«Crusading to the east was dying, and its institutions were following suit. In the early fourteenth century the Knights Templar were destroyed in a cynical and systematic attack led by the French government of Philip IV “the Fair” (see chapter 11), whose ministers accused Templar leaders of blasphemy, sexual deviance, and gross misconduct.43 Although many writers from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth fantasized about a new age in which the spirit of 1096–99 would once again descend, and all Christendom could reclaim Jerusalem, it would be 1917 before another western general could walk through the gates of the holy city as conqueror, when Edmund Allenby strolled in to take command on behalf of the Allies, who had driven out the Ottomans in the First World War.
Yet at the same time, crusading continued, and in some cases even in its original form against non-Christian “infidels.” The Teutonic Knights continued their war on pagans in the Baltic well into the fifteenth century. The Knights Hospitaller set up an international headquarters on Rhodes, where they fought running sea battles, policing the Mediterranean against Muslim pirates from Asia Minor and north Africa, under the guise of a holy war. And when the Ottoman Empire began to sweep toward eastern Europe, Christian knights rallied to the cause with crosses pinned to their plate armor. But just as often, crusading became a badge to wear to give any war fought by a Christian power an added gloss of legitimacy. In 1258 when Pope Alexander IV wished his allies (including the Republic of Venice) to make war on Alberigo of Romano, ruler of Treviso, he sent a papal legate to preach a crusade against Alberigo in St. Mark’s Square—a parade at which the legate produced a bevy of naked women whom he claimed had been sexually assaulted by the Trevisan. Soon after, in the 1260s, Simon de Montfort the younger, son of the Cathar crusader of the same name, declared his rebellion against King Henry III of England to be a crusade.* A century later, Henry III’s great-great-grandson John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, claimed to be a crusader when he went to fight on the Iberian Peninsula in the hope of seizing the crown of Castile in the name of his wife, daughter of the murdered king Pedro “the Cruel.” In the 1380s the English bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, led a crusade to Flanders, which was supposedly to wipe out supporters of an antipope, Clement VII, but was really a side campaign in the long-running Anglo-French struggle known as the Hundred Years War. The fifteenth century saw five crusades launched against the Hussites—followers of a Bohemian heretic called Jan Hus, an early dissident theologian of what would come to be known as the Reformation (see chapter 16). And in 1493, the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus sailed back from his first encounter with the Americas announcing in terms strikingly reminiscent of crusader rhetoric his discovery of a land of great wealth and many pagans, which could be claimed on behalf of all Christendom.
And this was far from the last mention of the C-word. Crusading outlived the Middle Ages, and remains today a favored trope of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and Islamist terrorists, all of whom cleave to the decidedly shaky idea that it has defined Christian and Muslim relations for a millennium. They are not right, but they are not original in their error either. Crusading—a bastard hybrid of religion and violence, adopted as a vehicle for papal ambition but eventually allowed to run as it pleased, where it pleased, and against whom it pleased, was one of the Middle Ages’ most successful and enduringly poisonous ideas. Its survival is a sign of both its genius and of the readiness of people both then and now to throw themselves into conflict in the name of a higher cause.»
Powers and Thrones
Dan Jones
Here, Read This 