I was wrong about this. My perceptions of the Crusade were false, just as many other peoples are.
The Christians for example seem to believe that the Crusades were a noble fight against violent attackers.
Well I did some research, and I found this is to a degree true. However, the atrocities that were commited during the Crusades, which was a war against the violent spread of Islam, were far from 'a little out of hand'.
Not only did Christian Crusaders slaughter Muslim armies, but they also continued to slaughter entire civilian populations of Muslim cities. Not only Muslims were slaughtered - but Jews, for some reason, also became the target of the Crusaders. The Crusaders even decided that the slaughter of Eastern Orthodox Christian was in order, and that Pagans were simply not acceptable and slaughtered them too. Finally, a prince, who refused to participate in the war, was murdered after the Crusades for not participating and commiting troops.
What was the concern? That they might be converted to Islam so they better be killed now?
No. This was not a war against Islam - this was a war for Catholic Church control over the lands.
The Christians have the audacity to credit the Crusades with economic development of the region. Well... when you have 1,000,000 living off the land of the area, and then you slaughter 500,000 of them, there's twice as much to go around.
Granted - it did establish trade routes into the middle east, which continued all the way to China. But if diplomacy and understanding were applied perhaps the wholesale slaughter of human beings would not have been necessary.
It stopped the violent attacks of Islam for a while - but what about the slaughter of people who peacefully converted to Islam out of choice, and faith, and belief?
Yes... this indeed was a war of control. A war of religious intolerance, and a war of racism.
You could say, however, that without the wars of the past, the Earth today would be so overpopulated, that we would all live in abject poverty, as we would not have developed the knowledge and technology to support the population growth.
We can also credit Christians to slavery (they weren't the first, but they sure did love it!)- which helped us build our economies on free labour, making our nations rich, and never repaying their debt to their slaves.
Finally, I'll leave you with a word from a leading historian on the Crusades era, Steven Runciman:
"High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed.. the Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God".
