European Colonialism in the Middle Ages

Colonialism in the Middle Ages. London: Weidenfeld and

Most histories of the crusades chronicle to varying degrees the process whereby Europeans journeyed to the Holy Land, fought their battles, and returned to Europe with certain riches and tales of the exotic Eastern culture. Prawer engages in a different tactic, chronicling the history of European cultures in the Holy Land. His principal thesis is that during the period of the crusades, Europeans established patterns of colonialism that persisted into the modern period. The character that various Middle Eastern cities and states assumed from the time that Europeans began to travel en masse to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean depended very much upon the character of the European locale from which those Europeans came. The settling of Europeans in the areas of the Holy Land constituted a major migration comparable to the mass migrations that took place in the great age of discovery, which began in the sixteenth century.

Prawer attributes the initial wave of colonization of the Holy Land by Christian Europeans in large part to the fact that no strategic postwar (i.e, postCrusade) plans were particularly envisioned by Urban II when he called the First Crusade. When the Christians took Jerusalem, it occurred to various rival factions that some advantage might be gained by establishing what came to be called the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Other pet

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e had married the daughter of the European King of Jerusalem, he added secular political considerations to the considerations of holy mission to his undertaking in the Holy Land. This fact, asserts Powell, was to affect all subsequent crusades, as well as the future relationships between secular prince and papacy. In other words, just as the pope had envisioned the Fifth Crusade as a way of establishing increased spiritual authority over secular life, so Frederick, coming at the close of the Fifth Crusade, began to envision the prince's crusade as a way of establishing secular authority over religious aims. Bradford, Ernle. The Sundered Cross: The Story of the Fourth Crusade. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: PrenticeHall, Inc., 1967. The Fourth Crusade, which began with as highminded and tendentious a papal preachment as any that had preceded it and which ended not only in the sordid sack of Constantinople in 1204 but also in the beginnings of an increasingly secularized social, political, and religious restructuring of Europe, forms the basis for Bradford's book. Bradford describes the circumstances of the Fourth Crusade in a way that supports his view that "few episodes in European history have had so great and so farre
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5484
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)