God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark

Author:Rodney Stark [Stark, Rodney]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Christianity, Religion, History
ISBN: 9780061582608
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2009-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

way. We know that a substantial proportion of the People’s Crusaders were kil ed in their several battles in Bulgaria. Surely many more died of the natural causes that always beset such groups in those days; even during the American Civil War, the Union Army lost three men from disease for every one lost in battle.37 So it is very difficult to guess how many of Peter’s people survived to be slaughtered by the Turks. Similarly, although many, perhaps most, of Hugh of Vermandois’s contingent who set sail from Bari drowned, we can’t estimate how many they were, let alone how many fel out along the way.

Al that having been said, I estimate that of the perhaps 130,000

who set out on the First Crusade in 1096, 90,000 did not take part in the siege of Nicaea in June 1097. That is a loss rate of roughly 35

per mile who died or turned back. And by the time Jerusalem was taken, perhaps as many as 115,000 (or 88 percent) of the original crusaders had been lost. If this seems excessive, consider that of Bohemond’s Normans who were sufficiently prominent to be named in the Gesta Francorum, a third were dead before 1099 and another fourth were unaccounted for.38 In addition, these estimates of losses do not include the several thousand additional knights who arrived by sea during the course of the campaign. So the total number who died or deserted probably totaled about 120,000—most of whom perished.

It was not until the upper-class sons of Europe were slaughtered in the trenches during World War I that Europe suffered the loss of a generation of leaders equal to that which took place during the First Crusade. Those who marched east were among the best and the brightest of their time. When they died, the responsibilities for managing many major estates and dealing with many important concerns fel upon widows and minor sons, and on those who failed to serve, just as it did in England, France, and Germany in the 1920s. Even so, commitment to crusading remained high for many more years as the families involved in the First Crusade continued to send their subsequent generations to defend the Holy Land. Indeed, when Europe began to sour on crusading, it appears that it was not the families who had given the most who lost heart; rather, it was families who had never sent a crusader who opposed continuing to pay the taxes required to sustain the crusader kingdoms.

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