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Within Christian circles, the terms crusade and crusader survive as expressions of devout purpose. Near where I live, a Christian high school calls its athletic teams "Crusaders," and several evangelical organizations refer to their ministries as Christian "crusades."

In other circles, however, crusade usually triggers less admiration, more shock. It recalls the violence and cruelty of medieval military expeditions to conquer the Holy Land, all done in the name of Christ and with the blessing of the church.

Many of us, then, not only balk at using the term crusades, we ask, "How could Christians have done such a thing?"

Historians usually answer this question by describing the historical circumstances, or the "proximate causes," of the Crusades. Three such causes often top the list.

First, Christians faced the military and political threat of Islam. The Seljuk Turks, new and fanatical converts to Islam, invaded the Holy Land and seized Christianity's sacred shrines. They then aggressively headed for Asia Minor, Christian territory. Forces of the Byzantine [Eastern Christian] Empire tried desperately to bar the invader, but at the battle of Manzikert (1071), the Turks captured the eastern emperor and scattered his army.

Within a few years, Asia Minor, the chief source of Byzantine revenue and troops, was lost. Nicea fell to the invaders in 1092, bringing the Turks perilously close to Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. The new emperor, Alexius I, sent emissaries to Pope Urban II, pleading for mercenaries to aid in the rescue of lost territories.

Thus, Christian crusaders streamed toward the Holy Land in part because they were invited. They were giving aid to Christians in the East.

Second, the Roman Catholic Church of the eleventh century was led by a militantly aggressive papacy. The reform-minded party of the church, which had recently come to power, thought church improvement lay in investing the pope with more authority; they cast a vision of the universal sovereignty of the Holy Father. In his rallying sermon for the First Crusade, Urban referred to himself as "spiritual ruler of the whole world."

A universal Christian sovereign, naturally, would want the Holy Land liberated from Turkish "infidels," so Urban was inclined to accept the invitation to send troops to Asia Minor and Palestine. Some historians speak of the First Crusade as "the foreign policy of the reformed papacy." That foreign policy would, it was hoped, bring the Holy City of Jerusalem back under Christian control. And it would possibly restore unity between Eastern and Western Christians.

Third, Europeans, after centuries of political and economic disintegration, were entering a new era of self-conscious unity.

Separate regions worked to enhance mutual interests: forest land was cleared, new markets opened, and Italian shipping poised to challenge Muslim dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. Many historians have suggested the Crusades would have been next to impossible without these Italian ships.

One answer, then, to "How could they?" is simply, "Conditions were right." Christian crusaders were swept along by the tides of history.

Still, most Christians today feel an ethical shock over the crusaders' seemingly blind and bigoted religious zeal. It is easy for us to criticize the Crusades. They permanently embittered relations between Christians and Muslims, and they left Jews suspicious and fearful of Christians.

Yet, if we fail to see the crusaders' spiritual ideals, we misperceive the spirit of the times. The evil elements of the Crusades, though repulsive, are not the whole story.

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49