Father Gregory walked briskly down the brightly lit and exquisitely ornate halls of the Lateran Basilica in Rome on his way to see Pope Paschal II. The news of the Crusader victory at Jerusalem was all over Europe and was widely celebrated as a triumph of the Catholic Church and its leaders. Though many of the senior clergy expressed horror at the brutal m******e of the population that had taken place after its capture, the b****y aftermath was but a footnote as the Christian world rejoiced that Jerusalem was now back under its control.
For the Saracens in the Holy Land, however, the brutality of the First Crusade would galvanize the many different factions into a unified force. The unintended consequence would trigger decades of holy war between the Saracens and Christians, and the latte
