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.'

The political motives of these three princes, and the interaction of their different policies, was thus a great factor in determining the course and the results of the First Crusade.

The influence of the Italian towns did not make itself greatly felt till after the end of the First Crusade, when it made possible the foundation of a kingdom in Jerusalem, in addition to the three principalities established by Bohemund, Baldwin and Raymond; but during the course of the Crusade itself the Italian ships which hugged the shores of Syria were able to supply the crusaders with provisions and munition of war, and to render help in the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem.4 Sea-power had thus some influence in determining the victory of the crusaders.

In any case, it hampered the Mahommedans as much as the jealousy between Alexius and the Latins hampered the progress of the Crusade.

It is interesting, too, to notice the part which the laity already plays in directing the course of the Crusade.

From the first the Crusade, however clerical in its conception, was largely secular in its conduct; and thus, somewhat paradoxically, a religious enterprise aided the growth of the secular motive, and contributed to the escape of the laity from that tendency towards a papal theocracy, which was evident in the pontificate of Gregory VII.

So, on that day of July, the First Crusade came to an end.

In 1100, indeed, it might appear that a new Crusade from the West, which the capture of Antioch in 1098 had begun, and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 had finally set in motion, was destined to achieve great things for the nascent kingdom.

One of the great mistakes made by the Franks was the breach of the alliance in 1147 - a breach which was widened by the attack directed against Damascus during the Second Crusade; and the conquest of Damascus by Nureddin in 1154 was ultimately fatal to the Latin kingdom, removing as it did the one possible ally of the Franks, and opening the way to Egypt for the atabegs of Mosul.

Before we turn to describe the Second Crusade, which the loss of Edessa provoked, and to trace the fall of the kingdom, which the Second Crusade rather hastened than hindered, we may pause at this point to consider the organization of the Frankish colonies in Syria.

The Templars were founded about the year 1118 by a Burgundian knight, Hugh de Paganis; the Hospitallers sprang from a foundation in Jerusalem erected by merchants of Amalfi before the First Crusade, and were reorganized under Gerard le Puy, master until 1120.

The commercial motive, again, had been one of the great motives of the crusade; and the class which was impelled by that motive would be both large and, in view of the quality of the Eastern goods in which it dealt, exceptionally prosperous.

Finally, when one remembers how, during the First Crusade, the pedites had marched side by side with the principes, and how, from the beginning of 1099, they had practically risen in revolt against the selfish ambitions of princes like Count Raymund, it becomes easy to understand the independent position which the burgesses assumed in the organization of the kingdom.

Thus was begun the Second Crusade, 1 under auspices still more favourable than those which attended the beginning of the First, seeing that kings now took the place of knights, while the new crusaders would no longer be penetrating into the wilds, but would find a friendly basis of operations ready to their hands in Frankish Syria.

Conrad, related by marriage to Manuel, decided in favour of the land route, which Manuel desired because it brought the Crusade more under his direction, and because, if the route by sea were followed, Roger of Sicily might be able to divert the crusading ships against Constantinople.

The crusaders of northern Germany never went to the Holy Land at all; they were allowed the crusaders' privileges for attacking the Wends to the east of the Elbe - a fact which at once attests the cleavage between northern and southern Germany (intensified of late years by the war of investitures), and anticipates the age of the Teutonic knights and their long Crusade on the Baltic. The crusaders of the Low Countries and of England took the sea route, and attacked and captured Lisbon on their way, thus helping to found the kingdom of Portugal, and achieving the one real success which was gained by the Second Crusade.

The Second Crusade now collapsed.

The position of the Franks in the Holy Land was not improved by the attack on Damascus; while the ignominious failure of a Crusade led by two kings brought the whole crusading movement into discredit in western Europe, and it was utterly in vain that Suger and St Bernard attempted to gather a fresh Crusade in 1150.

The result of the failure of the Second Crusade was the renewal of Nureddin's attacks.

The Crusade was now at last answered by the counter-Crusade - the jihad; for though for many years past Saladin had, in his attempt to acquire all the inheritance of Nureddin, left Palestine unmenaced and intact, his ultimate aim was always the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem.

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.