The History Room
A neat take on the Crusades
Basically the author says that the "barbarians" on the edges of Christian Europe and Muslim Arabia/Southwest Asia mutually benefited from the Crusades by allowing them into the mainstreams of their societies.
On July 15, 1099 — 915 years ago to the day —Jerusalem fell to the knights of the First Crusade, launching a powerful metaphor for the apparently implacable civilizational conflict between Islam and Christianity.For the better part of a millennium after they ended, no one in either Western Europe or the Middle East cared much about the Crusades. The Christian world was more wrapped up in its Greek and Roman past, and when Muslim thinkers considered foreign invaders, they were more likely to remember the trauma of the Mongols. Things started to change with the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, when patriotic historians rediscovered the Crusades as heroic examples of French, British or German chivalry and martial valor. This fascination famously flourished in World War I, when medieval legend offered a romantic alternative to the grim war in the trenches and early aviators became knights of the air with crosses emblazoned on their planes. Maybe it helped that the Crusades were among the few times English and French armies fought with and not against each other.An even greater irony goes back a thousand years to the Crusades themselves. The main protagonists on both sides of this archetypal religious war were barbarians from the edges of the Christian and Muslim worlds, respectively, who belatedly embraced their faiths with excessive zeal in order to fit into the civilizations they had only recently conquered. Seen as a conflict between Seljuqs and Normans rather than Muslims and Christians, the Crusades become a much more versatile parable for our era.
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Originally Posted by nathanbforrest45
