List of Crusades

Summary

Crusades include the traditional numbered crusades and other conflicts that prominent historians have self-identified as crusades. The scope of the term "crusade" first referred to military expeditions undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to the Holy Land. The conflicts to which the term is applied has been extended by decision to include other campaigns initiated, supported and sometimes directed by the Roman Catholic Church against pagans, heretics or for alleged religious ends. According to historian Thomas F. Madden:Traditionally, authors have defined the scope of the crusades in terms of the expeditions to the Holy Land...In the past few decades, this construction of the crusades has been largely abandoned by scholars. Although traditional histories included events like the Albigensian Crusade or Baltic Crusades, neither of which was bound for the East, they did so only peripherally. Modern scholarship has rehabilitated this periphery. Most historians now accept that crusading took on many different forms; the general passage to the Holy Land was but one of them. Crusades against pagans, heretics, and enemies of the church were just as common by the thirteenth century as wars against the lands of Islam. Much of Europe's crusading energy was also devoted to removing Muslim invaders from Spain.