Jerusalem Lost
Introduction
The most important event after the First Crusade itself was the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. Every crusade after that event was aimed, or at least claimed to aim, at recovering the city. None would ever succeed.
The Third Crusade figures as the most "romantic" of the crusades, mainly because modern authors have made it so. The crusade itself was a series of disappointments, but the individuals involved were among the most colorful of the era--especially Richard of England and Saladin Ayyub. The events and the participants are remarkable, but most important is that the crusade failed.
Because it failed, Europeans would spend nearly forty years in a state of almost continual crusading. This turned an occasional activity into a broad movement and elevated crusading to an important role in European society, politics and economy.
The history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem gets complicated at this point, and we will take some time to unravel it. In this unit we will see even more clearly that the fate of the Kingdom hung from a complex tangle of threads that we will gather into the strands of Europe, Islam, Byzantium, and Outremer. We will see that a history of the crusades must take into account what was happening in all four areas or else the whole story will not be told.