[AChimp]

the temple of solomon would have been destroyed during the lifetime of jesus...i honestly dont know if that is true

It was actually destroyed twice. The first time by the Babylonians circa 400 BC and then by the Romans in either 70 AD or 70 BC (one of those).

You are right about it being rebuilt by all those civilizations. It's Muslim tradition to build their holy sites on the holy sites of other religions.

the pope didnt need to increase his power. he was the most powerful man in europe at the time of the crusades.

Yeah, but as the saying goes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." I recall seeing a TLC program about the Crusades that said the Pope wanted to solidify his authority in Europe and expand his influence to all Christians. We probably will never know all the reasons. :/

and the raiders were not trying to take back the lands they had lost. these were seljuk raiders in anatolia, which never left muslim hands.

It still boils down to the fact that the raids started after the Crusades began. The Europeans were considered to be foreign invaders.

I read an interesting piece in a book I used in a history project in junior high that the only reason that the Europeans succeeded in taking Jeruselam was that a) the Muslims had just had a fairly protracted civil war, if not bloody, and there was a lot of confusion and b) they were all like "WTF?" when the European knights showed up one day and started attacking. It took them a while to realize that people would travel that far to actually pick a fight.

i am trying to dispell the image you have of them being some kind of gentleman race desperately trying to defend themselves from the bloodthirsty crusaders.

I'm not saying they were gentlemanly; all humans are equally capable of violence. In fact, Saladin's army once set fire to a grass plain and basically burned a Crusader army to death while they were sleeping. To this day, they still use their religion as justification for a lot of things that Christianity learned to distance itself from or was never associated with.

The fact of the matter is, though, that the Muslims were centuries ahead of Europe. The only reason why European scholars had copies of classical literature to study and imitate during the Renaissance is mostly because Arabs were big fans of Greek and Roman stuff and made hundreds of copies.

They also made great advances in science, particularly medicine, astronomy and math. The Crusades were actually beneficial for Europeans in a way, because it brought back countless new ideas and commodities when soldiers started coming home.