The Crusades (1095-1291)

Before entering into the sources, the underlying objection must be named: for many contemporary readers, the word "crusade" amounts to an immediate condemnation of the Church. The Catholic answer cannot content itself with minimising; it must distinguish.

Distinguish first between the pontifical institution (an armed penitential pilgrimage, codified by canon law) and the actual conduct of medieval armies (which could be brutal, like any medieval army entering a city taken by assault). Distinguish next between the First Crusade, which answered a documented Byzantine request, and the Fourth Crusade, diverted to Constantinople against the explicit will of Pope Innocent III. Distinguish finally between the theatres: Holy Land, Iberian Peninsula, Languedoc, Baltic — these are not the same case, and judging them together confuses distinct cases.

The British historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, who renewed university research on the Crusades from the 1980s onwards, sums up, in substance, the scholarly position as follows: the Crusades met the criteria of just war, because they arose in reaction to attacks on Christians or on their Church^[3].

This defensive-reaction thesis is defended notably by Riley-Smith and by the American historian Thomas Madden^[4]; it is taken up for the general public by the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, who is not a medievalist. By contrast, the Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman, while likewise rejecting Marxist readings of a colonial crusade, does not share this thesis: he stresses the political and territorial motives of the Crusades and disputes their purely defensive reading^[5]. The article that follows belongs to the first historiography, while remaining honest about the real violence.

To understand the appeal of Clermont, one must go back four centuries. The Crusades did not fall from the sky in 1095; they answered a geopolitical collapse that had lasted since the 7th century.

The great Muslim conquest of the 7th century

At the time Muhammad died in 632, the Mediterranean rim was overwhelmingly Christian. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Cyrenaica, North Africa, Visigothic Hispania: all were lands of gospels, councils, Fathers of the Church. Saint Augustine died at Hippo in 430; Saint Jerome translated the Vulgate at Bethlehem; Saint Cyril of Alexandria presided over the Council of Ephesus in 431.

In less than a century, this world collapsed militarily. The Battle of the Yarmouk, fought in August 636 (day-by-day dating debated among historians), shattered the Byzantine army of Emperor Heraclius. Damascus fell around 635, Antioch at the end of 637, Jerusalem in 637-638, Egypt between 639 and 642, Christian North Africa between 647 and 698, Visigothic Hispania in 711^[6]. The expansion halted at Poitiers (732) on the Pyrenean advance and at Constantinople (sieges of 674-678 and 717-718) on the eastern advance.

The Christian world thus lost, in a few generations, two-thirds of its ancient territory. This fact is rarely recalled in the popular narrative, yet it is the first truth of the Crusades case.

As the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark writes, in substance: in seventy years, the Arabs tore from Christianity two-thirds of its ancient world; the Crusades are not the beginning of a Christian aggression, but the late and limited response to a far vaster wave of conquest^[7].

Christian pilgrimages made precarious

For three centuries, pilgrimages remained possible to Jerusalem, but under varying conditions, depending on local Muslim powers. The Umayyads, then the Abbasids, then the Fatimids tolerated pilgrimage subject to dhimmi status ("protected") and payment of the jizya, a tax specific to non-Muslims. In simple words: Christians could keep their faith, but they paid a special tax and remained second-class citizens.

Two grave events marked Latin memory.

First, in 1009, the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah had the Holy Sepulchre destroyed by his orders. The sanctuary was razed. The chronicle of the Melkite patriarch of Antioch Yahya ibn Sa'id (died around 1066) gives the detailed account^[8]. The sanctuary would be rebuilt by the Byzantines from 1048 onwards, but the event remained a trauma: it proved that no lasting protection of the Holy Places was guaranteed by Muslim power.

Second, from the 1070s onwards, the Sunni Seljuk Turks took control of Palestine from the Shiite Fatimids. These new masters were less predictable; pilgrimage routes became dangerous; the Italian merchants (Venice, Pisa, Amalfi) who handled pilgrimage logistics testified to growing instability.

Manzikert 1071 and the appeal of Alexios Komnenos

On 26 August 1071, at Manzikert (eastern Armenia, present-day Malazgirt in Turkey), the Byzantine army of Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was crushed by that of the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan^[9]. The emperor was captured — an unprecedented event for more than eight centuries (since Valerian, 260). The news struck Christendom.

The consequences were catastrophic for Byzantium. Within a decade, the Seljuks took almost all of Anatolia, the military, agricultural and fiscal heart of the Byzantine Empire. It was the most violent territorial amputation the Empire had suffered since the 7th century.

It was in this context that Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, raised to the throne in 1081, explicitly requested military aid from the Latin West. His daughter Anna Komnene describes in the Alexiad, written around 1148, an emperor grappling with the Turkish advance in Bithynia, while the preaching of Peter the Hermit stirred in the West a movement of unprecedented scale^[10]. The formal Byzantine request is, for its part, documented on the Latin side: in March 1095, at the Council of Piacenza, Alexios's ambassadors publicly solicited before Urban II the aid of the Latins against the Turks^[11].

According to the historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, without this explicit and repeated request from Byzantium, there would have been no crusade: the appeal of Clermont was not a spontaneous initiative of an imperialist pope; it was the Latin response to an Eastern request for military aid^[12].

Pope Urban II, a former Cluniac monk, elected in 1088, is the direct heir of the great Gregorian reform: reaffirmation of pontifical authority, liberation of the Church from lay princes, refusal of simony and Nicolaitism. His decision in 1095 extends this reform — including in his relationship to knighthood.

The council and its context

From 18 to 28 November 1095, Urban II presided over a provincial council at Clermont, in Auvergne. The assembly dealt first with internal matters: truce of God, excommunication of King Philip I for adultery, ecclesial discipline. But on 27 November, in a field outside the town to accommodate the crowd, Urban II delivered a speech that changed history.

No verbatim record has come down to us. Four chroniclers wrote their version, several years after the events:

The four versions differ on exact wording but converge on five points: (1) appeal to relieve the Christians of the East; (2) Turkish threat to the Holy Places; (3) taking of the cross as an armed pilgrimage; (4) remission of sins; (5) cry of acclamation "Deus vult" ("God wills it"). Two attendances remain debated: that of Fulcher, generally accepted but debated, and that of Baudri, held to be very likely by recent historiography^[13].

Four accounts, one same core

Fulcher of Chartres stresses the channelling of knightly violence:

"Let those who were formerly accustomed to quarrel wickedly in private wars against the faithful now fight against the infidels, and let them bring to a victorious end the war that should already have been begun. Let those who were robbers now become soldiers." — Urban II, version of Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana, I, 3^[14]

Robert the Monk stages the great popular cry said to have burst forth in the middle of the speech:

"A race wholly alien to God, a generation that has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of these Christians, has depopulated them by pillage and fire. On whom then falls the task of avenging these wrongs and recovering this territory, if not on you, to whom God has given more than to any other people?" — Urban II, version of Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolymitana, around 1107-1120^[15]

At the end of the speech, according to Robert, "all those present cried out with one voice: 'God wills it! God wills it!'" — "Deus vult! Deus vult!"^[16]. Urban II is said then to have ordered that this acclamation become the war cry of the crusaders.

Baudri of Dol stresses the dimension of reparation owed to the oppressed Eastern Christians:

"You, oppressors of children, ravishers of widows, [...] advance boldly as knights of Christ, and hasten to the defence of the Eastern Church." — Urban II, version of Baudri of Dol, Historia Jerosolimitana, around 1107^[17]

Guibert of Nogent, finally, accentuates the providential dimension:

"Consider then that the Almighty may have reserved you for this purpose, so that through you He may restore Jerusalem from such abasement." — Urban II, version of Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos, around 1109^[18]

The French medievalist Jean Flori, in his major reference work La guerre sainte. La formation de l'idée de croisade dans l'Occident chrétien (Aubier, 2001), shows that these four accounts are rhetorical reconstructions, faithful in spirit but reworked by each author according to his audience and his theology^[19]. The true speech of Urban II is not preserved; but the core common to the four witnesses is solid.

The crusade indulgence: what it is and what it is not

The major theological innovation of Clermont is the crusade indulgence. In simple words: the Church told the repentant crusader that this long, dangerous journey, offered to God, replaced the punishments his already-forgiven sins still deserved. It is recorded in canon 2 of the council (transmitted by Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, XX, col. 815-816):

"Whoever, from devotion alone and not to gain honour or money, shall set out for Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God, this journey shall be counted to him for all penance." — Canon 2 of the Council of Clermont, 1095^[20]

This canon is precise. It does not say: "whoever kills a Muslim will go straight to heaven". It says: "whoever accomplishes, from pure devotion, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to liberate the Church, will see this journey counted for full penance". Three clarifications are needed.

First, the condition is "from devotion alone and not to gain honour or money". The indulgence does not cover those who leave for booty or glory. The criterion is interior.

Second, what is remitted are the temporal punishments for sins already committed and confessed — not future sins. The indulgence presupposes confession and repentance. Catholic doctrine, then as now, never granted preventive absolution for future crimes.

Third, the crusade indulgence is the adaptation of an already ancient institution: canonical penance commuted into pilgrimage. Since the 8th-9th centuries, the Church imposed on certain grave sinners long pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, Rome or Jerusalem, in place of or in addition to tariffed punishments. Clermont applies this logic to an armed pilgrimage, because the road to Jerusalem is now militarily dangerous.

Note the wording: the technical expression "plenary indulgence" postdates 1095 — canon 2 speaks of a journey "counted for all penance". It is modern historiography that recognises in this concession the first crusade indulgence^[21].

The historian Christopher Tyerman, professor at Oxford, sums up, in substance, this logic: without penance, the Crusades become inexplicable — they are first a penitential act, whose military dimension serves the liberation of the Holy Places^[22].

A broader ecclesial reform

The appeal of Clermont belongs to the Gregorian reform launched by Gregory VII (1073-1085). This reform has three axes: liberation of the Church from lay princes (investiture controversy), reaffirmation of the papacy as supreme magisterium, and channelling of knightly violence through the Truce of God and the Peace of God.

The crusade extends this last axis. Rather than letting the knights of the West slaughter one another in private wars ravaging peasants and clerics, their violence is diverted towards a cause deemed defensive: the liberation of the Holy Places and the relief of Eastern Christians.

The medievalist Jonathan Riley-Smith showed, by examining the charters of donations and testaments of crusaders (in which they sell their goods and settle their accounts before leaving), that the great majority of the first crusaders lost money by going: long journey, costly equipment, enormous mortality, little hope of booty. This contradicts the classical Marxist thesis of a crusade as an "outlet for younger sons in search of fortune" ^[23].

Jonathan Riley-Smith showed, in substance, that popes and preachers presented the crusade as an act of charity — love of God and neighbour —, crusaders being called to push back aggression and restore the Eastern Church^[24].

Historiography traditionally distinguishes eight great Holy Land crusades between 1095 and 1291, not counting secondary expeditions (popular crusades, the so-called "Children's Crusade" of 1212, of debated historicity, Baltic crusades, Albigensian Crusade, Spanish crusades). This is the classical count adopted here: the campaign of Prince Edward (future Edward I) in 1271-1272, which some Anglo-Saxon historians number as the "Ninth Crusade", is not counted as a distinct campaign, and the non-Levantine theatres (Baltic, Languedoc, Spain) belong to other cases^[25]. Each campaign has its own context, sponsor and record.

First Crusade (1096-1099)

Launched at Clermont, departed in three great waves (August 1096), it crossed the Balkans, Constantinople, Anatolia. Major stages:

• Battle of Dorylaeum (1 July 1097): decisive Christian victory over the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan.
• Siege of Antioch (21 October 1097 - 3 June 1098): seven extremely gruelling months, famine, desertions, then discovery of the Holy Lance (14 June 1098) which revived the besieged before the victory over Kerbogha (28 June 1098).
• Siege and capture of Jerusalem (7 June - 15 July 1099): see dedicated section below.

An expedition that left without any major Western king reached its objective. Four Latin states were founded: County of Edessa (1098), Principality of Antioch (1098), Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099), County of Tripoli (1102).

Second Crusade (1145-1149)

Triggered by the fall of the County of Edessa, taken by Zengi of Mosul on 24 December 1144. Pope Eugene III, a former disciple of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, published on 1 December 1145 the bull Quantum praedecessores, the first great crusade bull in the strict sense.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux personally preached the crusade on 31 March 1146 (Easter Day) at Vézelay, before the King of France Louis VII^[26]. Chroniclers recount that the crowd demanded so many cloth crosses that Bernard's robe had to be torn up to make more.

Military outcome: disaster before Damascus in July 1148, after a four-day ill-prepared siege. Saint Bernard, marked by it, expressed in his De consideratione addressed to Eugene III his grief at the defeat: the Christian people of the East had been struck, and he himself bowed under the blow^[27].

Third Crusade (1189-1192)

Triggered by the catastrophic defeat of Hattin (4 July 1187) where Saladin crushed the army of King Guy of Lusignan, and by Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. The news shook Europe; Pope Gregory VIII published the bull Audita tremendi on 29 October 1187.

Three kings departed: Frederick Barbarossa (drowned in Cilicia on 10 June 1190), Philip Augustus of France, Richard the Lionheart of England. Recapture of Acre (12 July 1191); victory of Arsuf over Saladin (7 September 1191); but Jerusalem was not retaken. An agreement (Treaty of Jaffa, 2 September 1192) nevertheless guaranteed free access for Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem for three years, in the streets as at the Holy Sepulchre^[28].

Fourth Crusade (1202-1204): the great diversion

Launched by Pope Innocent III as early as 1198. It was to target Ayyubid Egypt via the Mediterranean. The expedition turned into a moral catastrophe (see dedicated section below).

Fifth and Sixth Crusades (1217-1229)

The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) again targeted Egypt: capture of Damietta (5 November 1219), but disaster before Cairo because of the Nile flood (August 1221). Notable: Saint Francis of Assisi met Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil there in September 1219, in the Muslim camp, to attempt a peaceful approach to conversion^[29].

The Sixth Crusade (1228-1229) was led by Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen — excommunicated by Gregory IX at the very moment of his departure. Frederick negotiated diplomatically with al-Malik al-Kamil and obtained, through the Treaty of Jaffa of 18 February 1229, the peaceful retrocession of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth to the Christian kingdom. It is the only non-military crusade and the only diplomatic recovery of Jerusalem.

Saint Louis and the Seventh and Eighth Crusades (1248-1270)

King Louis IX of France, Saint Louis, embarked on 25 August 1248 with about 15,000 men^[30]. The Seventh Crusade (1248-1254) took Damietta (June 1249), then failed before Mansurah: on 8 February 1250, the crusader vanguard was crushed there; retreating towards Damietta, Louis IX was captured on 6 April 1250 at Fariskur by the Mamluks; released on 6 May 1250 for a ransom of 500,000 livres tournois — one million gold bezants — for his men, and the restitution of Damietta for his own person, according to Joinville's account^[31].

The Eighth Crusade (1270) targeted Tunis. Saint Louis died of illness there on 25 August 1270, before Tunis (medieval tradition speaks of "plague"; modern retrospective diagnosis favours dysentery)^[32]. Tradition reports that his last words were for Jerusalem^[33].

The fall of Acre (1291) and the end of the Latin states

On 18 May 1291, after six weeks of siege, the Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil took Saint-Jean-d'Acre with an immense army, which contemporary sources put at up to 220,000 men — a figure modern historians judge greatly exaggerated. The Templar citadel held out ten more days and fell on 28 May. The last Christian places (Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa, Château-Pèlerin) capitulated or were evacuated during the summer^[34].

This was the end of the Latin states of the Holy Land. No further major crusade would be launched towards Palestine; the military orders (Templars, Hospitallers) fell back to Europe.

This central episode concentrates the greatest negative apologetic charge against the Crusades. It must be faced without complacency, and without caricature.

Five weeks of siege

The crusader army arrived before Jerusalem on 7 June 1099. According to modern military historians' estimates (Kostick, France), the city was defended by a Fatimid garrison of about 3,000 to 4,500 men, including 400 Egyptian elite cavalry, against about 12,000 to 15,000 crusaders (11,000-12,000 infantry, 1,200-1,300 knights)^[35].

A first assault on 13 June failed. On 17 June, the arrival of Genoese and English ships at Jaffa supplied the timber needed to build siege towers. The crusaders built two mobile towers in three weeks. On 8 July, a fast and a barefoot procession around the walls preceded the final assault. On 15 July 1099, around noon, according to the Latin chroniclers, Letholdus of Tournai was the first to climb onto the ramparts, followed by Godfrey of Bouillon^[36].

The account of the Latin chroniclers

Three Latin chroniclers testify to the massacre that followed the capture.

The Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, an anonymous source close to the events (written around 1100-1101 by a crusader of the Norman contingent):

"Killing on their way as far as the Temple of Solomon, where the carnage was such that our men put their feet in their blood up to the ankles." — Gesta Francorum, book X, chap. 38, around 1100 (translation checked against the Hill edition; Latin text in note)^[37]

Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles, eyewitness:

"If I tell the truth, it will exceed your capacity to believe. Let it suffice to say that in the Temple and in the portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to the knees and up to the horses' bridles." — Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem, around 1100^[38]

Fulcher of Chartres mentions "nearly 10,000 dead" at the Temple, in a typically medieval rhetorical formula (round figures, symbolic value).

These accounts spare no one: neither Muslim men nor women nor children. Part of Jerusalem's Jewish community perished in the burning of the main synagogue (according to Ibn al-Qalanisi).

Muslim sources and the Cairo letter

Muslim sources of the 12th and 13th centuries give very high figures. Ibn al-Athir, writing around 1230, speaks of more than 70,000 dead in the al-Aqsa mosque^[39]. This figure is judged greatly exaggerated by modern specialists of the siege — Conor Kostick^[40] as well as Benjamin Kedar^[41]: the total population of Jerusalem at that date is estimated at 20,000-30,000 inhabitants at most, counting refugees flowed in from the countryside.

A document of great importance, preserved in the Cairo Geniza (a deposit of Jewish documents found at the Ben Ezra synagogue), gives fresh testimony. It is a letter written shortly after the siege by a Jew present at Ashkelon, describing the ransom of Jewish and Christian prisoners and the capture of the city. Kedar stresses that this Geniza letter is an almost contemporary testimony (Ashkelon letter, around 1100): it confirms the violence, but also mentions the ransoming of captives, and gives a more nuanced picture than the later Muslim chroniclers^[42].

What do modern historians say?

Current estimates converge on 3,000 to 10,000 dead, out of a residual population estimated at 15,000-30,000. Conor Kostick, in The Siege of Jerusalem: Crusade and Conquest in 1099 (Continuum, 2009), shows that medieval figures are rhetorical, designed to amplify the religious meaning of the victory or to mobilise Muslim indignation, and must never be read as modern censuses^[43].

Jonathan Riley-Smith also insists on a fact often forgotten: massacres of cities taken by assault were the norm of medieval law of war, shared by Christians, Muslims and Byzantines. In the aftermath of Hattin (4 July 1187), Saladin himself had the captured Templars and Hospitallers executed^[44]; Byzantine cities fallen to Muslims had known the same fate. The Jerusalem massacre is neither unique nor typically Christian: it is typically medieval.

This does not morally justify the crime. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls that "non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely" (CCC §2313). But the honest defence of the Church does not consist in denying the blood shed; it consists in placing it within the logic of a medieval war in which Christians, Muslims and Jews shared the same cruel practices.

Honest assessment

A solid Catholic position holds four points together:

1. The massacre is documented and proven. Catholic apologetics does not deny it.
2. Medieval figures are rhetorical. The modern estimate is a few thousand dead, not 70,000.
3. The sack of a city taken by assault was the medieval norm. This does not exonerate the crusaders, but removes the "Christians, for their part, were particularly barbaric" argument.
4. The Gospel does not sanctify the massacre. John Paul II in 2000 asked forgiveness, in the name of the Church, for the faults committed by her sons in this order of acts.

If the capture of Jerusalem is the hard moment of the case, the sack of Constantinople is its shameful moment. Here, Catholic apology has no excuse to offer: the event was immediately condemned by the papacy, and the Church reiterated this judgment on several occasions, up to John Paul II's public apology in 2001.

A Venetian and political diversion

Pope Innocent III preached the crusade from his election (1198), with a clear objective: retaking Jerusalem by the Egyptian route, by attacking Ayyubid Cairo. The crusaders (12,000 men, mainly Franco-Flemish) gathered at Venice in 1202. But the contingent was far below the 33,500 stipulated in the contract with Venice.

The Republic of Venice, under the nonagenarian and blind doge Enrico Dandolo, demanded full payment for the ships built. For lack of funds, the crusaders accepted a shameful deal: they would attack for Venice the Christian city of Zara (Zadar, in present-day Dalmatia, at the time under the Catholic Hungarian crown).

Zara fell on 24 November 1202. Pope Innocent III learned the news and immediately excommunicated all the crusaders^[45]. In February 1203, he lifted the excommunication of the non-Venetian crusaders (Franco-Flemish contingent), Venice remaining under the sanction.

Then came Alexios IV Angelos, a Byzantine prince in exile, who offered the crusaders a fortune and the submission of the Greek Church to Rome if they helped him retake the throne of Constantinople. The contingent, already compromised at Zara, accepted. First siege of Constantinople in July 1203: Alexios IV was enthroned. But he did not keep his promises; deposed in the night of 27-28 January 1204, he was strangled in prison on 8 February 1204^[46]. The crusaders then decided to besiege Constantinople on their own account.

On 12 April 1204, the combined assault broke through the defences; the city fell on 13 April. There followed a three-day sack (13-15 April) whose barbarity still marks world History. The Byzantine chronicler Niketas Choniates, an eyewitness, describes the pillaging of churches, the rape of nuns in convents, prostitution disguised as dancing on the high altar of Hagia Sophia, and the removal of relics (including the Holy Crown and many fragments of the True Cross, today in Latin treasuries)^[47].

Innocent III's immediate condemnation

Pope Innocent III learned the news a few weeks later. He then wrote a burning letter to his legate Peter, cardinal-priest of Saint Marcellus, dated 12 July 1205 (ep. 136 in the Brundage translation taken up by Fordham; register VIII, no. 134 of the critical edition — formerly book VIII, ep. 133; Patrologia Latina vol. 215, col. 699-702):

In substance, the pope reproached the crusaders for having abandoned the Holy Land to attack Christians: neither age nor sex had been spared, incest, adultery and fornication had been committed in broad daylight, holy places had been profaned, crosses and relics carried off, and the altar silver torn away and broken into pieces^[48].

And the harshest sentence, which prophesied the lasting estrangement of the Orthodox:

"How could the Church of the Greeks return to ecclesial unity, when it has seen among the Latins only an example of perdition and works of darkness, so that it now hates the Latins more than dogs, and not without reason?" — Innocent III, same letter to legate Peter of Saint Marcellus, 12 July 1205^[49]

The honest reading is clear: the pope of the time condemned in the most solemn manner possible the sack of Constantinople. No Catholic can claim that the Church sanctified this act.

John Paul II's apology in 2001

Eight centuries later, on 4 May 2001, Pope John Paul II, on a visit to Athens, met the Orthodox archbishop Christodoulos at the seat of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece. The pope spoke publicly and said:

"I think of the dramatic sack of the imperial city of Constantinople, which was for so long the bastion of Christendom in the East. It is tragic that the assailants, who had set out to ensure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, turned against their brothers in the faith. The fact that Latin Christians took part in it fills Catholics with deep regret." — John Paul II, address to Archbishop Christodoulos, Athens, 4 May 2001 (quotation checked against the official French verbatim)^[50]

And the explicit request for forgiveness:

"For all the past and present occasions when sons and daughters of the Catholic Church have sinned by action and by omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters, may the Lord grant us the forgiveness we ask of Him!" — John Paul II, Athens, 4 May 2001 (quotation checked against the official French verbatim)^[51]

To judge the Crusades, one must know the Catholic doctrine of war — which is neither integral pacifism nor generalised holy war, but strictly framed just war.

Saint Augustine and war out of love

It is Saint Augustine (354-430) who laid the foundations. In the City of God, he distinguishes private violence (always forbidden to the Christian in self-defence, according to the Gospel principle) and public violence exercised by legitimate authority to protect the innocent and punish the unjust.

"Those who make war do so in order that peace may ensue; and all who are engaged in military actions, even when they wage war, seek peace through their arms." — Saint Augustine, The City of God, book XIX, chap. 12, around 426^[52]

For Augustine, war can be an act of love of neighbour when waged to defend him. This is a decisive point: the Christian who defends an innocent by force is not contradicting the Gospel; he accomplishes charity in its temporal order.

Saint Thomas Aquinas: the three conditions

Eight centuries later, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) systematised in the Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, question 40, article 1, the three cumulative conditions of just war:

"For a war to be just, three conditions are required. The first is the authority of the prince, by whose command the war is to be made. [...] The second is a just cause, that is, that those who are attacked deserve to be attacked for some fault. [...] The third is the right intention of those who fight, so that they propose to promote the good or to avoid evil." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 40, a. 1, around 1271-1272^[53]

The three conditions are cumulative: all three are needed, and the absence of a single one makes the war unjust. Saint Thomas adds, in the same article, an interior requirement: "it is not lawful [...] to seek vengeance, cruelty, or greed".

Bernard of Clairvaux and the "new knighthood"

Between Augustine and Thomas, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), theologian, founder of Clairvaux Abbey (1115) and Cistercian reformer — the order itself was born at Cîteaux in 1098 —, wrote for the Templars a short work entitled De laude novae militiae ("In Praise of the New Knighthood"), between 1130 and 1136, at the request of Hugh of Payns, first master of the Temple^[54].

Bernard distinguishes, in a formula become famous, malicide from homicide: killing evil (malicidium) is not killing a man (homicidium), when the fight is waged to defend the innocent and the house of God. Put simply: stopping an aggressor who was about to kill innocents is not killing a man out of wickedness — it is stopping evil. The exact passage deserves to be read:

"The knight of Christ kills with security, he dies with still greater assurance. To himself he renders service when he dies, to Christ when he kills. [...] When he kills a malefactor, he is not a homicide, but, if one may say so, a malicide, and he is plainly Christ's avenger against those who do evil, and defender of Christians." — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude novae militiae, III, 4, around 1130-1136^[55]

The formula is strong; it has been criticised. But Bernard articulates several immediate safeguards in it: prayer, fasting, voluntary poverty of the Templars, strict submission to canon law, prohibition on attacking for booty. The knight he speaks of is not the mercenary who pillages; he is a monk in arms living under rule. Read in its context, the formula does not canonise war as such; it qualifies the death of an unjust aggressor dealt by one who defends the innocent at the peril of his life.

Application to the Crusades

With these criteria, one can judge piece by piece:

This table shows why it is false to judge "the Crusades" as a block. Each crusade must be assessed according to the criteria, and the conclusions are not the same.

A frequent accusation merges two distinct cases: the Crusades and forced conversion. Yet the Catholic Church constantly condemned forced conversion, before, during and after the Crusades. This is not a modern revision of the Second Vatican Council; it is the constant doctrine of the Magisterium.

Medieval Catholic law

Innocent IV (pope from 1243 to 1254), theologian and canonist, writes in his commentary on the Decretals:

"Baptism must not be imposed on infidels, nor on Jews, nor on Saracens. For faith requires free will, and no one believes unless he wills it." — Innocent IV, Apparatus in V libros Decretalium, on decretal X 3.42.3, around 1245^[56]

This principle is constant. Gregory I the Great (590-604) wrote to the bishops of Marseilles to defend the Jews against forced baptism. Nicholas I (858-867) answered the freshly converted Bulgarians: one cannot forcibly baptise those who do not will it. Sicut Iudaeis non, bull of Callixtus II (around 1120) renewed by many successive popes — including Innocent III (1199) —, juridically protects the Jews against forced baptism.

Innocent IV, Pius XII and Vatican II

In his address to the Italian Convegno Nazionale of 6 December 1953 ("Ci riesce"), Pope Pius XII recalls, in substance, that the act of faith is by nature a free act, and that no one can be compelled to embrace the Catholic faith (paraphrase of the address's point; see note)^[57].

The Second Vatican Council, in the declaration Dignitatis humanae on religious liberty (7 December 1965), takes up and systematises this constant doctrine:

"It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man's response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will. This teaching is contained in the word of God and it was constantly proclaimed by the Fathers. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act. Man [...] can adhere to the God who reveals Himself only if, drawn by the Father, he reasonably and freely puts his faith in God. It is therefore fully in accordance with the nature of faith that in matters religious every manner of coercion on the part of men should be excluded." — Vatican II, Dignitatis humanae, no. 10, 7 December 1965^[58]

Why confusing crusade and conversion by the sword is false

The Crusades did not aim at the conversion of Muslims. No magisterial document, no crusade bull (Quantum praedecessores, Audita tremendi, Vineam Domini Sabaoth, etc.) mentions the conversion of the Saracens as an objective. The official objective is threefold: liberation of the Holy Places, relief of the Eastern Christians, recovery of formerly Christian territories.

This does not mean that no crusader ever used violence against non-Christians. The anti-Jewish pogroms of the Rhineland (Mainz, Worms, Cologne, May 1096) during the First Crusade were committed by uncontrolled bands, explicitly condemned by local bishops (notably John I, bishop of Speyer, who defended the Jews at the peril of his life). Pope Callixtus II would reiterate the protection of the Jews with Sicut Iudaeis non in 1120.

This confusion (crusade = forced conversion) appears to us to stem from a late reading, inherited from 19th-century anti-clerical historiography and widely taken up in the 20th century: no primary document grounds it.

Many objections merge cases that are not of the same nature. One must distinguish.

The singular case of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229)

Launched by Innocent III after the assassination of his legate Peter of Castelnau on 14 January 1208 by a squire of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, the Albigensian Crusade targeted the Cathars of Languedoc, a dualist movement rejecting matter, marriage and several sacraments^[59].

This crusade raises specific questions:

• It targeted baptised heretics, not non-Christians.
• It became entangled with a political conflict between the French crown and the Occitan lords (Trencavel, Toulouse).
• The massacre of Béziers (22 July 1209), where the apocryphal phrase "Kill them all, God will know His own!" is said to have been uttered by legate Arnaud Amaury — a phrase reported by Césaire of Heisterbach alone, written some ten years later, which Jacques Berlioz (CNRS) holds to be a Cistercian rhetorical construction rather than a historical utterance^[60].
• It led to the founding of the pontifical Inquisition by Gregory IX in 1231, a case with its own dedicated Ignispedia article.

Catholic judgment need not excuse the violence of the Albigensian Crusade. But one must recognise that it raises different questions from those of Jerusalem 1099 or Constantinople 1204.

The Baltic crusades and the Teutonics

From the 1200s onwards, Baltic crusades were preached against the pagan peoples of Prussia, Livonia and Lithuania. They led to the creation of a Teutonic monastic-military state (1226-1525) which progressively colonised Prussian and Estonian lands. At Saule (22 September 1236), it was the Sword Brothers (Livonian order) who were crushed by the Lithuanians and Semigallians; their survivors would be absorbed by the Teutonic Order in 1237. The Teutonic knights would themselves suffer a decisive defeat at Grunwald (15 July 1410).

These crusades raise their own bundle of problems: German territorial expansion (Drang nach Osten), constrained Christianisation, lasting administrative violence. They are not the same case as the Holy Land crusades.

Do not confuse the cases

When someone mentions "the Crusades", the first reflex must be to ask: which ones? First, Fourth, Albigensian, Baltic? Honest judgment differs according to the theatres. A serious article refuses to confuse distinct cases.

The Crusades case raises ten great recurring objections. They must be treated in their strongest version (steelman), then answered precisely.

Before reading these ten answers, here is the gist in simple words. In the Middle Ages, Christians travelled very far, as far as Jerusalem, with weapons: these are called the Crusades. Many people today say it was a disgrace for the Church. Others say it was just. Who is right? To answer, one must look at the facts one by one: who attacked first? Did the crusaders want to steal and kill, or to protect Christians in danger? Did the Church promise heaven to those who kill? The answers below take each reproach seriously, even the harshest. They show two things together: yes, crusaders committed crimes, and the Church acknowledged it; but no, the Crusades were not gratuitous aggression — they answered four centuries of conquest and a call for help from the East. Read on as an investigation: each objection is heard, then examined with evidence in hand.

Objection 1 — "Jesus forbade all violence"

Strong version. Christ says "Turn the other cheek" (Mt 5:39) and "Put your sword back into its sheath" (Mt 26:52). The Christian Gospel forbids all violence and all war. The Crusades are therefore a radical betrayal of the Gospel.

Answer. The objection confuses private violence and public violence. Christ forbids personal vengeance, enmity towards one's neighbour, the use of the sword to defend one's honour or cause (Peter at Gethsemane). He does not say that legitimate civil authority can never use force against the unjust aggressor.

Saint Paul confirms: "Authorities are God's servants [...] to punish the wrongdoer; they do not bear the sword in vain" (Rom 13:4). Saint John the Baptist, questioned by soldiers, does not tell them "leave the army" but "do not extort, be content with your pay" (Lk 3:14).

The Fathers of the Church all held this double requirement: pacifism in the personal order, public justice in the political order. This is the doctrine of just war (Augustine, Thomas, Bellarmine, Vitoria, Suárez).

Criticising a concrete massacre (Jerusalem, Béziers, Constantinople) is therefore not enough to invalidate the possibility of a defensive war. Conversely, the possibility of a defensive war does not exonerate unjust acts committed in its course.

Objection 2 — "The Crusades were colonial aggression"

Strong version. The crusaders were younger European lords in search of fortune, who used religious rhetoric to conquer, pillage and colonise a Middle East that had done them no harm. The Latin states of the East were colonial principalities modelled on the European feudal system.

Answer. This thesis, dominant among Marxists of the 1950s-1970s (Maxime Rodinson, Claude Cahen), is today contested by major university works: Riley-Smith and Madden refute it with evidence in hand^[61][62], and Tyerman himself, who nevertheless disputes their purely defensive reading, likewise rejects Marxist readings of a colonial crusade^[63]. Three facts oppose it:

1. Study of donation charters: Riley-Smith, examining thousands of crusaders' testaments and donations, showed that the great majority of them lost money by going. Long journey (2-4 years), equipment costing several years' income for a knight, enormous mortality, little realistic hope of booty. The crusade was a spiritual investment, not an economic calculation^[64].

2. Population of the Latin states: the Franks always remained a small minority of the population of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The rest was made up of Christian Arabs (Orthodox, Jacobites, Maronites, Armenians), Muslims (Sunnis, Shiites, Ismailis, Druze), and Jews. It was a minority framework, not a settler colony like French Algeria.

3. The modern concept of colonisation is anachronistic. The crusaders did not create a mother-state meant to export its nationals and wealth. They created defensive feudal principalities, often ruined, which constantly requested subsidies from Europe to survive.

Objection 3 — "The Muslims had done nothing"

Strong version. In 1095, Muslims were not concretely threatening Europe. Urban II's expedition was therefore a gratuitous act, without just cause.

Answer. The objection ignores four centuries of history.

First, Muslims had conquered two-thirds of the ancient Christian world between 632 and 750: Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, Hispania, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Sardinia (partly). This massive conquest had not been undone; it formed the backdrop of all Mediterranean geopolitics.

Second, the Turkish threat to Byzantium was very real in 1095. Manzikert (1071), occupied Anatolia, Alexios Komnenos imploring the West: these are not fantasies.

Finally, pilgrimages remained unstable. The account of Peter the Hermit, who had attempted a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 1090s and is said to have returned beaten, despoiled, testifying to persecutions against Latin Christians, may be partly legendary but reflects a diffuse reality^[65].

The sociologist of religion Rodney Stark sums up, in substance: presenting the Crusades as an aggression of the West against a peaceful and innocent Muslim East would be false, even grotesque — it would reverse four centuries of Islamic military expansion^[66].

Objection 4 — "The indulgence promised automatic heaven for murders"

Strong version. Urban II promised paradise to whoever killed a Muslim. It is a moral blank cheque without equivalent in the history of religions.

Answer. This is a doctrinal caricature. See the section "The crusade indulgence" above.

Canon 2 of Clermont says: "Whoever, from devotion alone and not to gain honour or money, shall set out for Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God, this journey shall be counted to him for all penance." Explicit conditions: interior devotion, no greed, liberation of a Church. No mention of "kill Muslims". No promise of absolution for future crimes.

The indulgence covers the temporal punishments for sins already committed and confessed. It is not a licence to sin; it is a penitential grace.

In practice, many crusaders confessed before departure, settled their debts, freed serfs unjustly retained, made restitution. It is the testimony of the charters that shows this: the indulgence functioned as a lever of moral reform at the moment of departure, not as a licence to misbehave in battle.

Objection 5 — "The Jerusalem massacre proves Christian barbarity"

Strong version. On 15 July 1099, the crusaders killed with blood up to the ankles. This proves the specific barbarity of medieval Christianity.

Answer. See the section "The capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099" above.

The massacre is proven and condemnable. But four qualifications are needed:

1. Medieval figures are rhetorical (more than 70,000 victims in al-Aqsa mosque alone is demographically impossible).
2. The sack of a city taken by assault was the norm of medieval law of war, shared by Christians, Muslims and Byzantines. Saladin himself would massacre Templars and Hospitallers at Hattin (1187).
3. The Catholic Catechism recalls today that "non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely" (CCC §2313). The Church does not canonise the crusaders' conduct at Jerusalem.
4. John Paul II in 2000 publicly asked forgiveness for faults committed by sons of the Church in this kind of acts.

Objection 6 — "The Crusades were a war for conversion"

Strong version. The crusaders wanted to convert Muslims at the point of the sword. The "defensive war" objection is a retroactive alibi.

Answer. See the section "Forced conversion" above.

No magisterial document mentions the conversion of Muslims as a crusade objective. Successive bulls (Quantum praedecessores of Eugene III, Audita tremendi of Gregory VIII, Quia maior of Innocent III) always speak of: liberation of the Holy Places, relief of Eastern Christians, defence of the Latin states. The conversion of Muslims is, in medieval Catholic thought, the work of missionaries (Dominicans, Franciscans from the 13th century onwards), not of armies.

The emblematic episode is Saint Francis of Assisi meeting Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil at Damietta in September 1219, during the Fifth Crusade. Francis does not go to kill a Muslim; he goes to speak to him, to convert him if possible, or to die a martyr. The sultan lets him leave unharmed. This is the true Catholic posture towards conversion: preach, not kill.

Objection 7 — "The Crusades led to massacres of Jews in Europe"

Strong version. In 1096, crusader bands massacred the Jewish communities of the Rhineland (Mainz, Worms, Cologne, Speyer). This is direct proof of the intrinsic antisemitism of the Crusades.

Answer. The Rhineland pogroms of 1096, led notably by Count Emich of Leiningen and his irregular bands, are real and indefensible. Several thousand Jews died there.

But three qualifications:

1. The local Church condemned them. The Jewish chronicler Solomon bar Simson (around 1140) himself notes that Bishop John I of Speyer protected the Jews at the peril of his life, and that Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz offered asylum in his palace — which was alas stormed^[67].

2. These irregular bands were not the official crusade expedition. The papal contingent (Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond, Tancred) did not commit pogroms on the way. The bands responsible were deviant "popular crusades", without clerical supervision, dispersed before even reaching Anatolia.

3. The Church constantly protected the Jews. The bull Sicut Iudaeis non, promulgated by Callixtus II around 1120, would be renewed by several medieval popes — including, in the 13th century, Innocent III (1199) and Innocent IV —, forbidding the forced baptism of Jews and placing them under pontifical protection^[68].

The Catholic position is therefore not complicity with the Rhineland pogroms; it is their condemnation, in word and in deed, by local bishops and by the papacy.

Objection 8 — "The crusaders were illiterate pillagers"

Strong version. The crusaders were uncultured barbarians, driven by greed, who brought back to Europe the stolen fruits of Arab-Muslim and Byzantine civilisation.

Answer. This popular image is refuted by historiography. Three points:

1. Crusader contingents included literate men. Fulcher of Chartres, Raymond of Aguilers, Albert of Aix, William of Tyre write good-quality Latin, cite the classics, theologise. The crusade chronicles rank among the best narrative sources of the central Middle Ages.

2. Cultural transfers are complex. Sylvain Gouguenheim, in Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel (Seuil, 2008) — a debated thesis —, recalled that the great translations from Greek into Latin (Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid) passed not only through Arabic, but also directly from Byzantine Greek via the monasteries of southern Italy and the Norman abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. The one-sided narrative "without Islam, Europe would not know Aristotle" is false or highly reductive^[69].

3. Medieval Christianity produced, alongside the Crusades, intellectual masterpieces: Anselm of Canterbury (Proslogion, 1078), Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of Saint-Victor, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert the Great. The universities of Paris (1170), Bologna (1088), Oxford (1167), Salamanca (1218) were born in the same Middle Ages.

The same century that saw the First Crusade saw the birth of scholasticism, Gothic art (Saint-Denis, 1144) and the great theological syntheses.

Objection 9 — "The pope apologised, so the Church admits its crime"

Strong version. John Paul II asked forgiveness for the Crusades. This is therefore the official admission that the Church recognises having committed a crime.

Answer. The objection confuses two very different notions: the purification of memory and the admission of a structural crime of the Church.

The International Theological Commission, in the document Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past (Vatican, 7 March 2000), clarified by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (future Benedict XVI), explains, in substance, that the Church is holy in her mystery, but that this holiness does not exclude that sons and daughters of the Church committed, in the course of history, faults sometimes grave against the Gospel; and that it is for these faults — and not for an essential stain of the Church herself — that the request for forgiveness is made^[70].

John Paul II, in his homily of 12 March 2000 (Day of Pardon of the Holy Year), specified:

"As Successor of Peter, I have asked that in this year of mercy the Church, strong in the holiness she receives from her Lord, kneel before God and implore forgiveness for the past and present sins of her sons." — John Paul II, homily of the Day of Pardon, 12 March 2000, no. 3 — the pope takes up there the terms of his bull Incarnationis mysterium, n. 11^[71]

The Church does not recognise a "crime of the Church as such". She recognises, with an honesty that no other world institution systematically practises, that her sons committed faults in certain historical episodes. Theologically, this is the opposite of an admission of institutional guilt: it is the distinction between the objective holiness of the Church (which comes from Christ and the sacraments) and the frailty of her members.

Objection 10 — "The Crusades remain indefensible today"

Strong version. Whatever the historical distinctions, the word "crusade" must today be absolutely avoided. Any defence, even nuanced, is suspect.

Answer. The objection is more rhetorical than doctrinal. Three remarks:

1. The modern use of the word "crusade" ("crusade against poverty", "crusade against crime") is universally positive. No one hears in it a reference to medieval violence. The word has a semantic life of its own.

2. Intellectual rigour demands distinctions. Refusing to defend the Crusades "because one does not defend the Crusades" is a circular argument. The question is: what does honest history say, sources in hand? The answer is nuanced: yes to the just-war criteria for the First Crusade; no to the sack of Constantinople; yes to the documented massacres; yes to the pontifical condemnation of 1204; yes to the 2001 request for forgiveness.

3. Refusing debate amounts to letting caricatures dominate. When a Muslim or atheist interlocutor invokes the Crusades, the argument "we apologised, but we do not discuss" convinces no one. One must present the facts, in their fullness, and let the reader judge.

The current attitude of the Catholic Church towards the Crusades was solemnly formulated in two stages, during the Jubilee of the Year 2000 and the apostolic journey to Greece of May 2001.

The Jubilee of the year 2000

Saint John Paul II, in the bull of indiction Incarnationis mysterium (29 November 1998), had asked that the Holy Year be a time of "purification of memory". The International Theological Commission, chaired by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prepared a major doctrinal document: Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, published on 7 March 2000.

This document lays the theological basis of every ecclesial request for forgiveness. It carefully distinguishes:

• the objective holiness of the Church as Mystical Body of Christ, which cannot sin as such;
• the sins of the members of the Church, which can be grave, scandalous and historically documented;
• the ethical duty for the ecclesial community, led by the Pope, to publicly acknowledge these sins of members in order to serve truth, reconciliation and conversion.

In substance: what sons of the Church do against the Gospel does not engage the Church's own holiness; but the Church cannot be indifferent to it nor pretend to ignore it^[72].

The homily of the Day of Pardon

On 12 March 2000, first Sunday of Lent, at Saint Peter's Basilica, John Paul II celebrated the Day of Pardon. Seven cardinals and bishops took turns publicly confessing seven categories of sins committed by sons of the Church: (1) sins in general, (2) sins committed in the service of truth, (3) sins against the unity of the Body of Christ, (4) sins against Israel, (5) sins against love, peace and respect for cultures and religions, (6) sins against the dignity of women and the unity of the human race, (7) sins in the area of fundamental rights of the person.

The Crusades, without being named separately, were explicitly covered by the second (methods of intolerance and violence in the service of truth) and the fifth confession. Cardinal Francis Arinze, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, asked forgiveness, in substance, for the behaviour of those who, in the course of history, caused suffering to others, through contempt for their cultural and religious identity^[73].

Athens, 4 May 2001: the request for forgiveness to the Orthodox

On 4 May 2001, during his apostolic visit to Greece, John Paul II met the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens Christodoulos at the seat of the Holy Synod. Before the cameras, he spoke words become historic, already quoted above:

"I think of the dramatic sack of the imperial city of Constantinople [...]. It is tragic that the assailants, who had set out to ensure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, turned against their brothers in the faith. The fact that Latin Christians took part in it fills Catholics with deep regret." — John Paul II, Athens, 4 May 2001 (quotation checked against the official French verbatim)^[74]

On the same day, John Paul II and Christodoulos signed a joint declaration at the Areopagus, a landmark moment in dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox^[75].

To conclude, an honest Catholic reading holds four points together:

The Crusades oblige the Catholic reader to an exercise of adulthood: refusing both the innocent narrative ("everything was holy") and the accusatory narrative ("everything was criminal"), looking at sources, contexts, doctrinal distinctions, and the Church's own public repentance.

They also oblige one not to be duped by the narratives that use them: neither the 19th-century Western colonial narrative, which made them a title of imperial pride; nor the contemporary anti-Western narrative, which makes them the archetype of all religious violence. The Crusades are not the Gospel. But neither are they the opposite of the Gospel: they are complex human events, at the crossroads of an Eastern request for aid, an ecclesial reform, a medieval penitential spirituality, a knighthood in search of meaning, and all human frailties.

Régine Pernoud, in Pour en finir avec le Moyen Âge (Seuil, 1977), warned, in substance, against blanket condemnations of an entire age: each fact must be examined for itself, with evidence in hand^[76].

• The heretics and the black legend of the Inquisition — another sensitive case where real context and real faults must be held together.
• History argues in favour of Catholicism — the continuity of the Church through the centuries.
• Islam — religious, doctrinal and historical context of the Muslim world, to be known to understand the framework of the Crusades.
• Answers to Protestantism — other historical objections against Catholicism.
• The Gregorian Reform — the great movement of ecclesial reform of which the Crusades are one of the extensions.
• If God exists, why evil and suffering? — more general reflection on moral evil and the human use of freedom.