ABSTRACT
Carl Erdmann viewed the crusade as the end result o f a slow process of sanctification of war undertaken for the benefit o f the Church.1 The expedition preached by Urban II, from this perspective, would appear to be an operation intended to assist the Byzantine empire in its reconquest o f territories lost to the Muslims o f the East, analogous to the Spanish reconquista in the west. Jerusalem, therefore, became ancillary: the word was used only as a psychological inducement. This thesis, rightly criticized for its extremism,2 has been rejected for some years, though not w ithout equal extremism,3 in favour o f a conceptualization comparing the crusade to the penitential pilgrimage very fashionable since the middle of the eleventh century.4 This idea is based on the profound influence o f monasticism on the spirituality of the crusaders,5 on the omnipresence of Jerusalem
in the documentary sources,6 on the close similarity between the motivations of the crusaders and o f pilgrims as expressed in their charters o f departure, on the identical
1 C. Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart, 1935 [1965]); English trans: The Origin o f the Idea o f Crusade (Oxford, 1977).
