Medieval Scotland and how the Crusades expanded international links

Yet medieval Scotland was deeply connected to the rest of Catholic Europe and beyond and one enduring link was the Crusades. These holy wars against non-Christians, first called for by Pope Urban II at a council in Clermont, France, in 1095, lasted for centuries, even beyond the medieval period.

The second in this new series exploring Scotland’s historic links with the wider world looks at Scottish participation in these wars.Scots were among the many different peoples recorded joining the First Crusade (1096-99) but none of their names survive from this or other early expeditions.

READ MORE: How Scotland forged its international links before the Act of Union and beyond

Scots also fought with Hugh de Payens, the founder of the Knights Templar, in his failed attempt to capture Damascus in 1129. It was not until the Third Crusade (1189-92), which the Scoto-Norman noble Robert de Quincey joined, that we find the names of any Scottish participants.

Scottish crusading became more common in the 1200s, when members of the Stewart, Balliol, and Bruce families all joined Crusades. At least two Gaelic-speaking Scots joined the Fifth Crusade (1217-21) which attacked Damietta in Egypt. These were the poets Gille Brighde Albanach and Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh.

Muireadhach Albanach (Murdoch the Scotsman) was originally Irish but he moved to Scotland after he was banished from Ireland for murdering a lord’s steward with an axe. In one of his poems, probably written shortly before leaving for the Crusade, he wrote “Protect us in the hot land / gentle lady Mary”.

Other Scots joined the Ninth Crusade, the final major expedition to the Holy Land before the last Christian stronghold of Acre fell in 1291. But the Crusades did not end there. Instead, crusaders just went elsewhere, to fight non-Christians in Spain, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Baltic. Spain and Portugal had been divided between Muslim and Christian states ever since the Umayyad Caliphate invaded in 711. Over the centuries, the various Christian kingdoms had slowly conquered more and more territory from the Muslims. By 1300, only the Emirate of Granada remained.

One of the most famous Scottish Crusade expeditions to Spain was James Douglas’s in 1330. A hero of the First War of Independence, he and several other knights had arrived in Spain carrying with them the embalmed heart of Robert the Bruce, which they intended to take to Jerusalem. Douglas agreed to join Alfonso XI of Castile’s latest war against Granada and fought for the Spanish at the siege of Teba Castle. However, Douglas and all his companions were killed before the castle was taken. The most popular theatre for Scottish Crusaders was the Baltic, already familiar to many Scottish sailors, traders, and even settlers.

Since the early 13th century, the Teutonic Knights, a German order of warrior-monks like the Templars, had been slowly colonising and converting what is now coastal Poland, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. They battled with the Pagan peoples of the region, particularly the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

But they did not do this alone. A steady stream of Crusaders from western Europe would visit the region each summer to join the Teutonic Knights on their raids on the Pagans. The Order would put on great feasts, competitions, and tournaments to entertain their guests, before taking them on raids into Lithuania.

There were at least six such Scottish expeditions there between 1356 and 1410. The international nature of these expeditions meant that some Crusaders brought their national, and even personal, rivalries with them.

William Douglas of Nithsdale was a prominent Scottish knight who had fought in the wars against England in the 1380s. He also feuded with an English nobleman, Thomas, Lord Clifford, probably because of an argument over land. In 1390, Douglas challenged Clifford to a duel but it never went ahead. The following year, Douglas was on crusade with the Teutonic Knights in Konigsberg. He and his followers tried to attend mass at a church there, but were turned away. Douglas blamed a group of English Crusaders for this, a group that included Clifford.

So he set an ambush outside the church and attacked Clifford and his fellow knights but managed only to wound an English squire, while Douglas and two other Scots were killed.

To stop the violence escalating, the Crusaders’ hosts quickly led them on a raid against the Lithuanians.

The Crusades were not something that only went in one direction. While Scots went abroad to fight, they also affected Scotland in return. The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller both had outposts in Scotland from which they raised funds and recruited new members to send to the Holy Land.

The head of the Scottish Hospitallers, the preceptor of Torphichen, eventually became an important political figure and even had a seat in Parliament. This came to an end with the Scottish Reformation, when the last preceptor, James Sandilands, sold most of the Hospitallers’ Scottish lands to Mary Queen of Scots in return for being made Lord Torphichen in his own right.

But some Scots continued to fight in the Crusades after the Reformation. James Irving left Scotland in 1560 to join the Hospitallers and served with them in Malta for nine years.

In 1612, William Lithgow (above), the famous Scottish traveller and pilgrim, stopped off at Malta on his journey back from Egypt and the Middle East. There he met a countryman, William Douglas. Douglas had fought for the Hospitallers as a mercenary in their wars against the Turks and their allies the Barbary Corsairs, before eventually joining the order himself.

Crusading took many Scots, whether nobles and knights or poets and soldiers, across Europe and beyond, visiting Jerusalem, Egypt, Spain and the Baltic.

This practice extended even up to the century before the Act of Union. The Crusade movement helped connect Scotland with a wider world, exchanging people, stories, and artefacts with places on the edges of Europe and beyond.