Crusades  

The Impact of the Crusades 

by Thomas Madden 

 

Ed. note: the following summary of the crusades is taken from Thomas Madden's excellent 
Concise History of the Crusades, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Ltd., 1999, 
pp. 213-215, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the author and the publisher. The 
entire book is a fine and up-to-date survey of crusading, suitable for students and the general 
reader alike.  

For medieval men and women, the crusade was an act of piety, charity, and love; but it was 
also a means of defending their world, their culture, and their way of life. It is not surprising, 
then, that the crusades lost their appeal when Christians no longer identified themselves first 
and foremost as members of one body of Christ. By the sixteenth century, Europe was 
dividing itself along political rather than religious lines. In that new world, the crusade had no 
place.  

It is easy for moderns to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant, cynically evil, or as 
Runciman summed them up, "nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of 
God." Yet such judgements tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based 
on uniquely modern (and, therefore, western) values. If from the safety of our desk we are 
quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick 
to condemn us. Our infinitely more destructive wars waged for the sake of political and social 
ideologies would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the 
medieval and the modern, men fight for what is most dear to them. That is a fact of human 
nature that is not so changeable.  

It is common today to brand the crusades a failure even at attaining their original goals. 
Jerusalem was conquered, it is often asserted, but the crusader kingdom was short-lived. It 
may seem so from our own day, but it is not so. Jerusalem remained in crusader hands for 88 

years, and the kingdom lasted in Palestine for 192 years. ��� only distracted Muslim 

powers; they also formed a buffer between the Arabs and Turks and the vulnerable Byzantine 
Empire. It is true that the Fourth Crusade did immeasurable damage to the city of 
Constantinople, but it was Byzantium's subsequent weakness that made it permanent. It 
cannot be said (although it is often said) that the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 was 
responsible for the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantium survived 192 years after it regained 
its capital. It is in those years that the seeds of the empire's downfall can be found. Despite the 
many tragedies, the crusades may well have added years to the life span of the Byzantine 
Empire.  

For good or ill, the crusading movement did have long-term effects. In the judgement of the 
Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon, the crusades sapped from western Europe wealth 
and human lives that would have been better spent at home working hard and fostering 
friendly relations with the Muslim world. Like all scholars of that era, Gibbon saw medieval 
Christianity as a vile superstition, and those who fought for it as ignorant or deceived. It is 

highly questionable, however, whether Europeans would have beaten their swords into 
ploughshares merely because they lacked an external enemy. More likely they would simply 
have continued to wage internal warfare with greater vigor. Given the steady Muslim 
conquest of Christian lands over the centuries, it also seems unlikely that good relations could 
have been forged between the two religions without first establishing firm and secure borders.  

There can be little doubt that the crusades slowed the advance of Islam, although how much is 
an open question. The presence of the crusader states in the Near East for almost two 
centuries certainly destabilized Muslim power, and therefore hindered unification into a single 
Islamic state. Even the crusades that failed or did not materialize forced Muslim powers to 
divert resources from conquest to their own defense. At the very least, then, the crusades 
bought western Europe some time. Judging by the number of occasions it narrowly escaped 
Turkish invasion in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, Europe had need of 
that time.  

In a less direct sense, the crusades did play a part in the eventual neutralization of the Muslim 
threat. In Spain, where traditional crusade chivalry lasted longer than anywhere else, veterans 
of the reconquista and crusades in North Africa became the conquistadors of the New World. 
Although the conquests of Mexico and Peru were not themselves crusades, crusading culture 
played a crucial role in them. Popes, Spanish monarchs, and conquistadors naturally viewed 
the people of the New World through the lens of four centuries of crusading. The 
conquistadors were warriors of Christ in an infidel land. There, they carved out new Christian 
states. Without hesitation, they raised their swords against the barbaric cruelties of Aztec 
human sacrifice, which, they were convinced, were Satanic in origin. And they were desirous 
of booty, which the New World had in abundance. These were all well-established 
characteristics of the crusades.  

Spanish galleons laden with New World gold and silver financed more than one Holy League 
against the Turks. But more than that, the new wealth, coupled with a rise in industrial 
technology, allowed Europe to purchase raw materials from the Ottomans and sell back to 
them the finished goods at a bargain price. The resulting trade deficit, and the repeated failure 
of the Ottoman Empire to embrace technological advances in anything other than military 
applications, ultimately doomed the Turkish economy. Europe never did win a decisive war 
against the Turks until World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was already a dilapidated 
shell. Unable to compete with Europe's skyrocketing economy, the Ottoman Empire slowly 
bled to death. In the end, the discovery and exploitation of the New World not only saved 
western Europe, but propelled it to world hegemony. The Muslim threat was neutralized not 
by the crusades to the East, but to the West.  

http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/religion/crusades/crumadden.html