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The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to recover Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Islamic rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the recovery of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of Crusades were fought, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine emperor Alexios I against the Seljuk Turks and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe, there was an enthusiastic response. The first Crusaders had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations, opportunities for renown, and economic or political advantage. Later crusades were conducted by generally more organized armies, sometimes led by a king. All were granted papal indulgences. Initial successes established four Crusader states: the County of Edessa; the Principality of Antioch; the Kingdom of Jerusalem; and the County of Tripoli. The Crusader presence remained in the region in some form until the fall of Acre in 1291. After this, there were no further crusades to recover the Holy Land. Concurrent military activities in the Iberian Peninsula against the Moors and in northeastern Europe against pagan West Slav, Baltic, and Finnic peoples (the Northern Crusades) have also been called crusades – sometimes retroactively, long after the event had ended – due to the facts that they also had central approval by the Roman Catholic Church and that the military campaigns were organized in comparable fashion, with often similar rhetoric, symbolism, and banners as applied during the campaigns in the Middle East. Other church-sanctioned campaigns called crusades were fought against heretical Christian sects (precursors of proto-Protestantism), against the Ottoman Empire, and for political reasons. Unsanctioned by the church, there were also several Popular Crusades of ordinary citizens. Proclaimed a crusade in 1123, the struggle between the Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula eventually became better known as the Reconquista in European historiography, and only ended in 1492 with the fall of the Muslim Emirate of Granada. From 1147, campaigns in Northern Europe against pagan tribes were considered crusades. In 1199, Pope Innocent III began the practice of proclaiming crusades against Christian heretics. In the 13th century, crusading was used against the Cathars in Languedoc and against Bosnia; this practice continued against the Waldensians in Savoy and the Hussites in Bohemia in the 15th century and against Protestants in the 16th. From the mid-14th century, crusading rhetoric was used in response to the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and ended around 1699 with the War of the Holy League.

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