The Crusades
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The Crusades were a series of European military expeditions to the eastern Mediterranean between 1096 and 1291, launched to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim rule and later extended to other fronts. The First Crusade followed the appeal of Urban II at Clermont in 1095; the travelling armies took Nicaea and Antioch and in 1099 Jerusalem itself, where the massacre of its inhabitants was remembered on both sides. Four Latin states were founded along the coast, but they remained fragile and depended on constant reinforcement. Saladin recovered Jerusalem in 1187 after his victory at Hattin, prompting the Third Crusade of Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus and Frederick Barbarossa, which recovered the coast but not the city. The Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land at all: diverted by Venetian interests and dynastic intrigue, it sacked Christian Constantinople in 1204 and installed a Latin emperor. Later expeditions targeted Egypt, the Baltic pagans and the heretical Cathars in southern France. Commerce, law and the transmission of Greek and Arabic learning grew along the routes the armies used, while long contact hardened attitudes between Latin Christendom and both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Acre, the last major Crusader stronghold, fell in 1291.