How do you explain the crusades?

[CentralFLJames]

Here are a couple, provided with a snipet from each that I’ve quoted:

“Crusades were fought mainly against Muslims, though campaigns were also directed against pagan Slavs, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians and political enemies of the popes.[1]” Crusaders were granted an indulgence for past sins.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade

“But in the 1200s, shortly after the beginning of the crusades against the Muslims, wholly European crusades against Christian dissidents were enacted. The first victims were the Albigenses, sometimes called the Cathari, who were centered primarily in southern France. These poor freethinkers doubted the biblical story of Creation, thought that Jesus was an angel instead of God, rejected transubstantiation, and demanded strict celibacy.”
atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/christian/blfaq_viol_crusades.htm

It’t not really fair or accurate to lump the Albigenses conflict with the Crusades to free the holy lands. Only an atheist would intermix these vastly different campaigns to play on the negative connotation that came out of the so called enlightenment of secular Protestantism but was really just anti-catholic rhetoric and revisionist history. There were false popes involved on the Albigense side.

James