The time of the Crusades was difficult. In this article we will look at the horrors of the Crusades; we will tell you how they went and what could await you if you were a crusader. Read about facts about the Crusades that you didn't know about!
THE IDEA OF CRUSHWAYS
In 1095, Pope Urban II convened the Council of Clermont in France to consolidate his power and solve the problem of Muslim pressure on the neighboring Byzantine Empire. This council gave birth to the idea of the Crusades.
Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, Urban II called for a holy war against the Muslims. He wanted to conquer the Holy Land, of which Jerusalem was the pearl.
Pope Urban II instigated the first of the eight crusades. They took place between 1096 and 1291 and changed the geopolitical landscape of the world for centuries.
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Imagine if you were in that time right now. Do you think you would cheat death?
Below are 12 secrets of the Crusades and a description of the living conditions of the Crusaders that would threaten your life.
12. HUNGER AND CANNIBALISM
Let's say you signed up for the First Crusade in 1096. The Pope promised that if you die in battle, then all your sins will be forgiven and you will go to heaven.
If you are a knight, this is very convenient, because in your free time from holy wars, you also fought in ordinary wars, which were considered “sinful”.
If you are a peasant, then a crusade is also a good option. Indeed, at that time famine ravaged France, taking the lives of thousands of people.
The first crusaders were virtually undisciplined hordes of French and German peasants. And Turkish troops easily destroyed them.
During the second crusade, the crusaders also fought hunger. The annals state that "35,000 people joined the 4500 knights fleeing hunger and poverty." Many “marched barefoot” and unarmed.
It would take you a long time to get to Jerusalem, and if you didn't die on the road, you would be living on a spicy diet of plant roots and the fried flesh of your enemies.
Numerous eyewitness accounts of the siege of Maarra describe the Crusaders as "aggressive cannibals" who ate their enemies.
11. DEHYDRATION
Summer in the Holy Land is usually hot. The crusaders suffered greatly from the debilitating heat.
According to Crusades: War for the Holy Land, dehydration killed “as many as 500” crusaders in the summer of 1097. Besides, Muslims perfectly used the heat to help themselves.
Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 1187, when Sultan Saladin defeated King Ai at the Battle of Hattin. Saladin lured Guy's army away from the water source. When the crusaders began to dry in the sun, Saladin's troops set fire to the grass, and at the hottest moment of the day they rained arrows on the Europeans. The dehydrated crusaders could not effectively resist.
Further Saladin captured Jerusalem.
10. PRECIPITATION IN WINTER
The stifling heat and desert climate turned the Holy Land into hell for the Crusaders in the summer. However, the winter was no better.
Thomas Hartwell Horn wrote that “the crusaders in the late 12th century faced the Palestinian winter in all its horrors”. Men and women died from cold, incessant rains, strong winds and deadly hail.
Because of the mountainous terrain, streams of water washed away people and animals.
When, during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart's army traveled to Ascalon (located southwest of Jerusalem), they faced heavy rainfall and flooding.
Their onslaught destroyed food rations, the crusaders drowned in the moist earth. The chronicler Jeffrey Vinsauf wrote that "even the bravest people shed tears like rain."
9. MEDICINE
If you managed not to die before the first fight and survive in it, then the doctor who will be tasked with patching your wounds may well kill you.
After all, the Crusades took place in the Middle Ages, when medicine was not developed at all. It was a time when infant mortality was very high, mothers were constantly dying during childbirth, and doctors treated dementia by carving a cross on their foreheads.
The chronicles mention a case when a doctor in a crusader camp amputated a soldier's leg due to a "small infected wound." As a result, the patient died.
It was also difficult for the doctors. There is a known case when the crusader nobleman and almost the king of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, forbade doctors to make potions after for fear of poisoning. All doctors who tried to prepare medicines were executed.
8. SINGER
The word scurvy often conjures up images of sea pirates. But vitamin C deficiency can also affect land dwellers.
You might think it's easy to fix with oranges and limes. But remember what medieval people ate during the Crusades.
So how destructive has scurvy become? She destroyed one-sixth of the French army during the Fifth Crusade. The description of this campaign paints a terrifying picture.
In 1218, the Crusaders who besieged the Egyptian port of Damietta were "seized with severe pain in their feet and ankles, their gums were swollen, their teeth became loose and useless, their thighs and lower leg bones became black and putrid." The death that followed was more like mercy than punishment.
Scurvy raged during the Seventh Crusade, destroying the troops of Louis IX. Dentists at the time cut off “large chunks of flesh” from men's swollen gums.
As for Louis IX himself (who was later recognized as a saint), despite the version that he died of dysentery, it is quite possible that it was scurvy that killed him.
7. DYSENTERY
The history of the Crusades is rich in all kinds of diseases. If you are a crusader, your bladder may be crying bitter tears, or your backside may be causing a fear-related leak.
But this is not so bad. There is a good chance that any leakage of anything from your body during the Crusades could be the result of an intestinal illness.
Priests, beggars, knights, merchants, and criminals were the buffet table for parasites and disease.
Dysentery was one of the main diseases. This disease has claimed the lives of countless soldiers. The crusaders most often contracted dysentery through drinking water.
If you hate death without pants in your own liquid mud, don't worry, there were many other diseases. For example, tuberculosis or various types of fever, which, according to the chroniclers, "filled the rivers with the corpses of Christian and Muslim soldiers."
6. EARTHQUAKES
The first crusade ended in 40 years. But before the second began, as described in Thomas Keightley's The Crusaders, Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch, broke the truce and laid siege to the city of Aleppo.
Lack of water and supplies eventually forced him to give up the effort. But where Raymond failed, in October 1138 a violent earthquake left Aleppo in ruins. The earthquake razed the city to the ground, killing 230,000 people in total.
This brings us to a threat you never thought of: earthquakes.
The 1138 earthquake was not the only one. There is evidence of 13 or 14 earthquakes during the 200-year existence of the Frankish states, which were located along the faults of the Dead Sea.
5. CRUEL LAWS
In medieval times, crimes were severely punished. Counterfeiters were boiled in oil, adulterers were stoned, and crooks could be grilled, stabbed, or beheaded.
The defense of the accused did not exist in principle, and the use of severe torture to force confessions was encouraged. Unfortunately, the crusades have exacerbated this madness.
Christians began to associate homosexuality with Islam and mercilessly burned all suspects at the stake.
The Crusades also fostered hostility towards Jews, Gentiles, lepers, and the poor. In 1275, King Edward I of England instituted the Jewish Rite, which plunged Jews into poverty.
4. CHURCH PERSECUTION
Depending on what stage of the Crusades you lived in, deviation from the teachings of the Catholic Church could lead to your death.
In the 12th century, the goals that the crusaders pursued expanded significantly. Rather than focusing exclusively on the Holy Land, they also targeted lost souls in Europe.
Christians who did not adhere to the Roman Catholic Church were viewed as "cancer danger." They were even considered more dangerous than distant Muslims, because they harmed the Body of Christ from within.
In France, tensions over religious divisions spilled over into the Albigensian Crusade, in which the Catholic Church declared war on the Cathars.
The Cathars had unorthodox beliefs, claiming that Jesus was just an angel and his death was illusory. The Crusaders exterminated them by the thousands, burning them at huge bonfires.
The Albigensian Crusade marked the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition.
3. Persecution of Jews
If you were a Jew during the Crusades, many Christian warriors would consider you as an enemy as Muslims.
Christians viewed the Jews as "murderers of Christ," and some viewed the Crusades as an opportunity for brutal revenge on them. This is especially true of the First and Third Crusades.
In 1096, a group of peasants, led by the monk Peter Hermit, committed what some call the "first Holocaust." Eight hundred Jews were killed in Worms, more than 1000 in Mainz. The Jewish communities of Cologne and Speyer were also attacked.
2. UNGLOROUS DEATH
If you still want to live in the days of the crusades, maybe you can become a legendary king or a first-class mercenary?
The era of the Crusades is the time of the great kings (Richard I, Baldwin), the Sultan Saladin, the Templars and Assassins.
King Baldwin suffered from leprosy and died before the age of 25.
Richard the Lionheart, during the Third Crusade, was more dangerous than Saladin himself. He died in battle with his former crusader colleague, King Philip II. During the siege of one of the fortresses, Richard caught a crossbow bolt in his hand and died of infection.
Saladin, the venerable sultan, brilliant military leader and conqueror of Jerusalem, probably died of typhoid fever.
The Assassins changed history during the Crusades by killing Conrad of Montferrat before he became King of Jerusalem. But they were destroyed by the Mongols in the 1250s.
What about the Templars? They were intelligent and ferocious fighters, but in 1291 they lost the favor of King Philip IV, who owed them money. Philip massacred the Templars and burned many of them at the stake for fictional crimes.
1. Senseless slaughter
War is always hell, even when the Pope himself is in favor of it.
Raymond d'Auguilleres described the bloodthirsty bloodshed that ensued when Jerusalem fell into the hands of Christian troops in 1099: “Some of our people (and it was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies … others tortured them longer by throwing them into flames. Heaps of heads, hands and feet littered the streets, which were ankle-deep in blood. The Jews who defended the city along with their Muslim neighbors were locked up in the synagogue and set on fire. There was no mercy for women, children and elderly people”.
If you were in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, there was a high probability that you would not be brutally killed by Muslims, but by the crusaders themselves, whom you once called allies.
According to the Encyclopedia of Ancient History, deep mistrust and religious tensions between the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires led the Crusaders to sack Constantinople. The bloodshed was so strong that the "bloody rivers" allegedly "flowed through the streets of the city for several days."
With such holy wars, you don't need real hell to be punished for your sins. You would already be living in hell - that was the world of the Crusades.