The Crusades was a fantastic book that read like a great narrative. I will say that the Crusades get less interesting as they go on, with the first few being the most dramatic. But the cast of characters is probably most interesting in the Third Crusade, with Richard the Lionheart and Saladin facing off. I obviously picked this book up because of my love for the Crusader Kings videogame series and I was very satisfied with it. I feel like I learned a ton.
The First Crusade was preceded by Pope Gregory VII stoking the flames of holy war over twenty years before Pope Urban declared the Crusade in Clermont, France, in 1095. Gregory first tried to launch a holy war in 1074 against the Muslims of Asia Minor, who were driving back the Byzantines and conquering the peninsula. But Gregory's plans amounted to nothing in spite of (or maybe because of) his plans to lead the campaign in person. For the rest of his reign, Gregory VII clarified his idea, and, while in conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (the Investiture Controversy), Gregory hinted that death in battle against the German emperor would mean remission of sins. Asbridge identifies Gregory's radicalism as an important predecessor to the Crusades, because it normalized the idea of holy war so that by the time Pope Urban II called for a more carefully constructed Crusade, the idea was not so new.
It happened that Urban called the Crusade at a particularly fortunate time for the Catholic forces. Since a bloody coup against the Umayyads in 750, the Abbasids ruled the Sunni Muslim world as caliphs, and they moved their capital east, from Damascus to the newly created city of Baghdad. But the Sunni world shrank in 969 when the Fatimids, Shi'ites, took control of Egypt, opening up conflict over the Levant. Then, to fracture the Muslim world further, the Seljuq Turks invaded Iran and Iraq from the Central Asian steppes in the 1040s, with the warlord Tughrul Beg becoming sultan of Baghdad in 1055 and replacing Arabs with Turks in major government roles. But the powerful Seljuq Empire collapsed with the death of Malik Shah in 1092 and divided into smaller territories. Meanwhile, the Fatimid ruler and his vizier died in 1094 and 1095, meaning that the new ruler was just getting into power when Urban II declared the Crusade. However, Islam retained the historical memory of jihad; although it had declined over the centuries and came to be used mainly against other Muslims deemed heretics, the concept was merely dormant, not extinct.
Interestingly, there is no direct trigger for the Christian Crusade for Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for hundreds of years, and Christians and Muslims had been fighting minor conflicts for centuries that had never escalated into a full-scale holy war. So when the first Christians arrived to take back the holy land, the Muslims who lived in the area failed to understand the significance of the incursion and the era that was coming. The closest thing to a trigger for the First Crusade came in March 1095, when Urban was presiding over a council in Piacenza. He received ambassadors from Byzantium with an appeal from Emperor Alexius I Comnenus to aid him in fighting the Turks that had invaded Asia Minor (it would eventually be called Turkey in case you were wondering how that went). Alexius didn't realize he was about to be overrun with volunteers.
The Crusaders came in disorganized waves, not a well-ordered host. Crusaders thought it was a get-out-of-sin-free card that would completely guarantee their place in heaven, although the theologians at the Vatican certainly didn't think that was the case. The first group to arrive was led by a rabble-rousing preacher named Peter the Hermit, who gathered 15,000 volunteers across Europe, massacring Jews along the way. They were annihilated almost immediately after crossing into Muslim territory. But the next group was more successful. Led by Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin, between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians went on the first crusade, with about 10,000 of them being knights, between 35,000 and 50,000 being infantry, and the rest being women and children. It was the largest army assembled in Medieval Europe. The Crusade had no clear leader, and struggled across Asia Minor but surviving. Baldwin saw an opportunity to leave the Crusade early and carved out a fief in Syra called Edessa, and area with many Armenian Christians.
The rest of the Crusaders made their way to Antioch, a city with many Greek Christians that the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I very much wanted them to conquer for him. On their way, the Crusaders were able to defeat the armies of two brothers, Duqaq of Damascus and Ridwan of Aleppo, as both brothers had neglected to coordinate with one another. If they had fought together, they might have ended the Crusade right then and there. The Crusaders surrounded Antioch and laid siege to it. But the Iraqi general Kerbogha was on his way to attack them outside the city walls. Luckily for the Crusaders (and unluckily for the people of Antioch), Bohemond of Taranto was able to identify a tower guard who would let them in under cover of night and open the gates for them, which they succeeded in doing the day before Kerbogha arrived, and they slaughtered the inhabitants of the city. This gave Bohemond a serious claim to lordship over Antioch, which he did not intend to give to the Byzantines. However, at the same time, Raymond of Toulouse patronized a man named Peter Bartholomew, who somehow discovered the lance that pierced Jesus on the cross because a saint revealed its location to him in a dream. He proclaimed that Raymond was the rightful ruler of the Crusaders, and so Raymond sought to challenge Bohemond's lordship. Allegedly, the sight of the lance made Muslim armies panic, and supposedly helped the Crusaders win a victory against Kerbogha's forces that had besieged them in Antioch.
Lacking the men to seriously oppose Bohemond, Raymond of Toulouse decided to focus on the drive to Palestine and Jerusalem. He led Robert of Normany and Tancred, other major nobles, past Antioch and into Lebanon. Bohemond retained Antioch, which became the second Crusader State after Edessa. Unfortunately for Raymond, Peter Bartholomew became harder to control, and the spell broke when he declared in spring 1099 that they would need to start executing all the sinful Christians on the expedition. When challenged, he declared that he would walk to flames to prove the veracity of his connection to God. He either emerged unscathed and was killed by the sinful crowd, or emerged burnt and was mortally wounded, dying some days later. Either way, it was a bad look for Raymond since this was his guy, and by May 1099, Raymond was no longer the preeminent figure in the Crusade. He would have to share power with the other nobles.
The Crusaders seized Jerusalem in July 1099, and named Godfrey of Bouillon as the "Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre," king in all but name. Godfrey took power, but he held very little territory in reality. When he tried to take Ascalon, a port city, the people demanded to negotiate only with Raymond, and Godfrey refused, leaving the city in Muslim hands, which would allow it to serve as a launching point for the Fatimids against him. After the seizure of Jerusalem, most Crusaders went home to the west, leaving Godfrey extremely exposed with just 2,000 infantrymen an 300 knights. Urban died in the summer of 1099, just before he would have heard news of the recapture of Jerusalem, and his successor, Paschal II, declared another Crusade, but this one was a debacle, in which three separate armies were all destroyed by Seljuqs in Asia Minor before ever reaching the Levant. Godfrey died (likely of Typhoid) just a year after taking Jerusalem, in July 1100. His brother, Baldwin, succeeded him as King of Jerusalem.
In the early years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin struggled against all odds to preserve the Frankish state in the Levant. He even managed to create a truce with Tughtegin, the new ruler of Damascus, after Duqaq had died. The Syrian states came under enormous pressure after just a few years, and Bohemond fled, leaving Antioch to his nephew, Tancred de Hauteville. Allegedly, Bohemond left in a coffin with air holes poked in it and a dead rooster on top of him to fool the Byzantine authorities who he feuded with. Bohemond decided to lead a "crusade" against the Byzantines in 1107 for some betrayals that occurred during the First Crusade, but he was unsuccessful and slipped into obscurity. Tancred remained in power in Antioch as the nominal regent, but Bohemond never returned. Tancred spent his short reign defending and expanding Antioch's borders until he died at just 36 due to poor health. He was succeeded by Bohemond's infant son, Bohemond II, and Antioch was governed by Tancred's nephew, Roger of Salerno, as a regent.
The three Crusader States of Edessa, Antioch, and Jerusalem may have been officially disunited, but they were good at coming together to repel outside threats when necessary. The Franks, as they were known, would unite at a strong, defensible location, and then they would police the threatened region, seeking to disrupt the enemy's freedom of movement, while avoiding the risk of open battle. At one point, Roger of Salerno even allied with Tughtegin of Damascus to repel forces from Baghdad, creating a bizarre Christian-Muslim alliance. Meanwhile, Baldwin I of Jerusalem was able to seize more and more territory in 1107 and 1113 to start controlling trans-Levantine traffic, all the way to the Red Sea coast at Aqaba.
But in 1118, Baldwin I died in a campaign against Egypt, and was succeeded by his cousin, also named Baldwin. In 1119, Ilghazi of Aleppo destroyed Roger of Salerno's Antiochian army at a battle known to the Crusaders as the "Field of Blood," throwing the Crusaders into chaos. In 1123, King Baldwin II was captured by Muslims and spent 16 months in captivity. Bohemond II arrived in Antioch to assume control in 1126 but was slain just four years later, leaving an infant girl named Constance as his heir. When Baldwin II died from illness in 1131, the last of the old guard of Outremer (traditional term for Crusader States) was dead. Baldwin was succeeded by Melisende, the eldest of his four daughters, who was married to Count Fulk V of Anjou. She was the representation of the new world crusading had created, as her father was French and her mother an Armenian Christian. She would rule for thirty years with her husband and then her son as co-rulers. She inherited the throne at twenty-two years old. By this time, there was a desperate need for reinforcements. Some came from two new military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar, but more was necessary.
Life in the Crusader states was an interesting mix of tolerance and intolerance. While laws were passed to prevent fraternization between Muslims and Christians, perhaps these were necessary because it happened to often. In Usama ibn Mundiqh's Book of Contemplation, the Syrian Muslim nobleman who authored the book describes friendships with the Latins, although he regards them as culturally inferior to Muslims. Even the Templars cleared out of the al-Aqsa mosque when he wanted to pray there, and Asbridge writes that the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims, but between Franks (AKA Latin Christians) and everybody else.
The Crusaders came under serious threat after 1128, when the Turkish warlord Zangi, the atabeg of Mosul, took control of Aleppo. Some consider this the beginning of the Muslim reaction to the Crusades and the jihad against the Crusaders. But Zangi remained distracted, with one foot on either side of the Euphrates. For him, the battle against the Franks was more like a frontier war, and Baghdad was the main interest. That said, when Tughtegin died around the same time, the Franks lost a key ally in Damascus. In December 1144, Zangi took Edessa, eliminating the northernmost state of Outremer. The fall of Edessa shocked the Levant, and the remaining Franks sent envoys to the west in 1145 calling for a new Crusade and urgent reinforcements. The Second Crusade, as it became known, was even bigger than the first. This time, the Crusade was joined by actual kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, lending the holy war serious legitimacy and expanding its numbers. But the Crusade would be a failure, starting with tremendous losses along the way through Asia Minor.
Zangi was assassinated in September 1146 and we'll never know what he would have accomplished if he had lived, but his youngest son, Nur al-Dun Mahmud would go on to unite Syria. Despite his death, the Crusaders were unable to take advantage of Muslim disunity, and Louis VII and Conrad returned to Europe in 1148-49. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, Baldwin III disliked co-ruling with his mother, and in 1152, they nearly fought a civil war over it. Ultimately, Baldwin III drove her from her lands and forced her abdication. He started to solidify his power in the Crusader States, taking Ascalon after an eight-month siege in 1153. The next year, Nur al-Din seized Damascus, achieving what his father could not, and uniting Aleppo and Damascus for the first time since the Crusades had begun.
In 1157-58, Nur al-Din was struck by some dangerous illness that brought him close to death. He experienced a spiritual awakening thereafter and made the hajj to Mecca in 1161. Then, after a military defeat in 1163 that resulted in Nur al-Din barely escaping with his life, he swore vengeance on the Franks and refused a truce with them. That same year, Baldwin III died and was succeeded by his brother Amalric. To build strength to strike at Jerusalem, Nur al-Din sent his lieutenant, Saladin, to take over Egypt, but once Saladin had done so in 1171, he was not so eager to stay under Nur al-Din's control. There may have been a Sunni civil war between the two, but Nur al-Din died at sixty years old in 1174, leaving his empire to his son, al-Salih. Of course, Saladin wasn't about to let power slip away into some boy's hands. When the boy died at nineteen, Saladin took control of the empire, now controlling both Syria and Egypt. He also went to Masyaf in 1176 to deal with the Shi'ite "Assassins," who had made multiple attempts on his life from which he barely escaped, forging some kind of non-aggression pact.
Baldwin IV took the throne of Jerusalem when his father Amalric died in 1174, and presided over approximately a decade of decline for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Baldwin himself had leprosy, which made his rule more difficult with every year, and Saladin's successes in border skirmishes in 1179 broke all the last of the momentum the Crusaders had. But due to the death of the Caliph, Saladin became distracted from Jerusalem over the next several years, focusing instead on consolidating power in Syria and Mesopotamia by taking Aleppo and Mosul. But critically, when he became sick in 1185-86, Saladin nearly died and even wrote his will. But he recovered, killed those who plotted against him in his time of weakness, and found renewed vigor, much like Nur al-Din a quarter-century earlier, to fight the war against the Franks. While Saladin had spent most of his time in his reign up to this point fighting other Muslims, he now turned his attention to Jerusalem.
Baldwin IV died a few years earlier and Baldwin V died shortly thereafter in 1186, being replaced by his aunt Sibylla and her husband, Guy of Lusignan. But Raymond of Tripoli challenged them for the throne, and when it seemed he would lose, Raymond allied himself with Saladin. This culminated in Saladin's invasion of the Galilee region, climaxing in the Battle of Hattin on July 4, 1187. Having seized all the wells, Saladin knew the Crusaders were thirsty, having gathered nearly all the troops of the realm in one place without much water to fight a decisive battle. Then, Saladin dragged things out, letting their thirst grow and burning fires to smoke them out. Finally, Saladin struck and crushed Guy's forces, taking Guy into captivity. Tiberias capitulated immediately and was followed by Acre, Beirut, Sidon, Haifa, Caesarea, and Arsuf. Saladin spent two months taking all the settlements of the Levant in a mostly peaceful manner, promising to spare the lives of Christians if they would not take up arms, allowing them to either pay higher taxes, convert, or flee. On October 2, 1187, the supposed anniversary of Muhammad's flight to Jerusalem, Saladin entered the city, having negotiated with the remaining Franks that they convert, pay, or flee, ending the Crusader presence in the Levant. However, now that Saladin had taken these lands, he had to hold them, because he had now provoked the wrath of Christendom, which would soon launch another Crusade.
With the Third Crusade coming, Saladin was at the peak of his power, but he still hadn't taken Tyre, a city formerly on an island until Alexander the Great took it in a siege over a thousand years earlier by building a land bridge to it. This created a potential beachhead for the next wave of Crusaders. At the same time, former King of Jerusalem Guy of Lusignan was on what seemed like a suicidal mission to take Acre, also on the northern coast of Palestine. But Saladin failed to kill Guy and his ragtag band of supporters while they were still weak outside the walls of Acre, and he reached Acre in September 1189, just the same time as a fleet of fifty ships carrying 12,000 Frisian and Danish Crusaders and their horses arrived. In a battle fought outside the gates, a detachment of Crusaders managed to reach Saladin's tent, seizing loot. Despite the fact that the Muslims won a close battle, the morale shifted to the Crusaders, and Saladin had no momentum whatsoever. Some of the routed Muslim soldiers deserted, and those who lost wealth in the battle when Crusaders looted their camp became demoralized. Then, in March of 1190, when some ships from Acre tried to sally out to challenge the naval blockade of the city, they were destroyed, granting Crusaders unimpeded naval access for the rest of 1190. Acre's inhabitants lived on the edge of starvation waiting in vain for Saladin to break the siege.
In May 1190, the Crusaders already at Acre had filled in a path through the dry moat around Acre, using rubble and even dead bodies to create level ground. They brought three-storey siege towers soaked in flame-retardant vinegar to the walls, but the day was saved for Acre by a young metalworker who pioneered an even stronger form of Greek fire that burned through the vinegar, destroying the siege weapons.
Meanwhile, more Crusaders were on the way. the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa came by land and the French and English Kings Philippe Auguste and Richard the Lionheart came by sea. But after crossing Asia Minor and entering Cilicia, Frederick tried to ford a river on horseback, the horse lost footing, and Frederick fell in and drowned in the weight of his armor, a huge boon for the Muslims and a bad omen for the Crusaders. Richard was also facing obstacles in his way, but none that actually killed him. On the way to the Levant, a gale blew twenty-five of Richard's ships off course to Cyprus, ruled by the Byzantines, where the local population kidnapped Richard's sister and fiancee. Richard decided to immediately invade the island, conquering it, and taking back his fiancee, marrying her once the hostilities were over.
When Richard arrived in the Holy Land, Philippe Auguste was already there, but Richard made his presence felt. He first offered four gold pieces as a wage to all knights who would join him when the French king offered three, and then, when a part of the walls fell down, Richard offered two gold coins to anyone who could carry off a stone from the wall under heavy fire. Eventually, thanks to the influx of men, the Crusaders took Acre. But it was hard to get them to continue. Some preferred to stay in Acre, which had become a den of prostitution and gambling with so many soldiers there, and others wanted to leave. That is just what Philippe Auguste did when he got word that a relative in Flanders had died and that he would need to assert his claim. With Philippe Auguste gone and Frederick dead, Richard of England was now the sole leader of the Crusade.
Richard eventually convinced the men to march south along the coast to Jaffa and then Jerusalem, although he had to go back once to convince more to come. Along the way, he fought Saladin at a major engagement, the Battle of Arsuf, which seems to have been totally unplanned, and won, clearing the way to Jerusalem. But it wasn't so simple. By marching inland, the Crusaders would lose the advantage that came from naval resupply and their path back to the coast could be harried by Saladin's troops. Twice, the Crusaders marched towards Jerusalem, and twice they turned back around without taking it. Why?
All through the campaign, Richard had been putting forth feelers of negotiations with Saladin. Richard's strategy was interesting, because he wasn't always interested in negotiation, only rarely. What he was interested in was getting reports back from his men of Saladin's camp and the Ayyubids' thinking. Once he even asked for some chilled pears just to mess with Saladin's head by sending such a ridiculous request. For Richard, negotiation was a weapon, and he could use it to get a settlement, intelligence, or even sow dissension in the ranks of Islam. But now the negotiations became a real means of reaching settlement since both rulers faced challenges that turned the Third Crusade from a priority into a distraction.
Richard learned that since Philippe Auguste had returned to France, he had been plotting with Richard's brother John to take power from Richard in the Angevin realm of England, Aquitaine, and Normandy. Saladin, on the other hand, realized there was no way he could win against the Crusaders after his defeat at Arsuf and given the nature of the backstabbing and plotting going on within his own family. Saladin had two demands: that he would retain Jerusalem and Ascalon. Richard agreed, giving the Crusaders a thin strip of coastal land from Jaffa to Tyre and rights for Christians to enter Jerusalem as part of a three-year peace. Richard never entered Jerusalem, probably because he considered it humiliating to do so while still ruled by Muslims, his goal never quite reached. Richard ultimately failed to take Jerusalem because he failed to take into account the emotional aspects of leading a Crusade and because he was unable to take firm control of the expedition when troops insisted on marching to Jerusalem. But of course this wasn't really a win for Saladin and a loss for Richard. Asbridge calls it a tie, but I would say it was more of a pyrrhic victory for Saladin. The agreement was reached on September 2, 1192. Saladin was dead within six months from illness at just 55 years old, and Richard was dead by 1199, shot by a crossbow at 41 in front-line combat in southern France.
Pope Innocent III was elected by the college of cardinals on January 8, 1198, at just 37 years old, seeking to rejuvenate the papacy and its holy wars. Innocent saw three problems with prior holy wars: there were too many non-combatants going along, the expeditions were poorly funded, and they had ineffective command. Innocent sought to remedy these problems by reaffirming the Latin Church's right to lead Crusades, assuming the roles of recruitment, fundraising, and leadership. As a part of this, Innocent III expanded use of indulgences to fund the Crusades, which would come back to bite the church in about 300 years. But the donation chests didn't get full, and Innocent had to delay and delay again the Fourth Crusade.
When the Fourth Crusade did finally launch, it was a disaster. Few men arrived, and there wasn't enough money to pay for the massive Venetian armada the Crusaders had contracted to bring them to the Holy Land. At that point the Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo took over, but mainly used the Crusaders to settle scores and expand Venice's power. They never made it to the Holy Land. Instead, Dandolo directed them to Constantinople, where they sacked the largest city in Christendom. Innocent III was horrified, although he wasn't unhappy to see a smaller Latin empire take over Constantinople instead of the Greeks.
Meanwhile, in the Crusader States, internecine conflicts kept the realms of Antioch, Tripoli and fake Jerusalem (since it didn't control Jerusalem) unstable, but after Saladin's death, the Ayyubid realm had fractured. Acre was now the capital of Frankish Palestine, and had grown into a much larger city than before. The Fifth Crusade was launched in 1218 with the goal of landing at Damietta, in the Nile Delta, first to then take back Jerusalem over land. But because of all the new money and ship that allowed Crusader elites to now travel to and from their destinations more easily than ever before, leadership was less stable during Crusade number five, and it suffered as a result. The Crusaders took Damietta, but struggled thereafter. The Ayyubid ruler of Egypt offered them a deal to give them Jerusalem and most of Palestine as long as the Ayyubids would get the major forts, but the Crusaders refused. The descriptions that Asbridge gives of the siege of Damietta are horrific and show how terrible crusading really was. He writes that the Crusaders found "streets strewn with bodies of the dead, wasting away from pestilence and famine" and that they found skinny people in bed next to the dead. After 18 months of siege, Damietta had lost tens of thousands of lives. But then the Crusaders got their comeuppance with the flooding of the Nile, destroying their supplies and the expedition. The leader, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, was able, however, to still get a deal to get Jerusalem in 1229 after the Sixth Crusade without any blood spilled. However, it was unpopular since it gave up major fortresses and the Latins of Palestine threw rotten meat at him as he departed.
In 1244, Turkish Khwarazmians invaded and sacked Jerusalem, which led to another Crusade, led by Louis IX of France. He raised tons of money for it and mounted the only contested amphibious landing I know of in a Crusade, but he was stopped. He invaded up the Nile again, trying to defeat the Ayyubids in Egypt before turning to Jerusalem. Louis was actually captured by the Ayyubids, the only Christian king to suffer that humiliation. After he paid ransom, he stayed in Egypt until 1252 to secure the liberation of his troops. He travelled home in 1254 and took on a life of extreme piety and austerity, even considering moving to a monastery after the humbling Crusade.
The players in the middle east completely changed in the latter half of the 13th century. The Mamluks, Turkish slave-soldiers, staged a coup and took over Ayyubid Egypt and the Levant. From the East, Mongols stormed through, sacking Baghdad and reaching the Mamluks, who pushed them back twice, which was pretty miraculous for the time. King Louis IX tried another Crusade in 1267, but he diverted the Crusade to Tunisia, where he died, and the Crusaders never made it to the Holy Land. The Mamluks laid siege to Acre and took it in 1291, eliminating the last of the Crusader States.
In his analysis of the period as a whole, Asbridge points out that the Crusading ideology was almost bound to fail due to its emphasis on individual salvation through this act of penance. Compare Crusading to colonialism/imperialism, the far more successful movements to come from Europe in the following centuries. Whereas colonialism sent pioneers to live out in the world and imperialism sent government or corporate officials to rule the rest of the world, the Crusades sent pilgrims on a journey of penance. As a result, not so many stayed to rule the states they carved out. What the Crusader States needed to survive was a strong standing army of the faithful, but instead they only got periodic infusions via Crusades.
Finishing the book, I am reminded that for all the interesting stories that are told here, the Crusades are fundamentally a period of senseless violence from which very few people actually gained. The Crusades led to huge taxes on European peasants, violent pogroms against the Jews, horrific sieges throughout Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and just huge overall suffering. And in the end, it is hard to see what was gained. To me, the lesson of the Crusades is that when the senseless violence of elites goes unchecked, the rest of us suffer.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- By modern standards, medieval knights rode small horses that would be considered ponies today
- The term crusade was not used until the end of the 12th century, 100 years after the First Crusade. It had initially been called a "journey" or a "pilgrimage."
- The Knights Templar got their name because they had quarters in Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque (then converted into a church). It was also there that Solomon's Temple had stood, so they called themselves the knights of temple, AKA "templar."
- "Aleppo" means milk in Arabic, and so when forecasting his victory over the city, Saladin said that, "we have only to do the milking and Aleppo will be ours."
- To try to bring supplies and take messages in and out of Acre during the siege from 1189-90, Saladin sent expert swimmers to carry otter-skin pouches of goods undetected.
- In 1212, there was some kind of poorly recorded "Children's Crusade" that Asbridge doesn't get into. It seems not to have come to anything.
- In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, St. Francis of Assisi showed up to try to convert the Muslims, who politely refused.
- Something interesting is how in English, crusade can mean all sorts of efforts, like a crusade against drugs or a crusade against anything immoral, not just a religious war. And then in Arabic, a jihad is primarily an internal struggle, although we think of it as a religious war.
- Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany went to Saladin's tomb in Damascus in 1898 and laid a wreath there in respect for him, calling Saladin one of the most chivalrous rulers in history.
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