re: UPDATE: At least 290 people are dead in terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka this morning...

The goal of the Crusades was entirely justified. The Seljuk Turks were within months of taking down the Byzantine Empire. If Eastern Christianity fell, it's a good bet that Western Christianity would follow in a few generations. When Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095, it came after over 400 years of Islamic aggression against Europe as well as Christendom.

Bad things happen in war and some of the men who went off to the Holy Land to crusade were terrible human beings. But I feel as if the bad events that occurred during the Crusades are sometimes overblown by modern scholarship to make the Catholic Church look bad. It wasn't until the Enlightenment period that you finally saw literature being published AGAINST the Crusades.