WI: no Crusades?

Or at least, no First Crusade success.

The Crusades are by themselves so strange that removing them seems quite easy (anything from premature death of Urban II, to more dissent between East and West so that Alexios does not call for help, or more infighting between the Latin Kingdoms).

I'm more interested in the effects of “no Crusades”: how are the Latin kingdoms going to spend all this energy? Fighting each other? (probable). Going East? (likely). Conquering Constantinople instead? (also likely). Also, how are science, math, philosophy, and civilization in general, going to develop in Western Europe without all the loot? This could perfectly develop a situation in which Muslims would be considered the true heirs to Classical Antiquity, because they kept all the books.
 
No crusades in the Holy Land is probably do-able but no crusades against non-Catholics at all is pretty hard to do. Spain and Prussia are still active frontiers were Christianity is battling the Muslims / pagans and Sicily is also a live conflict area. Christian knights are also fighting for the Byzantines so the chance of being involved in in-fighting between various Byzantine civil war factions is also high. Could also see encroachment into traditional Byzantine areas much as Greece and Epirius
 
I'm not sure butterflying Urban II or Alexios gets rid of the Crusades, or something analogous to them, unless you keep the Turks out of Nicaea or butterfly them altogether.

I can imagine that with no Turks in the East, you may get a more heavily-armed Great Schism and the Catholic world taking a crack at Constantinople not too far down the road once the idea of reuniting the Church amicably gets lost. If nothing else you'll get a lot more French knights marching over the Pyrenees to play with the Al-Andalus taifas, or the Almoravids, depending on where the actual POD is.
 
It would be easy to make the First Crusade a real disaster. The other crusades are mainly the result of the success of the first crusade or had the task to reconquer lost parts of the crusader states.
I would define a crusade as a holy war with the goal to reconquer parts of the Holy Land, therefore the wars in Spain and Eastern Europe are under this definition only normal holy wars.
However knight orders could still arise from these holy wars at the borders of Latin Christianity.
The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire could survive (at least for some time), but with the main focus on the Balkans. It is still possible for the ERE to reconquer parts of Anatolia, if they use intelligent diplomacy. Still the Normans in Sicily are a great threat to the ERE. But the Kingdom of Sicily could also conquer parts of Tunesia (which was done for some harbor towns in OTL).
If the Papacy remains independent from Sicily and has some conflicts with the Holy Roman Emperor, and if the Normans haven't conquered parts of the ERE, it is possible that the Orthodox Church could reach some sort of agreements with the Papacy. (especially if the Pope needs protection from Sicily, and if at the same time the ERE rebuilds their naval power)

Still the Italian merchant cities could gain a lot of power in the Mediterranean, but I would assume that there is not as much contact between the Mediterranean and northwest Europe.
 
Things similar to crusades (like the conquest of England and Sicily by the Normans) were rather popular, so if Urban (and his spiritual successors) had not done it, someone else would have gathered a bunch of prospect-less knights and gone on a-conquering. Might have been rival claimants as in England, or simply people trying to carve out new kingdoms like the Hautevilles and the crusaders. Most likely to me is still Spain and the Mediterranean, because those are rich places (no knight is gonna get rich off conquering the huts of Prussian pagans, and the forts of his fellow Christians are rapidly becoming less appetizing).
 
Things similar to crusades (like the conquest of England and Sicily by the Normans) were rather popular, so if Urban (and his spiritual successors) had not done it, someone else would have gathered a bunch of prospect-less knights and gone on a-conquering. Might have been rival claimants as in England, or simply people trying to carve out new kingdoms like the Hautevilles and the crusaders. Most likely to me is still Spain and the Mediterranean, because those are rich places (no knight is gonna get rich off conquering the huts of Prussian pagans, and the forts of his fellow Christians are rapidly becoming less appetizing).

The idea that the crusading armies were largely made up of "prospect-less knights" looking to get rich is a myth. Aside from anything else, the sheer cost of travelling such long distances meant that only the wealthy and their dependants could afford to go on crusade.
 
The idea that the crusading armies were largely made up of "prospect-less knights" looking to get rich is a myth. Aside from anything else, the sheer cost of travelling such long distances meant that only the wealthy and their dependants could afford to go on crusade.
Someone had to gather them up, no doubt about it. Someone had to go and give them a prospect.

Said someone started out with some prospects, and the prospect-less knights wouldn't benefit all THAT much from any success (the big spoils in Sicily and England went to the big-wigs and their close allies), but it still seems to have been quite easy to gather up armies for a big conquest in the period.
 
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