The Real History of the Crusades

[Kiehlroy]

For all those ignorant of the crusades, read this:

The Real History of the Crusades

The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Most of what passes for public knowledge about it is either misleading or just plain wrong

By Prof. Thomas F. Madden

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

[Kiehlroy]

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne'er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders' expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.
At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? ...Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors...unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? ...And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood...condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?

The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself—indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:

Again I say, consider the Almighty's goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself.... I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.

[Kiehlroy]

It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.

Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes.
The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews' money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.

Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:

Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered.... Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."

Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.

It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.

By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.

***

But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

[Cornish Maid]

1204-the taking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders were originally bound for Egypt, but were persuaded by Alexius, son of Isaac Angelus,the dispossessed Emperor of Byzantium, to turn aside to Constantinople in order to restore him and his father to the throne. This Western intervention in Byzantine politics did not go happily, and eventually the Crusaders, disgusted by what they regarded as Greek duplicity, lost patience and sacked the city. Eastern Christendom has never forgotten those three appalling days of pillage. "Even the Saracens are merciful and kind", protested Nicetas Choniates, "compared with these men who bear the Cross of Christ on their shoulders." What shocked the Greeks more than anything was the wanton and systematic sacrilege of the Crusaders. How could men who had specially dedicated themselves to Gods service treat the things of God in such a way? As the Byzantines watched the Crusaders tear to pieces the altar and icon screen in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and set prostitutes on the Patriarch's throne, they must have thought that those who did such things were not Christians in the same sense as themselves.

[Now]

Fascinating timing for a re-write of history from a Christian perspective! I would like to hear what several centuries worth of previous historians who clearly outlined that the Crusades involved wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Jews by marauding Christians would have to say about this "new work."

Does this strike anyone else as being remarkably suspect?


Now.

[Doomer]

A brief history of Christianity :

· 391 C.E. (AD.): Christians burn down one of the greatest libraries in the world in Alexandria. Over 700,000 scrolls were destroyed.

· 500 to 1000: The church takes over and brings with it the cancer of the Dark Ages destroying almost everything that defined civilization. The Christian church all but wiped out education. technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce. During this period the church amassed enormous wealth.

· 1099 C.E.: Christian crusaders take Jerusalem and massacre Jews and Muslims. In the streets were piles of heads, hands and feet Millions were killed as a result of the Crusades. Note: Billy Graham still calls his preaching a crusade.

· 1208: Pope Innocent orders a crusade against the French Catha’s. Over 100,000 were killed by Arnaud’s men at Beziers.

· 1231: Pope Gregory IX establishes the Inquisition. Inquisitors were given license to explore every means of horror and cruelty. Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive. Ovens built to kill people. made famous by Nazi Germany. were first used in the Christian Inquisition of Eastern Europe Hitler. by the way. said he admired Martin Luther more than any other German. because Luther despised the Jews. Gruesome tortures used on hundreds of thousands of non-Christians in the Inquisition were so repugnant and horrible that I cannot even describe them to you. The Inquisition spread as far as Goa, India.


· 1377: The pope’s army descended on the Italian town of Cessna. For three days and nights beginning on Feb. 3, the slaughter continued. The squares were filled with blood. Women were violently raped, a ransom was placed on children, and priceless works of art were destroyed. Over 5,000 people butchered.

· 1497: The church began an enormous burning in Florence. The works of Latin and Italian poets, illuminated manuscripts, women’s ornaments, musical instruments and paintings were all burned.

· 1500s: The witch hunts are going full speed ahead. Members of the clergy proudly report how many they have killed. The Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov bragged that he had killed over 20,000 devil worshippers. Historians estimate more than 9 million people were executed after 1484, mostly women. This was as brutal as anything that happened in the Nazi’s 20th-century Holocaust.

· 1572: On St. Bartholomew’s Day more than 10,000 Protestants are slaughtered in France. Wrote Pope Gregory
XIII: “We rejoice that you have relieved the world of those wretched heretics.



Today:

Ø George Bush Sr. when he was president: ‘I don’t consider atheists to be citizens of America.”

Ø Randall Terry. of Operation Rescue. the anti-abortion fanatics. ‘It’s us against them. It is the God-fearing people against the pagans of the United States.

Ø Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Christian theology has been, and is, a disease of the intellect.”

[Kiehlroy]

1204-the taking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders were originally bound for Egypt, but were persuaded by Alexius, son of Isaac Angelus,the dispossessed Emperor of Byzantium, to turn aside to Constantinople in order to restore him and his father to the throne. This Western intervention in Byzantine politics did not go happily, and eventually the Crusaders, disgusted by what they regarded as Greek duplicity, lost patience and sacked the city. Eastern Christendom has never forgotten those three appalling days of pillage. "Even the Saracens are merciful and kind", protested Nicetas Choniates, "compared with these men who bear the Cross of Christ on their shoulders." What shocked the Greeks more than anything was the wanton and systematic sacrilege of the Crusaders. How could men who had specially dedicated themselves to Gods service treat the things of God in such a way? As the Byzantines watched the Crusaders tear to pieces the altar and icon screen in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and set prostitutes on the Patriarch's throne, they must have thought that those who did such things were not Christians in the same sense as themselves.

Were these Crusaders not Excommunicated? Was that not the equivilant of being condemned to hell?

[Kiehlroy]

A brief history of Christianity :

· 391 C.E. (AD.): Christians burn down one of the greatest libraries in the world in Alexandria. Over 700,000 scrolls were destroyed.

Not fact:

The library of Alexandria is a legend. Not a myth, but a legend. The destruction of the library of the ancient world has been retold many times and attributed to just as many different factions and rulers, not for the purpose of chronicling that ediface of education, but as political slander. Much ink has been spilled, ancient and modern, over the 40,000 volumes housed in grain depots near the harbor, which were supposedly incinerated when Julius Caesar torched the fleet of Cleopatra's brother and rival monarch. So says Livy, apparently, in one of his lost books, which Seneca quotes.[2] The figure of Hypatia, a fifth-century scholar and mathematician of Alexandria, being dragged from her chariot from an angry Pagan-hating mob of monks who flayed her alive then burned her upon the remnants of the old Library, has found her way into legend as well, thanks to a few contemporary sources which survived.[3] Yet while we know of many rumors of the destruction of "The Library" (in fact, there were at least three different libraries coexisting in the city), and know of whole schools of Alexandrian scholars and scholarship, there is scant data about the whereabouts, layout, holdings, organization, administration, and physical structure of the place.

Nobody is sure what the hell happened to the library.

Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the destruction of the Library:

1. Caesar's campaign in 48 BC
2. the attack of Aurelian in the 3rd century AD
3. the decree of Theophilius in 391 AD, and
4. the Muslim conquest in 642 AD or thereafter.

Each of these has been viewed with suspicion by other scholars as an effort to place the blame on particular actors. Moreover, each of these events is historically problematic. In the first and second case, there is clear evidence that the library was not in fact destroyed at those times. The third episode is often regarded as a myth, and the fourth episode is simply not documented, although some maintain that the final destruction of the Library took place at this time.

· 500 to 1000: The church takes over and brings with it the cancer of the Dark Ages destroying almost everything that defined civilization. The Christian church all but wiped out education. technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce. During this period the church amassed enormous wealth.

Fortunately Europe was coming out of it's Dark Age at the time that the Muslim world was entering it's own that in some places has lasted to this day.

· 1099 C.E.: Christian crusaders take Jerusalem and massacre Jews and Muslims. In the streets were piles of heads, hands and feet Millions were killed as a result of the Crusades. Note: Billy Graham still calls his preaching a crusade.

Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century

In 1009, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah had sacked the pilgrimage hospice in Jerusalem and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The maritime states of Pisa, Genoa and Catalonia were all actively fighting Islamic strongholds in Majorca and Sardinia, freeing the coasts of Italy and Catalonia from Muslim raids. Much earlier, of course, the Christian homelands of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and so on had been conquered by Muslim armies. This long history of losing territories to a religious enemy, as well as a powerful pincer movement on all of Western Europe, created a powerful motive to respond to Byzantine emperor Alexius I's call for holy war to defend Christendom, and to recapture the lost lands, starting at the most important one of all, Jerusalem itself.

And of course the Moors in Iberia.

Now tell me that these invaders were all gentle and mercifull when taking besieged cities.

Not every Muslim was as intellegent and civilised as Saladin.


[QUOTE=Doomer]· 1208: Pope Innocent orders a crusade against the French Catha’s. Over 100,000 were killed by Arnaud’s men at Beziers.


· 1231: Pope Gregory IX establishes the Inquisition. Inquisitors were given license to explore every means of horror and cruelty. Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive. Ovens built to kill people. made famous by Nazi Germany. were first used in the Christian Inquisition of Eastern Europe Hitler. by the way. said he admired Martin Luther more than any other German. because Luther despised the Jews. Gruesome tortures used on hundreds of thousands of non-Christians in the Inquisition were so repugnant and horrible that I cannot even describe them to you. The Inquisition spread as far as Goa, India.

· 1377: The pope’s army descended on the Italian town of Cessna. For three days and nights beginning on Feb. 3, the slaughter continued. The squares were filled with blood. Women were violently raped, a ransom was placed on children, and priceless works of art were destroyed. Over 5,000 people butchered.

· 1497: The church began an enormous burning in Florence. The works of Latin and Italian poets, illuminated manuscripts, women’s ornaments, musical instruments and paintings were all burned.

· 1500s: The witch hunts are going full speed ahead. Members of the clergy proudly report how many they have killed. The Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov bragged that he had killed over 20,000 devil worshippers. Historians estimate more than 9 million people were executed after 1484, mostly women. This was as brutal as anything that happened in the Nazi’s 20th-century Holocaust.

· 1572: On St. Bartholomew’s Day more than 10,000 Protestants are slaughtered in France. Wrote Pope Gregory
XIII: “We rejoice that you have relieved the world of those wretched heretics.

So oppurtunisim and brutality are strictly Christian European traits huh?

Today:

Ø George Bush Sr. when he was president: ‘I don’t consider atheists to be citizens of America.”

Ø Randall Terry. of Operation Rescue. the anti-abortion fanatics. ‘It’s us against them. It is the God-fearing people against the pagans of the United States.

Ø Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Christian theology has been, and is, a disease of the intellect.”

No, Mr. Emerson was partly right, any theology sprouted in the dump known as the middle east is a disease to the intellect.

I am not Christian, Muslim or Jew. However I am glad that the Muslims did not get any further in their plans of conquest and that the enlightment was just around the corner for Europe. While Europe would shed some of the traditions of a barbaric region the Muslims would stagnate in them.

[Cornish Maid]

Were these Crusaders not Excommunicated? Was that not the equivilant of being condemned to hell?

Yes they were after the siege of Zara.

The sacking of Constantinopal was the last straw as far as relations with Rome were concerned. The Orthodox prefered to take their chances with the Turks but as we know Constantinopal is now Istanbul.