A medieval missionary argued crusade conquest had failed and contradicted apostolic method

Evidence

I see many knights who go to the Holy Land beyond the sea, wanting to conquer it by force of arms, and in the end they are all brought to naught without obtaining their aim. Therefore it seems to me, O Lord, that the conquest of that Holy Land should not be done but in the manner in which You and Your apostles have conquered it: by love and prayers and the shedding of tears and blood. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1296

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Could feed the vault’s Islam-West genealogy as evidence that crusade was internally contested from within Christendom, complicating the ‘Christians uniformly favored holy war’ trope.
• SHARE: For someone tracking intra-Christian dissent on crusading; the sweet irony of a crusader-era mystic reading crusade history as empirical evidence of divine disapproval.