This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A war or conflict entry records a specific armed struggle, considered here for how religious belief, religious institutions or religious identity shaped why it was fought, who fought it and how it was remembered afterward, rather than for its military campaigns and battles in their own right. Christopher Tyerman's history of the Crusades treats these wars as a documented religious project with its own theology of holy violence, its own recruitment through preaching and vow, and its own long, contested afterlife in how later generations chose to remember it.
An entry records who called a conflict, on what religious or claimed religious grounds, who actually fought and who was excluded from fighting, and what a conflict's own participants said it was for, since a war's stated religious purpose and its documented political, economic or dynastic causes are frequently two separate, both worth recording, facts about the same event.
Many conflicts recorded here drew on religious language and religious institutions while also serving purposes their own participants rarely stated plainly, and the entry records that gap between a war's stated religious purpose and its fuller documented context honestly, rather than accepting either account on its own as the whole story.