crusades


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cru·sade

 (kro͞o-sād′)
n.
1. often Crusade Any of the military expeditions undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to recover control of the Holy Land from the Muslims.
2. A holy war undertaken with papal sanction.
3. A concerted effort or vigorous movement for a cause or against an abuse: a crusade for literacy; a crusade against drunk driving.
intr.v. cru·sad·ed, cru·sad·ing, cru·sades
To engage in a crusade.

[French croisade and Spanish cruzada, both ultimately from Latin crux, cruc-, cross.]

cru·sad′er n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

crusades

During the Middle Ages, Christian armies tried to recapture Jerusalem which had been conquered by Muslim Turks. These military expeditions were called crusades. They began before 1100 and ended in the late 1200s
Dictionary of Unfamiliar Words by Diagram Group Copyright © 2008 by Diagram Visual Information Limited
References in classic literature ?
Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their ladies?
Impossible to place our Cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture; pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at the return from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX.
* crusades, and that all the minuti of its fantastic science were
The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the Crusades. "Friend- ship" was one; "Memories of Other Days"; "Religion in History"; "Dream Land"; "The Advantages of Culture"; "Forms of Political Government Compared and Contrasted"; "Melancholy"; "Filial Love"; "Heart Longings," etc., etc.
If I can get enough to rebuild Artagnan, which my ancestors, impoverished by the Crusades, allowed to fall into ruins, and to buy thirty acres of land about it, that is all I wish.
The professor was carrying on a hot crusade against materialists.
For in 1204 the armies of the fourth Crusade, which had gathered to fight the heathen, turned their swords, to their shame be it said, against the Christian people of the Greek Empire.
This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade. He had it much at heart to begin.
It is almost impossible for one of them to write a line on the subject, however kindly he may do so, without being suspected of wishing to open a crusade against the fair sex.
Then, not more than half a dozen years ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade among the farmers of the Middle West.
The new King had formerly set forth upon a crusade to the Holy Land, and Prince John, his brother, was impossible to deal with--being crafty, cruel and treacherous.
Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!