The Crusades: Relics and Miracles

During the High Middle Ages the Cult of Relics played an important role in the the Pilgrimage movement and the Crusades, and in the creation of the Latin East. This Mediaeval cultural phenomenon manifested itself across much of the life of Catholic and Orthodox Christian, Islamic and Judaic societies in the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe in that epoch, affecting religion, ideology, both war and peace,politics, diplomacy, economics, commerce and the arts. Relics helped to construct cultural bonds and mediated in interconfessional relations between these otherwise separate worlds, remote each from the other.

Indeed, the Crusades catalyzed the processes, events and factors which came together to form the comprehensive nature of that bonding phenomenon. The Pilgrim and Crusader movements themselves originated from within the phenomenon and by the same token were dependent largely on it. The history of the Crusades was closely aligned to that of the most important living relic of Christianity - the Holy Land and its precious sacred sites and treasures. At the root of the Crusading ideology of the Latin West lay the liberation, protection and worship of the Holy Sepulchre and the Christian sanctuaries and relics in Syria and Palestine. These objects of veneration became at once motive, task, purpose, and sacred vow of the new, armed Pilgrimage. The Crusaders even adopted one of the most precious relics of Christianity - the Holy Cross of the Lord’s Passion - as their sacred symbol and emblem.