A series of religious wars launched from Western Europe between 1095 and 1291 to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim rule — establishing Crusader states in the Levant for nearly two centuries, devastating Jewish communities in Europe en route, transforming the papacy, enriching the Italian city-states, and producing a memory that continues to structure political rhetoric on multiple sides.
Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 with a speech at Clermont that no one recorded verbatim. The response was unlike anything he could have anticipated — tens of thousands of people walking or riding toward Jerusalem with crosses sewn to their clothes. They took the city in 1099 and massacred its inhabitants. The Crusader states they founded survived for nearly two centuries. The cultural memory they produced has survived nearly a millennium. The gap between what historians know about the Crusades and what contemporary political rhetoric claims is one of the largest in modern historical consciousness.