IMC 2026: Sessions

This session examines how the crusading ideal transcended conventional period boundaries, shaping conflicts and cultural memory from the later Middle Ages into the modern era. Far from ending in the thirteenth century, crusading discourses continued to structure political mobilization and historical imagination across shifting contexts.

Benjamin Weber investigates fourteenth- and fifteenth-century campaigns against Muslims, heretics, and pagans, showing how the category—and concept—of “crusade” (or “crusading”) emerged as both a unifying label and a mask for diverse aims. Emir O. Filipović turns to southeastern Europe, where papal indulgences, vows, and rhetoric sustained anti-Ottoman warfare. Drawing on papal bulls, Venetian and Ragusan records, he highlights the persistence of holy-war language that bridged the Middle Ages and early modernity. Magnus Ressel employs the concept of “Crusader Medievalism” (Horswell 2018) to trace the long afterlife of crusading from late-medieval historiography to the early nineteenth century. His case study of the Chevaliers libérateurs des esclaves blancs et noirs en Afrique, founded by Admiral Sidney Smith in 1814, shows how crusading motifs endured as legitimizing frameworks for colonialism and early imperialism.

Together, the papers argue that crusading was not confined to an epoch but operated as a trans-temporal tradition, continually reinterpreted and redeployed.