Crusade Spin-Offs - Keep The Franchise Going

(this is part eleven of twelve about The Crusades as a movie series)

If it was a small group of fighters / adventurers / armed pilgrims, later historians would not include it in the count of the canonical eight numbered crusades. Larger events that were total disasters would also be swept under the rug. Popes might call for a crusade, but the call would be ignored. Historical reality is not as tidy as a 5-slide pitch deck.

Once the seal was broken on spin-off crusades, the crusading movement expanded quickly beyond just reclaiming Jerusalem.

If the pope could call a crusade against his political opponents, why wouldn’t he? If the pope could call a crusade for some reason other than to take Jerusalem, then maybe a ruler could call a crusade themselves?

If Catholic heretics were fair game for a crusade, then it wasn’t too much a leap to persecute other Christian sects, Jews, and Muslims, wherever they were. The fox was set among the chickens for sure.

Some notable “crusading movements” outside the Big Eight numbered crusades are:

Reconquista:

The reconquest of Spain for Christian kingdoms was underway before the eastern crusades started, and it would continue long after Jerusalem was abandoned as the main goal for crusading.

Starting from just a tiny Christian kingdom in northwestern Spain in the 700s, the peninsula would evolve into a Christian north and a Muslim south with the Christian conquest of Toledo in 1085. The last Islamic kingdom was defeated in 1492 with the fall of Granada.

The Reconquista would take on the emphasis of a holy war midway through due to the influence of the crusades, and that notion would accelerate through the end and beyond with the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from the kingdom.

Albigensian Crusade:

The first major non-Jerusalem crusade was the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), a war against Cathars, a heretical sect of Christians in southern France. Pope Innocent III was the first to preach a crusade against fellow Christians, not a crusade to retake Jerusalem.

In 1229, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, descendant of Count Raymond IV, hero of the First Crusade, surrendered and married his daughter into the French royal family. The lords of northern France had marched south and stolen land and loot from their southern French cousins. Southern lands were annexed into France and under the thumb of the French king.

Baltic Crusades:

East of the Elbe River, the preliterate pagans of central and eastern Europe were divided into many rural tribes. Medieval crusaders called them Wends, and aimed not just to take their territory, but either convert them to Christianity or destroy them. It was brutal.

The Baltic Crusades kicked off in 1147 and were intermittently active. Albert, bishop of Livonia, conducted annual crusades 1199-1229, kicking it into overdrive for 30 years. In 1225, Polish nobles called on the Teutonic Knights to assist them against the Prussians. Eventually, all the pagans would be converted, and the Christian kingdoms would fight amongst themselves.

Children’s Crusade:

In the spring of 1212, some rowdy teenagers in Chartres, northern France, decided that they would retake Jerusalem. They marched up the Rhine River and teamed up with German teenagers on their mission.

The crusade made it to Genoa that same summer, but they forgot to bring any money, so they could not book passage across the sea. As ever, backpacking in Europe is so much easier if your parents pay for your rail pass. The crusade broke up and the kids went home to form angry punk rock bands and/or moody emo groups.

Hohenstaufen Crusades:

As a part of the continual struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, various popes declared crusades against Frederick II and his successors in the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

At first, Frederick would be under excommunication for a few years, then he and the pope would hug it out and things would be okay, or at least okay-ish, but then he would get excommunicated again a few years later.

This escalated into popes full-on calling crusades against Frederick personally, and then after he died in 1250, calling crusades against his heirs. Eventually the pope got his way and replaced the Hohenstaufen family, making the Hapsburgs the ruling dynasty in Germany.

Shepherds’ Crusade:

The common people were not happy to see crusading for Jerusalem winding down. After King Louis IX was captured in Egypt during the Seventh Crusade, they really flipped out. In 1251, farmers in Flanders took up their farm tools as weapons and marched toward Paris to get the French royal family to organize a crusade to retake Jerusalem.

At first their appeals moved the queen of France, but when these “shepherds” began killing Christian clergy for not enthusiastically supporting their demands for a crusade, royal officials shut the crusade down.

And that’s just a small sampler platter of fighting inspired by the crusades. Once the crusading toothpaste was out of the tube, there was no putting it back.

A spin-off takes a character (or group of characters) from the original story and then creates a continuation of the story based around them. Usually, spin-offs are not as beloved as the original.

While there is the occasional cameo by a character the audience knows, like the Teutonic Knights campaigning in Eastern Europe instead of in the Levant, most of the key figures are new characters.

At this point, the movie franchise is running out of steam. Audiences still remember how much they enjoyed the early movies (forgetting the flops), but now they’re moving on. Nothing lasts forever, so eventually the studio will have to cancel active projects and move on too…