The Crusades, the Knights Templar and hospitaller : a combination of religion, war, pilgrimage and tourism enablers

The crusades represent one of the best, and undoubtedly most controversial, examples of the complex relationship between war and tourism. Obviously they were not a tourist endeavour, they were religious sponsored war intertwined with elements of conquest and occupation and stimulated conflict in the Holy Lands for several centuries following; a contemporary issue explored in later chapters. The ultimate goal of the First Crusade (1096 to 1099) was to regain the ‘Holy Lands,’ recapturing Jerusalem for Christianity. Jerusalem is complicated. It is a holy city to the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and, according to Cline (2005), it has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and then recaptured 44 times. Furthermore, it is still highly emotive today. With that in mind, we wish to be clear that, it is not the purpose of this chapter to debate the rights and wrongs of the crusades, nor the reasons for them, nor their intents, or even to investigate the history of tourism in Jerusalem, but to explore how the crusades contributed to the enabling of tourism