Man, where to start with all this?
clearly many of you need to get your facts straight, so here they are:
First off, Hawklore, your history teacher is an ignorant buffoon, and you'd probably benefit from not paying attention to her idiotic, presentistic, small-minded, ahistorical and fundamentalist-faith-based lack of vision of the past. Period.
A basic rule when dealing with cultures, institutions and movements, both present and past, is that --as far as possible (linguistically and evidentially) --you refer to them what they choose to call themselves. If you need to make divisions on top of that, on top of that, you adapt as neutral terms as possible.
There are plenty of exceptions and side cases to this, but if you've got a group that asserts to be X, all their sources point unequivocally to them considering themselves X, and all non-X contemporaries refer to them as X, then you call them X. And if you say they're non-X, well you better have a damn good historical argument.
"They don't think like I do" is not a good historical argument. Nor is the variation at hand here: "The definition of Christianity is one I hold on faith. Therefore, everybody who doesn't adhere to my definition, isn't Christian." As an historian, I don't give a flying **** what your faith is; you are explaining the past in terms that are supposed to be comprehensible regardless of faith. Faith is not a valid historical source. You can use it in any number of theological applications, but introducing it into history is a methodological error equivalent to using a child's drawing of a horsie in geometry to prove that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. That child's drawing has value and interest, but not for geometry. The same for propositions held on faith -- they're great for all kinds of things, but not for history.
Okay, now to the rest of the mess:
What we call the "Catholic Church" or "Roman Catholic Church" claims to be the universal (hence Catholic) Christian church, and traces a continuous tradition all the way back to Peter, the Apostles and Jesus.
Orthodoxy has the same roots, and the split between them was originally geographical, following the split in the Roman Empire between the Western Empire (Rome, then Ravenna) and the East (Constantinople).
There are some major sticking points between east and west, such as the West's introduction of the phrase "and the Son" concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit in the Niceo-Constantinopolitan creed (just look up "filioque"). There's also the increasing insistence, from the late eleventh century on, on the part of the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope) that he be recognized as the human leader of the Christian Church in virtue of being Saint Peter's successor. This idea was never fully accepted in the West (and even today the pope still doesn't wield the power over Catholics that he claims to), and in the East, was ill-received indeed. Nevertheless, in spite of many Orthodox claims, there were several attempts at union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, and between the Armenian and Catholic churches. And in some places, they succeeded for a while. Heck, I've got tons of medieval latin theological texts on my desk that claim that Orthodox Christians are basically "Greek Rite Catholics".
So basically, the Catholics are Christians, and trace their history all the way back to Jesus. The same can be said for the Orthodox and Armenian churches. And yeah, the Copts and the Nestorians probably too.
Whether you consider Catholics "True Christians holding the one true faith" is your own affair and has nothing to do with history.
Now, the Crusades:
There were 4 crusades. The last two really did not count though. the 3rd only made it as far as Insatnbul (constantinople).
They must ahve got tired of riding and decided to just sack that place instead.
The 4th was the "Children's Crusade" It never made it out of France for the most part.
No offense, but if you're gonna talk out of your prettythang, use a toilet.
"Crusader" as a term (crucesignatus) first appears only in the early thirteenth century, around the time of what we refer to as the Fourth Crusade. By far, the most impressive and most successful crusade was the first, which left Western Europe in 1096 and resulted in the capture and occupation of a good deal of what is now Lebanon and Israel, including the sack and capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The concept of Crusade hadn't gelled -- basically the First Crusade set the model for later expeditions. Effectively, Crusades became armed pilgrimages for which those who undertook them were promised full indulgence of their sins (another specifically Latin Christian, aka Catholic, invention was Purgatory). After the First Crusade, there were many armed trips to the Holy Land, taken by individuals and small groups, but the next "general passage" occurred around 1147, was more or less a disaster with Louis VII and his knights wandering around Anatolia looking for a fight, and is called the Second Crusade. The Third Crusade, 1189 featured the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, leading his contingent to the Meander before drowning in 1190, and Philippe II Augustus and Richard the Lionhearted combining for the capture of Acre. The Fourth Crusade was an unmitigated disaster: death and politics back in France screwed thingsup from the start; the crusaders were heavily in debt to the Venetians (who'd built a bunch of ships for them), one of the leaders was married to the daughter of an emperor whose brother deposed him, threw him in jail, and gouged his eyes out. So they ended up sacking Constantinople (it wasn't called Istanbul until 1917), and establishing a latin empire there, taht lasted fifty years and still pisses off the Greeks today.
From then on, crusades were called for all kinds of things -- against heretics, in Spain, small ones, large ones, the oft-mentioned "Children's Crusade" (for which the evidence is pretty scanty), whatever seemed appropriate.
Anyway, there's plenty of information on the internet about this stuff. Some of it is even accurate.
