[pickemuphere]

It's long past time for something like this to be posted.

Yes, but too bad it's not entirely accurate. There was a great need -- at least in England -- to be rid of the mercenary elements that were increasingly disrupting society. There were a lot of bored knights wandering around with no one to fight. (Imagine Lear's retinue writ large, and you'll have a good sense of the problem.)

Simply put, the Crusades gave these fighters something to do. I can see no evidence that England felt any threat whatever from the Saracens. The Crusades were many things, but they were not defensive actions. In that I disagree with this author.

[Ann Archy]

They were defensive....they didn't want Christianity wiped out by the Muslims!!

[curmudgeonII]

To some extent the Crusades were, indeed, defensive. Looking back from the time of the prophet, you find that the Muslims conquered most of the Middle East, much of India, all of northern Africa, and had advanced in Europe to the point of conquering most of the Iberian peninsula and were threatening France from the Southwest. And all of this was done by the sword, not by theology. [Charle Martel, the hammer, was finally able to stop them from overrunning Western Europe.]
If this type of bellicose action did not require a military response I don't know what would.