There were so many the events of this century that we need to divide it, practically, into three parts. Then, we will do something different to narrate the events occurred. First, we will present a general panorama of everything that passed to, after, detail each one of the facts. It was a very rich century, with characters that changed the history of Christianity, but also marked by tragedies and horrors.

It was in this century that happened the greatest number of Crusades of history. It was a question of honor that the tomb of Jesus be recovered, as well as Jerusalem and all the Kingdom that today, belongs to that of Israel and that were in the hands of the Muslims. For this reason were organized the Crusades — expeditionary military movements that departed from Europe, especially from Rome, toward the Holy Land. According to the majority of the historians, occurred nine Crusades, being one of them composed only by children.

There was also another type of movement that we can call crusade, although it has not been directed to the Middle East. This movement reveals much of that which would come to become, later, the Inquisition. It was a kind of crusade turned to the persecution of those who thought in a different way, considered heretics for diverging from the Church.

We had the brutal Albigensian Crusade, that persecuted the Cathars in the city of Albi, in the south of France. It was initiated by pope Innocent III with the objective of eliminating the Cathar heresy. This crusade was marked by the extreme violence, with massacres of entire populations and the burning of Cathars at the stake. To the eyes of the Church, they were heretics.

Another persecution promoted by the Church occurred against the Waldensians. It had beginning in the previous century, but reached its apex in this century. This movement was founded by a rich merchant of the city of Lyon, in France, called Pierre de Vaux, or Peter Waldo.

We also witnessed the arising of the mendicant orders, composed of religious men who followed Jesus and made vows of poverty. There arose then the Franciscans, led by Francis of Assisi, who desired to live integrally the Gospel. There arose also the Dominicans, led especially by Dominic of Guzmán, who sought to preach the Gospel and became known as the Preachers of Christ.

From the Dominicans arose one of the great characters of history: an Italian called Thomas Aquinas. He is considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Catholic Church. He practically transformed the history of the institution and became Doctor of the Church. His thought sought to unite the scientific knowledge to the religious in a time of intense conflicts and transformations.

Thomas Aquinas sought to demonstrate that the reason (philosophy) and the faith (theology) are not contradictory, but complementary. For him, the Church could not limit itself to dogmatism; it needed also of a rational foundation. His thought kept similarities with that of the Jew Rambam, of the previous century, and with that of the Muslim Averroes.

Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica, considered the masterpiece of Scholasticism, in which he synthesized the Catholic doctrine about God, the moral and Christ. Still today this work is studied in the faculties of philosophy. Among many themes, it presents the five ways to demonstrate the existence of God.

This movement called Scholasticism, systematized by Thomas Aquinas, took Christianity into the universities. The Christian faith ceased to be restricted to the temples and passed to be object of academic study.

There is in Rome a cathedral called San Giovanni in Laterano (Saint John of Lateran), considered the mother of all the churches. It was built in the 4th century and initially dedicated to Jesus. Later, it passed to be dedicated to John the Evangelist and John the Baptist. It became also the seat of the Roman Church, although later it was substituted by the Basilica of Saint Peter. It was this church that, according to the tradition, pope Innocent III saw in dream being sustained by Francis of Assisi.

Various Councils of Lateran were realized, in homage to this church. In this century occurred the Fourth Council of Lateran, that debated themes of enormous relevance. The first of them was the dogma of transubstantiation. Before much discussed, it passed to be officially recognized as dogma, not being able to be questioned anymore. It was established that every Catholic should participate of the celebration of the Eucharist and receive the communion, remembering the Last Supper of Jesus.

The second theme was the act of contrition. It was determined that every Catholic should, at least once per year — for example, during the Holy Week —, confess his sins to a priest. This ritual became obligatory, for the priest would represent Jesus and would continue the mission entrusted to the apostles to forgive and guide the faithful.

The question of the heresies was also intensely discussed. In 1231, pope Gregory IX institutionalized the practice initiated in 1184 by pope Lucius III: the Inquisitorial Tribunal. As it was a tribunal of the Church, it passed to be known as Holy Inquisition. All that one who placed himself against any practice of the Church would pass to be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal composed by bishops, cardinals and Dominicans.

Initially, this tribunal had the purpose of judging ecclesiastical crimes. However, further ahead, in a quite distorted way, it passed not only to judge, but also to persecute, exploit and kill Jews and Muslims. People received rewards for denouncing others, the Church confiscated the goods of the condemned and enriched in an impressive way.

And they were not only the people considered witches, sorcerers and heretics that were condemned. Very rich people, sometimes only in reason of small disagreements with the Church, also ended up processed and had their goods confiscated. In many cases, the goods were taken even before the condemnation to death.

It is a century extremely rich, that allows multiple dimensions of analysis. The Crusades, for example, constitute a very interesting movement, initiated in the 11th century, that crossed the 12th century and intensified in this century. Curiously, the strategies adopted by the Christians were changing along the time. In the first Crusades, the objective was only to reconquer Jerusalem. However, after the Fourth Crusade, the strategy changed. As they were not managing to reach their intent, it passed to be thought in conquering territories that could serve as bargaining chip. They tried, then, to take Egypt as form of pressuring for the recovery of the Holy Land. However, they did not obtain success.

The objectives of the Crusades were quite varied. There were also incursions in the Iberian Peninsula that, since 711, had been conquered by the Muslims, transforming itself into territory of the Moors. Only the north of Spain and of Portugal, especially the Kingdom of Asturias, had remained Christian.

The Fourth Crusade occurred between 1202 and 1204. Initially, it had as objective Jerusalem, but ended up diverting its route to Constantinople. The crusaders passed, then, to fight the Christians of the East, the Orthodox, whose separation had occurred in the 11th century, during the Schism. There was among them a desire of religious and political predominance.

The result was that that region returned to be, for a short period of approximately fifty or sixty years, Catholic Apostolic Roman, ceasing to be Orthodox. Later, the Eastern Church reconquered the territory, but came out quite weakened.

Around 1210 there arose a movement that would gain force in 1212. It was concluded that the objective continued being to reconquer Jerusalem and that the next Crusade should be led by children. It is about one of the most absurd episodes of the history of the Church in Europe. They used a literal interpretation of the passage of Jesus: “Let come to me the little children, for of them is the Kingdom of Heaven”.

Two children, Stephen and Nicholas, gathered many others and resolved to organize the so-called Children’s Crusade, or Crusade of Purity. It was a tragic movement.

The children died along the path. Many were enslaved, both in Christian territories and Muslim. It is an episode remembered by historians with great sorrow. First, because the Church permitted that that happen, washing the hands before the situation. Second, because the own families believed that their children would return as heroes, transformed into knights. Instead of this, they were decimated or enslaved. A deeply dark period of history.

The Crusades did not possess only religious objectives. There were also political, economic and territorial interests. The principal purpose was the reconquest of Jerusalem, but, wherever they passed, the crusaders conquered territories, commercial routes and regions previously Christian. There was a whole set of interests involved.

The Fifth Crusade occurred between 1217 and 1221. It was in it that Francis of Assisi took part. Differently from the previous ones, it was not directed directly to Israel, but to Egypt, for there was the caliphate. The idea was to conquer Egypt to, later, retake Jerusalem.

This episode is quite interesting because the Christians practically nothing achieved militarily. Francis, however, even came to speak with the sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil, nephew of Saladin. That which the Christians did not manage to reach by force, Francis managed by means of dialogue. However, the Christians did not accept to establish agreements with the Muslims.

The Sixth Crusade occurred between 1228 and 1229 and was led by Frederick II. Although it was also considered a military failure, it obtained important diplomatic conquests. The Christians managed free access to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, places of enormous importance for Christian pilgrimage.

The Seventh and the Eighth Crusades were led by Louis IX, king of France, considered a saint king due to his moral qualities and his elevated religious sense. He was an excellent ruler for France and for his subjects. Deeply Christian, he frequented churches and cultivated a profession of faith very clear: to recover the Holy Land. Later, according to the spiritist tradition, he would have assisted Allan Kardec in the codification of the Doctrine of the Spirits. Today, Saint Louis is considered one of the great protectors of France.

In the Seventh Crusade, Louis IX was captured and his army ended up decimated. It was a great failure. When he managed to recover the freedom, he returned with the Eighth Crusade for a new attempt. Again he failed and, this time, Louis IX died during the campaign. The Crusade was abandoned. Besides a king very dear to the French, he became a true martyr of Christianity.

The Ninth Crusade occurred between 1271 and 1272 and was led by king Edward I, of England. It also failed completely. It was the end of the Crusades as great military expeditions. In 1291, the Templars still tried a last reaction, but without success, for Acre, a city situated in the north of Israel and that still remained under Christian domain, was conquered by the Muslims.

Thus ended definitively the Crusades. Jerusalem, that always had been the great objective, remained under Muslim domain. And, until today, it is about a region marked by conflicts. A territory that passed through so many hands along history...

The Crusades were initiatives motivated by the conviction that the Christians had the right to recover Jerusalem, then under Muslim domain. Various military campaigns were undertaken, and countless people died in these attempts. Europe lived almost two hundred years of successive religious wars.

With this, it fed the fire of intolerance between Christians and Muslims. It was in this context that strengthened, in part of the Islamic world, the conception that the Christians were enemies. It intensified the religious fight against the so-called infidels. At the end, however, little was resolved. Jerusalem remained under Muslim domain, while the animosity between the two groups became even deeper.

The Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom located in Baghdad, already mentioned in the previous centuries and that represented a true apex of knowledge, ended up being contaminated by this environment of hostility. Little by little, it was suffering a deep transformation. The hate, the intolerance and the rejection to the Christian world passed to occupy growing space, and that extraordinary intellectual tradition lost part of the brightness that it possessed.

Between 1209 and 1229 occurred the Albigensian Crusade, in which Christians fought and assassinated other Christians. In the south of France, in the region of Languedoc, there existed a city called Albi, origin of the name of the Crusade. The Christians who there lived were known as Cathars. They possessed a form of life distinct from that of the Roman apostolic Catholics. They believed in the immortality of the soul, defended reincarnationist ideas and cultivated a philosophy based on ethics, on morality and on the proximity between the people.

However, the Church saw the Cathars with great distrust, for they did not recognize the supremacy of the pope or of the ecclesiastical institution. For them, the true supremacy was that of morality, of love and of the living of the Gospel of Jesus. For this reason, various accusations were attributed to them by the Roman Church.

First: they were considered Manichaeans, followers of a doctrine arisen in Persia, in the 3rd century, through Mani. It was understood that they believed in a radical opposition between the spiritual world, considered true, and the material world, that should be rejected.

Second: they were considered Gnostics. They interpreted chapter XIV, verse 6, of the Gospel of John — “I am the way, the truth and the life” — not as the acceptance of the person of Jesus, but of the truths taught by Him. Thus, for the Cathars, it was not enough to declare oneself follower of Jesus; it was necessary to live as He lived.

Third: they were considered Docetists, for they did not believe that Jesus had materialized fully in flesh. For them, Jesus was essentially a spiritual presence.

The Cathars exercised an impressive magnetism and conquered many adherents. The Church saw in this a threat. The difficulty in accepting that someone could think in a different way was one of the factors that fed the persecution.

The pope Innocent III, considered one of the most important of the history of the Church, sent initially the Dominicans to persuade them to convert to the Christianity considered true. They refused.

Afterwards, military expeditions were sent to the region of the Cathars, who ended up being decimated. Men, women and children were killed in massacres of great proportions. It is estimated that about one million French Cathars died. There was no pity. The order was to eliminate all to prevent the propagation of their ideas.

When the crusaders went toward the Middle East, they faced armed armies in relatively equivalent combats. However, when they descended to the south of France to face the Cathars, they found an unarmed religious community, and not an army.

Another important character of this century was Peter Waldo, merchant of Lyon, in France. At a certain moment of his life, upon reflecting on the religious proposals of the Church, he concluded that the true foundation of the faith should not be the pope, but the Scriptures.

He made vow of poverty and passed to live the Gospel in a radical way, seeking to imitate Jesus. Many people began to follow him. The Church became bothered with this new movement and began persecutions. However, the Waldensians, as they came to be known, were not concentrated in a single region, as the Cathars. They spread through Europe and did not represent such direct threat to the Church. They did not possess great structure of preaching nor formed extensive communities. They were, above all, a movement of ideas.

The Church persecuted them, but did not exterminate them. The fact is that this thought became one of the seeds of that which, in the 16th century, from Martin Luther, would give origin to the Protestant Reformation.