The history of the Crusades began in 1095 involving the church forces called crusaders against Muslim armies almost throughout the continent of Europe. The Crusade was a military movement of the Roman Catholic church with the aim of reclaiming access to the Christian community of the holy land in Jerusalem which began in about 1905 by Pope Urban II. After the First Crusade, there was a two-year strife to determine who was entitled to occupy the holy land, with 6 great Crusades and several small Crusades. In 1291, this conflict ended with the collapse of a fortress belonging to the Christian forces at Acre and afterwards, the European Catholic forces no longer carried out an eastward strike. Some historians consider that the Crusades were a defensive war on the part of the Church when faced with the occupation by Islam, some regard it as another conflict occurring on the front line of Europe, and others see this as an aggressive and confident expansion perpetrated by Western Christianity.
The Beginning of the Crusades
The Crusade got its name from the cross logo worn by the troops of the church. There are a few different sources of names in Indonesian and English ie crusade. In English etymology, the crusade is taken from French croisade and Spanish cruzada both derived from the Latin cruciata or cruzata which means crucified. Although the Crusaders were called Crusaders after the war, they were never called by that name when the war was in progress. They are better known by the name fideles Sancti Petri which means followers of Saint Peter, or milites Christi which means the knight of Christ. The Crusades began when the Reformation and Counter-Reformation took place in the 16th century, and historians scrutinized the Crusades through their own religious eyes. Protestants saw the Crusade as a criminal manifestation of the papacy, while the Catholics saw this movement as a movement for the common good. In the Enlightenment, all historians seemed to agree that the whole Crusade and the Middle Ages were a barbaric behavior fueled by fanaticism. Researchers of the Enlightenment and modern historians of the West have begun to question the moral issues of these Crusaders, and in 1950 Steven Runciman wrote that the Crusades were nothing but a zero-tolerance activity in the name of God.
The fire that sparked the history of the Crusades began to burn in the year 636 when the Muslim forces succeeded in subduing the Byzantine army in the Yarmouk War and the power of the Palestinians was passed to the Umayyad dynasty, the Abbasid dynasty, and the Fatimaids. It was also during this period that the level of tolerance, trade, and political relations between Arab countries and European Christian countries experienced ups and downs and continued until 1072 when the Fatimids lost control of Palestine to the Seljuk Empire. One example of this incident is when the Fatimid caliph named al-Hakin bin Amrullah ordered the destruction of the Sepulcher Church and was unable to do anything when his successors allowed the Byzantine empire to rebuild it.
The Crusades
The first Crusade took place was the Reconquista which means retrieval. This war actually began in the 8th century and began to enter a turning point with the re-occupation of Toledo in 1805 and just gained "status" as a Crusade when Pope Calixtus II declared it in 1123. The second crusade was the People's Crusade that took place 1096 that began because Pope Urban was inspired by Peter the First lecture and eventually led 20,000 ordinary people to the Holy Land just after Easter that year.
The history of the Crusades continued with the First Crusade that took place from 1095 to 1099. The crusaders who took part in this war departed from France and Italy at different times of August and September with Hugh Vermandois leaving first carrying 4 parts of the army that went to Constantinople separate. These first Crusade leaders included: Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert Curthose, Hugh Vermandois, Baldwin of Bouillon, Tancred de Hauteville, and more. The crusaders tried to attack Turkey against Jewish and Muslim joint forces that they ultimately wiped out mercilessly. The crusaders then formed 4 crusader states namely Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and Jerusalem. When they were already victorious, Imad ad-Din Zengi, then governor of Mosul, succeeded in occupying Aleppo in 1128 and Edessa in 1144. The loss of the state crusader forced Pope Eugenius III to hold an advanced Crusade.
The second crusade took place from 1147 to 1149 and has been predicted by several preachers, one of whom is Bernard of Clairvaux. This war began without a significant win after the troops of Louis VII and Conrad III marched to Jerusalem in 1147 and launched a failed attack on Damascus. Even so, this war got good news with the victory of Northern European troops who managed to take back Lisbon. Before finally ceasing completely, there were several Crusades: First Swedish Crusade, Second, Third, Third Crusade, Crusade 1197, Fourth Crusade, Albigensian Crusade, Children's Crusade, Fifth Crusade, Sixth Crusade , The Crusades of the Seventh Cross, the Eighth Crusade, the Crusade of the Cross, the Aragonian Crusade, the Smyrniote Crusade, the Alexandrian and the Savoyards, and several other small Crusades that constituted a long list of Crusading histories