Abstract
The Crusades live on in the popular imagination as a movement of pious western knights seeking adventure, glory, and salvation. Forsaking home and country, they journeyed east, where they met, and defeated, the Infidel. At least that is how people tend to remember them. We have a vague recollection of Richard the Lionhearted and St. Louis (though we have trouble remembering which number he was), and maybe we remember Barbarossa, too. We know the Crusades took place in the Holy Land, and vaguely recall some related campaigns in Europe, but the only specific battle site that we can name with any certainty is Jerusalem. What we tend to forget, or overlook, is the toll in human lives on all sides of the Crusades, the episodes of violence that could at times be shocking, even to medieval sensibilities. And rarely do we ever ask ourselves the hard questions about the morality of it all, of the use of religion as a pretext for war and for violence against civilian populations. Adapted from the source document.