Rethinking the Crusades

by on February 9, 2026 | 16 Comments

The History Channel reminds us that on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II ordered the First Crusade. Before 1979 it was more difficult than it is today to imagine such a thing, a leader of a world religion ordering a military crusade to conquer territory in the name of God and for the well-being of its inhabitants. It is not hard for us to imagine such a thing now because we all live after 9/11 and the Iranian revolution in which Muslim radicals overthrew the Shah, instituted a theocracy, and began supporting global jihad. The roots of this movement ultimately go back to the founding of Islam but more proximately to the rise of Muslim radicalism that reacted to colonialism and modernity in the nineteenth century.

Before 1979, however, it was a little more difficult to imagine what the Western (and the Eastern) church did during the Crusades. It is a little ironic that the best modern analogy is Islamic jihad (a crusade for a principle that includes holy war against infidels), but historically the two are connected in a surprising way. In contrast to the way the story is told by the History Channel, the reality was a little more complicated.

The Crusades were a series of expeditions from Western Europe to the Mediterranean Sea from 1095 to 1291, though there were several expeditions after 1291 on the pattern of the Crusades. The term crusade is a modern term. It is related to the Latin word for cross (crux) and derives from crucesignati, “to take the sign of the cross.” When Crusaders went, they wore the sign of, or rode under the banner of, the cross.

Since the Enlightenment, the Crusades have most often been described as a violent, colonial expansion of the West into the East, a land grab.1 This view of the Crusades was promulgated by Voltaire (d. 1778), Hume (d. 1776), Diderot (d. 1784), and Gibbon (d. 1794) and probably became the standard church historical explanation via Mosheim’s (d. 1755) influential English-language volume.2

It is widely held that there were three objects:

  1. to recover Jerusalem from Islam
  2. to defend the West against the rise of the Ottoman Empire
  3. to acquire land

Modern historians say that the Crusaders were social flotsam and jetsam. There is evidence now, however, that the aristocracy who went did so at considerable personal cost. They had to maintain their household back home and pay for an entourage on the trip. It all cost five to six times their annual income; they mortgaged the future to go.

Rodney Stark and Thomas Madden have argued a revisionist view, that the Crusades were (at least partly) a reaction to Islamic expansionism. This view is omitted by some major treatments of the Crusades. Augustine had articulated a “just war” theory, but according to Madden, the early Christians did not have a doctrine of holy war. That only developed after the collapse of the Roman Empire and after the rapid spread of Islam in the seventh century. Islam had a concept of jihad, or holy war. Those who died in a jihad were considered martyrs. Madden argues that “expansionism working hand-in-hand with jihad had become an important component in the Muslim world view”.3

In this regard, one of Stark’s more provocative claims, following Henri Pierrene (1939), is that it was not the collapse of Rome or Christianity per se but the Islamic invasions that cut off Europe from trade and created essentially a Great Depression, an economic decline, by pushing European economies backward. He argues that the sophisticated lslamic culture often described by survey texts was actually stolen capital.

By the eighth century, Muslim forces were threatening Christian Europe, were stopped finally, and were driven back to Spain by Charles Martel in 732. It was in dealing with Muslims in Spain that the Christian notion of a holy war took root in the West. That notion combined with the idea of the pilgrimage. As you may know, every church and certainly every cathedral came to claim to have relics of the Savior, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the apostles. In the ninth century, the bones of St. James were allegedly discovered at Santiago de Compostello. The cult of St. James flourished. There had already been a pattern of pilgrimages to the Holy Land as penance. This was all part of a growing devotion to the life of Christ and the quest to reenact the stations of the cross.4

Talk began to grow not only of the reconquista of Christian lands but of the “Holy Lands.” By the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks (Muslim but not Arab) conquered Armenia, Syria, and Palestine. The Arabs had tolerated Christians, but the Turks destroyed some of the Christian churches in Jerusalem, murdered clergy, and captured pilgrims. There was not much money to be made from Christian pilgrims, so persecution lessened, but the trip to Jerusalem remained very dangerous because of political instability.

In 1071 the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV (d. 1071) led forces against the Turks in Asia Minor. The Turks defeated the Byzantine army and captured the emperor. The chessboard came to life—checkmate.

Despite the East’s suspicion of and theological hostility toward the West, Alexius I Comnenus (d. 1118) made a strategic alliance with the West for the sake of defending Byzantium against the Turks. Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) saw their need as an opportunity to restore stability to Europe (after the Vikings) and to potentially reassert papal sovereignty over Byzantine Christians.

By 1095 Urban II’s position was considerably strengthened. When Alexius I asked for help in that year, Urban II was in a position to give it. In standard accounts, Urban’s sermon, a call for a crusade outside the cathedral in Clermont in 1095, is regarded as the beginning of the Crusades.

About 150,000 Europeans went on the Crusades. Most were poor or female or elderly or all three! In the First Crusade, forty thousand men went. A small minority were knights. A few stayed in Palestine. The land captured was to go to the Byzantine emperor. Whatever the material benefits, there were supposed to be spiritual benefits as well. As pilgrimages became penance, Crusaders were granted a plenary indulgence.5

A Crusade army was a curious mix of rich and poor, saints and sinners, motivated by every kind of pious and selfish desire, yet it could not have come into being without the pious idealism that led men to risk all to liberate the lands of Christ.6

Urban II preached the First Crusade on November 27, 1095, at the Council of Clermont.7 His sermon was a call to Christian knights to liberate the Byzantine Christians from Muslim oppression. Not only that, but they would continue beyond Constantinople (Istanbul) to the Holy Land. Bloodcurdling stories were told. Preachers called knights and landed folk to “take up” their cross (hence, “Crusaders”) and follow Christ.

The Crusades were mostly a failure. Even from a strictly military point of view, only one was successful, and that success did not last very long. Some of the Crusades were detoured from their original purpose and did even more damage to the relations between the Eastern and Western churches. On balance, they cannot be thought to have been wise or helpful.

Certainly, in our era of renewed engagement with Islam (even if it is forced on us by violence), we should appreciate how the image of the Crusader is used against the West generally and Christians particularly. When I began teaching at Wheaton College (1995), one of my colleagues mentioned his crusade to get the name of the school mascot changed from Crusaders. My first reaction was to scoff, but over the years I have come to see that he was right. The word crusader does not mean much to us because we do not repeat horror stories from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but in some cultures they do. Thus, when Western Christians arrive in the Middle East innocently wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Crusaders,” it unintentionally sends the wrong message.

Christians are not Crusaders, but we are called to carry the cross. When Our Lord Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” he called us not to conquer lands for him militarily but to put to death our sinful nature (on this, see Heidelberg Catechism 43) and, sometimes, even to be crucified for him (as happened in the early church). That is a simple but really important point as we think about how to engage an ever increasingly suspicious and hostile culture. 

Addendum

Some of what the History Channel says about the Crusades is correct, but as is often the case, some of what it says is not. As a general rule, if you watch the History Channel: Caveat emptor. The job of the History Channel is, first, to gain ratings and to sell advertising. Their job is not, in the first instance, to get things right. It is a lot more difficult to market ambiguity, disagreement among historians, and nuance than it is to market a straightforward, oversimplified account with twenty minutes of material stretched to fill an hour through teases, commercials, and endless repetition.

Please do not misunderstand—I enjoy both the History Channel and H2. We can learn from history as entertainment. The Pawn Stars Rick Harrison is not a bad historian—for a guy in the pawn business. He knows what he knows and he (generally) knows where his limits are and calls in an interesting group of experts to evaluate things. Sometimes he gets things wrong, and we get to see him make mistakes and be corrected (and lose money on a deal). I sometimes show clips from the show to my seminars to illustrate how to think critically about claims about the past. The clip demonstrating how to spot a fake Rolex is a good example. The essence of critical thinking is not to take things at face value. It is to question, to scrutinize, to evaluate. In this instance, one has to know what the marks of a genuine Rolex are before one can spot a fake. Hmm, that sounds so familiar (see Belgic Confession, art. 29).

So, enjoy television (or internet) documentaries and history, but do not be buffaloed simply because someone with a PhD or “historian” next to his name makes a claim. It might be true, but it might not be true.

Notes

  1. See Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, updated ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 1.
  2. See Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (HarperCollins, 2009), 1–7.
  3. Madden, New Concise History, 7–8.
  4. On relics, see R. Scott Clark, “Has the Roman Doctrine of Justification Changed?”, and R. Scott Clark, “Canonization, Saints, and Christ Our Only Mediator.” See also Calvin’s Treatise on Relics.
  5. For more on indulgences, see R. Scott Clark, “In Case You’re Worried About Purgatory,” and R. Scott Clark, “Selling Indulgences?”.
  6. Madden, New Concise History, 13.
  7. Here are five versions of the speech.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2012.

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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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16 comments

  1. Robert Spencer is a good resource since he has done a lot of research on the Crusades since Muslim dawa-gandists tend to explain away passages in the Qur’an that seem to encourage domination of non-Muslims as governed by the context of hostile forces arrayed against Islam at the time of Muhammad. It is interesting to see the element of Islamic military expansion prior to the Crusades included in the reasons motivating some.

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  2. Some strong cautions on the current “warm fuzzies” being spread in conservative Christian circles about the Crusades being a long-overdue just war of defense against Islamic aggression:

    1. The core of the conservative position, namely, that the Byzantine Empire’s request for help from the West against Islamic aggression, and that we should not be embarrassed by Christian self-defense is not wrong. If that is all the Crusades did, it would be comparable to the efforts of the West to help South Korea under United Nations auspices, or (many of) the other efforts by the West to help small countries fight off Soviet aggression during the Cold War.

    2. The problem is that the Crusades were more than that. The Roman Catholic doctrines of penance and purgatory, though not entirely formed by the Crusades, were given a “rocket boost” of importance. If people can legitimately receive indulgences and “time off from purgatory” for going on crusade, much of medieval theology of penance makes sense. If, as Protestants believe, there is no such thing as purgatory, the eternal rewards promised to crusaders were, at best, a false promise made by well-intentioned people who were wrong, or more likely, an sick and twisted attempt to motivate people to risk their lives by inventing a motive comparable to the eternal rewards offered to Muslims who die in jihad.

    3. It is a matter of historical fact, not liberal attacks, that crusades were declared not only against Islam but also against closer enemies.

    Some of my ancestors probably were involved in the Baltic wars against the pagans in Lativa and Lithuania. Maurina, though today an Italian name, is in its origins a Latvian name, and it appears that it was taken by some of my ancestors who were younger sons of lower nobility in Florence who went on military expeditions to the Baltics, helped defeat the Latvians, and apparently one of them brought back a Latvian “war bride” — or worse — whose children with her were given land in the high Alps to raise food to supply a garrison on a mountain pass. While some “just war” arguments can be made to defend the Baltic Wars, no such arguments can be made to defend the Albigensian Crusades in the French Alps — the mountainous region between what is now Italy and France that later became a center of the Huguenot movement — which were little more than a land grab by nobles who took advantage of the Roman Catholic teaching that oaths sworn to heretics are not valid, broke their feudal obligations, and attacked local nobles and small semi-independent mini-states that refused to kill subjects who were Albigensians, Cathars, or various other dualistic or Manichean-influenced sects. One of the ironies of history is that Waldensians who had been some of the more effective lay opponents of full Catharism and semi-Catharistic groups such as the Albigensians got caught up in the Albigensian Crusade and in some cases were killed, not for being Albigensian, but purely based on their refusal to accept Roman Catholic authority rather than supporting Cathar or semi-Cathar heresy.

    That false teaching that oaths sworn to heretics can be broken (never mind the biblical example of the Gibeonites cited by the Reformers to rebuke Catholics on this matter) led directly to the burning of John Hus by violating his safe conduct pass.

    The Albigensian Crusade suffered from an additional problem. By promising the same remission of time in purgatory granted to crusaders who went to the Middle East, but requiring only a 40-day commitment for a much shorter trip to southern France, it attracted men of known vice and wickedness who wanted “time off from purgatory” without the very real risk of death and a years-long time commitment for a real crusade against Islam.

    A committed Roman Catholic will argue, correctly so, that much of this was an abuse of Catholic doctrine for political ends and that many of the later Crusades were promoted less by the church and more by local and regional politicians. They’re right.

    But the development of the Catholic doctrines of purgatory and penance and the related practice of indulgences are inseparable from the history of the crusades.

    I get it that it was helpful to promise Christian soldiers an eternal reward that would motivate them to fight without fear of death, comparable to an Islamic jihadist seeking his reward for a martyr’s death. I realize that the doctrines of penance and purgatory were not invented for the purpose of crusades, and were pre-existing problems.

    But the Crusades elevated pre-existing problems into a major part of Catholic doctrine in ways that were exceedingly unhelpful, and led to further developments including the burning of John Hus and the sale of indulgences that resulted in Luther’s revolt against Rome and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

    Conservative Roman Catholics can probably defend the crusades with a good conscience.

    Conservative Protestants need to be far more cautious.

    Just wars of self-defense are legitimate. Motivating soldiers by promising “time off” from a purgatory that does not exist? That was part-and-parcel of the Crusades, and should not be defended by any Protestant.

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    • Point well made. In addition to the perverse teachings of purgatory and indulgence, we should also consider the chiliastic mood at the end of the first millennium. Many people had been mislead to believe that the millennial kingdom was at an end and that retaking the “holy land” would culminate in Christ’s second coming and the final judgement. All these false teachings wickedly contributed to or excused the fervor and fanaticism that contributed to some of the most unchristlike conduct during the crusades.

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  4. From my own studies on the subject in my seminary work (however brief it may be comparably) I made a couple of retrospective observations that I’d like to share:

    For one, how influential the practice of penance was. It proved to be a slippery slope as penance ‘devolved’ from acts of service into acts of labor and eventually into acts of (potential) violence, like serving as an armed guard as one glaring example. The leap from armed service to crusade was not as large as might be imagined.

    For another, how much ‘power’ the Papacy truly possessed. It was striking to read that an offering for remission of sins was offered to any and all who fought or died in or on the way to a crusade in the Holy Land. I frankly still don’t understand how to square this with my understanding of Rome. How could the Pope make such an offer? Did they not believe there was absolutely no possibility of salvation outside of the mass?

    The crusades are certainly a rough mark on the history of the church. Dr. Clark, if you read this, I would be interested to read some resources on St. Augustine’s Just War theory. I understand that it is scattered across his various works. Perhaps a new resource addition to the hiedelblog?

    As always, I am grateful for your ministry and the HRA.

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      • I don’t disagree that, in the eyes of the west, the Crusaders made a positive impact on history and civilization. ‘Hero’ is probably not a term I would use but I can’t disagree with you.

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      • @ Chris Nelson: Please reconsider, and read my post above on the role of purgatory and penance in the Crusades.

        I am very sympathetic to the argument that the Crusades were a long-overdue just war of Western Christians assisting an Eastern Christian ally in a just war of self-defense. So far, so good.

        Many of the critics of the Crusades miss that key point. If that’s all the Crusades were about, I would be defending them on just war principles. A lot of bad things happened during the Crusades, but even the best militaries sometimes have inept, corrupt, or just plain unqualified leaders, or the political leadership makes decisions that lose with politics the hard-fought victories that had been won with the sword.

        That’s not just the Crusades. It’s easy to blame the Crusaders with hindsight that is 20-20, but let’s apply hindsight to what happened with more recent wars (including some in the Middle East). Virtually everyone today, apart from a few idiots in the fever swamps, defends World War II as a just war of self-defense, but there were plenty of bad decisions made that cost dearly in deaths and dire injuries during the war, and set the stage for the loss of China and the enslavement of half of Europe for four decades.

        The core of the problem is not poor politics or inept armies, but rather that the Crusades were preached with the motivation of doing penance and getting “time off” from Purgatory via an indulgence. Those problems did not disappear with the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Middle East. The end of the Crusades led to spiritualizing of the indulgences, and then to selling indulgences — the abuse that led to Martin Luther’s revolt and the beginning of the Reformation.

        Protestants need to use great caution in defending the Crusades.

        A war against jihadist Islam was needed and I don’t dispute that, but the baggage brought into the church by the preaching of indulgences led directly to the abuses that led to the Reformation.

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  5. After re-reading Dr. Crawford’s article again today, I would use it as the first source to begin a lively discussion about The Crusades. (Spring 2011 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.)

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  6. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for The Crusades for decades. For most of my adult life, I’ve suffered through the standard evangelical/Reformed expression of embarrassment and regret — all shame and extreme negative statements unmixed with any balancing views. Even before I began to read seriously about the subject, I instinctively knew that when unbelievers and Muslims agree completely on a topic against Christians, the real truth must be somewhat different. At last, contemporary scholarship is setting the record straight and looking at the entire movement more objectively.

    Of course, we should never make excuses for the darker aspects of The Crusades such as physical savagery and the terrible, deficient theology that fueled so much Crusade fever. But once you look at the period as a global, geopolitical and military response to the advance of Islam, you begin to see things in an entirely different light. For all its excesses, The Crusades did manage to check the violent expansion of Islam for over two centuries. That’s no small feat, and one for which the Christian West should be thankful (but rarely is, in our politically correct age).

    As a complement to the works by Stark and Madden mentioned above, 0ne “popular” but well-researched and well-written source is Robert Spencer’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)” (Regnery).

    Also look for Paul F. Crawford’s fine short article, “Four Myths About the Crusades” (free online – just search for it).

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  8. Very informative post. (And thanks for link to Rick Harrison. While you’re at it, since your coiffure is similar to Mr. Harrison’s, have you considered doing a short YouTube on “how to spot a fake historical conclusion”?)

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