In the US, Hegseth uses Crusade symbolism in political rhetoric
In the US, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in his 2020 book American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, compared the present day to the 11th century and stated that Christians should fight just as their fellow believers did a thousand years ago. As Deutsche Welle English reports, Hegseth has repeatedly used biblical language and Crusade symbolism when speaking about the war in Iran and the fight against the “evil of leftism.”
Urban II’s call
The Crusades are associated with Pope Urban II’s speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095. At the time, the papacy was opposed to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, while Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos appealed to Urban II for help in fighting the Seljuks.
Urban II called on the European nobility to wage a Holy War and promised its participants full remission of past sins and eternal salvation. Crusades historian Jonathan Phillips of Royal Holloway, University of London, noted that people traveled thousands of kilometers to unknown lands with an approximately 35–40% probability of dying.
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The People’s Crusade of 1096 was marked by mass killings of Jewish communities in the Rhineland. A more organized army of European nobility assembled in Constantinople between November 1096 and April 1097. After the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders killed thousands of Muslims and Jews. Many historians consider the capture of Acre by Mamluk warriors in 1291 to mark the end of the Crusades in the Holy Land.
Modern political symbolism
The memory of the Crusades is still used in political rhetoric today. In 2001, US President George W. Bush called the “war on terror” a crusade, sparking outrage. Osama bin Laden also used the term, portraying US-led military campaigns as a religious war against Islam, and referred to the image of Saladin, who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187.
The Latin phrase Deus vult, or “God wills it,” was used by far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik and the German party Alternative for Germany. Mohammad El-Merheb, an expert on the premodern Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, stresses that reducing the Crusades solely to a confrontation between Christianity and Islam simplifies history: these campaigns were also accompanied by antisemitic violence, attacks on other Christian communities, and alliances between Muslims and Crusaders.
