Crusades: The Crescent and the Cross

By the close of the eleventh century, Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for over four hundred years, but in 1095 Pope Urban II launched an unprecedented military campaign to seize it back – a ‘Crusade’ to purge the Holy Land of ‘the infidel’. Over sixty thousand Christian warriors would journey three thousand miles and for almost three years to reclaim the Holy City in the name of God. In a series of epic battles and bloody massacres, tens of thousands would die as the crusaders inched ever closer towards Jerusalem. This was the clash of the Crescent and the Cross.