The Crusades

Catalog description

This course is a survey of the Crusades. Beginning with a brief overview of biblical ideas of holy war and the political situation in Europe around the end of the eleventh century, it will examine the course of this movement from Pope Urban II’s first call to the Crusades in 1095 through the Crusades of the thirteenth-century via the accounts of Christians, Muslims, and Jews who experienced these movements first-hand. This course will also consider how the Crusades continue to influence modern politics as well as how they are presented in popular media, and will grapple with the idea of what is at stake when history is misreprented.