It also knocked Constantinople out of the cultural, political, and moral preeminence that it had enjoyed since Germans overran the Western Roman Empire. As it was, the involvement in the East, military, commercial, and cultural, helped pull Western Europe out of the Dark Ages and back into world history. The Crusader kingdoms were a portent of what could happen the next time European power spilled over its borders. These states fall into two groups: (1) those recovered from Islām, which was the purpose of the Crusades, and (2) those obtained at the expense of Romania, which had originally appealed for help against the Turks, but which was a tempting target both for its wealth and for its heterodoxy after the Schism of the Churches in 1054.Ĭrusader states can also include the lands of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights in the Baltic, which lasted until Prussia was secularized in 1525 and the last Grand Master of the Livonian Knights was made Duke of Courland by Poland in 1561, and the island of Malta, famously under the Hospitallers, the 'Knights of Malta,' until 1798. Outremer, 'across the sea,' means the states created and maintained by Crusaders and their descendants in the Middle East between 1098, during the First Crusade, and 1489, when Cyprus passed to Venice. Latin Emperors of Constantinople, 1204-1261.Teutonic and Livonian Knights, 1191-1525.The Norman Princes of Antioch, 1099-1287.

The Kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus, 1099-1489.

The Periphery of Francia:Ĭounts of Edessa, Princes of Antioch, Counts of Tripoli, Kings of Thessalonica, Dukes of Athens, Princes of Achaea, and the Grand Masters of the Military Monastic Orders

Crusader States, Kings of Jerusalem & Cyprus, Templars, Hospitallers, Israel, etc.

What if the crusader states survive