Map – Crusader Kingdoms (1098 – 1187 CE)

TIME PERIOD: 1098 – 1187 CE

“In a speech delivered at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II gave a grim description of the plight of the Christians of the East under the Seljuk yoke. He called on the nobility of Europe to wrest the Holy Land, the Holy City and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, cradle of Christianity and its rightful and eternal heritage, from beleaguerment by usurping infidels who sullied them by their very presence, if not by their deeds. Those who answered the call would be fighting a bellum sacrum, a holy war.”

Emmanuel Sivan, “Palestine During the Crusades (1099-1291),” A History of Israel and the Holy Land p. 240, The Continuum Publishing Group Inc., 2001

“For the first thirty years, the disunity of the Muslim world made things easy for the invaders, who advanced speedily down the coast of Syria into Palestine, and established a chain of Latin feudal principalities, based on Antioch [1098-1268], Edessa [1098-1146], Tripoli [1102-1146] and Jerusalem [1099-1187]. But even in this first period of success the Crusaders were limited in the main to the coastal plains and slopes, facing the Mediterranean and the Western world.”

In the interior, looking eastwards to the desert and Iraq, the reaction was preparing. The Seljuk princes who held Aleppo and Damascus were unable to accomplish very much. In 1127, Zangi, a Turkish officer in the Seljuk service, seized Mosul, and in the following years gradually built up a powerful Muslim state in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. His son, Nur al-Din, took Damascus in 1154, creating a sigle Muslim power in Syria and confronting the Crusaders for the first time with a really formidable adversary. The issue before the two sides was now the control of Egypt, where the Fatimid caliphate was tottering towards final collapse.”

Bernard Lewis, The Middle East p. 90-91 Scribner paperback, 1995

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