At crusades were military expeditions organized by Catholics from Western Europe, with the initial objective of to reconquer sacred places for the Christian world, such as the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, in the Palestine. The region was a place of pilgrimage for European Catholics. However, pilgrimages were made difficult after the conquest of the region by the Seljuk Turks, who professed their faith in Islam. The crusades were also a struggle of Christians against Muslims. Twelve crusade expeditions were organized.
O crusade movement it began in 1095, after the Council of Clermont, where Pope Urban II urged Christians to join the crusades. There were other goals besides the conquest of places sacred to Muslims.
The Byzantines have long called for the support of Western Christians to curb the advance of Seljuk Turkish Muslims into their territories. With this support, the Catholic Church could reassert itself again in the East, seeking the unification of the two Christian churches after the Great Schism of the East, of 1054.
On the internal plane of the European continent, there were social problems arising from demographic growth and the right of birthright. Demographic growth made it difficult for servile families to live on the plots of land where they worked for the lords. The birthright, which had developed during the early centuries of the Middle Ages, prevented the children of lords who were not the firstborn from having the right to inherit the lands from parents.
In this sense, members of the servant class could move to the East and thus reduce the number of members of a family. to be fed, and the sons of the landless nobility could conquer new parcels in the Holy Land, or on their way to it.
In addition, there was the interest of merchants, mainly Italians, in the reopening of trade routes in the Mediterranean Sea, which were also controlled by Muslim Arabs. The crusades represented for this social sector in part of Europe a possibility of economic gains.
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The First Crusade took place between 1096 and 1099, being also known as the Crusade of the Nobles. It was the only one who managed to achieve the objective of taking Jerusalem, which occurred in 1099. But this achievement did not last long. In 1187, Sultan Saladin reconquered the city. To react to the Muslim victory, the Third Crusade was organized between 1189 and 1192. This crusade was known as the Crusade of the Kings, because of the participation of Richard Coeur de Leão, from England; Felipe Augusto, from France; and Frederick I, the Red-Brown, of the Holy Roman Empire.
There were even more unusual crusades. The Beggars Crusade, which took place in 1096, was an unofficial movement, organized by some religious leaders not belonging to the Catholic clergy, such as Peter the Hermit. It was a popular movement linked to the mysticism of the time, being still massacred by the Turks. In 1212, there was the Children's Crusade, an also unofficial action organized only with children for these supposedly hold a pure soul, contributing to divine help in the fight against the Muslims. Many children were killed and enslaved in North Africa.
The Fourth Crusade was an example that the religious objective was not the main one, despite being the argument used to substantiate the action. Occurring between 1202 and 1204, it was commanded by Venetian merchants who managed to take the city of Constantinople from the Byzantines, creating the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople. With these measures, the Venetians and Genoese, mainly, began to control the trade routes in the Mediterranean. Although Constantinople was taken over by the Byzantines in 1261, the opening of trade routes continued, contributing to the European commercial development, with the union again of the West and the East, besides creating the bases for the development of the capitalism.
By Me. Tales Pinto
