Word Finder - crusade

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Any of the military expeditions undertaken by the Christians of Europe in the 11th to 13th centuries to reconquer the Levant from the Muslims.

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During the crusades, many Muslims and Christians and Jews were slaughtered.

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Any war instigated and blessed by the Church for alleged religious ends. Especially, papal sanctioned military campaigns against infidels or heretics.

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A grand concerted effort toward some purportedly worthy cause.

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a crusade against drug abuse

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A mass gathering in a political campaign or during a religious revival effort.

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A Portuguese coin; a crusado.

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To go on a military crusade.

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To make a grand concerted effort toward some purportedly worthy cause.

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He crusaded against similar injustices for the rest of his life.

The third crusade numbered among its chiefs Floris III.

The foremost heroes of the first crusade were Netherlanders.

It was in 1215 that the leader of this strange Crusade had first taken the vow; it was twelve years afterwards when he finally attempted to carry the vow into effective execution.

In 1269 James the Conqueror of Aragon, at the bidding of the pope, turned from the long Spanish Crusade to a Crusade in the East in order to atone for his offences against the law matrimonial.

Charles of Anjou had succeeded, as a result of the long "crusade" waged by the papacy against the Hohenstaufen from the council of Lyons to the battle of Tagliacozzo (1245-1268), in establishing himself in the kingdom of Sicily.

None the less the emperor sailed on his Crusade in the summer of 1228, affording to astonished Europe the spectacle of an excommunicated crusader, and leaving his territories to be invaded by papal soldiers, whom Gregory IX.

Here was a crusader against whom a Crusade was proclaimed in his own territories; and when he arrived in the Holy Land he found little obedience and many insults from all but his own immediate followers.

To turn now to the external events which followed on the Fourth Crusade.

By the end of October they had perished utterly at the hands of the Seljuks; a heap of whitening bones also remained to testify to the later crusaders, when they passed in the spring of 1097, of the fate of the people's Crusade.

To the same great rendezvous other leaders also gathered, some of higher rank than Godfrey or Raymund or Bohemund, but none destined to exercise an equal influence on the fate of the Crusade.

We have already seen that among the princes who joined the First Crusade there were some who were rather politiques than devots, and who aimed at the acquisition of temporal profit as well as of spiritual merit.

In pursuance of its terms the crusaders evacuated Egypt, and the Fifth Crusade was at an end.

The paradox of Frederick's Crusade is indeed astonishing.

To arrest his progress, a Crusade, preached by Boniface IX., led by John the Fearless of Burgundy, and joined chiefly by French knights, was directed down the valley of the Danube into the Balkans; but the old faults stigmatized by de Mezieres, divisio and pro Aria voluntas, were the ruin of the crusading army, and at the battle of Nicopolis it was signally defeated.

The logical result of the union was the Crusade of 1443.

An army of cosmopolitan adventurers, led by the Cardinal Caesarini, joined the 1 The dream of a Crusade to Jerusalem survived de Mezieres; a society which read "romaunts" of the Crusades, could not but dream the dream.

Everywhere in the r5th century, in Europe and in Asia, the crescent was victorious over the cross; and Crusade and mission, whether one regards them as complementary or inimical, perished together.'

Thus it was on a kingdom of crusaders who had lost the crusading spirit that a new Crusade swept down; and Saladin's army in 1187 had the spirit and the fire of the Latin crusaders of 1099.

The fingers of the clock had been pushed back; once more things were as they had been at the time of the First Crusade; once more the West must arm itself for the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem - but now it must face a united Mahommedan world, where in 1096 it had found political and religious dissension, and it must attempt its vastly heavier task without the morning freshness of a new religious impulse, and with something of the weariness of a hundred years of struggle upon its shoulders.

Conrad of Montferrat was, as much as any one man, responsible for the Third Crusade.

Meanwhile the papacy, as soon as the news reached Rome, despatched encyclicals throughout Europe; and soon a new Crusade was in full swing.

But the Third Crusade, unlike the First, does not spring from the papacy, which was passing through one of its epochs of depression; it springs from the lay power, which, represented by the three strong monarchies of Germany, England and France, was at this time dominant in Europe.

In Germany it was the solemn national diet of Mainz (Easter 1188) which "swore the expedition" to the Holy Land; in France and England the agreement of the two kings decided upon a joint Crusade.

The lay basis of the Third Crusade made it, in one sense, the greatest of all Crusades, in which all the three great monarchs of western Europe participated; but it also made it a failure, for the kings of France and England, changing caelum, non animum, carried their political rivalries into the movement, in which it had been agreed that they should be sunk.

Spiritually, therefore, the Third Crusade is inferior to the First, however imposing it may be in its material aspects.

We may conceive of the Third Crusade under the figure of a number of converging lines, all seeking to reach a common centre.

The emperor Isaac Angelus had not only the old grudge of all Eastern 1 The "economic" motive for taking the cross was strengthened by the papal regulations in favour of debtors who joined the Crusade.

Thousands must have joined the Third Crusade in order to escape paying either their taxes or the interest on their debts; and the atmosphere of the gold-digger's camp (or of the cave of Adullam) must have begun more than ever to characterize the crusading armies.

Here, with the burden of the day now past, the fine old crusader - he had joined before in the Second Crusade, forty years ago - perished by accident in the river; and of all his fine army only a thousand men won their way through, under his son, Frederick of Swabia, to join the ranks before Acre (October 1190).

The enforced inactivity of a whole winter was the mother of disputes and bad blood; and when Philip sailed for the Holy Land, at the end of March 1191, the failure of the Crusade was already decided.

They show the lay aspect of the Third Crusade; they anticipate the Crusade of Frederick II.

They show again the closer approximation and better understanding with the Mahom.medans, which marks this Crusade.

The Crusade had failed - failed because a leaderless army, torn by political dissensions and fighting on a foreign soil, could not succeed against forces united by religious zeal under the banner of a leader like Saladin.

The difficulties which had arisen between Isaac Angelus and Frederick Barbarossa contain the germs of the Fourth Crusade; the negotiations between Richard and Saladin contain the germs of the Sixth.

National rivalries had been accentuated and national differences brought into prominence by the meeting of the nations in a common enterprise; while, on the other hand, Mahommedans and Christians had fraternized as they had never done before during the progress of a Crusade.

But what the Third Crusade showed most clearly was that the crusading movement was being lost to the papacy, and becoming part of the demesne of the secular state - organized by the state on its own basis of taxation, and conducted by the state according to its own method of negotiation.

On the 1 The Crusades in their course established a number of new states or kingdoms. The First Crusade established the kingdom of Jerusalem (I too); the Third, the kingdom of Cyprus (1195); the Fourth, the Latin empire of Constantinople (1204); while the long Crusade of the Teutonic knights on the coast of the Baltic led to the rise of a new state east of the Vistula.

The history of the Fourth Crusade is a history of the predominance of the lay motive, of the attempt of the papacy to escape from that predominance, and to establish its old direction of the Crusade, and of the complete failure of its attempt.

As emperor, Henry was eager to resume the imperial Crusade which had been stopped by his father's death; while both as Frederick's successor and as heir to the Norman kings of Sicily, who had again and again waged war against the Eastern empire, he had an account to settle with the rulers of Constantinople.

The project of a Crusade and of an attack on Constantinople wove themselves into a single thread, in a way which very definitely anticipates the Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204.

In 1195 Henry took the cross; some time before, he had already sent to Isaac Angelus to demand compensation for the injuries done to Frederick I., along with the cession of all territories ever conquered by the Norman kings of Sicily, and a fleet to co-operate with the new Crusade.

Thus armed he pushed forward the preparations for the Crusade in Germany - a Crusade whose first of.ject would have been an attack on Alexius III.; but in the middle of his preparations he died in Sicily in the autumn of 1197, and the Crusade collapsed.

By the spring of 1200, owing to Innocent's exertions, a new Crusade was in full progress, especially in France, where Fulk of Neuilly played the part once played by Peter the Hermit.

Like the First Crusade, the Fourth Crusade also - in its personnel, but not its direction - was a French enterprise; and its leading members were French feudatories like Theobald of Champagne (who was chosen leader of the Crusade), Baldwin of Flanders (the future emperor of Constantinople), and the count of Blois.

But, with Syria in the hands of the Mahommedans, the attack on Egypt must necessarily be directed by sea; and thus the Crusade henceforth becomes - what the Third Crusade, here as elsewhere the turning-point in crusading history, had already in part been - a maritime enterprise.

Accordingly, early in 1201, envoys from each of the three chiefs of the Fourth Crusade (among whom was Villehardouin, the historian of the Crusade) came to Venice to negotiate for a passage to Egypt.

But the Fourth Crusade was not to be plain sailing to Egypt.

It is significant of the final result of these things that already in 1147 Roger of Sicily, engaged in war with Manuel, had proposed the sea-route for the Second Crusade, perhaps with some intention of diverting it against Constantinople; and in the winter of 1189-1190 Barbarossa, as we have seen, had actually thought and spoken of an attack on Constantinople.

It is this Hohenstaufen policy which becomes the primary occasion of the diversion of the Fourth Crusade.

On Christmas day 1201, Philip, Alexius and Boniface all met at Hagenau 1 and formulated (one may suppose) a plan for the diversion of the Crusade.