Crusade collection

“His thirst for blood was so unprecedented in recent times that those who are themselves thought cruel seem milder when slaughtering animals than he did when killing people. For he did not establish his victims' guilt of a crime and then dispatch them cleanly with the sword, which is a routine occurrence. Rather he butchered them and inflicted ghastly tortures. When he forced his prisoners, whoever they were, to pay ransoms, he had them strung up by their testicles--sometimes he did this with his own hands--and often the weight was too much to bear, so that their bodies ruptured and the viscera spilled out. Others were suspended by their thumbs or private parts, and a stone was attached to their shoulders. He would pace underneath them and, when he could not extort from them what was not in fact theirs to give, he used to cudgel their bodies over and over again until they promised what he wanted or died from the punishment. No one knows the number of those who perished in his gaols from starvation, disease, and physical abuse as they languished in his chains.â€
This vivid description was written in 1115 by Guibert of Nogent, the abbot of a small monastery near Laon in northeastern France. It concerned a prominent local lord named

As it neared the end of the first two centuries of its existence, the crusading movement was in a condition of crisis. Recent successes in Spain, Prussia, and Italy had been staggering, but they could not compensate for the fact that the defence of the Holy Land stood on the edge of calamity in the face of the Mamluk advance. Given the nature of crusading, the crisis was bound to be one of faith as well as military strategy: as the Constitutiones pro zelo fidei, the crusade decrees of the Second Lyons Council, expressed it in 1274, 'to the greater shame of the Creator, and the injury and pain of all who confess the Christian faith, they [i.e. the Mamluks] taunt and insult the Christians with many reproaches--"where is the God of the Christians?"' (cf. Ps. 115: 2). The crisis did not end in 1291 because few contemporaries accepted the loss of Palestine as final: indeed, arguably it was not until after the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337 that hopes for recovery were marginalized to an optimistic few. There are good reasons for beginning a survey of the later crusades by focusing on the fertile yeast of ideas, and the consolidation of methods of organization and finance, which the Second Lyons Council either initiated or furthered, and which spanned the decades on either side of 1300. These changes were not alone responsible for the survival of crusading for many generations to come; but they aptly displayed the qualities of engagement, resilience, and adaptability which underpinned that survival.

He began preaching in Berry in December 1095. He moved eastward into Lorraine, arriving in Cologne a little before Easter, on 12 April 1096. Other preachers were active, too, and a number of these converged on the city in April and May. Peter wanted to wait, to allow time for the Frankish nobility and others to gather as well, but some of his lieutenants grew impatient and left ahead of him.

The crusading movement had begun in the melodramatic fashion, which was to be typical of it thereafter. Coming himself from the class he wished to arouse, the pope must have known how to play on the emotions of arms bearers. Now about 60 years old, he had embarked on a yearlong journey through southern and central France. The summoning of an expedition to the aid of the Byzantine empire had probably been in his mind for several years and it had been aired at a council held at Piace