Mount Zion Ryan

After looking for something to read at Books-A-Million I settled on The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips. Seems pretty good so far, but like popular notions of the crusades, Phillips doesn’t seem to realize that the Crusades were wars of Liberation; at least that was the intent. Granted, the Crusaders failed to respect the native Christians. Nonetheless, the Crusaders believed they were liberating the Holy Lands from the Muslims. And they were. The “Middle East” or Levant or Outremer were Christian Lands. The great sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, were all ancient seats of Chirstianity. Here’s a map of Europe in 526.

The pink is the Roman Empire–some call it Byzantine. Regardless, it quite obviously includes much of what the Crusaders were trying to “conquer.”

Here is a good article on the Crusades:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/april2002/cover.htm

Compare the map above with this one:

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