The answer depends on whose side you were on. The crusades were a time of much death, hardships and poverty on all sides as in all wars.
In Europe, most of the important people across the lands joined the crusades and travelled to the middle east to fight and "reclaim the holy land". Due to this large exodus, much of the wealth went with it, never to return and Europe became more lawless and poverty-stricken as a result.
Both the processes of creating a timeline and thinking chronologically are similar in that both require thinking about time as a series of events that take place one after the other--as opposed to focussing on similarities and connections between events that may be "out of order" on a given timeline.
