Causes of medieval wars

Dynastic (contested thrones), religious (holy war and papal influence), and economic/territorial (land, trade, resources, tribute). Remember D-R-E.

A war driven by a contested inheritance or competing claims to a throne, usually when a ruler dies without a clear heir.

Holy war such as crusade or jihad, defending or spreading a faith, and the influence of the pope and clergy.

Control of land, trade routes and resources, plus the pursuit of wealth and tribute from weaker neighbours.

A long-term (underlying) cause makes war likely over years; a short-term (immediate) cause is the trigger that sets it off now.

Regular payment that one ruler forces a weaker ruler or people to hand over, often as a motive or spoil of war.

By calling a crusade, blessing one side, funding the fighting, or excommunicating a ruler who defied the Church.

Ambitious rulers, popes and generals precipitate wars, but usually by exploiting deeper long-term pressures already in place.

Different motives feed each other — economic need strengthens a dynastic claim, which a pope may then bless as holy.

Pope Urban II's religious call combined with knights wanting land and Italian cities wanting eastern trade routes.

To argue which causes mattered most and which were secondary, rather than treating every cause as equal.

It stops you writing a flat list — you show which causes were the deep foundations and which was the final spark.

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, in France.

To recover the Holy Land, above all the city of Jerusalem, from Muslim rule.

The Seljuk Turks crushed the Byzantine Empire and captured its emperor, taking most of Anatolia.

A Muslim Turkic people who conquered much of the Middle East in the 1000s and threatened Byzantium.

He wanted Western military aid to push back the Seljuk Turks after Byzantine losses.

A Church grant that cancelled the punishment owed for a person's sins — Urban offered it to crusaders.

It promised remission of sins, seeming to guarantee heaven for those who fought or died on crusade.

Landless knights sought land, poorer men sought plunder, and Italian cities sought trade and ports.

A leading noble who joined the First Crusade and became ruler in Jerusalem after its capture.

An ambitious Norman lord who joined partly to win his own territory and later ruled Antioch.

Long-term: Christian–Muslim tension, pilgrimage tradition, Seljuk advance. Short-term: Alexios's plea and Urban's 1095 appeal.

Religion was central, but land, plunder, trade and individual ambition were also essential — the causes mixed together.

Charles IV of France, who died without a son — ending the direct royal line and opening the crisis.

Through his mother, Isabella, who was the sister of the late Charles IV — a claim through the female line.

Philip VI of Valois. French nobles argued the crown could not pass through a woman, so they chose Charles IV's cousin.

A lord who holds land from a greater lord in return for loyalty and service.

A formal, kneeling promise of loyalty and service made by a vassal to his overlord.

The English king held Gascony (part of Aquitaine) as a vassal of the French king, owing him homage — a humiliating and unstable arrangement.

The Gascon wine trade and the Flanders wool trade.

The vast block of French lands (Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine) ruled by English kings from the 1150s — the long-term root of the dispute over English lands in France.

Philip VI's confiscation of Gascony, seizing it from Edward III as a disobedient vassal.

He claimed the throne of France itself, turning a land dispute into a war for the crown.

Philip VI chose to confiscate Gascony, and Edward III chose to claim the French crown — neither king would back down, escalating the dispute to war.

Sort them into long-term (Angevin roots, feudal Gascony, dynastic claim) and short-term (the 1337 confiscation), then reach a supported judgement.

In 1206, at a kurultai (assembly of chiefs), Temüjin was declared Genghis Khan, meaning something like 'universal ruler'.

A law code issued by Genghis Khan that replaced tribal custom, banned old blood feuds, and demanded loyalty to the khan above all else.

He broke up old tribal war-bands and regrouped soldiers into mixed units of ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand, shifting loyalty from tribe to khan.

Constant raiding over pasture, unpredictable herding conditions, and generations of blood feuds between rival tribes such as the Mongols, Tatars, Keraits and Naiments.

Plunder from conquered cities, tribute from surrendering rulers, and control of the Central Asian trade routes later called the Silk Roads.

The Khwarezmian governor of Otrar, on the Shah's orders, killed a Mongol trade caravan's merchants and seized their goods.

When Genghis Khan sent envoys to demand justice, the Shah had them killed too, an act the Mongols saw as an unforgivable insult.

Under steppe custom envoys were considered sacred and untouchable, so their killing demanded revenge and justified invasion.

1219, following the killing of Mongol merchants and envoys at Otrar in 1218.

He personally ended tribal blood feuds, rebuilt the army's structure through the yassa, and chose to direct the unified Mongol state outward into conquest.

The Mongols: the killing of merchants and envoys at Otrar (1218). The Hundred Years' War: Philip VI's confiscation of Gascony (1337) after the 1328 succession dispute.

It lets a student apply the same causes framework (long-term structural pressures, an individual leader, a short-term trigger) to a non-European conflict, showing breadth beyond Europe or the Middle East.