CCR has treated the Crusades both as a civilizational encounter in their own right and as the moment at which a distinct “Western” identity was forged. Peter O’Brien’s “Islamic Civilization and (Western) Modernity” in v65 works through the Crusades in detail: Urban II’s 1095 launch of the First Crusade; the Latin capture of Jerusalem in 1099; the failure to take Aleppo or Damascus; Roger of Antioch’s defeat at the Field of Blood (1119); the Second Crusade (1147-48) ending in fiasco; Nur al-Din and Saladin reuniting the Muslims and repossessing Jerusalem in 1187; the Third Crusade (Richard I, Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II); the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204; the Frankish control of Jerusalem from 1228 to 1244; the Mamluk expulsion culminating in the Fall of Acre on May 18, 1291; and the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.

In v84, a long article on “Crusading as Philosophical Construct” treats the Crusades as a philosophical project of Pope Urban II, St. Bernard, and Peter the Venerable. It argues that the Crusades were constructed at the intersection of holy war and pilgrimage, in a “proto-Europe” of plural polities, against a Byzantine East and an Islamic Near East. Jerusalem held a privileged symbolic place that unified otherwise divergent motivations.

Source summaries:

  • v65 (Fall 2011) — O’Brien’s v65 article contains the most extensive CCR discussion of the Crusades as civilizational encounter. (v65)
  • v68 (Spring 2013) — Barbara Onnis, “Some Overlooked Realities of Jewish Life under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain.” (v68)
  • v84 (Spring 2021) — “Crusading as Philosophical Construct: Thoughts and Actions of Pope Urban II, St. Bernard, and Peter the Venerable” examines the Crusade as a constructed unifying idea in a plural proto-European political space. (v84)