Medieval Crusades' Legacy Weaponized in Modern Politics and Culture Wars

Nearly a thousand years ago, Pope Urban II stood before a crowd of clergy and nobles in November 1095 and delivered a speech that would reshape the medieval world. He called for a Holy War to reclaim Jerusalem from Muslim control, promising those who took up arms complete forgiveness of their sins and eternal salvation. The gambit worked. Over the following centuries, millions of Europeans—princes and peasants alike—would march toward the Holy Land, driven by religious fervor, the promise of redemption, and the papacy's carefully constructed narrative of Christian civilization under siege. About 35 to 40 percent of them would never return home.

The Crusades were, at their core, a masterclass in how religious language could be weaponized for political ends. The papacy was locked in a power struggle with the Holy Roman Emperor, and when Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos appealed for military assistance against Seljuk Turkish advances in 1095, Urban saw an opportunity to demonstrate papal authority by rallying Europe's fractured nobility around a single cause. Medieval Europe was already a landscape of constant warfare, punctuated by droughts, famines, and plagues. Belief in the approaching end times was widespread. Urban's call to liberate the Church of God from Muslim hands offered something more powerful than land or treasure: it offered salvation itself, and a chance to participate in God's work on earth.

What followed was unprecedented bloodshed. A disorganized wave of peasants, low-ranking knights, and preachers set out first in 1096, massacring Jewish communities in the Rhineland—one of medieval Europe's earliest organized pogroms—before most were killed or turned back. A better-organized force of European nobility eventually assembled and, after a grueling campaign marked by disease, starvation, and exhaustion, captured Jerusalem in 1099. When they took the city, Crusaders slaughtered thousands of inhabitants—Muslims and Jews alike—unable or unwilling to distinguish between them. The conquest was swift but hollow; most Crusaders died of illness or hunger rather than in battle, and many simply abandoned the cause and returned home.

The Holy Land itself was far more complex than Urban's rhetoric suggested. It was a polyglot society divided among competing powers: Sunni Seljuk Turkish warlords and the Shi'a Fatimid Caliphate. Local populations took years to recognize the Crusades as an ideological project rather than another military raid. The Crusaders did achieve swift victories in cities like Edessa and Antioch, but their hold on the region was always fragile. By 1291, when the city of Acre fell to Mamluk warriors, the Crusader presence in the Holy Land had effectively ended, though later crusades would be called against Ottoman advances in Eastern Europe and during the Reconquista campaigns to retake the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule.

What is striking is not that the Crusades happened, but that their symbolic weight has only grown in the centuries since. In 2001, President George W. Bush described the War on Terror as a "crusade," a term that immediately inflamed tensions and played directly into the hands of those who wanted to frame the conflict as a religious war between civilizations. Osama bin Laden had already been using Crusade imagery in his propaganda, invoking the legacy of Saladin, the Kurdish commander who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 and who became, over time, a symbol of resistance to Western colonialism and imperialism.

Today, Crusade symbolism has become a calling card for far-right movements across the West. The Latin phrase "deus vult"—God wills it—appears in the rhetoric and even on the bodies of contemporary extremists, from mass murderer Anders Breivik to Germany's Alternative for Germany party. France's far-right Reconquête party takes its name directly from the medieval Reconquista. In the United States, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has "deus vult" tattooed on his arm and a Crusader cross on his chest, and in his 2020 book "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free," he explicitly compared the present moment to the 11th century, framing contemporary domestic and foreign policy conflicts—from the war in Iran to opposition to "leftism"—in the language of holy war.

But experts warn that these modern invocations drastically oversimplify what the Crusades actually were. The medieval campaigns were not simply a clash between Christianity and Islam. They were deeply antisemitic from the start, targeting Jewish communities across Europe. They involved violence against other Christian groups, including the Cathars in France and the Byzantine Christians themselves. They included cross-religious alliances and complex political negotiations that defy the simple civilizational narrative now being deployed. When contemporary politicians and extremists invoke the Crusades, they are not merely reaching back into history—they are selectively editing it, stripping away its contradictions and horrors to construct a usable past that justifies present conflicts as inevitable religious struggles. The real Crusades were violent, destructive, and far messier than the symbol has become.