But with the merging of Rome and Christianity, the Church’s spiritual enemies became indistinguishable from Rome’s political enemies. By the time the first Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, four years after Urban had dispatched them to liberate the Holy Land, Christianity was no longer the secret Jewish sect whose members, along with the rest of the Jews, had been forced out of the Holy Land by Rome a thousand years before. It was Rome: rich, mighty, thirsty for blood.
