Hello,
You are accurate as for as you go. May I add also that a primary cause for the First Crusade was the European custom knowns as primogeniture. As the word implies the first born son received the entirety of his father’s estate. This left second, third, and fourth sons, men bred for war, without wealth or land. The result was chaos and constant warfare across Europe. Declaring a crusade was a way of directing the fratricidal violence in Europe toward a distant enemy.
By most accounts the Norman contingent in the First Crusade was motivated by a desire for land. Robert Guiscard had already conquered Sicily (another point of transmission for classical scholarship via Islam). He regulary raised Norman armies from among his kinsmen for campaigns against the Byzantines. When word came of the First Crusade, the Normans joined en masse. But they seemed not much interested in the stated goal of taking Jerusalem. One group stopped at Antioch and set up a crusader kingdom on the coast. Another group struck out for Edessa where they established a second crusader state. The entire effort seemed more devoted to secular power than religious fervor.
The notion that there were 8 crusades is slightly erroneous. New pilgrims arrived yearly to take up the cause once the crusader kingdoms had been established. What they found was a duplication of the feudal wars being fought in Europe. Christians joined with Muslim allies against other Christians, and Muslims joined Christian allies against their own. In fact, many new Christian pilgrims were appalled to see that earlier generations had gone native over time.
The finger pointing by Christians and Muslims over who did what to whom during the crusades is so much bunk. The entire campaign was an extension of feudal warfare from one region to another. Dressed in religious robes, it was nonetheless a secular land grab. Using the history of the crusades to back contemporary arguments is pointless.
