Why the Crusades Began — The Real Story
The real story behind Europe’s holy wars—not Hollywood fantasy.
INTRO — WHY EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED ABOUT THE CRUSADES IS WRONG
The Crusades might be the most misunderstood wars in world history.
Modern films make them look like random Christian invasions.
Others simplify them into “good vs. evil” narratives that flatten centuries of geopolitics into a single slogan.
The real story is more complicated — and far more global.
The Crusades did not start the conflict between Christian Europe and the Islamic world.
They were a response to a world already transformed by four centuries of Islamic expansion.
From the 630s to 1000 AD, the Islamic Caliphates conquered:
The entire Near East (Syria, Palestine, Jerusalem, Lebanon)
Egypt and North Africa
Persia (the Sassanian Empire — Byzantium’s greatest rival)
Almost all of Spain
The island of Sicily
Major cities: Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage
In less than 120 years, Christianity went from dominating the Mediterranean to losing half of its historic territory.
By the time the Crusades began, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire — the oldest Christian state on earth — was collapsing.
The Crusades were not spontaneous.
They were Western Europe’s answer to a centuries-old geopolitical crisis.
