One of the central points of my story is a war caused by a country in search of religious legitimacy. I'm trying to flesh out this part but I'm having a lot of difficulty, so I decided to post here showing the kind of thing I'm looking for based on historical events to see if anyone can suggest something. I want to insert something that resonates with the search for legitimacy as a source of power. Like in the First World War, Russia wanted to take Constantinople (Istambul) from the Ottomans in an eventual victory to back it's claim of being the sucessor state of the Byzantine Empire, or the crusades to bring Christian rule to Jerusalem. I need some ideas to think outside the box here.
So what's something both those historical inspirations have in common? They tied their sense of 'legitimacy' to a specific place. Maybe there is a specific location in the other country that the one thinks is important, a temple or something. Maybe it's just a monument. If they want legitimacy to increase their power though, I'd imagine that the religion is one that's widely worshiped and not just in their country.
Everyone is religious. Everyone has a god or God. Everyone serves something. We all have some kind of hierarchical value structure. What ever is on the top of that structure is your god (or God). It can be money, the false illusion of human intelligence, power, God, Jeesus, Allah, pleasure, Dawkins, selfish identity plays and social positions... What ever you have there is your god. You can think things that hold positions in this value structure as immaterial "value beings". They are all the time competing in their power hierarchy. We humans are the soil, the fields, the ground. They grow on us, from us, between us and to us. These value beings, immaterial cultural copyants form coadapted complexes - memeplexes. And memeplexes fight other memeplexes. We human beings are in the role of meme machines, fields where memes cultivate themselves. And please, please, please... Don't think stupid internet virals and pictures when the word meme is used. If you got interested you can start from this book by Susan Blackmore... The_Meme_Machine
