ABSTRACT
Urban II’s appeal was cast in terms of the brotherhood of Christians Eastern and Western, and of the help that the West should bring to the Byzantines who were victims of the rapid expansion of the Seljuk Turks. And yet, in a little more than a hundred years, the Christian brethren of the East had become heretical enemies, and the Byzantine Empire was destroyed by the crusaders. The crusaders complained, not unjustly, that they lost considerably in the exchange. The crusaders considered themselves to be the army of God, carrying out highest duty of Christian, fighting for the Christian religion. In the early thirteenth century, Byzantine theologians still argued against the concept of the remission of the sins of crusaders dying in war. And it is no accident that the one time that an Orthodox Patriarch promised eternal salvation and remission of sins to those who died in war was a few years after fall of Constantinople to the crusaders.
