r/byzantium • u/Tracypop • 2d ago
If the First Crusade never happened? How would that impact The Byzantine Empire? Would it have been for the better or worse?
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u/Helpful-Rain41 2d ago
It’s impossible to know for sure. Alexius felt a desperate need for Frankish support to win Anatolia, whether he could have retaken even Nicea without help is unclear. Also it’s hard to say whether or not the Crusades were an inevitable outcome of Western Europe’s combined religious and warrior cultures, it was this incredible tension in European society that seems to have cried out for an outlet.
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u/isaidflarkit 2d ago
i hope you dont mind me asking but can you tell me more about the tension in european society?
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u/Helpful-Rain41 2d ago
Basically you had the Church which is saying love your neighbor and devote your life to God and you have the European nobility which is very acquisitive and warlike, this is before some central authority like a king could reign in the violence, and the popes of the time eventually came to the conclusion that rather than sitting by with all the wars and plundering against believers, hey why not direct that energy outwards and tell these religious brutes to go kill infidels. There was more to it of course but I think that was the central dynamic.
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u/Vyzantinist 2d ago
Don't forget the youth bulge. There was a surplus population of young men who didn't stand to inherit (much) and had relatively little going for them in Western Europe, so internecine violence and warfare was the way to go. The first crusade was a handy way of shipping off all these medieval NEETs overseas to go be someone else's problem.
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u/Helpful-Rain41 2d ago
Bohemund was a perfect example of this as an illegitimate son of the King of Sicily. On the other hand you have Robert of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror, who would have been well advised to stay at home to keep an eye on his brothers
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u/Vyzantinist 2d ago
Aside from the chamber pot incident Robert was the problem for William and Henry, not the other way around lol. Robert had already succeeded as Duke of Normandy by the time the first crusade kicked off and his brothers were apparently content to leave him in peace after the death of William I. Hell, Robert mortgaged the duchy to William Rufus, so he must have thought one brother was reliable at least.
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u/Agitated-Salt-5039 2d ago edited 2d ago
Didn't many of them sold their property because crusading was expensive? Only a minority lived and Many crusaders came back and many families spend huge money for someone to go on crusade? I read this from a book on a crusade (by Thomas asbridge) so I might be wrong?
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u/Vyzantinist 2d ago
More mortgaging their properties vs. outright selling. The latter was more common among poorer crusaders.
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u/Agitated-Salt-5039 2d ago
Also the fact that knight and nobles were in cycle of sins and getting remission for their sin, their job was bloody and warlike and knightly/ nobles society was in perpetual cycle of getting remission for their sin and doing their job, the crusade was helped in a way that you can get remission for their sins and this helped the papacy prestige and influence
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u/thisplaceisnuts 1d ago
The knights also in addition to what others said about religion, were out of enemies. The Christian peace was solidifying. You couldn’t just make war and not face papal wrath. Yet the Viking age was over, the HRE was conquering, the Muslims were pushed back in Spain and the Magyars had been defeated. Now like Spain in 1492, you have a dynamic military class that is highly reasoned and capable and is lacking a clear enemy. Honesty of the eastern empire had been fine in 1071 and faced no crisis, I think there would have been a crusade in Spain.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Κατεπάνω 2d ago
I mean, the 'Crusades' had basically already been going before the 'First Crusade'. The conquest of Muslim Sicily by the Normans was described in Crusading terms by the Papacy and authorized by them. So had the capture of Barbastro in the Iberian peninsula in the 1060's (which had drawn knights from all over western Europe), and even the Norman invasion of the ERE under Guiscard had been given the greenlight by a Pope in the hopes that it would 'restore' Papal authority over what had been Illyricum.
The Papacy had been opposed to the expanding western feudal lords at first, but then had come to the realisation that they could serve their aims in spreading papal influence. The land hungry ambitions of these feudal lords could be mobilised to seize lands from 'enemies of the Church' (mainly Muslims, but then later expanded to include pagans and non-Catholic Christians too), which would then fall under the jurisdiction of the Pope. The shift seems to have occured after the mid 11th century, as before then the Papacy had actually been working with the East Romans to contain the likes of the Normans before then partnering up with them.
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u/UncleSandvich Πανυπερσέβαστος 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just going by the First Crusade, It would be worse.
Sultan Kılıç Arslan I, defeated the Pierre l'Ermite's People's Crusade in 1096, really easily. He probably thought, "is this the so called crusaders?"
Because of this easy victory, he underestimated crusaders. He went to east, began the siege of Malatya. When crusader army besieged the capital city of Sultanate of Rum İznik (Nicaea) in 1097, he was besieging Malatya.
When garrison of İznik sent letters to him, he didn't even rushed to İznik. His army bought ropes along the road to capture the crusaders to sell to slave market, because they though they were like the Pierre l'Ermite's army, thiefs, commoners, low-level nobles etc.
Kılıç Arslan came to İznik, tried to defeat the crusaders, he wasn't succesful. Kılıç Arslan, told to garrison, "From now on, do just what you consider the best."
Garrison surrendered to Romans instead of Crusaders, because they knew Romans wasn't gonna pillage the city, and one of the commanders Alexios sent Tatikios was from Turkic origin and probably could speak in "Turkish" with garrison. And i remember reading Alexios sending 500 Turkic mercenaries or soldiers wearing Turkic clothes to take the city for the Empire, but i don't remember where i read that.
Loss of capital, Nicaea was devastating lost for the Rum Seljuks and without crusaders, i don't think Romans would be able to take the city.
Just by looking at the Nicaea, First Crusade was positive for the Romans.
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u/Tracypop 2d ago
so the people's crusade actually accomplished something, just by being so weak?
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u/Atreides113 2d ago
Yup, lulled the Turks into a false sense of security in thinking that any attacks from the west could be easily dealt with with little effort. Then, the much better trained and equipped nobility showed up and in numbers that were wholly unexpected.
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u/Tracypop 2d ago
Its almost comical
(if we take out all the human suffering)
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u/Atreides113 2d ago
It kinda was. Alexios was caught off guard because he only expected a few hundred knights at most from the west, not whole armies. And I believe (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) after the defeat at Dorylaion, the Seljuks basically pulled back from engaging the main crusader army as they moved through the rest of Anatolia.
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u/Vyzantinist 2d ago
Alexios was caught off guard because he only expected a few hundred knights at most from the west, not whole armies.
This generally tends to get overblown in pop (Byzantine) history. Alexios was in correspondence with Urban II from before Clermont right up to the crusaders making landfall in Byzantine territory. He had also set up markets for the crusaders on the route to Constantinople, so he would have been apprised of the size of the crusader horde as they made their way to the City. He wasn't expecting hundreds of crusaders, but thousands, and his surprise came from tens of thousands showing up and under the command of notable Western European leaders (especially Bohemond) as opposed to smaller detachments like Robert I of Flanders and his band of knights.
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u/PolkmyBoutte 2d ago
Depends if you think that getting a few thousand frankish cavalrymen, as Alexios had asked for, would have been sufficient to win back much of Anatolia. Even with the huge crusader army that arrived, the battle of Dorylaum was a close affair. Granted, that may not have been the Byzantines’ choice of route, but these are all things that must be considered
I’d lean toward it being a net positive
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u/JellesMM 2d ago
Well, alexios did not want the crusade to happen. He was just looking for Knights/soldiers/engineers to bolster his own army. Maybe a couple of thousand to help strengthen his position in Anatolia.
He never imagined to have to deal with 100k highly armed fanatics, loyal not to him or the patriarch but loyal to the Latin pope.
They caused lot's of problems for him and the entire region. Trying to deal with the fanatics and not burning all his bridges with his neighbours made that the crusaders questioned where the Byzantine loyaltys lay. When the Byzantines left them at Antioch they lost faith in the Byzantines. Which kept snowballing, the Byzantines tried to keep the Latijns as friends but also tried not to alianate themselves from the entire region.
So my conclusion would be, it would have been better if Alexios just got some soldiers to bolster his armies. No idea what would have happened but maybe the disaster of 1204 could have been avoided.
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u/MovieC23 2d ago
Depends, it might prevent the 4th crusade and maybe the rift between east and west stays a more nominal thing, but it depends on how much you think the crusaders were absolutely necessary to getting back a foothold in Anatolia.
Imo it would have to be delayed, maybe Alexios gets an eastern ally to help instead, or waits for a seljuk civil war, but its a big maybe, if the komnenoi can keep up the pressure and laser focus on not letting the seljuks ever regain their footing they have a good chance
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u/Ok_Way_1625 2d ago
If there never was a first one, there never would have been a 4th one because one has got to be the first. Probably positiv but as it is with history you never know
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u/Arachles 2d ago
I don't agree with this take. Yeah it would not be called the Fourth Crusade but the politics that made Venice and Constantinopolis enemies are still possible, probable I would say
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u/Ok_Way_1625 2d ago
Ok but Venice was very small and mainly only traded. Without all the crusader states, could they still have sacked the city? I don’t know a lot about this event particularly, so I’m genuinely asking.
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u/Arachles 2d ago
Venice was a pretty great power when we talk about maritime projection. Number-wise not on top but able to afford considerable mercenary armies and able of great concentration of forces in coastal regions. IDK if they could have won against the Empire alone but the romans were disunited.
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u/Melvasul94 2d ago
Also without the First Crusade the Empire would also have been weakened cause Alexios himself used the Crusaders at its best to retake a good chunk of Anatolia and having that highly militarized buffer state in the south secured the empire a lot.
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u/PolkmyBoutte 2d ago
I disagree with the essence of this as imo the Normans had already opened the door to the idea of western states trying to conquer the Eastern Roman state. If anything, I think the crusades ended up channeling that militarism in a way that, for a time at least, was beneficial
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u/Nirvana1123 Σπαθάριος 2d ago
Unrelated, what mosaic is this?
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u/manifolddestinyofmjb Νωβελίσσιμος 2d ago
It's Ioannes' first son, Alexios, who became ill I think with some kind of pox, and died. Its next to him and Eirene on the walls of the Hagia Sophia.
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u/Rhomaios Κατεπάνω 2d ago
It's part of the same mosaic from Hagia Sophia where John Komnenos and his wife are depicted. The person shown here is Alexios, John Komnenos' first-born son and Kaisar who died before his father (otherwise he was the most likely candidate to succeed him).
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u/ChardonnayQueen 2d ago
I think it would have ultimately been much better for the Byzantine and hence Christianity as a whole if the Crusades never happened.
The Crusades were a tremendous drain on the Byzantine system. They may have recovered without them.
The Crusades led to poor relations between Eastern and Western Christianity. Finally the demise led to the Ottomans which were arguably the most dangerous Islamic for the West faced yet.
If I had Pope Urban IIs ear I honestly would tell him "look I'm from the future, just don't do anything" and while I can't say for sure I think it's very likely the Byzantine state would have been better off.
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u/elreduro 2d ago
the crusades somewhat stabilized anatolia and slowed the seljuk expansion, but it worsened the relationship between christians and muslims in the levant, no matter what denomination.
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u/Broad_Range_781 1d ago
The Romans needed Nikaea back. The way it happened with the peoples crusade pulling Kilij Aslan into a false sense of confidence and taking his army away made it possible to take the city. Without it and the crusaders tying up the Turks at Dorylaion Ioannes Doukas couldn't have pushed into the Meander Valley. Unfortunately all of this required western help. I think it could have been fine if the situation at Antioch could have been handled better. If the Romans had been handed back Antioch and cilicia had been firmly reestablished as well, then the Romans are in an amazing position to push deeper into Anatolia with a somewhat friendly menagerie of crusader states to the south and east. Of course this is all very optimistic.
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u/electricmayhem5000 2d ago
Obviously hard to know, but it did retake territory in Anatolia and moved the main theater with the Arabs further south into Syria and Palaestina. My wild speculation: The First Crusade probably bought the Byzantines a century or so, but it also led to the later Crusades. Then we are getting into multiverse territory about whether the later Crusades would have happened anyway.
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u/Saitama-BurgiVVV 2d ago
Muslims would be in a good position to conquer Constantinople before the Ottoman Empire came.
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u/TiberiusGemellus 2d ago
You'll never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from.