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CRUSADES
. The long series of military campaigns that aimed to expand the borders of Latin
Christendom against international Islam and to defend Europe against residual paganism
and resurgent heresy on the local scene. Drawing inspiration from earlier western notions
of just war or divinely sanctioned war, the crusaders acted in the firm belief that their
goals—the principal one, especially for the people of feudal France, being the recovery of
the Holy Land—not only were justified in God’s eyes but were in fact God’s explicit
wish. Deus vult! (“God wills it!”) became their battle cry, which could be heard from the
11th century through the 15th. The campaigns against Palestine and Egypt, the Spanish
Reconquista, the wars against paganism in Lithuania, the struggle to stamp out Catharism
in southern France, and the 13th-century papal effort to topple the Hohenstaufen regime
in southern Italy all form part of crusade history; but the repeated efforts to regain and
defend the Holy Land are the center of the story, insofar as French military involvement
and popular support are concerned. That support remained surprisingly constant over the
centuries, despite the repeated failure of the campaigns themselves. Only the first four
Crusades are examined here in any detail. But French enthusiasm for crusading, while it
may never again have reached the extraordinary level of explosive energy that
inaugurated the First Crusade, lasted well into the age of gunpowder.
The passion for crusading arose from a passionate desire for peace. The decay of
Carolingian power in France in the 9th and 10th centuries amid endemic civil strife and
renewed foreign invasion brought stable social and economic life to a virtual standstill in
some parts of the realm. Famine and disease spread as brutal private wars engulfed the
countryside. Desperate for peace, Frankish peasants and village artisans organized an
impromptu series of mass protests that came to be known as the Peace of God movement.
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