The Crusades

The crusades were the culmination of two separate historical movements: pilgrimages and holy wars. Like pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the place where Jesus had lived and died, the crusades drew on a long tradition of making pious voyages to sacred shrines to petition for help or cure. The relics of Jesus’s crucifixion in Jerusalem, and even the region around it, attracted pilgrims long before the First Crusade was called in 1095.

As holy wars blessed by church leaders, the crusades had a prehistory. The Truce of God, begun in the late tenth century, depended on knights ready to go to battle to uphold it. The Normans’ war against Sicily had the pope’s approval. Already, as we have seen, the battle of 1063 in the reconquista of Spain was fought with a papal indulgence.

European crusaders established states in the Middle East that lasted for two hundred years. A tiny strip of crusader states along the eastern Mediterranean survived—perilously—until 1291.