Saladin & the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
The crusader “movement,” as it is sometimes called, stretched over a period of two hundred years, unleashing a frenzy of hate and violence unprecedented before the advent of the technological age and the scourge of Hitler.
The madness was initiated in the name of religion by a Pope of the Christian Church, Urban II, in 1095 as a measure to redirect the energies of warring European barons from their bloody, local disputes into a “noble” quest to reclaim the Holy Land from the “infidel.” Once unleashed, the passion could not be controlled. The violence began with the massacre of Jews, proceeded to the wholesale slaughter of Muslims in their native land, sapped the wealth of Europe, and ended with an almost unimaginable death toll on all sides. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great propagandist of the Second Crusade, would lament that he left only one man in Europe to comfort every seven widows.
There were five major crusades (and a handful of minor eruptions bred of the same instinct). Only the First Crusade was “successful,” in the sense that it managed to capture Jerusalem and in the process make the streets of the Old City run ankle deep with Muslim and Jewish blood. All the others were failures. Three of the five got close to the object of the enterprise, the Holy City. Only because of the disunity of the Arab world did the First Crusade succeed in capturing Jerusalem.
Precisely because of the unification of Egypt and Syria into a united Arab empire, the Third Crusade failed to capture it. In the Fifth Crusade, Frederick II of Germany negotiated his way into the Holy City, only to leave Palestine weeks later, pelted with garbage by his own people.
The Third Crusade, spanning the years 1187-92, is the most interesting of them all. It was the largest military endeavor of the Middle Ages and brought the fury of the entire crusading movement to its zenith. Perhaps most important, it brought two of the most remarkable and fascinating figures of the last millennium into conflict: Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia; and Richard I, King of England, known as the Lionheart.
