I need an alternate word for "Crusade".

I doesn't sound like a Pilgrimage since Khazar land weren't holy places. Latin has a lot of words meaning "war" "military expedition" and so on.
"Bellum Christi" is possible (or maybe, "Christo", with the dative). Be careful with Latin declensions, i know it's a mess for most people though. :)
Also, Latin seldom has nominal compounds of the "papabellum" type, they would rather say "bellum papae" (or "papas" i'm not sure of that declension :confused:)
"Bellum Sanctum" or less likely "Bellum Sacrum" meaning "Holy War" may be good.
 
Essentially, the theology is against the Jews, and it's a reverse mirror of the OTL First Crusade. A strong Byzantine Empire gets in over it's head against the Arabs and Khazars and appeals to the Rome-loving Otto III, rather then the weak (but with a strong ruler) Byzantines calling upon the somewhat apathetic Western rulers.

And rather then desiring to take the Holy City, the Crusaders want to take the rich cities along the Khazar trade routes. At this point, the Khazars are extremely rich.

Part of the problem is that this is not at all a mirror of the First Crusade. The First Crusade was entirely about moving to the Holy Land to liberate it from the infidel and permit free travel to the sacred sites. Rich cities had nothing to do with it. Wealth had nothing to do with it -- I'm not talking of individuals here, but of the mass movement.

And they weren't so much driven by secular rulers as by the clergy. To get a good early crusading theme down you need a combination of factors -- a reforming drive in the Church, a popularity of pilgrimages, and a goal. The goal was not to kill infidels (though that was certainly not discouraged, and might be considered a fringe benefit), nor to win lands (the majority of the Crusaders went home, and that was the great weakness of the Crusader states ever after). It was to go to the holy places - something difficult and dangerous to do since the Seljuks started killing pilgrims for sport.

So to get a mass movement like OTL crusades, you need the social and theological factors which combined. Otherwise, it's a just another war, with some cheap rhetoric tacked on as an afterthought. Sort of like Karl's Saxon expeditions.

Remember when writing that no one is a villain in their own eyes -- hating folks is pretty common historically, but no one ever went anywhere or did anything meaningful on hate alone. Even Nazis had a vision of the future that involved what they saw as positive movement towards a desired goal.
 

Zioneer

Banned
Hmmm. So you're saying that it doesn't have the right kind of factors for a Crusade? That's a shame. I suppose, with a weak Islamic Caliphate (as will happen in my TL), there will be no reason to call a Crusade, or indeed, any kind of Holy War?

Well, I suppose I could have the Khazars try a reverse Crusade towards the Levant; after all, they're the only Jewish nation at all, let alone the only one with enough power and desire to potentially take back Jerusalem.
 
Sacrabella. A bastardization of the Latin roots, to be sure, but not much more so than "crusade". As a bonus, it can be pronounced as one word with a plethora of different accents and syllabic stresses in order to come into the local vernacular use.
 
Why not use the German name for "holy war" : heiliger Kreig

Maybe "Erlösungkrieg", which means "salvation war" in German. You could call it a "salvatio" from the Latin word for "salvation".

:mad:It is "Heiliger Krieg", this is a very common and annoying error :mad:

And it is Erlösungskrieg, but I don't blame you for that.
 
Hmmm. So you're saying that it doesn't have the right kind of factors for a Crusade? That's a shame. I suppose, with a weak Islamic Caliphate (as will happen in my TL), there will be no reason to call a Crusade, or indeed, any kind of Holy War?

Well, I suppose I could have the Khazars try a reverse Crusade towards the Levant; after all, they're the only Jewish nation at all, let alone the only one with enough power and desire to potentially take back Jerusalem.

Not that there can't be a religious war, but that it won't look like OTL's Crusades without that impetus. Later developments of the Crusading concept (Algibensian Crusade, Aragonese Crusade, Teutonic crusades in the North) sprung from an already established concept.

For a comparison of a religious war that predated the Crusade concept, look at the earlier stages of the Reconquista. There's also Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons as an example of a "religious" war with rhetoric used as a thin fig leaf for conquest.
 
How about Barbarossa's Crusade? Alluding to Operation Barbarossa and the naming covention of the Third Crusade being often called the King's Crusade.

Though if one is classically minded, Anabasis would seem appropriet.
 
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