The Christian Drang nach Osten

We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic of human heroism, in which the defeat of the ‘right’ side had been happily reversed in their own age? Were they an immoral act of unprovoked aggression for which western Christians should apologise to the Muslim world, as the last Pope has rather absurdly purported to do on their behalf? Moral judgments, it is said, are not the historian’s province, but in this field they are hard to avoid. The casualties of the crusades, both human and material, were too high, the images too potent, the modern analogies too awful.

The main problem about the crusades, for contemporaries and moderns alike, is that the first one succeeded.