the first crusade essay

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The crusades (1095–1291).

Reliquary Cross

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling

Sword Pommel with the Arms of Pierre de Dreux (ca. 1187–1250), Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond

King Louis IX Carrying the Crown of Thorns

Pyxis Depicting Standing Saints or Ecclesiastics and the Entry into Jerusalem with Christ Riding a Donkey

A Knight of the d'Aluye Family

Gemellion (Hand Basin) with the Arms of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Scene from the Legend of the True Cross

Leaf from a Gospel Book with Four Standing Evangelists

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France

Jean Pucelle

Initial A with the Battle of the Maccabees

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi

Godfroy de Bouillon

Colin Nouailher

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem (from a set of Scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata)

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, abside

Auguste Salzmann

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, détails des chapiteaux

[Interior, Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem]

Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters , The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2001 (originally published) February 2014 (last revised)

The First Crusade Most historians consider the sermon preached by Pope Urban II at Clermont-Ferrand in November 1095 to have been the spark that fueled a wave of military campaigns to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control. Considered at the time to be divinely sanctioned, these campaigns, involving often ruthless battles, are known as the Crusades. At their core was a desire for access to shrines associated with the life and ministry of Jesus, above all the Holy Sepulcher, the church in Jerusalem said to contain the tomb of Christ ( 2005.100.373.100 ). Absolution from sin and eternal glory were promised to the Crusaders, who also hoped to gain land and wealth in the East. Nobles and peasants responded in great number to the call and marched across Europe to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire . With the support of the Byzantine emperor, the knights , guided by Armenian Christians ( 57.185.3 ), tenuously marched to Jerusalem through Seljuq-controlled territories in modern Turkey and Syria. In June 1099, the Crusaders began a five-week siege of Jerusalem, which fell on July 15, 1099 ( 92.1.15 ). Eyewitness accounts attest to the terror of battle. Ralph of Caen, watching the city from the Mount of Olives, saw “the scurrying people, the fortified towers, the roused garrison, the men rushing to arms, the women in tears, the priests turned to their prayers, the streets ringing with cries, crashing, clanging and neighing.”

The Crusaders took over many of the cities on the Mediterranean coast and built a large number of fortified castles across the Holy Land to protect their newly established territories ( 28.99.1 ), while also establishing churches loyal to Rome. For the Crusaders, the Dome of the Rock was the Temple of Solomon; the Aqsa mosque was converted to use as a palace and stables.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem established by the Crusaders boasted fifteen cathedral churches. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, for example, became the seat of a Western Christian bishop in 1110 ( 1988.1174.9 ).

Artists from different traditions met in the city of Jerusalem, with, for example, Syrian goldworkers on the right of the market near the Holy Sepulcher, and Latin goldworkers on the left (Conder 1896). Indeed, metalwork from this period sometimes combines an Islamic aesthetic with Christian subject matter ( 1971.39a,b ). Some pieces even bear an inscription indicating that they were made by an Islamic goldsmith for a Christian. Precious works of art fashioned for the churches of Europe celebrated their links to the Holy Land ( 2002.18 ; Toulouse Cathedral Limoges Reliquary ).

Second and Third Crusade In 1147–49, the Second Crusade, championed by the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux ( 1975.1.70b ), attempted to take Damascus in Syria. The campaign was a dismal failure because the Muslims had regrouped. Led by Salah al-Din (Saladin), Muslim forces advanced across Syria and finally retook Jerusalem in October 1187. Saladin was credited by his personal secretary with allowing the Patriarch of Jerusalem to leave the city with the church’s treasure, explaining: “If we make excuses [to confiscate this wealth] they [the Franks] will accuse us of treachery … let us not make them accuse people of faith of breaking their oaths. Let them go. They will talk about our benevolence” (Mohamed el-Moctar, in Paul and Yaeger, 2012, p. 209).

Entering the city, a vizier of Saladin marveled at how the Crusaders had beautified Jerusalem: “the care of the unbelievers had transformed [it] into a Paradise garden … those accursed ones defended with the lance and sword this city, which they had rebuilt with columns and slabs of marble [ 2005.100.373.86 ], where they had founded churches and the palaces of the Templars and the hospitallers … One sees on every side houses as pleasant as their gardens and bright with white marble and columns decorated with leaves, which make them look like living trees” (quoting Kadi el-Fadel in Hamilton, 1979).

By the end of the Third Crusade (1189–92), Crusader forces had gained Cyprus and the coastal city of Acre. Saladin guaranteed access to Jerusalem to European pilgrims and welcomed Jews back to the city as well.

The chronicle of the Spanish-born Ibn Jubayr, who traveled to Mecca from 1183 to 1185, speaks of the ease of trade in the Holy Land, even in times of military hostilities: “the Muslims continuously journeyed from Damascus to Acre (through Frankish territory), and likewise not one of the Christian merchants was stopped and hindered (in Muslim territories) … The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace” (as cited in Paul and Yaeger, 2012, p. 34).

The Fourth Crusade With each crusade, relations between the Byzantines and the Western forces became more estranged. The Fourth Crusade set out in 1202 with Egypt as its goal. After choosing sides in a dynastic dispute in Byzantium, however, the Crusaders turned their siege upon Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople, to collect an enormous sum of money that had been promised for their support. The city was sacked in 1204, its rich treasures divided between the Venetians (the lion’s share of which remains in the Treasury of San Marco, Venice), the French, and other Crusaders. The Latin Empire of Constantinople was established with Baldwin of Flanders as emperor. In 1261, the Byzantines regained the city .

Later Crusades Successive crusades were launched to the Holy Land. The knight Jean d’Alluye traveled to the Holy Land around 1240, but the circumstances of his voyage are not known ( 25.120.201 ).

The Seventh and Eighth Crusades, in 1248 ( 38.60 ) and 1270, were sponsored by Louis IX , who died in Tunisia ( 54.1.2 ; 37.173.3 ). In 1271, Sultan Baibars captured Montfort Castle ( 28.99.1 ), and in 1291, the Crusader city of Acre fell, ending the era of Latin Crusader kingdoms. Calls for new crusades over the next centuries were increasingly ignored, despite the renown in which Crusaders and the Holy Land were held in legend ( 1993.65.4 ; 23.21.4 ; 25.120.528 ; 25.120.529 ; 54.1.1 ; Belles Heures Heraclius leaf, folio 156 ).

Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “The Crusades (1095–1291).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/crus/hd_crus.htm (originally published October 2001, last revised February 2014)

Additional Essays by Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters

Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Art for the Christian Liturgy in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Classical Antiquity in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Private Devotion in Medieval Christianity .” (October 2001)
Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ The Art of the Book in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ The Cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Stained Glass in Medieval Europe .” (October 2001)

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The Crusades: Causes & Goals

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The Crusades were a series of military campaigns organised by Christian powers in order to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. There would be eight officially sanctioned crusades between 1095 CE and 1270 CE and many more unofficial ones. Each campaign met with varying successes and failures but, ultimately, the wider objective of keeping Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Christian hands failed. Nevertheless, the appeal of the crusading ideal continued right up to the 16th century CE, and the purpose of this article is to consider what were the motivating factors for crusaders, from the Pope to the humblest warrior, especially for the very first campaign which established a model to be followed thereafter.

Who Wanted What in the Crusades?

Why the Crusades happened at all is a complex question with multiple answers. As the historian J. Riley-Smith notes:

It cannot be stressed often enough that crusades were arduous, disorientating, frightening, dangerous, and expensive for participants, and the continuing enthusiasm for them displayed over the centuries is not easy to explain. (10)

An estimated 90,000 men, women , and children of all classes were persuaded by political and religious leaders to participate in the First Crusade (1095-1102 CE), and their various motivations, along with those of the political and religious leaders of the time, must each be examined to reach a satisfactory explanation. Although we can never know exactly the thoughts or motivation of individuals, the general reasons why the crusading ideal was promoted and acted upon can be summarised according to the following key leaders and social groups:

The Byzantine Emperor - to regain lost territory and defeat a threatening rival state.
The Pope - to strengthen the papacy in Italy and achieve ascendancy as head of the Christian church.
Merchants - to monopolise important trading centres currently under Muslim control and earn money shipping crusaders to the Middle East.
Knights - to defend Christianity (its believers and holy places), follow the principles of chivalry and gain material wealth in this life and special favour in the next one.

The Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire had long been in control of Jerusalem and other sites holy to Christians but, in the latter decades of the 11th century CE, they lost them dramatically to the Seljuks, a Turkish tribe of the steppe. The Seljuks, already having made several raids into Byzantine territory, shockingly defeated a Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in ancient Armenia in August 1071 CE. They even captured the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (r. 1068-1071 CE), and although he was released for a massive ransom, the emperor also had to hand over the important cities of Edessa , Hieropolis, and Antioch . The defeat astonished Byzantium , and there followed a scramble for the throne which even Romanos' return to Constantinople did not settle. It also meant that many of the Byzantine commanders in Asia Minor left their commands to stake their claim for the throne in Constantinople.

Meanwhile, the Seljuks took full advantage of this military neglect and, c. 1078 CE, created the Sultanate of Rum with their capital at Nicaea in Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor, which was captured from the Byzantines in 1081 CE. The Seljuks were even more ambitious, though, and by 1087 CE they controlled Jerusalem.

Several Byzantine emperors came and went but some stability was achieved during the reign of Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118 CE), himself a veteran of Manzikert. Alexios could not stop the Seljuks though, and he had only himself to blame for his territorial losses as it was he who had weakened the military provinces ( themes ) in Asia Minor. Alexios had done this in fear of the rising power, and thus potential threat to himself, of the theme commanders. Instead, he had bolstered the garrisons of Constantinople. The emperor had also been doubtful of the loyalty of his Norman mercenaries, given the Norman control of Sicily and recent attacks in Byzantine Greece . Seeing the Seljuk control of Jerusalem as a means to tempt European leaders into action, Alexios appealed to the west in the spring of 1095 CE to help kick the Seljuks out of not just the Holy Land but also all those parts of the Byzantine Empire they had conquered. The sword of Christendom could prove a very useful weapon in preserving the crown of Byzantium.

Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099 CE) received Alexios' appeal in 1095 CE, but it was not the first time the Byzantine emperor had asked and got papal help. In 1091 CE the pope had sent troops to help the Byzantines against the Pecheneg steppe nomads who were invading the northern Danube area of the empire. Urban II was again disposed to assistance four years later for various reasons. A crusade would increase the prestige of the papacy, as it led a combined western army, and consolidate its position in Italy itself, having experienced serious threats from the Holy Roman Emperors in the previous century which had even forced the popes to relocate away from Rome .

Urban II also hoped to reunite the Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christian churches, with himself at its head, above the Patriarch of Constantinople. The two churches had been split since 1054 CE over disagreements about doctrine and liturgical practices. The Crusades could be given wider appeal by playing on the threat of Islam to Christian territories and the Christians living there. Most important of all though was the loss of Christian control of the Holy Land with its unique sites of historical significance to Christianity, particularly the tomb of Jesus Christ , the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. On top of that, Spain was a reminder of how precarious the Christian world's situation really was. By 1085 CE half of Spain was back in Christian hands, and the Normans had wrested Sicily back to the Christian fold, but the Muslim threat in Europe remained a potent one, something Urban II could now remind people of. The appeal of Alexios I Komnenos had all sorts of political and religious advantages.

On 27 November 1095 CE, Urban II called for a crusade in a speech during the Council of Clermont , France. The message, known as the Indulgence and aimed specifically at knights, was loud and clear: those who defended Christendom would be embarking on a pilgrimage, all their sins would be washed away and their souls would reap untold rewards in the next life. In medieval Europe, Christianity permeated every aspect of daily life, pilgrimage was common, monasteries were full and the number of newly created saints booming. The idea of sin was especially prevalent and so Urban II's promise of immunity from its consequences would have appealed to many. Crucially, too, the church could condone a campaign of violence because it was one of liberation (not attack) and it had a just and righteous aim.

Urban II embarked on a preaching tour in France during 1095-6 CE to recruit crusaders, where his message was spiced up with exaggerated tales of how, at that very moment, Christian monuments were being defiled and Christian believers persecuted and tortured with impunity. Embassies and letters were dispatched to all parts of Christendom. Major churches such as those at Limoges, Angers, and Tours acted as recruitment centres, as did many rural churches and especially the monasteries. Across Europe, warriors gathered throughout 1096 CE, ready to embark for Jerusalem.

Merchants, although not so involved in the First Crusade, certainly became more involved from 1200 CE as they wanted to open up trade routes with the East, even to control such prosperous trade centres as Antioch and Jerusalem. Further, merchants could make a handsome profit from ferrying crusaders across the Mediterranean . Indeed, from the Second Crusade (1147-1149 CE), lucrative contracts were drawn up beforehand to ship armies across to the Middle East. The Italian trading states of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, as well as Marseille in France, were particular rivals, and each was eager to gain a monopoly on east-west trade. It should be remembered, though, that these cities also provided plenty of religious zealots keen to fight for the Christian cause and not just make cash from it.

European Knights

By the 11th century CE society in medieval Europe had become increasingly militarised. Central governments simply did not have the means to govern on the ground across every part of their territories. Those who did govern in practice at local level were large landowners, the barons who had castles and a force of knights to defend them. Knights, even kings and princes, too, joined the crusades for religious principles, a reward in the afterlife perhaps or the pure ideal that Christians and Christian sites must be protected from the infidel. It is important perhaps to note that there was only a very limited racial or religious hatred specifically against those who had usurped the Holy Land. Although the clergy certainly used the tools of propaganda available to them and delivered recruitment sermons across Europe, the fact that Muslims were virtually unknown to their audience meant that any demonisation had little value. Muslims were the enemy because they had taken Christian holy sites, not directly because they were Muslims. This important point is stressed by the historian M. Bull in the following terms:

Popular understanding of the crusades nowadays tends to think in terms of a great conflict between faiths fuelled by religious fanaticism. This perception is bound up with modern sensibilities about religious discrimination, and it also has resonances in reactions to current political conflicts in the Near East and elsewhere. But it is a perspective which, at least as far as the First Crusade is concerned, needs to be rejected. (Riley-Smith, 18)

For willing knights there was also the chance to win booty, lands, and perhaps even a title. Land might have to be sold and equipment was expensive, though, so there was certainly a major financial sacrifice to be made at the outset. Monasteries were on hand to arrange loans for this who struggled to meet the initial costs. There was, too, the idea of chivalry - that a knight should 'do the right thing' and protect not only the interests of their church and god but also those of the weak and oppressed. In the 11th century CE the code of chivalry was still in its infancy and so was more concerned with upholding a brotherhood of arms. Thus the relevance of chivalry as motivation to join the First Crusade is perhaps more to do with the importance of being seen to do what was expected of one by one's peers, and only in later crusades would its moral aspects become more prominent and the message fuelled by songs and poems of daring crusader deeds.

Many knights, too, were simply obliged to join their baron or lord as part of the service they performed to earn a living. Technically, crusaders were volunteers but one can imagine that staying at home to tend the castle fireplace while one's lord and benefactor rode off to the Middle East was not a practical option for knights in service. In addition, many knights followed their fathers or brothers as ties of kinship and mutual protection were strong. As the Crusades continued, traditions and expectations were established within families so that at least one member of each generation was expected to continue to fight for the cause.

Besides knights, the idea of a crusade had to appeal to ordinary foot soldiers, archers, squires, and all the non-combatants needed to support the cavalry units of knights when on campaign. That the ideal did appeal to ordinary folk, including women, is illustrated by such events as the people's army led by the preacher Peter the Hermit which gathered and arrived in Constantinople in 1096 CE. The unruly army, sometimes referred to as the “People's Crusade”, were promptly shipped by Alexios I Komnenos to Asia Minor, where, ignoring the Byzantine's advice, they were ambushed and wiped out near Nicaea by a Seljuk army on 21 October 1096 CE.

Besides the prestige and honour of 'taking up the cross', so called because crusaders wore a badge on the shoulder on their tunic or cloak, there were some practical benefits for ordinary citizens, at least by the 13th century CE. These included a delay in feudal service, a court case might be speeded up before departure, an exemption from certain taxes and tolls, a postponement of the repayment of debts, and even a release from excommunication.

As the historian C. Tyerman points out in his God's War , in many ways 1095 CE was the 1914 CE of the Middle Ages - a perfect storm of moral outrage, personal gain, institutionalised political and religious propaganda, peer pressure, societal expectations, and a thirst for adventure, which all combined to inspire people to leave their homes and embark on a perilous journey to a destination they knew nothing about and where they might meet glory and death or just death. The fervour did not dissipate either. If anything, the success of the First Crusade and the recapture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 CE only inspired more people to 'take the cross'. The idea of crusading spread to such endeavours as liberating Spain from the Moors (the Reconquista ) and attacking minority targets in Europe such as the Jews, pagans, and heretics (the Northern Crusades ). Orders of knights were created to defend the territories gained in the Middle East, and taxes were continuously raised to fund the crusades which followed as Muslim and Christian armies enjoyed both successes and failures, constantly keeping cartographers busy for the next four centuries.

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Bibliography

Asbridge, T. The Crusades. Ecco, 2011.
Gregory, T.E. A History of Byzantium. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Mango, C. The Oxford History of Byzantium. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Phillips, J. The Crusades, 1095-1204. Routledge, 2014.
Riley-Smith, J. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades. Oxford University Press, 1995.
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Tyerman. C. God's War. Belknap Press, 2009.

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Ancient History

Sieges, starvation, and salvation: the First Crusade explained

A crusading knight marching along a dusty road

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for an 'armed pilgrimage' to reclaim the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim control.

This sparked a movement that would last for 400 years called 'crusades' that would ultimately reshape both Europe and the Middle East.

The very first of these crusades would last for over the next four years, and would see tens of thousands of knights, nobles, and peasants embarked on a perilous journey to the Holy Land.

It would turn out to be the only armed pilgrimage to ever achieve its aims.

What caused the call to crusade?

When Pope Urban II made the call to crusade in 1095, it was the culmination of a number of causes that had developed over centuries.

It was often said that it was partly motivated by the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in AD 638 during the Rashidun Caliphate under Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab.

This was part of the Muslim conquest of the Levant, following the decisive Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE against the Byzantine Empire.

However, while was a significant blow to Christian pilgrims, who had previously been able to freely visit the city, this particular event had happened over 400 years earlier.

Also, modern historians have seen the call to crusade as a response to the more recent defeat of the Byzantine army by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

But, once more, it had been over twenty years since that had occurred, so it seems like an unlikely primary cause.

Ultimately, the most likely reason for the sudden call to action was a letter that the Byzantine emperor had sent to the pope in 1095, asking for military assistance against the encroaching Seljuk Turks.

It appears that the emperor may have expected the pope to send paid mercenaries.

Instead, Pope Urban II may have simply used the letter as a useful pretext to retake Jerusalem and unite Christendom against Islam.

Regardless of the direct cause, Pope Urban made the famous call for a crusade while he was at the Council of Clermont in France, in November of 1095.

It was a fiery speech that inspired thousands of nobles and peasants alike to take suddenly leave their lives in Europe and take up arms in the name of Christendom.

Preparations for crusade

The First Crusade was not well-organized nor well-planned. The major feudal lords who took up Urban's call did so for their own reasons, and they did not coordinate their efforts.

However, raising an army and organising a large invasion force took time, so the lords took a few months to arrange their affairs.

In the meantime, a different group started out first, known as t he Peasant's Crusade (or the People's Crusade).

They were a motley group of untrained peasants and commoners, led by Peter the Hermit.

He was an inspiring preacher who told the people that God would provide them with a miraculous victory over non-Christians.

As many as 40,000 common people from northern France and parts of Germany followed Peter the Hermit as they made their way east, towards the Holy Land.

However, on the way, the common people who had joined the People's Crusade used it as an excuse to attack local Jewish people, particularly in the Rhineland.

The Jews were seen as enemies of Christendom, and many crusaders saw the opportunity to kill them as a way to gain God's favor.

In May of 1096, a crusader mob in Mainz attacked a Jewish community, killing many people and plundering their homes and businesses.

This event set off a wave of anti-Jewish violence across Europe, as crusaders targeted Jews for conversion or death.

Eventually, the Peasant's Crusade reached the Byzantine empire in July 1096 and crossed into Asia Minor, where the Turkish armies were waiting.

The crusaders were poorly organized and had little chance of success against trained soldiers.

In their first battle with the Muslim forces, the People's Crusade was easily defeated Civetot in October 1096, where the poorly organized and untrained crusaders were ambushed and slaughtered by the Seljuk Turks near Nicaea.

Thousands were slaughtered, while some were captured alive and sold as slaves. Peter the Hermit had fled back to Constantinople and would join the First Crusade when it eventually arrived.

The First Crusade begins

The main body of the First Crusade, which is often known as the Princes' Crusade (to distinguish it from the Peasant's Crusade) set out from France in the late summer of 1096.

The crusaders were a mixed group of people from all over Europe. There were knights, nobles, peasants, and commoners.

Many of them had no experience in warfare. They formed into four different armies based upon the region of Europe they originated from, and were led by different groups of nobles.

Each of the four armies took different routes towards the east so that the considerable number of men didn't exhaust the food reserves along each road.

The main French forces were led by Raymond IV of Toulouse, while the army from Lorraine was commanded by Godfrey of Bouillon, and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne.

A third army of Italian-Norman men were led by Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred.

The fourth group was made up of northern French solders led by Robert Curthose (Robert II of Normandy), Stephen of Blois, Hugh of Vermandois, and Robert II of Flanders.

The combined number of people who set out as part of these forces, both soldiers and support staff, may have been as many as 100,000 strong.

Arrival in Byzantium

In 1096, the main body of the crusade, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, arrived in Constantinople, which was the capital city of the Byzantine Empire.

At this time, the Byzantine Empire was one of the richest and most powerful states in the Mediterranean world.

The Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I, appeared to be shocked by the large size of the armies that had responded to his letter.

He was probably even more surprised to learn that the soldiers were volunteers rather than paid mercenaries with battle experience.

However, the newly arrived forces posed a problem for the emperor. All of the soldiers needed to be fed and hydrated on a daily basis and, despite its wealth and size, the city of Constantinople could not support this number of men for long.

Alexios had to decide to either turn the forces away or move them across the Bosphorus strait as quickly as possible to alleviate the pressures on his empire.

After meeting with the leaders of the crusade and giving them approval to pass through his lands, the Byzantine emperor provided ships to ferry them across the water to Asia Minor and the Muslim territories. They landed in April of 1097.

The decision to allow the crusaders to cross their territory was a risky one, but it proved to be crucial in the eventual success of the crusade.

Once on the opposite shore, the crusaders were in hostile territory and had to embark on a difficult journey across Asia Minor in order to reach the Holy Land.

They were constantly harassed by the Seljuk Turks and had to fight several battles along the way.

Siege of Nicaea

The first major battle of the crusade was the Siege of Nicaea, in 1097. The crusaders arrived at Nicaea in early May, and they quickly began to besiege the city.

The Seljuk Turks inside the city were outnumbered and outmatched by the crusaders.

The Turkish governor, Kilij Arslan, had fled from the city when the crusaders approached in order to raise a relief force.

However, before he could return, Nicaea surrendered in June 1097 after only a one-month siege.

When the crusaders entered the city, they were shocked to learn that Manuel Butumites and Tatikios, Byzantine commanders, had reached an agreement with the defenders that Nicaea was to be officially handed back to Emperor Alexius.

This meant that the crusaders, who had done all the fighting and dying, were not able to take charge of the city nor gain any wealth from its capture.

While the western knights were disappointed, the fall of Nicaea was still a significant victory, as it gave them a friendly city in Asia Minor.

Battle of Dorylaeum

The next major battle came just a few weeks later at Dorylaeum, on the 1st July of 1097.

The Seljuk Turks, under the command of Kilij Arslan, had been gathering an army to oppose the crusaders, and they attacked them while they were crossing the high, open plains of central Asia Minor.

The crusaders were outnumbered and surrounded, but they were able to fight their way out of the encirclement and defeat the Seljuk Turks.

The battle was a close one, but this victory boosted morale and gave the crusading forces the confidence to continue their march towards Jerusalem.

Siege of Antioch

The crusaders arrived in Antioch in early October of 1097. The crusaders were again outnumbered, but they were able to maintain a siege of the city during the difficult winter months.

Lack of food meant that starvation weakened the attacks. By May, some of the crusaders were losing hope.

A small number of leaders, the most famous of which was Stephen of Blois, gave up on the crusade and returned to Constantinople.

Finally, Antioch was captured by the remaining crusaders on the 3rd of June, 1098, after one of the defenders accepted a bribe to allow the besiegers to sneak into the city one night.

However, the crusaders were quickly besieged inside the city themselves, as a large Muslim relieving force, led by Kerbogha of Mosul, arrived soon after the city had fallen to the Europeans.

Short of food and likely not to be able to survive the siege, a period of infighting and rivalry broke out among the crusaders.

However, on the 15th of June, 1098, a religious leader among the crusaders, called Peter Bartholomew, claimed to have miraculously found the Holy Lance under the floor of one of the churches in Antioch.

This sacred relic was said to be the spear that had pierced Jesus' side during his crucifixion.

The discovery of the Holy Lance helped to unite and inspire the crusaders, who believed that the relic would provide them with a miraculous victory over the enemy.

So, on the 28th of June, 1098, the crusaders charged out of the city of Antioch, led by Bohemond of Taranto, and defeated the Muslim army against tremendous odds.

The capture of Antioch and the defeat of the Muslim army was a significant victory.

It gave the crusaders a secure location to use as a base in the Holy Land, and it opened up the way to Jerusalem.

However, it also caused tensions within the crusade, as some crusaders wanted to return home with their loot while others pressed on towards Jerusalem.

The capture of Jerusalem

The final battle of the First Crusade was the Siege of Jerusalem. The crusaders finally arrived at Jerusalem in June 1099, after a difficult march through hostile territory.

The city was defended by the Fatimid Caliphate, but the crusaders met with little resistance from the Muslim defenders.

On the 15th of July 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon and his soldiers broke through the city walls and enter Jerusalem.

Once inside, the crusaders massacred the Muslim and Jewish population of the city.

The crusaders then began to establish Latin Christian rule over the city.

Following the capture of Jerusalem, the crusaders secured their victory at the Battle of Ascalon on August 12, 1099, where Godfrey of Bouillon led a force that decisively defeated the Fatimid army, ensuring Christian control over the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Aftermath of the First Crusade

The First Crusade was a resounding success for the Latin Christians. They had captured Jerusalem and established a foothold in the Holy Land.

The crusaders also formed four new Crusader states: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the County of Tripoli.

However, this victory would not last. Within fifty years, Muslim forces began to retake many of the cities that had been captured by the crusaders.

By 1144, only Jerusalem and Antioch remained in Christian hands.

Despite its eventual failure, the First Crusade was an important event in medieval history.

It demonstrated the power of medieval Christianity and showed that European knights were capable of defeating even the most powerful Muslim armies.

What were the motivations of the crusaders?

The Church was at the heart of the running of Medieval Europe, and the core of the daily lives of those living in the Middle Ages. As such, the First Crusade was heavily influenced by religion, in spite of the financial gain that the church would benefit from upon reclaiming Jerusalem. In fact, in his speech in Clermont, Pope Urban urged people to take up the cross based on purely devotional reasons, suggesting that they “take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves, Jerusalem prays to be liberated”. Religious reasons were also given for the violence that would take place on the crusade, with the Pope stating that “Christ commands it”. In spite of this, some historians have argued that the crusaders were purely motivated by money - many of them were incredibly poor and some were even criminals, which would make the prospect of earnings and territory in the Holy Land incredibly appealing. However, Indulgence still remained the biggest prize, with Christians offered “imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven” if they were to take part. Many modern historians have concluded that the figures, which show that 659 people left on the crusaders and only 104 settled, support the idea that the crusade was a pilgrimage with a spiritual focus.

MLA Citation/Reference

"The First Crusade". HistoryLearning.com. 2024. Web.

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Introduction & Top Questions

The effects of religion

The council of clermont.

Preparations for the Crusade
From Constantinople to Antioch
The siege of Jerusalem
The Crusader states
The Second Crusade
The Crusader states to 1187
The military orders
Legal practices
The Third Crusade
The Latin East after the Third Crusade
The Fourth Crusade and the Latin empire of Constantinople
The Albigensian Crusade
The Children’s Crusade
The Teutonic Knights and the Baltic Crusades
The Fifth Crusade
The Crusade of Frederick II
The Crusades of St. Louis
The final loss of the Crusader states
The later Crusades
The results of the Crusades
Crusade as metaphor

How many Crusades were there, and when did they take place?
What was the purpose of the Crusades?
Who were the leaders of the Crusades?
Were the Crusades successful?
Were there lasting results from the Crusades?

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The First Crusade and the establishment of the Latin states

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Table Of Contents

Background and context

Although still backward when compared with the other civilizations of the Mediterranean basin, western Europe had become a significant power by the end of the 11th century. It was composed of several kingdoms loosely describable as feudal . While endemic private warfare , brigandage, and problems associated with vassalage and inheritance still existed, some monarchies were already developing better-integrated systems of government. At the same time, Europe was feeling the effects of population growth that had begun toward the end of the 10th century and would continue well into the 13th century. An economic revival was also in full swing well before the First Crusade; forestlands were being cleared, frontiers pushed forward, and markets organized. Moreover, Italian shipping was beginning to challenge the Muslim predominance in the Mediterranean. Especially significant for the Crusade was a general overhaul of the ecclesiastical structure in the 11th century, associated with the Gregorian Reform movement, which enabled the popes to assume a more active role in society. In 1095, for example, Urban II was in a position strong enough to convoke two important ecclesiastical councils, despite meeting resistance from Henry IV , the German emperor, who opposed papal reform policies.

Thus it was that in the closing years of the 11th century western Europe was abounding in energy and confidence. What is more, as is evident in achievements such as the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, Europeans possessed the capacity to launch a major military undertaking at the very time the Seljuq Turks , one of several tribes on the northeastern frontier of the Muslim world who had embraced Islam in the 11th century, were beginning to move south and west into Iran and beyond with all the enthusiasm of a new convert.

The Crusades were also a development of popular religious life and feeling in Europe, particularly in western Europe. The social effect of religious belief at the time was complex: religion was moved by tales of signs and wonders, and it attributed natural disasters to supernatural intervention. At the same time, laypersons were not indifferent to reform movements, and on occasion they agitated against clergy whom they regarded as unworthy. A peace movement also developed, especially in France , under the leadership of certain bishops but with considerable popular support. Religious leaders proclaimed the Peace of God and the Truce of God , designed to halt or at least limit warfare and assaults during certain days of the week and times of the year and to protect the lives of clergy, travelers, women, and cattle and others unable to defend themselves against brigandage. It is particularly interesting to note that the Council of Clermont , at which Urban II called for the First Crusade (1095), renewed and generalized the Peace of God.

It may seem paradoxical that a council both promulgated peace and officially sanctioned war, but the peace movement was designed to protect those in distress, and a strong element of the Crusade was the idea of giving aid to fellow Christians in the East. Tied to this idea was the notion that war to defend Christendom was not only a justifiable undertaking but a holy work and therefore pleasing to God.

Closely associated with this Western concept of holy war was another popular religious practice, pilgrimage to a holy shrine. Eleventh-century Europe abounded in local shrines housing relics of saints , but three great centres of pilgrimage stood out above the others: Rome , with the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul ; Santiago de Compostela , in northwestern Spain; and Jerusalem , with the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus Christ ’s entombment. Pilgrimage, which had always been considered an act of devotion, had also come to be regarded as a more formal expiation for serious sin, even occasionally prescribed as a penance for the sinner by his confessor.

Yet another element in the popular religious consciousness of the 11th century, one associated with both Crusade and pilgrimage, was the belief that the end of the world was imminent ( see also eschatology and millennialism ). Some scholars have discovered evidence of apocalyptic expectations around the years 1000 and 1033 (the millennium of the birth and Passion of Jesus , respectively), and others have emphasized the continuance of the idea throughout the 11th century and beyond. Moreover, in certain late 11th-century portrayals of the end of all things, the “last emperor,” now popularly identified with the “king of the Franks ,” the final successor of Charlemagne , was to lead the faithful to Jerusalem to await the Second Coming of Christ. Jerusalem, as the earthly symbol of the heavenly city, figured prominently in Western Christian consciousness, and, as the number of pilgrimages to Jerusalem increased in the 11th century, it became clear that any interruption of access to the city would have serious repercussions .

By the middle of the 11th century, the Seljuq Turks had wrested political authority from the ʿAbbāsid caliphs of Baghdad. Seljuq policy, originally directed southward against the Fāṭimids of Egypt, was increasingly diverted by the pressure of Turkmen raids into Anatolia and Byzantine Armenia . A Byzantine army was defeated and Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was captured at Manzikert in 1071, and Christian Asia Minor was thereby opened to eventual Turkish occupation. Meanwhile, many Armenians south of the Caucasus migrated south to join others in the region of the Taurus Mountains and to form a colony in Cilicia .

Seljuq expansion southward continued, and in 1085 the capture of Antioch in Syria , one of the patriarchal sees of Christianity , was another blow to Byzantine prestige . Thus, although the Seljuq empire never successfully held together as a unit, it appropriated most of Asia Minor, including Nicaea, from the Byzantine Empire and brought a resurgent Islam perilously close to Constantinople , the Byzantine capital. It was this danger that prompted the emperor, Alexius Comnenus , to seek aid from the West, and by 1095 the West was ready to respond.

The turmoil of these years disrupted normal political life and made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem difficult and often impossible. Stories of dangers and molestation reached the West and remained in the popular mind even after conditions improved. Furthermore, informed authorities began to realize that the power of the Muslim world now seriously menaced the West as well as the East. It was this realization that led to the Crusades.

Alexius’s appeal came at a time when relations between the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian world were improving. Difficulties between the two in the middle years of the century had resulted in a de facto , though not formally proclaimed, schism in 1054, and ecclesiastical disagreements had been accentuated by Norman occupation of formerly Byzantine areas in southern Italy. A campaign led by the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard against the Greek mainland further embittered the Byzantines , and it was only after Robert’s death in 1085 that conditions for a renewal of normal relations between East and West were reasonably favourable. Envoys of Emperor Alexius Comnenus thus arrived at the Council of Piacenza in 1095 at a propitious moment, and it seems probable that Pope Urban II viewed military aid as a means toward restoring ecclesiastical unity.

The Council of Clermont convoked by Urban on November 18, 1095, was attended largely by bishops of southern France as well as a few representatives from northern France and elsewhere. Much important ecclesiastical business was transacted, which resulted in a series of canons , among them one that renewed the Peace of God and another that granted a plenary indulgence (the remission of all penance for sin) to those who undertook to aid Christians in the East. Then in a great outdoor assembly the pope, a Frenchman, addressed a large crowd.

His exact words will never be known, since the only surviving accounts of his speech were written years later, but he apparently stressed the plight of Eastern Christians, the molestation of pilgrims, and the desecration of the holy places. He urged those who were guilty of disturbing the peace to turn their warlike energies toward a holy cause. He emphasized the need for penance along with the acceptance of suffering and taught that no one should undertake this pilgrimage for any but the most exalted of motives.

The response was immediate and overwhelming, probably far greater than Urban had anticipated. Cries of “Deus le volt” (“God wills it”) were heard everywhere, and it was decided that those who agreed to go should wear a cross . Moreover, it was not only warrior knights who responded; a popular element, apparently unexpected and probably not desired, also came forward.

The era of Clermont witnessed the concurrence of three significant developments: first, there existed as never before a popular religious fervour that was not without marked eschatological tendencies in which the holy city of Jerusalem figured prominently; second, war against the infidel had come to be regarded as a religious undertaking, a work pleasing to God; and finally, western Europe now possessed the ecclesiastical and secular institutional and organizational capacity to plan such an enterprise and carry it through.

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The First Crusade

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The crusades were a series of wars that were mainly religious in nature. The two main sides were Islamic and Christianity. The primary purpose of the war was to secure control of the holy sites considered sacred by each group. A total of eight major crusades took place from 1096 to 1291 ( Krey, 2012). The violent, ruthless and bloody conflict changed the status of the European Christianity, making them key players in the fight for the conquered land in the Middle East. The existence of conflicting cultures between the Muslims and Christianity and the need by the Byzantine emperor to recapture the land lost to Muslim community initiated the call for military actions, prompting the call for the first crusade.

The first crusade of the 1095-1099 was one of the many crusades that were organized by Pope Urban II in an attempt capture the Byzantine Empire which had been conquered by Seljuq Turks. The military expedition re-captured the Holy land which had been conquered by the Islamic expansion. This was a reaction to appeal for military aid by Byzantine emperor. Urban II proposed warfare against the recently occupied cities of Antioch. During the conquests, crusaders established the kingdom of Jerusalem and Antioch, which was against the wish of the Byzantines who wanted their land taken by the Muslims returned to them. The first crusade was brought about by the combination of factors in Europe and the east. The political situation of the Catholic Christendom, political and social state in Europe gave rise to the reform movement within the papacy and a confrontation between Christianity and Islamic religion in the east. Byzantine Empire had to fight back for their land that had been taken by the Muslims, giving rise to more confrontations in the East.

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The Byzantine Empire which was conquered by the Seljuq Turks was mainly Christians. The empire transformed from the late Roman Empire to the Christianity. The churches spread throughout the empire and changed the whole land. Initially they were under the Roman Empire, which was too big too big for them to manage, prompting the division into smaller groups. Constantinople was a city of diversity. The residents were multi-ethnic. The merchants actively traded with the regions in the Mediterranean and east. The empire also witnessed a change in the language during the rule of Constantine. During this period, the language changed to Latin. However, the main spoken language was mainly Greek. After the reign of Justinian, Byzantine Greek became the major language for both written and spoken. The other section of the population still spoke Latin dividing communication. Due to the language differences and diversity in the customs, the two churches emerged. These were the Greek Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church, which all had different beliefs concerning Jesus Christ. They also had different beliefs on the nature of God and the date of Easter. The difference in the culture and the division witnessed in the empire facilitated the conquering of the Byzantine land by the Muslims. In the process some of the Byzantine empires converted to the Islamic religion, creating more diversity in the culture of the people of this empire. The empire lost most of its land to the Islamic religion during the military war, making them seek help from Pope Urban II ( Frankopan, P. 2012) . They wanted to get back their land, and not being used by the Catholic to build churches. After the war, they go back their land which was used by the empire to construct churches.

The conquerors, Seljuq Turkish, were Islamic dominated. They were nomadic horsemen who converted to Islamic they conquered the majority of the Middle East and Asia. They created a huge empire that expended to the Mediterranean and other parts of the Saia. During 1098, they conquered the land of Byzantine where they managed to convert most of the people to Islamic. The first crusade emerged which involved wars between Muslims and Christianity who all wanted to have control of the site they considered sacred and holy. They had gained considerable territory from the Byzantine. The crusade created a stage for many military orders when the two sides fought. They organized troops of different armies led by Raymond and Godfrey who departed for Byzantine in the year 1096 to help fight for the territory ( Gabriele, M. 2011). They believed in war as the only way to acquire the territory of the land they needed. They had a group of military which they used to attack the territory of the Byzantine Empire. Their belief in war and the culture of protecting what was sacred to them provided the driving forces that motivated them to fight for the conquering of the territory. The empire had a different belief from that of Christianity. They believed in the land being holy and a sacred place which they had to protect.

In conclusion, the first crusade involved the military war between the Muslims and Christianity. The war was based on the struggle for the territory where each group wanted to have control over the territory. The two sides had different beliefs about God even though they all recognized the existence of the holy place. The war led to each group adopting the culture of the other. The most affected being the Byzantine who were mainly converted to Muslims by the Seljuq Turkish. Some few Muslims also converted to Christianity. By the end of the eleventh century, Europe had emerged victorious in its right although it ended up losing some of its territories to the Islamic religion.

References

Krey, A. C. (Ed.). (2012). The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eye-Witnesses and Participants (Vol. 1). Arx Publishing, LLC.

Gabriele, M. (2011). An empire of memory: the legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade . Oxford University Press.

Frankopan, P. (2012). The First Crusade: the call from the east . Harvard University Press.

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Religion and the Crusades During Medieval Times
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Relationship Between the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades
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How Crusades Impacted the Changes in the Feudal System Structure in Europe?
How Did the Crusades Affect the Crusades?
How Did the Crusades Begin?
Why Did the Crusades Begin?
Why Did the Crusade Movement Ultimately Fail?
How Has Religion Caused Many Schisms in the History of the Religious Crusades in the Middle East?
How the Crusades Changed the Future for All of Europe?
How the Crusades Contributed to the Formation of Modern Europe?
How the Crusades Influenced a Cultural Change in Art and Literature?
How Did the Crusades Lead Western Europe Into the Renaissance?
How the Religious Crusades Changed the Art of War?
Were the Crusades About Expanding or Defending the Boundaries of Christe?
Were the Crusades Caused Primarily by Religious Devotion or by the Desire for Political and Economic Gain?
Were the Crusades Political or Religious?
Were the Crusades Worthwhile for the People of Europe?
What Are Goals Crusades?
What Were the Costs and Benefits of Cultural Interaction and Trade Spurred by the Crusades?
What Were the Effects of the Crusades?
Who Benefited Most From the Crusades?
Why the 4TH and 5TH Crusades Ended In Failure?
Why the Crusades Were Started?
Why Were the Crusades?
Why Has War and Religion Always Been Walking Hand in Hand?
Is Religion Just a Coverup for War?
What Motivated People Crusades Religious Zeal?
Were the Crusades Successful?
Why Are the Crusades Justified?
How the Crusades Influenced the Roman Catholic Church?
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Expedition Ideas
Renaissance Essay Titles
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Andrew Holt, Ph.D.

History, religion, and academia.

Jonathan Riley-Smith on the Motivations of the First Crusaders

See also: https://apholt.com/2017/07/28/the-most-influential-crusade-historians/

In any consideration of historians’ arguments about the appeal of the First Crusade to the earliest crusaders (as well as the circumstances by which it came about), Jonathan Riley-Smith must be front and center. No other scholar has had as much of an impact on the field of crusade studies over the past forty years than the now retired Cambridge University historian. Indeed, it is not an understatement to note that Riley-Smith, as the author of more than a dozen influential books and many influential essays, has revolutionized the modern historiography of the crusades. This was accomplished not only through his many important publications, but also the many doctoral students he taught at Cambridge who are now also professors at various institutions in North America and Europe that reflect his influence. His influence is also reflected in his role as a founder of the Society for the Study of the Crusades in the Latin East , the world’s leading scholarly society for the study of the crusades.

As a religious historian Riley-Smith has unsurprisingly devoted much of his career to the religious motivations of the crusaders and the religious appeal of the First Crusade. [1] At least as early as 1977, he argued that the crusade was a special type of holy war that was differentiated from all previous Christian holy wars by its unique institutional and penitential nature, thus it had a special religious appeal to those who participated. It was at first associated with pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the most penitential goal of all, and a place where devout Christians went to die, which may be why so many of the earliest crusaders were old men. [2]

Indeed, in the same work, Riley-Smith defined the penitential nature of crusading as its most distinctive feature in comparison with other holy wars. “In particular, I have become much more aware of the penitential element in crusading and the way it coloured the whole movement. I now believe that it was its most important defining feature. [3] Twenty years later Riley-Smith reiterated the same view and highlighted the crusade’s ‘revolutionary’ character. He noted, “It is no exaggeration to say that the idea of penitential warfare was to be a revolutionary one, because it put the act of fighting on the same meritorious plane as prayer, works of mercy, and fasting….” [4]

Such thinking was crystallized in Riley-Smith’s stunningly titled 1980 essay, Crusading as an Act of Love . [5] Here Riley-Smith focused on how the pious idealism of the crusaders inspired them to join the First Crusade as an act of Christian charity or “love.” Thus, the earliest crusaders viewed themselves as engaged in a sacrificial effort to restore Christ’s patrimony and aid suffering Christians in the East who had been requesting military assistance from the west in their efforts to fend off widespread Turkish aggression.

Indeed, as a result of the events of Manzikert in 1071, Muslim armies had conquered much of Christian Asia Minor and the surrounding areas in the years prior to the calling of the First Crusade. The ancient Christian cities of Nicaea and Antioch, for example, fell to Muslim armies in 1081 and 1084, with many Christians enslaved or subjected to dhimmi status as a result. Riley-Smith’s work on crusading charters demonstrated that many of the participants of the First Crusade cited concerns about the suffering of eastern Christians and the desecration of Christian holy places in explaining their reasons for participating.

In his highly regarded book The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, Riley-Smith highlights (see pages 23-24) the charter of two brothers written shortly before they embarked on the First Crusade. They noted that they were going on the crusade, in part, “…to wipe out the defilement of the pagans and the immoderate madness through which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive and killed with barbaric fury.” Thus, the first crusaders saw the First Crusade, during which around 1/3 of the knights who participated would give their lives, as a sacrificial “act of love,” fought on behalf of suffering and humiliated eastern Christians.

Riley-Smith also places a heavy emphasis on ecclesiastical sources. Indeed, his works are full of references to chronicles, letters and encyclicals written by priests and popes, and sometimes saints, all associated with the crusading movement at the highest and most intimate levels.

Beginning with Pope Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, for example, Riley-Smith uses ecclesiastical sources to claim that the pope based his appeal for the crusade on the necessity of Christian suffering and sacrifice. Rather than wealth or riches, the First Crusade, according to the pope, offered the perfect opportunity for redemptive suffering and sacrifice, as the crusaders, many of whom were not soldiers, would undoubtedly face numerous hardships as they trekked across continents fighting battles against their Muslim foes. [6] Indeed, Riley-Smith suggests that Urban preached the crusade on the basis of Luke 14: 27, which reads, “Whosoever doth not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

In keeping with the theme of sacrifice, rather than material gain, other clerical sources record how Pope Urban II cited the Gospel of Matthew to warn crusaders against having concerns for how their homes and families might do in their absence.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And everyone that hath left house or father or mother or wife of children or lands for my name’s sake shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting. ( Matt 19:29)

Riley-Smith bases these claims on several well-known early 12 th century clerical accounts of the Council of Clermont, including those of Baldric of Dol, Ekkehard of Aura, Robert of Rheims, and Fulcher of Chartres (among others). Although these sources were recorded years later, it is likely that people who were present at Clermont for the pope’s speech and had access to earlier documents from the council authored some of them. Importantly, these sources suggest that the Pope’s approach worked, as it had a massive appeal to his listeners, many of whom rushed forth to take crusading vows amid cheers of “God wills it!”

Perhaps more importantly, Riley-Smith also cites sources written by laymen to support his point and give a sense of the religious appeal of the crusade. In addition to crusade charters, as mentioned above, he points out how the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum , who is believed to have been a lower ranking knight, opened his narrative of his experiences during the First Crusade with “a moving reference to the subject.”

When already that time drew nigh, to which the Lord Jesus draws the attention of his people every day, especially in the Gospel in which he says, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’, there was a great stirring throughout the whole region of Gaul, so that if anyone, with a pure heart and mind, seriously wanted to follow God and faithfully wished to bear the cross after him, he could make no delay in speedily taking the road to the Holy Sepulcher . [7]

Riley-Smith also points out how such views carried over into the era of the Second Crusade (and after). Among his sources, he cites a letter by Bernard of Clairvaux authored after Muslim victories in the East over Latin Christians at Edessa and other places became known in the 1140s. Bernard argued that Christians should take up the cross for a new crusade [the Second Crusade] not to gain wealth or riches, but as a means of showing their love for fellow Christians suffering in the East. [8] Likewise, Riley-Smith also cites Pope Eugenius III’s crusade era encyclicals, in which the pope declared that crusaders were “fired by the zeal of charity” as they sought to cleanse the Holy Land of impurity.

So then, in sum, the evidence for Riley-Smith’s arguments for the “pious idealism” of the crusaders is not limited only to ecclesiastical sources, but sources written by non-clerical participants in the First Crusade as well. Clerics framed and sold the crusade as a spiritual venture, one that sought to provide aid to suffering Christians in the East and to restore Christ’s patrimony in the Holy Land. Far from suggesting personal enrichment during the First Crusade, clerics warned, or even boasted, of the hardships the crusaders would endure, but they celebrated the effects of such suffering as a means of bringing redemption to all participants who redeemed the crusading indulgence. Such an appeal carried over at least until the era of the Second Crusade, as Pope Eugenius III and Bernard of Clairvaux successfully appropriated both the religious philosophy and language that had led to the birth of the First Crusade, and without which the crusading movement might never have been born.

Yet modern cynics might question the religious appeal of the First Crusade by opting for a more realistic “follow the money” approach as a more reliable indicator of crusader motivations. Pious pronouncements about sacrificing for Jerusalem or to atone for sin can conceal greedy intentions, after all, and so one must also follow the money trail before the crusaders can be exculpated from charges of greed. Riley-Smith addresses such concerns head on through his innovative use of crusading charters to show that crusading was enormously expensive for the families of most crusaders and the material costs of crusading far outweighed any material benefits. [9] Indeed, first in a strongly worded 1995 article for the Economist and then in his 1997 book The First Crusaders , he showed that a crusade, far from amounting to a get rich quick scheme, could last for several months, if not years, resulting in enormous financial hardships and the risk of injury or death. During this time, it was usually the crusader and his family who were responsible for providing for the crusaders’ material needs and often, as the charters show, they had to sell property or take out mortgages to do so. Additionally, the crusaders’ abandoned family had the added challenge of managing businesses or farms at home in his absence, a concern also often alluded to in the sources.

Such conclusions, suggesting the expense of crusading for the typical crusader, have implied a greater spiritual motivation than previously thought. Indeed, the fact that the overwhelming majority of early crusaders immediately returned home, many in dire financial straits, after the completion of their vows, suggests the urgency with which they knew they needed to address varying problems on the home front caused by their prolonged absence. [10]

If later scholarship has shown that the crusaders did not profit from the crusades, nor even expect to profit, then this begs the question of how earlier scholars came to such radically different conclusions? In part the older view that crusaders were motivated by economic gain comes from the so-called “younger sons” thesis associated with the work of respected French social historian Georges Duby. In 1977, Duby had argued in his The Chivalrous Society , that because inheritance went to first born sons this left many younger second and third sons in a tough spot, without a chance to inherit their own lands. Thus the crusading enterprise suggested a means by which these additional sons could go carve out a place for themselves in the Holy Land. [11] Yet Riley-Smith has highlighted the weakness of this argument by showing that Duby based his popular and long held argument on sources involving only one family. [12] To the contrary, through the examination of wills and charters, Riley-Smith has shown no variation in the participation of first or second born sons on crusades, as they seem to have participated on an equal basis.

Riley-Smith’s arguments have been well received by other historians. Indeed, in a 1998 review of Riley-Smith’s The First Crusaders , Professor William Jordan of Princeton University effectively summed up the view of many current scholars of Riley-Smith’s research, when he wrote, “Riley-Smith has, I hope, laid to rest for all time the contention that crusaders profited from the wars. They did not, or at least the vast majority did not. Nor did they say that they expected to profit materially….” [13]

————-

[1] Frankly, I am not very comfortable categorizing Riley-Smith as only a “religious historian.” He has shown he is equally comfortable working in a variety of areas. Regardless, if one were forced to situate him into a particular category, it seems it would be religious history.

[2] Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 7.

[3] Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, xii.

[4] Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48.

[5] Jonathan Riley-Smith. “Crusading as an Act of Love.” History 65 (1980), 177-92.

[6] Indeed, things got so bad at times during the First Crusade that some starving crusaders, on one or [possibly] two occasions, resorted to cannibalism.

[7] Cited in Riley-Smith, Crusading as an Act of Love , 33-34.

[8] Riley-Smith, Crusading as an Act of Love , 33. Specifically, Riley-Smith quotes from Bernard’s “Epistolae”, PL . cixxxii, no. 364. Bernard asked, “If we harden our hearts and pay little attention [to Christian losses in the East]…where is our love for God, where is our love for our neighbor?”

[9] See The First Crusaders and Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Religious Warriors. Reinterpreting the Crusades.” The Economist , December 23, 1995. He notes “More recently those still looking for an economic explanation of the crusades have argued that rising populations forced European families to take measures to prevent the break-up of their estates, either through primogeniture or through the practice of allowing only one male of each generation to marry. These measures, it was said, produced a surplus of young men with no prospects, who were naturally attracted by the hope of adventure, spoils and land overseas. Yet there is no evidence to support the argument – nor, even, that younger sons tended to crusade rather than older ones. And it can be shown from documents that foremost in the minds of most nobles and knights was not any prospect of material gain but anxiety about the costs. Warfare is always an expensive business; and this was war of a type never experienced before. The crusaders were volunteers, at least theoretically. Those not ensconced in the household of a great crusading noble had to finance themselves. Meeting the bills often meant raising cash on property or rights. It was to alleviate this burden that European kings, shortly followed by the church, instituted systems of taxation (including the first regular income taxes) to provide subsidies. The argument that the crusades were a response to economic conditions at home turns out to be grounded on dubious assumptions.”

[10] While the First Crusade resulted in the establishment of four crusader states, Latin rulers immediately had to deal with the problem of depopulation, as the vast majority of their crusading armies returned home almost immediately.

[11] George Duby, The Chivalrous Society . (London: 1977),120.

[12] Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders , 21, etc…

[13] William Chester Jordan, “Review of The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 .” Church History 67:2 (1998), 359-361.

The journey of the First Crusade

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Why did Pope Urban II launch the First Crusade?

Crusades – Essay Questions on the First Crusade, 1095-99

In this course, Dr Nicholas Morton (Nottingham Trent University) considers three questions related to the First Crusade, 1095-99: (i) Why did Pope Urban II launch the First Crusade?; (ii) What motivated warriors and pilgrims from across Christendom to participate in the First Crusade?; and (iii) Why did the First Crusade succeed? In each module, we outline some potential approaches to the question, as well as considering the sources that are available that might help us answer the question.

In this module, we think about why Urban II decided to launch the First Crusade, focusing in particular on: (i) the view that Christianity was riven with in-fighting at this point in time, and the Pope wanted to export to fighting to somewhere else; (ii) the view that the Pope wanted to build bridges with the Greeks, especially given the Great Schism of 1054; (iii) the view that the Pope was interested in the expansion of Christendom; (iv) the view that the Pope was responding to the attack by the Seljuk Turks on the Byzantine Empire; (v) the view the Pope wanted to secure the city of Jerusalem, the perceived (spiritual) importance of which had grown rapidly in recent decades; (vi) the key sources that we might use to answer this question: the letters written by Urban II when launching the Crusade, Urban II's sermon at Clermont, the crusade chronicles, and other contemporary histories focused on European politics at this time. Suggested reading: – Tomaz Mastnak, Crusading Peace (2002) – Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: Call from the East (2012) – Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades (Second Ed.) (2003)

Cite this Lecture

Morton, N. (2018, August 21). Crusades – Essay Questions on the First Crusade, 1095-99 - Why did Pope Urban II launch the First Crusade? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-first-crusade-1095-99-essay-questions

Morton, N. "Crusades – Essay Questions on the First Crusade, 1095-99 – Why did Pope Urban II launch the First Crusade?." MASSOLIT , uploaded by MASSOLIT, 21 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/the-first-crusade-1095-99-essay-questions

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Opinion Guest Essay

The High Price of Safety in El Salvador

While some in Apopa have been imprisoned unfairly, many are thrilled that their neighborhood is safe since the gang crackdown by President Nayib Bukele, at right in the photo being hung. Credit... Juan Carlos for The New York Times

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By Megan K. Stack

Photographs by Juan Carlos

Ms. Stack, a contributing Opinion writer, reported from Apopa, El Salvador.

Aug. 29, 2024

Nöe del Cid watched his neighborhood come back to life from the seat of his wheelchair.

This tight row of cinderblock houses with barred windows and corrugated metal roofs formed, for much of Mr. del Cid’s life, a precarious border zone between enemy gangs. Bullet scars are still visible, chipped into the walls of houses and staining the flesh of residents like Mr. del Cid, who was partially paralyzed in 2003 by a gunshot to the neck.

In the two years since President Nayib Bukele unleashed his brutal crackdown on El Salvador’s gangs, most of the gangsters who once lorded over the neighborhood have been imprisoned, fled or gone into hiding, Mr. del Cid said.

“He took the action that we needed him to take. And not only that, he’s maintained it,” said Mr. del Cid, who at 38 is the president of the neighborhood’s community association. “It’s very admirable.”

When I visited the neighborhood recently, the street teemed with life — thickets of overgrown vines and hibiscus, neighbors gossiping on their stoops, Mr. del Cid’s wife deftly frying enchiladas on a gas cooktop propped on a table by the street. His mother, who lives across the way, keeps the TV running — when Mr. Bukele comes on, she uses a megaphone to broadcast the president’s words to the neighbors. You never know what he will say — or do! He’s part mafia boss, part Willy Wonka — a mercurial leader with a showman’s instincts, dropping dead-eyed threats between grand declarations of benevolence.

A young girl waking past a set of stairs and a cinderblock house.

Earlier this summer, thanks to a free ride on a bus sent by the government, Mr. del Cid and his neighbors joined the adoring crowd outside the National Palace to witness Mr. Bukele’s inauguration. This second term is both legally indefensible (El Salvador’s Constitution bans consecutive re-election) and, like the president himself, wildly popular (he won by a landslide). Mr. Bukele took the occasion to warn people not to complain about the “bitter medicine” coming their way. This is one of his favorite catchphrases — and he means it.

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Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

A dilapidated column bearing Trumps photo and graffiti against a red backdrop.

One evening in April of 2022, a hundred people milled around a patio at Mar-a-Lago, sipping champagne and waiting for Donald Trump to arrive. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, stood in front of an archway fringed with palm trees and warmed up the crowd with jokes about the deep state. The purpose of the gathering was to raise money for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy shop whose most recent annual report emphasized a “commitment to end woke and weaponized government.” Its founder, Russell Vought, a former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, and a leading candidate to be the White House chief of staff in a second term, was in attendance, chatting amiably with the guests. He is trim and bald, with glasses and a professorial beard. His group is a kind of ivory tower for far-right Republicans, issuing white papers with titles such as “The Great Replacement in Theory and Practice.” In 2021, he wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that asked, “Is There Anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?”

The Center for Renewing America is one of roughly two dozen right-wing groups that have emerged in Washington since Trump left office. What unites them is a wealthy network based on Capitol Hill called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which many in Washington regard as the next Trump Administration in waiting. C.P.I.’s list of personnel and affiliates includes some of Trump’s most fervent backers: Meadows is a senior partner; Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration, runs an associated group called America First Legal, which styles itself as the A.C.L.U. of the MAGA movement; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department lawyer facing disbarment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America. All of them are expected to have high-ranking roles in the government if Trump is elected again. “C.P.I. has gathered the most talented people in the conservative movement by far,” someone close to the organization told me. “They have thought deeply about what’s needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a more anti-establishment conservative movement.”

C.P.I. was founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint, a former adman from South Carolina who spent eight years in the Senate before resigning to lead the Heritage Foundation. During that time, he was one of Washington’s most notorious partisan combatants. As a senator, he attacked his Republican colleagues for being insufficiently conservative, tanking their bills and raising money to unseat them in primaries. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, called him “an innovator in Republican-on-Republican violence.” With C.P.I., DeMint wanted to create a base of operations for insurgents like himself. “If you’re not getting criticized in Washington,” he once said, “you’re probably part of the problem.”

Other conservative groups have defined Republican Presidencies: the Heritage Foundation staffed the Administration of Ronald Reagan, the American Enterprise Institute that of George W. Bush. But C.P.I. is categorically different from its peers. It’s not a think tank—it’s an incubator and an activist hub that funds other organizations, coördinates with conservative members of the House and Senate, and works as a counterweight to G.O.P. leadership. The effort to contest the 2020 election results and the protests of January 6, 2021, were both plotted at C.P.I.’s headquarters, at 300 Independence Avenue. “Until seven years ago, it didn’t exist, and no entity like it existed,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, told me. “It’s grown by leaps and bounds.”

C.P.I. and its constellation of groups, most of which are nonprofits, raised nearly two hundred million dollars in 2022. The organization has bought up some fifty million dollars’ worth of real estate in and around Washington, including multiple properties on the Hill. A mansion on twenty-two hundred acres in eastern Maryland hosts trainings for congressional staff and conservative activists. Four political-action committees have rented space in C.P.I.’s offices, and many more belonging to members of Congress pay to use C.P.I.’s facilities, such as studios for podcast recordings and TV hits. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of three dozen hard-line anti-institutionalist Republican lawmakers, and the Steering Committee, a similar group in the Senate, headed by Lee, hold weekly meetings at C.P.I.’s headquarters. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called the organization a “gathering site” that offered “regular contact” with the power brokers of the conservative movement. He told me, “You walk into the building and you can talk to Mark Meadows or Jim DeMint if they’re there, or Russ Vought.”

At the time of the event at Mar-a-Lago, in the spring of 2022, right-wing political circles were in a state of charged anticipation. Trump had not yet announced his reëlection bid, but inflation was high, Joe Biden was unpopular, and pollsters were anticipating a Republican rout in the upcoming midterms. “The left tried to drag America further into a dark future of totalitarianism, chaotic elections, and cultural decay,” C.P.I.’s leaders wrote. Those in attendance knew that Trump would soon enter the race. The question was what, exactly, they might get out of it.

Shortly after 6 P.M. , Trump strode onto the patio, wearing his customary dark suit and a blue tie, and launched into a stem-winder. “It was so fucking funny,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Almost nothing was related to the Center for Renewing America other than a reference to how good Russ was. He was riffing on whatever was on his mind.” Trump recounted a trip that he’d taken to Iraq as President, but he kept digressing to complain about a thirteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier that he’d commissioned. At one point, he turned to the culture wars but couldn’t remember the phrase “critical race theory.” Vought, standing nearby, had to prompt him. “He was burning down the house,” the person told me. “Everyone was loving it.”

Still, one aspect of the speech caught the attention of C.P.I.’s executives. Ever since Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment trial, in 2020, he has threatened to purge the government of anyone he considered disloyal. His defenders are united in the belief that career bureaucrats foiled his first-term plans from inside the government. C.P.I., which has spent years placing conservative job seekers in congressional offices, is now vetting potential staffers for a second Trump term. One of its groups, the American Accountability Foundation, has been investigating the personal profiles and social-media posts of federal employees to determine who might lack fealty to Trump. “The key throughout the speech was that Trump complained about his personnel,” the attendee said. “He said he had these bad generals, bad Cabinet secretaries. That was a big signal to the people there.”

Six years earlier, on a Monday in late March, cars ferrying some of the country’s most influential conservatives, including the Republican senators Jeff Sessions and Tom Cotton, began arriving at the Washington offices of the law firm Jones Day. DeMint, then the head of the Heritage Foundation, and Leonard Leo, the vice-president of the Federalist Society, entered discreetly through a parking garage, as they’d been instructed. Newt Gingrich, who wanted the press to see him, insisted on using the firm’s front door. They were attending a private meeting with Trump, who was rapidly gaining in the Republican primary but remained anathema to much of the G.O.P. establishment. “People in the conservative movement suddenly realized that Trump could be the horse that they could ride to victory,” a former senior Heritage staffer told me. “He was being shepherded around the conservative policy world. DeMint was a part of that.”

God rests on a cloud and thinks “I created man thirtyone hours ago why hasnt he texted yet”.

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As early as January, 2016, DeMint predicted that Trump would win the Republican nomination. It was an unpopular position among conservatives, many of whom felt more ideologically aligned with Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. In a conference room at Jones Day, Trump gave a brief speech and opened the floor to questions. Leo asked him whom he’d nominate for federal judgeships. Antonin Scalia, the conservative stalwart on the Supreme Court, had died the previous month. Trump replied, “Why don’t I put out a list publicly of people who could be the sort of people I would put on the Supreme Court?” DeMint immediately volunteered Heritage for the job of drafting it.

The Heritage Foundation was founded in the nineteen-seventies by Edwin Feulner, a Republican operative with a doctorate in political science. Under his direction, the think tank became the country’s leading bastion of conservative policy, with an annual budget exceeding eighty million dollars. When DeMint took over, in 2013, traditionalists on the organization’s board were concerned that his rebellious style would diminish the group’s reputation for serious research. He confirmed their suspicions by hiring several of his Senate aides. The former Heritage staffer said, “There were cultural differences between existing leadership and the DeMint team.”

But DeMint’s arrival reflected changes already under way at the organization. In 2010, as the Tea Party emerged as a force in conservative politics, the think tank launched an advocacy arm called Heritage Action, which issued scorecards evaluating legislators’ conservatism and deputized a network of local activists as “sentinels” to enforce a populist agenda. Vought, who’d previously worked as a staffer in House leadership, helped lead the operation. Under DeMint, the group became merciless in its attacks on rank-and-file Republican lawmakers. “Heritage Action was created to lobby the Hill, but they took it one step further,” James Wallner, a lecturer in political science at Clemson University, who worked with DeMint in the Senate and at Heritage, told me. “They had a grassroots army. They used tens of thousands of activists to target people.”

After the meeting with Trump, in 2016, some of DeMint’s staff objected to the task of drawing up a list of potential judges, arguing that Heritage was overcommitting itself. This was typically the domain of the Federalist Society, which was putting forth its own list of judicial nominees. But DeMint, sensing an opportunity to maximize his clout with Trump, dismissed the concerns. That August, after Trump became the Party’s nominee, Heritage was enlisted to participate in the Presidential transition in the event of a Trump victory. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey at the time, was overseeing the effort and put Feulner, who was then the chair of Heritage’s board of trustees, in charge of domestic policy. Feulner later told the Times that Heritage saw a greater opportunity to influence policy under Trump than it had under Reagan. “No. 1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes,” Feulner said of Trump. “No. 2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed.” He added, “If he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”

Heritage was already primed. The year after DeMint took over, he had begun an initiative called the Project to Restore America, which worked to build up a reserve of reliably conservative personnel. The morning after Trump won, DeMint called a meeting in an auditorium at Heritage headquarters. Many staffers had been there all night watching the returns in a state of elation. “We were criticized by a lot of our friends in the movement for even going to meetings with Trump,” DeMint said, according to the Times . Then, quoting a line from the eighties TV show “The A-Team,” he added, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

The following day, Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser, summoned Christie to his office on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, in New York. “We’ve decided to make a change,” Bannon told him. Mike Pence, the incoming Vice-President, and Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, were replacing him. Christie wrote in his 2019 memoir that thirty volumes of policy and staff plans collected in large binders over several months “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.” Christie’s firing set off a scramble to finish the job of staffing the new Administration and preparing a slate of agenda-setting policies before Trump was sworn in. Heritage now had an even more direct role to play. Pence was friendly with DeMint, and a former Sessions aide, who was appointed to lead the transition’s daily operations, was close with Ed Corrigan, a former executive director of the Senate Steering Committee who was then a vice-president at the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage went on to fill hundreds of jobs throughout virtually every federal agency, and some of the President’s most prominent Cabinet officials—including Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education; Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy—had appeared on the foundation’s lists of recommendations. “DeMint told friends and colleagues that he was proudest of his work at Heritage in placing Heritage employees into the Administration,” a DeMint associate told me. “That was a big deal.”

Still, Heritage’s board remained fiercely divided over DeMint. Mickey Edwards, a founding Heritage trustee, said at the time that DeMint had turned “a highly respected think tank” into “a partisan tool” for the Tea Party. Wallner, who joined Heritage as its research director in the summer of 2016, told me, “I walked into a civil war.” He recalled meeting a board member at a hotel bar near the White House who asked outright, “Are you on team DeMint?” Such critics had expected Trump to lose spectacularly in November, discrediting DeMint in the process.

Before Trump’s Inauguration, DeMint requested a new contract, but the board refused. The following spring, DeMint and his closest advisers went to San Diego for the annual Heritage donor retreat. The night before their flight home, they learned that DeMint was being fired. Corrigan was there, along with Wallner; Wesley Denton, a former DeMint staffer; and Bret Bernhardt, DeMint’s ex-chief of staff. “We had put our heart and soul into this,” Wallner told me. “It was shocking.”

According to a study by the Brookings Institution, there was more staff turnover in the first thirty-two months of Trump’s Presidency than there had been in the entire first terms of each of his five predecessors. Inside the White House, a former senior official told me, Trump was constantly enraged that his Cabinet wouldn’t break the law for him. He wanted the Department of Homeland Security to shoot migrants crossing the Rio Grande, the Defense Department to draw up plans to invade Mexico, and the Internal Revenue Service to audit his critics. Trump didn’t understand why the government couldn’t revoke the security clearances of former intelligence officials who criticized him on CNN. The official said that Trump “talked about firing large numbers of the federal workers,” to eliminate any further checks on his agenda.

The tumult presented an opportunity for outsiders like DeMint. He and his associates had started brainstorming their next moves before their flight from San Diego touched down in Washington. “You don’t need a think tank,” Wallner recalled telling DeMint. Their collective expertise was in Congress, where Party leadership always seemed to have the advantage of better and more extensive staffing. What if they levelled the playing field by helping to recruit conservative personnel, and schooling them in how to be more effective activists? DeMint and his group could train a new class of staffers and place them within the system.

Conservatives in Washington also needed somewhere to gather, share ideas, and strategize. From 2011 to 2015, a group of Republican House members, who would eventually form the Freedom Caucus, had regularly met in the kitchen of a Heritage executive. One night, his wife was hosting a work dinner, so the group relocated to a restaurant called Tortilla Coast, which became their new meeting spot. On occasion, when they tried to book space at the Capitol Hill Club, an exclusive Republican hangout in Washington, Party leadership made sure that their request was declined. “The thing that made Heritage so powerful were the coalitions they could build,” Wallner told me. “That was the stuff DeMint loved.” The sentiment on the plane, he went on, was “Let’s do this thing that DeMint loves to do, that’s so vital. It would be like a WeWork for conservatives.”

On May 10, 2017, DeMint and the others filed incorporation papers for the Conservative Partnership Institute. Their lawyer, who was also representing them in severance negotiations with Heritage, was Cleta Mitchell, a movement mainstay in her sixties who was, as the person close to C.P.I. told me, “the attorney for pretty much any new conservative group that was starting in Washington.” She became C.P.I.’s secretary. The institute’s accountant was a close associate of Leonard Leo’s. It was a lean operation at first: seven employees and a rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue above a liquor store and an Asian-fusion restaurant. At the end of its first year, the group’s total assets and liabilities were less than a million dollars.

Then the White House called. The President had been accusing his personnel of deliberately undercutting him, but his top aides were, in fact, struggling to fill an increasing number of vacancies within the executive agencies. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment for C.P.I.,” the person close to the organization told me. “The White House needed staffing help. People who joined the Administration were either R.N.C. hacks who didn’t like Trump or they were Trump-campaign supporters who could barely get their pants on in the morning.”

One day in June, 2018, Hill staffers working for conservative members of Congress received an e-mail: “Interested in a job at the White House?” C.P.I. was hosting a job fair, at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The director of the White House’s personnel office would be in attendance, along with other senior officials. C.P.I. had been conceived to help staff congressional offices, but it was scaling up. “They needed a national figure,” another former DeMint staffer told me. “Their brand is bigger with Trump.”

A year later, Trump was impeached for what he called a “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump suggested that U.S. military aid to Ukraine might depend on Zelensky agreeing to investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. At the impeachment trial, two members of the Trump Administration, Alexander Vindman, of the National Security Council, and Marie Yovanovitch, the recently fired Ambassador to Ukraine, testified against the President. Senator Cruz, who was coördinating with the President’s legal team, ran an impeachment “war room” out of the basement of C.P.I.’s headquarters. Using C.P.I. equipment, he also recorded a podcast, called “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” which he taped after each day’s testimony, attacking the proceedings as a partisan sham. “Verdict” was downloaded more than a million times, making it one of the most popular political podcasts in the country.

A few weeks after Trump was acquitted, on a party-line vote in the Senate, a C.P.I. executive named Rachel Bovard addressed an audience at the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of conservative activists. They’d assembled for a board-of-governors luncheon at a Ritz-Carlton in California. “We work very closely . . . with the Office of Presidential Personnel at the White House,” Bovard said, in footage obtained by Documented, a Washington-based watchdog group. “Because we see what happens when we don’t vet these people. That’s how we got Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, O.K.? That’s how we got Marie Yovanovitch. All these people that led the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

By then, conservative activists, including Ginni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, were assembling lists of “bad people” in the government for Trump to fire or demote. Government officials on the lists were often identified as either pro-Trump or anti-Trump. But behavior that counted as anti-Trump could be little more than an instance of someone obeying the law or observing ordinary bureaucratic procedure. In one memo, in which a Trump loyalist argued against appointing a former U.S. Attorney who was up for a job at the Treasury Department, a list of infractions included an unwillingness to criminally investigate multiple women who had accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, according to Axios. In October, 2020, Trump issued an executive order that was largely overlooked in the midst of the pandemic and that fall’s election. Known as Schedule F, it stripped career civil servants of their job protections, making it much easier for the President to replace them with handpicked appointees.

The following month, when Trump refused to accept his election loss, “there were people in the White House who operated under the assumption that they were not leaving,” a former aide said. One of them was John McEntee, a caustic thirty-year-old who’d once been Trump’s personal assistant and was now in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. (In 2018, John Kelly, who was then Trump’s chief of staff, had fired McEntee for failing a security clearance owing to a gambling habit, but Trump rehired him two years later.) Young staffers were scared that McEntee might find out if they started interviewing for other positions. “There was fear of retribution if it got back to him,” the former aide said. Other White House officials, such as Meadows, were clear-eyed about the election results but vowed to fight them anyway. Meadows discreetly told a few staffers that, when Trump’s term was over, they should join him at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “C.P.I. was his ticket to be that pressure point on Capitol Hill,” one of the staffers told me. “He wanted to be the guy who held Congress to the MAGA agenda.”

Parents looking at their energetic child.

From the start, C.P.I. was involved in efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results. One Freedom Caucus member recalled, “Election Day was Tuesday, and we got back to the Capitol the following Monday. Tuesday, they’re meeting at C.P.I. and talking about how to get Trump sworn in on January 20th.” On November 9th, during the Senate Steering Committee’s regular meeting at C.P.I., Sidney Powell, a conservative lawyer, gave a talk about challenging the election results. “My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies,” Senator Lee, of Utah, told Meadows in a text. “You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”

By the end of December, many Republicans, including Lee, had given up on Powell. She was citing rigged elections in Venezuela as evidence that the voting-machine company Dominion had tampered with ballots cast for Trump, but, despite frequent requests from Trump loyalists, she could never substantiate the claims. Hard-core partisans came up with a new plan: they wanted to disrupt the process by which the government would certify the election results, on January 6, 2021. Cleta Mitchell, the secretary of C.P.I. and a lawyer for Trump, was central in advancing this idea. She had gone into the 2020 race believing that Democrats would attempt to steal votes. “I was absolutely persuaded and believed very strongly that President Trump would be reëlected and that the left and the Democrats would do everything they could to unwind it,” she later said.

Two days after the election, Mitchell wrote an e-mail to the legal academic John Eastman, encouraging him to craft a case that the Vice-President had the unilateral authority to throw out the election results in seven states, where the legislatures could then choose new slates of pro-Trump electors. Pence, who consulted his own legal experts, was unconvinced. But Eastman hardly needed to persuade Trump, who urged his supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure Pence into blocking the certification process. Eventually, Eastman would be indicted in Arizona and Georgia on conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering charges for his role in trying to overturn the election. (He pleaded not guilty.)

Much of the effort to turn people out for the January 6th protest took place at C.P.I. “There were a series of conference calls,” the Freedom Caucus member told me. “Mark Meadows was on a lot of them. Trump was on more than one. The rally was a big thing that C.P.I. and Freedom Caucus members were involved in. The idea was that they were going to get everybody together on the Mall. That was all discussed at C.P.I.” (A C.P.I. spokesperson told me, “No idea what they’re talking about. C.P.I. had absolutely no involvement in these events.”)

On the afternoon of January 2nd, Mitchell joined the President on an hour-long phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, in which Trump told him to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he needed to win the state. Later that evening, members of the Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, the caucus’s chairman, were scheduled to meet at C.P.I. to strategize about how to get their constituents to show up on January 6th. “Meadows was originally going to participate in person, but they moved it to conference call just to cover a wider breadth of people that weren’t in town,” Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows’s aide, said in an interview with lawyers from the January 6th Committee. The President also dialled in.

Even after the riot at the Capitol, Mitchell continued to contest the 2020 returns from her perch at C.P.I. For some of the more elaborate electoral challenges, such as audits of the results in Arizona and Georgia, which persisted after Biden had taken office, it was important to the organizers that the process seem legitimate and serious—and therefore independent of Trump. According to an investigation by Documented, C.P.I. used an accounting mechanism to hide the fact that the former President was funding part of the organization’s recount efforts. On July 26, 2021, Trump’s political-action committee, Save America, donated a million dollars to C.P.I. Two days later, a new nonprofit called the American Voting Rights Foundation, or A.V.R.F., was registered in Delaware; its direct controlling entity was another group tied to C.P.I. The same day, Mitchell sent an e-mail to Cyber Ninjas, a private company that a group of far-right state legislators in Arizona had recruited to conduct an audit of the Presidential results in Maricopa County. C.P.I. then paid a million dollars to A.V.R.F. According to the Guardian , it was the “only known donation that the group has ever received.” On July 29th, in an e-mail on which a C.P.I. executive was copied, Mitchell explained that A.V.R.F. was contributing a million dollars to the Arizona audit.

This spring, I received some friendly but unencouraging advice from a person close to DeMint: I shouldn’t count on speaking with him or his advisers. They were highly suspicious of mainstream attention. DeMint is now more of a figurehead at C.P.I. than an active leader of the organization. Meadows, who joined C.P.I. a week after leaving the Trump White House, and now receives an annual salary of eight hundred thousand dollars from the organization, is primarily a fund-raiser. He was indicted last year for election interference. (He pleaded not guilty.) Being in legal trouble is often a badge of honor in Trump’s circles, but Meadows has fallen under suspicion from some of his old allies. ABC News reported last year that he had secretly spoken with federal prosecutors who were investigating the former President, a story that Meadows has since disputed. A recent Times Magazine article called him “the least trusted man in Washington.”

The daily operations of C.P.I. are run by Corrigan, its president, and Denton, the group’s chief operating officer. Corrigan declined to speak with me, but Denton was eventually willing to chat. One morning in May, we met in a coffee shop in the basement of a Senate office building. He is genial and plainspoken, with a youthful air and a beard that hangs thickly off his chin. During DeMint’s eight years in the Senate, Denton served as his director of communications, and they moved to Heritage together, in 2013. With the exception of a brief stint in the Trump Administration, where Denton worked at the Office of Management and Budget with Vought, he has been at C.P.I. since its creation.

“There’s nothing complicated about what we do,” he told me. “We train staff and place staff. That’s it. There are some outgrowths of that, in terms of supporting new groups. But, basically, we’re here to support those who are in the fight.”

In 2021, C.P.I.’s board made a fateful and, in retrospect, wise decision. High-ranking figures from the Trump Administration were leaving the government and needed a place to land during the Biden years. “It’s not hard to be a liberal in D.C.,” Denton told me. “It’s not the same for our side.” But C.P.I.’s founders were wary of creating just another version of the Heritage Foundation. “We had the opportunity to build a vast, huge bureaucratic organization when all our friends were coming out of the Trump Administration,” Denton said. “Instead, we helped them set up their own organizations.”

The structure of these groups could seem both byzantine and incestuous to an outsider, but the idea, Denton told me, was “to insure mission alignment.” Stephen Miller formed America First Legal, a public-interest law group that has primarily targeted “woke corporations,” school districts, and the Biden Administration. Vought started the Center for Renewing America, which generated policy proposals as though the Trump Administration had never ended. Corrigan and Denton were on the board of Vought’s group; Vought, Corrigan, and Denton sat on the board of Miller’s group. As more organizations joined the fold, their boards increasingly overlapped, and the roster of ideologues and Trump loyalists grew. Gene Hamilton and Matthew Whitaker, key figures from the Trump D.O.J., worked at America First Legal. Ken Cuccinelli, from the Department of Homeland Security; Mark Paoletta, from the Office of Management and Budget; and Kash Patel, from the Department of Defense, became fellows at Vought’s group.

By the end of 2021, C.P.I. had helped form eight new groups, each with a different yet complementary mission. The American Accountability Foundation focussed on attacking Biden’s nominees. The State Freedom Caucus Network helped state legislators create their own versions of the House Freedom Caucus in order to challenge their local Republican establishments. The Election Integrity Network, run by Mitchell, trained volunteers to monitor polling places and investigate state and local election officials. American Moment concentrated on cultivating the next generation of conservative staffers in Washington.

C.P.I. connected the founders of these groups with its network of donors and, in some instances, helped support the organizations until they could raise money for themselves. As American Moment waited for the I.R.S. to formalize its nonprofit tax status, for example, C.P.I. served as a fiscal sponsor, allowing donors to earmark money for the new group by giving it to C.P.I. The organization also offered its partners access to an array of shared resources: discounted real estate, accounting services, legal representation. “This all had an in-kind value of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. C.P.I.’s accounting firm, called Compass Professional, was run by Corrigan’s brother; its law firm, Compass Legal, was headed by Scott Gast, a lawyer in the Trump White House.

Aside from C.P.I., Compass Legal’s most lucrative client to date, according to F.E.C. filings, has been Trump himself, whose campaign and political-action committees have paid the firm four hundred thousand dollars in the past two years. Another major client was the National Rifle Association, which paid the firm more than three hundred thousand dollars in 2022. Compass Legal was established in March, 2021, two months after C.P.I.’s lead lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, was forced to resign from her job as a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner. Her participation in Trump’s phone call to the Georgia secretary of state had caused too much controversy. She blamed her departure on a “massive pressure campaign” orchestrated by “leftist groups.” In a subsequent C.P.I. annual report, the group said that a large part of its mission was helping conservatives “survive the Leftist purge and ‘cancel-proof’ conservative organizations.”

This was not simply the rhetoric of conservative victimhood. Andrew Kloster, a former employee of Compass Legal who is now Representative Matt Gaetz’s general counsel, described one of C.P.I.’s goals as “de-risking public service on the right.” For anyone who might run afoul of mainstream opinion, C.P.I. had created an alternative, fully self-sufficient ecosystem. One part of it was material: recording studios, direct-mail services, accounting and legal resources, salaried jobs and fellowships. The other element was cultural. C.P.I. was demonstrating to Trump allies that, if they took bold and possibly illegal action in service of the cause, they wouldn’t face financial ruin or pariah status in Washington.

Over coffee at the Capitol, in May, Kloster, who is bald with a bushy beard, explained the story behind a legal-defense fund that he’d helped create, called Courage Under Fire. It supported people who’d been “targeted for their civil service in conservative Administrations, including those indicted for fighting the 2020 election,” he said. The fund has spent more than three million dollars to date, according to the Washington Post , with the money going toward legal costs incurred by John Eastman; Mike Roman, a former Trump-campaign operative; and Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser to Trump who has since been convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena related to the January 6th investigation. “We started with a lot of Trump advisers,” Kloster said. “It’s a large class.” Eastman, he added, was a prime example: “He has been targeted for legal advice he gave in the course of his duties consulting with former President Trump. He’s being charged with criminal fraud. That’s for the mob lawyer in ‘The Godfather’ trying to knowingly facilitate crimes, not for someone saying, ‘Here’s what I think the law is.’ ”

Courage Under Fire was created by Personnel Policy Operations, a nonprofit in the C.P.I. network which, in 2022, spent more than a million dollars on lawyers for Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, according to NOTUS , an online news site. C.P.I. maintains that the groups it has launched are independent. “We don’t control them,” the C.P.I. spokesperson said. But Brendan Fischer, the deputy executive director of Documented, pointed out that in 2022 nearly all the money spent by Personnel Policy Operations came from C.P.I., and that virtually all such spending went toward legal defense. He told me, “The most reasonable inference is that they were routing money from C.P.I. to Personnel Policy Operations to pay for Meadows’s and Clark’s legal fees.” (The C.P.I. spokesperson said, “Liberal groups like these have made wild claims against the right for years that go nowhere. C.P.I. is in compliance with all laws for nonprofits.”)

Tim Dunn, a billionaire Texas oilman and a major donor to C.P.I., has been tapped specifically to fund the group’s legal-defense efforts. When Scott Perry, of Pennsylvania, the former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, faced legal scrutiny for his involvement in January 6th—he had organized an attempt to contest the results in his state and, after ignoring a congressional subpoena, was ordered by a judge to turn over his cell phone to prosecutors—Meadows arranged to pay his legal fees by asking Dunn for the money, someone with knowledge of the arrangement told me. (Perry’s campaign and C.P.I. both denied this account. “This is completely false,” the C.P.I. spokesperson said. Dunn could not be reached for comment.)

C.P.I.’s headquarters is a three-story town house with a blue door, on a leafy block near the Capitol. Inside, a warren of offices gives way to a series of parlorlike spaces with high ceilings. There are luminous conference rooms upstairs, each named for a prominent donor.

Last summer, I visited 300 Independence Avenue to interview Vought. At the time, we were discussing his role in creating a congressional subcommittee to advance a dominant Republican narrative in the House: that Democrats had weaponized the federal government against conservatives. It was a kind of unified theory of the deep state, which held that the Justice Department and the U.S. intelligence community had colluded to silence right-wing voices. It had the added utility of casting Trump as the ultimate martyr of the conservative movement. Each of his legal travails, Vought said, proved that Democrats were shamelessly engaged in “lawfare.”

These days, Vought has appeared in the news as a key architect of a second-Trump-term agenda, alongside some of the other usual suspects: Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton, Jeffrey Clark, and Kash Patel. Trump has been explicit about his intention to exact revenge on political enemies. “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he told a crowd of supporters in March of last year. “And, for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Three months later, after his arraignment in Miami for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing a federal investigation, he added, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt President in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”

Vought and Clark, meanwhile, have been advancing a formal rationale to break the long-standing expectation that the D.O.J. should operate independently of the President. The norm has been in place since Watergate, but they have argued that Trump could run the department like any other executive agency. Clark published his case on the Center for Renewing America’s Web site under the title “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent.” In early 2021, while Trump was fighting the results of the election, he wanted to make Clark the Attorney General, but the entire senior leadership of the department threatened to resign en masse. Now, if Clark gets a top job at the D.O.J., he is expected to use the position to try to remake the department as an instrument of the White House.

Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times . The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.

Many of the other agenda items related to immigration that were delayed, blocked, or never fully realized during the chaos of the first term would be reinstated to more extreme effect in a second: an expanded ban on refugees from Muslim-majority countries, a revocation of visas for students engaged in certain forms of campus protests, an end to birthright citizenship. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error,” Miller told the Times last November. “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

The overarching scheme for the second Trump term, called Project 2025, follows an established Washington tradition. It is being organized by the Heritage Foundation and has taken the form of a nine-hundred-page policy tract. But the scale of this undertaking, which is costing more than twenty million dollars, is bigger than anything Heritage has previously attempted. The organization has hired the technology company Oracle to build a secure database to house the personnel files of some twenty thousand potential Administration staffers. Kevin Roberts, the current president of Heritage, has also enlisted the participation of more than a hundred conservative groups, as well as top figures from C.P.I.: Vought, Corrigan, Miller, and Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment. “These were the key nodes,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Roberts was paying Center for Renewing America, American Moment, and America First Legal to do parts of the project.” (Heritage did not respond to requests for comment.)

The fact that Heritage was helping to staff a full-fledged MAGA operation, the person went on, was a reflection of C.P.I.’s mounting influence. Two years ago, Roberts addressed the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering of far-right activists, which was hosted by an organization that is now associated with C.P.I. “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours,” he said. Last year, Corrigan, who is on the steering committee of Project 2025, was invited to speak at Heritage’s fiftieth-anniversary conference. “The leadership at Heritage has brought back the C.P.I. folks even though they got pushed out six years before,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Kevin is being realistic. He needs to make peace with these guys.”

My source, who has been involved in Project 2025, outlined a few immediate actions that Trump would take if he won. Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., would be fired “right away,” he told me. Even though Trump nominated Wray to the position, the far right has blamed Wray for the agency’s role in arresting people involved in the insurrection. (As Vought told me, “Look at the F.B.I., look at the deep state. We have political prisoners in this country, regardless of what you think about January 6th.”) The other hope in getting rid of Wray is that, without him, the Administration could use the agency to target its political opponents.

The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”

Trump’s former economic advisers Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro want Trump to impose tariffs of as much as ten per cent on foreign imports. Economists across the political spectrum have predicted that such a policy—which could trigger an international trade war, dramatically boosting inflation—would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. “Lighthizer and Navarro are fucking clowns,” the person told me.

Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Something under discussion is who they could actually appoint without Senate confirmation,” the person added. Schedule F, the executive order from October, 2020, that enabled the purge of career civil servants, was rescinded by the Biden Administration, but it would be reinstated by Trump. Presidents typically take their most decisive action in the first hundred days. The plan for Trump, I was told, was to set everything in motion “within hours of taking office.” This was what Trump had apparently meant when he told Sean Hannity, earlier this year, that he wouldn’t be a dictator, “except for Day One.”

The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the most radical aspects of Project 2025. There are no benefits—only political liabilities—to endorsing so many specifics. Trump’s supporters already know what he stands for, in a general sense. And there is the more delicate matter of the former President’s ego. “He wouldn’t want to be seen as taking guidance from any other human being,” the former senior White House official told me. “He doesn’t like to be seen as someone who doesn’t know everything already.” On July 5th, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He said that he wished them luck.

His fortunes, though, were rising. The Presidential race was now his to lose. By the spring, he was steadily leading in national polls, with a larger edge in key battleground states. The Biden campaign had proposed two debates, with a format designed to control Trump’s pugilistic impulses: no studio audience and the microphones silenced after each answer, to prohibit interruptions. But during the first debate, on June 27th, Biden faltered. He stood rigidly at the podium, with a slack, vacant expression. His voice was weak and wavering, and he repeatedly trailed off mid-thought. The disastrous performance has since led an increasing number of Democrats to call for him to withdraw from the race. The following week, Trump was on the golf course with his son Barron and was caught on video summarizing the current electoral landscape. “I kicked that old broken-down pile of crap,” he said of Biden. “That means we have Kamala,” he went on. “I think she’s going to be better. She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic.”

In the first year of Biden’s Presidency, C.P.I. raised forty-five million dollars, more money than it had received in the previous four years combined. A single donor was responsible for twenty-five million dollars of that year’s haul: Mike Rydin, a seventy-five-year-old widower from Houston, who in 2021 made a fortune from the sale of his company, which developed software for the construction industry. Until then, he was a small-time Republican donor and a relative unknown in national political circles; in 2019, he contributed only about seven thousand dollars to the Trump campaign, according to the Daily Beast. But Rydin told me that he considered C.P.I.’s founder “the most honest man in America.”

While DeMint was in the Senate, he started a political-action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to raise money for right-wing candidates who challenged Republican incumbents in Party primaries. “That was a cardinal sin,” the DeMint staffer told me. “He primaried his colleagues.” Some of the candidates supported by the PAC —Lee, in Utah; Rand Paul, in Kentucky; and Marco Rubio, in Florida—defeated fellow-Republicans backed by Senate leadership, then won their general elections. But, in other races, DeMint’s intervention backfired. In Delaware, he championed the candidacy of Christine O’Donnell, a conservative activist whose campaign imploded after footage surfaced of her saying that she’d “dabbled into witchcraft.” DeMint was unbothered. “I’d rather have thirty Marco Rubios in the Senate than sixty Arlen Specters,” he once said, referring to the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, who eventually switched parties.

DeMint’s crusade reminded Rydin of his own career—the years of financial struggles, the uncertainties, the skeptics. “I knew what it was like to be alone,” he said. “It’s tough to be alone, to fight battles alone.” When a representative from the Senate Conservatives Fund reached out to him, in 2009, Rydin agreed to donate a thousand dollars. “That was, like, the most money I’d ever donated to anything,” Rydin said. Afterward, he told me, “someone calls me and says, ‘Senator DeMint wants to talk to you.’ And I said, ‘A senator? Really?’ ”

Rydin is polite and unprepossessing, almost droll. In our conversations, he was guarded but firm in expressing his commitment to ending illegal immigration, cutting government spending, and getting foreign countries to deal with their own problems. Rydin admitted that when Trump, as President, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico “it scared the hell out of me.” But, he added, “everything Trump did turned out wonderfully. I’m not going to second-guess him anymore.” In the end, Rydin’s attraction to extreme figures seemed more personal than ideological. In 2015, he met Mark Meadows after Meadows, then a congressman from North Carolina, attempted to oust the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, a radical act for which Meadows was later described as “a legislative terrorist.” “He was absolutely terrified to do that,” Rydin told me. “He got no support whatsoever.”

Shortly after DeMint started C.P.I., in 2017, he and a colleague flew to Houston to meet with Rydin and other potential donors. Rydin had donated to Heritage while DeMint was there but stopped after his departure. (He has since resumed his contributions.) “It wouldn’t have bothered me if I never contributed to them again,” he said, “because they were firing Jim.” Now DeMint told him about his plans to create a conservative community in Washington, a place where members of Congress could confer before and after votes. “I’m on board,” Rydin told him. “You don’t have to say anything else.”

Man playing with beach ball in pool standing next to woman answering call on her phone.

Rydin was ready to donate to C.P.I., but his wife, who avoided politics, was uncomfortable with him giving more than twenty-five thousand dollars. “To get her to twenty-five thousand dollars was a big deal,” he said. By the time she died, of cancer, in 2020, he’d increased his donation to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The next year, “I sold my company and had a lot of money,” he told me.

C.P.I. used part of Rydin’s twenty-five-million-dollar donation to buy, for seven million dollars, a lodge with eleven bedrooms on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which it named Camp Rydin. The property has a shooting range and a horse stable. (“It’s rustic but luxurious,” the person close to C.P.I. told me.) To date, C.P.I. has held some two dozen trainings there for congressional staff and conservative activists, according to travel-disclosure forms filed with the government. Rydin has also donated to many of the groups in the C.P.I. network, including the Center for Renewing America, American Moment, and the American Accountability Foundation. In July, America First Legal sent out a preëlection fund-raising pitch: through August 15th, all donations up to two million dollars would be matched by “Houstonian patriot and generous AFL supporter Mike Rydin.”

As a nonprofit, C.P.I. is forbidden to engage in partisan spending or certain kinds of lobbying. Its network of associated organizations, however, has allowed it to do both of those things through a legal back door. America First Legal, like C.P.I., is a nonprofit. But it has a related entity called Citizens for Sanity, which can spend money on political advertising with minimal restrictions. In the last six months of 2022, Citizens for Sanity spent more than ninety million dollars on ads, including one that ran during the World Series. It laid the blame for crime, high inflation, and low wages on illegal immigration and warned viewers that Biden was leading the country toward “World War Three.” Other ads have decried “the woke left’s war on girls’ sports” and the “woke war on our children.” The group’s spending eclipsed that of both C.P.I. (which spent twenty-three million dollars in 2022) and America First Legal (which spent thirty-four million dollars). It’s impossible to know who donated the money, but the address listed on the tax documents for Citizens for Sanity is 300 Independence Avenue.

C.P.I.’s pitch to donors is also predicated on its close relationships with legislators in Washington. One member of the Freedom Caucus told me that House lawmakers were directly involved in C.P.I.’s fund-raising efforts. “When they made donor phone calls, they talked about how C.P.I. was the home of the Freedom Caucus,” the member told me. “The idea was ‘You should give to us because we support the real conservatives.’ ” When House members are in Washington to take votes, C.P.I. often arranges donor events at 300 Independence Avenue. “The presence of the members was to help raise money, and they were requested to mingle with the donors,” the lawmaker said.

C.P.I.’s association with the Freedom Caucus raises questions about whether the organization can credibly claim to be a nonprofit that steers clear of actual lobbying. In January of 2023, members of the Freedom Caucus met at C.P.I.’s headquarters to strategize about their attempt to block Kevin McCarthy from becoming the House Speaker. Meadows joined and advised them on how to proceed; he was regarded as someone with expertise, having tried to oust Boehner in 2015. “It’s pretty extraordinary that Meadows was sitting there talking about how to deny McCarthy the Speakership and how to negotiate concessions,” the member told me. C.P.I. also exerts an unspoken power over lawmakers because of its ties to the House Freedom Fund, the caucus’s political-action committee, which is also registered at 300 Independence Avenue.

Since 2021, Rydin no longer appears to be C.P.I.’s biggest donor. His foundation gave the group $1.5 million in 2022, but, according to C.P.I.’s tax filings, an unnamed donor contributed $15.5 million that year. Among C.P.I.’s most recent donors are the Servant Foundation, a fund backed by David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby; Donors Trust, a fund associated with Leonard Leo and the Koch family; the Bradley Impact Fund, an offshoot of a Wisconsin-based philanthropy where Cleta Mitchell serves as a board secretary; and the Ohio food-packing magnate Dave Frecka and his wife, Brenda, who have a conference room named after them at 300 Independence Avenue. “The previous dark-money political-influence operations tended to be run by more old-school billionaire, polluter, right-wing interests,” Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told me. “C.P.I. represents the MAGA move into this space.”

On a bright, warm day in May, I visited Saurabh Sharma, the twenty-six-year-old head of American Moment, which describes its mission as “identifying, educating, and credentialing” a new generation of conservative staffers. Dressed in a blazer and tie, with round glasses and brown bit loafers, he greeted me in front of a small door on Pennsylvania Avenue that was wedged between a Sweetgreen and a Dos Toros. A narrow staircase led to a small office suite that the group had rented from C.P.I.

Between February, 2022, and March, 2023, C.P.I. bought seven buildings and a parking lot along this stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. It made the purchases through a web of more than a dozen limited-liability companies, taking out at least twenty-five million dollars in mortgages. What helps the group cover the monthly payments is the rent that it charges its network of affiliated nonprofits. Behind the buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, C.P.I. plans to close off the back alley and create a nine-thousand-square-foot “campus” called Patriots’ Row. It already has a property next to the Senate; by expanding its footprint closer to the House, it hopes to insure that staffers from both chambers, as well as the lawmakers themselves, have places to congregate within walking distance of their daily business.

Sharma led me past a counter with a tap for cold brew and into a room filled with chairs and a lectern. He is originally from Texas, where he was the youngest-ever chairman of the state’s Young Conservatives association, and carries himself with the aplomb of someone twice his age. “No one else is as obsessed with finding young people and making them into extremely influential political actors within bureaucratic government life,” he told me. “No one cares as much about doing that as I do.”

Four years ago, Sharma stayed up late one night reading an essay by Senator J. D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, who was then a venture capitalist and a best-selling author. The piece, titled “End the Globalization Gravy Train,” was a statement of principles for a branch of the conservative movement ascendant in the Trump era and known as the New Right: economic nationalism, foreign-policy isolationism, hostility to immigration. Sharma was struck by a portion of the essay in which Vance argued that personnel at every level of government in Washington were not up to the task of responding to the demands of the moment. It was something that Sharma had heard gripes about before, during a summer internship in Washington. For too long, he said on a recent podcast, government offices were staffed by “twenty-three-year-old shitheads” sent to D.C. by their parents to keep them “as far away from the family business as humanly possible.” He put it to me more soberly: “The personnel pipeline needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Who are the fifty twenty-year-olds we should be looking at? There needs to be a white-glove process by which they’re brought into the fold.”

In the winter of 2021, C.P.I. convened a meeting of its top donors in the ballroom of a Miami hotel. Sharma pitched the donors on his new venture, alongside Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump. “It was a very risky thing for them to do,” Sharma told me of C.P.I. “Most groups in Washington don’t want to share their donors. It shows a great deal of confidence on the part of C.P.I.” At the gathering, Sharma met Rydin, who immediately took to him. Later on, while Sharma was speaking to another donor, Rydin approached the pair. “Isn’t this guy so impressive?” Rydin said to the donor, pointing to Sharma. “Well, are you going to help him?”

Sharma considers C.P.I. a “fraternity” devoted to, in his telling, creating a new and lasting culture in Washington. “The right and its people are almost like sedimentary rock,” he said. “It’s like the Grand Canyon. You can see the layers in it. Who the President is in any given year defines what kind of people choose to get involved in center-right politics.” He ran through some history, starting with Barry Goldwater, in the nineteen-sixties, and ending with Trump. “President Trump getting elected brought in an entirely new generation of people,” he said. The problem was that most Republicans in Washington had initially detested the former President. As a result, Sharma said, “no one was interested in elevating a young kid that came to them and said, ‘I’d really like to get involved in politics because President Trump was right. We got lied into Iraq. We should shut down the border. And we’re getting sold out by China when it comes to trade.’ ”

American Moment, he went on, was correcting the “injustice” of the fact that, for the first few years of Trump’s term, the views of such young people were “artificially suppressed” in Washington. “The way that the Trump legacy will be immortal, the way that Trump himself will be immortal, is if there’s a corresponding generation of people that are drawn to politics based on his vision,” Sharma said. Some conservative ideologues tend to see Trump as a wild but ultimately necessary means to an end. In Sharma’s view, Trump is the “alpha and the omega of the conservative movement.” He told me, “The only reason these opportunities exist is because Trump ran and won. The only reason these opportunities exist today is because Trump hasn’t left the scene.”

Sharma had to leave to host a book party at C.P.I. headquarters, which was across the street, and we strolled over together. While we waited at a crosswalk, a young congressional staffer stopped to shake Sharma’s hand. A few other people were making their way to C.P.I.’s town house. At the party, there was a full bar and pulled-pork sandwiches. In a few days, American Moment would be hosting a Hawaiian-themed bash called the Lawless Lawfare Luau, where attendees would wear leis. “I don’t know a D.C. without C.P.I.,” Sharma told me. “But those who were around before say it was a wasteland.” ♦

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The Crusades (1095-1291)
The First Crusade Most historians consider the sermon preached by Pope Urban II at Clermont-Ferrand in November 1095 to have been the spark that fueled a wave of military campaigns to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control. Considered at the time to be divinely sanctioned, these campaigns, involving often ruthless battles, are known as the ...
First Crusade
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The Crusades were a series of military campaigns organised by Christian powers in order to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. There would be eight officially sanctioned crusades between 1095 CE and 1270 CE and many more unofficial ones. Each campaign met with varying successes and failures but, ultimately, the wider objective of keeping Jerusalem and the Holy Land in ...
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The First Crusade, called in response to a request for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus, was astonishingly successful.The Crusaders conquered Nicaea (in Turkey) and Antioch and then went on to seize Jerusalem, and they established a string of Crusader-ruled states.However, after the Muslim leader Zangī captured one of them, the Second Crusade, called in response, was defeated ...
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At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade, and a renewed and generalized Peace of God. Crusades - Holy War, Jerusalem, Europe: Western Europe became a significant power by the end of the 11th century. An economic revival was in full swing, and Europeans had proven they could launch a major military undertaking.
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The First Crusade was organized in 1096 by pope Urban II according to the request of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I. The seek for aid was sent primarily because of Asia Minor lands taken from him by Seljuq Turks. First, the pope asked French knights for a force union, but the crusade quickly turned into a big-scale military campaign attaching ...
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The Success of the First Crusade. The first crusade was a military expedition by European Christians to regain the holy lands and occurred in 1095. It was viewed as an unprecedented success by historians of the day and by contemporary historians. The reasons for this great success, if it can be named great at all, are numerous.
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Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48. Jonathan Riley-Smith. "Crusading as an Act of Love." History 65 (1980), 177-92. Indeed, things got so bad at times during the First Crusade that some starving crusaders, on one or [possibly] two occasions, resorted to cannibalism.
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Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Reliquary Cross

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling

Sword Pommel with the Arms of Pierre de Dreux (ca. 1187–1250), Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond

King Louis IX Carrying the Crown of Thorns

Pyxis Depicting Standing Saints or Ecclesiastics and the Entry into Jerusalem with Christ Riding a Donkey

A Knight of the d'Aluye Family

Gemellion (Hand Basin) with the Arms of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Scene from the Legend of the True Cross

Leaf from a Gospel Book with Four Standing Evangelists

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France

Initial A with the Battle of the Maccabees

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Godfroy de Bouillon

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem (from a set of Scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata)

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, abside

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, détails des chapiteaux

[Interior, Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem]

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Crusader States

First Crusade

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Sieges, starvation, and salvation: the First Crusade explained

What caused the call to crusade?

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Siege of Nicaea

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Siege of Antioch

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Aftermath of the First Crusade

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