The Crusades of the 11th to 13th centuries were a pivotal period in the history of Western Europe and

the Mediterranean in general. While Western Europe and the Middle East had maintained contact after the fall
of the Roman Empire in the form of commerce, diplomatic embassies and occasionally, conflict, the two
regions were largely disconnected during the early middle ages. Politically, socially and economically,
Western Europe and the Middle East slowly drifted apart such that by this period, they were clearly distinct
and separate regions of the Mediterranean. The longstanding discrepancies between the two regions make the
advent of the first crusading expeditions all the more interesting. While one might expect the impact of such an
event to be proportional on both the West and the Middle East, the historical record indicates that it was
actually Western Europe that saw the most profound changes as a result of the crusades. While the Islamic
states of the Levant and North Africa experienced modest effects as a result of the crusades, Western Europe
saw significant and longstanding changes in the conduct and ideology of its dominant religious authority: the
Catholic Church.

From the start, the crusades were understood by the papacy as a method of consolidating and
expressing papal authority in Europe. It was only in the decades preceding the First Crusade that the papacy
had truly established itself as an autonomous force of its own, especially in the aftermath of the Investiture
Controversy and the successive Concordat at Worms. As such, the initiation of the crusades served to further
strengthen and consolidate papal power and authority throughout the Catholic world. Papal authority now fully
extended beyond the realm of religious doctrine and the appointment of religious officials; thanks to the
crusades, the papacy could be said to wield actual military power (beyond the forces directly controlled by the
Papal States). This realization of wide ranging Papal military power also brought about another change to the
Catholic Church and in the long run, to Christianity as a whole in Europe. This particular change was the
development of the doctrine of holy war and the militarization of Christianity. Indeed, by initiating the
crusades, the papacy essentially approved of violence on behalf of God and the organized use of force and
violence to spread the faith. While the intimate connection between Christianity and conquest had its
precedents well before the 11th century, the crusades did much to normalize such rhetoric of religious
conquest. One can understand the violent European religious conflicts of the 16th to 17th centuries as well as
the Spanish conquest of the Americas as having been based on crusader era notions of holy war. As the
textbook Western Civilizations Vol. 1 succinctly notes, crusading continued to dictate the terms of Western
Europeans attitude towards the wider world and even toward one another.

In addition to the normalization of violent rhetoric in Catholic Europe, the Crusades also impacted
Christianity in its entirety, especially with regard to relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
While Pope Urban II had envisioned the crusades as a means to heal the schism between the Eastern and
Western churches, by the end of the fourth crusade in 1204, the relationship between the two could hardly have
been worse. Misperceptions and mutual distrust by both the Byzantines and the Crusaders contributed to the
worsening of relations that culminated in the Sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204. This event
highlighted the exacerbating effects of the crusades on the so called Great Schism and the role these
expeditions ultimately played in cementing the division between Eastern and Western Christianity.

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