![]() ![]() Like other recent historians, Nicholson redefines crusading to denote ‘any military expedition originated, authorised and organised by the papacy any expedition which its participants depicted as a crusade … or any instance of penitential warfare, holy war which justified fighting in defence of the Christian faith with the expectation of spiritual reward’. Helen Nicholson’s project in Women and the Crusades is to consider all dimensions of women’s participation, both on campaign and on the home front. As they failed in their primary goals – to recapture territory and convert Muslims – the crusaders’ ideal evolved towards the purification of society through penance and imitation of Christ in his Passion, especially in the very lands where he suffered. ![]() But recent scholarship has revisited crusading from new perspectives, seeing in the movement not merely a long series of failed foreign wars, but a penitential practice that deeply shaped European Christendom and involved the whole of society, men and women alike. In the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4, the Venetians diverted the army from Egypt to sack Constantinople, while the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 devastated a flourishing Occitanian culture. Departing crusaders routinely attacked Jews, giving them the options of slaughter or forced baptism (many preferred collective suicide). Aside from the bitter legacy of hate they left in the Middle East, they also wrought havoc in Europe. F ew medieval enterprises have been as romanticised or as vilified as the Crusades.
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