3 Insights
“Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away. Power is exercised from innumerable points in the interplay of non egalitarian and mobile relations.” — Michel Foucault
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when we whisper together, are quiet and meaningless.” — T.S. Eliot
What I Learned this Week
The term Crusade might sound fixed and official to us now, but it actually evolved over time. During the First Crusade, no one called it a “crusade.” People used words like iter—Latin for “journey”—or peregrinatio, a spiritual pilgrimage. That’s how they saw it: not a war, but a sacred mission.
It wasn’t until the early 1100s that a new term appeared—crucesignatus, or “one signed by the cross.” This marked a shift in identity. These weren’t just pilgrims anymore; they were warriors carrying a divine symbol.
The Crusades
The Crusades are basically a series of religious wars endorsed by the Christian Church that lasted for almost two centuries—yes, TWO hunderd years. These were fought primarily between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. As always when a war happened, questionable motives were simmering beneath the religious justification.
Because this topic is so vast let’s focus on the starting point, where it all began.
In 1095 AD, Emperor Alexios Komnenos reached out to Pope Urban II, asking for military help to push the Seljuk Turks out of Anatolia. What Alexios probably had in mind were mercenaries—paid, experienced fighters who could match the discipline and skill of his own imperial troops.
But what Alexios didn’t anticipate was that Pope Urban had something much bigger in mind. The idea of reclaiming Jerusalem and the Holy Lands had already been on the Pope’s radar well before the First Crusade was officially called later that year at Piedmont. Some sources suggest Urban may have misunderstood Alexios’ request—others believe he simply took advantage of it. Either way, the Pope saw this as a chance to bring together the fighting European barons and send their aggression toward a religious goal. It also helped get them out of Western Europe. From the beginning, Jerusalem was the true target. The Crusaders believed it was their duty to “liberate” it.
Urban’s movement took public form at the Council of Piacenza, where he first received Alexios’s appeal. Later that year, at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Urban made his famous speech—delivered outdoors to accommodate the crowd. Though the council mainly focused on church reforms, his sermon to the public was a turning point. He called on Christians to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from the Seljuks. That speech ignited the First Crusade.
What is interesting about the First Crusade is how something that started as a response to a cry for help became a turning point in world history. It was messy, driven by contradictions: brutal violence in the name of God, idealism mixed with greed, spiritual longing tangled up in politics.
A fascinating statement from the book The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading by Jonathan Riley-Smith is: “The achievement of the crusaders becomes even more remarkable—in fact it is quite incredible—when one considers that soldiers already weakened by starvation, who certainly appreciated the importance of taking food before battle since they took care to give their horses extra rations, deliberately fasted before their more important engagements. One wonders how they managed to fight at all.”
This line captures the sheer intensity of the crusaders’ religious conviction. These weren’t just soldiers fighting for land—they were believers willing to weaken themselves physically for what they saw as a sacred cause.
The fact that they fasted before major battles, despite being on the brink of collapse, says a lot about how spiritual belief overrode even basic survival logic.
Reflections
Where is the line between true sacrifice and recklessness?
The Real Con 123