And with the coming of the Ottomans, the region remained solidly Muslim, as it mostly is today. And the crusades didn't really open up lines of communication between the Christian and Muslim worlds, because those lines of communication were already open. Plus, most historians now agree that the crusades didn't bring Europe out of the Middle Ages by offering it contact with the superior intellectual accomplishments of the Islamic world. In fact, they were a tremendous drain on Europe's resources. For me, the crusades matter because they remind us that the medieval world was fundamentally different from ours. The men and women who took up the cross believed in the sacrality of their work in a way that we often can't even conceive of today. And when we focus so much on the heroic narrative, or the anti-imperialist narrative, or all the political infighting, we can lose sight of what the crusades must have meant to the crusaders.