WorldViews. The World in Textbooks

[p. 91]

§ 85. The Outcome of the Crusades.

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The end of the Crusades was brought about by the gradual decline of the mood of religious rapture and asceticism which had initially inspired this event. The Crusades had caused a huge loss of life and property, albeit without securing, in the long term, the Christian colonies conquered in the Orient. The reasons for this failure lay primarily in the disunity and poor political leadership of the crusading states; but also in the fact that too few people were emigrating from the Occident in order to cultivate Syria along European lines, and that those who did emigrate were largely war veterans rather than farmers. The failure of the Crusades could also be ascribed to the fact that this was a military state in which all possessions and sources of income were insecure and solicited on the point of a sword, in which hankering after quick profits and life’s pleasures were rife and undermined every form of moral life. In the meantime, the Crusades have had a profound influence on Occidental culture. It is thanks to the Crusades that the knighthood, which was the most distinguished representative of this movement, could lend its ideal social ranking an element of religious rapture and ensure that it would merge to form a bond throughout Christian Europe. The Crusades, and the encounters with foreign peoples and moral values which resulted from them, led to an increase in technical knowledge and scholarship, which inevitably had a highly stimulating effect on the people in the Occident. Aristotle, for example, whose works form the basis of all medieval philosophy known as scholasticism, became known in the Occident via Arabic scholarship. Pointed arches, which are used in Gothic architecture, for example, was first used in Arabic architecture, albeit merely for ornamental purposes.