section_path: High Middle Ages/Crusades
section_name: Crusades
paragraph_text: Crusades
  
  Clashes with secular powers led to the militarisation of the papacy. In response to a Byzantine appeal for military aid against the Seljuk Turks, Urban II (pope 1088–99) proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. He declared the liberation of Jerusalem as its ultimate goal, and offered indulgence —the remission of sins—to all who took part. Tens of thousands of commoners formed loosely-organised bands to march to the east. They lived by looting, and attacked Jewish communities. Few of them reached Anatolia, and those who succeeded were annihilated by the Turks. The official crusade departed in 1096 under the command of prominent aristocrats such as Godfrey of Bouillon (d. 1100) and Raymond of Saint-Gilles (d. 1105). The crusaders defeated the Turks in major battles at Dorylaeum and Antioch, allowing the Byzantines to recover western Anatolia. The westerners consolidated their conquests in the Middle East into crusader states, but their security depended on external military assistance (which led to further crusades). Muslim resistance was raised by ambitious warlords such as Saladin (d. 1193), who captured Jerusalem in 1187. New crusades prolonged the crusader states' existence for another century, until the last strongholds fell to the Mamluks of Egypt in 1291.
  
  The papacy also used the crusading ideology in other theaters of war. The Iberian crusades became fused with the Reconquista, and reduced Al-Andalus to the Emirate of Granada by 1248. The German and Scandinavian rulers' expansion against the neighbouring pagan tribes developed into the Northern Crusades, forcing the assimilation of a number of Slavic, Baltic and Finnic peoples into the culture of Catholic Europe. The Fourth Crusade was diverted from the Holy Land to Constantinople and captured the city in 1204, setting up a Latin Empire in the east. Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1259–82), ruler of a Byzantine rump state, recaptured the city in 1261 but parts of Greece remained under western rule. The Albigensian Crusade, against the Cathars of Occitania, provided an opportunity for the French monarchy to expand into the region.
  
  With its unique ceremonies and institutions, the crusading movement became a leading element of medieval life. A crusader oath could be fulfilled with a cash payment beginning in 1213, which gave rise to the sale of plenary indulgences by church authorities. The crusades fused monastic life with military service in the framework of a new type of monastic order, the military order, including the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights. The Teutonic Knights focused much of their activity in the Baltic, where they founded their own state in 1226.