As for those who say the Crusades were holy wars, the popes and medieval chroniclers who wrote the Crusader accounts were as skilled at propaganda as today’s spin doctors. They used the rhetoric of holy war as an excuse for conquest and plunder.
One modern historian who has debunked the Crusades myth says that the Crusades were:
"...a series of bloody and unsuccessful attempts to conquer and colonize the lands of the Middle East. They can be seen as an early example of European imperialism." *
It is important to remember that the Crusades were primarily about greed, power, and land, not religion.
* Thomas Madden in Crusades: The Illustrated History