King Richard the Lionhearted

King Richard: Master of the third crusade
In the eleventh century the life of people varied greatly based upon social status. Kings, bishops, and nobles would have massive amounts of wealth and essentially created the phrase, “lives like a king.” They would live in massive castles observing the land while they watched the peasants work the fields. On the other hand the peasants lived in terrible housing with awful conditions. They lived in tiny shacks with their own animals and in their feces on a hard dirt floor. The only thing they had to look forward to was the supposed heaven for being an avid member of the Church, which was the highest authority in their lives. If a priest would tell a peasant to do something they would do it.   On the other side of the hemisphere a renaissance was occurring. Art, literature and science were all having massive advances, the Arabian empires were expanding, conquering, and inventing all under the banner of Islam, all the while converting more and more followers to the fast growing faith.   Eventually, however, the Muslims became cocky and stopped allowing Christian pilgrims into the Holy Land and the city of Jerusalem. They did this to make a Jerusalem a Muslim only city. The Christians, though, still wanted to visit the holy land.   This is what pope Urban II used to start the first crusade, the new series of wars that shaped the relationship between Europe and the Middle East today.

Life on a farm was boring. You woke up, raked the fields went to sleep and then did it all again. Except for the occasional break on Sunday to go to church, life was dull. So how would a bored young man escape the mundane life of a farmer? The answer is easy: join a crusade.
      There were eight official crusades. That is to say, the pope declared them and there were national armies at their disposal, but there were dozens more crusades declared outside of the pope’s jurisdiction. Crusades like the Children’s Crusade and the Peasants’ Crusade...