Crusades motivation

Question

I was just debating with a catholic acquaintance. He ascribed merit to the catholic crusades and said that many historians agreed with him. Are there any non-catholic historians who believe that the crusades were not motivated as a distraction from internal conflicts? His chief comments were that the crusades protected Europe from invaders and liberated Israel. I was taught that the crusades were a distraction from problems in Rome and the pope. What does history actually say was the multifold motivation for the crusades?

Answer 1

I think you can't really separate the two sets of motivations for the crusades (religious fervor/ political or power-grabbing issues) from one another. In a time where politics and religion were habitually and naturally intermixed it's hard to expect something else.

A look at the least of leaders of the First Crusade to examine their personalities can be useful here (it's a study in mini-prosopography, if you like):

• Raymond IV of Toulouse - a really pious man (he refused to be crowned king of Jerusaleml [famous story, look it up]), also a great noble who badly wanted to be even greater and to found his own principality.
• Godfrey of Bouillon - another rather pious man who was also a savvy political operative (he did not refuse the rule of Jerusalem, just humbly asked to be styled Protector instead of King).
• Baldwin of Boulogne (Godfrey's younger brother) - the proverbial medieval younger-son-with-no-patrimony who was looking for a principality of his own, by whatever means.
• Bohemond & Tancred of Taranto - Also mostly looking for land to grab.
• Robert of Normandy - a good-for-nothing perennial rebel who was so poor he couldn't get out of bed for lack of clothing appropriate to his rank.
• Hugo of Vermandois - Empty boaster.
• Robert of Flanders - Seems to have been in it mostly for religious reasons (and glory). He did not try to carve up his own principality.

To sum, it was a (un)healthy mix of religious fervor, greed and striving for glory.

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As for the context of the Crusades, they were sort of a counter-movement by Christian Europe against the previous great Moslem movement of conquest. For example, Raymond had fought against the Moors in Spain before the Crusade - so there was clear continuity between the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades.

Answer 2

Even as someone with an Anglo-Saxon background, I find it informative to look upon the Crusades in the way the residents of the area must have viewed them - a series of barbarian invasions from the north-west.

Yeah, the Crusaders had their reasons. In their own minds they were completely justified. But the same could be said for the Huns and the Mongols and the Vikings. If we are going to give their side that much weight, we should at least be willing to do the same for other wave invaders of history.

So while I could list some "motivations", I don't really find them nearly as compelling as it appears your friend does. The main issue was that there was a percieved military imbalance. Europeans thought they could whip the Turks and the other near-east rulers if they acted together. The rest is just the rationalization for doing so that they happened to arrive at.

Answer 3

In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson makes the following interesting observation:

The Roman system of coinage outlived the Roman Empire itself. Prices were still being quoted in terms of silver denarii in the time of Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814. The difficulty was that by the time Charlemagne was crowned Imperator Augustus in 800, there was a chronic shortage of silver in Western Europe. Demand for money was greater in the much more developed commercial centres of the Islamic Empire that dominated the southern Mediterranean and the Near East, so that precious metal tended to drain away from backward Europe. So rare was the denarius in Charlemagne’s time that twenty-four of them sufficed to buy a Carolingian cow. In some parts of Europe, peppers and squirrel skins served as substitutes for currency; in others pecunia came to mean land rather than money. This was a problem that Europeans sought to overcome in one of two ways. They could export labour and goods, exchanging slaves and timber for silver in Baghdad or for African gold in Cordoba and Cairo. Or they could plunder precious metal by making war on the Muslim world. The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe’s monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.

He cites Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages as a source.