History is mor3 complicated and narratives matter.
“By the time Pope Urban II preaches the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095, Islamic powers have held two-thirds of formerly Christian territory for more than four hundred years. The immediate trigger is a request for help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, whose empire is hemorrhaging Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks after the disaster of Manzikert (1071). The Crusades, whatever else they were, were not unprovoked. They were a delayed and ultimately failed counterattack in a war that began four centuries earlier and, viewed at the level of Eurasian geopolitics, did not end until the second siege of Vienna in 1683.This does not exonerate specific atrocities. “