Crusades-Encyclopedia Return to Crusades-Encyclopedia    Return to Table of Contents Traditionalists
While scholars have differed over what qualifies as a crusade, such a qualification is necessary in determining the proper scope of crusades historiography. The issue is an important one for historians because with the expansion of the crusading movement comes the corresponding expansion of sources available for study. Yet the very issue of defining a crusade has, until recently, been one of the areas of greatest disagreement among crusades scholars. Scholars have essentially divided into two camps on the issue, those known as traditionalists and those known as pluralists. Traditionalists have emphasized the well-known and often popularized crusading efforts in the East, which took place from the end of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth centuries, as the embodiment of the crusading movement. In this case, the purpose of a crusade is either to assist eastern Christians or to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher.(1) Among the most notable of the traditionalists is the German scholar Hans Mayer. Mayer, in his work The Crusades, first published in German in 1965 and English in 1972, defined a crusade as having Christian domination over the Holy Sepulcher as its goal.(2) This narrow definition allows only for those expeditions with Jerusalem as its destination as a proper crusade and may also be a more accurate reflection of popular understandings of the crusades. The traditionalists position is in contrast to those who hold a pluralists position. Pluralists cite papal authorization as the defining feature of a crusade, regardless of against who or where it is directed and as a result qualify a much greater number of movements and expeditions as crusades. Hans Eberhard Mayer- Crusades-Encyclopedia Pluralists- Crusades-Encyclopedia 1. Giles Constable. “The Historiography of the Crusades.” In The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World. Ed. Angeliki Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh. (Washington DC: Dumberton Oaks, 2001), 12. 2. Hans Eberhard Mayer. The Crusades, 2nd ed., trans John Gillingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). (c) Andrew Holt, December 2005- Permission is granted for electronic copying and distribution in print for educational or personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.