battles, he returned to England after concluding a treaty
with the Mameluke Sultan, Baybars. Once again, another
frustrating failure.
After 1271, Christian resolve weakened further, and in the following
twenty years the Mamelukes systematically reduced the remaining
Crusader strongholds. The last to fall was Acre, which was besieged by
120,000 men under the leader Malek–Aschraf. The 25,000 Christian
defenders resisted heroically for three months, only to flee in their ships to
Cyprus when all was lost. The garrison of Knights Templars, however,
remained, and together with the Christian presence in the Middle East was
completely annihilated.
Without a doubt, the Crusades for the Holy Land from the military point of
view were ultimately a total failure due in large part to the self-interest,
contention, infidelity and avarice that racked and divided the Christian
forces. The various massacres after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 and at
Constantinople in 1204 are without excuse and still leave their scars on
East-West relations. In addition, the unofficial People’s Crusade of 1096
and the Children’s Crusade were tragic follies that led to the deaths of tens
of thousands of enthusiastic but misled individuals. In his Easter Message
of 2000, Pope John Paul II showed that the Church was willing to admit
responsibility for “sins committed in the service of truth.” But those who
continually raise these failings in order to denigrate the whole crusading
movement and the Church per se overextend themselves. Excesses occur in
any just war – for example, the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in
February 1945. Nevertheless, the ideal of the crusade stands unchallenged;
that is, wars fought in self-defense to recapture what was lost to an unjust
aggressor whose actions over the previous 450 years had showed an
intention to devor the whole of Christendom.
Critics of the Crusades are also strangely silent about Islamic militarism
and expansion. One never hears outrage over the Moslem conquests of
Christian regions and the large-scale kidnappings of Christian children,
discriminatory taxation policies and the forced conversions of whole
populations to Islam. Apologies are never demanded of the Moslems for
invading Western Europe in the eighth century or Eastern Europe in the
fifteenth century. This silence also extends to present-day persecutions of
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