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Nov 13, 2019 · Six experts discuss whether the events of the crusades continue to affect lives and politics in the region and around the globe today
Oct 3, 2024 · Nearly a thousand years ago, European Christians embarked on what became known as the First Crusade: an unprecedented, massive military campaign to take Jerusalem from Muslims and claim the...
- Ramtin Arablouei
May 5, 2015 · What impact did the success of the First Crusade (1099) have on the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean? What was the effect of crusading on the people and institutions of western Europe? How did people record the Crusades and, finally, what is their legacy?
- Overview
- HISTORY Vault: The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross
They weren't all battles and bloodshed. There was also coexistence, political compromise, trade, scientific exchange—even love.
It’s often said that winners dictate history. Not so for the medieval holy wars called the Crusades.
Muslim forces ultimately expelled the European Christians who invaded the eastern Mediterranean repeatedly in the 12th and 13th centuries—and thwarted their effort to regain control of sacred Holy Land sites such as Jerusalem. Still, most histories of the Crusades offer a largely one-sided view, drawn originally from European medieval chronicles, then filtered through 18th and 19th-century Western scholars.
But how did Muslims at the time view the invasions? (Not always so contentiously, it turns out.) And what did they think of the European interlopers? (One common cliché: “unwashed barbarians.”) For a nuanced view of the medieval Muslim world, HISTORY talked with two prominent scholars: Paul M. Cobb, professor of Islamic History at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades, and Suleiman A. Mourad, a professor of religion at Smith College and author of The Mosaic of Islam.
The Crusades
HISTORY: Broadly speaking, how do Islamic perspectives on the Crusades differ from those of the Christian sources from Western Europe?
In 1095, Pope Urban II launched an unprecedented military campaign to seize back Jerusalem from Muslim hands. Over 60,000 Christian warriors would spend years journeying and fighting to reclaim the Holy City in the name of God.
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As the Crusades began, what were the physical boundaries of the Islamic world?
PC: The Islamic world—that is, those lands that recognized Muslim rulers and the authority of Islamic Law—was much bigger than the land of the Latin Christian west. It stretched from Spain and Portugal in the west to India in the east. And from central Asia in the north to Sudan and the horn of Africa in the south.
Portrait of Saladin, the first sultan of Egypt and Syria and the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. While Saladin led Muslim opposition to the western Crusaders, he also befriended some, like King Baldwin III of Jerusalem.
At that time, the core of the Islamic world was divided between a Shi’ite dynasty in Egypt and a Sunni dynasty in Syria and Iraq. But there was eventually a movement toward unification, right?
- Missy Sullivan
Aug 24, 2023 · From the crusades of the medieval period to racial violence today, mankind has sought ways to ‘sanctify’ harmful actions, explains a scholar of religion.
What has been the legacy of the Crusades in Europe and across the Muslim world in modern times? Why is the evolution of the Saladin legend throughout history so remarkable?
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Why did European countries use pseudo-Crusades?
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that had the objective of reconquering Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Muslim rule.
