Antonio Machado 2010

Pilgrimages and Crusades, understood in the long span of history, have followed one another as a state of permanent war, interrupted only by fleeting periods of peace. A consequence of militant Christianity—mirrored at times by its Islamic and Hebrew counterparts—these conflicts have entrenched a historical rift between East and West.

For the medieval Crusades continued into the modern world. The very term “crusade,” despite a millennium of existence, remains ambiguous—even among specialists—and often subject to manipulation. As a result, we can distinguish three distinct periods in the chronology of the Crusades:

A classical period, stretching from Pope Urban II’s cry of “God wills it!” in 1095 to the premature death of Saint Louis in 1270, when the campaign to liberate Jerusalem unfolded through eight expeditions, in accordance with the doctrine of holy war deeply rooted in the feudal imagination.

A modern period, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the second siege of Vienna in 1683, during which new political and religious realities distanced the redemptive idea from its medieval origins, giving rise to new interpretations. The knight-errant took the place of the crusading paladin, just as chivalric orders replaced military ones.

And a contemporary period, which extends to our own day in the form of a perversion of the original myth—appropriated by dictators to legitimize their wars and regimes, by extremists to justify their acts of violence, and even by the subliminal language of advertising.

Through this dynamic perspective, tracing the evolution of the term and the transformations of its meaning, this book advocates for conceptual precision and a visual history of the modern Crusades. In this renewed framework—through the dialogue between text and image—I will examine, across its full historical continuum, the militia of Christ and the crusade of God. Merely clamorous images, perhaps, for the silent reader.