The Crusades were a series of military expeditions, launched in Europe and generally sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, that sought to regain control of Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Land from the followers of Islam. The Crusades were conducted primarily from the 11th through the 13th century, although minor Crusades took place for another 200 years. Eight major official Crusades occurred between 1095 and 1270. The Crusades met with only limited and temporal success, eventually leaving a legacy of bitterness and mistrust between two of the world’s great religions.
Crusades
After a century and a half of efforts—with mixed success—by Western Europe to seize control of the Holy Land, the Seventh Crusade of 1250 led by Louis IX of France was the last best chance to change the political and military situation in the Eastern world before the Reformation. Read more
Crusades
It was the spring of 1097 and the Turks guarding the walls of Nicaea were in a confident mood. Read more
Crusades
Their name has been synonymous with murder for almost a thousand years, but few people know the full truth about the enigmatic organization known as the Assassins. Read more
Crusades
By the middle of the 12th century, much of western Europe had settled into a tenuous, often interrupted peace, and many modern nation-states had begun to emerge. Read more
Crusades
The Battle of Dorylaeum, fought on July 1, 1097, marked the first full-scale military clash between the Christian armies of the West and the Muslim armies of the East. Read more
Crusades
At dawn on May 18, 1565, one of the largest armadas ever assembled appeared off the Mediterranean island of Malta. Read more
Crusades
The hot sun beat down on the mud-brick and wooden buildings, the lush orchards, and the patchwork of pastoral fields around the oval-shaped, walled city of Damascus in southern Syria on the morning of July 24, 1148. Read more
Crusades
Thick black smoke rose skyward from burning villages on the southern frontier of the Hungarian Kingdom in the spring of 1395. Read more
Crusades
The Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) encompassed three civil wars that were fought between two rival branches, York and Lancaster, of the House of Plantagenet, for control of the English throne. Read more
Crusades
Dawn broke clear and hot over Constantinople on July 17, 1203.
All manner of war machines were clustered around the Latin crusaders’ fortified camp on a hill where the Monastery of Saints Cosmas and Damian was located. Read more
Crusades
In the late 14th century, a new and seemingly irresistible force was emerging in the East, the likes of which Europe had not seen for centuries. Read more
Crusades
In November 1177, Saladin launched his first significant military campaign against a crusader state. With 26,000 men, siege engines, a huge baggage train, and his own personal force of elite Mamluk bodyguards, Saladin marched his Ayyubid army across the Sinai Desert from Egypt into southern Palestine. Read more
Crusades
The advance of long ranks of scimitar-wielding Nubian and robed Bedouin archers on foot signaled a dramatic change in Ayyubid Muslim tactics against the Frankish army marching south along the Palestinian coast from Acre towards Jaffa. Read more
Crusades
In 1194 English King Richard I returned to England from his long absence on the Third Crusade and set about recovering the castles his younger brother John had taken in his absence. Read more
Crusades
During the mid-14th century, a new theater of the crusades erupted, this time on the doorstep of Christian Europe. Read more
Crusades
The mass of heavily armored crusader knights swept across the frozen surface of Lake Peipus toward the Novgorodian troops that waited anxiously on the eastern shore. Read more
Crusades
The garrison soldiers of Beziers gazed down from the ramparts at the Crusader army setting up camp outside their high-walled city on July 21, 1209. Read more
Crusades
The Latin Crusaders manning the battlements were armed with spears, axes, and crossbows. They shared with each other a desire to fight and die for the Cross. Read more
Crusades
The christian crusaders that marched south into Ottoman Rumelia in 1444 bet heavily that the combined power of Poland, Hungary, and Wallachia would prove sufficient to break the iron grip the Ottoman Porte had on the southern Balkans. Read more
Crusades
The Hussites, all but forgotten today, were a 15th-century sect of religious reformers, forerunners of the Protestant Reformation that was to come a century later. Read more
