Meeting the main players

The Crusades began in 1095, when diverse Europeans, answering a call from the

pope and united in religious zeal (or so they said), tried to free the Holy Land,

Palestine, from Turk rulers. They weren’t the Ottoman Turks, whose great empire

would supplant the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, but rather their

predecessors in Middle Eastern empire-building, the Seljuk Turks.

The Seljuk Turks were a nomadic and marauding population of barbarians from wild

north central Asia. Barbarians show up in Chapters 5 and 6 as well as in this chapter

because they kept showing up in successive centuries — riding into lands as diverse

and far-flung as China and Spain.

Like the China-conquering Mongols, the Turks called their chiefs by the title khan. In

the early centuries of the first millennium, Turks were a subject people, paying tribute

(sort of like taxation without representation) to another barbarian group, the Juan-

Juan. But as the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries spread the

religion Islam, the Turks converted and adopted the Arab fervor for empire-building.

The Seljuk ascendancy (conquering Asia Minor in the eleventh century and beating the

armies of the Byzantine Empire) alarmed Christendom (the Christian world) all the way

back to Rome, where the last straw for Pope Urban II was the Seljuk takeover of

Palestine. Western Christians felt possessive about this land — today’s Israel and the

Palestinian territories — because Jesus of Nazareth had lived and died there and it

contained the holiest shrines of Christianity. Meanwhile, nobody asked the people

living in Palestine if they wanted to be freed from Turkish rule.

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