Defining the "Crusades"

[NB: I AM PLANNING ON ADDING PICTURES TO GO ALONG WITH THE TEXT HERE!]

So, what are the "Crusades?"

For starters, the word “crusade” and the name “crusader” are anachronisms largely invented by historians (medieval sources refer to crusaders most commonly as “pilgrims”). Over the course of the last century, in fact, numerous historians have debated endlessly over what actually constitutes a “Crusade.” They have differed in their formulation of what constitutes a crusade, as well as the relative importance of each element. One of the earliest (and most enduring) formulations fixated on the preaching of holy war by churchmen acting under the aegis of the papacy. Ideological seeds of holy war had existed for centuries in Christian Europe in frontier regions where faiths and cultures clashed, but it was only in the late-eleventh century that the papacy—invigorated with new spiritual authority after decades of reform—engineered and sanctioned a new brand of militant spirituality that would open a host of possibilities for the martial aristocracy of Europe. Only now could the knightly nobility channel its martial and destructive energies towards a shared goal (the liberation of the eastern church) with spiritual reward (the remission of sin).[1]

Initial efforts to define crusading have been challenged, reaffirmed, or nuanced by successive historians. Some have emphasized crusading as a form of pilgrimage, a religious practice that had reached a sort of craze among nobles and peasants alike by the time that Pope Urban II preached the first crusade at Clermont in 1095. Pilgrimage was a key means of achieving remission of sin at this time as well as one of the few opportunities that many medieval people would have to travel. In fact, local religious institutions (especially monasteries) often provided one member of the community each year with a sum of money to make a journey. That said, tenth-century pilgrims were not only destined for the famous sites of early Christianity—very distant and expensive to travel to—but could more easily and frequently make shorter pilgrimages to local shrines and monasteries.[2]

A further point of debate in the definition of “crusade” is the relevance of Jerusalem as the destination and end-goal for crusaders. One eminent crusade historian argued that the goal of journeying to Jerusalem and liberating it from the enemies of the faith was integral to the experience of crusading. A major problem is that historians have tended to define “the crusades” as a coherent movement based on the novelty of the “first crusade” undertaken at the end of the eleventh century. Most pertinent for the project at hand, how do wars undertaken on the last pagan-Christian frontier of the European Middle Ages (the “northern crusades”) fit in to the templates developed by historians fixated on expeditions to the Holy Land?[3]