“The Crusades” are one of the highest points in Christian Church history. Or, depending on how you look at it, one of the lowest. As we discussed last time, the inspiration for the First Crusade was the Pope’s idea of how to get a bunch of troublesome knights out of Europe for a while. That worked, and in the process, a number of notably distinguished people and events came into western history. The Knights of Malta, one of the all-time leaders in selfless civic service resulted from the Crusades. The very present city wall of Jerusalem were built by the Turks in anticipation of the continued attacks by Crusaders.
The Turks themselves came to be a force in world politics largely as a result of the Crusades. The Turks lived north and east of what we today think of as Iran, up on the Russian Steppe. They were moving south and west as so many before them had, when they encountered Islam. Most converted. The Arabs, until then the leaders of the Islamic movement, immediately put them to work, fighting the Greek, or Byzantine Empire. Many Arabs came to regret that decision, for eventually the Turks took over the entire Islamic world, and ran it as first the Seljuk and later the Ottoman empire for several hundred years,
Into this swirling mix of competing races, empires and religions came several thousand Christians, organized into armies whose mission was to free, then, secure, the Holy Land. The Greeks didn’t like them, and generally thought them little better than barbarians (which was probably accurate); the Arabs especially disliked being dispossessed by them in Jerusalem and the two Christian kingdoms they set up, and a large part of Europe came to see service in the Holy Land as something that was almost a Christian duty, at least for those of a military bent of mind.
All sorts of our western myths and legends come from the Crusades: a red cross on a white field was the emblem the Pope gave to any knight who’d go and fight. The Jerusalem Cross was the symbol of the one of the Christian kingdoms, there. The Maltese Cross was the insignia of the Hospitalers of St. John, knights who invented hospitals as we know them, providing respite for pilgrims who became ill. Today, they’re the Knights of Malta. The Knights Templar, or Knights of the Temple, were intimately connected with what we know as the Masonic order. Robin Hood was intimately connected with great King Richard, who went to Jerusalem, and his evil brother Prince John, who did not. All this and more resulted from the “Crusades”, and none of it could have happened without the strong support of the western Church.