Were Christians responsible for the Crusades?
Image via Wikipedia There were certainly atrocities committed as part of the Crusades : the sack of Jerusalem stands as one glaring example which we should lament as Christians . However, to be fair the Crusades as a whole must be set against both the backdrop, and immediate context of Islamic expansion through warfare and conquest. The Byzantine Empire, the great empire of eastern Christendom , was under continued assault and invasion. North Africa had fallen to the Muslims ; Spain had been invaded. While the French mainland invasions from Spain had been repelled prior, there were regular attacks by Muslim raiding parties along Mediterranean coastal France, Italy, Greece, etc. This is one reasons why medieval (and later!) Greek, Italian and French villages along the coasts sit atop fortified hills – Muslim raiding parties which killed the men, sexually assaulted/captured the women, and took the children as slaves back to North Africa/Palestine. The medieval world was a re