I am a college student that's freaking out a little bit, I have to write an essay about the crusades and whether or not they were a failure. I understand that it was Pope Urban's plan to reunite the east and western Christendom. I know quite a bit about the fourth crusade and I am stating that the fourth crusade was a complete failure because the cemented the anti-latin sentiments coming from the Greeks in Constantinople, making the great schism permanent. Urban's second part of his plan was to make the Holy Land accessible to all by way of crusades. What my question is, is why after the first crusade and the establishment of a Kingdom of Jerusalem, why could the crusaders not hold the Holy Land
I would recommend looking into a couple of influential essays on the core concept of what crusading meant at the time the first is by Christopher Tyreman the second is by Markowski (should be cited in Tyreman's article). Do you think that crusade meant the same thing in the late eleventh- as in the early thirteenth-century? Are you perceiving the driving force of Western crusades, implicitly the papacy in your question, as a monolithic body with an institutionalised intent? What about the motivations of crusaders in Outremer, or Iberia, Occitania, or the Baltic? What does this proliferation of crusading destinations, or the establishment of a minimum term for crusader indulgences (see Dan Power's fantastic article on the topic) maybe indicate? Was the First Crusade a success because of the unity of purpose of the Franks or the shattered political situation in the Levant? Was it a difference in martial culture, or purely military technique, or are those concepts actually distinct?
A very big question, which has many possible interpretative answers and no definite one. An essay is meant to prove your ability to lay out an argument based on an analytical reading of secondary and primary literature. Your professors and lecturers are not expecting you to put the nail in the coffin of the issue in a short (2,000 words?) essay. Your answer won't be all encompassing, but acknowledging deficiencies or limitations is a natural part of scholarship (just don't spend your time showing off that you've read stuff without engaging with the arguments)!
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