[andyfox]

The latest scholarship is Thomas Asbridge's The First Crusade: A New History, quite an entertaining read. Asbridge was a student of Jonathan Riley-Smith, who is something of an apologist for the Crusades. Yet, of the First Crusade, Asbridge says:

"The first point to acknowledge is that the call to arms was not directly inspired by any recent calamity or atrocity in the East. And although the Holy City of Jerusalem, the expedition's ultimate goal, was indeed in Muslim hands, it had been so for more than 400 years--hardly a fresh wound.

"The reality was that Islam and Christendom had coexisted for centuries in relative equanimity. There may at times have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbours, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish this enmity from the endemic political and military struggles of the age.

"Europe was a long way from being engaged in an urgent, titanic struggle for survival. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors of Iberia and the Turks of Asia Minor shared a religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose. Where Christians and Muslims did face each other across the centuries, their relationship had been unremarkable, characterized, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and other of coexistence. There is little or no evidence to suggest that either side harboured any innate, empowering religious or racial hatred of the other.

“Most significantly, throughout this period indigenous Christians actually living under Islamic law, be it in Iberia or the Holy Land, were generally treated with remarkable clemency. The Muslim faith acknowledged and respected Judaism and Christianity, creeds with which it enjoyed a common devotional tradition and a mutual reliance upon authoritative scripture. Christian subjects may not have been able to share power with their Muslim masters, but they were given freedom to worship. All around the Mediterranean basin, Christian faith and society survived and even thrived under the watchful but tolerant eye of Islam. Eastern Christendom may have been subject to Islamic rule, but it was not on the brink of annihilation, nor prey to any form of systematic abuse.”

[emphasis added]