Far to the south, in the Iberian peninsula, a few small surviving Christian outposts had meanwhile begun the long struggle to recapture lands held by the Moslems. Early in the 11th century, the once powerful Moorish Caliphate of Cordova had splintered into small fragments which immediately set out to fight each other, presenting a golden opportunity to the Christian lords of Leon, Castile, Navarre and Aragon. The only problem was that these lords, too, were still so involved in their private little wars with each other that they failed to take advantage of the situation. It was not until the very end of the century that the kingdom of Castile showed some initiative and captured the great Moslem city of Toledo; rival Aragon then undertook an offensive of its own, capturing Saragossa in 1118. But for nearly another hundred years thereafter, little advance was made. Finally, in 1212, when ambitious Pope Innocent III proclaimed a Holy Crusade against Moslem Spain, the work of reconquest began in earnest. In that year, Castile won a decisive victory at Navas de Tolosa; James I of Aragon – called El Conquistador – captured the Balearic Islands and Valencia; and Ferdinand III of Castile took Cordoba and Seville. Before the end of the 13th century, the Moslems held little more than the southern kingdom of Granada; there, however, they held on for another 200 years, until the very eve of the most momentous event in Spanish history, when Christopher Columbus set out to capture for the Spanish Crown an immense empire in a new world.
Papal calls for Holy Crusades against Islam were by then a familiar theme in the Christian world, already preceded by a much more ambitious enterprise – the freeing of the Holy City of Jerusalem. Ever since the Islamic conquests of the 7th century, Jerusalem had been in Arab hands, though the Moslems had not only tolerated Christianity, but had continued to permit the traditional Christian pilgrimages into Jerusalem and to the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb of Christ. Pilgrimages were a deeply rooted practice in European society, performed usually as a penance for sins committed in the past; the holiest, most difficult pilgrimage of all was that journey to Jerusalem. Scores of such treks took place over the centuries, sometimes attended by hundreds, even thousands of repentant sinners.
Toward the end of the 11th century, however, this peaceful state of affairs came to an end. From the north, out of central Asia, came another Moslem people, the Seljuk Turks. They broke into the Caliphate of Baghdad, conquered Armenia and Asia Minor almost to the very gates of Constantinople. To once mighty Byzantium, this was a major catastrophe. When Alexius I ascended the throne, the empire consisted of Constantinople and the coastal area and little else, and even that was already under attack from Sicily. Without a fleet or an adequate army, besieged on all sides, Alexius turned to the West for help; in 1094, an embassy arrived in Rome with a formal request to Pope Urban II for aid from the Christian soldiers of Western Europe.
The Pope quickly seized this golden opportunity to re-assert leadership over the Western world. Winning back Jerusalem had been a centuries-long dream shared by many Christians, and now it even offered the possibility of reuniting the Eastern and Western Churches into one universal Christendom. In November 1095, at Clermont, Pope Urban II appealed to the knights and nobles of Europe to forget their private battles and to join forces for the rescue of the Holy City.
And the Western world, for once united in a common cause, responded enthusiastically. Throughout France, England, the Low Countries, and Italy, knights, clergy, nobles, even kings sewed the emblem of the cross to their tunics, and with the battle-cry of ‘God Wills It!’ they started out on the Holy Crusades. For a century and a half, armies and hordes of adventurers trampled across Europe and into Asia, inspired by Christian fervor and dreams of a Christianized Holy Land.
As military expeditions, the Crusades accomplished very little indeed. Usually organized without proper leadership, the swarms of European warriors wound up fighting for far less noble motives. The Roman Church, of course, was looking to subdue and replace the imperial Byzantine Church; Norman knights, in particular, appear to have been drawn primarily to a rich new world of plunder; and nearly everyone else had been aroused to a deep hatred for the Moslem infidel by the appeals of propagandists and the exaggerations of the horrors and cruelties supposedly perpetuated on the Holy Land. At any rate, Jerusalem, twice captured, lost and recaptured, was finally lost again to the Turks, who retained possession of the Holy City for another 600 years. Divided, with manpower and financial resources in short supply, the European armies failed again and again in seven distinct Crusades and several minor ones. With the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the 14th century, moreover, Europe, far from conquering the Holy Land, was forced to defend its own borders.
But the spirit of the Crusades continued, with Rome never ceasing its appeals. The rescue of the Holy Land was still in the minds of 15th-century Portuguese and Spanish explorers who began to strike out far beyond the confines of the old Mediterranean world. Even as late as 1492, Christopher Columbus still felt compelled to pledge a part of his anticipated profits from his discovery to the conquest of the Holy Land.
In most other respects, however, the Crusades were to have far-reaching influences on the lives of the Western European people. The most immediate result was a renewed interest in commerce, not only within Europe, but with the outside world, which had for so long been so completely ignored. Since there was no place and no method of selling any surplus products in all Europe, the Western people had long ago stopped to produce surplus of any sort; and since there was no longer any merchandise to sell, there had been no need for merchants. 11th-century Europe knew nothing of commercial enterprises, and profit by trade was an entirely foreign idea to its people.
But even the medieval domains of Europe could not live entirely without some sort of trade. Certain necessities of life simply had to be obtained from outside sources – salt, for example, or iron for tools and weapons. Also, during the all too-frequent times of local crop failures and famines, the inhabitants were often forced to seek help from a neighboring domain or province. But such goods were traded only out of necessity; there was no profit motive involved, nor any professional middlemen to handle the action.
Only in a few Italian towns, those with connections to Byzantium, had the merchant survived. Venice, Naples and Genoa, though little more than mere shadows of their Roman greatness, had continued to keep up a regular trade with the East. If Christian shipowners no longer dared to cross the Mediterranean Sea, which had become the haunt of Moslem pirates, the coastal trade to the Byzantine Empire had remained relatively safe. Constantinople was still a commercial center, just as it had been in ancient times, and it was from this city that the overland trade routes led to the Far East, across the Black Sea, and up the rivers of Russia into the Baltic lands.