In November of 1095 Pope Urban II stood before a crowd at the Council of Clermont in France and called for a holy war.
He told the assembled nobles and clergy that Jerusalem, the holy city, was in the hands of Muslims and that it was the will of God for Christians to take it back. He promised that those who died on the campaign would have their sins forgiven and would go directly to heaven.
The crowd responded with chants of God wills it.
The First Crusade began the following year. Hundreds of thousands of people died over the following two centuries of crusading. Jerusalem was taken, held, lost, fought over, and fought over again. The human cost was staggering on all sides.
And behind the religious justification were political calculations that the pope and the kings who joined him understood very clearly.
What Urban II Actually Needed
Urban II had a problem. The church and the Holy Roman Emperor had been locked in a bitter dispute over who had the right to appoint church officials. This conflict, called the Investiture Controversy, had destabilized both political and religious authority in Europe for decades.
Urban needed something that could restore the prestige and authority of the papacy. Something that would unite the feuding nobles of Europe under the banner of the church. Something that would give the pope a role as the supreme spiritual and political leader of the Christian world.
A holy war answered all of those needs. It gave the church a mission that overrode local political disputes. It put the pope in the position of commander of a Christian army. It gave restless nobles and knights an outlet for their aggression that the church could direct. And it promised spiritual rewards that no secular ruler could offer.
The Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople had also asked for military help against Muslim incursions. Urban answered that request with something much larger than what was asked for, because a large crusade served the political needs of the western church far better than a small military alliance.
What the Nobles Got Out of It
The nobility of Europe did not join the Crusades purely out of religious devotion either. Land and wealth in Europe were concentrated among the eldest sons of noble families. Younger sons got little or nothing. The Crusade offered younger sons a chance to win land and title in the Holy Land.
The Italian city-states, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, had enormous economic interests in controlling trade routes to the east. Military campaigns that opened or protected those routes were commercially valuable. The Fourth Crusade in 1204 famously ended not in Jerusalem but in Constantinople, which the crusaders sacked and looted while it was still a Christian city, because Venetian creditors redirected the campaign to serve their own commercial interests.
The religious justification was real to many of the people who participated. People genuinely believed they were doing God's will. But the people who organized and directed those beliefs toward specific political and military objectives had interests that were not purely spiritual.
That is the pattern. The faith of ordinary people is real. The way that faith gets organized and directed by institutions with power and resources and political interests is something else.
The Crusades were a holy war. They were also a political project. Both things were true at the same time. And understanding both is the only way to understand what actually happened.
Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.
