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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 4204570, member: 80804&quot;]It had a lot to do with the concept of primogeniture. By this tradition, only the eldest son could inherit the father&#039;s land. Younger brothers (especially those from &quot;the wrong side of the sheets&quot;) might get some inheritance - or none - but were never in line to step into their father&#039;s shoes as lords of the land on his death.</p><p>So you have a lot of relatively well-off (or at least higher class), relatively well-educated younger brothers with no prospects of being anything beyond (clutch the pearls!) a merchant or professional soldier with the accompanying necessity of dirtying one&#039;s hands with work and endeavor.</p><p>These were the &quot;upstart firebrands&quot; to which you refer - and they often left without much urging since all the land in Europe was spoken for. Of course, to the extent that such folks listened to the church, they also got encouraging propaganda from that source, The church, in its capacity as a mouthpiece of the nobility, was encouraging the crusades. This was probably at least partially in hopes of enabling this diaspora of potential troublemakers to the East. These &quot;dispossessed&quot; younger nobles assumed they could carve out their own kingdoms by crushing the local opposition - the sophistication and ferocity of which they pitifully underestimated. However, those who managed to live and return to Europe came armed with something far more valuable - learning and technology. They brought home medical knowledge and amazingly, people who would have died from wounds and/or diseases were getting better! They brought home the Arabic numerals including the amazing abstract concept and character of zero and replaced the insanely difficult and cumbersome Roman numeral system of mathematical notation. They brought home (for those open minded enough to profit from it) the extant collected knowledge of the ancient world - as much as the Islamic world had been able to preserve from the holocaust of knowledge occurring at the end of the western Roman Empire, and the further work carried out by eastern scholars in all fields. </p><p>I am probably over simplifying here and I&#039;m sure folks will chime in to correct me on various points, but this is the &quot;Cliff&#039;s Notes&quot; version of the causes and effects of &quot;The Crusades&quot; I carry around in my head.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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