The crusade is a feature of medieval Christian civilisation with a decidedly contemporary resonance. The crusades are also highly relevant to current academic debates about the relationship between core and periphery in later medieval western European culture. As early as the Second Crusade in the 1140s an attempt was made to synchronise multiple crusade expeditions on three general fronts: in the Middle East, in Spain and in north-eastern Europe. The theological bases and the popular reception of the various formulations of the crusade indulgence are both hotly debated by historians. Western pilgrimage to the East had already been picking up in the eleventh century, and the success of the First Crusade made possible a veritable pilgrimage boom. In terms of facilitating expressions of religious devotion, the most noticeable effect of the crusades was the Latin control of Jerusalem and the Holy Places between 1099 and the Muslim reconquest under Saladin in 1187.

The kingdom of Hungary was formed and consolidated as a part of Latin Christendom during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Hungary was at the intersection of three cultures: the Roman Christian, Byzantine and nomad. And its development was influenced by each. The dynasty that ruled Hungary was the house of Arpád, whose first Christian king was Stephen I. While monastic communities conforming to the Greek rite flourished in Hungary until the thirteenth century, the missionaries and priests who gathered at Stephen's court were westerners and Roman Christianity became the majority religion. Pagan revolts broke out in 1046 and 1061, and pagan practices persisted. By the twelfth century, landed property was becoming the basis of Hungarian society, with groups of different legal status living on royal, ecclesiastical and noble estates. Hungary's social and economic structure underwent radical changes. A strong Christian kingdom emerged with a social organization, where the beginnings of money economy, chivalry and early Gothic appeared.

This chapter emphasizes the administrative underpinning that allowed a strengthened papacy to emerge at the end of the twelfth century under Pope Innocent III as the single most influential political and spiritual institution of Latin Christendom. The Lateran palace also served as administrative centre of the Roman church as well as of her temporal properties: the duchy of Rome and the patrimonies of the see of St Peter. From a very early period the popes were more than just bishops of Rome. Their position of leadership in the rest of Christendom, with regard to jurisdiction going back to the council of Sardica which allowed deposed bishops and other clergy to appeal to the Roman see, brought with it the frequent use of emissaries or legates as papal representatives, for instance at ecumenical councils. In the early twelfth century the college of cardinals included three ranks: bishops, priests and deacons.

This chapter focuses on the term 'exploration' for the identification, investigation and recording of practical routes. The story of exploration in the fifteenth century is very largely of the crossing of the Atlantic with routes that linked its shores and led to other oceans. This story should be understood against the background of the internal exploration of Latin Christendom in the late Middle Ages. The discovery of new sources of gold and slaves meant that the direct economic effects of west African exploration were potentially revolutionary. Exploration was a means whereby the civilisation of Latin Christendom established access to and, in the longer run, command of a disproportionate share of the resources of the world. Explorers made a major contribution to the reversal of fortunes on a global scale. Previous civilisations derived their images of the world from dogmas of cosmology, from inductive reasoning, from revelation, from inherited tradition or from the elaboration of theory.

The nobility of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages needs and deserves to be studied from a standpoint that is not merely socio-economic, but political and cultural, too. Europe is deemed synonymous with Latin Christendom. The Castilian nobility was distinctly divided into three categories: the titulos, the caballeros and later the hidalgos and the escuderos. Nobles from different parts of western Christendom could also meet at the court. The Prussian Reise, that cross-roads of western nobility, was more characteristic of the fourteenth than of the fifteenth century. Texts, in some cases translations, spread far from their place of origin identical concepts of nobility and chivalry, and stimulated commentaries upon them. The existence of noble classes of varying importance within different European societies is explained, first and foremost, by the long-term history of these societies, and, vitally, by its outcome.