The Crusades Compared To Today

Perhaps no event in the course of the middle ages is as iconic yet misunderstood as the Crusades. The image of cross-bearing knights doing battle with exotic Islamic soldiers is one that most westerners are quite familiar with. It is because of this prominence in the imaginations of modernity that the language and sentiment of the Crusades are still evoked. With the advent of the war on terror, the Crusades have become increasingly appropriated to cast imperialism as a present-day holy war. George Bush even used the term “Crusade” in reference to the September eleventh terrorist attacks, making this parallelism all the more relevant to contemporary discourse. Despite the proclivity to draw similarities between the twelfth century and today, the Crusades can only be adequately explained by examining the events in their own time. In doing such, it will become clear that the forces that engendered the Crusades was not the desire for material wealth, but rather a religious devotion long extinct in the west.
With the decline of clerical institutions, Europe’s intellectual landscape transitioned to more secular pursuits. Enlightenment scholars looked back to the Crusades with irreverence. The preeminent historian Edward Gibbon, writing in the late eighteenth century goes as far as calling the Crusades an act of “savage fanaticism.” The Enlightenment was however, quickly supplanted by romanticism in the nineteenth century. Prominent romantics such as Francois Michaud compared crusading with the contemporary enterprise of colonialism, all the while extolling the civilizing virtues of both. Europe’s preoccupation with imperialism was often even justified by using allusions to its crusading