Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The crusades (1095–1291).

Reliquary Cross

Reliquary Cross

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling

Sword Pommel with the Arms of Pierre de Dreux (ca. 1187–1250), Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond

Sword Pommel with the Arms of Pierre de Dreux (ca. 1187–1250), Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond

King Louis IX Carrying the Crown of Thorns

King Louis IX Carrying the Crown of Thorns

Pyxis Depicting Standing Saints or Ecclesiastics and the Entry into Jerusalem with Christ Riding a Donkey

Pyxis Depicting Standing Saints or Ecclesiastics and the Entry into Jerusalem with Christ Riding a Donkey

A Knight of the d'Aluye Family

A Knight of the d'Aluye Family

Gemellion (Hand Basin) with the Arms of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Gemellion (Hand Basin) with the Arms of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

Scene from the Legend of the True Cross

Scene from the Legend of the True Cross

Scene from the Legend of the True Cross

Leaf from a Gospel Book with Four Standing Evangelists

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France

Jean Pucelle

Initial A with the Battle of the Maccabees

Initial A with the Battle of the Maccabees

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi

Godfroy de Bouillon

Godfroy de Bouillon

Colin Nouailher

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem (from a set of Scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata)

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem (from a set of Scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata)

Designed by Domenico Paradisi

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, abside

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, abside

Auguste Salzmann

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, détails des chapiteaux

Jérusalem, Saint Sépulcre, détails des chapiteaux

[Interior, Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem]

[Interior, Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem]

Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters , The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2001 (originally published) February 2014 (last revised)

The First Crusade Most historians consider the sermon preached by Pope Urban II at Clermont-Ferrand in November 1095 to have been the spark that fueled a wave of military campaigns to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control. Considered at the time to be divinely sanctioned, these campaigns, involving often ruthless battles, are known as the Crusades. At their core was a desire for access to shrines associated with the life and ministry of Jesus, above all the Holy Sepulcher, the church in Jerusalem said to contain the tomb of Christ ( 2005.100.373.100 ). Absolution from sin and eternal glory were promised to the Crusaders, who also hoped to gain land and wealth in the East. Nobles and peasants responded in great number to the call and marched across Europe to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire . With the support of the Byzantine emperor, the knights , guided by Armenian Christians ( 57.185.3 ), tenuously marched to Jerusalem through Seljuq-controlled territories in modern Turkey and Syria. In June 1099, the Crusaders began a five-week siege of Jerusalem, which fell on July 15, 1099 ( 92.1.15 ). Eyewitness accounts attest to the terror of battle. Ralph of Caen, watching the city from the Mount of Olives, saw “the scurrying people, the fortified towers, the roused garrison, the men rushing to arms, the women in tears, the priests turned to their prayers, the streets ringing with cries, crashing, clanging and neighing.”

The Crusaders took over many of the cities on the Mediterranean coast and built a large number of fortified castles across the Holy Land to protect their newly established territories ( 28.99.1 ), while also establishing churches loyal to Rome. For the Crusaders, the Dome of the Rock was the Temple of Solomon; the Aqsa mosque was converted to use as a palace and stables.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem established by the Crusaders boasted fifteen cathedral churches. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, for example, became the seat of a Western Christian bishop in 1110 ( 1988.1174.9 ).

Artists from different traditions met in the city of Jerusalem, with, for example, Syrian goldworkers on the right of the market near the Holy Sepulcher, and Latin goldworkers on the left (Conder 1896). Indeed, metalwork from this period sometimes combines an Islamic aesthetic with Christian subject matter ( 1971.39a,b ). Some pieces even bear an inscription indicating that they were made by an Islamic goldsmith for a Christian. Precious works of art fashioned for the churches of Europe celebrated their links to the Holy Land ( 2002.18 ; Toulouse Cathedral Limoges Reliquary ).

Second and Third Crusade In 1147–49, the Second Crusade, championed by the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux ( 1975.1.70b ), attempted to take Damascus in Syria. The campaign was a dismal failure because the Muslims had regrouped. Led by Salah al-Din (Saladin), Muslim forces advanced across Syria and finally retook Jerusalem in October 1187. Saladin was credited by his personal secretary with allowing the Patriarch of Jerusalem to leave the city with the church’s treasure, explaining: “If we make excuses [to confiscate this wealth] they [the Franks] will accuse us of treachery … let us not make them accuse people of faith of breaking their oaths. Let them go. They will talk about our benevolence” (Mohamed el-Moctar, in Paul and Yaeger, 2012, p. 209).

Entering the city, a vizier of Saladin marveled at how the Crusaders had beautified Jerusalem: “the care of the unbelievers had transformed [it] into a Paradise garden … those accursed ones defended with the lance and sword this city, which they had rebuilt with columns and slabs of marble [ 2005.100.373.86 ], where they had founded churches and the palaces of the Templars and the hospitallers … One sees on every side houses as pleasant as their gardens and bright with white marble and columns decorated with leaves, which make them look like living trees” (quoting Kadi el-Fadel in Hamilton, 1979).

By the end of the Third Crusade (1189–92), Crusader forces had gained Cyprus and the coastal city of Acre. Saladin guaranteed access to Jerusalem to European pilgrims and welcomed Jews back to the city as well.

The chronicle of the Spanish-born Ibn Jubayr, who traveled to Mecca from 1183 to 1185, speaks of the ease of trade in the Holy Land, even in times of military hostilities: “the Muslims continuously journeyed from Damascus to Acre (through Frankish territory), and likewise not one of the Christian merchants was stopped and hindered (in Muslim territories) … The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace” (as cited in Paul and Yaeger, 2012, p. 34).

The Fourth Crusade With each crusade, relations between the Byzantines and the Western forces became more estranged. The Fourth Crusade set out in 1202 with Egypt as its goal. After choosing sides in a dynastic dispute in Byzantium, however, the Crusaders turned their siege upon Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople, to collect an enormous sum of money that had been promised for their support. The city was sacked in 1204, its rich treasures divided between the Venetians (the lion’s share of which remains in the Treasury of San Marco, Venice), the French, and other Crusaders. The Latin Empire of Constantinople was established with Baldwin of Flanders as emperor. In 1261, the Byzantines regained the city .

Later Crusades Successive crusades were launched to the Holy Land. The knight Jean d’Alluye traveled to the Holy Land around 1240, but the circumstances of his voyage are not known ( 25.120.201 ).

The Seventh and Eighth Crusades, in 1248 ( 38.60 ) and 1270, were sponsored by Louis IX , who died in Tunisia ( 54.1.2 ; 37.173.3 ). In 1271, Sultan Baibars captured Montfort Castle ( 28.99.1 ), and in 1291, the Crusader city of Acre fell, ending the era of Latin Crusader kingdoms. Calls for new crusades over the next centuries were increasingly ignored, despite the renown in which Crusaders and the Holy Land were held in legend ( 1993.65.4 ; 23.21.4 ; 25.120.528 ; 25.120.529 ; 54.1.1 ; Belles Heures Heraclius leaf, folio 156 ).

Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “The Crusades (1095–1291).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/crus/hd_crus.htm (originally published October 2001, last revised February 2014)

Further Reading

Burgoyne, Michael Hamilton. Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study . London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1987.

Conder, Claude R., trans. "The City of Jerusalem." Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society 6 (1896).

Dandridge, Pete and Mark Wypyski. "Sword and Dagger Pommels Associated with the Crusades, Part II: A Technical Study." Metropolitan Museum Journal 46 (2011), pp. 145–51.

Folda, Jaroslav. The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Folda, Jaroslav. Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Goss, Vladimir P., ed. The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange Between East and West During the Period of the Crusades . Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1986.

Grabar, Oleg, and Benjamin Z. Kedar eds. Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem's Sacred Esplanade . Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2009.

Hamilton, Bernard. Monastic Reform, Catharism, and the Crusades . London: Valorium Reprints, 1979.

Hillenbrandt, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

La Rocca, Donald J. "Sword and Dagger Pommels Associated with the Crusades, Part I," Metropolitan Museum Journal 46 (2012), pp. 133–44.

Paul, Nicholas, and Suzanne Yeager, eds. Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Prawer, Joshua. The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Rozenberg, Silvia, ed. Knights of the Holy Land: The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem . Exhibition catalogue. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1999.

Additional Essays by Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters

  • Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Art for the Christian Liturgy in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
  • Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Classical Antiquity in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
  • Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Private Devotion in Medieval Christianity .” (October 2001)
  • Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ The Art of the Book in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
  • Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ The Cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages .” (October 2001)
  • Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “ Stained Glass in Medieval Europe .” (October 2001)

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Crusades

The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge and Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades by Jonathan Phillips

T he historian Marc Bloch, who died a martyr's death when shot by the Nazis, observed that "once an emotional chord has been struck, the limit between past and present is no longer regulated by a mathematically measurable chronology". Although we are approaching the millennium of the First Crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, the spirit of this archetypal conflict between a militant Catholicism and its rival faiths in Iberia, Southern France, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Baltic lives on. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, George W Bush said: "This crusade… this war on terror is going to take a while." As Jonathan Phillips remarks, his incendiary comment was a propaganda gift to Osama bin Laden, who for years had been talking about Jewish-Crusader attacks on Islam.

Thomas Asbridge makes the same point. How can it be, he asks, that this language of medieval holy war has found a place in modern conflicts, as if there were some "unbroken line of hatred and discord connecting the medieval contest for control of the Holy Land to today's struggles in the Near and Middle East?" He concludes that the crusades are a potent, alarming and dangerous example of the "potential for history to be appropriated, misrepresented and manipulated" for political ends. Together with Phillips, he points out that the Muslim idea of the crusade embodied in the Arabic term al-hurub al-salabiyya ("the wars of the cross") only appeared in the course of the nationalist struggles in the 19th century. The crusaders' Muslim contemporaries employed less emotive, more secular language: "the wars of the Franks",

Both of these books take us back to the period in western history when belief in the afterlife was paramount. Philips describes a society "saturated with religious belief", where fear of damnation was universal. Ordinary life was fraught with eternal hazards. Practically every church contained frescoes or sculptures depicting the horrors of hell – devils gouging out the eyes of screaming sinners, living humans skinned and eternally roasted – contrasted with the peace, tranquillity, and safety of heaven for the saved. The Church's message was terrifyingly simple: there was no avoiding the consequences of sin. Urban II, an ambitious and ruthless Frenchman, launched the movement with a brilliant new formula: wipe the slate clean by going on the crusade. All the vicious and violent misdeeds that were occupational hazards for medieval warriors and their entourages would be cancelled. For the knightly classes the "neatest aspect of all is that they could continue fighting – only now their energies would be directed towards the enemies of God, rather than their fellow Christians".

And who were these enemies of God? The obvious ones were the Saljuq Turks, who were moving into Byzantine lands. The ostensible excuse for Urban's appeal to arms was a request by the Emperor Alexius in Constantinople, whose territories in Anatolia (now eastern Turkey) were being taken over by these semi-nomadic invaders. These encroachments, however, had been going on for many decades without much bothering the papacy, while the holy city of Jerusalem, the scene of Christ's passion and site of his crucifixion and tomb, had been under Muslim rule for four centuries without scandal, with Christian pilgrims generally free to travel there.

The first crusade, as Asbridge explained in an earlier account he published in 2004, was really about the consolidation and extension of papal power in the anarchic and faction-ridden lands of western Europe. Crusading redirected the energies of feuding warlords, "channelling their bloodlust beyond the borders of the Latin West for the 'good' of all Christendom". Philips underlines this point by giving much fuller treatment than Asbridge to the papally-sanctioned crusades outside the Middle East – against the Muslim states in Iberia, against pagans in the Baltic and Cathar heretics in southern France.

The outcome was a configuration of politics, religion and culture that we now take for granted: failure in Outremer (today's Middle East), where the Latin kingdoms were doomed to extinction, being reliant on continued provisioning from western Europe; but success in Iberia, where the crusading ideology revitalised the Spanish Reconquista. As Asbridge explains in a masterful conclusion, the huge distances involved in mounting military expeditions or even maintaining regular contact with Levantine kingdoms situated thousands of miles away proved insuperable once the Muslim East had rallied to the cause of defeating the Frankish intruders.

The other major contest between Latins and Muslims ended in Christian victory because of Iberia's proximity to the rest of Europe. But ideology was also crucial, as Phillips makes clear: Castilian and Catalan rulers had fought Spanish Muslims for decades with the limited objectives of advancing their territorial holdings and securing commercial privileges; but after Pope Eugenius III launched the Second Crusade in 1145, the Iberian campaign became overtly religious, with Christian rulers securing the full array of papal indulgences and other spiritual rewards.

Religious fervour added heroism to the conflict, but also cruelty. Both writers enliven their narratives with blood-curdling details culled from Muslim and Frankish sources: the decapitated heads of prisoners paraded on spikes to humiliate and enrage the enemy; battlefields where dead horses resembled hedgehogs from the quantity of arrows sticking into them; winter sieges where the people "tormented by the madness of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of dead Saracens, which they cooked and ate insufficiently roasted".

But there are also heartening examples of respect and even collaboration across the religious divide, with instances of tolerance and decency that belie images of "medieval" fanaticism. Asbridge has no doubt that the conflict was between the Franks and Levantines, rather than Christians and Muslims. "One fact is clear: in the Latin East, the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims but between Franks (that is to say, Latin Christians) and non-Franks (be they eastern Christian, Jewish or Muslim)."

The papacy's real agenda was revealed in the Fourth Crusade, when the crusaders sacked Constantinople in a campaign to install a short-lived puppet regime intended to extend papal rule over the eastern branches of Christendom. In the words of a Byzantine witness, the Franks thought nothing of violating nuns, "tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men". Another Greek writer contrasted the brutality of the westerners with the humane treatment the Muslim hero Saladin accorded to the people of Jerusalem, which he reconquered in 1187 (before it was again lost to Islam, briefly, in 1229).

Asbridge suggests, however, that for all his energy in uniting Islam (which he achieved by suppressing the brilliant civilisation that had flowered in Egypt under the Shiite Fatimids), Saladin had "neither the will nor resources to complete the conquest of the Palestinian coastline". It would be left to the much more ruthless and fanatical Mamluk Sultan Baibars, who held back the Mongol invaders at Ayn Jalut in 1260, to create the conditions leading to the final exit of the Franks from Palestine in 1291.

Yet despite all the battles and sieges, commerce continued unabated. The Spanish Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr, who visited the Levant in the early 1180s, found the Muslims of western Galilee living in farms and orderly settlements alongside the Franks. He even suggested that his co-religionists were more likely to be treated with justice by a Frankish landlord than by one of his own faith. The military order of the Templars, who occupied the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, allowed Muslims to pray individually in the al-Aqsa mosque, while even in the heat of battle a knight might be allowed the dignity of answering a quiet call of nature before returning to the fray.

Both of these books contain compelling narratives that resonate inescapably with contemporary events. Each of the authors has published previous books – Asbridge on the First Crusade, and Philips on the disastrous Fourth. Both play to their detailed knowledge the sources, without appearing to repeat themselves. If a common message can be gleaned through the mayhem of distant battles, it is that fragments of human decency can survive the furies inspired by contested symbolic appropriations of a jealous Abrahamic god.

Malise Ruthven's books include Islam in the World (Granta) and Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)

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crusades war essay

The Crusades: A Complete History

A comprehensive account of a compelling and controversial topic, whose bitter legacy resonates to this day. 

Crusaders embark for the Levant. From ‘Le Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon’, France, 1337. (Bibliothèque Nationale / Bridgeman Images)

During the last four decades the Crusades have become one of the most dynamic areas of historical enquiry, which points to an increasing curiosity to understand and interpret these extraordinary events. What persuaded people in the Christian West to want to recapture Jerusalem? What impact did the success of the First Crusade (1099) have on the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean? What was the effect of crusading on the people and institutions of western Europe? How did people record the Crusades and, finally, what is their legacy?

Academic debate moved forwards significantly during the 1980s, as discussion concerning the definition of a crusade gathered real steam. Understanding of the scope of the Crusades widened with a new recognition that crusading extended far beyond the original 11th-century expeditions to the Holy Land, both in terms of chronology and scope. That is, they took place long after the end of the Frankish hold on the East (1291) and continued down to the 16th century. With regards to their target, crusades were also called against the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula, the pagan peoples of the Baltic region, the Mongols, political opponents of the Papacy and heretics (such as the Cathars or the Hussites). An acceptance of this framework, as well as the centrality of papal authorisation for such expeditions, is generally referred to as the 'pluralist' position.

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The emergence of this interpretation energised the existing field and had the effect of drawing in a far greater number of scholars. Alongside this came a growing interest in re-evaluating the motives of crusaders, with some of the existing emphases on money being downplayed and the cliché of landless younger sons out for adventure being laid to rest. Through the use of a broader range of evidence than ever before (especially charters, that is sales or loans of lands and/or rights), a stress on contemporary religious impulses as the dominant driver for, particularly the First Crusade, came through. Yet the wider world intruded on and then, in some ways, stimulated this academic debate: the horrors of 9/11 and President George W. Bush's disastrous use of the word 'crusade' to describe the 'war on terror' fed the extremists' message of hate and the notion of a longer, wider conflict between Islam and the West, dating back to the medieval period, became extremely prominent. In reality, of course, such a simplistic view is deeply flawed but it is a powerful shorthand for extremists of all persuasions (from Osama Bin Laden to Anders Breivik to ISIS) and certainly provided an impetus to study the legacy of the crusading age into the modern world, as we will see here, calling on the extensive online archive of History Today .

The First Crusade was called in November 1095 by Pope Urban II at the town of Clermont in central France. The pope made a proposal: 'Whoever for devotion alone, but not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.' This appeal was the combination of a number of contemporary trends along with the inspiration of Urban himself, who added particular innovations to the mix. For several decades Christians had been pushing back at Muslim lands on the edge of Europe, in the Iberian peninsula, for example, as well as in Sicily. In some instances the Church had become involved in these events through the offer of limited spiritual rewards for participants.

The Council of Clermont and the arrival of Pope Urban II. Bibliothèque Nationale / Bridgeman Images

Urban was responsible for the spiritual well-being of his flock and the crusade presented an opportunity for the sinful knights of western Europe to cease their endless in-fighting and exploitation of the weak (lay people and churchmen alike) and to make good their violent lives. Urban saw the campaign as a chance for knights to direct their energies towards what was seen as a spiritually meritorious act, namely the recovery of the holy city of Jerusalem from Islam (the Muslims had taken Jerusalem in 637). In return for this they would, in effect, be forgiven those sins they had confessed. This, in turn, would save them from the prospect of eternal damnation in the fires of Hell, a fate repeatedly emphasised by the Church as the consequence of a sinful life. To find out more see Marcus Bull , who reveals the religious context of the campaign in his 1997 article.

Within an age of such intense religiosity the city of Jerusalem, as the place where Christ lived, walked and died, held a central role. When the aim of liberating Jerusalem was coupled to lurid (probably exaggerated) stories of the maltreatment of both the Levant's native Christians and western pilgrims, the desire for vengeance, along with the opportunity for spiritual advancement, formed a hugely potent combination. Urban would be looking after his flock and improving the spiritual condition of western Europe, too. The fact that the papacy was engaged in a mighty struggle with the German emperor, Henry IV (the Investiture Controversy), and that calling the crusade would enhance the pope's standing was an opportunity too good for Urban to miss.

A spark to this dry tinder came from another Christian force: the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Alexios I feared the advance of the Seljuk Turks towards his capital city of Constantinople. The Byzantines were Greek Orthodox Christians but, since 1054, had been in a state of schism with the Catholic Church. The launch of the crusade presented Urban with a chance to move closer to the Orthodox and to heal the rift.

The reaction to Urban's appeal was astounding and news of the expedition rippled across much of the Latin West. Thousands saw this as a new way to attain salvation and to avoid the consequences of their sinful lives. Yet aspirations of honour, adventure, financial gain and, for a very small number, land (in the event, most of the First Crusaders returned home after the expedition ended) may well have figured, too. While churchmen frowned upon worldly motives because they believed that such sinful aims would incur God's displeasure, many laymen had little difficulty in accommodating these alongside their religiosity. Thus Stephen of Blois, one of the senior men on the campaign, could write home to his wife, Adela of Blois (daughter of William the Conqueror), that he had been given valuable gifts and honours by the emperor and that he now had twice as much gold, silver and other riches as when he left the West. People of all social ranks (except kings) joined the First Crusade, although an initial rush of ill-disciplined zealots sparked an horrific outbreak of antisemitism, especially in the Rhineland, as they sought to finance their expedition by taking Jewish money and to attack a group perceived as the enemies of Christ in their own lands. These contingents, known as the 'Peoples' Crusade', caused real problems outside Constantinople, before Alexios ushered them over the Bosporus and into Asia Minor, where the Seljuk Turks destroyed them.

Led by a series of senior nobles, the main armies gathered in Constantinople during 1096. Alexios had not expected such a huge number of westerners to appear on his doorstep but saw the chance to recover land lost to the Turks. Given the crusaders' need for food and transport, the emperor held the upper hand in this relationship, although this is not to say that he was anything other than cautious in dealing with the new arrivals, particularly in the aftermath of the trouble caused by the Peoples' Crusade and the fact that the main armies included a large Norman Sicilian contingent, a group who had invaded Byzantine lands as recently as 1081. See Peter Frankopan . Most of the crusade leaders swore oaths to Alexios, promising to hand over to him lands formerly held by the Byzantines in return for supplies, guides and luxury gifts.

In June 1097 the crusaders and the Greeks took one of the emperor's key objectives, the formidable walled city of Nicaea, 120 miles from Constantinople, although in the aftermath of the victory some writers reported Frankish discontent at the division of booty. The crusaders moved inland, heading across the Anatolian plain. A large Turkish army attacked the troops of Bohemond of Taranto near Dorylaeum. The crusaders were marching in separate contingents and this, plus the unfamiliar tactics of swift attacks by mounted horse archers, almost saw them defeated until the arrival of forces under Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon saved the day. This hard-won victory proved an invaluable lesson for the Christians and, as the expedition went on, the military cohesion of the crusader army grew and grew, making them an ever more effective force.

Over the next few months the army, under Count Baldwin of Boulogne, crossed Asia Minor with some contingents taking the Cilician towns of Tarsus and Mamistra and others, heading via Cappadocia towards the eastern Christian lands of Edessa (biblical Rohais), where the largely Armenian population welcomed the crusaders. Local political conflict meant Baldwin was able to take power himself and thus, in 1098, the first so-called Crusader State, the County of Edessa, came into being.

Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem (c.1058-1118), from the Abrégé de la Chronique de Jerusalem, France, 15th century. De Agostini / Bridgeman Images

By this time the bulk of the army had reached Antioch, today just inside the southern Turkish border with Syria. This huge city had been a Roman settlement; to Christians it was significant as the place where saints Peter and Paul had lived and it was one of the five patriarchal seats of the Christian Church. It was also important to the Byzantines, having been a major city in their empire as recently as 1084. The site was too big to surround properly but the crusaders did their best to squeeze the place into submission. Over the winter of 1097 conditions became extremely harsh, although the arrival of a Genoese fleet in the spring of 1098 provided some useful support. The stalemate was only ended when Bohemond persuaded a local Christian to betray one of the towers and on June 3rd, 1098 the crusaders broke into the city and captured it. Their victory was not complete, however, because the citadel, towering over the site, remained in Muslim hands, a problem compounded by the news that a large Muslim relief army was approaching from Mosul. Lack of food and the loss of most of their horses (essential for the knights, of course) meant that morale was at rock bottom. Count Stephen of Blois, one of the most senior figures on the crusade, along with a few other men, had recently deserted, believing the expedition doomed. They met Emperor Alexios, who was bringing long-awaited reinforcements, and told him that the crusade was a hopeless cause. Thus, in good faith, the Greek ruler turned back. In Antioch, meanwhile, the crusaders had been inspired by the 'discovery' of a relic of the Holy Lance, the spear that had pierced Christ's side as he was on the cross. A vision told a cleric in Raymond of St Gilles' army where to dig and, sure enough, there the object was found. Some regarded this as a touch convenient and too easy a boost to the standing of the Provençal contingent, but to the masses it acted as a vital inspiration. A couple of weeks later, on June 28th, 1098, the crusaders gathered their last few hundred horses together, drew themselves into their now familiar battle lines and charged the Muslim forces. With writers reporting the aid of warrior saints in the sky, the crusaders triumphed and the citadel duly surrendered leaving them in full control of Antioch before the Muslim relief army arrived.

In the aftermath of victory many of the exhausted Christians succumbed to disease, including Adhémar of Le Puy, the papal legate and spiritual leader of the campaign. The senior crusaders were bitterly divided. Bohemond wanted to stay and consolidate his hold on Antioch, arguing that since Alexios had not fulfilled his side of the bargain then his oath to the Greeks was void and the conquest remained his. The bulk of the crusaders scorned this political squabbling because they wanted to reach Christ's tomb in Jerusalem and they compelled the army to head southwards. En route, they avoided major set-piece confrontations by making deals with individual towns and cities and they reached Jerusalem in June 1099. John France relates the capture of the city in his article from 1997.

Forces concentrated to the north and the south of the walled city and on July 15th, 1099 the troops of Godfrey of Bouillon managed to bring their siege towers close enough to the walls to get across. Their fellow Christians burst into the city and over the next few days the place was put to the sword in an outburst of religious cleansing and a release of tension after years on the march. A terrible massacre saw many of the Muslim and Jewish defenders of the city slaughtered, although the oft-repeated phrase of 'wading up to their knees in blood' is an exaggeration, being a line from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation (14:20) used to convey an impression of the scene rather than a real description – a physical impossibility. The crusaders gave emotional thanks for their success as they reached their goal, the tomb of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre.

Their victory was not yet assured. The vizier of Egypt had viewed the crusaders' advance with a mixture of emotions. As the guardian of the Shi'ite caliphate in Cairo he had a profound dislike of the Sunni Muslims of Syria, but equally he did not want a new power to establish itself in the region. His forces confronted the crusaders near Ascalon in August 1099 and, in spite of their numerical inferiority, the Christians triumphed and also secured a substantial amount of booty. By this time, having achieved their aims, the vast majority of the exhausted crusaders were only too keen to return to their homes and families. Some, of course, chose to remain in the Levant, resolved to guard Christ's patrimony and to set up lordships and holdings for themselves. Fulcher of Chartres, a contemporary in the Levant, lamented that only 300 knights stayed in the kingdom of Jerusalem; a tiny number to establish a permanent hold on the land.

Over the next decade, however, aided by the lack of real opposition from the local Muslims and boosted by the arrival of a series of fleets from the West, the Christians began to take control of the whole coastline and to create a series of viable states. The support of the Italian trading cities of Venice, Pisa and, particularly at this early stage, Genoa, was crucial. The motives of the Italians have often been questioned but there is convincing evidence to show they were just as keen as any other contemporaries to capture Jerusalem, yet as trading centres they were determined to advance the cause of their home city, too. The writings of Caffaro of Genoa, a rare secular source from this period, show little difficulty in assimilating these motives. He went on pilgrimage to the River Jordan, attended Easter ceremonies in the Holy Sepulchre and celebrated the acquisition of riches. Italian sailors and troops helped capture the vital coastal ports (such as Acre, Caesarea and Jaffa), in return for which they were awarded generous trading privileges which, in turn, gave a vital boost to the economy as the Italians transported goods from the Muslim interior (especially spices) back to the West. Just as important was their role in bringing pilgrims to and from the Holy Land. Now that the holy places were in Christian hands, many thousands of westerners could visit the sites and, as they came under Latin control, religious communities flourished. Thus, the basic rationale behind the Crusades was fulfilled. There is a strong case for saying that the crusader states could not have been sustained were it not for the contribution of the Italians.

One interesting side-effect of the First Crusade (and a matter of immense interest to scholars today) is the unprecedented burst of historical writing that emerged after the capture of Jerusalem. This amazing episode inspired authors across the Christian West to write about these events in a way that nothing in earlier medieval history had done. No longer had they to look back to the heroes of antiquity, because their own generation had provided men of comparable renown. This was an age of rising literacy and the creation and circulation of crusade texts was a big part of this movement. Numerous histories, plus oral storytelling, often in the form of Chansons de geste , popular within the early flowerings of the chivalric age, celebrated the First Crusade. Historians have previously looked at these narratives to construct the framework of events but now many scholars are looking behind these texts to consider more deeply the reasons why they were written, the different styles of writing, the use of classical and biblical motifs, the inter-relationships and the borrowings between the texts.

Another area to receive increasing attention is the reaction of the Muslim world. It is now clear that when the First Crusade arrived the Muslims of the Near East were extremely divided, not just along the Sunni/Shi'ite fault line, but also, in the case of the former, among themselves. Robert Irwin draws attention to this in his 1997 article, as well as considering the impact of the crusade on the Muslims of the region. It was a fortunate coincidence that during the mid-1090s the death of senior leaders in the Seljuk world meant that the crusaders encountered opponents who were primarily concerned with their own political infighting rather than seeing the threat from outside. Given that the First Crusade was, self-evidently, a novel event, this was understandable. The lack of jihad spirit was also evident, as lamented by as-Sulami, a Damascene preacher whose urging of the ruling classes to pull themselves together and fulfil their religious duty was largely ignored until the time of Nur ad-Din (1146-74) and Saladin onwards.

The Frankish settlers had to fit in to the complex cultural and religious blend of the Near East. Their numbers were so few that once they had captured places they very quickly needed to adapt their behaviour from the militant holy war rhetoric of Pope Urban II to a more pragmatic stance of relative religious toleration, with truces and even occasional alliances with various Muslim neighbours. Had they oppressed the majority local population (and many Muslims and eastern Christians lived under Frankish rule), there would have been no-one to farm the lands or to tax and their economy would simply have collapsed. Recent archaeological work by the Israeli scholar Ronnie Ellenblum has done much to show that the Franks did not, as was previously believed, live solely in the cities, separated from the local populace. Local Christian communities often existed alongside them, sometimes even sharing churches.

Muhammad al-Idrisi’s map of the world, with Jerusalem at its centre, drawn for Roger II of Sicily in 1154. Bridgeman Images

The Frankish states of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem established themselves in the complex religious, political and cultural landscape of the Near East. One of the early rulers of Jerusalem had married into native Armenian Christian nobility and thus Queen Melisende (1131-52) had a strong interest in supporting the indigenous as well as the Latin Church. The quirks of genetics, coupled with a high mortality rate among male rulers, meant that women exerted greater power than previously supposed given the war-torn environment of the Latin East and prevailing religious attitudes towards women as weak temptresses. It still needed a strong personality to survive and, in the case of Melisende, that was certainly so, as Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts in a 2011 article, which also gives a sense of the city of Jerusalem during the 12th century, as well as some contemporary Muslim views of the Christian settlers.

The Franks were always short on manpower but were a dynamic group who developed innovative institutions, such as the Military Orders, to survive. The Orders were founded to help look after pilgrims; in the case of the Hospitallers, through healthcare; in that of the Templars, to guard visitors on the road to the River Jordan. Soon both were fully-fledged religious institutions, whose members took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It proved a popular concept and donations from admiring and grateful pilgrims meant that the Military Orders developed a major role as landowners, as the custodians of castles and as the first real standing army in Christendom. They were independent of the control of the local rulers and could, at times, cause trouble for the king or squabble with one another. The Templars and Hospitallers also held huge tracts of land across western Europe, which provided income for the fighting machine in the Levant, especially the construction of the castles that became so vital to the Christian hold on the region.

In December 1144 Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured Edessa to mark the first major territorial setback for the Franks of the Near East. The news of this disaster prompted Pope Eugenius III to issue an appeal for the Second Crusade (1145-49). Fortified by this powerful call to live up to the deeds of their first crusading forefathers, coupled with the inspiring rhetoric of (Saint) Bernard of Clairvaux, the rulers of France and Germany took the cross to mark the start of royal involvement in the Crusades. Christian rulers in Iberia joined with the Genoese in attacking the towns of Almeria in southern Spain (1147) and Tortosa in the north-east (1148); likewise the nobles of northern Germany and the rulers of Denmark launched an expedition against the pagan Wends of the Baltic shore around Stettin. While this was no grand plan of Pope Eugenius but rather a reaction to appeals sent to him, it shows the confidence in crusading at this time. In the event, this optimism proved deeply unfounded. A group of Anglo-Norman, Flemish and Rhineland crusaders captured Lisbon in 1147 and the other Iberian campaigns were also successful but the Baltic campaign achieved virtually nothing and the most prestigious expedition of all, that to the Holy Land, was a disaster, as Jonathan Phillips explains in his 2007 article. The two armies lacked discipline, supplies and finance, and both were badly mauled by the Seljuk Turks as they crossed Asia Minor. Then, in conjunction with the Latin settlers, the crusaders laid siege to the most important Muslim city in Syria, Damascus. Yet, after only four days, fear of relief forces led by Zengi's son, Nur ad-Din, prompted an ignominious retreat. The crusaders blamed the Franks of the Near East for this failure, accusing them of accepting a pay-off to retreat. Whatever the truth in this, the defeat at Damascus certainly damaged crusade enthusiasm in the West and over the next three decades, in spite of increasingly elaborate and frantic appeals for help, there was no major crusade to the Holy Land.

To regard the Franks as entirely enfeebled would, however, be a serious error. They captured Ascalon in 1153 to complete their control of the Levantine coast, an important advance for the security of trade and pilgrim traffic in terms of reducing harassment by Muslim shipping. The following year, however, Nur ad-Din took power in Damascus to mark the first time that the cities had been joined with Aleppo under the rule of the same man during the crusader period, something that greatly increased the threat to the Franks. Nur ad-Din's considerable personal piety, his encouragement of madrasas (teaching colleges) and the composition of jihad poetry and texts extolling the virtues of Jerusalem created a bond between the religious and the ruling classes that had been conspicuously lacking since the crusaders arrived in the East. During the 1160s Nur ad-Din, acting as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy, seized control of Shi'ite Egypt, dramatically raising the strategic pressure on the Franks and at the same time enhancing the financial resources at his disposal through the fertility of the Nile Delta and the vital port of Alexandria.

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, reconsecrated as an Islamic shrine when Jerusalem was retaken by Saladin in 1187. Jonathan Phillips

This period of the history of the Latin East is related in detail by the most important historian of the age, William, Archbishop of Tyre, as Peter Edbury describes. William was an immensely educated man, who soon became embroiled in the bitter political struggles of the late 1170s and 1180s during the reign of the tragic figure of King Baldwin IV (1174-85), a youth afflicted by leprosy. The need to establish his successor provided an opportunity for rival factions to emerge and to cause the Franks to expend much of their energy on bickering with each other. That is not to say that they were unable to inflict serious damage on Nur ad-Din's ambitious successor, Saladin, who from his base in Egypt, hoped to usurp his former master's dynasty, draw the Muslim Near East together and to expel the Franks from Jerusalem. Norman Housely expertly relates this period in his 1987 article. In 1177, however, the Franks triumphed at the Battle of Montgisard, a victory that was widely reported in western Europe and did little to convince people of the settlers' very real need for help. The construction in 1178 and 1179 of the large castle of Jacob's Ford, only a day's ride from Damascus, was another aggressive gesture that required Saladin to destroy the place. Yet by 1187 the sultan had gathered a large, but fragile coalition of warriors from Egypt, Syria and Iraq that was sufficient to bring the Franks into the field and to inflict upon them a terrible defeat at Hattin on July 4th. Within months, Jerusalem fell and Saladin had recovered Islam's third most important city after Mecca and Medina, an achievement that still echoes down the centuries.

News of the calamitous fall of Jerusalem sparked grief and outrage in the West. Pope Urban III was said to have died of a heart attack at the news and his successor, Gregory VIII, issued an emotive crusade appeal and the rulers of Europe began to organise their forces. Frederick Barbarossa's German army successfully defeated the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor only for the emperor to drown crossing a river in southern Turkey. Soon afterwards many of the Germans died of sickness and Saladin escaped facing this formidable enemy. The Franks in the Levant had managed to cling onto the city of Tyre and then besieged the most important port on the coast, Acre. This provided a target for western forces and it was here in the summer of 1190 that Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart landed. The siege had lasted almost two years and the arrival of the two western kings and their troops gave the Christians the momentum they needed. The city surrendered and Saladin's prestige was badly dented. Philip soon returned home and while Richard made two attempts to march on Jerusalem, fears as to its long-term prospects after he left meant that the holy city remained in Muslim hands. Thus the Third Crusade failed in its ultimate objective, although it did at least allow the Franks to recover a strip of lands along the coast to provide a springboard for future expeditions. For his part, Saladin had suffered a series of military setbacks but, crucially, he had held onto Jerusalem for Islam.

Portrait of Saladin.

The pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216) saw another phase in the expansion of crusading. Campaigns in the Baltic advanced further and the holy war in Iberia stepped forwards too. In 1195 Muslims had crushed Christian forces at the Battle of Alarcos, which, so soon after the disaster at Hattin, seemed to show God's deep displeasure with his people. By 1212, however, the rulers of Iberia managed to pull together to rout the Muslims at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa to seal a major step in the recovery of the peninsula. That said, the particular cultural, political and religious make-up of the region mean that it would be wrong, as in the Holy Land, to characterise relations between religious groups as constant warfare, a situation outlined by Robert Burns and Paul Chevedden . In southern France, meanwhile, efforts to curb the Cathar heresy had failed and, in a bid to defeat this sinister threat to the Church in its own backyard, Innocent authorised a crusade to the area. See the piece by Richard Cavendish . Catharism was a dualist faith, albeit with a few links to mainstream Christian practice, but it also had its own hierarchy and was intent upon replacing the existing elite. Years of warfare ensued as the crusaders, led by Simon de Monfort, sought to drive the Cathars out, but ultimately their roots in southern French society meant they could endure and it was only the more pervasive techniques of the Inquisition, initiated in the 1240s, that succeeded where force had failed.

The most infamous episode of the age was the Fourth Crusade (1202-04) which saw another effort to recover Jerusalem end up sacking Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Jonathan Phillips describes this episode. The reasons for this were a combination of long-standing tensions between the Latin (Catholic) Church and the Greek Orthodox; the need for the crusaders to fulfil the terms of a wildly over-optimistic contract for transportation to the Levant with the Venetians and the offer to pay this off by a claimant to the Byzantine throne. This combination of circumstances brought the crusaders to the walls of Constantinople and when their young candidate was murdered and the locals turned definitively against them they attacked and stormed the city. At first Innocent was delighted that Constantinople was under Latin authority but as he learned of the violence and looting that had accompanied the conquest he was horrified and castigated the crusaders for 'the perversion of their pilgrimage'.

Capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204

One consequence of 1204 was the creation of a series of Frankish States in Greece that, over time, also needed support. Thus, in the course of the 13th century, crusades were preached against these Christians, although by 1261 Constantinople itself was back in Greek hands.

In spite of this series of disasters, it is interesting to see that crusading remained an attractive concept, something made manifest by the near-legendary Children's Crusade of 1212. Inspired by divine visions, two groups of young peasants (best described as youths, rather than children) gathered around Cologne and near Chartres in the belief that their purity would ensure divine approval and enable them to recover the Holy Land. The German group crossed the Alps and some reached the port of Genoa, where the harsh realities of having no money or real hope of achieving anything was made plain when they were refused passage to the East and the entire enterprise collapsed.

Thus, the early 13th century was characterised by the diversity of crusading. Holy war was proving a flexible and adaptable concept that allowed the Church to direct force against its enemies on many fronts. The rationale of crusading, as a defensive act to protect Christians, could be refined to apply specifically to the Catholic Church and thus when the papacy came into conflict with Emperor Frederick II over the control of southern Italy it eventually called a crusade against him. Frederick had already been excommunicated for failing to fulfil his promises to take part in the Fifth Crusade. This expedition had achieved the original intention of the Fourth Crusade by invading Egypt but became bogged down outside the port of Damietta before a poorly executed attempt to march on Cairo collapsed. Frederick's attempts to make good this were frustrated by genuine ill health but by this time the papacy had lost patience with him. Recovered, Frederick went to the Holy Land as, by this time, king of Jerusalem (by marriage to the heiress to the throne) where – irony of ironies – as an excommunicate, he negotiated the peaceful restoration of Jerusalem to the Christians. His diplomatic skills (he spoke Arabic), the danger posed by his considerable resources as well as the divisions in the Muslim world in the decades after Saladin's death, enabled him to accomplish this. A brief period of better relations between pope and emperor followed, but by 1245 the curia described him as a heretic and authorised the preaching of a crusade against him.

Aside from the plethora of crusading expeditions that took place over the centuries, we should also remember that the launch of such campaigns had a profound impact on the lands and people from whence they came, something covered by Christopher Tyerman . Crusading required substantial levels of financial support and this, over time, saw the emergence of national taxes to support such efforts, as well as efforts to raise money from within the Church itself. The absence of a large number of senior nobles and churchmen could affect the political balance of an area, with opportunities for women to act as regents or for unscrupulous neighbours to defy ecclesiastical legislation and to try to take the lands of absent crusaders. The death or disappearance of a crusader, be they a minor figure or an emperor, obviously carried deep personal tragedy for those they had left behind, but might also precipitate instability and change.

St Louis embarking for the Crusades.

The previous year, Jerusalem had fallen back into Muslim hands and this was the principal prompt for what turned out to be the greatest crusade expedition of the century (known as the Seventh Crusade) led by King (later Saint) Louis IX of France. Simon Lloyd outlines Louis's crusading career. Well financed and carefully prepared and with an early victory at Damietta, this campaign appeared to be set fair only for a reckless charge by Louis's brother at the Battle of Mansourah to weaken the crusaders' forces. This, coupled with hardening Muslim resistance, brought the expedition to a halt and, starving and sick, they were forced to surrender. Louis remained in the Holy Land for a further four years – a sign of his guilt at the failure of the campaign, but also a remarkable commitment for a European monarch to be absent from his home for a total of six years – trying to bolster the defences of the Latin kingdom. By this time, with the Latins largely confined to the coastal strip the settlers relied more and more on massive fortifications and it was during the 13th century that mighty castles such as Krak des Chevaliers, Saphet and Chastel Pelerin, as well as the immense urban fortifications of Acre, took shape.

By this stage the political complexion of the Middle East was changing. The Mongol invaders added another dimension to the struggle as they conquered much of the Muslim world to the East; they had also briefly threatened Eastern Europe with savage incursions in 1240-41 (which also prompted a crusade appeal). Saladin's successors were displaced by the Mamluks, the former slave-soldiers, whose figurehead, the sultan Baibars, was a ferocious exponent of holy war and did much to bring the crusader states to their knees over the next two decades. James Waterson describes their advance. Bouts of in-fighting among the Frankish nobility, further complicated by the involvement of the Italian trading cities and the Military Orders served to further weaken the Latin States and finally, in 1291, the Sultan al-Ashraf smashed into the city of Acre to end the Christian hold on the Holy Land.

Some historians used to regard this as the end of the crusades but, as noted above, since the 1980s there has been a broad recognition that this was not the case, not least because of the series of plans made to try to recover the Holy Land during the 14th century. Elsewhere crusading was still a powerful idea, not least in northern Europe, where the Teutonic Knights (originally founded in the Holy Land) had transferred their interests and where they had created what was effectively an autonomous state. By the early 15th century, however, their enemies in the region were starting to Christianise anyway and thus it became impossible to justify continued conflict in terms of holy war. The success of Las Navas de Tolosa had effectively pinned the Muslims down to the very south of the Iberian peninsula, but it took until 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella brought the full strength of the Spanish crown to bear upon Granada that the reconquest was completed. Plans to recover the Holy Land had not entirely died out and in a spirit of religious devotion, Christopher Columbus set out the same year hoping to find a route to the Indies that would enable him to reach Jerusalem from the East.

The 14th century began with high drama: the arrest and imprisonment of the Knights Templar on charges of heresy, a story related by Helen Nicholson . A combination of lax religious observance and their failure to protect the Holy Land had made them vulnerable. This uncomfortable situation, coupled with the French crown owing them huge sums of money (the Templars had emerged as a powerful banking institution) meant that the manipulative and relentless Philip IV of France could pressure Pope Clement V into suppressing the Order in 1312 and one of the great institutions of the medieval age was terminated.

 Modern painting of Mehmed II and the Ottoman Army approaching Constantinople with a giant bombard, by Fausto Zonaro

Crusading within Europe itself had continued to mutate, too. The papacy had issued crusading indulgences on many occasions during its own struggles against both political enemies and against heretical groups such as the Hussites of Bohemia. The main threat to Christendom by this time, however, was from the Ottoman Turks, who, as Judith Herrin relates, captured Constantinople in 1453. Numerous efforts were made to draw together the leaders of the Latin West, but the growing power of nation states and their increasingly engrained conflicts, exemplified by the Hundred Years' War, meant that there was little appetite for the kind of Europe-wide response that had been seen in 1187, for example. Nigel Saul outlines this period of crusading history in his article.

Certain dynasties such as the dukes of Burgundy, were enthusiastic about the idea of crusading and a couple of reasonably-sized expeditions took place, although the Burgundians and the Hungarians were thrashed at Nicopolis in Bulgaria in 1396. By the middle of the 15th century the Ottomans had already twice besieged Constantinople and in 1453 Sultan Mehmet II brought forwards an immense army to achieve his aim. Last-minute appeals to the West brought insufficient help and the city fell in May. The Emperor Charles V invoked the crusading spirit in his defence of Vienna in 1529, although this struggle resembled more of an imperial fight rather than a holy war. Crusading had almost run its course; people had become increasingly cynical about the Church's sale of indulgences. The advance of the Reformation was another obvious blow to the idea, with crusading being viewed as a manipulative and money-making device of the Catholic Church. By the late 16th century the last real vestiges of the movement could be seen; the Spanish Armada of 1588 benefitted from crusade indulgences, while the Knights Hospitaller, who had first ruled Rhodes from 1306 to 1522 before making their base on Malta, inspired a remarkable victory over an Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Jonathan Riley-Smith relates the knights' story. The Hospitallers of Malta had also survived a huge Turkish siege in 1480 and their existence served as a long-lasting relic of the original crusading conflict until Napoleon Bonaparte extinguished their rule of the island in 1798.

Crusading survived in the memory and the imagination of the peoples of western Europe and the Middle East. In the former, it regained profile through the romantic literature of writers such as Sir Walter Scott and, as lands in the Middle East fell to the imperialist empires of the age, the French, in particular, chose to draw links with their crusading past. The word became a shorthand for a cause with moral right, be it in a non-military context, such as a crusade against drink, or in the horrors of the First World War. General Franco's ties with the Catholic Church in Spain invoked crusading ideology in perhaps the closest modern incarnation of the idea and it remains a word in common usage today.

In the Muslim world, the memory of the Crusades faded, although did not disappear, from view and Saladin continued to be a figure held out as an exemplar of a great ruler. In the context of the 19th century, the Europeans' invocation of the past built upon this existing memory and meant that the image of hostile, aggressive westerners seeking to conquer Muslim or Arab lands became extremely potent for Islamists and Arab Nationalist leaders alike, and Saladin, as the man who recaptured Jerusalem, stands as the man to aspire to. Articles by Jonathan Phillips and Umej Bhatia cover the memory and the legacy of the crusades to bring the story down to modern times.

Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway University of London and the author of Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (Vintage, 2010).

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Rethinking the Crusades

William Urban | Oct 1, 1998

It may be a commonplace to say that interpretations of historical events often tell us as much about the historian's own era as about the age that is supposedly being described, but it is at best only partly true. Sometimes there is a certain inertia in interpretations, a rigor mortis grip by the dead hand of the past. This seems to be especially true regarding the Crusades, one of the greatest adventures of Western civilization, fraught as they were by impressive feats of arms and spectacular defeats. Today's historians have been slow to see connections between medieval efforts to protect commerce, ensure access to holy places, and build coalitions that could give potential aggressors pause, and modern international peacekeeping operations. Instead, historians continue to emphasize aspects of the crusading experience that apply better to the first decade of our century than to the last.

Just as great books go out of print, so stimulating theories go out of date. Teachers may find it harder to buy legal-sized yellow note pads, but the harried lecturer recycling outdated material will exist forever. Instant updates are possible only in Orwell's 1984 . In the case of the medievalist, there are good reasons for a time lag: not only is there an age difference between lecturer and audience, but in the age of specialization, faculty have more incentive to publish for their peers than to address their students or the educated general public. This observation, crudely put, is more subtle than it might appear; issues that seem burning bright in the ivory tower are, for average citizens, hazy faraway flashes from the lighthouses of the mind. Students and educated laity expect to see the relevance of anything they read or watch. As Jonathan Riley-Smith noted in The Crusades: A Short History (1987), "history is a reconciliation of the past with the present; otherwise it would be incomprehensible to those for whom it is written. And since the present is always in a state of flux it follows that interpretations and judgments alter with time" (256). Our current interpretations of the Crusades, powerful though they were in their day and capable as they still remain of providing important insights into their motivations and outcomes, are at least a generation out of date.

Current Textbook Interpretations

Many textbooks present the still dominant view that the Crusades were a form of European colonialism. To cite from one of the better textbooks, Robert Lerner, Standish Meacham, and Edward Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture (13th edition. New York: Norton, 1998), "The rise and fall of the crusading movement was closely related to the fortunes of the high-medieval papal monarchy. Thus, the Crusades can be seen as part of a chapter in papal and religious history. In addition, the Crusades opened the first chapter in the history of western colonialism" (322–23). They conclude, "Western colonialism in the Holy Land was only the beginning of a long history of colonialism that has continued until modern times" (329). The understandable modern Arab nationalist version is that Israel is the new crusader state, a military/religious embodiment of European colonialism; this finds increasing support on American campuses even though more than half of the Hebrew-speaking population of Israel is descended from Near Eastern Jews (inaccurately referred to as Sephardic) and, therefore, fits poorly into the stereotypical view of the Israeli citizen as a Zionist, an escapee from the Holocaust, or an emigrant from Russia. The crusader states, too, had Near Eastern roots in the Armenian and Arab Christian communities, with whom the Franks occasionally intermarried, and in their frequent alliances with Moslem states.

A subtheme to colonialism emphasizes Realpolitik, power politics, and Christian fanaticism. To give but two examples from good textbooks: John McKay, Bennett Hill, and John Buckler, in A History of Western Society (1995), 282–86, emphasize the role of the papacy in secular affairs in Europe and in religious leadership over the Orthodox Church: "the papacy claimed to be outraged that the holy city was in the hands of unbelievers" and "the papacy actually feared that the Seljuk Turks would be less accommodating to Christian pilgrims than the Muslims had been" ( sic, 282). "Crusades were also mounted against groups perceived as Christian Europe's social enemies. In 1208, Pope Innocent III proclaimed a Crusade against the Albigensians, a heretical sect" (284). Lynn Hunt, Thomas Martin, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie Smith in their Challenge of the West (1995) also emphasize the papacy's desire to lead and quote the pope's admonition to "wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves" (355). They use this latter point to summarize the goals of the First Crusade (357). The later Crusades are in the section subtitled "European Aggression Within and Without" (401–05). All this surely reflects our mistrust of authority figures, the secularization of modern society (by which all religious motivation is suspect), and the attractions of socialism, pacifism, and nonviolence. The story we tell about the Crusades is that of ambitious nobles and merchants; intolerant Christians who kill innocent Jews, peaceful Arabs, and nonconventional Christians (heretics); and scheming popes. Most of these villains are half-competent fools and knaves who enrich themselves through taxes and trade, excusing their excesses through pious hypocrisy.

In these stories the Turks are somehow forgotten, as though they were not a dangerous enemy at that time, or are confused with Arabs, while the Armenians, Byzantines, and other Near Eastern Christians are ignored for lack of time and space to discuss them. What is emphasized most strongly is the moral superiority of "natives," non-Christians, and nontraditional Christians. Secondly, the victimization of culturally superior Moslems by ethnocentric Westerners whose crudeness is equaled only by their love of violence and cunning. Lastly, any questioning of this thesis is dismissed as racism.

Anticolonialism and Political Correctness

In short, an aging collection of anticolonial sentiments has merged with mild political correctness (opposition to violence, skepticism toward Western religious traditions and practices, concern for social issues reflecting race, gender, class, and ethnicity) to dominate current historiography of the Crusades.

This is prominently reflected in the film media, most notably in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and Terry Jones's History of the Crusades. 1 It is also somewhat out of touch with Generation X. My students prefer Errol Flynn's Robin Hood to Costner's and enjoy Men in Tights . Jones's much better but strongly antiwar BBC series praised Baibar's use of slave troops against the crusaders. What would he have said if crusaders had adopted that practice? On the whole, Jones is far the better scholar (and arguably the better actor), but he remains a child of the sixties—like so many of us who are active teachers today.2

Not that political correctness is completely wrong; by one definition, it is simply good manners taken to extremes. Moreover, it has deep roots in our religious and moral heritage. The Crusades, however, are unlike other areas of history, especially American history, where differing interpretations relevant to contemporary life can be easily found to present to students. Is there a widely distributed right-wing interpretation of the Crusades? Certainly not in the high-quality institutions of higher education on the American continent; certainly not in meetings of the professional associations of medievalists. Not that we need extremist views, but Western Civ and World Civ instructors (ever more often graduate students or adjunct faculty) often have only a scanty background in medieval studies and, although the Web provides many sites on the Crusades that reflect a wide variety of interpretations, we may expect that for a while yet most instructors will continue to rely heavily on textbooks.

Not that comparing the Crusades to European expansion in early modern times or 19th-century colonialism was ever fully satisfactory, but the concept did fit well with the historians' 20th-century worldview until quite recently, and even the worldview of those who disagreed strongly with Marxist theories about colonialism and neocolonialism. It had the advantage of retaining some connection with the previous generation's emphasis on the struggle between church and state while turning upside down those historians' beliefs as to what the holy wars were all about. Medieval colonialism was once a new and exciting idea, even a provocative one; moreover, it supported the perceived duty of socially involved scholars to challenge or even overturn some of the foundational beliefs of traditional Western society. By such reasoning historians could use the Crusades as another example of Western civilization run amok; they could even explain the Vietnam War. Since modern historians of the Crusades were better trained than their predecessors and had access to more materials, they could write better histories; that made it all the easier to dismiss the work of past generations as inconsequential.

Overlooked in this was the awkward fact that until the 1700s there was a desperate struggle between Christendom and Islam. As the West gained the upper hand in the 1800s, the way was opened for Romanticists to emphasize individual heroism—Walter Scott's Richard and Saladin—and exotic climes and self-sacrificing idealism—Kipling's India and the White Man's Burden. Without doubt, 19th-century imperialism benefited from the widespread belief that European civilization must be defended and extended. European states cooperated in the war against slavery in Africa and Asia, against banditry in Central America, and in defense of the rights of Christian minorities and Christian missionaries in China and Africa. Perhaps no single episode pulled all these themes together as well as "Chinese" Gordon's doomed enterprise at Khartoum. The British public was divided over the wisdom of becoming involved in the Sudanese wars, but within a few years Britain's traditional pro-Turkish policy was reversed, and in 1918 the public celebrated Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, a feat that had eluded even Richard the Lionheart.

Once the French and British divided up the Near East between them (with a few scraps for Italy), the parallels of this undeniably crass imperialism to the medieval crusader states seemed very clear to interwar scholars. Add to this the rise of pacifism, socialism, and communism, all of which were popular in the universities of the thirties, and it was inevitable that a message would go out that the elimination of Western colonialism (later, neocolonialism) was a necessary step toward the Future's triumph over the Past. One did not have to be a Leninist to see the germ of truth in this argument and its effectiveness in getting a student audience's attention. In the sixties a rebirth of pacifism, the nuclear stalemate, and Vietnam caused many to question whether any war was ever worth fighting. The last moral credibility of the Crusades vanished. The Cold War persuaded some that calls to serve a higher purpose were only pretexts, and others began to believe that even the best of intentions will go astray.

The Contemporaneity of the Crusades

The late 1980s should have been a watershed for this dour view of the ways that modern politics intersect with the history of the Crusades. Pope John Paul II became an active and effective force against communism, not just in his support of Solidarity in Poland, but in his insistence on emphasizing the moral aspect of commonly accepted practices (abortion, for example) and traditional beliefs against utilitarian and progressive philosophies. This raised the struggle of systems above the pettiness of power politics. It should have suggested that the Crusades might have been more than efforts to profit from international trade.

My own eyes were opened at two historical conferences held under papal authorization in Rome in 1986 and 1987. The conferences were ostensibly on the conversion of the Baltic peoples, discussions of the church's role in crusades against paganism and Orthodoxy, but the real purpose was to remind modern Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians that the church had not forgotten them. (For months after each conference Radio Moscow had regular tirades about the church's interference with internal Soviet policies, and the Soviet Union's 1986 traveling trade show included a huge exhibit showing how happy Estonians were and how their culture was being protected and preserved.) As a historian specializing in the Baltic, I found this interplay of history and modern politics fascinating; as a non-Catholic I found the spectacular Mass conducted by Lithuanian bishops not only uplifting but also a reminder that the Soviet empire was held together by ties less secure than those invisible ones connecting subject peoples to the church.

About this same time I was becoming aware that the terms "imperialism" and "neoimperialism" increasingly failed to explain satisfactorily why some postcolonial states were unable to get organized; that intellectuals once unable to see the evil side of communism had begun to realize that something was rotten east of Denmark; and that the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Islamic world and the wackiness of New Age paganism might cast doubt on the belief that non-Christian religions and nontraditional Christianity were always benign.

Meanwhile, the United Nations was becoming more active. Sudan and Somalia revealed that aid and police-force actions without the will to use military power must fail. Bosnia suggested that diplomatic offers to host peace talks and declarations of arms embargoes were not much more useful in the 1990s than they had been 60 years earlier in Ethiopia and Spain. Rwanda showed that peoples few had heard of could kill unimaginable numbers of tribal enemies without resort to modern weaponry; Cambodia demonstrated that peoples could kill their own kind with equal ferocity. The international community found itself in an awkward position, trying to think of ways to stop genocide, terrorism, intolerance, even the slave trade, without sending in military forces. Moreover, the international community was being asked to protect the environment, secure greater access to good water, prevent overfishing and protect the rain forest, dispose of existing nuclear bombs and biological agents, and to save the world economy from dictators like Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who portrayed himself as the champion of Islam against the West. Surely, I thought, these challenges will affect what we choose to teach about the past, especially about the Crusades.

I began to ask my students why we refer to some of our national movements as crusades. Their responses were interesting. No answer at first, of course, since there seemed to be little connection between Innocent III and Carry Nation, but once the hurdle of the irrelevant example was overcome, they showed that they understood why the term is so attractive. There are, in fact, four characteristics of movements we call crusades: (1) a moral cause, often based on Christian principles; (2) a long-term commitment to the cause by a dedicated minority; (3) victory achieved only by suffering and struggle against determined, entrenched enemies who have powerful belief systems of their own; and (4) results that are not always what the crusaders expected—the law of unexpected consequences coming into play.

My own classroom experience further suggests that today's students are not terribly excited about discussions of imperialism and power politics. Those topics may yet be powerful at institutions where a strong Marxist presence is traditional; but by and large, students from Middle America do not conjure up visions of fat capitalists wearing striped pants and smoking cigars. Their mental image is Bill Gates, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, and Donald Trump and IBM, Coca-Cola, and other multinational corporations, many foreign-owned. They see offsetting efforts by labor unions, nongovernmental organizations, mafias, and terrorist organizations. In short, as far as their very practical minds are concerned, the reality of today's world has worn down the imperialist and power politics interpretation on one side; ethnic and gender politics have eroded them down elsewhere. I have learned that students are interested in practical historiography: how current political, religious, and social concerns affect the way they have been taught to see the past. Most do not want to be told that their high school teacher was wrong (God forbid that they should be confused) and many have a keen eye for bias (though they are not always sufficiently knowledgeable or sophisticated to understand its full implications), but they all appreciate being enabled to see better what messages are being sent. History is a bit like advertising, it seems: if students like the sales pitch, they may buy it, but they like to see inside the package first. Alumni tell me that they have found it useful to know that historical interpretations have changed and will always be subject to change, and to understand that whatever we teach as "the latest thing" now will be a decade out of touch in 10 years. They appreciate having been given as much original material as possible, because those do not change as rapidly or thoroughly.

If, as most historians believe, historical interpretations often reflect current concerns, what does this suggest that future interpretations of the Crusades will be? When medieval popes, monarchs, and common laity realized that the Holy Land could not be defended without warriors and the West was too far away to send timely help in the form of volunteer armies, those individuals created crusading orders. In the past few years we have sent international peacekeeping forces to Kuwait, Bosnia, and Liberia; we are organizing rapid-response units that when deployed consist of real warriors, not merely observers and potential hostages. We are coming to understand that, individually, nation states are unable to provide protection for commerce, tourism, religious pilgrims, or even national borders; only international efforts can be effective against religious fanaticism, organized criminality, and political radicalism. Nevertheless, as in the Middle Ages, when Christian alliances with Moslems against coalitions of Moslems and Christians existed, today we are occasionally frustrated and often confused by the intricacies of local politics, and our best efforts are handicapped by the lack of resources and resolve.

A Time for Reassessment

This suggests that the time is ripe for a reassessment of the Crusades in light of our present concerns. There are four plausible directions this reassessment will take.

  • The present interpretations will persist as long as instructors order traditional textbooks and continue to repeat unthinkingly in lectures the concepts they themselves were taught in college years ago. Although campus culture wars suggest that "conservative" values are already widespread among today's students, years will pass before many of them join tomorrow's faculty, years more before they teach the graduate school seminars. Even then, this interpretation will probably not die out because there are aspects of the Crusades which were imperialistic, and because power politics were undoubtedly important.
  • Present trends in multiculturalism and "history from below" might result in less and less textbook space being given to the Crusades; if so, the events themselves, as well as the comments about morality, may slowly vanish into the footnotes.
  • If Islamic fundamentalism becomes a serious threat, this will be reflected in our classrooms and textbooks by giving the Crusades more prominence and more favorable interpretations. I remember well the student reactions during the Iranian hostage crisis: If Urban the instructor had followed the example of Urban II, my campus might have been less safe for our Moslem students; fortunately, no one contemplated blaming people they knew for events far away. It may well be that some extremely astute professors have been well aware of this danger all along and, therefore, have retained the old interpretations out of fear of what new ones might bring.
  • The least contentious likelihood, the one suggested in this essay, is to look for connections between our efforts to resolve today's most difficult international problems and the crusaders' experiences as medieval peacekeepers. This would not completely supplant the older tradition, but would certainly complement it. The risk is small, that of complicating an already long and complex episode in world history, an episode too burdened with details to be made easily comprehensible, too loaded with outdated political baggage to interest many students, and so foreign to the world of today that Hollywood can pass off its version of the events as reality. But, if we take a sufficiently broad view of those events, tie them to what students who read newspapers read daily, historians may find more justification for the crusaders' efforts, be less inclined to mock their motivations, and even perhaps express regret that their high ideals resulted in such demoralizing failure. The study of the Crusades may actually create more sympathy for our own moral dilemmas, lack of unity, and mistakes.

It is not that we need a definitive interpretation of the Crusades. That is a mirage that will disappear before we can reach it. But the more we understand how our present interpretations have come about, the more we will have the context in which to do our own thinking. The more this makes the past relevant to the present, the more likely students are to remember what we say and to think about it. We encourage our students to venture beyond the memorization of facts and concepts. We should do the same by periodically rethinking the meaning of critical moments in the past.

1. Teaching through movies (as opposed to the study of film) has become practical only recently. Consequently, it is only recently that articles on movies have appeared in the pages of the American Historical Review and Perspectives . See Lorraine Attreed and James Powers, "Lessons in the Dark: Teaching the Middle Ages with Film," Perspectives (January 1997): 11–16. Libby Haight O'Connell, "The History Channel and History Education," Perspectives (October 1995): 15, 22, reported that the History Channel will allow free copying of Terry Jones's History of the Crusades, and also that Theodore Rabb, then president of the National Council for History Education, had authorized production of teaching materials for this series that will be distributed free of charge to 20,000 teachers.

2. Though better known as a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jones has written Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London: Methuen, 1980).

William Urban teaches in the Department of History at Monmouth College.

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Essay Sample on The Crusades: Really a Holy War?

The crusades are often referred to as a Holy War and this is because it was heavily influenced by religion. For the Christians, the war was about regaining the Holy land and protecting their brethren to the east from the barbaric infidels. The Pope, and other members of the church, justified the killings perpetrated by their crusaders by creating scenarios where it was just in God's eyes to kill and it was always justified to kill those who do not follow God. Speeches and sermons wove this story into the minds of the everyday Christian and added bonuses for those who chose to take up the sword in the lord's name. The desecration of what the Christians believed was rightfully given to them by God created an anger and a justification for perpetrating violence against the heretics who inhabited the Holy land. 

Crusading was not an inexpensive endeavor for those who joined which is why the reward had to be worth the cost, “Preaching was the principal means by which the church recruited and organized people for each major crusading expedition”  by showing the rewards that could be received. Pope Urban II preached at the Council of Claremont that “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested” , those who joined the crusading efforts were rewarded with the opportunity to go to paradise when they die, which outweighed the costs of going. Peter the Hermit was one of the most popular leaders to “embrace Pope Urban II’s call for Christians to go on crusade” . As he was preaching based on Urban's call for a Holy war there were similarities between both of the men's reasonings, although Peter preached about God rewarding his own followers with the idea that a better life awaited them in Jerusalem . The difference between Urban and Peter was that Peter was the organizer of the Peasants’ Crusade which was responsible for the “bloody massacre of the Jews living in the Rhineland” . Peter was disliked by some of his contemporaries as he allowed his followers to perpetrate violence against “gentiles and Christians alike” . Peter the Hermit demonstrates how the preaching of the crusade led to Christians believing that violence in the name of God was just, no matter who it was against, which can be seen again during the Fourth Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and the subsequent sack of Constantinople happened over 100 years after the Council of Clermont, during which the bishops and clergy present needed to come up with a righteous reason for the war on a fellow Christian city. They justified it by preaching that the Greeks had insulted the laws of Rome and “for this reason one ought certainly to attack them, and that it was not a sin, but an act of great charity”  . They made it just to attack fellow Christians as for them it was what God wanted.

The First Crusade was, as the name implies, the first crusade. Pope Urban II initiated this crusade with his speech at Clermont  by invoking his power as the pope to tell people that this war was what God wanted and that he was doing this on Christ's behalf. It was certain that he employed that it was “God’s leadership of the expedition”  not his own in order to convince the people that was only the messenger and the Christians of Europe needed to raise arms to fight for their fellow Christians of the east. Urban II’s speech at the Council of Clermont was recorded by five different men some of which were written years after the actual speech . Although what he actually said was recorded differently the message of the speech was clear: “waging war to regain the Holy Lands was in no way a sin, but rather a righteous and spiritually rewarding act.” . Urban used the ideas of the Peace of God and the Truce of God to directly call for a crusade. The Peace of God was a religious movement that “prohibited [combatants] from causing injury to members of the clergy,... [and] from attacking religiously “consecrated places,” such as monasteries and churches, and prohibited from fighting on Sundays and feast days” , and the Truce of God merely expanded on the Peace of God by restricting the days combatants could fight which included Thursdays to Monday and any holy days during the week . Urban II created a connection between the infidels breaking this agreement and a justification for violence, the enemies were damaging and harming members of the church and as Urban says “If anyone seizes a bishop let him be treated as an outlaw. If anyone seizes or robs monks, or clergymen, or nuns, or their servants, or pilgrims, or merchants, let him be anathema (that is, cursed)” . This is a call for violence against those who attack a Christian and attacking the Holy Land was an attack on Christianity itself.

The height of religion being used to justify the crusades for the Christians would be their battle cry. The crusaders rallying battle cry was “Deus Vult” which translates to “God Wills It”, the strength this cry had is shown during the account of Bohemond’s reaction to it in the Gesta Francorum. Bohemond asked the crusaders how prepared they were to battle, what Christian symbols they bore, and what battle cry they shouted, when he heard their answer, he “he ordered the most precious cloak which he had with him cut to pieces, and straightway he had the whole of it made into crosses” . The battle cry united the people of the First Crusade was a symbol of what the crusades represented and that every casualty that happened was on the behalf of the Lord. Every death of a Christian was worth the cost because it was ‘Deus Vult’ as “the war conducted for its [the churches] preservation had to become a service to God.” . After the Fall of Edessa in 1144, Pope Eugene III wrote a letter to King Conrad III of Germany that explains the thoughts about the crusaders dying at the time: “adversity is part of God's plan for men. Like the ancient Israelites who were impelled by Pharaoh's cruelty to answer God's call and flee from Egypt” . The idea of God having a plan for every person makes it easy for the crusaders to rush into a fight with whichever group the church has determined is the enemy. Only God can determine when a person would die and so a crusader either died and entered eternal paradise or lived on to continue to be a good Christian.

For the Christians pilgrimage was “a journey that has religious or spiritual significance.”  and as Jerusalem was an important city in the life of Jesus Christ it gained even more importance as a pilgrimage spot. Jerusalem is located in the Holy land which was a contested area even before the First Crusade, from 1009 to 1025 due to the Fatimid caliphate’s persecution of Christians in Palestine and the closing of the route by the Greek government Christians were prevented from going on any pilgrimage . When the First Crusades army captured Jerusalem in 1099 there was an outpour of “contemporaries [seeking] to record the deeds of the pilgrims for posterity, situate the conquest in an explanatory theological framework and recruit support – both military and liturgical –” . Propagandists took this ideal Christian and used it to further gain support for the Church. The First Crusade could be considered one large pilgrimage and it inspired “a series of crusades, or war-pilgrimages, to the east” , mainly the Second, Third, and Fourth Crusades. Looking at the crusades as a pilgrimage shows how much Christianity influenced the actions of the crusaders.

The preaching of the crusade, the popularity of the Holy land, and the idea of God’s will all came together to create an environment where violence against those who had gone against God and the church was deserved. Both Pope Urban II and Peter the Hermit set the stage for the types of reasoning that would be given in the subsequent crusades during their speeches in the First Crusade. Urban determined that the acts of violence that would be performed to regain the Holy land was all God’s will, which is a theme that would carry on throughout the crusades. The idea of a Holy war came to exist through the preaching’s of Urban II, which said that regaining the Holy land was God’s will. By using offers of plenary indulgences and building up the anger at any infidels the church convinced its people that the crusades were not only justified but necessary. 

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Medieval Europe + Byzantine

Course: medieval europe + byzantine   >   unit 11, what were the crusades.

  • How was crusading justified?
  • The when, where and who (of crusading)
  • The impact of the crusades

How do we define the crusades?

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How was crusading justified?

Christ leading crusaders into battle, detail from an Apocalypse, with commentary (The "Queen Mary Apocalypse"), early 14th century, f. 37 (British Library)

Christ leading crusaders into battle, detail from an Apocalypse, with commentary (The “Queen Mary Apocalypse”), early 14th century, f. 37 ( British Library )

Just warfare

Crusades were wars—that is firm ground. More specifically, crusading was represented as just warfare, according to the idea of just war established by St. Augustine of Hippo .

Augustine wrote that warfare was sometimes a necessary and lesser evil in certain conditions. Specifically, a war could be just if there was:

a) just cause, b) legitimate authority, and c) right intention.

A just cause was a previous injury or act of aggression. As a result, crusading was described as defensive.

A legitimate authority was just that: an authority who held the power—granted by God, from Augustine’s perspective—to invoke war. Crusading, it was argued, was authorized by popes and legitimate secular leaders.

Participants had the right intention if they believed war was completely unavoidable and sought only to use minimal force to check aggression against them. In theological terms, participants were supposed to be motivated by Christian love, (i.e. charity), rather than by anger, hatred, or fear. Crusade supporters stressed that participants were driven by the desire to help liberate purportedly oppressed Christians and save them from purported atrocities and slavery, and the desire to do the same for the personified Church or even Christ himself, both supposedly injured by the enemies of the crusaders.

But participating in a just war could still be sinful. For example, Duke William I of Normandy’s invasion of England was considered just, but Norman participants had to do penance afterwards. So saying that crusading was a just war wasn’t enough. Many writers communicated that crusading was holy warfare, meaning that it was a just war that was not only authorized but also realized by God himself. In theological terms, then, God was the one taking action; God was the one waging war. Crusaders were divine tools, rather than moral agents in their own right. It was this belief that led one monk, Guibert of Nogent, to title his account of the First Crusade “The Deeds of God done through the Franks” (he was not-so-subtly revising an earlier, and in his opinion theologically crude account, titled “The Deeds of the Franks”). Of course, if a crusade was a holy war, then the enemies of crusading were enemies of God and the whole Christian faith , not just enemies of particular Christians—and that was precisely how Muslims and other crusader targets were depicted in many pro-crusade accounts.

Crusader icon with St. Sergius carrying a crusader standard featuring a red cross on a white ground, with a female door, 13th century, from the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, Egypt (photo: published through the Courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai)

Crusader icon with St. Sergius carrying a crusader standard featuring a red cross on a white ground, with a female door, 13th century, from the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, Egypt (photo: published through the Courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai)

Penitential warfare

Finally, crusading was also represented as penitential warfare. This means that crusading was believed to be an act of penance—a way to make amends to God for sins one had committed, so that an individual could achieve salvation. It means that crusading was not simply seen as a necessary evil—it was seen as a positive spiritual good for those who participated. Participants were not merely excused for their involvement; they actively acquired spiritual merit. In the simplest terms, crusading was presented as a good deed, even though it involved killing people.

To make sense of this, we need to recognize that violence was often perceived to be much more morally neutral in medieval Europe than it is today. Violence acquired its moral value from intentions and context, like who was performing the violence and to whom it was done (this should remind you of Augustine’s just war theory: cause, authority, and intentions). Thus, the same action—let’s say, hitting someone in the face—could be immoral and unchristian in one context, and moral and Christian in another.

Given the penitential element in crusading and the number of expeditions that involved long journeys to holy places, it is not surprising that crusading was often described as a pilgrimage, a journey to a holy location like a shrine, a church, or even an entire city, like Jerusalem. Those who went on pilgrimage frequently sought spiritual advantages, like forgiveness of sins or a closer relationship with God or a saint; they also sometimes hoped for more earthly advantages, like healing. Pilgrimage was a sacred act for medieval Christians, and was itself often an act of penance (sometimes voluntary, sometimes assigned by a priest in confession). Crusading borrowed some of the language, rituals, and symbols of pilgrimage, and shared its penitential nature.

Aquamanile in the Form of a Mounted Knight, c. 1250, copper alloy, 37.3 x 32.7 x 14.3 cm, Germany (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Aquamanile in the Form of a Mounted Knight, c. 1250, copper alloy, 37.3 x 32.7 x 14.3 cm, Germany ( Metropolitan Museum of Art )

Changing definitions

It’s important to emphasize again that people didn’t write a theory of crusading in advance. There wasn’t even a specific word for “crusade” until more than 100 years after the First Crusade. In addition, the nature of crusading seems to have operated differently and meant different things depending on time, place, and participants.

Additional resources

What were the crusades?

The when, where and who (of crusading).

The impact of the crusades.

Dr. Susanna A. Throop, The Crusades: An Epitome (Leeds: Kismet Press, 2018), an open access book.

Dr. Ariel Fein, “Material culture of the Crusades,”  Reframing Art History , 2022.

The Crusades on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Crusades — The Crusades (1095–1291)

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The Crusades (1095–1291)

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Published: Dec 18, 2018

Words: 1195 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

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What does it mean to claim the US is a Christian nation, and what does the Constitution say?

FILE - A statue of Benjamin Franklin is seen at The Franklin Institute, Feb. 10, 2015, in Philadelphia. Franklin, like some other key founders, admired Jesus as a moral teacher but would not pass a test of Christian orthodoxy. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

FILE - A statue of Benjamin Franklin is seen at The Franklin Institute, Feb. 10, 2015, in Philadelphia. Franklin, like some other key founders, admired Jesus as a moral teacher but would not pass a test of Christian orthodoxy. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

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Many Americans believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and the idea is energizing some conservative and Republican activists. But the concept means different things to different people, and historians say that while the issue is complex, the founding documents prioritize religious freedom and do not create a Christian nation.

Does the U.S. Constitution establish Christianity as an official religion?

What does the constitution say about religion.

“(N)o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” (Article VI)

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” (First Amendment)

FILE- President Joe Biden, with from left, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and House Speaker Mike Johnson of La., pray and listen during the National Prayer Breakfast, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Washington. Johnson has spoken in the past of his belief America was founded as a Christian nation. Biden, while citing his own Catholic faith, has spoken of values shared by people of “any other faith, or no faith at all.” (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

If it says “Congress,” does the First Amendment apply to the states?

It does now. Early in the republic, some states officially sponsored particular churches, such as the Congregational Church in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Within a few decades, all had removed such support. The post-Civil War 14th Amendment guaranteed all U.S. citizens “equal protection of the laws” and said states couldn’t impede on their “privileges or immunities” without due process. In the 20th century, the Supreme Court applied that to a number of First Amendment cases involving religion, saying states couldn’t forbid public proselytizing, reimburse funding for religious education or sponsor prayer in public schools.

What does it mean to say America is a Christian nation?

It depends on whom you ask. Some believe God worked to bring European Christians to America in the 1600s and secure their independence in the 1700s. Some take the Puritan settlers at their word that they were forming a covenant with God, similar to the Bible’s description of ancient Israel, and see America as still subject to divine blessings or punishments depending on how faithful it is. Still others contend that some or all the American founders were Christian, or that the founding documents were based on Christianity.

That’s a lot to unpack. Let’s start at the top. What about the colonies?

Several had Christian language in their founding documents, such as Massachusetts, with established churches lasting decades after independence. Others, such as Rhode Island, offered broader religious freedom. It’s also arguable whether the colonies’ actions lived up to their words, given their histories of religious intolerance and their beginnings of centuries-long African slavery and wars on Native Americans.

What about the founders?

The leaders of the American Revolution and the new republic held a mix of beliefs — some Christian, some Unitarian, some deistic or otherwise theistic. Some key founders, like Benjamin Franklin, admired Jesus as a moral teacher but would fail a test of Christian orthodoxy. Many believed strongly in religious freedom, even as they also believed that religion was essential to maintain a virtuous citizenry.

Were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution based on Christianity and the Ten Commandments?

References to the Creator and Nature’s God in the Declaration reflect a general theism that could be acceptable to Christians, Unitarians, deists and others. Both documents reflect Enlightenment ideas of natural rights and accountable government. Some also see these documents as influenced, or at least compatible, with Protestant emphasis on such ideas as human sin, requiring checks and balances. In fact, believers in a Christian America were some of the strongest opponents of ratifying the Constitution because of its omission of God references.

Were most early Americans Christian?

Many were and many weren’t. Early church membership was actually quite low, but revivals known as the First and Second Great Awakenings, before and after the Revolution, won a lot of converts. Many scholars see religious freedom as enabling multiple churches to grow and thrive.

Were Catholics considered Christian?

Not by many early Americans. Some state constitutions barred them from office.

How did that change?

Gradually, but by the time of the Cold War, many saw Catholics, Protestants and Jews as God-believing American patriots, allied in the face-off with the atheistic, communist Soviet Union.

Was it only conservatives citing the idea of a Christian nation?

No. Many proponents of the early 20th century social gospel saw their efforts to help the needy as part of building a Christian society. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt prayed on national radio for God’s blessing “in our united crusade ... over the unholy forces of our enemy.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that civil rights protesters stood for “the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

What do progressive Christians say today?

“Christian nationalism has traditionally employed images that advocate an idealized view of the nation’s identity and mission, while deliberately ignoring those persons who have been excluded, exploited, and persecuted,” said a 2021 statement from the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, an umbrella group that includes multiple progressive denominations.

What do Americans believe about this?

Six in 10 U.S. adults said the founders originally intended America to be a Christian nation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. Forty-five percent said the U.S. should be a Christian nation, but only a third thought it was one currently.

Among white evangelical Protestants, 81% said the founders intended a Christian nation, and the same number said that the U.S. should be one — but only 23% thought it currently was one, according to Pew.

In a 2021 Pew report, 15% of U.S. adults surveyed said the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation, while 18% said the U.S. Constitution was inspired by God.

One-third of U.S. adults surveyed in 2023 said God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians to set an example to the world, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings survey. Those who embraced this view were also more likely to dismiss the impact of anti-Black discrimination and more likely to say true patriots may need to act violently to save the country, the survey said.

Sources: Pew Research Center; Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings; “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” by John Fea.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

crusades war essay

British firms' exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia's war machine in Ukraine, Sky data analysis finds

Items including drone equipment and heavy machinery are being sent from the UK to countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Uzbekistan and are then being moved to Russia, analysis indicates. Exports to former Soviet satellite state Kyrgyzstan have risen by over 1,100%.

crusades war essay

Economics and data editor @EdConwaySky

Wednesday 21 February 2024 22:52, UK

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Sky News' Ed Conway on how Russia could be evading UK export sanctions

British companies are exporting hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment and machinery which almost certainly ends up in Russia, undermining the official sanctions regime and bolstering Vladimir Putin's war machine, according to data analysis from Sky News.

The items - which include drone equipment, optical supplies and heavy machinery - are being sent to countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan and others, from where they are understood to be forwarded on to Russia .

Ukraine war latest: Russia hits out at UK after prison bosses sanctioned over Navalny death

The numbers show that despite the sharp fall in the flow of goods to Russia, following the imposition of trade sanctions after its invasion of Ukraine two years ago, large volumes of sensitive, "dual use" British goods are still finding their way to Moscow.

The analysis underlines the scale of Britain's participation in a shadow economy which helps keep Russia's military supplied with parts and hardware for the weaponry it uses against Ukraine

Flows of British goods to Russia itself have fallen by 74% since the outbreak of war, following the imposition of sanctions. The vast majority of exports still flowing to Russia are food, medical products or other humanitarian items.

Flows of heavy machinery, electrical equipment and cars have dropped to nearly zero.

UK exports to Russia

Those figures imply the sanctions regime has been incredibly successful, and indeed, a government spokesperson said: "We have implemented the most severe package of economic sanctions ever imposed on a major economy."

However, closer examination of Britain's official trade statistics provides an alternative prism.

They show that while UK exports to Russia have fallen sharply, UK exports to a suite of former Soviet satellite states - from Uzbekistan to Georgia - have risen at an unprecedented rate.

British exports to Kyrgyzstan, the small former Soviet satellite state, have risen at a breakneck rate, by over 1,100%. These exports are dominated by the heavy machinery and vehicles which can no longer be sent directly to Russia.

UK goods exports to Kyrgyzstan

A Europe-wide problem

According to Robin Brooks, former chief economist of financial body the IIF, this is something which has been going on for some time, with other European countries, most notably Germany and Poland, also sending large quantities of hardware to Russia via these Caucasus and Central Asian states.

"They're clearly getting an order from somewhere that is a Russian satellite that happens to be domiciled in one of these Central Asian countries," he said.

"What happens then? Maybe there's plausible deniability, maybe they know... all we know for sure is that the rise in export volumes that is happening is completely insane, and is inconsistent with any underlying data in these countries.

"So the only reasonable explanation is: Russia.

"From the Western European and especially the EU side, I would say, this has been going on for a while. It is at this point widely known in Brussels, and I think there is a key question as to why nothing is being done at a central EU level to stop this?"

British officials argue that they are constantly attempting to tighten the UK sanctions regime. A spokesperson told Sky News: "We also recently announced the creation of a new Office of Trade Sanctions Implementation to strengthen our enforcement of sanctions.

"Any non-compliance with these tough sanctions is a serious offence and punishable through large financial penalties or criminal prosecution."

Exports to other Russia-adjacent states

However, the scale and breadth of the trade is striking. UK export volumes haven't just spiked to Kyrgyzstan. They are also up nearly as sharply to Armenia, which, according to Mr Brooks, has recorded a sharp increase in its onward goods exports to Russia.

UK goods exports to Armenia

Doubly worrying is the fact that among the goods being sent to these countries are significant quantities of items considered "dual use" - which can be repurposed into weaponry.

Found in battlefield remains of Russian weapons

The European Union has a list of 45 categories of goods - "common high priority items" as they call them - which have been found in battlefield remains of Russian weapons.

Sky News analysis shows that British exports to four Caucasus and Central Asian states of these goods, which have been documented as being used to kill Ukrainian citizens - have risen by over 500% since the outbreak of war.

UK exports of sanctioned items

The analysis shows that by far and away the biggest category of goods being sent to these four Caucasus and Central Asian nations was "parts of aeroplanes, helicopters or unmanned aircraft" - in other words, equipment which can be used to make drones and other aeronautic units.

British companies have exported £6m worth of these goods to the four countries, above what they historically tend to export to them.

Other items being sent by UK exporters include data processing machines, aeronautic navigation equipment and radio navigation aids.

Main UK items exported

According to Tom Keatinge of RUSI: "It's absolutely a red flag if you're producing that kind of equipment... and you've got this big spike in exports to Kyrgyzstan.

"You've surely got to stop and ask yourself: why is that? Am I indirectly resourcing the Russian military? And clearly you don't want to be doing that. And indeed, in doing that, you're probably in breach of sanctions.

"The tragedy is that whenever the Ukrainians dissect a drone, or a cruise missile or communications equipment that they get their hands on, there are components in those bits of equipment that come from the EU, that come from the UK and come from the US, and have been manufactured since February 2022.

"So these are fresh exports, these are not legacy exports."

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Navalny's legacy: His ceaseless crusade against Putin and corruption

Bill Chappell

crusades war essay

Alexei Navalny rose to fame in Russia with headline-grabbing investigations into corruption in the highest levels of President Vladimir Putin's regime. Navalny (right) is seen here at a court hearing in Moscow in March 2017. Kirill Kudryavtsev /AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Alexei Navalny rose to fame in Russia with headline-grabbing investigations into corruption in the highest levels of President Vladimir Putin's regime. Navalny (right) is seen here at a court hearing in Moscow in March 2017.

Alexei Navalny, a thorn in Russian President Vladimir Putin's side, was repeatedly attacked and jailed. When he tried to enter politics, Navalny was threatened, thwarted and poisoned. Finally, on Friday, he was reported dead in a Russian prison at age 47.

For years, Navalny was Russia's most outspoken critic of Putin and his inner circle, publishing embarrassing details about corruption and excess as Russia's household income per capita plunged in an era of cheap gas prices and international sanctions.

Alexei Navalny, Russian politician who opposed Putin to the end, has died in prison

Alexei Navalny, Russian politician who opposed Putin to the end, has died in prison

In Navalny's final hours of freedom, he was calm, funny and watching 'Rick and Morty'

In Navalny's final hours of freedom, he was calm, funny and watching 'Rick and Morty'

"I want to live in a normal country and refuse to accept any talk about Russia being doomed to being a bad, poor or servile country," Navalny told NPR in 2018 . "I want to live here, and I can't tolerate the injustice that for many people has become routine."

Launching attacks against the status quo, and Putin

Navalny told Russians they deserved better — from their leaders and in their own lives. His message of change resonated particularly strongly in Russia's younger generation, many of whom have lived only under Putin's influence: Since 1999, Putin has been either Russia's president or its prime minister.

Navalny rose to fame by publishing investigations that exposed corruption, using videos on YouTube and other platforms as he sought to get around officials' efforts to limit the size of his audience. He organized mass street demonstrations, calling for political mobilization against Putin's regime.

As the world mourns Navalny, leaders and supporters point at Russia's government

The world reacts to the death of Navalny, a top critic of Russian President Putin

Many of the excesses he exposed were hiding in plain sight: luxury homes that he called the spoils of profiteering by Putin and his allies.

In 2021, Navalny released a bombshell video accusing Putin of using a slush fund to build a palace on the Black Sea. That report has now been viewed nearly 130 million times on YouTube . The Kremlin denied Navalny's claims, calling the investigation "pure nonsense."

Alexei Navalny is the latest Putin critic to die in suspicious circumstances

Alexei Navalny is the latest Putin critic to die in suspicious circumstances

Photos: See Russian anti-corruption leader Alexei Navalny's life in pictures

The Picture Show

Photos: see russian anti-corruption leader alexei navalny's life in pictures.

In the opening lines of that video, Navalny called Putin "a petty KGB officer who now masquerades as a great spy."

In 2016, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation published a story on a luxurious summer-vacation estate frequently visited by then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev — including a special house just for ducks. The story included aerial footage of the property and its three helipads, along with an explanation of its ownership by a foundation with links to Medvedev's family.

'No Doubt' That Navalny Poisoning Was Russian Operation, Former CIA Russia Chief Says

'No Doubt' That Navalny Poisoning Was Russian Operation, Former CIA Russia Chief Says

Yellow ducks soon became a symbol of anti-regime protest — and in 2017, a huge inflatable yellow duck was among those detained by police, as security forces cracked down on large demonstrations.

A cornerstone of that protest took place in St. Petersburg, Putin's hometown. In a sign of Navalny's ability to inspire the public, his followers took his message to the city's streets, chanting words that are among the most dangerous to utter in their country: "Russia without Putin."

Navalny was frequently detained in connection to the demonstrations he organized. Russian authorities also accused him of fraud in 2014, securing a criminal conviction that Navalny called retribution for his activism. Election officials also cited the fraud conviction on Navalny's record as justification to reject his attempt to run against Putin for the presidency.

Russian opposition activist Navalny is sentenced to 19 more years in prison

Russian opposition activist Navalny is sentenced to 19 more years in prison

Prosecutors repeatedly brought criminal charges against Navalny over the years; even in cases where he was able to go free, courts often attached conditions that served as leverage, threatening to limit his activities.

Last August, Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison over charges related to extremism.

In recent years, Putin's regime has tightened its grip on speech and other rights even more, in attempts to quell dissent over its invasion and war against Ukraine.

Banned From Election, Putin Foe Navalny Pursues Politics By Other Means

Banned From Election, Putin Foe Navalny Pursues Politics By Other Means

In the face of those controls, Navalny's family, his attorneys and supporters in Russia and in exile have helped get his message out — including last summer, when he used a court statement to condemn Putin's vision of Russia.

"It is now floundering in a pool of mud and blood, with broken bones, and an impoverished, robbed population; and with tens of thousands of people who have died in the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century," Navalny said, according to a message his team shared online.

2 experiences shaped Navalny's outspoken advocacy

Navalny was born in a rural area west of Moscow in 1976. After becoming a lawyer in 1998, he earned an economics degree. And while Navalny's political activism saw him pushing for a market economy and liberal democracy, his ideological leanings were difficult to parse. Early in his public life, he was also seen as being sympathetic to far-right parties.

Navalny once told NPR that under an authoritarian regime, political nuances didn't matter: The overarching goal — people should agree, he said — is to call for open and fair elections, an independent judiciary and other aspects of a free society.

'Navalny' documentary spotlights the Russian who dared to take on Putin

Movie Reviews

'navalny' documentary spotlights the russian who dared to take on putin.

He also identified two experiences that set him on a collision course with Putin. One was his work as an attorney, where he concluded that Russia's court systems wouldn't be free to dispense justice unless the country reformed its government. Another was an eight-month fellowship at Yale University in 2010, which he said revealed "the bigger picture" of how other political systems operate.

When Navalny decided to share his ideas for a new Russia, he didn't rely on traditional print and broadcast media. "Probably you can call me a person of the internet," he said. "It was a lifesaver not just for me but everyone else who suddenly found themselves under censorship."

Navalny also rejected the label of "dissident," saying it suggested he was someone who stood alone. "If you take any of my anti-corruption investigations or any points from my political platform, I'm sure the majority of Russian citizens would support me," Navalny told NPR in 2018 . And that, he added, was why the government would not allow him to run against Putin for the presidency.

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Charles M. Blow

Alabama’s I.V.F. Ruling Shows Our Slide Toward Theocracy

The facade of Alabama’s Supreme Court building.

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.

The drumbeat of incidents moving us ever closer to the seemingly inescapable future is so steady and frequent that we’ve developed outrage fatigue — we’ve grown numb.

For instance, on Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children and that destruction of those embryos, even by accident, is subject to the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In his concurring opinion, the chief justice, Tom Parker, wrote, “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

The ruling could mean less access to reproductive care in Alabama if specialists in the field of in vitro fertilization simply choose to practice in states that don’t threaten their efforts.

There have been cases before in which embryos were destroyed as a result of negligence, but the Alabama decision significantly ups the ante. It essentially turns cryopreservation tanks into frozen nurseries.

The idea is absurd and unscientific. It is instead tied to a religious crusade to downgrade the personhood of women by conferring personhood on frozen embryos.

I called Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, who told me: “One of the points in the abortion debate is, ‘Is it really about abortion or is it about controlling women and controlling sex?’ And this clearly exposes the idea that it’s not just about abortion.” He said, “There is no more pro-life medical treatment available, ever, than in vitro fertilization, and this decision clearly threatens the ability for that to continue.”

Control of women’s bodies is the endgame. And some religious conservatives won’t stop until that goal is achieved. For that reason, intervening victories — like the overturning of Roe v. Wade — will never be seen as enough; they will only intensify a blinding sense of righteousness.

There is an array of reproductive rights cases percolating around the country that could make their way to the Supreme Court — the same court that Donald Trump brags about transforming, having appointed a third of its justices. The legal and political battles over these issues are far from over, and the preservation of women’s remaining rights is far from certain.

The only thing that seems to be temporarily stopping congressional Republicans from pushing for a national abortion ban — after years of arguing that their goal was merely to allow individual states to make their own laws — is that the issue of reproductive choice is an electoral loser for their party.

But now Trump is reportedly talking privately about supporting a national 16-week abortion ban, with some exceptions.

This is what many of his supporters want, and many of them believe he has been singularly chosen by God to advance their theocratic aims. It’s one of the reasons that they overlook Trump’s glaring flaws and the fact that Trump himself is not a particularly religious man.

It’s worth noting that many of the right’s efforts, including on the issue of abortion, are led by men who want births but can’t give birth, reflecting an imbalance between power and expectation that may carry over to a younger generation. A fascinating new report from Pew Research found that although men and women 18 to 34 “are about equally likely to say they want to get married,” 57 percent of young men say they want children one day, compared to just 45 percent of young women.

Abortion is just one front on which this religious fight is being waged. As of last week, the A.C.L.U. was tracking 437 anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills being considered by state legislatures.

Then there’s the alarming effort by conservative groups to transform and reshape the federal government in ways that curtail American freedoms, but also, according to Politico , to bring Christian nationalist ideas into a second Trump administration.

To those advancing these ideas, the will of God counts more than the will of the American people, even when Americans object or disagree.

Reportedly, one idea among the various proposals is invoking the Insurrection Act on Trump’s first day back in office to facilitate deployment of the military against protesters.

We are perilously close to all this becoming a reality, potentially aided and abetted by disaffected Democratic voters.

I’m talking about many Democrats with single-issue objections to President Biden — whether it’s opposition to his position on the Israel-Hamas war, disappointments about the overall state of the economy or concerns about the president’s age — who haven’t committed to supporting his re-election, who don’t seem to see that in November the country faces one of the most existential electoral decisions it ever has faced.

If these Democrats decide to punish Biden by sitting it out, they could wind up performing one of the greatest acts of self-immolation in recent political history: abandoning an administration committed to the protection of democracy and possibly allowing the ascension of a theocracy intent on destroying the very freedoms that progressives cherish.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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An earlier version of this article misstated when an Alabama Supreme Court ruling was issued. It was this past Friday, not Tuesday.

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Charles M. Blow is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about national politics, public opinion and social justice, with a focus on racial equality and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. @ CharlesMBlow • Facebook

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  1. The Crusades (1095-1291)

    The First Crusade Most historians consider the sermon preached by Pope Urban II at Clermont-Ferrand in November 1095 to have been the spark that fueled a wave of military campaigns to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control. ... The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace" (as cited in Paul and Yaeger, 2012, p ...

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    The First Crusade lasted from 1096 to 1099. The Second Crusade began in 1147 and ended in 1149. The Third Crusade started in 1189 and was concluded in 1192. The Fourth Crusade got underway in 1202 and ended in 1204. The Fifth Crusade lasted from 1217 until 1221. The Sixth Crusade occurred in 1228-29. The Seventh Crusade began in 1248 and ...

  4. The Crusades: Consequences & Effects

    The Muslim world had, prior to the crusades, already embarked on jihad - often translated as 'holy war' but meaning, more accurately, a 'striving' to both defend and expand Islam and Islamic territories. Despite the religious significance of Jerusalem to Muslims, the coastal Levant area was only of minor economic and political importance to the caliphates of Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia.

  5. The impact of the crusades (article)

    First, the earliest military orders originated in Jerusalem in the wake of the First Crusade. A miltary order is a religious order in which members take traditional monastic vows—communal poverty, chastity, and obedience—but also commit to violence on behalf of the Christian faith.Well-known examples include the Knights Templar (officially endorsed in 1129), the Knights Hospitaller ...

  6. The Crusades: Causes & Goals

    The Crusades were a series of military campaigns organised by Christian powers in order to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. There would be eight officially sanctioned crusades between 1095 CE and 1270 CE and many more unofficial ones. Each campaign met with varying successes and failures but, ultimately, the wider objective of keeping Jerusalem and the Holy Land in ...

  7. The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge and Holy

    The first crusade, as Asbridge explained in an earlier account he published in 2004, was really about the consolidation and extension of papal power in the anarchic and faction-ridden lands of ...

  8. The Crusades: A Complete History

    The word became a shorthand for a cause with moral right, be it in a non-military context, such as a crusade against drink, or in the horrors of the First World War. General Franco's ties with the Catholic Church in Spain invoked crusading ideology in perhaps the closest modern incarnation of the idea and it remains a word in common usage today.

  9. Rethinking the Crusades

    The last moral credibility of the Crusades vanished. The Cold War persuaded some that calls to serve a higher purpose were only pretexts, and others began to believe that even the best of intentions will go astray. ... The least contentious likelihood, the one suggested in this essay, is to look for connections between our efforts to resolve ...

  10. Historiography of the Crusades

    William of Tyre writing his history, from a 13th-century Old French translation, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS 2631, f.1r. The historiography of the Crusades is the study of history-writing and the written history, especially as an academic discipline, regarding the military expeditions initially undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, or 13th centuries to the Holy Land.

  11. Crusades

    The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, ... The evolution of a Christian theology of war developed from the link of Roman citizenship to Christianity, ... This edition also includes an essay on chivalry by Sir Walter Scott, whose works helped popularize the Crusades.

  12. Essay Sample on The Crusades: Really a Holy War?

    11 July 2022. Get sample for $1. The crusades are often referred to as a Holy War and this is because it was heavily influenced by religion. For the Christians, the war was about regaining the Holy land and protecting their brethren to the east from the barbaric infidels. The Pope, and other members of the church, justified the killings ...

  13. Objectives and role of the Crusades

    Crusades, Military expeditions, beginning in the late 11th century, that were organized by Western Christians in response to centuries of Muslim wars of expansion.. The objectives of the Crusades were to check the spread of Islam, to retake control of the Holy Land, to conquer pagan areas, and to recapture formerly Christian territories.The Crusades were seen by many of their participants as a ...

  14. What were the crusades? (article)

    This was crusading. Now imagine Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily. Frederick regains Jerusalem from the Muslims without waging war—it helps that he knows Arabic. He is crowned the King of Jerusalem in 1229, but returns to Europe to find the pope waging war on his lands. This, too, was crusading—at least it was for some ...

  15. » How was crusading justified?

    Crusades were wars—that is firm ground. More specifically, crusading was represented as just warfare, according to the idea of just war established by St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine wrote that warfare was sometimes a necessary and lesser evil in certain conditions. Specifically, a war could be just if there was: a) just cause,

  16. Crusades

    Crusades - Holy Wars, Jerusalem, Europe: The Albigensian Crusade took place to remove the Catharism heresy from southern France. The saying "Kill them all. God will know his own." was allegedly made by the papal legate when asked how the Crusaders should distinguish the heretics from true Christians after they captured Beziers; the Crusaders massacred almost the entire population of the city.

  17. Religious Wars: The Crusades

    1656 Words | 7 Pages. The crusades were a religious dispute between Christianity and Islam that took place in order for the Christians to take back their holy land, Jerusalem, from the Muslims. Urban II initiated the crusades at the Council of Clermont through a speech, with an audience of noblemen and clerics.

  18. The Crusades Essay

    The Crusades Essay. 1421 Words6 Pages. The Crusades were a series of battles that, from the beginning, had religious undertones. At the beginning of the 11th century, the Byzantine emperor Alexios I called for Pope Urban II to help with the growing threat of Turkish presence. Pope Urban II responded immediately by convincing Catholic soldiers ...

  19. The crusades: holy war or struggle for wealth

    The Crusades, the words themselves inspire thoughts of bravery, chivalry, and the quest for glory in the name of Christianity for God himself. This is what an uneducated person in medieval studies may be persuaded to believe, that the Crusades were a holy quest to regain Jerusalem, the holy land. However upon closer inspection, and a little ...

  20. The Crusades: Really a Holy War? Essay

    The Crusades were a series of wars fought between the Christian Europeans and the Muslim Turks, which occurred between the years of 1096 to 1272. In this Holy War the Christians goal was to obtain the Holy Land from the Turks, in which they did not succeed. Although the Christians did not meet their goal, many positives did come out of their ...

  21. The Crusades (1095-1291): [Essay Example], 1195 words

    In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in southern France, the Pope moved toward Western Christians to take up arms to help the Byzantines and recuperate the Holy Land from Muslim control. This signified the beginning of the Crusades. In the year 1000, the area of Anjou was overseen by Fulk Nerra. Constantine the Great was the main ...

  22. Opinion

    Guest Essay. Putin Has Already Lost. Feb. 22, 2024. ... His war has backfired not only in Ukraine but also in Europe. The European Union, jolted into action by the invasion, summoned a common ...

  23. Holy War: The Crusades

    The Crusades were a series of holy wars that took place from 1095-c.1300 to reclaim the holy land , although it became a fight for wealth and power. The Crusades were nicknamed the "holy war" because the semitic religions fought for Jerusalem. These nine Crusades were all brutal wars that caused civilian casualties, this occurred during the ...

  24. The Crusades: The Holy War And Religion

    The Crusades: Really a Holy War? Essay. The Crusades were one of the most prominent events in Western European history; they were not discrete and unimportant pilgrimages, but a continuous stream of marching Western armies (Crusaders) into the Muslim world, terminating in the creation and eventually the fall of the Islamic Kingdoms. ...

  25. What Navalny's death means for Russia, Putin and the world

    His anti-corruption crusade formed a new genre of immaculately documented and thriller-like films that displayed the yachts, villas and planes of Russia's rulers. ... In his essay "Live Not by ...

  26. Is the US a Christian nation? What the Constitution says

    In a 2021 Pew report, 15% of U.S. adults surveyed said the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation, while 18% said the U.S. Constitution was inspired by God. One-third of U.S. adults surveyed in 2023 said God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians to set an example to the world, according to a ...

  27. British firms' exports are almost certainly bolstering Russia's war

    Flows of British goods to Russia itself have fallen by 74% since the outbreak of war, following the imposition of sanctions. The vast majority of exports still flowing to Russia are food, medical ...

  28. A Special Anguish Among Palestinian Citizens of Israel

    The war in Gaza has made life even more complicated and difficult for Palestinian citizens of Israel. ... Guest Essay. A Special Anguish Among Palestinian Citizens of Israel. Feb. 23, 2024, 1:07 a ...

  29. Navalny's ceaseless crusade against Putin and corruption : NPR

    Alexei Navalny, Russian politician who opposed Putin to the end, has died in prison. "I want to live in a normal country, and refuse to accept any talk about Russia being doomed to being a bad ...

  30. Alabama's I.V.F. Ruling Shows Our Slide Toward Theocracy

    Opinion Columnist. If you don't think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you're not paying attention. The drumbeat of incidents moving us ever closer to the seemingly inescapable future ...