Kurt Jensen :
Themes in crusading history – some historiographical considerations

The historical writing about the crusades began during the actual conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 when historians attempted to understand what had actually happened. The two main explanations became the will of God and the strength of man, especially of the French nobility. No criticism of crusading as such existed until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The colonial experience of the nineteenth century gave to crusading history an emphasis upon administrative and legal studies which after WWI became strongly influenced by economic and social history and also, again, by an open moral disapproval of crusading. Since c. 1970, this has rapidly changed, economic explanations for medieval crusading are now being replaced by studies of the personal motivation of the individual crusader and the definition of crusading has changed from the "exclusive’’ – in which only expeditions to Jerusalem are considered proper crusades - to the "inclusive", according to which all papally authorised wars against the enemies of the Church giving the participants indulgence were true crusades.This change has broadened the topics covered by crusade historians immensly and in 1998 led to a critique that such a definition makes the concept of crusading too vague and useless for analysing and understanding the medieval reality. In spite of such criticisms, crusading history in the year 2000 is one of the largest and most expanding fields within medieval history and has returned to the kind of explanations that were formulated in 1099 by focussing upon the intent of the individual crusader and his or her attempt to do the will of God.