RenegadePaddy wrote:Crusades are a very poor example, they were about land and wealth, and the "useful" outlet of the excess landless nobility - not faith - to the vast, vast majority.
Go look up the numbers of converts to both sides, mercenaries, and those who changed allegiance more than once. Religion played very little part (ironic, I am aware)
I'm not saying that there weren't other significant factors, or that the motives of those who preached crusade
were quite as spiritual as the rhetoric would have you believe, yet I do know that the motivation of a significant number of peasants and lower nobles was a religious one. I completely disagree. The nobility was a minority, and discounting the desire for plunder the vast majority were stirred into action by religious preaching.
Have just lifted this section from Wikipedia (have read Riley-Smith before, though, and very much agree with the arguments stated - not just a google to find the evidence I require).
Spiritual versus earthly rewards
Older scholarship on this issue asserts that the bulk of the participants were likely younger sons of nobles who were dispossessed of land and influenced by the practise of primogeniture, and poorer knights who were looking for a new life in the wealthy east.
However, current research suggests that although Urban promised crusaders spiritual as well as material benefit, the primary aim of most crusaders was spiritual rather than material gain. Moreover, recent research by Jonathan Riley-Smith instead shows that the crusade was an immensely expensive undertaking, affordable only to those knights who were already fairly wealthy, such as Hugh of Vermandois and Robert Curthose, who were relatives of the French and English royal families, and Raymond of Toulouse, who ruled much of southern France. Even then, these wealthy knights had to sell much of their land to relatives or the church before they could afford to participate. Their relatives, too, often had to impoverish themselves in order to raise money for the crusade. As Riley-Smith says, "there really is no evidence to support the proposition that the crusade was an opportunity for spare sons to make themselves scarce in order to relieve their families of burdens".[7]
As an example of spiritual over earthly motivation, Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin settled previous quarrels with the church by bequeathing their land to local clergy. The charters denoting these transactions were written by clergymen, not the knights themselves, and seem to idealize the knights as pious men seeking only to fulfill a vow of pilgrimage.
Further, poorer knights (minores, as opposed to the greater knights, the principes) could go on crusade only if they expected to survive off of almsgiving, or if they could enter the service of a wealthier knight, as was the case with Tancred, who agreed to serve his uncle Bohemund. Later crusades would be organized by wealthy kings and emperors, or would be supported by special crusade taxes.
Not saying religion was the sole motivation, but to say it played no part is ludicrous.
