Modern depiction of the crusades

Depiction means in a picture or scripture. The Crusades started after five centuries of Islamic Jihad had conquered and annihilated, or forcibly converted, over two-thirds of what had formerly been the Christian world. The crusades were actually expensive, many of the crusaders had to sell their property to raise money for the long journey to the Holy Land and knew that their chances of returning alive were slight.  Most who did manage to survive and return came back with nothing material to show for their efforts. They say that Crusaders attempted to forcibly convert Muslims to Christianity. The Crusaders saw themselves as Pilgrims seeking to recapture and liberate Christian lands from vicious invaders. A Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr who traversed the Mediterranean on his way to Mecca in the early 1180's and found that the Muslims were far better off in those lands controlled by the Crusaders than they were in Muslim ruled lands. Muslims preferred to live in the Crusader realms because those lands were more orderly and better managed. The Crusades brought Europe time. From the first century of Islam Muslim armies were invading Europe. The constant depiction of the Crusades as a failure is not justified by the historical record. The Crusades succeeded in seizing the initiative, throwing the Muslim invaders onto the defensive, for the first time after five centuries of attack. The Crusades were more than just military exploits. They built and touched upon almost every aspect of life in the day, in fact that is especially clear when one looks at their outcome. If the popes who promoted the Crusades gained the authority to muster and army and send it on a mission, it should be noted that they never acquired the actual power of a field commander to oversee a battle or call for specific maneuvers. In the end their excursion into the armed forces did more damage than good to the prestige of the papacy. By the last Crusade, many in Europe had come to see the Pope as just another war-mongering king, not the guardian of souls who stand before heaven's gate. But in other respects, these Church-sanctioned wars brought some benefit to Medieval Europe. Crusading brought no significant new territories or allies into the European cultural sphere, at best it can be said it opened the door slightly for western traders to do business abroad, but even that proved harmful by making the Church seem commercial and greedy. Worse yet the enormous drain of energy and manpower won the West little more than increased antagonism with it neighbors in the East. 

At a critical time, the Crusades united a divided Europe, and threw the Muslim invaders back, bringing a peace and security to Europe that had not been known for centuries. As a result of the tremendous sacrifices of the Crusaders, Christian Europe experienced Spiritual Revival and Biblical Reformation which inspired a great resurgence of learning, scientific experimentation, technological advancement, and movements that led to greater prosperity and freedoms than had ever been known in all of history.

A picture of what Europe might be like today had Islam succeeded in conquering it, one can look at the previously Christian civilizations of Egypt and what today is called Turkey. The Copts in Egypt now make up just 100% of the total Egyptian population, and are severely oppressed. What today is called Turkey was once the vibrant Christian Byzantine Empire, the economic and military superpower of its day. Today the Christian civilization which had flourished there for a thousand years has all but been extinguished. The last Christian city in Asia, Smyrna, was massacred by the Turkish Army in 1922.

The crusaders were reacting to over four centuries of relentless Islamic Jihad, which had wiped out over 50% of all the Christians in the world and conquered over 60% of all the Christian lands on earth-before the crusades ever began. Many of the towns liberated by the crusaders were still over 90% Christian when the crusaders arrived. The Middle East was the birthplace of the Christian Church. It was the Christians who had been conquered and oppressed by the Seljuk Turks. So many of the towns in the Middle East welcomed the crusaders as liberators. Far from the crusaders being the aggressors, it was the Muslim armies which had spread Islam from Saudi Arabia across the whole of Christian North Africa into Spain and even France within the first century after the death of Muhammad. Muslim armies sacked and slaughtered their way across some of the greatest Christian cities in the world. Including, Alexandria, Carthage, Antioch, and Constantinople. These Muslim invaders destroyed over 3,000 Christian churches just in the first 100 years of Islam. When we think about the Middle Ages, we inevitably view Europe in the light of what t became rather than what it was. The fact is that the superpower of the Medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades were a battle against all odds with impossibly long lines of supply and cripplingly inadequate logistics. 

An expert named Robert Spencer says that the crusades may be causing more devastation today than they ever did in three centries when most of them were fought, according to Robert Spencer. 

The Crusades