Barren County Middle School iLearn@Home
7th Grade Social Studies
Day 1
Choose one of the options below to complete as your classwork for this snow day.
Option 1:
1. Log in to Barren County Schools
website and click on Barren County
Middle School.
2. Go to Teacher websites. Click on my
name.
3. On my page, click the iLearn@Home
link or my google classroom link.
4. In google classroom, locate
iLearn@Home day 1 and complete.
5. Be sure to use the graphic organizer at
the end of this packet to summarize
the articles.
6. Watch the two videos that go along
with the articles.
Option 2:
1. Read the attached articles.
2. Summarize the articles using the Who,
What, Where graphic organizer at the
end of the packet.
Contact information should you need extra help. If your teacher does not reply or is not available,
please email on of the other teachers.
delenia.alls@barren.kyschools.us
nicholas.pace@barren.kyschools.us
jennifer.toms@barren.kyschools.us
What were the crusades?
Knight, Psalter, with litany, prayers and Easter tables (The "Westminster Psalter"), c. 1200, f. 220 (British
Library)
What comes to mind when you think of the crusades? Earnest and alarmingly buff knights
(in shining armor, of course) engaged in against-the-odds quests to accomplish godly deeds
in an evil world? Red crosses on pure white backgrounds? Orlando Bloom?
This is not surprising. A quick look at our pop culture and politics in the West
reveals a continued fascination with the crusades. Compared with popular
representations, the historical reality is more complicated and often less heroic.
How do we define the crusades?
Imagine a man-at-arms in the French city of Clermont in 1095. He is listening to Pope Urban II—the
only pope he has ever seen in person!—speak passionately about the need to fight in the Holy Land.
His lord is persuaded, and gathers his men and resources. The man-at-arms says goodbye to his
family, and departs in 1096 on years of painful journeying and military campaigns. He dies of
starvation at Antioch, never seeing Jerusalem. His family never knows his fate. This was crusading.
Now imagine Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily. Frederick regains Jerusalem from
the Muslims without waging war—it helps that he knows Arabic. He is crowned the King of Jerusalem
in 1229, but returns to Europe to find the pope waging war on his lands. This, too, was crusading—at
least it was for some, though others, like the pope, disagreed.
Finally, imagine an English knight in 1370. He plans to travel to northeastern Europe to fight nonChristians and help Christians there expand their territory. He will go for a season, enjoy feasting and
knightly camaraderie, then return home and go back to his regular life, with his reputation enhanced
by his trip. You guessed it: this was also crusading.
Crusading took many different forms, and attempting to precisely define crusading has engaged
historians in intense debates for more than 150 years.
Scholarly debates
Most of the debates among scholars are concerned with identifying the key characteristics of a
crusade. Some, for example, consider only expeditions aimed at Jerusalem or the Holy Land to be
crusades. This approach is responsible for the traditional, numbered crusades (i.e., First Crusade,
Second Crusade, etc.).
Others downplay the importance of a specific target, and emphasize instead characteristics related to
authorization and procedure. These scholars would ask, did a pope authorize the expedition? Did
participants take vows and receive certain legal and spiritual privileges? Taking this approach yields a
larger number of crusades, spread over a larger geographical area and chronological range. At the
same time, some question whether the role of authorities (i.e, the pope) determined a crusade as
much as grassroots enthusiasm among ordinary people. These scholars would look, instead, for
signs of mass popular support for an expedition. Still others assert that the characteristics of
crusading were so diffuse throughout medieval culture that it is impossible and ultimately misleading
to attempt to define what was or was not a crusade.
It is also fair to say that many scholars recognize that one can spend too much time seeking a
meticulous definition, in essence missing the forest for the trees!
Outward signs
If crusading was so nebulous, how did potential participants know what a crusade was? Remember
our man-at-arms in Clermont in 1095? He (and his lord) noticed preaching for a new expedition
(perhaps emphasizing a papal proclamation, perhaps not), or heard people around him discussing it.
Perhaps he also saw others taking public vows and wearing the sign of the cross on their garments.
He may have learned of certain legal privileges designed to encourage participation and help protect
property and families in the crusader's absence. Or perhaps he heard of a papal promise of an
indulgence (“indulgence” in this context simply means a spiritual benefit of some kind—the precise
kind of indulgence offered for crusading changed over time).
Finally, our man-at-arms was interested in crusading, but for others, someone with authority over
them (or someone they loved), may simply have told them it was happening or that they were going.
Much like today, some people may have simply paid attention to their taxes; at times, especially in the
later Middle Ages, both the Church and secular authorities levied funds for new expeditions. Any or all
of these factors may have caught people’s attention, especially if they came from a family or region
with a tradition of crusade participation. Meanwhile, for those who were the targets of crusader
violence, presumably the only sign needed was the sight of an approaching army bedecked with
crosses.
Different points of view
While it’s valuable to seek to understand the crusades from the perspective of participants, it’s equally
important to seek out different points of view. Internal criticism of the crusading movement was more
limited than many today might expect. What criticisms existed were usually leveled at specific
expeditions or participants, rather than at the idea of crusading in general or the underlying attitudes
towards religion and violence that made crusading possible.
Muslim voices, whether in the Iberian Peninsula (what is now Spain and Portugal), the Levant (the
eastern Mediterranean), or further afield, described the crusades in different ways—often as simple
territorial expansion, religious warfare, or a combination of the two. Descriptions of the “Franks”
themselves (as the crusaders were called) ranged from respect to ridicule to hostility.
Records from Jewish communities around the Mediterranean sometimes described an
indiscriminating ferocity and zealous fervor held by many crusaders, a theme also underlined by
Christians within Europe who did not conform to Church teachings, and thus were called “heretics.”
Some accounts of the crusades from the Byzantine Empire (a medieval state based on the remains of
the classical Roman Empire) emphasized the purported “barbarity” and relative naivete of the
crusaders.
Essay by Dr. Susanna Throop
How was crusading justified?
Christ leading crusaders into battle, detail from an Apocalypse, with commentary (The "Queen Mary
Apocalypse"), early 14th century, f. 37 (British Library)
Just warfare
Crusades were wars—that is firm ground. More specifically, crusading was
represented as just warfare, according to the idea of just war established by St.
Augustine of Hippo.
Augustine wrote that warfare was sometimes a necessary and lesser evil in certain conditions.
Specifically, a war could be just if there was:
a) just cause,
b) legitimate authority, and
c) right intention.
A just cause was a previous injury or act of aggression. As a result, crusading was described as
defensive.
A legitimate authority was just that: an authority who held the power—granted by God, from Augustine’s
perspective—to invoke war. Crusading, it was argued, was authorized by popes and legitimate secular leaders.
Participants had the right intention if they believed war was completely unavoidable and sought only to use
minimal force to check aggression against them. In theological terms, participants were supposed to be
motivated by Christian love, (i.e. charity), rather than by anger, hatred, or fear. Crusade supporters stressed that
participants were driven by the desire to help liberate purportedly oppressed Christians and save them from
purported atrocities and slavery, and the desire to do the same for the personified Church or even Christ himself,
both supposedly injured by the enemies of the crusaders.
But participating in a just war could still be sinful. For example, Duke William I of Normandy’s invasion
of England was considered just, but Norman participants had to do penance afterwards. So saying
that crusading was a just war wasn’t enough. Many writers communicated that crusading was holy
warfare, meaning that it was a just war that was not only authorized but also realized by God himself.
In theological terms, then, God was the one taking action; God was the one waging war. Crusaders
were divine tools, rather than moral agents in their own right. It was this belief that led one monk,
Guibert of Nogent, to title his account of the First Crusade “The Deeds of God done through the
Franks” (he was not-so-subtly revising an earlier, and in his opinion theologically crude account, titled
“The Deeds of the Franks”). Of course, if a crusade was a holy war, then the enemies of crusading
were enemies of God and the whole Christian faith, not just enemies of particular Christians—and
that was precisely how Muslims and other crusader targets were depicted in many pro-crusade
accounts.
Penitential warfare
Finally, crusading was also represented as penitential warfare. This means that crusading was
believed to be an act of penance—a way to make amends to God for sins one had committed, so that
an individual could achieve salvation. It means that crusading was not simply seen as a necessary
evil—it was seen as a positive spiritual good for those who participated. Participants were not merely
excused for their involvement; they actively acquired spiritual merit. In the simplest terms, crusading
was presented as a good deed, even though it involved killing people.
To make sense of this, we need to recognize that violence was often perceived to be much more
morally neutral in medieval Europe than it is today. Violence acquired its moral value from intentions
and context, like who was performing the violence and to whom it was done (this should remind you
of Augustine’s just war theory: cause, authority, and intentions). Thus, the same action—let’s say,
hitting someone in the face—could be immoral and unchristian in one context, and moral and
Christian in another.
Given the penitential element in crusading and the number of expeditions that involved long journeys
to holy places, it is not surprising that crusading was often described as a pilgrimage, a journey to a
holy location like a shrine, a church, or even an entire city, like Jerusalem. Those who went on
pilgrimage frequently sought spiritual advantages, like forgiveness of sins or a closer relationship with
God or a saint; they also sometimes hoped for more earthly advantages, like healing. Pilgrimage was
a sacred act for medieval Christians, and was itself often an act of penance (sometimes voluntary,
sometimes assigned by a priest in confession). Crusading borrowed some of the language, rituals,
and symbols of pilgrimage, and shared its penitential nature.
Changing definitions
It’s important to emphasize again that people didn’t write a theory of crusading in advance. There
wasn’t even a specific word for “crusade” until more than 100 years after the First Crusade. In
addition, the nature of crusading seems to have operated differently and meant different things
depending on time, place, and participants.
Text by Dr. Susanna Throop