Crusades: Definition, Religious Wars & Facts

One of the major turning points in Medieval history were the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of wars the were fought between the Christian Europeans and the Muslim Turks. They occurred between the years of 1096 to 1272.

In this Holy War the Christians goal was to obtain the Holy Land from the Turks, but they did not succeed. Although the Christians did not meet their goal, there were many positives that came out of their attempt. Due to the reason that they did not meet their goal, many positives came out of their effort, and many people say that it was a successful failure.

The Crusades were organaly started by western European Christians after many years of Muslim wars. The first objective was to stop the expansion of Muslim states. They also wanted to reclaim the Holy Land in the Middle East. And finally to recapture territories that had already been Christian.

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The crusades were started by Pope Urban Between 1095, when the First Crusade was launched, and 1291. There were numerous expeditions to the Holy Land, to Spain, and to the Baltic, the Crusades continued for several centuries after 1291. Almost two-thirds of the Christian people were captured by Muslims by the end of the 11th century. The Crusades attempted to stop the advance. Though the crusades failed to capture Jerusalem, they had many major impacts on Western Europe.

The Crusades were a series of many military expeditions conducted by European Christians in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries to conquer the land of Israel from the Muslims or to repel their counterattacks. The explicit cause was the reports received from Jerusalem troubling the maltreatment of Christian pilgrims and the way that their access to the Holy Places was destroyed. In a lot of these reports, the harmfulness of the Jews was also stressed, so that from the beginning the ground was prepared for including the Jews in the freshly stimulated animosity against the unbelievers.

At the period of the analogous expeditions of French knights to help the Spanish Christians against the Moors, the Jews of Narbonne and elsewhere had been attacked notwithstanding the permissions of Pope Alexander II. It was originally meant that the crusaders should concern themselves only with the success of their expedition overseas, and to not intervene in the affairs of the Christian countries of Europe. However, precisely because the crusaders ignored this advice, the Crusade was partially deflected from its first course, with tragic consequences for the Jews of Europe.

The knights' templar, were a Catholic military order that were founded in 1119 and recognised in 1139 by the papal bull Omne datum optimum. The Knights Templar was a large organization of Christians during the medieval era whose mission was to protect European travelers visiting the Holy Land while also carrying out military operations. Even though its original purpose was to protect pilgrims from danger, the Knights Templar quickly expanded its duties.

They became the defenders of the Crusader states in the Holy Land, and protected the citizens. They were known as brave, highly skilled, and talented warriors. In the late 12th century, Muslim armies retook Jerusalem and took control of the Crusades, forcing the Knights Templar to move around several times. During the Fall of Acre in 1291 the destruction of the last remaining Crusader refuge in the Holy Land happened.

The Europeans helped the military campaigns in the Holy Land and began to erode over the many decades that followed. Even more, many secular and religious leaders became increasingly critical of the Templars’ wealth and power. By 1303, the Knights Templar lost its place in the Muslim world and established a base in Paris. There, King Philip IV of France planned to bring down the order, mainly because the Templars had denied the indebted ruler the additional loans that he wanted.

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