The Crusades

Explanation: It was at the Council of Clermont, on November 27, 1095, that Urban II launched his famous call. The exact phrase he is said to have used was reconstructed by five different chroniclers, with five fairly different versions: we will never know what he actually said.

Explanation: Jerusalem fell on July 15, 1099, after five weeks of siege. The bloodbath that followed (Jews and Muslims massacred, with some sources even reporting cannibalism at Maarat shortly before) would leave a lasting mark on Eastern memory, still vivid today.

Explanation: At Hattin, on July 4, 1187, Saladin crushed the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been deprived of water under the burning sun. This defeat, not a siege, handed Jerusalem over three months later. Saladin would release most prisoners against ransom, a gesture that forged his reputation as a chivalrous ruler in the West.

Explanation: Richard I of England, nicknamed the Lionheart, led the crusade alongside Philip Augustus and Frederick Barbarossa. In 1192 he signed a truce with Saladin that left Jerusalem to the Muslims but opened the city to Christian pilgrims. On his way back, he was captured in Austria and freed only against a colossal ransom.

Explanation: Barbarossa drowned in 1190 in the Saleph, an Anatolian river, while crossing on horseback. His army scattered at once, depriving the crusade of a decisive force. German legend has it that he never died but sleeps in a cave at Kyffhäuser, waiting to come back and save the Empire.

Explanation: Diverted by the Venetians, the Fourth Crusade plundered Constantinople in 1204, a Christian and supposedly allied city. The loot was fabulous: the four horses of Saint Mark's in Venice came from there. Pope Innocent III, horrified, excommunicated the pillagers but later endorsed the Latin Empire built on the ruins.

Explanation: In 1270, Louis IX died under the walls of Tunis, struck down by an epidemic (probably dysentery or typhus). He had already led the Seventh Crusade in Egypt twenty years earlier, where he was captured. Canonized in 1297, he remains the only king of France ever granted sainthood.

Explanation: Hugh of Payns created the Order of the Templars, whose rule was drafted by Bernard of Clairvaux. Along the way, they invented an international banking system (bills of exchange, deposits in their commanderies) that would end up costing them dear: Philip the Fair had them arrested in 1307 to seize their treasury.

Explanation: The Hospitallers of Saint John, driven out of Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522, received Malta from Charles V against a symbolic rent: one falcon a year offered to the viceroy of Sicily. They held the island until Bonaparte arrived in 1798. The order still exists today, based in Rome.

Explanation: Pushed back from the Levant, the Teutonic Knights launched a long conquest of pagan Prussians and Lithuanians. Their capital Marienburg (Malbork, in Poland today) is still the largest brick fortress in the world. They were eventually crushed by the Poles and Lithuanians at Tannenberg in 1410.

Explanation: Medieval chronicles tell of thousands of children leaving for the Holy Land. Modern research thinks many were in fact poor adult or teenage peasants. The survivors never reached Jerusalem: some were sold as slaves in Marseille, others returned starving.

Explanation: Acre fell on May 18, 1291 to the Mamluks of Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil. It was the last great crusader stronghold in the Holy Land. The Templars and Hospitallers retreated to Cyprus, then Malta and Rhodes. Two centuries of Western military effort had just gone up in smoke in six weeks.

Explanation: Frederick II Hohenstaufen, excommunicated by the pope, personally negotiated with Sultan al-Kamil and recovered Jerusalem without a fight, through a treaty. He crowned himself king of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulchre in 1229. The episode deeply embarrassed the papacy: nobody had planned for a crusade to succeed through talking.

Explanation: The Albigensian Crusade targeted the Cathars of Languedoc, deemed heretics. First time a crusade was launched against Christians. During the sack of Beziers in 1209, a legate is said to have shouted "Kill them all, God will know his own": the phrase is probably apocryphal, but the massacre was very real.

Explanation: Tradition counts 8 major crusades, from 1095 to 1270 (First to Eighth). In reality, historians debate it: some stop at 7, others count a ninth led by the future Edward I of England. It is a useful but arbitrary textbook division.