Did the crusades had a racial war component or they were pure religious based

[Mortimer]

what do you think.....

[Gooding]

I think the people who launched the Crusades found a perfect opportunity to play upon the religious convictions of their subordinates so they could fill their coffers with gold.

[Unome]

Mostly racial-based, for Europeans to purge SE Europa (and Yisrael) of Arabids and Turkish incursions.

[Bezprym]

Religious.

[Odin]

Religion based.

[Bosniensis]

Crusades were barbarism initiated by illegal Bishop of Rome Urban II namely Odo of Châtillon or Otho de Lagery
also known as "Barbarian Pope" on Balkans because he was a Frank.

Those Crusaders later even plundered Constantinople stealing enormous amount of Gold. (Crusades were a plunder mission after all, as if barbarians knew anything about holiness of anything).

[Bobby Martnen]

what do you think.....

Purely religious. The idea of race didn't become popular in the West until the 1500s.

I see the Crusaders as heroes.

[catgeorge]

Even the Varangian Guard considered them as barabarians

[StonyArabia]

Religious based nothing to do with race. Race importance would play an important part with the foundation of the America's and trans-atlantic slave trade

[sean]

The Crusades were driven mostly by religion, but there were a host of other reasons why knights, lords, princes, and peasants alike took up their weapons in the name of God.

Spoiler!

The most commonly known Crusades are the campaigns in the Eastern Mediterranean aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule, but the term "Crusades" is also applied to other Church-sanctioned campaigns. These were fought for a variety of reasons including the suppression of paganism and heresy, the resolution of conflict among rival Christian groups, or for political and territorial advantage. At the time of the early Crusades the word did not exist, only becoming the leading descriptive term around 1675.

Pope Urban II declared that anyone who went off to the Crusades and fought the non-Christians, and then confessed their sins in good Catholic form, would be automatically forgiven, it was the start of this practice that would call into question the ethical values of the Catholic Church, since the decree sent the message that you could do anything with the Church's approval as long as the end goal was an acceptable one. According to the Pope, it was a just war. And if the Pope said it, then it must be true.

Pope Eugenius III promised those that fought in the Crusades entitled the same privileges as the clergy — and that was no small thing. That meant that Crusaders would have debts removed, would not have to pay interest on loans, and would get out from beneath the burden of taxes. And that was in addition to the freedom of having their sins lifted when they confessed, because whatever was done in the name of freeing the Holy Land from the infidels was, quite clearly, all right by God.

By 1418, Pope Martin V had started a Crusade not against the infidels in Jerusalem, but against the rebel Christians in Bohemia. Before it was over, five different Crusades would be taken beneath the Catholic banners and against the Hussites, with the sole purpose of stamping out the growing influence of the man they had burned at the stake a few years before. It was, perhaps, the most bizarre Crusade of them all, with Christians fighting Christians, declaring each other heretics and immoral, and killing in the name of a "Holy War" defending the same God.

When Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned while trying to cross a river in Turkey, some of his army even gave up their religion saying that the death of their King was a clear sign that God had frowned on their mission. The army was supposed to fight side by side with the French and English armies of Philip Augustus and Henry II of England.