The Crusades as Trendsetter

to believe that war was the greatest means of achieving success, whereas the Christian nations—as a matter of compulsion—developed a different way of thinking, which was that since they could not achieve success on the battlefield, they should begin to devote their energies to peaceful fields. The Christians for their part called these efforts ‘Spiritual Crusades’. I would say rather that a better term would be ‘Peaceful Crusades’. Subsequently, a silent process was gradually set in motion among the Christian nations based on constructive activities such as study and research. All the books available in those times were acquired and translated into European languages. Research was undertaken in many different fields of knowledge, including, most importantly, that of nature. This process of peaceful research and study, which continued for a long period of time, ushered in the age of the Renaissance in Christian Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Developments in the sciences and other fields of knowledge continued uninterruptedly until a new world came into existence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a world which was different in every respect from that of ancient times. It was a high point in the development of western civilization, and its most prominent aspect was that it totally revolutionized the criterion of power for the first time in human history. In ancient times, war was the criterion that determined power. Now, in this new age, rightly called the ‘scientific age’, peace had become