When the Crusades are mentioned, we often picture armored knights on horseback, banners flying, and holy wars fought for control of the Holy Land. But the reality of being a crusader was far more complicated and brutal than any song or story suggested. The people of medieval Europe loved tales of brave heroes, and the most famous of them all was the Song of Roland. Originally about a hero battling Basque forces, it was rewritten before the Crusades to feature Muslim enemies instead.
The song was enormously popular and served as propaganda, driving men to join up. Taking part in a crusade was known as “taking the cross,” and it was a literal cross sewn onto tunics, a practice that started informally and grew into a formal requirement by the Third Crusade. The color of the cross varied by country—green for the Flemings, red for the French, and silver for the English—acting like a medieval sports jersey. Mounting a crusade was a logistical nightmare.
Gathering tens of thousands of men, horses, and equipment to march from Europe to the Middle East was perilous. The journey was so dangerous that some armies simply gave up halfway and went home. After the port of Antioch was captured, crusaders could travel by sea, but that required hiring or building large fleets, which meant carrying a lot of money. The trip itself was deadly; during the Third Crusade, a crowd of pilgrims fell into a river while crossing a narrow bridge, and over 100 men drowned.
Even leaders weren’t safe. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the Saleph River after insisting on crossing against his council’s advice. His followers were so demoralized that many abandoned the crusade and went home, and some even converted to Islam. Crusaders faced enemies not just on the battlefield, but in the climate itself.
European hygiene practices, developed for damp, dark forests, were completely unsuited to the arid deserts of the Holy Land. The Muslims, whose faith required sanitary rituals, had much better practices for the heat. The crusaders quickly adopted them, using scented oils to mask body odor and washing with hard soap, which Europeans had never known before. Although the crusades were meant to challenge Muslim control of the Holy Land, the license given to the armies also fueled persecution of the Jews.
While the pope issued no official call against them, anti-Semitism was a common byproduct of crusader sermons. Medieval historian Albert of Aix described a spirit of cruelty rising against the Jewish people, including casual slaughter in the Kingdom of Lorraine. Count Emicho of Leiningen led an army along the Rhine and Danube, massacring Jews in every city he passed through. The First Crusade was more spontaneous than later ones, and many men brought their families.
Women were present in military camps in various capacities. Some served men, but others fought and even took leading roles. Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of France’s King Louis VII, was a political and diplomatic leader who convinced her husband to join the siege of Antioch. While the story of her leading 300 noble women into combat is now considered a legend, other accounts confirm women executing prisoners, preparing siege machines, and taking up arms.
One account even describes a woman leading 500 knights on missions against Muslim encampments. The motivations for joining were rarely pure. Some crusaders were fleeing debt, others sought fortune, some craved glory, and many were genuinely faithful. During the First Crusade, Pope Urban II promised absolution for all sins to any Christian who helped.
In later crusades, most fought for their king—Richard the Lionheart for the English, Philip II for the French, and Frederick Barbarossa for the Germans. Without these leaders, few would have had the drive to go. When Barbarossa died, his army gave up. The Knights Templar began as protectors of Christians in Jerusalem, but after the Pope endorsed them with special privileges like tax immunity, their numbers swelled.
They grew into a powerful, disciplined army in their own right, eventually protecting travelers all along the route to the Holy Land. Life on the march was harsh. Supply lines stretched across the known world, so rations were thin. Many crusaders were forced to beg, barter, or forage to avoid starvation.
Bartering could be dangerous; one crusader was trampled by townspeople after arguing over the price of a loaf of bread. For knights, there was the option of eating their horse, but that was a last resort—there was a stigma to being a horse-less knight, and they would be more vulnerable in combat without it. Sadly, eating horses may not have been the true last resort. Letters from the siege of Antioch suggest some crusaders may have been reduced to cannibalism.
The crusades were among the most gruesome conflicts in history, and both sides committed atrocities. Who captured you could make all the difference. The Muslim commander Saladin was famously merciful, allowing Christian doctors to tend to his prisoners and releasing over a thousand captives after retaking Jerusalem. But he had a particular hatred for military orders like the Knights Templar, and he would have them immediately killed.
Plated armor made a soldier nearly invincible against sword slashes, but it wasn’t without its own dangers. A full suit could weigh up to 100 pounds, and wearing it was exhausting. Running in chain mail required twice as much energy as without. In the Battle of Agincourt, the French lost in part because they had to march through mud in their heavy armor, sapping their strength before the fight even began.
But armor wasn’t just heavy; it was also deadly in the desert heat. Soldiers were literally baked inside their metal suits, and many died of heat exhaustion. Some took their armor off entirely, while others covered it with cloth to keep the sun from heating it to the cooking point—but that meant wearing a heavy metal suit and a jacket in the blazing desert. Armor also had weak points: gaps near the groin, neck, and armpits.
Resourceful fighters would grapple their opponents and stab those spots with daggers, sometimes through the eye slit of a helmet. The English longbow was a devastating counter to armored knights. Over six feet long, it had more power and range than other bows, and a skilled archer could fire six arrows in the time it took a crossbowman to fire one. A longbow arrow could pierce armor and chain mail.
At the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V’s longbowmen overwhelmed the heavily armored French. Horses were smaller than you might think. Researchers studied about 2,000 horse bones from medieval England and found most were less than 4 feet 10 inches tall—no bigger than a modern pony, though they were bred to be strong. Formal military training didn’t really exist.
Soldiers relied on skills gained over a lifetime, like hunting, which built horsemanship and weapon skills. By the later Middle Ages, knights could demonstrate their skills on the tournament circuit, though tournaments had their own dangers—Duke Leopold V of Austria was killed in a jousting accident in 1194. Soldiers generally fought in whatever they owned, so armor varied by wealth. They also supplied their own food.
When Charlemagne gathered his army, he gave instructions like a school supply list: shield, lance, sword, dagger, bow, arrows, tools, three months of food, and clothing for half a year. One of the perks of victory was plunder. Soldiers stripped slain enemies of armor, weapons, and anything valuable, and they might ravage a conquered village. In the early medieval period, lords distributed the spoils equally, as Charlemagne did after defeating the Avars.
Siege warfare meant a lot of waiting. Henry III gathered 60,000 crossbow bolts and built nine siege engines for his attack on Kenilworth Castle, which lasted six months. When the castle finally surrendered, it held only two days’ worth of food. The goal of a siege was intimidation, attrition, and surrender, not utter destruction.
Communication on the battlefield was a mess. If a rumor spread that a commander had died, panic could follow. At the Battle of Hastings, false news of William of Normandy’s death prompted his troops to flee. He had to take off his helmet and yell, “Look at me, I’m alive, and with God’s aid, I will gain the victory!
” to rally them. Prisoners were tricky. Capturing too many meant you had to feed and shelter them. Henry V, after his victory at Agincourt, ordered the execution of his French captives.
But nobles and wealthy captives could be ransomed for money or land, and capturing opponents for ransom became a market during the Hundred Years War. Religion and war were inseparable. Warrior bishops and priests appeared on the battlefield. William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, fought alongside him at Hastings.
Commanders believed victory proved God’s support—even when Christians fought other Christians, both sides claimed the same God. The only way to tell where God’s favor lay was to see who won. Some medieval war stories sound made up but aren’t. Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, killed an enemy named Mael Brigte, cut off his head, and tied it to his saddle.
As he rode home, the head’s tooth scratched his leg. The wound became infected, and that was the end of the earl. It’s the only known time a severed head defeated an earl. In 1325, the Italian cities of Modena and Bologna went to war over a bucket.
When Modena snuck into Bologna and stole a prized bucket from the town well, Bologna declared war. They mustered 32,000 men, and 2,000 people died. All over a stolen bucket. At the Battle of Sluys in 1340, the French chained 19 boats together, thinking it would make their navy impossible to break.
Instead, it locked them in place, and the English routed them completely. In 1119, the Battle of the Two Kings between Henry I of England and Louis VI of France saw about 900 knights engaged—but only three were killed. The fighters, as Christian soldiers, decided to take prisoners rather than kill each other, out of fear of God and fellowship in arms. The Battle of the Ice in 1242 saw Teutonic Knights attack the Novgorod Republic across a frozen lake.
The knights, heavily armored, rode onto the ice, but it cracked under their weight and their horses, and the Russians won. Sometimes, faith was a battlefield tactic. In the 6th century, Clovis, a Frankish king, refused to convert to Christianity until a battle was going badly. He cried out to Jesus, offering a deal: if Jesus delivered a victory, Clovis would be baptized.
The tide turned, he won, and he converted. Vlad the Impaler earned his name. As ruler of Wallachia, he wanted to keep the Ottomans out. When Sultan Mehmed II invaded, Vlad welcomed him with the corpses of 23,000 impaled Turks.
Mehmed, evidently needing no second warning, turned back. Known to the Turks as Kaziklu Bey, the Impaling Prince, he’d later be remembered as Dracula. Even if you were a king, daily life in the Middle Ages wasn’t a luxury. The plague killed an estimated third of Europe’s population, and treatments were horrifying.
People strapped live chickens to their swelling sores, drank potions laced with mercury or arsenic, and consumed “unicorn horn”—which was actually ground precious gems. None of it worked. Royal marriages were political, and spouses were often cousins. The Pope forbade William the Conqueror and his wife Matilda of Flanders from marrying, but William did it anyway.
Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were second cousins. The “royal touch” was believed to have magical healing powers. Commoners with scrofula begged kings to lay hands on them. Kings sometimes had to touch hundreds of sick individuals, well before hand sanitizer existed.
Many kings were illiterate. Ministers and scribes did the reading and writing for them, so they often signed documents with just a scratch. Princesses had rough lives. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of the future King Henry VIII, was married at 12, widowed at 13, and pregnant with her son.
Women got pregnant often, and the maternal mortality rate for upper-class mothers might have been up to 20%. Infant mortality was also high. Castles were miserable places. They were drafty, freezing in winter, and dripping with dampness.
The royals had to move from palace to palace just to stay warm. Tapestries weren’t decorations; they were insulation. Toilets were chamber pots, emptied out the window. The finest castles had “garderobes,” stone seats over shafts leading to pits—basically, very tall porta-potties that needed regular emptying.
Flushing didn’t exist. Being a king was a round-the-clock job. Charles V of France woke at 6:00 a. m.
, prayed, attended mass, met with subjects, met with his council, had breakfast at 10, then had meetings all day. He lived the life of a medieval CEO with no vacation. Knights had a career that involved a code of chivalry, but it was less about holding doors open for ladies and more about not beating up priests, stealing cattle, hurting women, or setting fires. It was a list of what not to do.
Knights were expected to attend mass, and their diet was mostly meat because they thought vegetables were poisonous. They drank alcohol because it was safer than contaminated water, and they drank a lot. They were required by law to dress better than peasants, even emphasizing their crotches with large codpieces. A knight’s job was to serve his lord in a private military.
They generally only worked about 40 days a year, and the rest of the time they were “on call. ” They passed the time in tournaments, which were exclusively for noblemen, and they competed for prizes. Training to be a knight could start at age seven, and it took about 14 years of drilling until they were proficient at age 21. They slept in shifts, with some staying awake to keep watch while others prayed or slept.
Castle life for everyone else wasn’t glamorous. Since there was no plumbing, waste just collected in cesspools under the toilets, making every castle a giant outhouse. There was no running water, so baths were rare. Servants were ill and smelling, and privacy was nonexistent.
The toilets were long wooden benches with several holes, in full view of anyone walking by. Castles were crowded, with dozens of servants, several generations of the lord’s family, and all their personal staff. It was like living in a tiny, cramped city serving one family. Prisoners in castles were routinely tortured.
One popular method involved letting rats eat a prisoner alive from the inside out. The idea was that extreme pain cleansed a person of their sins. Rats were everywhere, and they carried a plague that eradicated around half of Europe’s population. The best way to get through the day in a poo-smelling, rat-infested house was with a mug of ale.
Lords and ladies drank fine wine, while servants drank whatever they could get. It was safer than the contaminated water. Meals were taken in the great hall, where people were seated by status. The important people sat at the head of the table with gourmet dishes, while servants were tucked away in the back eating stew.
More than 85% of a town’s residents were peasants who weren’t allowed inside the castle. They worked the land and had to feed themselves. Castles were kept “clean” by spreading rushes, reeds, and herbs across the floor to absorb spills and cover up stench. When they were switched out, everything was revealed—beer, grease, bone fragments, spittle, and animal waste.
Essentially, you were always walking on a layer of barely concealed filth. In the first half of the Middle Ages, most kitchens were built of wood. Cooking over open flames in a building full of timber and hay meant the entire kitchen could catch fire at any moment. Medieval super-weapons were terrifying.
The Byzantines invented Greek fire, a flammable liquid that could be sprayed through a hose and was very difficult to put out. Its recipe was a secret, and it helped the Byzantines carve out an empire that lasted nearly 800 more years. The recipe was lost after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. In 1452, a Hungarian engineer named Orban offered to cast an enormous bronze cannon for Emperor Constantine XI of the Byzantine Empire.
When Constantine couldn’t afford it, Orban took his design to the Ottomans. The bombard was 27 feet long with a 30-inch diameter, firing a projectile that weighed up to 1,500 pounds. It required 200 men and 60 oxen to move. When Mehmed brought it to the siege of Constantinople in 1453, it devastated the city’s walls and allowed the Ottomans to sack the city.
The Welsh longbow was around 6 feet long and required almost double the draw strength of a modern hunting bow. One English knight claimed an arrow went through his thigh, which was covered in chain mail, then penetrated his saddle and killed his horse. The Dutch Hellburner was simply a ship packed with as much gunpowder as possible, designed to drift into an enemy formation. One explosion claimed over 1,000 Spanish lives and could be heard up to 50 miles away.
Trebuchets were mislabeled catapults that could launch a projectile weighing over 300 pounds a distance of more than 650 feet. They were used to fling heavy stones, flaming barrels, decapitated heads, and even cows. The Korean turtle ship was an armored warship with a dragon head on the bow that could emit toxic fumes. They were the Korean antidote to the Japanese Navy, and Admiral Yi Sun-sin used them to turn back the Japanese.
War wagons, first used by the Hussites, were made of hardened wood and positioned in circular formations to create a temporary fortress. Archers fired through holes while soldiers with flails defended. The Chinese fire lance was a spear with a firework attached. It launched a projectile or poison at close range.
It was most effective in defense, especially when defending city walls. The crusades stand as one of the most gruesome conflicts in human history, a time when faith, ambition, and fear drove people to commit atrocities and endure unimaginable suffering. And when it was all over, the armor, the weapons, and the castles remained—reminders of a brutal age when even a king’s life was far from luxurious.
