I’ve always believed I am quite poorly informed about the Crusades and have read that Muslim resentment continues to this day about the many invasions to “cast the infidels out of the Holy Land.” I don’t think my understanding of the crusades improved much after reading this book by Malcom Billings. There is significant detail of people, alliances, paths taken to the various battle sites, battles, and outcomes. What the Crusades accomplished for the Catholic Church still seems to me to be a mystery. The Church certainly sent several Crusades of tens of thousands of loyal worshipers off to what was death or slavery for many or most. Crusaders often had to give up everything to fund their preparations to arm and equip themselves and their entourage for a brutally hazardous trip for the honor of dying on the journey, fighting to the death or being enslaved in a faraway location. The book was prepared as a companion to a BBC radio series, and perhaps the radio shows in combination with the book would have left me feeling a bit more comfortable.

I’m not going to try to sort out the overwhelming amount of information about the countless Crusades, but there were some interesting factoids, and I did learn a few things. For example, the Pope Urban II “preached” the first crusade in 1096, and a key figure was a very strange sounding man called Peter the Hermit. The beginning of that crusade was consistent with what happened on many of the crusades. There were 800 Jews slaughtered by the crusaders as they were setting out for the Holy Land.

There are references to towns at various locations along the path to the Holy Land being sacked and inhabitants raped and murdered during many of the crusades. It seems the Crusaders often contained bands of murderous thieves. On the other side there were the Knights Templar who were generally quite admirable and the Knights of Saint John, or Hospitalers, who dedicated themselves to caring for the sick and injured.

I challenge anyone to keep up with the numerous popes “preaching” Crusades and threatening to cast anyone failing to answer the call from the church. There was one remarkable time when there were three claiming to be pope, and they were calling for Crusades to support their claim to the position.

Many of the battles were over some location where there was supposed to be a religious relic to be recovered. It sounded as if there were enough “splinters of the true cross” that someone could have assembled several crosses. Two gruesome relics were the decapitated heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. There were also numerous references to pieces of bones of various saints. The battles were often sieges against massive castles, and the book has photographs of the remnants of many of those.

It sounded as if the greatest challenge to crusaders was to survive the trip to the battle. The journey was long and the paths often took them over mountain ranges with brutal weather and little food to be scavenged. Many of the crusaders and their horses and other livestock died on the way. Then they faced well rested and equally dedicated foes intent on killing them. The battles were vicious affairs. There was one description that so many arrows were launched at the crusaders that it wasn’t uncommon for someone to survive but “look like a porcupine” with all the arrows that had struck them. There were some acts of kindness, but mostly victors slaughtered the fallen indiscriminately. The only survivors of a defeated city, regardless of whether the defeated were Christian or Muslim, would be sold into slavery. The value of slaves plummeted because of the Crusades. One man was sold for the “price of a shoe” in a time when there was such a glut of slaves.

I mentioned some interesting factoids. Richard the Lionhearted defeated the followers of Isaac Ducas Comnenus, who called himself “Emperor of Cyprus” and had made an alliance with Saladin (I include these details to demonstrate the level of detail in the book). The “Emperor” was brought before Richard and said his only request was, “…that he might not be placed in fetters and manacles of iron.” The King “…ordered fetters and manacles of silver and gold be made for him.” Richard died of infection after he was shot by a crossbow bolt during a siege of a castle in Aquitaine (just as portrayed in the Russell Crowe movie “Robin Hood”).

A good example of the senseless brutality was a battle where Christians fought alongside Muslims against a Crusader assault on the town of Beziers. The Crusaders won and 7000 people from the town packed themselves into the church. The church was ordered to be burned, and when told that there were Christians in the church the “…papal legate then made a remark that has resounded through the centuries. ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’.”

Perhaps the most interesting factoid was the siege of Kerak by Saladin against “…Reynald of Chatillion who had been Prince of Antioch…” Reynald was hosting a wedding party when Saladin’s forces arrived, and the festivities continued while the artillery barrage pounded the walls. The bridegroom’s mother sent some dishes from the wedding feast to Saladin’s tent. “He chivalrously responded by enquiring where the newlyweds were sleeping, and gave orders to his artillery to ease up on that part of the citadel!”

I’ve been interested in the insanity of the “Children’s Crusade,” and there were only a couple of pages with little information about the Crusade. A shepherd named Stephen preached a Crusade in 1212 for children based on what he said was a vision of Christ. There is a picture of the Crusade, which was said to be consisted of thousands of children aged 6 to teenagers, riding hobby horses on their way to the Holy Land. The only survivors I noted were those who were loaded into ships that sailed to Egypt where they were immediately captured on arrival and sold into slavery.

Popes did not learn from the insanity of the Children’s Crusade. There were Crusades being “preached” by Popes as late as 1798.