A quiz question · medium
On a November day in 1095 a pope preached a sermon in central France that started two centuries of warfare in the Holy Land. He promised the audience full remission of sins if they took up the cross. Which pope?
Urban II preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. Gregory VII is the pope of the Investiture Controversy — he made Emperor Henry IV stand barefoot in the snow at Canossa in 1077. Innocent III, a century after Urban, was the pope of the catastrophic Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204 instead of going to Jerusalem. Clement V, two centuries later, was the Avignon pope who suppressed the Knights Templar in 1312.
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The Crusades The Crusades were a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Catholic Church, primarily aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim control, between 1095 and 1291. They reshaped the medieval Mediterranean and produced two centuries of Christian-Muslim military conflict.