The Crusades: Salvation or Exploitation? Student’s Name University Affiliation

The Crusades: Salvation or Exploitation? The crusades trace their origin to the eleventh century. Europe’s many states were at constant loggerheads over boundaries and territories (Bréhier, 1908). The head of Christendom, on the other hand, embroiled himself in arguments over investitures. At the time, the Pope had managed to keep the Church united. Faced with the threat of the Mohammedan tribes and the Byzantine Empire, the Church came under pressure to suppress the Muslim persecution of Christians in the East. According to Bréhier (1908), the Pope was the only figure who could institute such a conquest. However, his eminent authority was not enough to persuade the Western nations to take up arms to conquer the Holy Land and to regain the Holy Sepulcher (“The Crusades,” 2013). Nevertheless, the sour relations between Syria and the Western Nations favored the Pope’s intentions. According to “The Crusades (1095-1291)” (2013), most historians attribute the beginning of the Crusades to a sermon preached by Pope Urban II in November 1095. The Christian faithful considered these waves of military campaigns as divinely sanctioned and thus Christians executed them with the utmost vehemence. Ten centuries later, the question that lingers in our minds is,” Were the Crusades a quest for Salvation or was there an intention of exploiting the peasants in Europe and the Mohammedan tribes in the East?” Many scholars have investigated and thoroughly scrutinized the Crusades. The Crusades, nevertheless, are still subject to a lot of controversy (Madden, 2007). Such controversy emanates from the participants who took part in the Crusades to the actual events of the Crusades. The eleventh century witnessed feudal primogeniture, a series of poor