Crusades Trivia
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60 free Crusades trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Two centuries of holy war began with a speech in a French field in November 1095 and ended with the fall of Acre in 1291. This quiz covers the whole span: Pope Urban II at Clermont and the cry of 'Deus vult', Peter the Hermit's doomed People's Crusade, the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem, the four crusader states, the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, and the string of numbered crusades that followed, from the Kings' Crusade of Richard and Barbarossa to Louis IX dying of dysentery outside Tunis. It also covers the people on both sides: Saladin, Baibars and the Assassins; Godfrey of Bouillon, the Leper King, Raynald of Châtillon and blind Doge Dandolo; the sack of Constantinople, the Children's Crusade, the Albigensian and Northern crusades, and Krak des Chevaliers. Questions run from easy (which pope launched the First Crusade) to expert (how many marks Richard's ransom cost). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Crusades, individual campaigns, battles, orders and leaders, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our medieval history, Knights Templar and Byzantine Empire quizzes next.
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Q 01Which pope proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095?
Urban II
Urban II promised remission of sins to all who marched east, yet never learned how it ended: he died two weeks after Jerusalem fell, before the news could reach Italy.
Q 02Which Seljuk capital, site of a famous church council in 325, surrendered in 1097 during the First Crusade's opening siege?
Nicaea
Nicaea gave up in June 1097, but to the Byzantine emperor's envoys, who had bargained in secret with its Turkish garrison; the crusaders camped outside were left without the plunder they had expected.
Q 03Which Byzantine emperor's appeal for help against the Seljuk Turks sparked the First Crusade?
Alexios I Komnenos
Alexios I Komnenos had asked the West for mercenaries to help him win back Anatolia; what arrived instead were vast armies with a goal of their own, Jerusalem.
Q 04Where was the 1071 battle in which the Seljuks captured a Byzantine emperor and opened Anatolia?
Manzikert
Manzikert left Emperor Romanos IV a prisoner of the sultan Alp Arslan, who freed him on terms; his rivals at home then overthrew and blinded him, and Anatolia lay open to the Turks.
Q 05The Latin battle cry of the First Crusade, 'Deus vult', means what?
God wills it
God wills it: one eyewitness chronicle has cross-wearing crusaders chanting it three times with one voice in 1096, and shouting it again with glad voices as they seized an enemy city's towers.
Q 06Which French priest led the peasant 'People's Crusade' of 1096?
Peter the Hermit
Peter the Hermit was away asking the Byzantine emperor for help when the Turks wiped out his followers, so he survived, joined the princes' armies and preached on the Mount of Olives before Jerusalem fell.
Q 07On their way east in 1096, crusaders led by Count Emicho carried out massacres of Jews in which region?
The Rhineland
The Rhineland towns of Worms and Mainz saw Jews killed even inside the bishops' palaces where they had sought shelter; Emicho never reached the Holy Land, for the Hungarians routed his band on the way.
Q 08Which city did the First Crusade capture in June 1098 after a siege of more than seven months?
Antioch
Antioch fell when an Armenian guard let the crusaders climb into his tower by night; within days a huge Turkish relief army arrived and trapped the victors inside the city they had just taken.
Q 09Which relic did Peter Bartholomew claim to unearth during the 1098 siege in Syria?
The Holy Lance
The Holy Lance, dug from under a church floor after Peter's visions, rallied the besieged crusaders, but doubts never died: he tried to prove it by walking through fire and was dead within two weeks.
Q 10Which Shia dynasty ruling from Cairo had retaken Jerusalem from the Turks a year before the crusaders stormed it?
The Fatimids
The Fatimids of Egypt won Jerusalem back in 1098, so a crusade preached against the Turks ended on 15 July 1099 by storming a city held by the Turks' own enemies.
Q 11Godfrey of Bouillon would not be called king in Jerusalem and, by tradition, took which title?
Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre
Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre is the title tradition gives him, with the story that he would not wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn thorns; his brother and successor had no such qualms and was crowned king in 1100.
Q 12The crusader states were also known by the French name 'Outremer', meaning what?
Overseas
Overseas, literally 'beyond the sea': Outremer was always short of fighting men, because most crusaders went home once Jerusalem was won.
Q 13The Second Crusade was called after which crusader state fell to Zengi in 1144?
Q 21Which crusader lord's raid on a Muslim caravan during a truce provoked Saladin's 1187 campaign?
Raynald of Châtillon
Raynald of Châtillon had earlier sent ships down the Red Sea to threaten the pilgrim road to Mecca; captured in 1187, he was killed, by most accounts, by Saladin's own hand.
Q 22Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who beat Saladin at Montgisard in 1177, is known by which nickname?
The Leper King
The Leper King's illness was first noticed by his tutor, the chronicler William of Tyre, who saw that the boy felt nothing when playmates scratched his arm; he still led armies against Saladin in his teens.
Q 23The Third Crusade was led by Richard I, the King of France and which emperor?
The County of Edessa
The County of Edessa, the first crusader state to be founded, was also the first to fall: Zengi struck while its count had marched most of his army away, and the city was his by Christmas Eve 1144.
Q 14Which abbot preached the Second Crusade in a famous sermon at Vézelay in 1146?
Bernard of Clairvaux
Bernard of Clairvaux drew such a crowd that he had to preach in a field; when the crusade he had raised collapsed, the blame fell on him and he sent the pope a written apology.
Q 15The Second Crusade's main army under Louis VII and Conrad III failed to take which city in 1148?
Damascus
Damascus had once been an ally of the crusader kingdom, yet the two kings chose it as their target and abandoned the siege after only four days, short of water outside its walls.
Q 16Which queen of France rode on the Second Crusade beside her husband, Louis VII?
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Eleanor of Aquitaine came home estranged from Louis; the marriage was annulled in 1152, and within two months she had married Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II, taking Aquitaine with her.
Q 17Crusaders sailing to the Second Crusade stopped in 1147 to help capture which Iberian city from the Moors?
Lisbon
Lisbon fell after a four-month siege: bad weather had driven the crusader fleet into Porto, where Portugal's king won its help by promising the city's plunder, and many settled there instead of sailing on.
Q 18Saladin, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, was of which ethnic origin?
Kurdish
Kurdish: Saladin was born into a Kurdish military family and first reached Egypt on the staff of his uncle Shirkuh, whose command he took over in 1169 at the age of 31.
Q 19Saladin destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem on 4 July 1187 at which battle?
Hattin
Hattin was won by thirst: Saladin lured the army away from its springs onto an arid plateau, and after a night without water it broke; King Guy was captured and the relic of the True Cross was lost.
Q 20The 'Horns' that give Saladin's great 1187 victory its name are the twin peaks of what?
An extinct volcano
An extinct volcano: the waterless crusader army, already choked by smoke from the brush fires Saladin's men had lit, made its last stand on the slopes of its twin peaks.
Frederick Barbarossa
Frederick Barbarossa, by then in his late sixties, was the first of the three to set out, and chose to march his army overland through the Balkans and Anatolia while the two kings went by sea.
Q 24How did the German emperor die on the Third Crusade in June 1190?
He drowned crossing a river
He drowned crossing a river, the Saleph in what is now Turkey; accounts differ on whether he fell from his horse or stopped to bathe, but most of his army turned for home and only a remnant reached the Holy Land.
Q 25On his way to the Holy Land in 1191 Richard I conquered which island from Isaac Komnenos?
Cyprus
Cyprus fell within weeks: its ruler had seized Richard's shipwrecked followers, and tradition says that Richard, having promised not to put Isaac in irons, had him bound in chains of silver instead.
Q 26Richard I defeated Saladin in September 1191 at which battle during the crusaders' march south along the coast?
Arsuf
Arsuf was decided by a charge Richard may not have ordered: after hours under arrow fire the Hospitallers at the rear broke ranks, and he threw every knight in behind them and drove Saladin's army from the field.
Q 27The 1192 Treaty of Jaffa left Jerusalem in Muslim hands but granted what?
Access for unarmed Christian pilgrims
Access for unarmed Christian pilgrims was the most Richard could win: he had marched within sight of Jerusalem but judged that he lacked the men to hold it even if he took it, and settled for a three-year truce.
Q 28In legend, which minstrel found the captive Richard I by singing beneath castle walls?
Blondel
Blondel belongs to a tale first told around 1260. The real captive was passed from Duke Leopold of Austria to the emperor Henry VI, who set his price at 150,000 marks, a sum raised by heavy new taxes on Richard's subjects.
Q 29Which relative plotted with France's king to seize the captive Richard I's throne?
John
John, his younger brother, allied with the king of France and tried to seize the throne while the 150,000-mark ransom was being raised; once free, Richard forgave him and in the end named him heir.
Q 30Richard I survived the Third Crusade only to be killed in 1199 by what weapon while besieging a minor French castle?
A crossbow
A crossbow bolt at Châlus ended a ten-year reign of which he had spent barely six months in his own kingdom; the rest went on crusade, in a German prison and at war in France.