WHAT LED TO THE FIRST CRUSADE?
The Roman Empire and Christianity came into being together, but for their first three hundred years they were each other’s enemies. It took the Roman Emperor Constantine I (the Great) to reconcile empire and church. Taking power in a time of turmoil, he (1) legalized Christianity (313 A. D.), (2) won a common confession of faith for Trinitarian Christians at the Council of Nicaea (325 A. D), and (3) moved the empire’s capital from Rome in Italy to his new city, Constantinople, in what is now Turkey (330 A. D). Even in Constantine’s day, the empire was culturally split between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East. Under attacks by Germanic and Hunnish invaders, the empire in the West waned rapidly. The empire in the East stayed strong, and would last till 1453 A. D. Trinitarian Christianity survived, and even thrived, in both regions. The Christians of the two regions, though, went their own ways. In the West, the Latin-speaking Christians, mostly under the guidance of th
