As we seek to understand some of the major differences between Christianity and Islam, it is impossible to ignore 1,400 years of a conflicted history. It is a story more often written in blood than with ink.

No one who has lived or traveled in the Middle East can be unaware of the lingering resentment felt toward the "Latins," as the Crusaders are called. This bitterness extends beyond Muslims to Greek Orthodox Christians, who have never forgotten the trauma of the Fourth Crusade of 1204. On that occasion, Crusaders from the West, marching under the banner of the cross, raped and pillaged Constantinople, doing to their fellow Christians what no Muslim army had been able to do up to that point. Missiology expert Ruth Tucker has written of the lingering effects of the crusading mentality on Christian missions: "So bitter was the animosity of Muslims toward Christians, as a result of the savage cruelty manifested during the Crusades, that even today the memory has not been erased, and evangelism remains most difficult among people of the Muslim faith."

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But How Did It All Begin?
Seen from another perspective, the crusades were but a delayed reaction to earlier Muslim aggression. Beginning with the fall of Jerusalem in 636, Muslim armies captured, blitzkrieg-like, all of the major urban centers of early Christianity--Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria, and Carthage (the city of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine). In 1453, Constantinople itself fell to the Ottoman Turks, the ruling force in the Muslim world at that time. During the Reformation, the armies of Islam in the 1520s were pressing on the gates of Vienna. They continued to do so periodically until they were finally turned back in 1683. Leaders of the Christian West were not being paranoid when they saw their civilization threatened by militant Islam.

The crusades were a violent, sporadic, and ultimately ineffectual response to this threat. When Pope Urban II called for an international counter-jihad to liberate the Holy Land from the infidels, thousands of people responded deus vult ("God wills it"). Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, encouraged the Knights of Europe to do the honorable thing by taking up the sword under the banner of the Cross: "Our King [Jesus] is accused of treachery; it is said of him [by the Muslims] that he is not God, but that he falsely pretended to be something he was not. Any man among you who is his vassal ought to rise up to defend his Lord from the infamous accusation of treachery; he should go to the sure fight, where to win will be glorious and where to die will be gain."

Holy City Retaken and Then Lost Again
In 1099, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders. They slaughtered all Muslims and Jews, including women and children. They converted the Dome of the Rock into a church. This victory was short-lived, however, as the famous general Saladin recaptured the Holy City in 1187. In 1291 the final Crusader forces were defeated at Acre, and Christians were expelled from the Holy Land. From then on until the end of World War I, the holy sites of Jerusalem were under the control of Muslim forces.

In the early years of the Reformation, when it seemed that Europe might be run over by the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Turks, there was much talk about recruiting soldiers for a new crusade. Although he was no pacifist, Martin Luther was opposed to this idea. The church should not fight with the sword, he said. There are other weapons it must wield, another kind of warfare it should wage, and thus it "must not mix itself up with the wars of the emperor and the princes." What if we sent evangelists rather than warriors to the Turks? he asked. Perhaps some of the Muslims there would be converted "when they see that Christians surpass the Turks in humility, patience, diligence, fidelity, and such like virtues."