Weren’t the crusades really just about wealth and land?
totentanzlied-deactivated201602 answered:
Maybe for some Templar nobles and some Hospitaller nobles but overall, no – you honestly believe the average, crusading peasant earned any bit of wealth or land from his battles?
If you do, you’re a bit of a tool – they were nothing more than lower-class Catholic peasants who followed the call after being demanded to or willingly choosing to; there were a number of vagrant battle-monks that crusading armies employed that went with no pay sometimes and only went for the purpose of fighting for God.
Half of these soldiers, men-at-arms, of crusading armies became nothing more than standing soldiers and standing guards after the battles were won and cities, taken – Lords became owners of land and wealth, and even then, continued to place a lot of inward and external focus on religion and nothing else; only a few Templar lords for the most part blatantly showed they had no interest in nothing but wealth and land.
Sometimes the conditions men-at-arms in crusading armies would leave to fight for were far worse than those they had at home, and they knew it’d be so – they merely desired to fight for God.
Goes on and on after that, really – the children’s crusade? Certainly not in the name of avarice or influence considering neither ever had anything to do with the people involved or with the result of what was done; Barbarossa led nearly 100,000 men across thousands of miles on foot because he believed he was traveling to fight for God only to have them all fall by the hands of Orthodox Greeks.
Richard the Lionheart went to restore Catholic power after the rise of Salah ad’Din in the Savant and the “Holy Lands” and continued fighting for years across the area with English soldiers and other soldiers from Catholic nations alike, to never really earn any sense of true conquest or individual power – they’d win, then lose, then win, then lose; the Crusades were a back-and-forth contest of religious and cultural dominance between Muslims and Christians.
