Historian says religion not the motive behind Crusades

[Shinra Executive]

Historian says religion not the motive behind Crusades

They're right. Religion was an indirect motive for a lot of people, but the real cause was for expansion and rule. From the personal perspective, people also saw it as an opportunity for wealth or even just to survive. The world was just coming out of the Dark Ages.

 

[Shinra Executive]

I'm bored, figured I'd expand on my last post on this dead thread

Christianity and Islam both took a few hundred years to come to a complete rise. The Christian faith became noticeable at about 30AD, when the Christ had really started his mission. But it wasn't until the 4th century that Christianity was a recognizable religion the world over. It took the religion a few hundred years to get to high gear. In the same way, the Prophet Muhammad come around in the 6th century, but Islam didn't kick into high gear until about the 10th century.

In other words, the time of the Crusades were not coincidental. It was centrifugal to traditional Islam that Muslims not associate with Christians or Jews. Mind you, this is what the Quran explicitly states and this was a time when Islam was on at it's primary rise.
Naturally, any Christian who ventured or lived in Muslim lands got kicked out or worse.

But since Christianity was prominent as well, and even several hundred years more simmered then Islam, it had a natural knack for evangelizing (standardizing) any state seized by western cultures, which had long since grown familiar with the religion.
Imperials were mainly heading to the North, putting the European barbarians under siege. But they also headed East a bit, treading on Islamic lands. For every place they took control of, Christianity naturally came with it. This is where the West and Islam started bumping heads. It's not as if the Church was simply going around looking for trouble. For the West, it was all about expansion, and the Church didn't really become involved until the West saw Islam as a hopeless conflict of interest to that expansion.

Only for a brief period of time was both religions ever at mortal odds with each other, and it was a product of a non-religious, preexisting aggravation. It quickly went from politics to religion to politics. Only the theme of religion really stuck around. The Cross and the Crescent Moon weren't much more then identifiers by then.