The Christian Mediterranean
Six centuries after Jesus, the lands around the Mediterranean were largely Christian. Egypt, Syria, the Holy Land, North Africa, and Asia Minor were the heartlands of the faith, home to great churches at Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Carthage, where Augustine had once been a bishop.
To the east lay the Persian (Sasanian) Empire. From 602 to 628, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) and Persian empires fought a long, exhausting war that left both of them weak.
Muhammad and the birth of Islam
In 610, in the Arabian city of Mecca, Muhammad began preaching that there is one God and that he was God's messenger. In 622 he moved to Medina, where he became both a religious and a political leader. By his death in 632, most of Arabia had accepted Islam.
From the beginning, Islam joined faith and government. Muhammad was a prophet, a lawgiver, and a military commander, a pattern that shaped everything that followed.
The great conquests
Within a century, Arab armies swept out of Arabia. They defeated the Byzantines at the Yarmuk River in 636, took Jerusalem in 637, conquered Persia, took Egypt by 642 and Carthage in 698, crossed into Spain in 711, and reached the Indus River in the east.
Christians in the conquered lands became dhimmis: protected, but second-class, paying a special tax (the jizya) and living under many restrictions. Over the following centuries, most of these once-Christian lands became majority Muslim. In 691 the Dome of the Rock was completed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The conquests were finally stopped at the walls of Constantinople (674–678 and 717–718) and in France, where Charles Martel defeated an Arab army near Tours and Poitiers in 732.
Caliphs, Christians, and a border at war
The Abbasid caliphs ruled from their new capital at Baghdad, where scholars, many of them Christians and Jews, translated Greek science and philosophy into Arabic. In Spain, a separate caliphate ruled from Córdoba, while small Christian kingdoms in the northern mountains began the long Reconquista.
Along the borders, Byzantine and Muslim armies raided and fought for centuries. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built over the traditional site of Jesus's tomb, to be destroyed.
The Seljuk Turks and a cry for help
In 1071 the Seljuk Turks, recent converts to Islam, crushed the Byzantine army at Manzikert and captured the emperor. Within a few years they had overrun most of Asia Minor, setting up their capital at Nicaea, less than a hundred miles from Constantinople. They also took Jerusalem, and Christian pilgrims reported harassment on the roads.
In 1095, the Byzantine emperor Alexios I sent envoys to the pope asking for soldiers to help defend Eastern Christians.
The First Crusade
At Clermont, in France, in November 1095, Pope Urban II called on Western knights to go east, rescue their fellow Christians, and free Jerusalem. The crowd answered, 'God wills it!' Tens of thousands took the cross.
Some of the first bands to march, in 1096, massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland, despite the efforts of some bishops to protect them. The main armies took Nicaea in 1097, won at Dorylaeum, besieged Antioch for eight months, and finally reached Jerusalem.
On July 15, 1099, the crusaders stormed the city and slaughtered many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, a massacre remembered with horror ever since.
The Crusader states
The crusaders set up four Latin states along the eastern Mediterranean: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Castles rose across the land, and new military orders, the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, swore to defend pilgrims.
When Edessa fell in 1144, Bernard of Clairvaux preached a Second Crusade (1147–1149), but it ended in a failed siege of Damascus.
Saladin
Saladin, a Kurdish general, united Egypt and Syria under his rule. On July 4, 1187, he destroyed the crusader army at the Horns of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee, and soon took most of the kingdom.
Jerusalem surrendered in October 1187. Unlike the crusaders in 1099, Saladin did not massacre the city. Most residents were allowed to ransom themselves and leave, though thousands who could not pay were sold into slavery.
The Third Crusade
Europe's three greatest rulers set out to retake Jerusalem. The German emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned while crossing a river in Asia Minor in 1190. Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart of England arrived by sea, and in 1191 they recaptured Acre, where Richard then executed some 2,700 Muslim prisoners.
Richard defeated Saladin at Arsuf and came within sight of Jerusalem, but never took it. In 1192 the two signed a truce that kept a strip of coast in Christian hands and allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem.
The Fourth Crusade: Christians against Christians
The Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land. Deep in debt to Venice for its ships, the army first attacked the Christian city of Zara, then sailed to Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. In April 1204 the crusaders sacked it: churches were looted, and many people were killed.
The crusaders ruled Constantinople until 1261, and the wound between the Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) churches has never fully healed. In 2001 and 2004, Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for it to Orthodox leaders.
The end in the East
Later crusades attacked Egypt (1217–1221 and 1249–1250). The emperor Frederick II won Jerusalem back by treaty in 1229, without a battle, but it was lost for good in 1244. King Louis IX of France was captured in Egypt and later died on crusade at Tunis in 1270.
Meanwhile the Mamluk sultans of Egypt steadily took the remaining crusader cities. When Acre fell in 1291, the crusader states came to an end.
Spain: the Reconquista
In Spain, the struggle lasted nearly eight centuries. Small Christian kingdoms in the north slowly pushed south: Toledo fell to Castile in 1085, a great Christian victory came at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and Córdoba and Seville were taken in the 1230s and 1240s.
The last Muslim kingdom, Granada, surrendered on January 2, 1492. That same year, Spain expelled its Jews, another dark chapter, and Columbus sailed west.
The Ottoman Empire
A new Turkish power, the Ottomans, rose in Asia Minor around 1300 and pushed into the Balkans. On May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire after more than a thousand years. Hagia Sophia, for nine centuries the greatest church in Christendom, became a mosque.
The Ottomans reached the gates of Vienna in 1529. A Christian fleet stopped them at sea at Lepanto in 1571, and in 1683 a relief army led by King Jan Sobieski of Poland broke the second siege of Vienna. It was the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion into Europe.
Looking back as Christians
The Crusades did not come out of nowhere. They answered more than four centuries of conquest of once-Christian lands, and a direct appeal for help from Eastern Christians. Many crusaders were sincere believers who sacrificed everything.
But the Crusades also included terrible sins: massacres of Jews in 1096, the slaughter in Jerusalem in 1099, the sack of Christian Constantinople in 1204, and the idea that fighting could earn forgiveness. Jesus told Peter to put away his sword (Matthew 26:52) and said, 'My kingdom is not of this world' (John 18:36). The gospel spreads by witness, love, and the Holy Spirit's power (Acts 1:8; 2 Corinthians 10:3–5), not by armies.
Christians still live in these lands today, including Coptic Christians in Egypt, Assyrians in Iraq, and believers in Syria and Lebanon, often under pressure. The best answer to this history is the one Jesus gave: love your neighbor, including your Muslim neighbor, and share the good news with gentleness and respect.