Crusades

Later Crusades Essay.

After the first Christian Crusade that begun in 1095 there were eight classified crusades that generally aimed towards the area of Sirya and Palestne that lasted untill the 1270’s. Yet after much humiliation and the repeated defeat of the Crusaders in the Lavant, most of the Eropean powers understood the fact that the Holy Land was unnatainable. Most the crusading efforts were aimed at the enemies of Catholics such as the Turkish invaders who sought to destroy Christianity and the doctrinal heretics in Bohemia. Two such crusades are The Crusade agains the Ottoman turks which started around the mid 14th century and the crusade agains the Hussite heretics which started in 1420. To further understand the similarities and differences between these two crusades perhaps it would be best to associate them to our definition of a crusade and see how they compare and differ from each other as well as compare them to the first crusade. The reason I chose to analize particularly these two crusades is because they fall into the same time frame, have different objectives and perhaps hinder the each other’s succes.

After the defeat of the Seljuk Turks by the Mongols in 1243 a Ghazi prince by the name of Ertugrul had assimilated a small state by his death in 1280. This state, later ruled by his son Osman had spread it’s rule over a large area in north-west Asia Minor, as far as the Agean and the Black sea. This was the beginning of the Ottoman Turks as well as the beginning of their wide spread conquest of the region due to their state being well governed as well as having a disciplined army. By 1331 the Ottoman Turks have taken Nicaea and Uskudar (across the Bosporus from Constantinople) and by 1389 had singificant dominance over the Balkans. In 1370 the new Catholic pope, Gregory XI was already raising the threat of the Ottoman’s to the European lords. Yet a major unity of European powers were wrecked by the self-interest of each country and it’s benefit. For example the German princes did not want to have a major crusade for the fear of rising imperial authority. During this time every ruler in Europe “…acknowledged the need for a crusade, as the only practicable means of pooling the resources required to combat this massive and hostile power; but in practice nearly all of them blocked its organization” .