Based on Pope Urban II’s original agenda, the Crusades were at least partially successful. Most importantly to Western Europe, the holy city of Jerusalem was taken from the Muslims after several years’ effort (and untold expense in lives, property and men). This in turn established an unprecedented element, that of Western Catholic forces entering into the Middle East and creating a warlike presence; no matter the later course the Crusades would take, the Muslim populations now had reason to perceive a very real threat. Then, the sheer masses of crusaders achieved for Urban II a second goal, that of taking Anatolia through conquest of its primary cities. That these efforts were accomplished in, again, the span of only several years says a great deal about the momentum and urgency of the Christian effort, particularly as disorganization so marked its progress. The taking of Jerusalem and Anatolia, then, may be described as the results of an immense wave of Christian power crashing into the region, which provided some measure of success.
It may be that the actual duration of the Crusades itself, however, as well as its naturally as inherently fragmented from the start, were ultimately responsible for what would be eventual failure. The Crusades may in fact be viewed as a kind of template in which vast ambition relying on military strength will likely achieve initial success, and then give way to indigenous forces eventually retaking control over the conquered territories. After hundreds of years of bloody warfare, with inestimable losses to all sides, the great irony is that Muslim power remained firmly based in the Middle East, even as Jerusalem, sporadically recaptured by the Christians, was finally within Muslim control once more. This being the reality, it is reasonable to argue that one outcome of the Crusades was the onset of an intense hostility between Christian and Muslim peoples which would endure to modern eras. That this hostility was based upon Christian aggression into foreign lands – the objective of the Holy City regained for Christianity notwithstanding – must as well have fueled anti-West and anti-Christian feeling in the Middle East.
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"The History of Crusades".
With regard to other consequences, Urban’s initial ambition to obligate Byzantium evolved, and virtually inevitably, to a more heated antagonism between Eastern and Western Christian power bases. The most unfortunate result here, in fact, was that the West made little effort to save the Christian treasures of Byzantium as it gradually fell to the Turks. If in fact Urban’s initial objective had been to save Byzantium in order to make it beholden to the West, the reality translated to wars over Byzantine rule rivaling those over the holy cities held by the Muslims; internal Church politics, in a word, transformed what should have been natural allies into enemies. As to the types of armed conflict, it is reasonable to state that the first Christian onslaught “set the stage” for how violently it would be conducted, and on both sides. It cannot be known if the savagery of the Muslim forces would have been in place without this initial attack, but it is likely that the brutality of the West encouraged reprisals of a similar nature. Certainly, as the Catholic forces believed themselves to be committed to a divine mission, the enemy was all the more perceived as undeserving of mercy, so intensely brutal action was the norm, as witnessed by the slaughters made by Peter’s Army and the massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland. The First Crusade, in fact, appears to be nearly maniacal in nature, and so relentlessly savage that no standard for acceptable warfare was considered. That the Muslims responded in kind, then, is hardly surprising.
