In 1098, Hildegard of Bingen was born at the time of the crusades. Three years before that on a synod in Clermont, Pope Urban II called the Christians to the crusades after the Byzantine Empire asked for help against the Muslim Seljuks. The call by the Pope spread like wildfire throughout the whole of Europe, and many people made their way East according to the motto „God wishes it!“ and the promise of an absolution of sins. For the Church, the crusade was also an instrument of establishing a force of law and order in Central Europe and to possibly eliminate the separation between the Eastern and Western Church. The first wave of crusaders mainly consisted of ordinary people and had already been beaten in October 1096 near Nicaea. In July 1099, a better organized army was then able to take Jerusalem and so finish the First Crusade.

Provoked by the itinerant preachers who accompanied the crusade, the aggression was soon directed against people of other beliefs in the home countries. Already in 1096, many Jews had become victim of fanatic crowds in towns like Mainz, Trier, Speyer and Worms, which were all very close to Hildegard’s future places of work. Although she does not mention it in her writings, Hildegard certainly learned about these occurrences in the course of her life and was also in contact with the Jewish population in her region: According to her Vita she visited Jews in order to question them and perhaps in order to discuss the interpretation of the Holy Scripture with them. Hildegard „refuted them by her own law and encouraged them with words of pious admonition to the belief in Christ“.

While Hildegard was working on her first work Scivias on the Disibodenberg, events gathered pace again: The Seljuks did not give up on the conquered regions and reconquered the County of Edessa in 1144. This development made Pope Eugenius III call for the Second Crusade on 1 December 1145. He sent out the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, who was already famous by then, for the crusade sermons. After Bernard convinced King Conrad in an inflammatory speech in December 1144 to take the cross, he went from Speyer down the Rhine. He was able to stop the monk Radulf, who had been inciting the people to attack the Jewish population, and to send him back to his monastery so that similar violent pogroms as had happened before the First Crusade could be prevented. During his crusade sermons, Bernard received a letter with a completely different content: A woman reported she had had a vision, instructed by the word of God, about „the inner meaning of the interpretation of the Psalter, the Gospels and other Catholic volumes“. The author of the letter was Hildegard who saw an opportunity in the presence of the powerful Abbot to receive acceptance from this high authority for the work she was writing. The answer to her was, perhaps due to „the press of business“ very brief and was limited to a few vague words only.

In the meantime, the crusade lead by the Kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III, respectively failed quickly. The majority of Conrad’s troops had already been beaten in 1147 in Anatolia, and the French contingent only partly reached the Holy Land. The original objective, to reconquer Edessa, was given up when the town was destroyed by the Seljuks. The army besieged rich Damascus instead, which actually was not an enemy, but seemed to be a worthwhile conquest. However, this undertaking also failed, just like the entire Second Crusade in 1148. Hildegard did not talk about events during the crusades, but it can be assumed that the fight for the Holy Land confirmed her belief to be at the beginning of the ending times.