The Crusades Were Sold as Holy War but the People Who Called for Them Had Political Reasons

 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.

The Similarities Between Ancient Gods and Modern Religion Are Not a Coincidence

 This is not an attack on any religion. It is history. And it is history that most people who practice modern religions have never been taught.

The story of a god who dies and comes back from the dead did not originate with Christianity. It is one of the oldest religious ideas in human history. And the versions that existed before Christianity share enough details with the Christian story that scholars have been studying the connections for over a century.

Osiris

Osiris was the Egyptian god of the dead, the afterlife, and resurrection. His story is one of the oldest in recorded religion going back to ancient Egyptian texts from over four thousand years ago.

Osiris was killed by his brother Set who dismembered his body and scattered the pieces. His wife Isis gathered the pieces and resurrected him. After his resurrection Osiris became the ruler of the afterlife and the judge of the dead. Those who lived righteously could enter his kingdom after death.

The parallels to later religious traditions are striking. A god who dies. A resurrection. A kingdom of the dead ruled by the resurrected god. A moral framework where righteous living determines what happens after death.

Osiris was worshipped in Egypt for thousands of years. His cult spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. By the time Christianity emerged, the story of a dying and resurrected god connected to the afterlife and moral judgment was deeply embedded in the religious culture of the region.

Mithras

Mithras was a god worshipped across the Roman Empire at roughly the same time Christianity was spreading. The cult of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers.

Mithraism involved a sacred meal shared by followers. Initiates went through stages of spiritual development. The religion involved moral codes and ideas about the afterlife. The central figure of Mithras was often depicted as born from a rock and associated with light and the sun.

The cult of Mithras and early Christianity competed for followers across the Roman Empire during the same centuries. They were targeting similar populations with similar kinds of spiritual offerings. The degree to which one influenced the other is debated by historians, but the similarities were noted by early Christian writers themselves, some of whom attributed them to the devil deliberately counterfeiting Christian truth in advance.

What Historians Say

Historians who study comparative religion do not argue that Christianity invented nothing new. The message of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels has its own character and its own specific historical context. The ethical teachings, the emphasis on love and forgiveness, the specific historical figure at the center of the story. These elements have their own integrity.

What historians do argue is that the religious ideas of any time and place are shaped by the religious ideas that came before them. Christianity did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a world saturated with ideas about dying and rising gods, divine births, sacred meals, afterlife judgment, and the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Some of those ideas got absorbed into the new religion, whether consciously or simply because they were part of the cultural water everyone in that world was swimming in.

Understanding that does not have to undermine anyone's faith. But it does undermine the idea that any religion's ideas appeared from nowhere with no connection to what came before.

All human ideas have history. Religious ideas are no exception.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

When Rome Made Christianity Its Official Religion It Did Not Give Up Power It Took More

 For the first three centuries after the death of Jesus, Christians in the Roman Empire were persecuted.

They were a minority religious group that refused to participate in the imperial cult, the official state religion that required worship of Roman gods and emperors. That refusal was considered treason. Christians were imprisoned, executed, and thrown to animals in public arenas.

Then in 312 CE the Emperor Constantine won a pivotal battle and credited his victory to the Christian God. In 313 CE he issued the Edict of Milan granting religious tolerance throughout the empire. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the official state religion of Rome.

This is usually told as a story of Christianity's triumph. But look at it from the perspective of political power and it looks like something different.

What Constantine Actually Did

Constantine did not convert to Christianity and then figure out how to govern a Christian empire. He governed a crumbling empire that was held together by religious unity and found a new religious framework that could serve that function.

The old Roman religion was not working well as an instrument of political unity. It was diverse and decentralized. Local gods competed with state gods. The emperor worship system required constant maintenance and was generating conflict with growing minority populations.

Christianity offered something the old system did not. It was monotheistic, which meant everyone worshipping the same single God. It had an existing organizational structure with bishops and councils and established theology. It had a message of universal brotherhood that could potentially hold together a diverse empire. And critically, its God was a God of all humanity, not just of Rome, which made it more compatible with ruling a multi-ethnic empire.

Constantine did not surrender power to the church. He recruited the church into the project of empire. He gave bishops legal authority. He funded church construction with imperial money. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to settle theological disputes, presiding over it himself as a political ruler deciding matters of religious doctrine.

By aligning the empire with Christian doctrine, Rome gave the Church both political and moral authority. In Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, the emperor held supreme authority over both the state and the church, embodying the concept of Caesaropapism, a blend of secular and religious power in one figure.

The emperor and the church needed each other. The church got protection, resources, and official status. The emperor got a unified religious framework that could hold the empire together and a moral authority that claimed God was on his side.

What Got Left Out of Official Christianity

When Constantine and the councils of bishops decided what Christianity was officially going to believe and teach, they made choices about what to include and what to exclude.

There were many early Christian texts and communities with very different ideas about who Jesus was, what he taught, and what the church should look like. The councils decided which texts were authoritative and which were heretical. The texts that were excluded were suppressed. Some were destroyed.

The version of Christianity that emerged from this process was shaped not just by theological reasoning but by the political needs of an empire that needed a unified, hierarchical, obedient religious structure.

A religion that taught that the poor were blessed and the meek would inherit the earth was adopted by the most powerful empire in the western world and used to keep its subjects obedient. That is one of the more remarkable transformations in the history of religion.

The pattern it established lasted for a thousand years in Europe. Church and state working together, legitimizing each other, maintaining a social order that kept power where power already was.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.