The Crusades in The Medieval Period

The Crusades were a series of religious wars by the Latin church in the medieval period. The most known Crusades were the groups in the Eastern Mediterranean aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule. At the time of the early Crusades the word Crusade did not exist, only becoming the leading described word around 1760. In 1095, Pope Urban II summoned The First Crusades in a sermon at the Council of Clermont. He supported the military support for the Byzantine Empire and its Emperor, Alexios I, he needed some reinforcements for his war with westward migrating Turks settling Anatolia. One of Urban’s aims was to guarantee pilgrims access to the Eastern Mediterranean holy sites that the muslims controlled but scholars disagreed to say that this was the primary motive for Urban or the people who heeded his call. Urban’s ideas were to unite the Western and Eastern branches of Christendom, which has been divided since the Eastern-Western split because of opposed sections in the Mediterranean since 1054 and to establish as the head of the united church.

The crusades succeed in establishing the first four Crusader states in the Eastern Mediterranean: The country of Edessa, The principality of Antioch, The Kingdom of Jerusalem, and The Country of Tripoli, The happy responses to Urban’s preaching from all upper class, middle class, and lower class members in Western Europe made a precedent for the other Crusades.

Volunteers became Crusader by taking a public vow and all received indulgences from the church. They were set on removing all other religions on the face of the planet and setting the christianity as the one main religion from then to the end of time and they did so with brute force and murderous acts, they believed that God would send the soldiers to heaven if they went out and killed everyone who wouldn’t submit to their beliefs or had a different belief other than christianity and they would “sacrifice” to the great God almighty.

Most of them killed mainly Islamic people they were at war with for two centuries. The Crusaders killed 1.7 million people for not believing in God. The Crusaders seeked out to obtain glory and honour or to satisfy feudal obligations. It took a two-century attempt for the reclaiming of the Holy Lands and The Crusaders failed to reclaim the Holy Lands, but there were six major Crusades and numerous less important Crusades following the first Crusade. After the last Catholic outposts fell in 1291 there were no more Crusades but the mass tolls the Crusades left behind were longer lasting in Northern and Western Europe. The Wendish Crusades and the Archbishop of Bremen brought all the North-East Baltic and the tribes of Mecklenburg and Lusatia into Catholic control