Comparison Between 950 And 1350: The Driving Force Of Expansion

The period between 950 and 1350 saw a great expansion of Western Christendom: the Iberian Peninsula, the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, parts of Eastern Europe, and the Crusader States saw the extent to which Christianity’s influence could be spread across the known world. No better was this driving force of expansionism expressed than in the Crusades. Shortly after the first Crusade, the contemporary writer and abbot Guibert of Nogent coined the phrase “Holy Christendom’s new Colonies” for the recently conquered areas of Syria and Palestine ; similarly, the true nature of the societies created by the Crusades has been debated fiercely over the past two centuries. The question of whether the Frankish settlements in the Levant were created