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The crusades started in 1095 CE, with the speech made by Pope Urban II. In that speech, Pope Urban II referred to the Christians as the noble race of the Franks. He encouraged Christians to join the armies to get Jerusalem from the Muslims. Most of the crusaders that left Europe to fight the Muslims were actually aiming to form kingdoms and acquire the wealth found in those lands. That is why the many groups of crusaders were often quarreling amongst themselves over rule of places when they conquered cities. The crusaders were against everyone who did not follow their religion and did not look like them. This included Muslims, Jews, and even dark-skinned Christians, all of whom were attacked and murdered by them. They even sacked the city of Constantinople, which was ruled by the Eastern Church (the Byzantine Church). Immediate cause The immediate cause of the First Crusade was Alexius I's appeal to Pope Urban II for mercenaries to help him resist Muslim advances into territory of the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine Empire had been defeated, and this defeat led to the loss of all but the coastlands of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Although the East-West Schism was already beginning to brew between the Catholic Western church and the Greek Orthodox Eastern church, Alexius I hoped for a positive response. However, the response was much larger, and less helpful, than Alexius I desired, as the Pope called for a large invasion force to not merely defend the Byzantine Empire, but also to retake Jerusalem.

When the First Crusade was preached in 1095, the Christian princes of northern Iberia had been fighting their way out of the mountains of Galicia and Asturias, the Basque Country and Navarre, with increasing success, for about a hundred years. The fall of Moorish Toledo to the Kingdom of León in 1085 was a major victory, but the turning points of the Reconquista still lay in the future. The disunity of the Muslim emirs was an essential factor, and the Christians, whose wives remained safely behind, were hard to beat: they knew nothing except fighting, they had no gardens or libraries to defend, and they worked their way forward through alien territory populated by infidels, where the Christian fighters felt they could afford to wreak havoc. All these factors were soon to be replayed in the fighting grounds of the East. Spanish historians have traditionally seen the Reconquista as the molding force in the Castilian character, with its sense that the highest good was to die fighting for the Christian cause of one's country.

While the Reconquista was the most prominent example of Christian reaction against Muslim conquests, it is not the only such example. The Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard had conquered the "toe of Italy," Calabria, in 1057 and was holding what had traditionally been Byzantine territory against the Muslims of Sicily. The maritime states of Pisa, Genoa and Catalonia were all actively fighting Islamic strongholds in Majorca and Sardinia, freeing the coasts of Italy and Catalonia from Muslim raids. Much earlier, of course, the Christian homelands of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and so on had been conquered by Muslim armies. This long history of losing territories to a religious enemy created a powerful motive to respond to Byzantine emperor Alexius I's call for holy war to defend Christendom, and to recapture the lost lands, starting at the most important one of all, Jerusalem itself.

The papacy of Pope Gregory VII had struggled mightily with reservations about the doctrinal validity of a holy war and the shedding of blood for the Lord and had, painfully and with difficulty, resolved the question in favour of justified violence. More importantly to the Pope, the Christians who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land were being persecuted. Actions against Arians and other heretics offered historical precedents in a society where violence against unbelievers, and indeed against other Christians, was acceptable and common. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Gregory's intellectual model, had justified the use of force in the service of Christ in The City of God, and a Christian "just war" might enhance the wider standing of an aggressively ambitious leader of Europe, as Gregory saw himself. The northerners would be cemented to Rome and their troublesome knights could see the only kind of action that suited them. Previous attempts by the church to stem such violence, such as the concept of the "Peace of God", were not as successful as hoped. To the south of Rome, Normans were showing how such energies might be unleashed against both Arabs (in Sicily) and Byzantines (on the mainland). A Latin hegemony in the Levant would provide leverage in resolving the Papacy's claims of supremacy over the Patriarch of Constantinople, which had resulted in the Great Schism of 1054, a rift that might yet be resolved through the force of Frankish arms.

In the Byzantine homelands, the Eastern Emperor's weakness was revealed by the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which reduced the Empire's Asian territory to a region in western Anatolia and around Constantinople. A sure sign of Byzantine desperation was the appeal of Alexius I Comnenus to his enemy, the Pope, for aid. But Gregory was occupied with the Investiture Controversy and could not call on the German emperor, so a crusade never took shape.

For Gregory's more moderate successor, Pope Urban II, a crusade would serve to reunite Christendom, bolster the Papacy, and perhaps bring the East under his control. The disaffected Germans and the Normans were not to be counted on, but the heart and backbone of a crusade could be found in Urban's own homeland among the northern French.

//Battles of the Crusades// introduces 20 key battles from this period of religiously-inspired conflict in Europe and the Middle East. Beginning with the battle of Dorylaeum (1097), where Anglo-French heavy cavalry decisively defeated a much larger Turkish army, and finishing with the battle of Varna (1444), where Sultan Murad II’s Ottoman army destroyed a combined Hungarian and Polish force, examples from every era and campaign are featured.

The First Crusade is represented by battles at Antioch (1098), Jerusalem (1099), and Harran (1104), while battles between the Crusader states and their Muslim neighbours include Sarmada (1119), Montgisard (1177), and Saladin’s destruction of the Crusader army at Hattin (1187). Colorful accounts of lesser known Crusades, such as the Christian recapture of Lisbon (1147), the massacre of the Albigensian heretics at Beziers (1209), and the destruction of Louis IX’s expensively assembled crusader army at Mansura (1250), are also included. Battles from the //Reconquista// of Spain (Las Navas, 1212) and the expansion of the Teutonic Knights (Lake Peipus, 1242, and Grunwald, 1410) make this a rounded account of 400 years of religious conflict.

Off To The Crusades
In 1183 the younger Henry died leaving Richard as the heir to the English throne. Another family dispute occurred when Richard received the lands of his brother. Henry was expected to give his Aquitaine to his brother John. Richard refused to give up the homeland of his mother. While this dispute over family land raged on, Richard learned of the tragic loss at Hattin, where the Crusaders had lost Jerusalem to the Saracen leader [|Saladin]. Richard soon took up the cross of the crusades, much against his father's approval. In 1189, upon the death of Henry II, Richard was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey London. One of his first actions was to free his mother from prison. His second was to begin to raise funds for his crusade known to history as the Third Crusade. He imposed a tax on the English people called a Saladin tithe as a means of aiding his war effort.

A King Imprisoned
After the Third Crusade, Richard began his homeward journey to England. Put ashore by bad weather he found himself in Austria home of Leopold, whom Richard had angered by actions during the crusade. Leopold captured King Richard and imprisoned him in his castle. Eager for a piece of the action the Emperor of Germany offered Leopold 75,000 marks for Richard taking him into custody in Germany. Rumors ran rampant throughout England over the missing king. There is a legend that the troubadour Blondel heard his king singing in a castle and responded with a song that the both of them were sure to know. Whether true or not the fact remains that two Abbots were soon dispatched to journey for him through the network of the church. Even Eleanor, Richard's mother wrote to the Pope for assistance in the matter. Richard was found and soon a ransom was set for his return to England. The sum was 150,000 marks an amount equal to three years of annual income and weighing at three tons in silver.

Return Of The King
Richard returned to England receiving a hero's welcome. He forgave his brother John, by saying he was manipulated by cunning people and vowed to punish them and not his brother. Unfortunately for the King he returned to a land in financial troubles. The cost of the Crusade and his large ransom had tapped out the finances of the land. This monetary trouble was to plague him for his remaining five-year reign. He created a new great seal as a means to raise funds and made void all documents signed with the old.

Death Of A King
For such a brave and noble man, King Richard's death came about in a rather strange way. In Chalus, Aquitaine, a peasant plowing his fields came upon a treasure. This treasure consisted of some gold statues and coins. The feudal lord claimed the treasure from his vassal, Richard in turn claimed the treasure from the lord, who refused. This prompted Richard to siege the village. During the siege Richard was riding close to the castle without the protection of full armor. He spotted an archer with bow in hand on the wall aiming a shot at him. It is said Richard paused to applaud the Bowman. He was struck in the shoulder with the arrow and refused treatment for his wound. Infection set in and Richard the Lionheart died on April the 6th 1199. He was buried in the Fontvraud Abbey in Anjou France