Also after the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate, Islamic power was far from uniform, coordinated or in any sense a growing threat to Europe. The reasons for the Crusades were all coming from the Christian side where unpropertied nobles were so numerous that they had to swarm to find new places to lay their eggs.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

If you’re from the US or Europe, you likely grew up with a vision of the Crusades as a series of ill-fated attempts to achieve some holy purpose. Maybe it was stories of Richard the Lionheart, or of Knights Templar praying in Jerusalem.

If (like me) you didn’t grow up with that cultural milieu, you may have a different perspective: the Crusades were Europe’s way of getting rid of its surplus of bloodthirsty maniacs by pointing them generally south and east and telling them to have fun looting, raping, and pillaging. Saladin is a name you may know as the great general who rescued Jerusalem from the Christians – and if you know what the armies that came before and after him did, you’ll know why he’s considered a hero.

The series below gives a bit of this history from the Arab perspective, which is fairly similar to the perspective of everyone else living in the Middle East. It may also give context to why referring to what you’re doing as a “Crusade” is not going to make you any friends outside of Europe, to put it very politely.

(Related: the reason knights show up in Christian European tales as heroes, and in everyone else’s tales as the monsters.)

h/t Kee Hinckley​

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/the-crusades-an-arab-perspective/2016/12/shock-crusade-conquest-jerusalem-161205081421743.html