[muawiyah]

By the 1600s (17th century) the Ottoman Empire was on the run ~ King Felipe I/iI and has Catholic League had already sent the Ottoman fleet to the bottom of the ocean and turned the Eastern Mediterranean into a Christian Lake. Hungary was successfully defended against Islamic incursions and the West was in a position to sweep the Turks out of Europe ~ except they decided to hold the 30 years war which delayed things a bit.

The Crusades were several hundred years earlier!

You may be confounding Crusader with Conquistidore ~ and Reconquista.

The Reconquista was fought in Spain from about the 800s to the late 1400s ~ mostly by heavy armed knights who immigrated from Cornwall, Brittany and some parts of Burgundy. You have to understand that most of Europe was your typical disease ridden third world hellhole for most of that period, and the battle against Islam was actually carried out by quite small states with a reasonably high level of culture and civilization. The Crusaders went to Israel. BTW, again we're speaking of Cornish and Breton knights ~ not really Frenchmen or Germans at the time.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Actually, I was talking about both. What was left of the Holy Roman Empire drove the Muslims out of Vienna. Jan Sobieski, Charles Martel, etc.

I just don't want the Crusades to be forgotten, or belittled. Catholics were 1000 years ahead of the curve, having fought the Mohammedans since virtually the beginning, as the Mohammedans drove Christians out of North Africa.