Compare And Contrast The Crusades And The War On Terror

The Crusades and the War on Terror: two events that occurred over 900 years from each other. Whether it’s church or state calling for a war, these two events have striking similarities. On one hand, there are two armies that fought in the name of their Gods and the dominance of their religions. In more recent time, allies of the United States came together to defeat something that threatens the entire world, terrorism. Even though these two wars seem very far apart, they are similar because of the events that inspired these wars, predominantly Christian nations are fighting Muslim nations and lastly, the fact that the United States and allied nations have always tried to involve themselves in Middle Eastern affairs. The Crusades first

During the First Crusade, the Pope called for all of Western Europe to come together and fight against the Pagans of the East. According to H. E. J. Crowley, “The First Crusade was the culmination of the long process which there took shape, in Western Europe, the idea of a holy war against the heathens, sponsored by the church”. Crowley supports the idea that all of Western Europe was coming together to fight the heathens, who were the Muslims of the East. This conflict of East versus West would carry into the modern era and the War on Terror. Before 9/11, there were terrorist attacks in Turkey, Denmark, India, and Argentina. All of these countries associate themselves with powerful countries where Christianity is the main religion, such as the United Kingdom or the United States, by being allies with them. Once the United States began the “crusade” against terrorism, many other nations began to follow. It all started with the controversial invasion of Iraq. President Bush began a manhunt for the planners of the attack as well as a search for (nonexistent) WMDs in Iraq. He was able to involve other major countries in western Europe such as, “Britain, Spain, Italy, etc” and elsewhere. This compares to the First Crusade, because major countries across Western Europe were also fighting in Eastern territories, such as Asia Minor (modern

This all started because after the First Crusade, the West began to dominate the East both politically and economically. According to Tyerman, “Without the westerners’ political and economic capacity to sustain conquest and colonization…these wars would have been proved evanescent”. This shows that the West always had an edge on the East. As a result, the West was always taking advantage of the East and colonizing in these places for more resources. Colonization played a key role in the West because the countries were always competing to have more resources than the other. Meanwhile, the countries in the East were not so dependent on colonization and dealt with what they already had. The West was able to expand to the East in places such as, “the Mediterranean and the Baltic” because of the “failure of the Muslim powers in North Africa and Southern Iberia and of the disparate tribes of the southern and eastern Baltic to maintain any concerted resistance to Christian expansion allowed the Crusaders to prevail”. Since Muslim countries was weaker than the Christian countries after the Crusades, they were always being stomped on and taken advantage of. The only time the East could prevail over the West was when they conquered Southern Iberia, or Spain. The Moors successfully claimed the lands of Southern Iberia, which is now the country of Spain, for Islam after the fall of