Containing the history of the crusades to the Holy Land between 1095 and 1291 in a single, accessible volume is a massive challenge. But it does offer enormous opportunities. The chance to trace the grand sweep of events, uncovering the visceral reality of human experience–through agony and exultation, horror and triumph; to chart the shifting fortunes and perceptions of Islam and Christendom. It also makes it possible to ask a series of crucial, interlocking and overarching questions about these epochal holy wars.

Issues linked to the origins and causes of the war for the Holy Land are of fundamental importance. How did two of the world’s great religions come to advocate violence in the name of God, convincing their followers that fighting for their faith would open the gates to Heaven or Paradise? And why did endless thousands of Christians and Muslims answer the call to crusade and jihad, knowing full well that they might face intense suffering and even death? It is also imperative to consider whether the First Crusade, launched at the end of the eleventh century, was an act of Christian aggression, and what perpetuated the cycle of religious violence in the Near East for the two hundred years that followed.

The outcomes and impact of these holy wars are equally significant. Was the crusading era a period of unqualified discord–the product of an inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’–or one that revealed a capacity for coexistence and constructive cross-cultural contact between Christendom and Islam? We must ask who, in the end, won the war for the Holy Land and why, but more pressing still is the question of how this age of conflict affected history, and why these ancient struggles still seem to cast a shadow over the world to this day.

MEDIEVAL EUROPE

In the year 1000, the county of Anjou (in west-central France) was ruled by Fulk Nerra (987–1040), a brutal and rapacious warlord. Fulk spent most of his fifty-three years in power locked in near-constant struggle: fighting on every front to retain control of his unruly county; scheming to preserve his independence from the feeble French monarchy; and preying upon his neighbours in search of land and plunder. He was a man accustomed to violence, both on and off the battlefield–capable of burning his wife at the stake for adultery and of orchestrating the ruthless murder of a royal courtier.

But for all the blood on his hands, Fulk was also a committed Christian–one who recognised that his brutish ways were, by the tenets of his faith, inherently sinful, and thus might lead to his eternal damnation. The count himself admitted in a letter that he had ‘caused a great deal of bloodshed in various battles’ and was therefore ‘terrified by the fear of Hell’. In the hope of purifying his soul, he made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, more than 2,000 miles away. On the last of these journeys, now an old man, Fulk was said to have been led naked to the Holy Sepulchre–the site of Jesus’ death and resurrection–with a leash around his neck, being beaten by his servant while he begged Christ for forgiveness.²

What drove Fulk Nerra to make such drastic gestures of repentance, and why was his story filled with such feral turmoil? Even people in the eleventh century were shocked by the count’s unbridled sadism and outlandish acts of devotion, so his career evidently was an extreme example of medieval life. But his experiences and mindset were reflective of the forces that shaped the Middle Ages and gave birth to the crusades. And it would be people like Fulk–including many of his own descendants–who stood in the front line of these holy wars.

Western Europe in the eleventh century

Many of those who lived in the same early eleventh-century world as Fulk Nerra feared that they were witnessing the last dark and desperate days of humanity. Apocalyptic dread reached its height in the early 1030s, when it was thought the millennial anniversary of Jesus’ death would presage the Last Judgement. One chronicler wrote of this time: ‘Those rules which governed the world were replaced by chaos. They knew then that the [End of Days] had arrived.’ This palpable anxiety alone helps to explain Fulk’s penitent mentality. But as far as the count and his contemporaries were concerned, it had not always been so. They harboured a collective memory of a more peaceful and prosperous past; a golden age when Christian emperors ruled in God’s name, bringing order to the world in accordance with His divine will. This rather hazily imagined ideal was by no means a perfect recollection of Europe’s history, but it did encapsulate some shards of truth.

Roman imperial rule had provided stability and affluence in the West until the late fourth century CE (Common Era). In the East the Roman Empire lived on until 1453, ruled from the great city of Constantinople, founded in 324 by Constantine the Great–the first emperor to convert to Christianity. Today, historians refer to this enduring realm as Byzantium. In the West between the fifth and the seventh centuries power devolved on to a bewildering array of ‘barbarian’ tribes, but around the year 500 one of these groups, the Franks, established control over north-eastern Gaul, giving rise to a kingdom known as Francia (from which the modern nation of France took its name).* By 800, a descendant of these Franks, Charlemagne (768–814), had united such a huge swathe of territory–encompassing much of modern France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries–that he could lay claim to the long-dormant title of emperor of the West. Charlemagne and his successors, the Carolingians, presided over a short-lived period of renewed security, but their empire crumbled under the weight of succession disputes and repeated invasions by Scandinavian Vikings and eastern European Magyars. From the 850s onwards, Europe was again ripped apart by political fragmentation, warfare and unrest. The embattled kings of Germany still sought to claim the imperial title and a royal house in France survived in a desperately emasculated state. By the eleventh century Constantine and Charlemagne had passed into legend, the embodiments of a distant era. In the course of medieval European history, many a Christian king sought to emulate and imitate their supposed achievements–among them some who would fight in the crusades.

By the time of Fulk Nerra, the West was gradually emerging from this post-Carolingian age of decline (despite the predictions of Armageddon), but in terms of political and military power, and social and economic organisation, most regions were still highly fragmented. Europe was not partitioned into nation states in the modern sense of the word. Instead, the likes of Germany, Spain, Italy and France were divided into many smaller polities, ruled over by warrior-lords, most of whom were bound by only loose ties of association and loyalty to a crown monarch. Like Fulk, these men bore titles such as dux and comes (duke and count) that harkened back to Roman and Carolingian times, and were drawn from the ranks of a nascent military aristocracy–the increasingly dominant class of well-equipped, semi-professional fighting men who came to be known as knights.

Eleventh-century Europe was not in a state of fully fledged anarchy, but the ravening violence of feud and vendetta was commonplace, and lawlessness endemic. Society was highly localised. Nature’s grip over the West had yet to be loosened, with vast swathes of land still blanketed in forest or left open and uncultivated, and most major road systems dated back to imperial Rome. It was common, in such a world, to go through life without travelling more than fifty miles from one’s birthplace–a fact that made Fulk Nerra’s repeated journeys to Jerusalem, and the later popularity of crusading in the distant Holy Land, all the more extraordinary. Mass communication also did not exist as it would be understood today, because most people were illiterate and printing had not yet been invented.