Villehardouin: Grandeur and Nobility Essay

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for an army to go to the Holy Land, Jerusalem. This was what was later known as the ‘First Crusade’. A crusade is a religious war or a war mainly motivated by religion. The first crusade consisted of 10’s of thousands of European Christians on a medieval military expedition to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims. This doesn’t mean that the first crusade was just motivated by religion. Throughout this essay, I will be suggesting the main reasons of why people went on crusades and which different people went for specific reasons and why.

Another aspect that contributes to the statement that the crusades were not motivated by religious factors is that the crusaders wanted more land. Many Crusaders wanted to govern their own piece of land in a new area, so they decided to fight being guaranteed a piece of land; in this era land equaled money, the more land you had, the wealthier you were—religion didn’t get you very far. By having a new plot of land, in a new area the Crusaders would be able to rise above their social status and experience a newfound wealth that would be next to impossible back in their homeland. Through this, we can see the prime motivation of the Western European’s commencement of the crusades was their aspiration for land. Even Pope Urban II, an example and leader for all the people, wanted to fight just to get the Holy Land back. So if the prime example for the people, a leader that everyone looked up to was demonstrating greed and voracity then it would only be natural for his people to follow. Not only did Pope Urban II and officials express tremendous amounts of self-indulgence, but they very well knew what was going on beforehand; the selection mentions that they worked to “prepare” the people for a crusade by changing conditions within their society and economy. The changing of economic aspects portray that the Crusaders were unhappy with their current state of wealth and the easiest way to fix that was to

The crusades did nothing but leave religious hate. Document 1 states that “They also left a bitter legacy of religious hatred behind them. In the Middle East, both Christians and Muslims committed appalling atrocities in the name of religion. In Europe, crusaders sometimes turned their fury against Jews, massacring entire communities.

The Crusades were a sequence of religious and political wars fought for over 200 years for power of the Holy Land. Originally the purpose for the Crusades was to take the Holy Land and Jerusalem away from the Muslims. However, the people who partook in this series of wars were not only driven by their faith, but they were also motivated by their own economical gains. Numerous Crusaders were inspired by the chance to gain wealth, land and power. At the same time the Roman Catholic Church saw the Crusades as an opportunity to gain the Holy Land for Catholics. In all, these examples show that the Crusades were not only driven by religious beliefs but by economic and political gain as well.

However, this didn’t mean that they were merciful, for example one Jew was captured and led to a church where the crusaders tied a rope around his neck and there they said “You can still be saved; will you change your faith?” When he didn’t cooperate, they cut off his neck. The Crusaders were so brutal that they were thought to be just as guilty to God then other religions. For example an abbot of Cluny wrote during the second crusade, “What is the good of going to the end of the world at great loss of men and money to fight the Saracens, when we permit among us other infidels who are a thousand times more guilty towards Christ than the Mohammedans?” He describes here how the Mohammedans were a lot less guilty towards Christ then the Christians who were in the Crusades themselves for killing innocent

Document states that are the crusader are negative or positive. They also state that when were some of the wars and where it was. Like one of the fights are in Constantinople in 1204, the Venetians, who had been hired to transport the crusaders, and the knights agreed to attack the Byzantine capital instead.This is important because here was so much people that died. What if you were one of those people or you daughter or son. The crusade were a bloody war so much fights and wars because the crusades didn’t like muslims, christians, and the jews. There was a war in April 1204 there was a war between the crusades and the christians.

Thomas Madden’s Crusades is an exposition of the crusades, which occurred during the Middle Ages. The Crusades were a series of military conflicts of a religious character. They remain a very important movement in human history, and are hard to understand, as they include several themes and they lasted for a long time (about two hundred years, and the author covers a period of about eight centuries in his chronological work). Religion is, of course, the most recurrent theme we think about the Crusades, but is it the only factor to explain them? How does Madden, considered as one of the most foremost historian of the Crusades, expose them in his book? Is his work effective to understand this period of History? Madden has the ambition to

Thomas Madden’s Crusades is an exposition of the crusades, which occurred during the Middle Ages. The Crusades were a series of military conflicts of a religious character. They remain a very important movement in human history, and are hard to understand, as they include several themes and they lasted for a long time (about two hundred years, and the author covers a period of about eight centuries in his chronological work). Religion is, of course, the most recurrent theme we think about the Crusades, but is it the only factor to explain them? How does Madden, considered as one of the most foremost historian of the Crusades, expose them in his book? Is his work effective to understand this period of History? Madden has the ambition to

This War is a Crusade Diaries and letters home are the primary source of information for this book, however the author does concede that.

spread around the field so that we get a share of the best and the

“For nine and a half centuries, the textbooks have repeated, almost word for word, with mechanical regularity, that the cause, or at least the immediate cause, of the Crusades was the Turkish conquest of the Near East, which they say constituted a very real threat to Christendom, that had to be countered by military action.” (Cahen)

The first three crusades were arguably the most influential. The First Crusade (1096-1099) consisted of four main armies from different Western European regions, led by Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Godfrey of Bouillon, Hugh of Vermandois and Bohemond of Taranto. Another, less organized band known as the Peoples Crusade also set off under the command of a popular preacher known as Peter the Hermit. Another group of Crusaders, led by the Count Emicho, they carried out a many massacres of Jews in various towns in Rhineland in 1096, doing this caused outrage and it caused a major crisis in Jewish-Christian relations. In May 1097, the Crusaders and their Byzantine allies attacked Nicea the Seljuk capital in Anatolia. The city surrendered in late June. In The First Crusade many of the battles that took place were ‘started’ by Christian fighters. This outlook on the battles were bad for the Catholic Church because the First Crusade was always known as their fault but as Augustine wrote “warfare was sometimes a necessary and lesser evil in certain conditions.” This established that the First Crusade can be justified as a just war because the Christian armies were battling for sacred sights and although they admit it was a sin, the sin was lessened because of the circumstance.

Accordingly, Memoirs of the Fourth Crusade has been reviewed vigorously over the past century and central among these reviews is a genuine acceptance of Villehardouin s authenticity and accountability with respect to his

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