Atheists, Marxists, Protestants and unenlightened 'enlightenment' 'geniuses', have long crusaded against the Catholic crusades which are far longer than normally taught. The first 'Crusade' against Muhammadism fascism was at Covadonga in northern Spain, in 722. The Moslem Jihad had wiped out Christianity, its people, churches and civilization from 632 AD to the battle of Covadonga, in a wide arc stretching Arabia to Spain. 10 years after the Spanish Christians stopped the Moslem war of annihilation in Spain, Charles Martel and his heavy infantry did the same at Tours – the site of the richest abbey in Europe and a target of depraved Moslem depredation. The Crusades lasted until 1683 and the siege of Vienna by Moslem Turks or nearly 1000 years.

None of the criticasters of the Crusades would be here opining on the non-existent demonic, lurid atavism of the Crusades, if Catholic Europe had not successfully defeated the Moslem hordes. Period. That is just a simple historical reality. In the past 20 years most real scholarship now acknowledges this fact, and most real historians understand the weight, gravity and unbridled uncivilized fascism named Submission, which almost erased European civilization. Weidonkopf's book, 'The Glory of the Crusades' is a necessary anodyne to the asinine, ahistorical putrid mess spewed out by lovers of Islam, and deniers of historical import and accuracy.

Why the animus against the Church and the Crusades, taught in schools, the media and by grinning, moronic politicians? Weidenkopf on the unenlightenment era:

“If these Reformation-era writers [Protestants] were the first to view the Crusades through the lens of anti-papal rhetoric, seeing the entire effort as nothing other than a vast waste of European resources undertaken by barbaric, superstitious warriors, these themes received increasing nourishment once combined with the new anti-Church hostility of the Enlightenment.

Centered in France and occupying the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment sought to weaken the influence of the Church in European society. Enlightenment thinking affected most areas of life, including the study and presentation of history. Crusade history was used by intellectuals “not as a historical study in its own right but as a tool in conceptual arguments about religion and the progress of civilization.”10 The Crusades would continue to be used in this way by future generations to further their own agenda against society and the Church.11

The main Enlightenment critics of the Crusades were the Frenchmen Voltaire and Denis Diderot, and England’s David Hume and Edward Gibbon. Voltaire (1694–1778) waged a fierce campaign of satire and ridicule against the Catholic Church. In 1751 he published an essay on the Crusades in which he described them as an “epidemic of fury which lasted for 200 years and which was always marked by every cruelty, every perfidy, every debauchery, and every folly of which human nature is capable.”12 He further opined that the Crusades were “wasteful, pointless, ruined by excessive papal ambition for worldly power, an example of the corrosive fanaticism of the middle ages.”13

Diderot (1713–1784) also saw the Crusades in a wholly negative light and criticized them for the despoliation of Europe. Diderot wrote that the consequences of these “horrible wars” were “the depopulation of its nations, the enrichment of monasteries, the impoverishment of the nobility, the ruin of ecclesiastical discipline, contempt for agriculture, scarcity of cash and an infinity of vexations.”14 Diderot also complained that the Crusades were worthless enterprises of savagery in which European knights were sent by the Church to “cut the inhabitant’s throats and seize a rocky peak [Jerusalem] which was not worth one drop of blood.”15

Hume (1711–1776) believed the Muslim world was superior in “science and humanity” and the Crusades were “the most signal and most durable monument to human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.”16

The reflections of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) on the Crusades mimicked the writings of his fellow “enlightened” thinkers principally in the thought that the Crusades brought nothing but negative consequences to Europe. In Gibbon’s mind, the Crusaders were ignorant and superstitious criminals manipulated by the Church.

Gibbon also believed that the primary motivation of the Crusaders was greed, with Western warriors bent on the pursuit of “mines of treasures, of gold and diamonds, of palaces of marble and jasper, and of odoriferous groves of cinnamon and frankincense.”18 This erroneous view of Crusader motivations, still commonly held, may be Gibbon’s enduring mark on the popular history of the Crusades.”

Not one single objection by the aforementioned 'geniuses' has one iota of fact to support them. In fact the exact opposite of their declarations is supported by evidence, history and the barbarity and threat of the Moslem Jihad.

So here we have fat, pompous, periwigged limp wrists such as Gibbon or Voltaire, men who were entirely ignorant of medieval history, commenting on a topic – the Crusades – they knew nothing about! As Protestants or in the case of Hume et al. Atheists, they had little regard for truth, or for civilization and its development. Their main concern was to slander and vilify the Church. Only someone as insipid as Voltaire could regard a Gothic Cathedral, his eyeglasses, a chimney, a massive water mill grinding grain, or the creation of books and printing, artifacts among 1000 one could name which were invented during the Medieval era, as part of a 'Dark Age'. The only aspect of the non-existent Dark Age was the dark cloistered arrogance and stupidity of those too lazy, too blind, too bigoted to see the real world and understand and respect, what had come before.