What was the reason behind the crusades and how many where they!!?

Answer 1

...So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.....

Answer 2

There were many reasons behind the Crusades. The first started when the Pope received a cry for help from some churches in Jerusalem. One of their holy relics, what legend said was the remains of Christ's cross was taken from them by the Muslim ruler and buried at the gates of Jerusalem so that anyone entering or leaving the city would tread on it.

Well there were a lot of younger sons at the time from noble families that wanted to make their own way in the world - and were causing border disputes. A holy war to win the Holy city free from a ruler that not only disrespected their faith, but also frequently kidnapped and enslaved Europeans on religious pilgrimage seemed like a good solution. It gave the younger sons something to do, it punished the people abusing and enslaving Christians and secured the main city of their faith, and also gave them a new economic resource. Muslims of the time were not following the edict to protect all people of the Book (the old testament) but were giving folks the choice of convert or die and after you were converted by the sword if you backslid to the faith of your fathers, they killed you anyway. Either that or they let your keep your faith and made you a slave. There is still slavery in the Middle East today and if you look up the History of the Marines you will see that the shores of Tripolli in their song refers to when they were sent in to try and rescue American sailors that were kidnapped and kept as slaves by they Bey of the Barbary coast - so it is not just Christian propaganda like some people like to claim.

And though sometimes other wars were called Crusades, there were 9 that were against the Muslims that were considered Holy and church sanctioned although in fact Europeans and the Middle East have been fighting pretty constantly since then too (Russians vs Ottomans, English in Afghanistan in the 19th century, the Barbary campaigns...)

Answer 3

The Crusades were expeditions undertaken, in fulfilment of a solemn vow made by Christian Kings and Nobles, to deliver the Holy Places of the Holy Land and most importantly Jerusalem, from Mohammedan rule.

Since the Middle Ages the meaning of the word crusade has been extended to include all wars undertaken in pursuance of a vow, and directed against infidels, i.e. against Mohammedans, pagans, heretics, or those under the ban of excommunication. The wars waged by the Spaniards against the Moors constituted a continual crusade from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; in the north of Europe crusades were organized against the Prussians and Lithuanians; the extermination of the Albigensian heresy was due to a crusade, and, in the thirteenth century the popes preached crusades against John Lackland and Frederick II.

It has been customary to describe the Crusades as eight in number:

the first, 1095-1101;
the second, headed by Louis VII, 1145-47;
the third, conducted by Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 1188-92;
the fourth, during which Constantinople was taken, 1204;
the fifth, which included the conquest of Damietta, 1217;
the sixth, in which Frederick II took part (1228-29); also Thibaud de Champagne and Richard of Cornwall (1239);
the seventh, led by St. Louis, 1249-52;
the eighth, also under St. Louis, 1270.
This division is arbitrary and excludes many important expeditions, among them those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In reality the Crusades continued until the end of the seventeenth century, the crusade of Lepanto occurring in 1571, that of Hungary in 1664, and the crusade of the Duke of Burgundy to Candia, in 1669. A more scientific division is based on the history of the Christian settlements in the East.

The origin of the Crusades is directly traceable to the moral and political condition of Western Christendom in the eleventh century. At that time Europe was divided into numerous states whose sovereigns were absorbed in tedious and petty territorial disputes while the emperor, in theory the temporal head of Christendom, was wasting his strength in the quarrel over Investitures. The popes alone had maintained a just estimate of Christian unity; they realized to what extent the interests of Europe were threatened by the Byzantine Empire and the Mohammedan tribes, and they alone had a foreign policy whose traditions were formed under Leo IX and Gregory VII. The reform effected in the Church and the papacy through the influence of the monks of Cluny had increased the prestige of the Roman pontiff in the eyes of all Christian nations; hence none but the pope could inaugurate the international movement that culminated in the Crusades. But despite his eminent authority the pope could never have persuaded the Western peoples to arm themselves for the conquest of the Holy Land had not the immemorial relations between Syria and the West favoured his design. Europeans listened to the voice of Urban II because their own inclination and historic traditions impelled them towards the Holy Sepulchre.

For a complete history of the Crusades, from the Christian perspective I hasten to add, go to the link provided.

Answer 4

At least nine crusades in the Levant/Middle East, and 7 more in other parts of the world.

For the reasons, read : "Crusades" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

Answer 5

They wanted to be rich.

Answer 6

Jihad in reverse.
how many?
a few.