The 12th Century in Europe: Crusades, Power Struggles and the Decline of the Byzantine Empire

It was the first in which crowned European monarchs participated, namely King Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany. However, their hosts proceeded separately in 1147, did not coordinate well with each other or the Byzantines because all parties mistrusted one another, and as a result they were met with defeat and the effort was mostly abandoned by 1148. This was a pattern during the Crusades: just commanding and managing the logistics of their own forces so far from home was an almost insurmountable challenge, coordinating such forces among one another was beyond their organizational abilities. Much of this can be attributed to the personal rivalries that plagued these forces from top to bottom because they were not professional armies, they were feudal armies, the backbone of which were knights – warriors who devoted their lives to practicing the martial arts. It was through their prowess on the battlefield that they advanced themselves and as such competed for personal glory.

Although the Second Crusade was ultimately a failure, it did not recapture Edessa or take its other targets of Damascus and Ascalon. It did provide rich material for the troubadours of France and the minnesingers of Germany that would inspire future generations of knights to paint over their own coats of arms with a simple red cross on a field of white.

The Holy Land was not the only target of the Second Crusade. Although many southern Germans were willing to participate in the campaign in the Levant, the Saxons to the north had more immediate concerns: various groups of pagan Slavs with whom they shared a contentious and violent border, the Wends foremost among them.

This so-called Wendish Crusade was given full papal support and the same status as other Crusaders with the same spiritual rewards due them, namely full remission of all their sins. Danes, Poles, and Bohemians joined the Saxons in their campaign of 1147. The Slavs attacked Saxon lands preemptively in the spring, and the Crusaders spent the summer first driving the pagans out of their territory before attacking various forts and important religious sites. The effort was met with mixed results, although the Crusaders were able to extract tribute from the Wends and other pagan Slavs, they were not successful in converting the majority of their population.

This would prove to be only the beginning of the series of conflicts that are known to us today as the Northern Crusades (also known as the Baltic Crusades), but the beginning of a state in the eastern Baltic controlled by the Teutonic Order that would eventually evolve into Prussia. The Baltic would become the battleground of German nobles like Henry the Lion, who because of personal rivalries with Barbarossa sought their own fortunes outside of imperial ambitions, namely, by northeastward expansion.

The third theater of the Second Crusade was on the Iberian Peninsula, where King Alfonso VII of León and Castile and King Alfonso I of Portugal were authorized to prosecute their campaigns against the Moors as part of the wider crusade. Portugal had only become a kingdom in 1143, but their forces were bolstered in June of 1147 when a multi-ethnic force of 6,000 Crusaders that had departed from England were forced to land on the Portuguese coast due to storms. They were convinced by Alfonso I of Portugal to join him in an attack on Lisbon, which was besieged and surrendered after four months in October. Many stayed and settled in the city, bolstering the future armies of the Reconquista, while others continued on to the Holy Land by sea.

This was an important turning point for the Reconquista in general, and delivered a valuable port city into the hands of the Portuguese that would eventually become their capital. The indulgences offered by the papacy to knights from across Europe would imbue the Reconquista with the Crusader spirit and continually attract new recruits. Christian forces in Iberia were now on the offensive and would never again relinquish that momentum.

Furthermore, the Treaty of Cazola (1179) designated zones of conquest between the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to avoid any future Christian infighting. Not only was this the only undeniably successful effort of the Second Crusade, it began the historic relationship between the kingdoms of Portugal and England that would eventually be ratified into a formal treaty of alliance in the 14th century – the oldest alliance in the world that is still in force today.

Unlike during their Italian campaigns, Norman armies were almost always outnumbered by their Muslim foes in Sicily, but enjoyed a string of successes and thus built a myth of invincibility among their enemies and themselves. The Kingdom of Sicily included Sicily, Apulia, Calabria, and Malta and was established on Christmas Day of 1130 under the rule of Roger II, who was crowned by Antipope Anacletus II.

His rival, Innocent II, felt threatened by now having a powerful neighbor to the south, in addition to the emperor in the north, and so decided to turn one threat against the other. He instigated rebellion in the Normans’ southern Italian provinces along with a German invasion in 1137 and participated himself, but the campaign was met with difficulties. Eventually, the troops of Emperor Lothair II revolted and in 1139, papal troops were ambushed and Innocent II himself captured, forcing him to acknowledge Roger’s rights.

Roger II based his kingdom on the Byzantine model of the divine right to rule in order to uphold his ahistorical realm – Sicily had been an important player in the Mediterranean since antiquity due to its bountiful wheat and position in the central Mediterranean, but it had always been the pawn of greater powers and had never been a major independent player able to dominate its neighbors. Due to the infusion of bellicose Norman blood, this was about to change. The Normans valued knowledge and questioned the crews of all visiting ships about where they had been and what they had seen, recording the data and thus giving the Normans both an excellent knowledge of geography and of contemporary events.

After securing his own territory in southern Italy, most notably ending the self-rule of Naples, and implementing his Byzantine-inspired government, Roger set about expanding his dominions. His forces were able to take advantage of the Second Crusade by attacking the Byzantines in Greece: his forces attacked several islands in addition to sacking Athens, Corinth, and Thebes, wherefrom he carried off most of the Jews who were involved in the silk trade and who would subsequently form the basis of the Sicilian silk industry in Palermo. By 1153, he had captured Tunis and Tripoli, adding the richest parts of North Africa to his realm. Roger II made himself into one of the most powerful kings in Europe by the time of his death in 1054.

Emperor Frederick I, known today by his Italian epithet Barbarossa or “red beard”, is a towering figure in German history with a status similar to that of Arthur in Britain as a “sleeping hero” who will arise one day when his people’s need is greatest. Proponents of German unification in the late 19th century went so far as to declare Kaiser Wilhelm I, the first ruler of the new German Empire, to be the reincarnation of Frederick I.

He began his reign in 1152 at a time when imperial power was at a low-point and the German princes were strong and independent, his cousin Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony foremost among them. He was the first to technically be referred to as sacrum, “Holy” Roman Emperor in 1157, a title now applied generally to all the Roman-German emperors, even if the term Romanorum Imperator Augustus was the official title.

Frederick had distinguished himself as a soldier during the Second Crusade and would prove himself as a warrior time and again, both in bringing his German princes to heal and in pressing his rights in Italy. Frederick was remarkable for his endurance, ambition, and skill as an administrator in addition to his prowess on the battlefield. Although classically educated, he was not a philosopher king, and instead had the more practical sensibility of a bureaucrat so that he may be thought of as a warrior-administrator. Although he was able to subdue most of his rivals in Germany, receiving the submission of Henry the Lion in 1181, he was more prone to uphold the feudal tradition rather than reform it, and so the level of imperial authority he enjoyed would not be sustained for posterity.

During the first of six expeditions to Italy in 1154-5, Frederick I received the Iron Crown of Italy in Pavia and was crowned Emperor of the Romans at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. However, two parties emerged in Italy, those who supported Frederick’s vision of imperial rule in Italy, the Ghibellines who consisted mostly of rural noble families and smaller cities, and the Guelfs who opposed it, mostly consisting of larger mercantile cities. Loyalties were also strategic: those threatened by incorporation into the Papal States tended to be Ghibelline, while those facing imperial subjugation were Guelf.

Although Frederick I was successful in restoring imperial authority in Germany to what it had been during the lifetime of Otto I, the increasingly prosperous Guelf city-states of northern Italy comprising the Lombard League, along with a renewed alliance between the Normans of Sicily and the papacy, successfully resisted his attempts to assert imperial authority south of the Alps. Eventually, after being unable to overcome the combined might of the Italians on their own ground and being defeated at the Battle of Legnano, Frederick was forced to recognize the sovereignty of the Papal States and the independence of the Italian city-states, even if they still nominally owed him fealty, in exchange for papal recognition of the emperor as overlord of the imperial church at the Peace of Venice (1177) and the Peace of Constance (1183).

Henry I ruled from 1100 to 1135, during which time he reigned in the power of the nobles, built on Anglo-Saxon legal traditions, increased the role of law, and founded new institutions like the Royal Exchequer.

However, on November 25th, 1120, his only son and heir was killed in the White Ship Disaster when he and his companions were drowned in the English Channel. After attempting to establish his daughter Matilda’s infant son Henry d’Anjou as his heir with her as regent, Stephen of Blois usurped the throne after the death of Henry I in 1135. A civil war between the supporters of Matilda and Stephen, known as the Anarchy, would last until 1153.

King Stephen is often referred to as Bad King Stephen and this was not because he was a cruel tyrant, but rather because he was simply a “bad king”: the same chivalrousness and generosity that had won him favor in becoming king now made him weak because he had so little left to give. Therefore, the headstrong barons of England did not fear him and increasingly engaged in private wars. Men who had been sworn to uphold the peace and security of one of the richest kingdoms in England were now ravaging it, and mercenaries from the Low Countries and Germany began flooding the country. When paid, these mercenaries were deadly effective warriors, when not, they became large bands of brigands pillaging the countryside. England, the South in particular, was devastated as a result.

The personal rivalry between the crowned heads of England and France delayed their cooperation on the Crusade and as such, their forces did not arrive until 1191. King Philip II of France, known as Philip Augustus, was a skilled politician and administrator who was also the first person to style himself “King of France” instead of “King of the Franks”, a distinction which first appeared ca. 1190. King Richard I of England, known as Richard the Lionheart, was a military genius but an otherwise inept ruler who did not speak English and did not even particularly like England – he spent only about 6 months of his reign there and preferred sunny Aquitaine.

Their conflict was not only a matter of interest: the men had personal conflicts resulting from their divergent personalities, and from Richard’s broken engagement to Philip’s sister. After seizing the crown from his aging father, Richard took up the Crusade that Henry II had agreed to with Philip Augustus.

A storm shipwrecked his sister and fiancé on the island of Cyprus, along with much of the funds for the campaign, and all were seized by a rebel Byzantine prince who controlled the island. Richard thus conquered the island, which became an important Crusader outpost for the next four centuries.

He arrived to assist Philip at the siege of Acre in June, and the subsequent surrender of the city returned 1,000 prisoners as well as the True Cross and a large ransom for the captured garrison. Feeling slighted and in ill-health, Philip returned to France after the successful siege, along with Leopold V of Austria whom Richard had also offended, leaving the remaining Crusader army firmly in the hands of the Lionheart.

Saladin was a man known both for his skill as a general as well as being one of the most chivalrous figures of the Middle Ages, which gained him great respect and renown among Europeans. Although Saladin would not have to face the old warhorse Frederick I as he feared, another opponent would prove to be as great of a chivalric warrior as he: Richard I the Lionheart.

Richard was one of the greatest warriors of his day, just like his father and grandfather before him, and he relished in playing the role of the chivalric warrior. That being said, while he could be most gracious and chivalrous to captured Muslim princes, he was also known for his ruthlessness and cruelty toward common captives. This is evidenced by an 1191 incident following the fall of Acre when he ordered the decapitation of all 2,700 members of the Muslim garrison in view of Saladin and his army after Saladin had failed to make the first payment of their ransom.

Subsequently, Richard was marching his army to Jaffa, vital for launching an attack on Jerusalem, when he was attacked by Saladin at Arsuf. Although outnumbered, the Crusader army held together in the face of the onslaught and delivered a shattering charge against the Muslim army, who were routed with terrible losses. Richard the Lionheart successfully upended Saladin’s reputation of invincibility and earned his respect, but was never able to retake Jerusalem itself, largely hindered by infighting between Guy and Conrad, rival claimants to the throne of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or what remained of it.

In the course of the 12th century, the Komnenos made a concerted but ultimately unsuccessful effort to restore the Byzantine Empire’s military, territorial, economic, and political position to where it was before the disastrous Battle of Manzikert and the subsequent loss of most of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks.

However, they were successful in restoring the prosperity and cultural output of the Byzantine Empire, and increased contact with the West, sharing their technology freely with the Latins. Manuscripts like the Marian Homilies made in the first half of the 12th century by Jakobos Kokkinobaphos in Constantinople, and the St. Peter Pericopes from Salzburg, which blends Byzantine principles of style with visual themes from western examples, attest to the ongoing artistic and cultural relevance the Byzantines. They also enjoyed a Renaissance of interest in classical authors that would eventually spread to the West.

This tension boiled over in April of 1182 after the death of Emperor Manuel I in 1180 when his widow, the Latin princess Maria of Antioch, acted as regent to their infant son. The citizens of Constantinople had long been resentful of the Italian merchants in the city, who now numbered 60,000, and believed that favorable conditions given them by the authorities allowed them to dominate trade in the city. The regency of this Latin princess was the last straw, and the citizenry of Constantinople turned against the Italians in the city in a riot that has come to be known as the Massacre of the Latins. Although many sensed trouble was coming and had taken to sea, most of the Latin population was mercilessly slaughtered without distinction for women or children.

Although trade relations were soon restored, trust never was and the incident only confirmed western suspicions of the treacherous and duplicitous nature of the Byzantines. No objections were raised in the West when a Norman expedition under William II  sacked Thessalonica, the Empire's second largest city, in 1185. The citizens of Constantinople would themselves be punished two decades later when the so-called Latins returned – their vengeance would begin the irreversible decline of the Byzantine Empire.