ABSTRACT
For Edward Gibbon, the crusades concerned nothing less than 'the world's debate'. It can still be argued that crusading 'was of central importance to nearly every country in Europe and the Near East until the Reformation' with profound implications for modern politics. Western historians have subsequently read into the crusades European colonialism; racial and cultural superiority; the triumph of faith over materialism or reason; and nationalist epic. Just war in medieval Europe boasted a Christian pedigree as old as Constantine the Great and Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries, with a much older parentage in Roman public war and the scriptural battles of the Israelites from Moses to the Maccabees. Across Western Europe during the Investiture Contest ecclesiastical interests were pursued through secular politics, issues of the legitimacy of lay behaviour being interpreted in a spiritual context.
