Crusaders failing to convert the Holy Land

Pete, I think our good friend Karl Marx can help you out a bit here. All Wars are economic. Even when people talk of religious wars, all that means is that various aspects of religious dogma, practice and political associations have important economic implications for much or most of the population. For example, the Protestant Nobles living in England following Henry VIII's reign of terror over the Catholics, really didn't give a damn about saying the Mass, or even Papal authority, but they sure as hell weren't going to give back any or all the land they stole from the Catholic English Monasteries, were they? This amounted to almost half of England, for Chrissakes! And much of the Protestant rebellion in Germany, the Netherlands and England was the direct result of the monopoly granted by Pope Alexander VI to Catholic Spain and Portugal over all the riches of the New World. What they were really "protesting" wasn't Papal authority, per se, but the fact that it was excluding them from their rightful share of the wealth. When Christianity originally swept the Roman Empire, including Palestine and the other states of what became, during the Crusades, Outremer, it represented a means to challenge and reform the Roman Empire from within. People were seeking alternatives to Roman Power, perhaps because it was so oppressive that people needed an escape and alternative. In contrast, Islam was developed specifically in response to the collapse of the Roman Empire, and because of the perceived need for some centralized government power to stem the resulting anarchy. Really, the Koran is just a simplified manual for "instant government", in place of total anarchy. And, when the Crusaders tried to conquer the Holy Land in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, anarchy still reigned. Islam was simply more practical and profitable, from a purely economic point of view, than Christianity, because it represented a stabilizing force. Christianity is, by its very nature, anti-government. So, in context, at the time of the Crusades, the people of Outremer quite rightly perceived that they were better off with the stabilizing force of Islam, purely in economic terms, than with the anarchy of Christianity. There was no possibility of Christianity "winning out" under these circumstances, over Islam. It was only the vast wealth of the New World, and the even more anarchic Protestant world view that freed Europeans to ruthlessly exploit it, that finally gave Christianity an edge over Islam, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now, of course, with no new frontiers to exploit, once more Islam is in the ascendant, as a stabilizing force for humanity.