Published: 2013-04-17 04:44:49
At Collab with Qarly
The Crusades were a series of wars taking place in Asia Minor and the Levant between 1095 and 1291, in which Western European nations engaged using the propaganda of religious expeditionary wars. The first crusade was called by Pope Urban II of the Roman Catholic Church, with the stated goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem. The background to the Crusades was the centuries of Arab–Byzantine Wars and the Seljuq-Byzantine Wars and the recent decisive defeat of the Byzantine army by Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071. The Norman conqueror Robert Guiscard's conquest of Byzantine territories added to the problems of the Byzantine Empire. In an attempt to curtail both dangers, its Emperor Alexios I sought to align Christian nations against a common enemy, requested western aid, and Pope Urban II in turn enlisted western leaders in the cause of taking back the Holy Land.[1]
Europeans had historically called the occupants of the Holy Land Saracens, and used this in a negative sense throughout the Crusades and often into European history books into the 20th century.
The term "crusade" is also used to describe religiously motivated campaigns conducted between 1100 and 1600 in territories outside the Levant[a] usually against pagans, heretics, and peoples under the ban of excommunication for a mixture of religious, economic, and political reasons.[b] Rivalries among both Christian and Muslim powers led also to alliances between religious factions against their opponents, such as the Christian alliance with the Islamic Sultanate of Rûm during the Fifth Crusade.
The Levant (pron.: /ləˈvænt/, Arabic: بلاد الشام Bilād ash-Shām) or Arabic: المشرق العربي al-Mashrīq al-'Arabiyy), also known as the Eastern Mediterranean and Greater Syria and historically as Outremer, is a geographic and cultural region consisting of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt".[2] The Levant consists today of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Hatay Province and other parts of southern Turkey, some regions of northwestern Iraq and the Sinai Peninsula.
An ox (plural oxen), also known as a bullock in Australia, New Zealand and India, is a bovine trained as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castrated adult male cattle; castration makes the animals more tractable. Cows (adult females) or bulls (intact males) may also be used in some areas.
Oxen are steers of any breed of cattle, that are at least four years old, and taught to work. Steers, in this catagory, that are younger than four years old, are called "Working Steers".
A steer is a castrated bull.
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