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:This article is about the historical Crusades and the extended term "Crusade". For the artillery system, see XM2001 Crusader; for the fighter jet, see F-8 Crusader; for the television series, see Crusade.Historically, the Crusades were a series of several military campaigns, usually sanctioned by the Papacy, that took place during the 11th through 13th centuries. They were Catholic endeavors to capture the Holy Land from the Muslims. In a broader sense a "crusade" was any war fought for religious reasons.
1 Historical background
The origins of the crusades lie in developments earlier in the Middle Ages. The breakdown of the Carolingian empire in the later 9th century, combined with the relative stabilization of local European borders after the Christianization of the Vikings, Slavs and Magyars, meant that there was an entire class of warriors who now had very little to do but fight among themselves and terrorize the peasant population. The Church tried to stem this violence with the Peace and Truce of God movements, forbidding violence against certain people at certain times of the year. This was somewhat successful, but trained warriors always needed an outlet for their violence.
One such outlet was the ReconquistaThe Reconquista ( Spanish and Portuguese for reconquest was the conquest of the Moorish kingdoms of Spain and Portugal by Christian rulers, culminating on January 2, 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella, Los Reyes Catolicos ("The Catholic Monarchs"), expelled in SpainThe Kingdom of Spain is a country located in the southwest of Europe. It shares the Iberian Peninsula with Portugal, Gibraltar and Andorra. To the northeast, along the Pyrenees mountain range, it borders France and the tiny principality of Andorra. It inc, which at times occupied Spanish knights and some mercenaries from elsewhere in EuropeFor the band of the same name, see Europe (band . Europe is a continent forming the westermost part of the Eurasian supercontinent. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Se in the fight aganist the Islamic MoorsMoors is used in this article to describe the medieval Muslim inhabitants of al-Andalus and the Maghreb, whose culture is often called "Moorish". For other meanings look at Moors (Meaning) or Blackamoors. The name derives from the ancient Berber tribe of. In 1063, Pope Alexander IIAlexander II born Anselmo Baggio (d. April 21, 1073), pope from 1061 to 1073, was a native of Milan. As bishop of Lucca he had been an energetic coadjutor with Hildebrand in endeavouring to suppress simony, and to enforce the celibacy of the clergy. His e had given papal blessing to Spanish Christians in their wars against the Muslims, granting both a papal standard (the vexillum sancti Petri) and an indulgence to those who were killed in battle.
This background in the Christian west must be matched with that in the Muslim east. Muslim presence in the Holy Land goes back to the initial Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century. This did not interfere much with pilgrimage to Christian holy sites or the security of monasteries and Christian communities in the Holy Land of Christendom, and western Europeans were not much concerned with the loss of far-away Jerusalem when, in the ensuing decades and centuries, they were themselves faced with invasions by Muslims and other hostile non-Christians such as the Vikings and Magyars.
However, a turning point in western attitudes towards the east came in the year 1009, when the Fatimid caliph of Cairo, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem destroyed. His successor permitted the Byzantine Empire to rebuild it under stringent circumstances, and pilgrimage was again permitted, but many stories began to be circulated in the West about the cruelty of the Muslims toward Christian pilgrims, which played an important role in the development of the crusades later in the century.
