Word Finder - crusading

definition

To go on a military crusade.

definition

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

example

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

The policy of Alexius was destined to produce evil results, both for the Eastern empire and for the crusading movement.

Peter and his chancellor de Mezieres represent the last flicker of the crusading spirit.

It contains some fine tapestry and portraits, and the Lee Pennyfamiliar to readers of Sir Walter Scott's Talisman-which was brought from Palestine in the 14th century by the Crusading knight, Sir Simon Lockhart.

The Latinizing Armenians adopted it from Rome in the crusading epoch.

Though crusades had not yet been preached, the strife with the Mussulman at once brought in the crusading element; to the Christian people of the island they were in many cases real deliverers; still, the actual process by which Sicily was won was not so very different from that by which Apulia had been won.

It is indeed true that to thousands the hope of acquiring spiritual merit must have been a great motive; it is also true, as the records of crusading sermons show, that there was a strong element of "revivalism" in the Crusades, and that thousands were hurried into taking the cross by a gust of that uncontrollable enthusiasm which is excited by revivalist meetings to-day.

The armies of Fulcher and Gottschalk were destroyed by the Hungarians in just revenge for their excesses (June); the third, after joining in a wild Judenhetze in the towns of the valley of the Rhine, during which some io,000 Jews perished as the first-fruits of crusading zeal, was scattered to the winds in Hungary (August).

Raymund of Toulouse (the first prince to join the crusading movement) along with Bishop Adhemar, the papal commissary, led the Proven9als down the coast of Illyria, and then due east to Constantinople, arriving towards the end of April 1097.

On the other hand, the success of the crusading movement was imperilled, both now and afterwards, by the jealousy of the Comneni.

The crusading princes were well enough aware of the gulf which divided the caliph of Cairo from the Sunnite princes of Syria; and they sought by envoys to put themselves into connexion with him, hoping by his aid to gain Jerusalem (which was then ruled for the Turks by Sokman, the son of the amir Ortok).

Alexius took possession of the town; and though he rewarded the crusading princes richly, some discontent was excited by his action.

The growth of Baldwin's kingdom, as it was suggested above, owed more to the interests of Italian traders than it did to crusading zeal.

We have already seen that it was the theory of the Eastern emperors - a theory which logically followed from the homage of the crusaders to Alexiusthat the conquests of the crusaders belonged to their empire, and were held by the crusading princes as fiefs.

Thus, although Alexius had been able, in the wake of the crusading armies, to recover a large belt of land round the whole coast of Asia Minor, - the interior remaining subject to the sultans of Konia (Iconium) and the princes of Sivas, - he left the territories to the east of the western boundary of Cilicia in the hands of the Latins when he died in 1118.

The crusading states had been founded by adventurers who thirsted for gain; and the primitive appetite did not lose its edge with the progress of time.

To the crusading king of I The manorial system in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was a continuation of the village system as it had existed under the Arabs.

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 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.

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 forty years from 1189 to 1229 form a period of incessant crusading, occupied by Crusades of every kind.

Yet it must be admitted that the idea of a spiritual regeneration accompanied the crusading movement of 1188.

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.

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.

The crusading barons of France chose their own leader, and determined their own route, without consulting Innocent.

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.

Yet the result of the Fourth Crusade was on the whole disastrous both for the papacy and for the crusading movement.

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 Crusades afforded new details which might be inserted into old matters, and a new spirit which might be infused into old subjects; and a crusading complexion thus came to be put upon old tales like those of Arthur and Charlemagne.

The crusading princes of Antioch never held the place, though they attacked it in 1124; and Saladin, who took it in 1183, made it a stronghold against them and the northern capital of himself and his successors until the Tatar invasion of 1260.

He is at once the gigantic eater of Turpin, the huge warrior eight feet high, who could lift the armed knight standing on his open hand to a level with his head, the crusading conqueror of Jerusalem in days before the crusades, and yet with all this the temperate drinker and admirer of St Augustine, as his character had filtered down through various channels from the historical pages of Einhard.

An open breach was only delayed by the desire of both kings to fulfil the crusading vows which they had recently taken.

Lebanon during the Frank period of Antioch and Palestine, the Maronites being inclined to take the part of the crusading princes against the Druses and Moslems; but they were still regarded as heretic Monothelites by Abulfaragius (Bar-Hebraeus) at the end of the 13th century; nor is their effectual reconciliation to Rome much older than 1736, the date of the mission sent by the pope Clement XII., which fixed the actual status of their church.

This Edmund received in his own day the surname of Crouchback, not, as was afterwards supposed, from a personal deformity, but from having worn a cross upon his back in token of a crusading vow.

In 1453 a crusading bull was issued imposing a tenth on all benefices of the earth to equip an expedition against the infidel.

He was now planning to induce the crusading armies of the West to pass through his territories, and seemed about to play a leading part in the third Crusade.

In the first year of the 13th century, the Knights of the Sword, one of the numerous orders of crusading military monks, had been founded in Livonia to "convert" the pagan Letts, and, in 1208, the still more powerful Teutonic order was invited by Duke Conrad of Masovia to settle in the district of Kulm (roughly corresponding to modern East Prussia) to protect his territories against the incursions of the savage Prussians, a race closely akin to the Lithuanians.

Originally planted on the Baltic shore for the express purpose of christianizing their savage neighbours, these crusading monks had freely exploited the wealth and the valour of the West, ostensibly in the cause of religion, really for the purpose of founding a dominion of their own which, as time went on, lost more and more of its religious character, and was now little more than a German military forepost, extending from Pomerania to the Niemen, which deliberately excluded the Sla y s from the sea and thrived 'Archbishop of Gnesen 1219-1220.

He gathered a fine Norman army (perhaps the finest division in the crusading host), at the head of which he crossed the Adriatic, and penetrated to Constantinople along the route he had tried to follow in 1082-1084.

Not only was the result of the crusade extremely favourable to the extension of the Roman power, but throughout the middle ages the papacy never ceased to derive almost incalculable political and financial advantages from the agitation produced by the preachers and the crusading expeditions.

When he was compelled to decree the Albigensian crusade he endeavoured more than once to discontinue the work, which had become perverted, and to curb the crusading ardour of Simon de Montfort.

The rite of extreme unction was introduced in the crusading epoch, although it was already usual to anoint the bodies of dead priests.

Soon after the greater crusading societies had been formed similar orders, such as those of St James of Compostella, Calatrava and Alcantara, were established to fight the Moors in Spain instead of the Saracens in the Holy Land.

The Order of St George, said to have been founded in the 12th century as a crusading order and revived by the emperor Maximilian I.

They were all originally founded as military religious orders, like the crusading Templars and the Hospitallers, but to fight for the true faith against the Moors in Spain.

The mention of the order of the Teutonic Knights reminds us how the crusading spirit had affected Christendom.

The second period includes the Genoese crusading exploits in the East, and extends to their victory over the Pisans (c. 1130), while the third reaches down to the days of the author's archbishopric. The sixth part deals with the constitution of the city, the seventh and eighth with the duties of rulers and citizens, the ninth with those of domestic life.

This phase began to give way in the irth century to a commercial and industrial renaissance, which received a great impetus from the crusading movements - themselves largely economic - and by the 14th century had made the Netherlands the factory of Europe, the Rhine a vast artery of trade, and north Italy a hive of busy cities.

He visited Palestine in the reign of Baldwin I., Latin king of Jerusalem (1100-1118), and apparently soon after the crusading capture of Acre (1104); he claims to have accompanied Baldwin, who treated him with marked friendliness, on an expedition against Damascus (c. 1107).

But when, in the crusading age, the Greek Church and state were alike in danger from Lat n encroachments, Photius became a national hero, and is at pres nt regarded as little short of a saint.

The crusading army under Guy of Lusignan, king of Jerusalem, which was besieging Acre, gave battle on the 4th of October 1189 to the relieving army which Saladin had collected.