LITMIR.BIZ

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the knights were a specialized minority who fought from horseback. Wrapped head to toe in light chain mail, they fought with a lance, sword, axe, or mace, bobbing and ducking behind a large shield that bore the brunt of the enemy’s blows. Each knight was at the head of a team of noncombatant support personnel—squires, pages, grooms—and supplemented by light infantry and archers.

      The Seljuk Turks were recent arrivals from the steppe who fought mostly as mounted archers. The older nations of the Mideast, such as the Fatimids of Egypt, fought much the same way as the Europeans. Neither style of fighting had a clear advantage. European knights were more heavily armored but slower than the Turks. European crossbows had a longer range but a slower rate of fire than the short bows of the Turks. On open ground, the Turks had the advantage, but at close quarters and in siegecraft the Franks did.

      Some of the more dedicated crusaders formed into orders of fighting monks to escort and protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Headquartered in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount and the Amalfitan Hospital, these Templars and Hospitallers kept monastic vows of poverty and chastity, and then worked off all that pent-up energy by smiting the heathens. Because the Templars controlled movement to the Holy Land, they invented the letter of credit, whereby pilgrims would leave cash at an office of the order in Europe and carry a receipt to be redeemed at any other office of the order worldwide. As the only Europeans who understood the dark art of moving money around, the Templars acquired a sinister reputation.

      The Crusades into the Holy Land coincided with a couple of other efforts to expand Christendom: the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain and the Teutonic conquest of the pagan Baltic Sea. All three efforts exchanged personnel and learned from one another. The Second Crusaders even stopped in Spain on the way to Palestine and helped the local Christians by capturing Lisbon from the Moors.

       Second Crusade

      Almost a half century passed, and the crusaders were settled comfortably into four crusader states: Edessa, Tripoli, Jerusalem, and Antioch. The Holy Land was firmly in control of the children of the First Crusaders, but then the new Saracen ruler, Zengi, consolidated an empire in Syria and reduced the crusader states to three by capturing Edessa, the inmost outpost of Christendom. Europe organized a second crusade to take it back (1147), and this time kings jumped on the bandwagon—Philip Augustus of France, Conrad III of Germany. However, the royal dilettantes of the Second Crusade were not as dangerous as the hungry, landless adventurers of the First Crusade, so they didn’t make a dent in the surrounding Saracens.

       Third Crusade

      After Zengi’s death, the empire was passed around to several young Zengids until Saladin, a Kurdish general acting as regent, decided to rule in his own name instead. At first, Saladin maintained peaceful relations with the Christians on the Levantine coast, but then a crusader lord, Reginald of Chatillon, ambushed a Muslim caravan and seized Saladin’s sister. Saladin avenged the offense with a new jihad that climaxed in a massive Saracen victory at the Battle of Hattin. This opened the way for Saladin to capture Jerusalem along with many Templar prisoners, whom he put to death.

      Losing Jerusalem convinced Europe to get serious about crusading again. In 1190, Richard the Lionheart, the brand new king of England, set out from Marseilles with King Philip II of France. The Holy Roman Empire in central Europe was supposed to supply the backbone of the expedition, but shortly after crossing into Asia Minor, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa slipped in a river he was fording and was pinned underwater by the weight of his armor, drowning.

      History likes the Third Crusade. This was the classy crusade, where wise and virtuous kings hacked each other apart with honor and style. There was none of that wading through rivers of blood after capturing every city. In the Third Crusade, all of the rivers of blood came from people who jolly well knew what they were getting into. After an especially good fight, a victor might simply salute his stunned and helpless opponent instead of sliding a dagger into the eye slot of his helmet to finish him off.

      OK. It probably wasn’t nearly as sporting as later stories imagine, but both sides in the Third Crusade received good press. Saladin is one of the most beloved warlords in Muslim history, and many otherwise somber historians describe him in unusually affectionate language; “when he smiled, he could light up a room” is an actual quote from a recent history.¹⁰ Dante imagined Saladin in the minimum-security wing of Hell, where decent heathens are merely quarantined rather than boiled in lava. Richard the Lionheart, meanwhile, has gone down as one of the most beloved kings in English history (with one of history’s greatest nicknames) based entirely on his crusading. He barely even visited his own kingdom, which he impoverished to support his holy war. Philip II stuck around only long enough to earn his points with the pope, and then he hurried home to France.

      In reality, Saladin’s sense of honor was flexible. After Hattin, two leading crusaders were brought before him in chains. He fed the first one, explaining that the rules of hospitality now forbade him from killing a prisoner who had been given food and drink by his captor. The other prisoner—Reginald of Chatillon, whom Saladin was planning to kill for breaking the truce—lunged for a cup of wine and downed it before anyone could stop him. Reginald thought, Aha! I’m safe! But Saladin killed him anyway because no one likes a smart-ass.¹¹

      Richard, too, was not completely chivalrous. After taking Acre from the Muslims, Richard gave Saladin a week to come to terms. When the deadline passed, Richard dragged his 2,700 Saracen prisoners of war outside the city gates and beheaded them, along with 300 of their family members. Freed from this encumbrance, the full crusader army rode off to battle.

      The two titans fought only one pitched battle. After a frustrating campaign of maneuver, the armies finally met at Arsuf. Richard held his anxious knights back under a shower of Arab arrows until the right moment presented itself. Then, the Lionheart released a cavalry charge that broke the enemy ranks and slaughtered them. The victory, however, went nowhere because Richard had to hurry home to save his wobbly throne from his brother and save his fiefs in France from his onetime comrade, Philip II. Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands.

       Fourth Crusade

      By now, Christendom had realized that Palestine could not stand alone; its larger neighbors, Egypt and Syria, conquered it too easily. No empire in recorded history has ever been anchored on Palestine, so the next wave of crusaders (mobilized by Pope Innocent III) decided to take Egypt by sea and build on that.

      When this new batch of crusaders arrived in Venice, it turned out that they didn’t have enough money to pay for their trip to the Orient. Being businessmen above all else, the Venetians said, No problem, the crusaders could earn the money by taking the Adriatic port of Zara away from Hungary. The city was duly assaulted and turned over to the Venetians.

      The pope immediately excommunicated the entire crusader force for this assault on fellow Christians, and several leaders backed out of the enterprise, but the bulk of the crusaders pushed on. Faced with crusader stubbornness, the pope backed down and took the crusaders back into the church.

      Because every wave of crusaders had, like locusts, left a trail of desolation as it made its way through the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantines were reluctant to let the crusaders pass again. The crusaders themselves had mixed feelings about the Byzantines. Sure, these Greeks were Christians, but they were also schismatics who practiced their own alien version of the religion in defiance of the pope. Rather than negotiate rights of passage this time, the crusaders found an exiled Byzantine prince who claimed the throne, and in 1204 they seized Constantinople on his behalf. When he turned stingy about paying them for their support, however, the Franks installed one of their own as king. Thus, the last city left unlooted from the Ancient Era was thoroughly ransacked, and many precious books, pieces of art, and archives from the Greco-Roman zenith disappeared—burned, trampled, melted, smashed, or stolen.

      As payment for ferrying the crusaders into battle against Byzantium, Venice took four big bronze horses to decorate Saint Mark’s Square, plus a scattering of easily defensible islands to control the trade of the eastern Mediterranean.

      While western Europeans occupied the strategic core of the Byzantine Empire, three backwater provinces remained under Greek rule. Over the

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