The truth about the crusades is very simple. The middle east lands lived
in
peace & prosperity as "Christian" city states until the Muslim invaders
came. The Crusades was all about driving them out. Bottom line is that
the
Muslim hoards attacked Christianity first. That's a simple fact.
"VRWC6" <nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:t7kbp11m7olk423v089rhlo8gp8odsgm3l@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The Real History of the Crusades
> A series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought
> by religious fanatics? Think again.
> by Thomas F. Madden
>
> With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not
> used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot
> (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International
> Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places),
> ****ing over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies
> that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the
> September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.
>
> As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory
> tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight
> deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they
> asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W.
> Bush for using the word crusade in his remarks? With a few of my
> callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the
> answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they
> really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I
> was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has
> a just grievance against the West. Doesn't the present violence, they
> persisted, have its roots in the Crusades' brutal and unprovoked
> attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other
> words, aren't the Crusades really to blame?
>
> Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so. In his various video
> performances, he never fails to describe the American war against
> terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton
> has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present
> conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and
> embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of
> Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still
> bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists
> should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton
> took a beating on the nation's editorial pages for wanting so much to
> blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the
> Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president's fundamental
> premise.
>
> Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record
> straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are
> not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the
> Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of
> several decades of very careful, very serious scholar****p. For them,
> this is a "teaching moment," an op****tunity to explain the Crusades
> while people are actually listening. It won't last long, so here goes.
>
> The threat of Islam
>
> Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are
> generally ****trayed 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 do***entary, 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.
>
> 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 suc***bed. 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.
>
> Understand the crusaders
>
> 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.
>
> 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 op****tunity 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.
>
> 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 hard****ps 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.
>
> What really happened?
>
> 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 tem****al 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 re-conquest 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
> op****tunity of such rich indulgence as this.
>
> 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.
>
> All apologies
>
> 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 Catholic 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.
>
> The failure of the Crusades
>
> 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.
>
> When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in
> 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of sup****t for a new Crusade
> in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III
> of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably.
> Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to
> Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which
> formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such
> a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only
> the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was
> puni****ng the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up
> throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian
> society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.
>
> Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war
> effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help.
> Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their
> lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all
> Christians were called to sup****t the Crusades through prayer,
> fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin,
> the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single
> entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187
> at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of
> the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of
> the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering
> one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2.
> Only a tiny handful of ****ts held out.
>
> The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I
> Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France,
> and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand
> affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The
> aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his
> army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard
> came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already
> divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre,
> the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up
> Richard's French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard's
> lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard
> led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually
> reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and
> after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City,
> Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a
> truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to
> Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow.
> The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True
> Cross remained intense throughout Europe.
>
> The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and
> better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204)
> ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics,
> which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to
> Constantinople to sup****t an imperial claimant who promised great
> rewards and sup****t for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne
> of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he
> had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the
> Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the
> greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had
> previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the
> Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of
> 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a
> door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It
> is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of
> the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two
> further-and perhaps irrevocably-apart.
>
> The remainder of the 13th century's Crusades did little better. The
> Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in
> Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the
> city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first
> also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the
> Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the
> Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he
> never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much
> older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died
> of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis's death, the
> ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad
> against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had
> succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus
> erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts
> and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a
> foothold in the region until the 19th century.
>
> Europe's fight for its life
>
> One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have
> soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense,
> they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not
> less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman
> Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying
> Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople
> and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the
> Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but
> desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to
> survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam
> would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian
> world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant's
> The ****p of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled
> "Of the Decline of the Faith":
>
> Our faith was strong in th' Orient,
> It ruled in all of Asia,
> In Moorish lands and Africa.
> But now for us these lands are gone
> 'Twould even grieve the hardest stone .
> Four sisters of our Church you find,
> They're of the patriarchic kind:
> Constantinople, Alexandria,
> Jerusalem, Antiochia.
> But they've been forfeited and sacked
> And soon the head will be attacked.
>
> Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480,
> Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of
> Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and
> his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege
> to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his
> progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is
> virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany,
> then, would have been at their mercy.
>
> Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else
> was brewing in Europe-something unprecedented in human history. The
> Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval
> piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had
> led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and
> the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was
> preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation,
> which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made
> Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to
> the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade,
> defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like
> that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As
> Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated
> Turks began to seem backward and pathetic-no longer worth a Crusade.
> The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he
> finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle
> East.
>
> 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. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would
> have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars
> fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval
> and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all
> that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice,
> provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear,
> something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or
> not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without
> their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for
> women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished.
> Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism,
> another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.
>
> Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of
> History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works,
> including The New Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with
> Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople.
> This article originally appeared in the April 2002 issue of Crisis and
> is reprinted here with permission.
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