Jerusalem and Judea are IN ASIA making them Asian and Christian. Asian Christians. Desperate for something to correct are we?
It's anachronistic and meaningless to think in terms of modern ideas of continental land masses.
You wouldn't say the Byzantine Empire comprised both European Christians and Asian Christians now would you?
You first tried justifying the Crusades, then proceeded to realize that the motivation was monetary not religious and shifted your position to one of "I will agree if you admit" something I can't honestly admit because it is not true.
Good grief, where do you get the idea that I 'justified the Crusades'? (and I was only talking about the 1st Crusade)
If I explained why Hitler invaded Poland would that count as 'justifying' it?
In the mind of most participants, they were a religiously inspired reconquest of the Holy lands from those that
they perceived as barbarian infidels which tapped into a theme of European though, including a significant strand of millenarianism (especially among those who joined in the People's Crusade/Peasant's Crusade which was a total shambles).
Also where do you get the idea that I suddenly started to believe they were about plunder?
Crusading was an expensive hobby, and soldiers had to pay their own way. It probably cost an average knight
4 years of income to pay for everything. Now most people don't have 4 years of income sitting in a treasure chest so you had to sell/mortgage assets to raise this much. Many people literally sold all of their worldly goods to pay their way.
So many people were selling property to go on the Crusade (usually to the Church and monasteries) that it significantly depressed the price of assets. Not only were you selling what you owned, you were getting a bad price for it.
For the average knight you needed chain mail (ridiculously expensive at the time), multiple swords, spears, shields, bows, tents etc., a specially bred destrier (war horse), 2 or 3 palfreys (to ride outside battle), perhaps some pack horses, at least 4 or 5 men to look after the horses, armour, weapons, and help you in battle, perhaps cooks or other household staff, some hounds or whatever else you decided to take (maybe even your wife and kids). You also needed money (well often precious metals, gems, etc) to pay for everything on the road, which you know might take years.
And just as lots of people selling drove the prices of you assets down, lots of people buying drove the prices of everything you needed up.
So you were vastly underselling property to overpay for horses, weapons, equipment, gems, etc. and you also knew that because of the very large number of people going on Crusade, your share of any plunder would be very small. It's not surprising that very few participants ever made a profit.
Does that really sound like a good way to make an easy buck? If you wanted to plunder you could easily do that by plundering a neighbouring lord's lands then go home to sleep in your own bed at night. Or you could have bought up property at a knockdown price from the others selling up to go crusading (then go plunder a neighbouring lord's lands).
That doesn't mean that people didn't plunder when they got the chance, they did want some of their money back after all, but it wasn't a driving force. A few nobles might even have seen an opportunity to create themselves a nice little kingdom, but obviously most people couldn't have such dreams.
Most knights went home after the capture of Jerusalem and were not richer.
Western Europe did benefit financially from the effects of the Crusades, but from increased trade access to the Middle East via the formation of the Crusader states. Much of the decline in the West was due to the loss of trade routes following the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Genocide is preventing generations of people from having the opportunity at life by killing the generation that would produce them.
Genocide is the systematic attempt to wipe out a specific group of people. It has a meaning different from simply 'killing lots of people'.
Indiscriminate mass slaughter by a frenzied mob after sacking a single city is not a genocide. It was also a regular occurrence in medieval warfare, especially if cities didn't surrender as you couldn't hold a walled city if it was full of people waiting to rise up and kill you.
In case this needs to be pointed out, none of this is saying 'wow, weren't the Crusaders nice and civilised paragons of virtue', it was a brutal massacre even by the standards of the time.
Genocide is not accurate though, even if it does serve your polemical purpose.
Until the 19th/20th C, Arab sources don't even seem particularly bothered by the Crusades, they are seen as a pretty unremarkable event in history: a series of wars with the Franks that they won convincingly. They were just standard wars that didn't even warrant creating a specific Arabic equivalent of the word 'Crusades'
(if you still think I am a biased liar, search my name and genocide and you will find me arguing against the polemical claim that Muslims committed a genocide in India for exactly the same reason. I assume, to be consistent, you would argue that they did commit a genocide there correct?)
They literally killed every inhabitant of Jerusalem
No they didn't, just a lot of them (not that this really makes it any better)
A few were allowed to leave, some wealthier ones were ransomed.
European Christians ridiculed Greek culture for centuries and since the Church Fathers, the only reason they changed was because they saw the success of the Muslims who learned science and philosophy and taught them.
If you want a more nuanced perspective, I recommend
God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam.
You can read a short review of it
here that deals with the myth of the 'Dark Ages'.
It is true that Europe benefited from Arabic philosophy and science, I said so at the beginning, although Greek philosophy also came via the Byzantines
"However, it would be quite wrong to say that Muslims acted only as a conduit through which ancient learning could reach the West. The Byzantines independently preserved almost all of the most important surviving scientific texts in the original Greek, and few of them would have been lost without the Arab scribes.17 Rather, the importance of Muslim science lies in the innovative works of philosophy, mathematics and medicine that the Islamic world produced. The Arabic origin of mathematical terms such as algebra and algorithm are further indications of how much we owe to the Islamic Empire.18" God's Philosophers
It is also fair to point out that the reason Europe lost its Greek heritage was to a significant degree caused by both the Arab conquests and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and that Europe's relative poverty was related to very limited access to lucrative trade routes that resulted from these.
Also worth noting that it was the Church that was the driving force behind the translation of Greek/Arabic sources.
Or that you are obviously desperate for a win in what is essentially a meaningless debate.
That I see through you like invisible glass.
Jesus wept. Pot/kettle, etc.
Half of this thread is you getting angry about people having the cheek to disagree with you, which makes them all mendacious lying idiots who talk out of their ***.
You even got angry about me referring to Persians as 'non-Arab Muslims' which seems to have been perceived as some kind of slight despite me making a point that broadly agreed with you.
Calm down, it's a discussion.
