People had better start coming to terms as to WHY the Crusades happened. It wasn’t crazy Christians just going on a rampage for no particular reason.
Look at the history of the middle east, look how Islam spread as a timeline against the Crusades. We should all be GRATEFUL that the Crusades occurred. If they didn’t we probably wouldn’t exist as we do. Were there some that committed crimes? Sure, but tell me one war where that didn’t happen. People on both sides committed crimes during WWII - does that mean that we’re guilty of something horrible for defeating the Nazi’s??????
Of course not.
+1
Actually, on balance, the Crusades probably harmed the cause of resistance to Islam. (And I mean in the course of military and diplomatic history at the time and in the centuries following, not by their continued propagandistic use by Muslims and Islamophile anti-Christian secularists, though that’s another downside to the enterprise.)
The real bulwark against the advance of Islam from the East was, down until it dwindled to a city-state, the Empire (Roman Empire, but your leave, the notion that it was a different “Byzantine” Empire is an invention of the “Englighenment” historians who had an axe to grind and wanted to deny Romanity to the Christian Romans and claim it for themselves). Even when it was not much more than city-state, there was a brief period in the 14th century when an Ottoman sultan was a vassal of the Emperor, though it was bracketed by periods when the roles were reversed. Everything the First Crusade managed to accomplish in terms of stabilizing the eastern frontier of the Empire and of Christendom as a whole was more than undone by the treachery of the Fourth Crusade — it was that treachery, not the defeat at Manzikert as Western apologists try to claim, that sealed the Empire’s fate, doomed the Balkans to the Muslim yoke, and opened the way for the repeated Muslim attempts on Vienna.
Leaving aside the brief period of Christian control of the Holy Land, it’s not even clear the First Crusade did that much good — the period following it was full of intrigues and little wars which had dissident Muslim Emirs siding with the Emperor against the Caliph and one or another of the Crusader states, Latin-held Antioch besieged by the Emperor, and all manner of other chaos. The Empire and Christendom as a whole might have been better off if a pack of intriguing Western European noblemen had not be deposited in the Middle East and the Empire under the Comneni had just had to deal with the Muslim threat on its own.
As an Antiochian Orthodox Christian, I’m not even sure the Crusaders controlling the Holy Land was on balance a good thing — they forcibly replaced Orthodox bishops who were still in communion with Rome, completing the Great Schism —in 1054, only Constantinple and Rome breached communion, the other Patriarchates were still in communion with both until 1098 when the Crusaders installed a Latin bishop in the occupied see of Jerusalem and spent two years trying to “convert” the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, who had not before then broken communion with the Pope of Rome.