The Crusades

The Renaissance was a rebirth of Classical thought and ideas in Western Europe. For centuries, the Byzantines and Arabs had been the custodians of the works and writings of the Ancient Greeks and...

The crusades were a series of military expeditions carried out by Christians from all throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. The crusaders travelled to the Middle East in an attempt to seize the...

The First Crusade, which occurred between 1095 and 1099, was the first attempt at recapturing the Holy Land. The military operation was initiated on the executive orders of Pope Urban II during a...

Positive: The eastern and western Roman Empires had gradually drifted apart due to differences in language (the Eastern Empire spoke Greek, the western Latin), religion (Orthodox vs. Roman Catholic...

If we are talking about who called the First Crusade, rather than who went on it, the only possible answer is Pope Urban II. There were two major motives that influenced the pope in his call for...

In the feudal system, the Catholic Church played a huge role in the navigation of society, and the pope was considered a representative of God on earth. The kings and feudal lords thought that they...

The experience of the Jewish people during the First Crusades, as with many historical periods characterized by marked increases in antisemitism, pogroms, and so on, demonstrated above all their...

There were several crusades spread over several hundred years, and the reasons they were initiated varied, although almost all were the result of Papal exhortations; in fact the First Crusade began...

When, in 1088, Cardinal Otho de Lagery was elected Pope, taking the title Urban II, one of his highest priorities was the capture of the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Muslims, who had conquered...

The ideas that drove the First Crusade were born out of a general sense in Christian Europe that, because the first millennium was approaching, the return of Christ was surely nigh. As such, it was...

The Crusades were a series of military campaigns that occurred from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. They were the result of the Turks' military defeats of the Byzantine Empire,...

The Crusades represent a series of religious wars that lasted from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. Mostly, they took part in western Asia and were directed and financed by the European...