This is our last chance to talk about the Crusades on this podcast. So I put listener questions to Dr Nicholas Morton.
Dr Morton is Associate Professor in Middle Eastern and Global history at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. His research focuses on the history of the Crusades and the Medieval Middle East between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries. He has written four other books on Crusading and the Crusader states as well as The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East.
His new book The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East is available now.
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The History of Byzantium 
I hate to come across as a pedant, and I’m fully aware of how easy it is to misspeak when speaking off-script (such as during an interview), be all that as it may, I feel compelled to point out that the soldiers did not come to Jesus asking what should they do but to John the Baptist. The verse is Luke 3:14: “Even the soldiers on guard asked him [John the Baptist], What of us? What are we to do? He said to them, Do not use men roughly, do not lay false information against them; be content with your pay.”
Personally, this does not seem very compelling either in favor of or against the Christian military orders. There are other verses I would choose. Since the question of how these orders justified their existence was raised specifically, I thought some precision on this point was worth the while.