How Wide Is a Crusade

Historians of the crusades have argued for decades over how broadly the term should be defined, a debate with real consequences for what counts as a crusade at all and how many there ultimately were. Jonathan Riley-Smith and other scholars associated with what is sometimes called the pluralist position argue that any campaign meeting the crusading movement's specific institutional criteria, papal call, the taking of a vow, and the grant of crusading indulgences, counts as a crusade regardless of its target, which extends the category well beyond the eastern Mediterranean campaigns to include the Baltic, Iberian Reconquista and internal European crusades. A narrower, more traditionalist reading, associated with earlier generations of crusade scholarship, restricts the term more closely to the sequence of expeditions aimed at recovering or defending Jerusalem and the Holy Land specifically.

Christopher Tyerman's scholarship has further complicated the picture by questioning how coherently contemporaries themselves understood crusading as a single unified concept even within its own medieval period, arguing the idea of a crusade as one continuous movement was itself partly a later historiographical construction imposed on a more varied and improvised set of medieval military and religious undertakings.