crusades

crusades The crusades constituted the most popular mass movement of the later Middle Ages. They may be defined as a species of holy war, authorized by the pope; a just war, that is a defensive reaction to aggression towards Christian people or territory, their participants enjoying a set of privileges offered by the pope and enshrined in canon law. Such a definition, crucially, did not require a crusader to fulfil his vow in the Holy Land, nor did it postulate Muslims as the normative object of crusading. Crusades came to be deployed against a variety of opponents—against Moors in Spain, Mongols in eastern Europe, pagan Slavs in north‐eastern Europe, heretics in Bosnia and in southern France, and a variety of papal political opponents.

Many of these various applications were controversial at the time. The same is true of the very notion of crusade, from the time that Pope Urban II made his call to the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. In protestant Britain, crusades have been harshly judged for centuries. This train of thought was famously stated by David Hume in his condemnation of crusade: ‘the most signal and durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.’ Such a tradition has militated against serious consideration of the significance of the crusades in British history. Were the crusades not a terrible distraction, deflecting the king from his primary concerns at home? Were they not a deplorable squandering of resources that could have been more usefully employed in England?

Times and attitudes have changed. One recent trend has been a move towards thorough investigation of the impact of the crusades upon the societies in which they were preached, and it is now apparent that the crusades affected vast areas of life. The heyday of crusading was in the 12th and 13th cents., at least so far as English participation is concerned, but as an institution the crusade only finally withered in the later 16th cent. Every king of England between 1154 and 1327 took the cross, though only one, Richard I, fulfilled it in person.