Religious Conflicts: The First Four Crusades

For as long as people can remember there have been religious conflicts, one of the most memorable of these conflicts was The Crusades. The Crusades were a time in Europe’s history where there was great religious conflict between Muslims and Christians that started in 1096, and ended with the ninth Crusade in 1272. They started as a religious territorial war over Jerusalem, but changed to be more territorial over time. This caused the first four Crusades to have the most impact, excluding the Children’s Crusade, which was the beginning of the end of the Christian empire. Which in the end, although the Christian empire put up a good fight for almost 200 years; they fell with their last empires, Jerusalem and Acre. vThe Crusades really started centuries before with Christian pilgrims making voyages to the holy lands. These voyages started feuds between Muslims and Christians many decades before the Crusades even started. Although these wars are never recognized, they are very important to the events leading up to the Crusades. Over the years, the Christian community would send men to the holy land, and year after year they would be killed, starting many small wars between the
For example, the knights were never really sure of their leader, and because of that there were many disagreements and there was not much trust between the knights, “They had no obvious or widely accepted leader, no consensus about relations with the churchmen who went with them, no definition of the pope’s role, and no agreement with the Byzantine emperor on whether they were his allies, servants, rivals, or perhaps enemies. These uncertainties divided the Crusaders into factions that did not always get along well with one another.” Which was a great factor leading up to their downfall. Also, the Crusades were turned into massive slaughters and murders of innocent people because of their lack of understanding for other