Warfare as Mercy and Love

From 1096 until 1271, Christians from western Europe waged eight major wars and many smaller military operations in the Near East and North Africa that scholars now call the crusades. The spiritual leaders of the Catholic population, from the popes on down, regarded these expeditions as just and holy wars, in part because they considered the earlier Muslim conquests as unjust incursions into and occupation of Christian lands. Furthermore, they resented the fact that more recently Islamicised Turkic peoples continued to press militarily on the remaining independent realms in the eastern Mediterranean, in particular, the Byzantine Empire, a situation that reached crisis proportions in the late 11th century. In fact, this situation was what prompted the First Crusade, whose recovery of Jerusalem and establishment of new Christian polities, the Crusader States, made it the most successful of all these wars. Christians took up arms with similar justifications elsewhere as well, such as Iberia and the eastern Baltic region. In time, military campaigns against dissenting Christians and enemies of the political aspirations of the Church in Europe also received papal validation as ‘crusades’, which is to say, as just and holy wars.