The main reason behind the fall of the Byzantines was the devastation left by the first campaigns passing by Byzantium (the city of Constantinople), the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and subsequent campaigns were turned towards it.
The Crusades were a series of military conflicts of a religious nature that most of the Christian countries of Europe fought against what they considered external and internal threats. The Crusades were directed against a number of ethnic and religious groups that included Muslims, Slavic pagans, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, and political enemies of the popes. The Crusaders were making promises and leniency. Estimates put the number of victims who died in the Crusades between one to three million. [5] [6] The goal of the Crusades was originally to seize Jerusalem and the Holy Land that was under Muslim control, and that base was originally launched in response to an invitation from the Eastern Byzantine Orthodox Empire to help them against the expansion of Muslims and the Seljuks in Anatolia.
The term Crusades is also used to describe contemporary and subsequent wars by conducting campaigns to the sixteenth century in the regions that were not limited to the Levant but also targeted the pagans in northern Europe, what the Christian belief considered to be "heretics", and the peoples subject to the prohibition of expulsion for a mixture of religious reasons. , Economic, and political reasons. The rivalries that erupted between Christians and Muslims alike to obtain powers led to the emergence of alliances between religious factions against their opponents, such as the Christian alliance with the Sultanate of Rome during the Fifth Crusade.
The influence of the Crusades was far-reaching both politically and economically, as well as social influences, some of which persisted in contemporary times. Because of the internal conflicts between Christian kingdoms and political forces, some of the Crusader missions were diverted from the original goal, such as the Fourth Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Constantinople and the Christian division of the Byzantine Empire between the Venetians and the Crusaders. The sixth crusade was the first crusade without the blessing of the Pope, setting a precedent that political rulers began a crusade without referring to the head of the Catholic Church.
Modern historians have widely differing opinions about the Crusaders. [7] For some, their behavior was inconsistent with the stated goals and the implicit moral authority of the papacy, as evidenced by the fact that the pope sometimes forbade the Crusaders as an ecclesiastical. Crusaders were often plundered while traveling, and their commanders generally retained control of the captured lands instead of returning them to the Byzantines. During the popular Crusade, many Jews were killed in what is now the Rhineland massacre. Constantinople was occupied during the Fourth Crusade. However, the Crusades had a profound impact on Western civilization: the Italian city-states obtained significant concessions in exchange for aid to the Crusaders and the existing colonies that allowed trade with the eastern markets even during the Ottoman period, which allowed Genoa and Venice to flourish. [8] The Crusaders strengthened the collective identity of the Latin Church under the leadership of the papacy. They served as a source for novels of heroism, equestrianism, and piety that fostered romance, philosophy, and medieval literature. [9] The results of the remaining solid campaigns were that they increased the separation and separation of Western Christianity from its eastern counterpart, [10] although the goal of sending the Catholic Church to the first campaign was theoretical in principle to fulfill the call by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus to help repel the Seljuk invasions of Byzantium
