What were some of the positive effects of the crusades on europeans?

Answer 1

One of the positive effects of the crusades were the advances in medicine that knights saw in their Arab and Persian opponents and brought back to Western Europe. It was not uncommon for an Arab to join a train of a Crusaders in their return to Europe; once there, he would teach some of his mysteries of healing to the doctors of the West. Additionally, when Crusaders came into Jerusalem in 1099, they found the beginnings of a hospice for Christian pilgrims and Moslems alike which had been bankrolled by some merchants from Naples. These knights began to help them, and after requesting approval from the Church, they received a "Papal Bull" recognizing them as an official order in 1113. The Knights Hospitallar, became a religious/monastic/ military order (counterintuitive, but true) and then re-built, administered, maintained and defended a hospital in Jerusalem which had been built in 600 by the Church to care for ailing pilgrims who were visiting the Holy Land in the 1080. They opened another hospice in Rhodes in the 14th century. We owe the church-run hospital movement and the hospice movement to the Crusades because it combined the superb Eastern science and medical skills with the ministry of healing that was part of the early church's original mandate (see Matthew 9:35, 4:23). Another is that the Crusades brought the western world into contact with eastern and oriental culture and intellect, which laid the groundwork for the Renaissance. To the Arabs we owe our "Arabic" system of numbers (as opposed to the clumsy Roman figures), as well as decimal notation. Architecture, literature, geography, medicine, arithmetic-all those branches of knowledge which distinguish the educated from the uneducated may be traced back to the incredible intellect of the East, and they were claimed by the West during the Crusades. Finally, is the great unifying effect that the Crusades had upon Europe. The European leaders were so busy fighting the East, they did not have time or money to engage one another in combat. Additionally, there are some that believe that even the church itself was saved from "in-fighting" and other similar horrors because of its outward focus on the Crusades. It seems horrible to admit, but the Western World is absolutely what it is today- better off in every way- spiritually, mentally and , physically- because of the Crusades. We owe much to the people that were cruelly slaughtered; may they be at peace. T.B. Dickerson