Today, a lot of people in the West have a negative view of the Crusades for a variety of reasons. When did the perception of the Crusades change?
Crusades were a demonstration of the power of the papacy and the Catholic church. They were tools used to combat heresy after the late twelfth-century and during the Hundred Years War and the Papal Schism crusades had lost a lot of their moral authority. It has been argued, quite persuasively, that crusades, and excommunication, became political tools used in regional rivalries. See the Albigensian Crusade for a particularly egregious example although this only got worse in later periods.
Crusading in the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries became almost solely the preserve of the House of Burgundy who maintained a long tradition of crusading. Other nations, such as England and France, were involved in serious conflicts (both internally and against one another over the course of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries). In the fifteenth-century a crusading army raised in England to fight the Hussites by Cardinal Beaufort. This army was re-directed as a response to the fall of Orleans in 1429. This army had been funded by the papacy through donations by European rulers - including Charles VII of France. Now a crusading army which he had partially funded had been directed against him! To say the least the Pope was embarrassed and Charles furious!
Western chivalry's finest had been dealt a devastating blow at Nicopolis (1396), which was partially why the dukes of Burgundy felt such a personal vendetta towards the Saracens in the fifteenth-century. Detailed studies by fifteenth-century humanists deconstructed and secularised the religious threat.
Now I am not an early modernist or Tudor historian so I cannot go into whether the rise of Protestantism and anti-papal fervor contributed to the negative view of the crusades, but I can contribute an (hopefully) interesting aside.
There is an argument currently on the fringe of the Crusade Studies school which is mooting whether 'crusades' existed. Obviously they are not arguing that crusades did not happen but that medieval society did not think of them as historians do. They did not conceive of grand campaigns with specific purposes.
This was sparked off by Michael Markowski's article on the term crucesignatus. His analysis concluded that:
the medieval concept of crusade was not static during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From the late to mid-twelfth centuries, Jerusalem and the related concept of pilgrimage was essential to the medieval definition of crusade. This aspect became the major defining characteristic of the whole crusade movement for Hans Eberhard Meyer (1972: 283-5). As time passed, however, other military actions not connected to the Holy Land, like the Slavic and Albigensian Crusades, were officially considered genuine crusades.
Christopher Tyreman took this a step further a decade later:
It could be argued that the difference between pilgrimage and crusade had been inherent since 1095, but only after 1187-8 was it recognized in law and government action, that is secular law and secular government. The running was made not by canonists or curial legists, but by servants of temporal powers. It has even been suggested that Innocent III himself was introduced to the word 'crucesignatus' by Gerald of Wales in 1199 (previously popes had favoured more laborious phrases based on crucem accipere). Gerald, a clerk of Henry II and a preacher of the cross in Wales in 1188, had been using the word since before 1191 The distinctive word for crusaders did not first appear after 1187. The phrase had occurred since the First Crusade. In letters, chronicles, and in some of the rites for taking the cross, 'crux' and 'signare' appear together. A solitary source from the Second Crusade uses the word 'cruziatur'. However, it was only during and after the Third Crusade that the term 'crucesignatus' (and 'crucesignata') gained wide currency; and the initiative seems to have come from temporal authorities, not the papacy. It would be entirely in keeping with a view of crusading as not at first a clearly defined phenomenon if the pressure for its legal and practical definition came from secular, not ecclesiastical, law and government, as long as we remember always that both were administered by educated clerics.
(...)
Ironically, the essence of pre-1187 crusading is to be found not in the content of Peter of Blois's Passio Reginaldi, but in its subject. Raynald first appears as a mercenary of Baldwin III at the siege of Ascalon in 1153. Two excellent marriages made him successively prince of Antioch and then lord of Kerak and Oultejordain. He believed in aggression as the best method of advancement. In his career he pillaged Cyprus and terrorized the Red Sea. He became identified with an actively hostile policy towards Saladin. His end, hacked to death by Saladin himself, was entirely appropriate: extreme violence in the best of company. He was an adventurer who had tasted the pleasures of success as well as the miseries of a Moslem prison for sixteen years. His opportunism ended in death and his transfiguration into a martyr: an 'athlete of the Lord' indeed, as Peter of Blois put it in a cliche famous long before 1095. But there is no evidence that Raynald ever took the cross. In the twelfth century he did not have to, because, in some senses, there were no crusades to fight.
Now I apologise for the block-quotes but these historians are far more concise than I was when I tried to explain it. Christoph Maier (Zurich) recently delivered a paper at the 'Crusades and the Latin East' Research Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (London, Senate House). This paper ('What if there were no Crusades in the Middle Ages') was an attempt to take a Reynoldsian knife to the very concept of 'Crusade'. It was a speculative effort but not spectactular in results. The consensus, in the discussion afterwards, seemed to be that while we can agree that crusades were not thought of as campaigns there was a certain something, a feeling among contemporaries were doing something new - something that one contemporary said 'we don't have a word for this but this is what is happening' (obviously not a literal quote).
It is likely that we conceive of crusades entirely differently to contemporaries not just in our opinions of the moral authority of the crusade itself but also in what constituted a crusade. These are still emerging arguments, and not ones which I think will be as devastating as Elizabeth A.R. Brown and Susan Reynolds on feudalism.
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