The Crusades are such a massive and broad topic, where do I even begin to understand them?

Nobody is answering OP btw

ending attacks on pilgrims and getting unrestricted access to the holy land for them was the crusade's stated goal

lol saladin actually allowed more pilgrimage than the crusaders did. When the cruaders ruled, they wouldn't let coptic christians make the pilgrimage because they saw them as heretics, whereas Saladin was fine with all christians doing pilgrimage.

You're such a rube

The crusaders were military genius,they modified their ships for long‑distance transportation of their warhorses and they recycled the ships timber to build on-site hospitals.

They produced prefabricated castles (Richard I’s was called “Mategriffon”, or “kill the locals”) and designed floating fortresses, Oliver of Paderborn’s amphibious siege tower proved invaluable during the siege of Damietta in the Nile Delta in 1218.

And our current conflicts in the Middle East are about protecting the innocent from ruthless dictators.... Amirite?

>third crusade fails
It retook almost everything Saladin took, and came to a peace with the Muslims with Christians allowed access to Jerusalem. Seems like a win to me.
Also the Richard/Saladin bromance is based.

>Also the Richard/Saladin romance is based.

Do you think they fugged? :3

The Crusades were an over-reaction to the pleas of Alexios Komnenos: he made the situation seem more hopeless than it really was, and exaggerated details of the oppression of Christians in the Holy Land.

There WAS some mistreatment of Christian pilgrims en route to the Levant, but this was mostly from the various Turkic vassal tribes that the Seljuk Sultans could only barely control. And the treatment wasn't particularly directed solely at Christians: travel to the Levant became more risky for everyone as a result of having steppe raiders in Anatolia and Syria, as well as the conflicts between the Fatimids and Seljuks (who had split into various factions).

So the Crusades were initiated on a very faulty premise. Muslim aggression into Europe had already been checked, so it wasn't a reaction to that. And they were a complete failure.

He's right you know. The Crusaders wouldn't even consider themselves as such but as a armed pilgrims. I'd recommend you inform yourself on how important a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was for the average medieval person, they were deeply religious and believed that the earthly Jerusalem is the same as the celestial Jerusalem.

Also the Arabs destroyed the holy sepulchre and harassed pilgrims once the more inept Caliphs took power which resulted in the collapse of the central power in Bagdad.

>Muslim aggression into Europe had already been checked
What? By the end of the 11th century, Spain was far from being christianized, the Almoravidish and Almohadish invasion threatened all of the Christian rule in Spain which was divided anyway. And the Komneni dynasty got their ass wiped by the Turks as you stated yourself.

I also wouldn't call the Crusades a failure in terms of what they achieved culturally, what knowledge they brought to Europe and how they sort of unified Europe and eventually solidified the rule of Kings. Before the Crusades, Europe was little more than a area of feudal squabbles between robber knights. I personally grew up next to a medieval church that was build during the Crusades in an oriental style.

>Also the Arabs destroyed the holy sepulchre

You left out how the next Caliph (az-Zahir) allowed the Christians to rebuild the thing, and even allowed the Byzantines to channel an enormous amounts of fund into its reconstruction (which, desu, was a complete waste of time an effort).

>I'd recommend you inform yourself on how important a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was for the average medieval person

Fuck off. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was - in comparison - unimportant to the Western European, considering the feudal structure prohibited most people from even leaving their allotted fief. Second, the more important place of pilgirimage for Europeans was Santiago de Compostela, not Jerusalem. Thirdly, Christianity has never placed as much emphasis on pilgrimage to Jerusalem as have the Muslims with their Hajj.

>considering the feudal structure prohibited most people from even leaving their allotted fief
Wtf are you talking about? Pilgrimages were huge in medieval Europe.

Muslim aggression into Europe had been stopped by both the Battle of Tours and the Arab Siege of Constantinople, both which had ended in failure for the Muslims. While most parts of Spain were still in Almohad hands, the Christian kingdoms of Leon and Castile and Navarra were stable enough, and there had been to real Muslim 'push' to drive into Europe.

>Before the Crusades, Europe was little more than a area of feudal squabbles between robber knights

After the Crusades, Europe was still nothing more than an area full of feudal squabbles between robber barons and kings.

>fuck off
Santiago de Conpostela only became popular after Jerusalem was lost for good and recently became more popular amongst baby boomer hippies.

Feudal lords did pilgrimages to Jerusalem regularly. And if you seriously think that they placed no emphasis on that you have no idea about medieval Christian eschatology and worldview. Why the fuck do you think took hundreds of thousands of people, knights, lords and peasants alike, up the sword to fought for Jerusalem across the sea if they didn't give a shit?

And your Muslim comparison doesn't work either. As a Muslim you easily travel to Mekka through Muslim territory.

>Why the fuck do you think took hundreds of thousands of people, knights, lords and peasants alike, up the sword to fought for Jerusalem across the sea if they didn't give a shit?
>hundreds of thousands of people

The First Crusade had a strength of an estimated 35,000. The People's Crusade that came before it had a high estimate of 40,000, half of whom dropped out before even making it out of Europe. Only ~20,000 made it to Constantinople.

I don't know where you're getting the hundreds of thousands.

I was talking about the number of people stretched over the first three Crusades.

>After the Crusades, Europe was still nothing more than an area full of feudal squabbles between robber barons and kings.
Wrong. The kings could emancipate themselves as organizers and authorities throughout the Crusades starting with the second, cementing royal authority.

>he made the situation seem more hopeless than it really was

It's not like Eastern Christendom was on the verge of being utterly eradicated, as it has since been. Your hindsight is clouding your vision of how these things were seen at the time. To anyone living in the late 11th century, the Roman Empire that had been the last major Christian power in the east was on the verge of collapse after Manzikert. If the First Crusade hadn't happened Constantinople would almost certainly have been taken 3 centuries earlier.

>Muslim aggression into Europe had already been checked

The fuck are you on about? On the eve of the Crusades Muslims controlled Pergamon, which was like 30 miles from Europe.

They never met. They thought about letting their brother and sister fugg though.

That's not really what happened either. This is the usual take based on the Alexiad and the various chansons of the First Crusade, but both of these have a vested interest in presenting the event through their own world views colored by events that happened just after the campaign.

Alexios wanted knights, true, but not so much to specifically fight a concerted Turkish invasion threatening him but to put down an assortment of rebellions both east and west from Serbs, Pechenegs, long-time Turkish vassals, other Greeks, and Armenians. This was at a time when his own position was not very secure due to a recently failed coup d'etat that kept him pinned inside Constantinople.

The First Crusade was the emperor's gambit to reassert his crumbling authority across the empire and prevent another civil war and eventual usurper marching on the capital just as he himself had done during an earlier war. In the aftermath only two independent principalities remained: the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, formed over the course of the crusade and also manipulated by Alexios to help him crush rebellious Turkish beyliks, and the Crusader States also formed during the event against his wishes but out of his control after the squabbling at Antioch. Both of these states however would be greater threats to the empire than the civil war would have been.

If you want to move past questions of "what happened" and ask questions of "how did medieval people think and process that which was happening around them" then you need to get into primary sources.

In order to understand the crusades in general you need to have some knowledge of the first crusade. Not only did the first crusade establish the political landscape of the kingdom of Jerusalem (the re-taking of Jerusalem after it falls in 1187 is a narrative which persists through Louis IX), but it also left a deep mark on relations between the Eastern Roman empire and the Western Christian kingdoms.

Nearly any secondary source will do for understanding the master-narrative of the first crusade. There have been some decent recommendations in this thread. The Cross and the Crescent by Richard A. Fletcher will give you a broad overview of christian/muslim relations before, after, and during the crusades.

You want to familiarize yourself with the landscape and historical actors so that way you can read the primary sources without getting lost. You also want to understand the tensions and anxieties of the christian west and the muslim east.

For the first crusade, use this online copy of a chronicle written by Fulcher of Chartres sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/fulcher-cde.asp

Look around and see if you can find Robert the Monk's history of the first crusade as well. You will be able to compare and contrast the different decisions made by each author and their political motivations.

The gesta francorum and the gesta tancredi are nice primary sources, largely from the norman perspective.