Constantinople was the Eastern Catholic capitol (Rome being the Western capitol), they fought to regain it...
You might want to research a bit more here, if the crusader attack on Byzantium had been about "regaining", how come the crusaders didn't stay after having taken Constantinople? Rather than eventually leaving it (and the Byzantium they'd carved up) once it had been sacked and leaving it considerably weakened at that?
i dont have a clue on what Russians you are speaking about since Russia wasnt even thought of at the time of the crusades in Jerusalem....please elaborate -
You ever hear of Alexander Nevsky? Battle of the Ice?
If you want to claim there were no Russians at that time (the Kievan Rus and their Novgorod republic being what?), you might as well claim that there were actually no Germans prior to 1871.
And the Heretics in France was the doing of a power crazed asinine Pope close to a 100 years after the Crusades originally began in Jerusalem.
Nope, it actually started out with Philip of France having had a bellyful of the
state-within-the-state that the Knights Templar had established in the Languedoc. Beginning to dismantle the order as early as 12 years after the last crusade in the "Holy Land"(siege of Acre and its fall to the Mamluks).
In the process conveniently settling his substantial loans from the Templars by annihilating the creditor.
At the time the Pope was taking orders from the French king and not the other way round and it had nothing to do with Clement having initiated the whole affair.
The Albigensian Crusade (against the Cathars) ran practically parallel to these proceedings but lasted longer, with at least 2 Popes I can think of having been in opposition to the Cathars but French royal interests again having been the driving factor in crushing the Cathars.
At the time of the early Crusades the word did not exist, only becoming the leading descriptive term around 1760.
Agreed in that its coinage to what we use in English today was made round about then,
crucesignatus however was already a label for "God's warriors" as early as the third crusade and via the later Francophication (croisade) found its way into English.
That all being said (and before getting lost in semantics powered by etymology), they might as well have called all the ventures cake-walks, the general principle their pursuit was sold on was that they were god's will.
In 1095 Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in a sermon at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for the Byzantine Empire and its Emperor, Alexios I, who needed reinforcements for his conflict with westward migrating Turks colonising Anatolia. One of Urban's aims was to guarantee pilgrims access to the Eastern Mediterranean holy sites that were under Muslim control
Yeah, we're all quite capable of reading wiki.
But some of us are also capable of asking what the hell fighting the (primarily Egyptian) Fatimid dynasty that held Jerusalem had to do with aiding Alexios against the encroaching Turks, when those very Fatimids had just kicked the Turks out of Jerusalem and actually offered to ally themselves with the crusaders against those very Turks.