13.3 Patriarch and Papacy: The Church and the Call to Crusade

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

  • Describe the East-West schism within the Christian Church
  • Explain why Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade
  • Discuss the concept of religiously motivated warfare in Christianity and Islam
  • Identify the reasons western Christians traveled to the Middle East as crusaders

The image of holy war has often colored the history of the Middle Ages. We can view it either positively in terms of warriors engaged in an altruistic struggle, or in a more negative light as a conflict rooted in bigotry and ignorance. The factors that justified holy war existed in Christianity well before the Crusades, but the Crusades helped shape specific ideals that sanctioned armed conflict based on religious beliefs. These ideals were both internal to Christian Europe and reactions to developments in the Islamic world.

This lesson has no exercises.

The content of this course has been taken from the free World History, Volume 1: to 1500 textbook by Openstax