Reading path · 8 stops
The Crusades
Two centuries of holy war for the eastern Mediterranean, and the states it built and broke.
In 1095 a pope's sermon set armed pilgrims marching east, and for two hundred years Latin Christendom fought for Jerusalem and the coast of the Levant. The crusades planted fragile kingdoms in the East, bled Byzantium, raised up Saladin and the sultans who answered the call to jihad, and bound Europe to the Mediterranean world it had half-forgotten. This path follows the whole arc, from Clermont to the fall of the crusader states.
Suits the Strategist · the Chronicler
1 · Encyclopedia · Person · 1095Pope Urban IIThe pope whose sermon at Clermont in 1095 launched the First Crusade.
2 · Encyclopedia · Event · captured Jerusalem 1099First CrusadeAgainst every expectation, the first expedition took Jerusalem in 1099 and made the crusading idea seem blessed.
3 · Profile · 1099 CE – 1291 CEKingdom of JerusalemThe greatest of the crusader states: how a conquered coast was ruled, defended and finally lost.
4 · Encyclopedia · Person · d. 1193SaladinThe Kurdish sultan who united Egypt and Syria and turned the tide of the holy war.
5 · Encyclopedia · Event · 1187Battle of HattinOne July day in 1187 destroyed the kingdom's army and gave Jerusalem back to Islam.
6 · Encyclopedia · WorkKrak des ChevaliersThe greatest of the crusader castles, and what fortress architecture reveals about holding hostile land.
7 · Encyclopedia · Event · 1204Fourth CrusadeThe crusade that never reached Jerusalem: it sacked Christian Constantinople instead, and Byzantium never fully recovered.
8 · Encyclopedia · StateCrusader statesThe settlements as a whole - Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, Jerusalem - and why they could not last.