The symbol evoked the 4th-century Roman ruler and first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. Their acceptance of the cross also testified to their recognition of its spiritual power and their own sanctification. In public view, and drawing on far older precedents, they voluntarily accepted a cloth cross, which they wore to publicise their vow to fight the armed enemies of the Christian faithful. This essay addresses the roles that they played in making themselves and their weapons worthy of engaging in holy war, and explores the curious relationship between mercy and their weapons, in particular the dagger.Ĭrusaders, a term derived from crux, the Latin word for cross, were men who ‘took the cross’ or, rather, received the sign of the cross. As warriors, the crusaders prepared themselves in carefully orchestrated and choreographed ways before departing Europe and going into battle. The Christian soldiers who fought in these expeditions were both pilgrims and warriors. In time, military campaigns against dissenting Christians and enemies of the political aspirations of the Church in Europe also received papal validation as ‘crusades’, which is to say, as just and holy wars. Christians took up arms with similar justifications elsewhere as well, such as Iberia and the eastern Baltic region. In fact, this situation was what prompted the First Crusade, whose recovery of Jerusalem and establishment of new Christian polities, the Crusader States, made it the most successful of all these wars. Furthermore, they resented the fact that more recently Islamicised Turkic peoples continued to press militarily on the remaining independent realms in the eastern Mediterranean, in particular, the Byzantine Empire, a situation that reached crisis proportions in the late 11th century. The spiritual leaders of the Catholic population, from the popes on down, regarded these expeditions as just and holy wars, in part because they considered the earlier Muslim conquests as unjust incursions into and occupation of Christian lands. From 1096 until 1271, Christians from western Europe waged eight major wars and many smaller military operations in the Near East and North Africa that scholars now call the crusades.

Medieval bridal