The Crusades were justified

"Romans indeed were expansive. However, unlike Muslims, the Roman expansionism was not motivated by religion." I fail to see how that makes a difference. The Romans were conquerors bent on world domination, it doesn't matter what their motivation was. And yes, the Umayyad caliphate had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula hundreds of years before. But they were hardly "knocking on Rome's door"; in fact, there were no large-scale invasions after 732, when the Battle of Tours showed them the true military might of the Franks. It doesn't matter what tenets the Islamic religion has about expansion; they are human beings, so they turned to self-serving pragmatism because the idea of expansion was suicidal. And in 1085, over a decade before the Crusades, King Alfonso VI of Leon captured a large chunk of land from Muslim Spain, calling it the Kingdom of Toledo [1]. The Empire was in very little danger. "With the enemy so close at the capital of Christianity, the religion was but one war away from complete annihilation." That's an exaggeration so huge, it's completely wrong. If you're talking about Constantinople, Muslims did conquer it centuries later in 1453, and the religion of Christianity was still very much intact. If you happen to be talking about Jerusalem, it was already under Muslim control and doing just fine. Christians and Jews were allowed to coexist peacefully within the city, unless there happened to be an insane ruler at the time. I'm glad you brought up Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, because he is called the "mad caliph" for a reason. Many of his Muslims contemporaries despised his destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, seeing it as incredibly disrespectful. His successor, Ali az-Zahir, allowed the Byzantine Emperor to begin reconstructing the shrine in 1042. Almost every Muslim caliph at the time showed respect toward Christianity; the fact that one went crazy is a fault of the individual, not of the entire Islamic religion. Perhaps medieval Europeans were ill-informed of the facts, but this is hardly a reason why such bloody retaliation was justified. "But in 1000s, with the Muslims destroying those very destinations of pilgrimage, the heart of Christianity was in danger." Again, that was under the rule of one mad king; during this time period, Muslim persecution of Christians or Jews was extremely rare. As historian Michael Foss points out, "For more than three hundred and fifty years, from the time when the Caliph Omar made a treaty with the Patriarch Sophronius until 1009, when mad al-Hakim began attacks on Christians and Jews, the city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land were open to the West, with an easy welcome and the way there was no more dangerous than a journey from Paris to Rome....Soon [after al-Hakim] the panic was over. In 1037 al-Mustansir came to an amicable agreement with Emperor Michael IV." There is no reason or evidence to suggest that pilgrims' lives were in jeopardy. A good number of the Crusader princes were ranged from cowardly to greedy to monstrous. Richard the Lionheart, one of the most well-known crusading heroes, was a cruel tyrant who raped women and massacres thousands of prisoners out of frustration. But I suppose you're right; evil men can take command no matter how justified their war is. So I will lay off that topic for now. "The justification for the Crusades comes from the original intentions, not the aftermath from people blinded by violence." I disagree completely; the original intent of the Crusades was most definitely to slaughter all Muslims in the Holy Land. Examine again Pope Urban II's speech [3], because you can't get much closer to the original intentions than that. "On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends." He not only insults the Arabic race, but explicitly commands everyone embarking on the Crusade to "destroy" them in one sentence. If that isn't a call for genocide, I don't know what is. Elsewhere in the speech he refers to the Saracens as "a despised and base race, which worships demons". Whether or not you believe that Muslims worship demons, it's clear that the medieval Catholics had a disgust and hatred for any race that was predominately Muslim, and their goal was to clear them all out of the Holy Land, dead or alive. And indeed, once the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established, there was not one Muslim to be found in the city. "Even though the People's Crusade was called a Crusade, it was not one." In what way was it not a crusade? Notice that in round 1 I defined "crusade" as "The wars fought between the forces of western Christendom and Islam from approximately the 11th to 13th centuries AD". It meets those qualifications, and nowhere does it say that it must be papally sanctioned. If you disagree with my definition, you should have told me before you accepted the debate. "The Fourth Crusade was the reason there were no more crusades." Have you forgotten about Crusades Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine? And the Barons' Crusade? And the numerous crusades against European pagans? All of these happened well after the Fourth. I will now allow Pro to give further counter-argument. SOURCES: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://legacy.fordham.edu...