Are we at war with Islam?

[Airbornelawyer]

Originally posted by NousDefionsDoc
I don't really know anything about the Crusades, but if the Muslims won, why is Spain a Catholic country and not Muslim?

The mission of the Crusades was not to defend Europe from Islamic armies. It was to recapture the Holy Lands from the infidels and to save the Eastern Church. That mission failed. In fact, the Crusaders own depredations weakened the Eastern Church and Empire. Though Constantinople itself held off until falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Empire was a shadow of itself and there was no sufficiently powerful central authority to prevent the schisms of the Eastern churches. And while a few small Crusader kingdoms and castles held out, the Holy Lands were in Muslim control until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

One could argue that the ultimate benefits still inured to the West (though one could make a similar argument that Germany and Japan "won" by losing World War II):

• The Arab armies were ultimately victorious, but were so weakened that their emirates were easy prey for the Turkic and Mongol invasions. This also facilitated the Reconquista.
• The church in Rome was strengthened as the main religious authority in the West (even after the Reformation, Protestant churches tend to define themselves by their differences with the Holy See, and could care less about the Patriarchate of Constantinople).
• While strengthened as a religious authority, the secular authority of the Church was pretty much destroyed by the Crusades. Local kings and princes were strengthened, advancing the rise of the European state system which gave Europe much of its strength and came to dominate the political landscape of the world.
• During the Dark Ages, the West had been almost completely cut off from the East. After the Crusades, trading ties remained open, and everything from spices to Aristotelian philosophic treatises flowed West.
• The Muslim world's dominance of the Eastern trade routes led the Western kingdoms to search for alternatives, which flowered into the Age of Discovery. Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, Magellan and others would open new routes to Asia's treasures, and find new lands to conquer.

There are counterarguments to some of these - notably whether some of these, such as the rise of the secular nation-state, would have developed notwithstanding the Crusades. And of course, the later Crusades in Europe proper, divorced from the original goals set forth at the Council of Clermont, weakened southeastern Europe and opened the door for the Ottoman conquest.