Most modern historians of the Crusades agree that the way we separate and number the multiple Crusade expeditions is ahistorical at best and misleading at worst. For one thing, the flow of European warriors to the Holy Land was not nearly as organized and episodic as the numbering system suggests. For another thing, treating the Crusades this way obscures the fact that the Crusader states along the eastern Mediterranean coast were a continuous presence there for almost two centuries, quite apart from the various calls for Crusade that went on in Europe.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 