Counter arguments
In, Crusading As An Act of Love, the idea of love being the pushing factor of the crusades is explored. The amount of violence and death that accompanied the crusades, acts usually associated with negative emotions, one would assume to be only motivated by anger or hate for non-Christians, but with this secondary article Riley-Smith exposes another cause and possible roots of the idea of violence through love. The author believed that Augustine, a philosopher and theologist, as well as the works of Thomas Aquinas, impacted the ideologies that when coupled with the clever usage from the popes, impacted the crusades.
As was seen in the secondary source, the connection between religious commitment and violent hostility had developed into a movement through propaganda sculpted by those of the cloth. That message would reach to Christians and non-Christians alike. “It is not believable that the popes who proclaimed crusades and the more respectable preachers who whipped up enthusiasm for them did not grasp the complexity of the Christian position. They must have presented their one-sided version of love deliberately, with a view to the audience they were addressing. It could be that they dared not do otherwise.”(Crusading as an Act of Love) Even with this statement there is an admittance to the pragmatic use of a manipulated