''[[InsistentTerminology Basileia ton Romaion]]'', the Empire of the Romans. Oddly enough, it was actually experiencing a minor renaissance under the Komnenoi and was actually getting stronger between the First and Third Crusades, but the Fourth Crusade put the kibosh on that.

* WhatCouldHaveBeen: During the Third Crusade, there was a plan for Saladin's brother, Al-Adil to marry Richard's sister, Joan of England, and install them as the new King and Queen of Jerusalem.

* '''The Third Crusade:''' Also known as the Crusade of the Three Kings. After the Second Crusade had ended, Turkish emir Nur ad-Din, Zengi's son, took control of Damascus, unified Syria, and subjected Egypt to his rule. When Nur ad-Din died in 1174, his general in Egypt, the Kurd Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known as Saladin, seized power and became his successor. Now commanding a unified Muslim front, Saladin defeated the King of Jerusalem's army in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, conquered Acre, and headed towards Jerusalem itself; the city, not being able to stand against Saladin's army, surrendered after being put under siege. The fall of Jerusalem after it had been nearly a century in Christian hands caused widespread alarm across Europe, and a new Crusade was called to retake her. King [[UsefulNotes/RichardTheLionHeart Richard I "The Lion-Hearted"]] of England and King Philippe II "Augustus" of France suspended their war with each other and joined the crusade. Frederick I "Barbarossa" of the HolyRomanEmpire also answered the call, but his crusade was cut short when he drowned in the River Saleph in Turkey on his way to Outremer; a tiny fraction of his army straggled on under the command of Leopold, Archduke of Austria. Philippe and Richard arrived in Acre in 1190 and 1191 respectively (Richard having paused along the way to be married and to conquer UsefulNotes/{{Cyprus}}) and recaptured the city. However, after a falling-out in the Crusader leadership (Richard had jilted Philippe's sister, threw Leopold's banner off the walls of Acre, and was supposedly complicit in the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashshashin assassination]] of the King of Jerusalem), Philippe and Leopold left the Holy Land, while Richard carried on the campaign, defeating Saladin again at Arsuf and Jaffa. However, it became apparent to Richard that he would not be able to hold Jerusalem with his remaining forces; moreover, Philippe, back in Europe, was already plotting against him with Richard's brother, John. Richard therefore reached an agreement with Saladin which allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims into the city, and afterwards pulled back his army and set forth to England. As ill-luck would have it, he was forced to make his way home through the domains of Leopold of Austria -- where he was recognized, seized, and held ransom in the castle of Dürrenstein by Leopold and his overlord, Barbarossa's son, the [[HolyRomanEmpire Emperor]] Henry VI.

* '''The Sixth Crusade:''' In 1228 [[HolyRomanEmpire the Holy Roman Emperor]] Frederick II (called ''Stupor Mundi'', "Wonder of the World") landed in Palestine; through a spectacularly unexpected coup of diplomacy, he reached a peace agreement with the ruler of Egypt and seized the rule of Christian Jerusalem for himself. A section of the kingdom, including Nazareth and Bethlehem as well as the Christian parts of the Holy City itself, was delivered to the crusaders for a period of ten years ―, until some Muslims who were not content with their leaders' decision to allow the crusaders back into Jerusalem put the city under siege and expelled the remaining Christian forces in 1244. This is the last time the crusaders would maintain any actual control of Jerusalem itself.

*** First Crusade: Elvira de Castilla (wife of Raymond de Toulouse) and Godehilde de Toeni (wife of Bauduoin de Boulogne).

** In the Third Crusade, [[HolyRomanEmpire Emperor]] Frederick Barbarossa, already known as a {{Badass}} for his leadership in many wars in Italy, marched an army of many thousands from Germany to southern Turkey, curb-stomped an enormous Turkish army at Iconium, sacked the Seljuk capital, headed towards the Holy Land -- [[SuperDrowningSkills and drowned in a one-foot deep river]] (his armor was too heavy for him to get up and he may also have had a heart attack simultaneously).

** Andronikos I of the Byzantine Empire. He started out as a standard power-hungry [[TheCasanova Ladies' Man]] and CreepyUncle, but after gaining power, he quickly turned into a paranoid tyrant who started ordering the gruesome executions of everyone who looked at him funny.
** Isaakios Komnenos of Cyprus (a foe of Richard the Lion-Hearted). Mistakenly let out of prison by Andronikos (mentioned above), he then headed straight for Cyprus and started a campaign of RapeAndPillageAndBurn.

** At the time of the First Crusade, Raymond de Toulouse was probably in his mid-fifties.
** During the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa was in his sixties.

* DecoyProtagonist: Frederick Barbarossa, leader of the Third Crusade. See {{Anticlimax}} above.

** Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade. Frederick Barbarossa was Christendom's White Knight, leader of a PowerTrio of European warrior-kings. Richard was actually the least well-known of the three at the time. Frederick's death in a [[SuperDrowningSkills freak accident]] before the Third Crusade could really get off the ground meant someone had to step in and take a leadership role...and in the process, become legend.

** Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, a reluctant Crusader king who took Jerusalem without a fight, despite being excommunicated twice. He put the crown on Jerusalem on his own head because the Catholic authorities refused to participate in the coronation.

** TheAce: Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor. Unfortunately he didn't get very far before [[EpicFail drowning while trying to cross a river]].
** TheBigGuy: Richard the Lionheart, King of England. Obliged [[YouAreInCommandNow to take charge of the Crusade]] with Frederick's death, and became a hero of Medieval legend.

* SuperDrowningSkills: Kilij Arslan I shortly after the First Crusade and Frederick Barbarossa during the Third both died of drowning after battles. To be fair, they were both wearing armor, which is not terribly conducive to swimming, but even so...

* ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresII'' has two campaigns including missions inspired by the Third Crusade: one focused on Saladin, one focused on Frederick I Barbarossa.

** Andronikos I of the Byzantine Empire
** Isaakios Komnenos of Cyprus (a foe of Richard the Lion-Hearted)

* GodSaveUsFromTheQueen: Chroniclers often portrayed Maria Komnēnē, the second wife of Amaury of Jerusalem, this way.

** Shajar Al-Durr, during the Seventh Crusade. A former slave girl turned wife of As-Salih Ayyub, the Fatimid Sultan. Her husband died suddenly not long after the arrival of the crusaders, but she and the Mamluks were nonetheless able to stop the Crusaders from achieving their goals.

* RavenHairIvorySkin: Isabelle Ire de Jérusalem.

* WhatAnIdiot: In an era of amazing leadership and brilliant strategy, there were numerous occasions when leaders suffered from holding the IdiotBall. Examples include sacking an allied city for no apparent reason, getting lost on the way to the war, and marching a force to attack Saladin's army in the middle of a desert. In heavy armor. In the middle of the day. With ''no water''. The dehydrated and exhausted army was summarily defeated, resulting in the capture of Renauld de Chatillon.

The ''immediate'' cause was the petition from the [[ByzantineEmpire Byzantine Roman]] Emperor Alexios I to [[UsefulNotes/ThePope Pope Urban II]] for help against the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests Muslim conquests]] in the Byzantine Empire. Less directly, Alexios' request was a somewhat delayed response to the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and to the ongoing campaigns of Norman lords based in southern Italy against Constantinople's holdings in the Balkans. Manzikert was symptomatic of the Byzantines' major problem to the East--the arrival and rise of the Turks, who had upset the balance of power that had existed between the Empire and the Arabs for over 200 years. The Normans for their part were to the Byzantines emblematic of Catholic Christendom's small-mindedness and stupidity--''attacking'' the only thing keeping the ascendant Turks from rampaging all over a completely unprepared Europe. The Emperor (or someone in his court) conceived an idea: Why not turn these bloodthirsty, land-hungry Normans (and their equally uncouth Catholic friends) against the Turks? Hence the letter to the Pope, who in turn considered all sorts of angles to convince the Normans--whom he also disliked, since the Normans had kidnapped his predecessor and were generally wreaking havoc in Italy as well--to fight the Turks. Eventually, the Pope got wind[[note]]According to tradition, from a fanatical fellow named Peter the Hermit.[[/note]] of a Turkish provocation to all Christendom--the Turks had just (re)taken Jerusalem from the Fatimids, and being a more itchily pious lot than the Fatimids, they tended to treat Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem poorly (as opposed to the Fatimids, who were more like "as long as you keep the gold flowing, we don't care what you do").[[note]]The Christians also remembered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but that had happened about a hundred years before the First Crusade and was the order of the Fatimid "[[RoyallyScrewedUp Mad Caliph]]" Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who had this whole thing about religious minorities--and majorities, since he, an Ismaili Shiite, persecuted his empire's Sunni majority as well--and particularly hated Christians (possibly because his mother was Christian). Al-Hakim's sane son granted Christians permission to rebuild the church, which the Seljuk Turks respected when they took Jerusalem. Didn't matter though: the Westerners couldn't be bothered to distinguish between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Turk, or "Mad Caliph" and sane Sultan until years after they got to the region.[[/note]] This gave the Pope an idea: sell this war as a kind of ''armed pilgrimage'', with the holy aim of "bringing the Cross to Jerusalem." After all, "Bring the Cross to Jerusalem" is a ''much'' better slogan than "Save the Greek Empire".

* ''Pagan's Crusade'' by Catherine Jinks is a young adult novel in which the ironically-named Pagan Kidrouk becomes a squire to one of TheKnightsHospitallers in the Third Crusade. (In the sequels, Sir Roland returns to his native France, taking Pagan with him, and they eventually get tangled up in the Albigensian crusade as well.)

* '''The Second Crusade:''' Initially the Muslim leaders did not do anything about the Crusaders, as they had internal conflicts to deal with, and a period of relative calm followed in the Holy Lands between the Muslim and Christian population. Eventually, however, Muslim forces under Zengi, the Turkish Atabeg ("Viscount", more or less) of Mosul (in what is now northern UsefulNotes/{{Iraq}}) finally organized and retook the city of Edessa in 1144; a second crusade was launched to defend the new kingdoms. They had great success in the Mediterranean but failed to win any major battles in Palestine. King Louis VII of France and the [[HolyRomanEmpire Holy Roman Emperor Konrad II]] returned to their countries (although not before Louis led a completely futile and [[IdiotBall idiotic]] attack on Damascus--one of the few Arab ''allies'' of the Crusaders). This crusade was supposedly enlivened by the spectacle of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wife of the King of France, conducting with her ladies-in-waiting a sort of pageant of "women-warriors" (as well as being accused of carrying on an ''affaire'' with her uncle(!), Raymond of Antioch).

* OutsideContextVillain: By around 1250, the Muslim forces had soundly defeated and driven back the Christian forces. The shaky alliance of European monarchs had fallen apart, and there was little chance of them getting their acts together to mount another Crusade any time soon. There would be no further significant threat from the west. Unfortunately, during the two bloody centuries before, nobody had really been paying attention to what was happening further ''east''. ''Cue the Mongol Horde''. Of course, historians point out that the Crusaders had drained the region significantly of its manpower and left it vulnerable to an attack from the East. The Crusades essentially marked the end of the Muslim Golden Age, culminating in Hugelu Khan's sack of Baghdad and the destruction of the House of Wisdom.

* RedHeadedHero: Foulques d'Anjou, Frederick Barbarossa, and Richard the Lion-hearted.

* Throughout the ''Requiem'' series of books by Robyn Young, which follows the fall of the [[TheKnightsTemplar Templars]], we see the fall of Acre and the attempts of the Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and Pope Clement V to get another crusade going. They never do.

* ChurchMilitant: Most prominently, [[UsefulNotes/ThePope Bl. Urban II]]. He was the one who turned a small distress letter into a predecessor for a World War.
** Several, which may double as TropeNamers: TheKnightsHospitallers, TheKnightsTemplar, and TheTeutonicKnights.

* HeyItsThatGuy: In spades:
** Foulques d'Anjou, the king of Jerusalem, was the grandfather of UsefulNotes/HenryTheSecond.

** TagalongKid: Robert de Normandie, disgraced at home in England, despite being the oldest son of the famed William the Conqueror, his contribution to the crusade was rather minor and consisted of only himself and a small guard

The Crusades were a series of military campaigns that took place between the [[TheHighMiddleAges 11th and 13th centuries]] against the Muslims, or Saracens, to reconquer the Holy Land (other conflicts, such as the campaigns against the Moors in Spain, the Baltic pagans, or even the Albigensian [[TheHeretic heretics]], were occasionally styled "crusades", but in the popular mind, it is the Palestinian campaigns that dominate). The ''immediate'' cause was the petition from the [[ByzantineEmpire Byzantine Roman]] Emperor Alexios I to [[UsefulNotes/ThePope Pope Urban II]] for help against the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests Muslim conquests]] in the Byzantine Empire. Less directly, Alexios' request was a somewhat delayed response to the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and to the ongoing campaigns of Norman lords based in southern Italy against Constantinople's holdings in the Balkans. Manzikert was symptomatic of the Byzantines' major problem to the East--the arrival and rise of the Turks, who had upset the balance of power that had existed between the Empire and the Arabs for over 200 years. The Normans for their part were to the Byzantines emblematic of Catholic Christendom's small-mindedness and stupidity--''attacking'' the only thing keeping the ascendant Turks from rampaging all over a completely unprepared Europe. The Emperor (or someone in his court) conceived an idea: Why not turn these bloodthirsty, land-hungry Normans (and their equally uncouth Catholic friends) against the Turks? Hence the letter to the Pope, who in turn considered all sorts of angles to convince the Normans--whom he also disliked, since the Normans had kidnapped his predecessor and were generally wreaking havoc in Italy as well--to fight the Turks. Eventually, the Pope got wind[[note]]According to tradition, from a fanatical fellow named Peter the Hermit.[[/note]] of a Turkish provocation to all Christendom--the Turks had just (re)taken Jerusalem from the Fatimids, and being a more itchily pious lot than the Fatimids, they tended to treat Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem poorly (as opposed to the Fatimids, who were more like "as long as you keep the gold flowing, we don't care what you do").[[note]]The Christians also remembered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but that had happened about a hundred years before the First Crusade and was the order of the Fatimid "[[RoyallyScrewedUp Mad Caliph]]" Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who had this whole thing about religious minorities--and majorities, since he, an Ismaili Shiite, persecuted his empire's Sunni majority as well--and particularly hated Christians (possibly because his mother was Christian). Al-Hakim's sane son granted Christians permission to rebuild the church, which the Seljuk Turks respected when they took Jerusalem. Didn't matter though: the Westerners couldn't be bothered to distinguish between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Turk, or "Mad Caliph" and sane Sultan until years after they got to the region.[[/note]] This gave the Pope an idea: sell this war as a kind of ''armed pilgrimage'', with the holy aim of "bringing the Cross to Jerusalem." After all, "Bring the Cross to Jerusalem" is a ''much'' better slogan than "Save the Greek Empire".