Causes And Consequences Of The First Four Crusades

The first part of the Medieval period saw conflict, commerce, and contagion. Prophet Muhammad gave birth to Islam, a religion that expanded quickly into Christian territories; the Silk Road connected the eastern markets to western consumers, and unwittingly created a corridor for diseases.
The first four Crusades (1095 - 1254 CE), while seeming to be religious wars, were also very much political battles fought for secular reasons like political alliances, trade routes, and control of land. The conflict began when a tribe of Muslim Turks moved down from Turkestan, into Persia, and ultimately annihilated the Christian Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV in 1071. Finally settling in the Holy Lands and Jerusalem, the Turks then refused Christian pilgrims access to holy sites. Fearing further expansion by the Turks into Christian lands, Greek Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118 CE) sought assistance from another Christian leader, Pope Urban II, to muster up an army to reclaim Holy Lands. Upon a papal promise that death during the crusade would guarantee admittance into heaven, an army of believers, many of whom were ordinary men, untrained in the arts of war, processed to “Constantinople by land and by sea in August 1096 CE. Believing their faith would defend them, this popular
Led by Umar, internal tensions were redirected into an outward expansion effort toward the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires. “Territorial expansion created many unanticipated problems...Umar believed that the Islam that was revealed to Prophet Muhammad was to be a community of Arabs and that non-Arab Muslims should not be regarded as equals. He designated Arabia for Arabs only and expelled the non-Arabs. Umar also forbade intermarriage between Arab Muslims and non-Arab Muslims and prohibited the non-Arabs from owning property in the conquered lands” (Acrobatiq,