Why did Europe lose the Crusades?
A little while ago, I started to wonder about a historical question: Why did Europe lose the Crusades? The conventional wisdom, at least as I've always understood it, is that Europe was simply weaker and less advanced than the Islamic Middle Eastern powers defending the Holy Land. Movies about the Crusades tend to feature the Islamic armies deploying fearsome weapons - titanic trebuchets, or even gunpowder. This is consistent with the broad historical narrative of a civilizational "reversal of fortunes" - the notion that Islamic civilization was much more highly advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, there's the obvious fact that the Middle East is pretty far from France, Germany, and England, leading to the obvious suspicion that the Middle East was just too far away for medieval power projection. Anyway, I decided to answer this question by...reading stuff about the Crusades. I read all the Wikipedia pages for the various crusades, and then read a book - Th...