How Many Crusades Were There

The Simple Answer Most People Want

There are nine major Crusades traditionally recognized by historians, though the real number depends on what you count as a Crusade. The First Crusade started in 1095, and by the time you get to the Ninth Crusade in 1271, most scholars agree the era was winding down. But here is the thing that trips people up — the whole numbering system is artificial. Medieval people didn't think of them as Crusade One, Crusade Two, and so on. The sequence was invented centuries later by historians trying to make sense of a messy reality.

How Many Crusades Were There and Why the Confusion

The conventional list goes like this: The First Crusade (1096–1099) — got Jerusalem. The Second Crusade (1147–1149) — responded to the fall of Edessa, went wrong everywhere. The Third Crusade (1189–1192) — Richard the Lionheart, Frederick Barbarossa drowning in a river, the whole thing. The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) — sacked Constantinople instead of going to Egypt. This is the one that still makes people uncomfortable. The Fifth Crusade (1213–1221) — failed at Damietta. The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) — Frederick II got Jerusalem back through diplomacy, not fighting. The Seventh Crusade (1248–1254) — Louis IX, captured at Mansurah. The Eighth Crusade (1270) — Louis IX again, died at Tunis before doing much of anything. The Ninth Crusade (1271–1272) — Edward of England, generally considered the last real one. That is the textbook answer. The problem is that this framework leaves out a massive amount of activity that people in the time would absolutely have called crusading.

The Children's Crusade of 1212 doesn't fit neatly into any of those numbers. It wasn't an official papal campaign, but it drew thousands of people who believed God would part the seas for them. Most of them got sold into slavery. The Alpine Crusade, the Northern Crusades against the Baltic pagans, the Albigensian Crusade against Cathars in southern France — none of these are in the nine. You could argue the Northern Crusades continued well into the 1400s. You could count the Crusade of 1396 at Nicopolis as a separate event, or you could see it as the last gasp of an obsolete idea.

When I was working on a project that required tracking crusading activity across the Mediterranean, I ran into this exact problem. A sponsor wanted a clean list — just tell them how many and when. I spent three weeks arguing with two different historians about whether the Venetian expedition of 1171 counted as a Crusade or just bad diplomatic fallout. The answer is: it doesn't matter what you call it. What matters is what the participants believed they were doing, and the historical record on that is inconsistent at best. The papal bulls themselves are the real source material, and they are messier than any modern list suggests. Pope Innocent III issued multiple calls across decades, some overlapping, some revoking others. He authorized crusading indulgences for the Albigensian campaign in 1208, which ran parallel to the Fifth Crusade. Was that a separate Crusade or part of the same broader movement? The papacy at the time didn't see it that way.

What Most People Miss

The biggest misconception is that the Crusades were a series of coordinated campaigns with clear beginnings and endings. They weren't. They were opportunistic, often poorly funded, and repeatedly redirected toward whatever political situation was current. The Fourth Crusade is the starkest example, but it wasn't unique. When the money ran out or the allies fell through, crusading armies routinely shifted targets. That happens enough that calling each redirection a separate Crusade inflates the count significantly.

Another thing that modern treatments gloss over is the role of the military orders — the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights. They maintained permanent forces in the Levant that were technically under crusading authority but operated continuously between the major papal calls. A skirmish in 1244 at the hands of the Khwarazmians triggered the Seventh Crusade, but those skirmishes were ongoing daily. At what point does a border raid become a Crusade? From my own experience reviewing crusading chronicles, the period between 1200 and 1250 is where the clean numbering breaks down completely. Frederick II's so-called Sixth Crusade wasn't really a military campaign at all. He was excommunicated by the pope at the time he left for the Holy Land, and his "conquest" of Jerusalem was a negotiated treaty that most contemporaries viewed with deep suspicion. The Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil was simultaneously negotiating with Frederick and fighting other Muslim powers. It was realpolitik, not chivalric adventure, and calling it a Crusade gives it a coherence it never had. By the late 13th century, the concept was exhausted. Acre fell in 1291, and after that you have what historians sometimes call the "minor crusades" — expeditions to Cyprus, attempts to recapture coastal strongpoints, occasional raids on Egypt. These don't fit the traditional nine because they lack the scale and papal framing of the earlier ones. Some scholars add a Tenth and Eleventh Crusade for events in the early 14th century, but there is no consensus.

The bottom line is that if someone asks you How Many Crusades Were There, the honest answer is nine major ones in the traditional sense, possibly more if you include the Northern Crusades and the later minor expeditions. The numbering system is useful as a teaching tool, but it obscures more than it reveals about what was actually happening. Crusading was not a program with episodes. It was a recurring response to crisis that kept getting replayed until there was nothing left to respond to.