Much of this is incomprehensible to the modern West, including (if not especially) its Christians. How could the crusaders be motivated by love and piety, considering all the brutal violence and bloodshed they committed? Not only is such a question anachronistic—violence was part and parcel of the medieval world—but centuries before Islam, Christian theologians had concluded that “the so called charity texts of the New Testament that preached passivism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behavior of the private person” and not the state,
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