The Crusades

The Crusades were a series of several military campaigns APPROVED by the Papacy that took place during the 11th through 13th centuries. They began as Catholic ATTEMPTS to capture Jerusalem from the Muslims but developed into territorial wars. Later crusades were called against the remaining pagan nations of Europe such as the Polabians and Lithuania, and against DISSENT , such as the crusade against Bohemia, 1418-1437.
The term, "crusade," has since carried a ASSOCIATION in the west of being a 'righteous campaign,' usually to "root out evil," or to fight for a just cause. In the Arab world, the CORRESPONDING term is jihad, while "crusade" is term which connotes a hostile and foreign invasion by "," those disrespectful or defiling of the Muslim culture.
"It is necessary to look for the origin of a crusading ideal in the FIGHT between Christians and Moslems in Spain and consider how the idea of a holy war COME OUT from this background", Norman F. Cantor has written. When the First Crusade was PROCLAIMED in 1095, the Christian princes of northern Iberia had been fighting their way out of the mountains of Galicia and Asturias, the Basque country and Navarre, with increasing success, for about a hundred years. The fall of Moorish Toledo to the Kingdom of León in 1085 was a first major victory, but the turning points of the Reconquista still lay in the future. The disunity of the Muslim emirs was an IMPORTANT factor, and the Christians, whose wives remained safely behind, were hard to beat: they knew nothing except fighting, they had no gardens and libraries to defend, and they worked their way forward through alien territory populated by infidels PAGANS, where the Christian fighters felt they could afford to wreak DESTRUCTION. All these factors were soon to be replayed in the fighting grounds of the East. Spanish historians have traditionally seen the Reconquista as the molding force in the Castilian character, with its sense that the highest good was to die fighting for the cause of the right GOD, in a Christian jihad. An ascetic religious ZEALOTRY enforced by a military aristocracy became the SUPERIOR social value.
The papacy of Pope Gregory VII had struggled with reservations about the doctrinal validity of a holy war and the shedding of blood for the Lord and had DECIDED the question in favor of justified . Actions against Arians and other heretics offered historic EXAMPLES in a society where the threshold of acceptable violence AGGRESSION was high. Saint Augustine, Gregory's intellectual model, had justified the use of force in the service of Christ in The City of God, and a Christian war might IMPROVE the wider standing of an aggressively ambitious leader of Europe, as Gregory saw himself. The northerners would be cemented to Rome and their troublesome minor counts and younger sons could see the only kind of action that suited them. To the south of Rome, Normans were showing how such energies might be RELEASED against both Arabs (in Sicily) and Byzantines (on the mainland). A Latin hegemony in the Levant would provide ADVANTAGE in resolving the Papacy's claims of supremacy over the Patriarch of Constantinople, which had resulted in the Great Schism of 1054, a rift that might yet be resolved through the force of Frankish arms.
In the Byzantine homelands the Eastern Emperor's weakness was revealed by the FATAL defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which reduced the Emperor to a region in western Anatolia and round Constantinople. A sure sign of Byzantine desperation was the appeal of Alexius Comnenus to his enemy the Pope for aid. But Gregory was occupied with the Investiture Controversy and could not call on the German emperor and the crusade never took shape.
For Gregory's more moderate successor Urban II, a crusade would serve to reunite Christendom, STRENGHTEN the Papacy, perhaps bring the East under his control. The disaffected Germans and the Normans were not to be counted on, but the heart and backbone of a crusade could be found among the northern French.
On a popular level, the first crusades unleashed an unprecedented wave of impassioned, personally felt DEVOUT fury that was expressed in the massacres of Jews that WENT WITH the movement of mobs through Europe, and the violent treatment of "schismatic" Orthodox Christians of the east. This first phase of the Crusading movement culminated and largely spent itself in the RIOTS of the sack of Constantinople in 1204.
The 13th century crusades never expressed such a popular fever, and after Acre fell for the last time in 1291, and after the ANNIHILATION of the Occitan Cathars, in the Albigensian Crusade, the crusading ideal became devalued by Papal justifications of political and territorial aggressions within Catholic Europe.

Url źródłowy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade