Assignment example

Europeans Crusades against Muslim The crusades by the Europeans were motivated by various factors. With the Muslim having reveredand consequently conquered Jerusalem, they embarked on religious wars against the Christians. Thus, according to Pope Urban II, the need for the crusades was triggered by the inhumane acts that the Muslims perpetrated on the Christians, which ranged from torture, brutal murder, forceful circumcision, and rape for the Christian women (Edward, 183). Additionally, the Muslims engaged in defiling the Christian worship places and alters, forcing the Christians embark on crusades against them. The main reason therefore, that led to the crusades being held was to create the desire and accelerate the urge for the Christians to reclaim the conquered territories (184). The misery the Franks suffered, which included poverty, sicknesses and civil wars are the other reasons behind the European engagement in the fighting crusades. The Christians also observed that there had been previous prophesy to the effect that religious wars must come and must be fought (Gabrieli, 11). The urge to follow the Christian teachings, which required that individuals should love their God more than their wives and children served as a conviction that the Europeans needed to engage in the crusades to re-acquire the territories previous conquered by the Muslims. The conviction that the Christians was the true religion explains their behavior in the middle east of requiring that prayers be done facing the east, and even forcing Muslims to stop facing Mecca and instead face the east while praying (Giullo, 187).
Works Cited
Edward, Peters. The first Crusade: The Chronicle of Charters (2nd ed.). University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. 182-185. Print.
Gabrieli, Francesco. Arab Historians of the Crusades. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. 10-12. Print.
Giullo, Einaudi. Arab historians of the crusades transforms the Italians. Routledge and Kegan Paul ltd., 1969. 186-188. Print.