ABSTRACT
The Crusades, beginning at the end of the eleventh century and continuing throughout the Middles Ages, showed Christendom at its most united and most complex. The word crusade (French, croisade) means ‘taking the cross’ and in its simplest definition a crusade was a holy war launched at the invitation of the Pope and generally directed towards the Holy Land. Pilgrimage was a characteristically medieval activity: visiting the sites and tombs of the saints, ‘the very special dead’, as a way of celebrating holy lives and expiating sins. The Crusades were to an extent an armed pilgrimage; a response, in their immediate origin, to the military might of the Seljurk Turks’ threatening of the holy places.
