preview

While The Crusades May Have Begun With A Noble Intention,

Better Essays

While The Crusades may have begun with a noble intention, or set out with objectives that sought to relieve the suffering of fellow Christians, those original ideas were perverted and twisted until The Crusades were not at all noble or justified. This is particularly obvious in retrospect when we can look at history from various perspectives and draw conclusions, but it seems that even at the time it might have been obvious that the original intent had been misused in order to advance the personal aspirations of many people taking part. From the start of The Crusades, it was made clear that there would be a reward for Christians taking part in the action. People had to be persuaded into joining the fight and so they were promised a holy …show more content…

If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.” Urban II urged all in attendance to heed his call to aid their fellow Christians in regaining control of Palestine, which was at that time ruled by Muslims and thus many bands of European Christians set off towards the Holy Land. However, it was not long before they started garnering some negative attention. Albert of Aix gives a description of the way the Crusaders following Count Emico brutally slaughtered hundreds of Jews out of pure bloodthirsty greed rather than necessity. Albert seems confident that the Christians who behaved so poorly will be judged only by God and thus recounts the horrific tales of Emico’s band moving through Europe in a fairly detached tone. “So the hand of the Lord is believed to have been against the pilgrim who had sinned by excessive impurity and fornication, and who had slaughtered the exiled Jews through greed of money, rather than for the sake of God 's justice, although the Jews were opposed to Christ. The Lord is a just judge and orders no one unwillingly, or under compulsion, to come under the yoke of the Catholic faith.” (Albert of Aix, Chronicle, Emico and the Slaughter of the Rhineland Jews). Therefore, it is clear that even their contemporaries had difficulty condoning the Crusaders actions because while

Get Access