End of the Crusades

Moreover, with the end of the Third Crusade, the crusading movement as a whole faded into anticlimax. No subsequent crusade came remotely close to gaining its objectives, as the Third Crusade arguably had. Of the later crusades, only the Fourth Crusade (12021204) was a success in military terms, but it went hopelessly astray, conquering the Christian city of Constantinople, and never engaged the Islamic world at all.1 The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Great regained Jerusalem for Christendom in the early thirteenth century (12291244), by diplomacy rather than war, but he received few thanks for his effortsthe Church excommunicated himand his success had no lasting impact.2 The last Frankish strongholds on the coast of Syria survived for a century after the Third Crusade, but they were never what the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other Frankish principalities had been in the twelfth century, true forces in the region. As an ideolog

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olitical struggle for control of Aquitaine.14 The political element in the siege has not gone wholly unrecognized by earlier writers. Kate Norgate, writing in the 1920s, says that A double motive seems now to have urged him southward. The troublesome halfbrothers Aimar of Angouleme and Aimar of Limoges were, it appears, again plotting or at least credibly suspected of plotting treason against him. He had also been informed of a wonderful treasure trove on the land of a baron of the Limousin.15 For Norgate, then, Richard's campaign in the region around Limouges had a strategic motive, though the specific decision to besiege ChalusChabrol itself seems in her view to have been motivated primarily by the rumors of treasure. A full evaluation of the circumstances of Richard's death lies beyond the scope of this study. I am not aware of any study that attempts to respond to Gillingham's "revisionist" account of Richard's death, but his version should at least remind us that the conventional interpretation may be neither complete nor final. More broadly, our doubts about Richard's death may encourage us to question the metaphors drawn from it, about both Richard's own life a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Third Crusade, Richard Saladin, Mecca February, Philip Augustus, Norgate Richard's, John Gillingham, Egypt Syria, Kingdom Jerusalem, Muslim Syria, Middle Ages, third crusade, richard saladin, oxford university press, orig pub, university press, york oxford, richard lionheart, oxford university, press 1988, york oxford university, richard's death, university press 1988, baha ehdin, baha ehdin saladin, weidenfeld nicolson 1978,
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