The Crusades

The Crusades were a series of religious expeditionary wars blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church, with the stated goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem. The Crusades were originally launched in response to a call from the leaders of the Byzantine Empire for help to fight the expansion into Anatolia of Muslim Seljuk Turks who had cut off access to Jerusalem. The crusaders comprised military units of Roman Catholics from all over western Europe, and were not under unified command. The main series of Crusades, primarily against Muslims, occurred between 1095 and 1291. Historians have given many of the earlier crusades numbers. After some early successes, the later crusades failed and the crusaders were defeated and forced to return home.Several hundred thousand soldiers became Crusaders by taking vows; the Pope granted them plenary indulgence. Their emblem was the cross—"crusade" is derived from the French term for taking up the cross. Many were from France and called themselves "Franks," which became the common term used by Muslims. At the time Christianity had not yet divided into the large number of geographically intermingled branches later formed, the (western) Roman Catholic and (eastern) Byzantine Orthodox churches being the main groups; the Crusaders simply considered themselves to be "Christian" rather than Muslim.The term "crusade" is also used to describe religiously motivated campaigns conducted between 1100 and 1600 in territories outside the Levant usually against pagans, heretics, and peoples under the ban of excommunication for a mixture of religious, economic, and political reasons. Rivalries among both Christian and Muslim powers led also to alliances between religious factions against their opponents, such as the Christian alliance with the Sultanate of Rûm during the Fifth Crusade.The Crusades had political, economic, and social impacts on western Europe. It may have resulted in substantially weakening the Christian Byzantine Empire, which several centuries later, fell to the Turks.The Reconquista, a long period of wars in Spain (Iberia) where Christian forces reconquered the peninsula from Muslims, is closely tied to the Crusades.In modern usage the term "crusade", or "crusade against...", is often used metaphorically to refer to any idealistically- or ideologically-motivated campaign without religious connotations, as in "Crusade Against Cancer".
Category:Wars