The attle of Hattin, as it has come to be known, was a very decisive event in the history of the Crusades.
After destroying the Christian army, Saladin and his Muslim brothers quickly conquered almost every Frankish city and on October 2, 1187, the Holy City of Jerusalem fell which signaled the beginning of the Third Crusade, "a reaction to the fall of the Holy City of Jerusalem to the Muslim forces under Saladin" (Spielvogel, 277).

When Western Christians learned of the fall of Jerusalem into Muslim control, the entire European continent reacted with shock and utter dismay. Almost immediately, the Pope declared a brand-new Crusade, led by the kings of France and England, being Phillip II and Richard I; however, they did not reach the Holy Land soon enough, for by 1191, Saladin had managed to lay siege to the town of Acre, yet on July 12, the Crusaders and…...

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Bibliography

Brehier, Louis. "Crusades." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. IV. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 2006. Internet. Retrieved at http://www.newadvent.

A org/cathen/04543c.htm.

Crusades." Columbia Encyclopedia. Internet. 2005. Retrieved at  http://www.bartleby.com/65/cr/Crusades.html .

Dajani-Shakeel, Hadia. "War: A Muslim Perspective." ChristianityToday.com. Internet. 2001. Retrieved at  http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter

The Second Crusade, 1147-1149, was led by Louis 7th of France and the Holy Roman Emperor and proved to be a failure (Crusades 1 pp). The purpose of the Third Crusade, 1189-1192, was to reclaim Jerusalem, which had been lost in 1187 to Saladin, the Islamic army's greatest general (Crusades 1 pp). This effort was undermined by the personal rivalry between Philip II of France and Richard I of England (Crusades I pp). Initially, the Fourth Crusade was against Egypt, an Islamic domain, however, "it was diverted by the Venetian merchants (who owned the ships the Crusaders were traveling on) to attack Christian Constantinople, a commercial rival of theirs," permanently weakening the Byzantine Empire (Crusades I pp). During the Fifth Crusade, 1218-1221, the Crusaders captured Egypt, then lost it (Crusades I pp). Then, led by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, the Sixth Crusade, 1228-1229, recaptured Jerusalem through negotiations with…...

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Works Cited

The Crusades 3

http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc1/lectures/21crusades.html

The Crusades I.  http://www.loyno.edu/~seduffy/crusades.html 

Crusades 2

Crusades
The First Crusade took place from 1096 -- 1099. The First Crusade was a great surprise to both the Christians and the Muslims, the two opposing parties of the Crusades. The victory of the First Crusade went to the Christians. The Crusades were a series of nine wars waged during the Middle Ages between Christians and Muslims. The wars were waged between the 11th and 13th centuries specifically.

In 1071, the Muslim Turkish armies thoroughly defeated the Christine Byzantine military forces at the Battle of Manzikert. (Madden, 2002) The Christians were defending their territories in Asia Minor. Asia Minor had been swiftly invaded and conquered by outsiders and the Byzantine emperor at the time sought assistance from the west. A council was called and a decision was made:

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II called on the knights of western Christendom to right this wrong by taking up…...

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References:

Madden, Thomas F. (2002) The Crusades: Essential Readings. Blackwell, Boston.

McKay, J.P., Hill, B.D., Buckler, J., Ebrey, P.B., Beck, R.B, Crowston, C.H., & Wiesner-Hanks, M.E. (2009) A History of World Societies, Volume 1. Bedford/St. Martin's.

Crusades
An overview of the book, specifically its focus on the bloody aftermath of the Fourth Crusade to take Jerusalem, as chronicled and assembled by Regine Pernoud in pages 201-216 of his text

The text The Crusades by Regine Pernoud presents, in its overview of the events, two contemporary chronicled versions of the pivotal events that took place in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade to take Jerusalem by the Christian world. The first such a chronicle is by Geoffrey Villehardouin. The second is by one Robert of Clari. Villehardouin's chronicle is perhaps the most famous contemporary, observed account of this long and bloody Fourth Crusade. Ultimately, the crusade ended in such terrible pillage of the siege of Jerusalem that even the Pope himself condemned its aftermath. Villehardouin went as a Christian, but also as a historian. Robert of Clary is mentioned by Villehardouin as one of the participants involved in the…...

He successfully asked the Christian countrymen to volunteer as penance. (4) in a period of flux the faith of the church became a unifying force, where one was greatly needed and men of arms swore allegence to the church and followed many calls for piece within France and other nations, especially freedom from violence against the poor and the faithful. (5)
Riley-Smith also makes clear that the conditions of Islam at the time of at least the first crusade offered ripe pickings for crusaders, as it was in political turmoil with long standing warfare over the two main rival types of Islamic faith and their various leaders. (26) the transition of the crusade period to one of internal defenses rather than eastern defenses is also discussed at length and allows the reader to see the various stages and crusades inside the context of each successive movement, rather than as an…...

Kilij Arslan, having seen saw how easily his army had defeated the Frank invaders at minimal cost, grossly underestimated at his great cost the much more disciplined and formidable European crusading armies that followed. (McFall 5, "Ill-Fated Crusade....")
The Second ave

The 'second wave' of crusaders -- elite contingents of effective military force led by local leaders and knights from different parts of Europe took a little longer to organize and depart for the East in the summer of 1096. The major contingents of the second wave were led by Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, numerically the largest group; Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, and his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne; Duke Robert of Normandy, and Bohemond of Taranto. (Lloyd 36) hen these formidable groups of crusaders began to appear at the gate of Constantinople in early 1097, the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I, was taken by surprise. He had expected…...

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Works Cited

 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6753299 

Atiya, Aziz S. Crusade, Commerce, and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.

A www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000424265

Irwin, Robert. "Muslim Responses to the Crusades." History Today Apr. 1997: 43+.

Crusades
Motivating Factors

Of the several theories about motivating factors for the Crusades, the most interesting one is that the late eleventh-century people were in the West suffered from anxiety "verging on alarm" related to their salvation.[footnoteef:1] In fact, the prevailing theory along this line is that Pope Urban II successfully co-opted the collective apprehension of the faithful in his 1095 clarion call.[footnoteef:2] Urban convinced the people that they could win remission of all their sins by participating in the liberation of Jerusalem from the Muslims.[footnoteef:3] The basis for this perspective is that the first Crusade was a Euro-Centric initiative driven primarily by deeply seated Catholic identity, devotion, and anxiety.[footnoteef:4] In Western Europe, a degree of religious fervor focused on sacred places and sacred things, such as the ability of saints to mediate on behalf of believers through their relics.[footnoteef:5] There was an accompanying and powerful notion that holy things could be…...

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References

Althoff, Gerd; Fried, Johannes; and Geary, Patrick J. (2002). Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 305 -- 8.

Chazan, Robert. (1996). European Jewry and the First Crusade. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. p. 60. Retreived  http://books.google.com/books?id=sndVK_foqI4C&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Housley, Norman. (2007). The Crusades and Islam. Medieval Encounters, 13, 189-208. Retrieved http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/ncaputo/euh4930-08/articles/hously.pdf

Joinville, John. (1995). Vie de Saint Louis (ed. And trans. J. Monfrim) Paris: Garnier, 26-29, as cited in Housley, p. 198.

Instead, they next went to yzantium and inflicted a damaging blow on Constantinople -- our Christian brethren divided from us in schism, but united to us in the Faith. What a devastating blow this was to our goal of holy war. These Crusaders, rather than fighting the infidel, fought only with other Christians! Why should Christ bless such a fight?
The Latins proved themselves untrustworthy and the fact that these Crusaders never even made it to the Holy Land shows exactly how our faithful can use a holy purpose to set about achieving their own aim. I was forced to excommunicate these violators of sanctuaries and thieves of holy things. The securing of money and profits, political favors and patronage, were their sole aim. I wonder whether they ever had any intention of confronting Islam in the Holy Land. It breaks my heart to think that the answer might be…...

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Bibliography

Phillips, Jonathan. The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. NY: Viking,

2004. Print.

Crusades Impact on the Economy of England
Impact of Crusade on the economy of England

The crusade era was also termed as the era of commercial revolution in England, since it changed the economy from being a traditional economy to a market economy. During the crusade period economies were self sufficient and traditional, the Englishmen grew crops and manufactured goods in a manor system, however this is also the period when they discovered better ways such as the horse power, three field systems and the iron plow to produce food and be more efficient; all of this lead to a surplus in food production and the growth of economy.

This research is based on the wars fought by the Englishmen to recover and acquire land that would make England rich and powerful, more specifically it aims at exploring how this crusade impacted the country's economy. In a bid to address this question the…...

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Work Cited

Aberth, John. From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later middle Ages. London: Routledge. Press, 2001

Abulafia, David. The New Cambridge Medieval History: c. 1198-c. 1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Astill, Grenville and John Langdon Medieval Farming and Technology: the Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe. Leiden: BRILL Press, 2007

Barron, Caroline. London in the later middle Ages: Government and People 1200 -- 1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005

"[footnoteef:6] At the time of The Crusades the relations between the West and Byzantium is reported to have been characterized "as a clash of cultures." [footnoteef:7] The Greeks are reported to have seen themselves as "civilized superiors to the barbaric and violent westerners." [footnoteef:8] However, it is reported that the Western Christians did not have a monopoly on brutality, as "the Byzantines were capable of extraordinary unpleasantness. he death of Emperor Andronicus I Comnenus in 1185 bears witness to this. With one eye gouged out, his teeth pulled out and his right hand severed, he was paraded through the streets of Constantinople, pelted with excrement before being hung upside down, having his genitals hacked off and finally killed by sword thrusts into his mouth and between his buttocks."[footnoteef:9] The Fourth Crusade resulted in the crusaders contracting the Venetians to supply a fleet and in 1202 in the Fall of the…...

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References

Phillips, J. (2004) The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. History Today. Vol. 54, Issue 5. 2004. Retrieved from:  http://www.historytoday.com/jonathan-phillips/fourth-crusade-and-sack-constantinople 

The Crusades (2013) Judaism Today. Retrieved from:  http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/the_crusades/

.. Popular understanding of the crusades nowadays tends to think in terms of a great contest between faiths fuelled by religious fanaticism. This perception is bound up with modern sensibilities about religious discrimination, and... It is a perspective which, at least as far as the First Crusade is concerned, needs to be rejected.
Bull, 1999, p. 16/17)

The Crusades

The first crusade was initiated when Alexis I, the leader of the Byzantine Empire asked Pope Urban II for help in defending his territory against the Seljuk Turks. The religious aspect of this request was that Alexis claimed that the Eastern Christians were suffering as a result of Islamic rule. Another aspect was the danger that Christians pilgrims faced. In this regard it should be remembered that places such as the tomb of the apostle Saint James were sacred and important for pilgrims. Of course, Jerusalem and Palestine were favored pilgrimage destinations due to…...

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References

Bull, M. (1999). 2 Origins. In The Oxford History of the Crusades, Riley-Smith, J. (Ed.) (pp. 15-34). Oxford: Oxford University.

Corrick, James. (1995) The Late Middle Ages. San Diego: Lucent Books.

Crusades. New Advent. Retrieved July 26, 2006, at    http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001037063 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04543c.htm 

Haas, L. (2001). The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. The Historian, 63(4), 881.  http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=65567896

Smith goes on to claim that on in Italy is there any "indisputable influence" (471) of the Crusades. Trade increased dramatically. Charanis agrees with the notion that the Crusades left behind more damage than they did anything good. He does admit the "crusading, as a historical phenomenon, was a significant movement" (Charanis 1952, 131). Along with these critics, John Mansbridge concurs that the Crusades did not end positively. hile the goal was to save Christianity from Muslim influence, after the Crusades ended this was not the case.
In addition, the Crusades did not establish a way of life in Europe "that had not already begun or that would not have been brought about without these protracted and wasteful wars' (Mansbridge 1973, 109). Mansbridge adds that one social change was probably "hastened" (110) by the Crusades and this was the weakening feudal power of kings. hat many come to realize by…...

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Works Cited

Charanis, Peter. "Aims of the Medieval Crusades and How They Were Viewed by Byzantium."

Church History. 21. 2. (1952) JSTOR Resource Database. Information Retrieved March 5, 2009.

Craig, Albert, et al. The Heritage of the World. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. (2000)

Mansbridge, John Marjorie Rowling, Life in Medieval Times. New York: Perigree. (1973)

Crusades were seen by many in the West as a religious act, caring the banner of Christianity against the non-Christian Muslim world. There was also a strong political component. There were in fact several Crusades keeping this fighting going for two centuries. The Muslims were at first defeated and then managed to eject the Crusaders and start to rebuild the Muslim world. While some in the West might use the term "crusade" in a non-religious manner today, to Muslims the word continues to conjure images of an invasion by the West specifically as an expression of bigotry against Islam.
The Western powers fought the Crusades against the Muslims for several reasons, and the religious element was only one of those reasons. The Muslim world at the time was divided into factions, and Muslim Spain had started to go its own way in the eighth century. Much of the Muslim world…...

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Bibliography

Egger, Vernon O. A History of the Muslim World to 1405. Upper Saddle River NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004.

Vernon O. Egger, A History of the Muslim World to 1405 (Upper Saddle River NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004), xi.

In the 900s, engaging in pilgrimages to churches and other holy sites in Europe became popular, probably due to a Christian desire to rid themselves of their sins and afflictions through sacrifice. In the year 1000, Stephen I became the first Christian ruler of Hungary, which reduced the length of time a Christian pilgrim would spend in hostile lands. Over the next century thousands of European Christians would travel each year to Jerusalem, the center of their world. Christian philosophers of the time were also murmuring about the impending apocalypse at the turn of the millennium and how Jerusalem would figure prominently in that event.
In 1065 a group of German pilgrims were attacked by a marauding Turkish Army unit, but with the help of the walls of an abandoned town and the Egyptian Army they lived to tell their tale of a near-Apocalyptic event back home (ubenstein, 2011, p.…...

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References

Hansen, V. & Curtis, K. (2014). Voyages in World History: Volume 1 to 1600 (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.

Rubenstein, J. (2011). Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse. New York: Basic Books.

As Zimbardo explains in his Stanford Prison study, the behavior of the guards just got worse and worse over time because there was no supervision or accountability (2013). "Dehumanization also occurred because the prisoners often had no prison clothes available, or were forced to be naked as a humiliation tactic by the military police and higher ups. There were too many of them; in a few months the number soared from 400 to over a thousand. They didn't have regular showers, did not speak English, and they stank. Under these conditions it's easy for guards to come to think of the prisoners as animals, and dehumanization processes set in" (Zimbardo, 2013).
Thus, all of these factors worked together to create a barrel of evil and the Christians who were part of the Crusades were not immune to it. As Zimbardo explains, virtually any good person who is put into such…...

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References

BH. (2005, June 22). The Real History of the Crusades. Retrieved from Brutallyhonest.org:  http://www.brutallyhonest.org/brutally_honest/2005/06/the_real_histor.html 

Sindi, a. (n.d.). The Cannibalism and Bloodbaths of the Crusades. Retrieved from Radioislam.org: http://www.radioislam.org/sindi/croisades.htm

Zimbardo, P. (2013, March 7). Philip Zimbardo: Why Do Good People Do Evil Things? Retrieved from talesfromthelou.wordpress.com:  http://talesfromthelou.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/philip-zimbardo-why-do-good-people-do-evil-things/

King Arthur has been a steady feature in pop culture since the original stories of him were told hundreds of years ago.  In fact, he retains a mythical status because of the quasi-historical nature of the stories told about him, leading to many people wondering if King Arthur is actually a real person.  The consensus appears to be that he was not an actual person, but that there were real people whose stories contributed to the stories of King Arthur.  It is no surprise, then, that he continues to be a compelling character in books,....