Posted: Jun 23, 2010 9:50 am
Mazille wrote:Tim, is there something to the hypothesis that the crusades - at least the first few - also served to find an occupation for second-born sons and other landless nobles, who would otherwise have just wreaked havoc in their home regions? I don't remember where I picked that up, but I remember that it sounded like a reasonable explanation to me.
Except it's not borne out by the evidence. The main problem the Crusader States faced was a manpower shortage. This was because the Crusades weren't some kind of mass migration of second born sons and other landless nobles. They were "armed pilgrimages", where the participants swore to campaign in the east, visit Jerusalem and help protect the holy places. Then when they had done this the overwhelming majority of them went home. Why? Because they weren't landless - they had estates to get back to that they had neglected for the two years or so it took to go on crusade.
Careful study of the documentary sources (eg agreements to take on power-of-attorney for a Crusader while he was away) shows clearly that the vast majority of Crusaders were not landless at all, which is why so few of them stayed in "Outremer". This is also why the Crusader States built some of the world's most sophisticated and large scale castles: this was a way that the very small number of Europeans could manage to control large swathes of territory and, for about 200 years, hold out against vastly numerically-superior enemies.
The kingdoms of Outremer may have lasted much longer if more Crusaders were landless, but the evidence shows that this was not the case at all.