The Crusades Persuasive Essay

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Poor nutrition, plagues, sexism, and social classes: these are only four of the prices of civilization that we, along with our ancestors, have faced. War is another major source of destruction, but also cooperation or even the creation of a new identity. War has the power to “make or break” a civilization, completely changing the course of history. No historian can ignore wars due to their influence. Merely one example of these influential wars are the Crusades. So, what is a Crusade? Depending on the historian, a Crusade can be defined as an official military expedition sanctioned by the pope and launched from Europe, of which there are eight or nine, or a Crusade can be defined as the offering of the Crusade indulgence. Through the latter …show more content…
Let’s look at each of these factors in turn. In the case of motivation by religion, some historians make the point that Pope Urban II indicated at the Council of Clermont in 1095 that crusaders would be coming to the aid of Christians in the Byzantine Empire. He reported in his speech that the people of Persia, who were actually Turks and not Persians, had taken so much land from the Greek empire that it would take months to walk through it. It is also true that, at this time, the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, called for the help of Christians in the West since the Seljuk Turks of Central Asia, having recently become Muslim, seized the lands of Anatolia in Asia Minor. The pope promoted myths of Muslim atrocities by saying that churches were destroyed, turned into mosques, and Muslims had killed Christians in disturbing ways, most notably by cutting their abdomens open, taking a part of their intestines out, tying the intestines to a stake, and forcing them to walk until all their intestines fell out and they collapsed. An additional horrific scene described by the pope was of Muslims forcing the people in conquered lands to stretch their necks to see if their heads could be cut off with one stroke of a

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