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The Crusades were military campaigns sanctioned by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. In 1095 Byzantine Emperor Alexios I, in Constantinople, sent an ambassador to Pope Urban II in Italy pleading for military help against the growing Turkish threat. The Pope responded promptly by calling Catholic soldiers to join the First Crusade. The immediate goal was to guarantee pilgrims access to the holy sites in the Holy Land under Muslim control. His long-range goal was to reunite the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom after their split in 1054 with the pope as head of the united Church. A complex 200-year struggle ensued. Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics from many different classes and nations of Western Europe became crusaders by taking a public vow and receiving plenary indulgences from the church. Some crusaders were peasants hoping for Apotheosis at Jerusalem. Pope Urban II claimed that anyone who participated was forgiven of their sins. In addition to demonstrating devotion to God, as stated by the Catholic Church, participation satisfied feudal obligations and provided opportunities for economic and political gain. Crusaders often pillaged the countries through which they traveled, and contrary to their promises the leaders retained much of this territory rather than returning it to the Byzantines.〔 The People's Crusade prompted the murder of thousands of Jews, known as the Rhineland massacres. Constantinople was sacked during the Fourth Crusade rendering the reunification of Christendom impossible. Due to the weakening that resulted from the siege, the remnants of the Byzantine Empire finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The Catholic Church mounted no coherent response when their last stronghold in the region, Acre, fell in 1291. Opinions concerning the conduct of crusaders have varied from laudatory to highly critical. The impact of the crusades was profound; they reopened the Mediterranean to commerce and travel, enabling Genoa and Venice to flourish. Crusader armies would trade with the local populations while travelling, and Orthodox Byzantine emperors often organized markets for crusaders moving through their territory. The Crusades consolidated the collective identity of the Latin Church under papal leadership, and were a source of heroism, chivalry, and piety. This consequently spawned medieval romance, philosophy, and literature. However, the crusades reinforced the connection between Western Catholicism, feudalism, and militarism, which was counter to the Peace and Truce of God that Urban had promoted. ==Terminology== ''Crusade'' is a modern term derived from the French ''croisade'' and Spanish ''cruzada''; by 1750, forms of the word "crusade" had established themselves in English, French, and German. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' records its first use in English in 1757 by William Shenstone. When a crusader swore a vow (''votus'') to reach Jerusalem, they received a cloth cross (''crux'') to be sewn on their clothing. This "taking of the cross" became associated with the entire journey, and crusaders saw themselves as undertaking an ''iter'' (journey) or ''peregrinatio'' (armed pilgrimage). The inspiration for this "messianism of the poor" was an expected mass apotheosis at Jerusalem.〔 The ''numbering of the Crusades'' is debated, with some historians counting seven major Crusades and a number of minor ones from 1096 to 1291.〔 Others consider the Fifth Crusade of Frederick II as two crusades, making the crusade launched by Louis IX in 1270 the Eighth Crusade. Sometimes the Eighth Crusade is considered two, the second of which is the Ninth Crusade. In the pluralistic view of the Crusades developed during the 20th century, "Crusade" encompasses all papal-sanctioned military campaigns in the Middle East or in Europe. A key distinction between the Crusades and other holy wars was that the authorization for the Crusades came directly from the pope, who claimed to be working on behalf of Christ. This takes into account the view of the Roman Catholic Church and medieval contemporaries, such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, which gives equal precedence to military campaigns undertaken for political reasons and to combat paganism and heresy. This broad definition includes the persecution of heretics in Southern France, the political conflict between Christians in Sicily, the Christian re-conquest of Iberia, and the conquest of pagans in the Baltic.〔 A narrower view is that the Crusades were a defensive war in the Middle East against Muslims to free the Holy Land from Muslim rule. Popes periodically declared political crusades as a means of conflict resolution amongst Roman Catholics; the first of these was declared by Pope Innocent III against Markward of Anweiler in 1202. Others include a crusade against the Stedingers, several (declared by a number of popes) against Emperor Frederick II and his sons, and two crusades against opponents of King Henry III of England who received the same privileges as participants in the Fifth Crusade. A common term for Muslim was ''Saracen''; before the 16th century, the words "Muslim" and "Islam" were rarely used by Europeans. In Greek and Latin, "Saracen" originated in the early first millennium to refer to non-Arab peoples inhabiting the desert areas around the Roman province of Arabia. The term evolved to include Arab tribes, and by the 12th century it was an ethnic and religious marker synonymous with "Muslim" in Medieval Latin literature. ''Frank'' and ''Latin'' were used during the Crusades for people belonging to any of the Western nations of Europe, distinguishing them from ''Greeks''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「crusades」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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