The first crusade and its role in the formation of the "society of persecution"

Prior to the Millennium, the papacy sought to escape from the power of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. This struggle for investment ended in the victory of the Church. Ambitious and ambitious Pope Gregory VII started the greatest reform in the scale of ecclesial reconstruction, named after his name the Gregorian. On the one hand, this pontiff tried to muffle the popular criticism of the clergy and restore the shaken authority of the churchmen by introducing celibacy and creating new monastic orders with a severe charter. On the other hand, the pope tried to curb the increasingly multiplying class of landless (because of the right of a major) knights. The younger sons of the feudal lords, being by the right of birth by the people of the sword, represented a "slow-motion mine" for society. Declared "Days of the peace of God" - bans to conduct military operations on certain days - saved the situation a little. These factors - the desire to strengthen the piety before the clergy and a huge mass of unruly armed people - and prepared the first crusade.

After the mutual curses exchanged between the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople in 1053, the two Churches finally separated. However, when the Seljuks invaded the Byzantine Empire, Basil Alexis I Comnenus asked the Western European rulers for military assistance. Such a miserable position of Byzantium was very much in the hands of the papacy. It was possible not only to send a huge mass of chivalry beyond the sea, but also to strengthen the authority of the Church, leading the first crusade. But for this it was necessary to turn the usual secular conflict for the lands into a holy war for the Tomb of the Lord. However, to become the head of this military campaign, ousting the excommunicated Henry IV of Germany and Philip I of France, it was necessary to make one important theological sweep.

Until this time, the Church called murder by sin and war a matter of sinful, or at least lesser evil. Now before her was the task of calling "black white" and most directly get involved in the bloodshed. Using the image from the Revelation of John about the struggle of the archangel and the angelic army with the army of Antichrist, the papacy of Rome began talking about righteous wars. So in the autumn of 1095 in Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand in France) at the church cathedral, Pope Urban II, the sacred first crusade was declared. And then the theologians substantiated this with allegations that depriving the life of the infidel, no murder is committed, but on the contrary, the eradication of evil takes place.

Crusader troops on the way to the Holy Land distinguished themselves by large-scale Jewish pogroms, and the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 led to such a massacre that, according to Fulko Chartrsky's recollections, "the feet plunged into the blood of the killed wives and children on the ankles." And above all this, the cry of the "Christian" army rattled: "This is pleasing to God!". This campaign turned the medieval foundations of society. The way of slipping to a practically totalitarian "society of persecution" began, according to Murray's apt expression, when one group after another was excluded from the society (declared enemies of God) by certain groups of the population: Jews, religious dissidents, Orthodox, lepers, etc. It is difficult to say exactly how many crusades there were, because not all of them were officially declared papal (there were 8 such people), but only inspired with sermons.

One thing is certain: from the time of the first invasion of the Holy Land, the murder of the one whom the Roman Catholic Church will point to as an enemy was no longer considered a sin, but the highest religious virtue. In the 13th century, when the first crusade was launched into Christian lands (against the Albigensians), tolerance was declared a sin. At the IV Lateran Council in 1215, Pope Innocent III declared the enemies of the Lord to be schismatics, that is, Orthodox Christians. And already in 1232, Gregory IX urged the good Catholics to sew a cross and go to war against Novgorod and Pskov. The military campaign continued with varying success from 1232 to 1240, while the Battle of Lake Peipsi in April 1242 (called the Battle of Ice) did not put an end to the claims of the Pope to the East Slavic lands. It is difficult to imagine the fate of the Slavic peoples if the crusades to Russia ended differently, because in his bull (9.12.1237), Gregory IX urges the Crusaders to ruthlessly "destroy the enemies of the cross."