Wow. Nothing in your list, save maybe the unifroms, is correct.
There were no “Dark Ages” from which to recover in the 12th ir 13th century.
It’s possible, certainly, that peaceful traders, travelers, and pilgrims could eventually have stimulated a wider interest in the wonders of the East, and an appetite for Eastern goods. That was happening to a small degree even before the Crusades.
But, it was a slow process. And the Seljuk Turks, who conquered the Middle East in the Eleventh Century, weren’t always especially friendly to traders, travelers, and pilgrims.
The Crusades jump-started the process. They got a lot of Westerners to the East in a hurry, and many returned home in short order to describe what they had seen.
If you want to run with a hypothetical, without the crusades Richard ‘The Lion Heart’ wouldn’t have hocked his kingdom to go on the Third Crusade, stayed in Aquitaine and produced an heir. Consequently John would not have acting king of England from 1189, or not have succeeded him in 1199 ergo we may not have got Magna Carta.
I reckon the establishment of Christian kingdoms (and bases) in the Levant did wonders to re-secure the safety of passage through the Med., which had gone to the dogs when the wheels fell off the Roman Empire. The Greeks had often tried to do it on their own, but got their butts handed to them on and off, hence the repeated (and routinely ignored, until it got expedient not to) calls for help. A joint effort might have done something, and safer seas means more commerce.
This however is pure conjecture on my part.
I’ve been somewhat suspicious of this story for a long time, not because it’s exactly false, but because it seems to be a bit of a just-so tale. Learning never died out in the West, that there was substantial contact going on including in academic circles.
If the crusades did accomplish something, it was to expand the central authority of the monarchies, begin the path to a professional military, and build up the navy (with the organization necessary to do so). The Renaissance* started in Italy - Christian lands which had common contact with the east and south (as well as hosting substantial cultural diversity and contact with Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Greece). And Italy benefited from the skills brought by Byzantine refugees. In addition, Italy was economically advanced and probably hosted the most developed financial and industrial base in the world at the time, as well as several major naval powers. If the crusades spread such knowledge, it was more likely a result of increased contact with the Byzantines.
The end of the crusades was marked as a time of general problems. While the High Middle Ages were reaching their peak, Christianity was also contracting in areas and beginning to stagnate. The Crusades and the black death cut society off at the knees. Yet they did certainly unite much of Europe, served to spread cultural ideas and contact between north and south, spread a common Christianity from the Atlantic to Lithuania, and exposed tensions in the Muslim world.
Also, the Byzantines learned the hard way that you don’t mess with Enrico Dandolo.
*The importance and meaning of the Renaissance is actually being heavily debated. However, most arguments acknowledged it a was a new direction in though which laid some of the groundwork for the Enlightenment.
Robin Hood!
True - the central problem a lot of medievalists have with it being the word “The”, which tends to ignore all the other, medieval, ones: theOttonian, Carolignian and 12th C renaissances (that last one needs a better name!)
Ehrm… much of Spain was controlled by Muslims because it had been invaded. Prior to the invasion, Hispania was mostly Christian (Catholic, Arrianism having been abandoned by the Goth Kings in the Council of Toledo, but not Roman yet because that particular Rite was implemented later). By the time the Crusades to the Holy Land got underway, our Reconquista was already going. It’s bad enough getting to hear complaints that “Spain almost didn’t send warriors to the Crusades”, don’t come now telling me that we owe the Reconquista to the northerners.
This is an actual complaint that someone has voiced or written? Are the authors Spaniards whining about what Spain “should have done” or Northerners, (or Italians), trying to insult Spaniards?
Either way, that is one of the oddest statements I have encountered.
There was in the eleventh, when the First Crusade took place.
Regards,
Shodan
Nitpicking a little here, but Arabic numerals started coming into Europe before the Crusades. Pope Sylvester II was pretty influential in trying to get them adopted, and then Italian merchants trading with North Africa brought them back to Italy.
In terms of the recovery of classical works, I sort of agree with that if you’re including the Spanish crusades, because of Gerard of Cremona, John of Seville and the Toledo School and all that. But if you’re talking about just the crusades in the Middle East, not as much. Most of the classical knowledge transmitted from that direction came from the Byzantines.
No. The “Dark Ages” is a myth invented around the time of the Renaissance and pushed further by 16th and 17th century philosophers, but there never was such a beast.
Northerners. I remember both an English documentary and a German one.
The replies from our living room were along the lines of “we had the moors right here, genius, we didn’t need to go on a trip to find them!”
Okay, we have two competing traditions here. The “Dark Ages” where Europe sunk into ignorant barbarity after the Fall of Rome and the revisionist “there weren’t no such thing as the Dark Ages” ( all revisionists speak in a southern drawls 
). While I firmly believe the revisionist correction is very useful, the real truth IMHO is somewhere in the middle, leaning in a revisionist direction. There were substantial collapses of population and weakening of international trade, generalized learning, administrative sophistication ( just look at the difference between Roman and medieval taxation models ) and particularly political cohesion after the dissolution of the WRE and the partial hamstringing of the ERE. It was incomplete and nowhere universal, indeed in some areas there was steady advance with no real break at all. But a lot really was lost - that was the reason the rediscovery of the classics of antiquity were significant in the first place.
So I personally wouldn’t go so far as to say there weren’t any Dark Ages, more that we were not nearly as dark as was once envisaged. More a pallid gray. But there was definitely some European diminution in learning.
Well, sure - but you could say the same for Egypt and Syria :D. It’s not like there was anything special about Iberia in that regard, other than the conversion to Islam was probably slower and less complete in the 11th century and that it sat on the western edge of the Muslim world. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that Iberia would end up Christian again.
Otherwise I agree with you - well before the First Crusade was in the offing the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba into the taifas had created an opening that the Christian states in Iberia were beginning to take advantage of. Of course on the eve of the Crusades that project had temporarily come to a crashing halt in 1086 thanks to the Almoravids.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right ; but as a budding medievalist posting on the Interwebs I feel like trying to put a dent into the whole “dung ages” pop culture image takes precedence over rigorous and nuanced academical debate :o
I had a professor who liked to call it “The Medieval Industrial Revolution.”
I thought that as of the start of the Muslim conquests 630s&ff the former Roman Empire world was pretty much as fully Christian as it would ever be. If not, what were the non-Christian religions of Spain, aside from the Jews? (Arianism was Christian).
(Sorry for the Spanish)
I’m laughing at the idea of a bunch a Spaniards shouting at the TV (in Castillian accent) “Hostia, cómo íbamos a mandar gente a las puñeteras cruzadas si teníamos a los putos moros aquí mismo, coño. Me cago en la leche por estos inglesitos mamones”
Just in case, for us Latin Americans it’s funny to hear Spanish people curse,
Of course the collapse of ERE meant a cultural disarray in much of Europe and a nice couple of centuries of regaining the ímpetus to spend money and time on learning. However, the false concept (I’d call it a myth) of the Dark Ages was that Europe was purposely kept in the dark by the (evil) Church, which supposedly hamstrung or banned science.
Visigothic Spain went under 711-714 more or less. But there is some limited evidence for pagan survival ( or possibly revival ) in the 680’s and 690’s when meetings were held to address issues with animism in the Iberian countryside. It is very, very likely that despite the nominal conversion of, for example, the Visigothic elite to Arianism ( later Catholicism in the 6th century ) that the rank and file of the composite Germano-Alanic hordes that entered Iberia were substantially pagan. See here.
Still by the time Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed over to Gibraltar in 711 it is likely that the population was basically nominally Christian, just in some cases clinging to folk beliefs the church considered heretical. That was a pretty common pattern in Europe in general in that period.