Over de Kruistochten

[C uit W]

Crusaders and Historians [naar index]
(Thomas F. Madden First Things - 15-7)

Reviewing:

The First Crusade: A New History
By Thomas Asbridge
Oxford University Press
408 pp. $35

The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople
By Johnathan Phillips
Viking
374 pp. $25.95

Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades
By Christopher Tyerman
Oxford University Press
247 pp. $24.29

The Crusades have been a topic of intense scholarly investigation for the last forty years. Some of the best historians in the world have focused their efforts on learning how the Crusade movement, unique in human history, could have developed and flourished in medieval Europe. In thousands of journal articles and scholarly monographs Christianity's holy wars have been probed, analyzed, and debated. Much still remains to be done, but the fruits of all of this research cannot be denied. We now know much more than ever before about the Crusades.

Unfortunately, little of this has reached a general audience...leaving the field to novelists, journalists, or anyone else with a desire to sell books. And make no mistake: The Crusades have always been of interest to readers, and since the attacks of September 11, histories of the Crusades have been in very high demand. For instance, Karen Armstrong...an ex-nun who reissues her book Holy War whenever trouble is brewing in the Middle East...wasted no time adding a new introduction and getting the book back into bookstores within months of the attacks. Innumerable other popular books were quickly cobbled together, mostly cribbed from Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades...a beautifully written book, but one that is now more than fifty years old and thus does not take account of more recent scholarship. Runciman delivers the expected story: The Crusades were a series of brutal wars of intolerance in which the cynical, voracious, superstitious, and gullible waged insensible war against a peaceful, sophisticated Muslim world, crushing the opulent Byzantine Empire in the bargain.

Frustrated with the ways in which the Crusades have been used and distorted, a few historians are now attempting to close the yawning gap between the academy and general readers. Among the new crop of histories are Thomas Asbridge's The First Crusade: A New History, Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, and Christopher Tyerman's Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades. All three of these writers are distinguished historians. All three seek to bring the fruits of decades of scholarship to a popular audience. And all three are keenly aware that in the process they are smashing many cherished myths.

Take, for example, what might be called the Myth of the Greedy Younger Son. This myth holds that an increase in population, the development of feudal primogeniture, and a series of bad harvests created a situation in medieval Europe where thousands of well-trained and land-hungry warriors were milling about with nothing to do. Rather than have them make trouble at home, Pope Urban II convinced them to carve out territories for themselves in the faraway Muslim world. This myth more closely resembles the world of nineteenth-century colonialism than it does the Middle Ages. New research has definitively shown that Crusaders were predominantly the first sons of Europe: wealthy, privileged, and pious. Crusading was extremely expensive and more than a few noble families risked bankruptcy in order to take part. They did so for medieval, not modern, reasons. Crusading for them was an act of love and charity by which, like the Good Samaritan, they were aiding their neighbors in distress. Muslim warriors had conquered eastern Christians, taken their lands, and in some cases killed or enslaved them. The Crusader believed it was his duty to right that wrong.

The Greedy Younger Son is not the only myth historians have discarded. It may surprise some to learn that the Crusades were almost never profitable, since booty was so scarce. Or that the Christian settlers in the so-called Crusader Kingdom were not themselves Crusaders. Or that the Crusades met all the criteria of a just war, especially in their defensive nature. Or that the Crusades had nothing at all to do with colonialism. Or that the Crusades were in no way wars of conversion. Or that the Crusades were not related to Muslim jihad (except insofar as they were a defense against it). Or that the Muslim world knew nothing at all about the Crusades before the nineteenth century.

If your image of Western civilization relies on a depiction of the Crusades as an insane and bloodthirsty attack on a peaceful and sophisticated Muslim world, then you are not going to like what recent historians have to say. This is apparent in some of the responses to these new works. In a New Yorker review of the books by Asbridge and Phillips, the journalist Joan Acocella seemed a little miffed by what she found coming out of the academy. How can two professional historians talk of piety, devotion, and selflessness as Crusader motivations? "Does this mean that Asbridge and Phillips think the Crusades were OK?" she asks incredulously. No, it means they think it is their job as historians to uncover the truth. Acocella speaks approvingly of the much older works by Runciman and John Julius Norwich, who is no historian. The entry of scholars into popular Crusade history does not seem to be welcomed in all quarters.

As the title suggests, Thomas Asbridge's The First Crusade: A New History begins at the beginning. The First Crusade was called in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to an urgent plea for assistance from the Byzantine Empire, the last Christian state in the East. Things had been going badly for Christians for several centuries, ever since the explosion of Muslim warriors out of Arabia in the seventh century. Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa...the core of the Christian world...had been conquered by Muslim jihad warriors and subjected to Islamic rule and law. When Turkish jihad warriors invaded and conquered Asia Minor, they reduced Christendom to a tiny corner of the world.

Urban took the plight of Eastern Christians and the continued subjugation of the Holy Land to the knights of Europe; he asked them to take up the cross and turn back these conquests as an act of penance. Thousands responded. The First Crusade, which was, in typical medieval fashion, governed by a committee of barons, marched thousands of miles across eastern Europe, crossed the Bosporus at Constantinople, and then pushed on to Nicaea, which served as the capital of the Turkish sultanate. After restoring Nicaea to the Byzantine emperor, the Crusaders crossed Anatolia and against all odds restored to Christian control the city of Antioch, one of the ancient patriarchates of Christianity. The Crusaders also acquired nearby Edessa and then continued south along the coast until they finally turned inland and caught their first glimpse of the holy city of Jerusalem. After prayers, penances, and many hardships, they captured it in July 1099.

The modern historian can only marvel at the First Crusade. I know of no other instance in human history in which so many soldiers marched thousands of miles from their home and endured numerous hardships deep in enemy territory for no good strategic or economic reasons. Their reasons had much more to do with the next world than with this one. It is equally amazing that a loosely organized enterprise like this with no clear understanding of the local terrain or sure means of provisioning could so often snatch victory from the jaws of apparent defeat. As Asbridge notes, "Modern historical analysis can offer a rationalization of their accomplishments, but for contemporaries living in the medieval age one thing alone explained the spectacular triumph of the First Crusade...God's omnipotent will."

Asbridge's history works well on many levels. He tells his story vividly, but he does not shy away from details that may muddy his otherwise clear picture. When a scholarly debate exists on a point, he brings it up forthrightly and describes it succinctly. Throughout his narrative he liberally sprinkles footnotes that direct interested readers to the best scholarship available. With knowledge of medieval siege weapons, armor, and basic army conditions, Asbridge argues that the internal command of the First Crusade was not as fractious as historians have generally believed. What really adds depth and color to this history, though, is Asbridge's familiarity with the region and the careful attention with which he describes it. Readers see the landscapes and fortifications through the eyes of someone who has studied them closely.

Among the most contentious issues in scholarly circles are those that touch on the origin of the Crusades. In the 1930s Carl Erdmann argued that the Crusades came out of a larger ecclesiastical reform movement in Europe that sought to reign in and control warriors. Urban II, Erdmann argued, used the Byzantine plea for aid as a means to harness Europe's military energy for Church purposes, and also as a means to convince the Byzantine Christians to accept papal primacy. It was, he claimed, popular sentiment that eventually expanded the mission to include Jerusalem.

Response to the "Erdmann Thesis" has been varied, with some historians accepting it in a modified form and others rejecting it. Asbridge cannot avoid presenting his own judgment, and it is here I have difficulties with his approach. Asbridge's Urban II, much like Erdmann's, is a schemer whose primary motivation is to exert his own power. There was, Asbridge contends, no compelling external reason for the First Crusade. One would think the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world might engender some bad feeling, but Asbridge insists, "All around the Mediterranean basin, Christian faith and society survived and even thrived under the watchful but tolerant eye of Islam. Eastern Christendom may have been subject to Islamic rule, but it was not on the brink of annihilation, nor prey to any form of systematic abuse."

What of the recent Muslim conquest of Asia Minor? Asbridge does not consider it worth mentioning. And what of the Byzantine plea for assistance? Asbridge concedes that it "may have stimulated, at least in part," the pope's call for a Crusade, but since he ignores the reason for the urgent request, he quickly drops the request itself. Having discounted or ignored all external reasons for the First Crusade, Asbridge is free to conclude that Urban's call was "primarily proactive rather than reactive, and the Crusade was designed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of the papacy." Caught in a struggle with the German emperors over investiture, the pope must have conceived the Crusade plan as "an attempt to consolidate papal empowerment and expand Romesphere of influence."

This argument would be stronger if the pope had sought to raise an army to attack his German enemies rather than sending his supporters thousands of miles from home. Asbridge goes beyond Erdmann in claiming there had been a full schism between Rome and Constantinople since 1054. Yet no other historian accepts this. The enthusiastic response of the Western knights is just one of many pieces of evidence which suggest that, despite some friction, Christians did not recognize a schism even as late as 1095. Asbridge, holding to his claim about the schism, argues that the pope had to convince the knights in his sermon at Clermont that the Byzantines were not schismatics hated for two generations but really "blood brothers." Urban's reports of Muslim atrocities, Asbridge contends, "had little or no basis in fact, but they did serve Urban's purpose." The pope instituted a "denigration and dehumanization of Islam" to convince the Christian warriors that the Crusade was no "shameful war of equals between God's children" but a righteous thing.

Asbridge's assessment of Urban credits the pope with far more foresight and rhetorical authority than he had. It also ignores the real danger that Islamic expansionism posed to the survival of Christendom. Nevertheless, when Asbridge gets beyond his discussion of Urban's motivations, The First Crusade provides a first-rate description of the course and consequences of that initial moment in the Crusades. It is a story not to be missed.

It was in the eighteenth century that historians began to number the Crusades and, for good or ill, the convention stuck. There was a Second Crusade, led by two kings and preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. It failed dramatically...which is perhaps why it has never received much attention. The Third Crusade, on the other hand, has always attracted interest, for it pitted Richard the Lionheart against Saladin in a fight to the finish for Jerusalem itself. The Fourth Crusade is a different story altogether. Ranking as one of the oddest expeditions in medieval history, the Fourth Crusade has been a favorite topic among scholars and popular authors alike. How can one not stare in wonder at a Crusade that was organized to rescue Jerusalem and ended up devastating Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world?

The Fourth Crusade was the brainchild of an energetic young pope, Innocent III (1198-1216). Innocent was determined to launch a new Crusade to reconquer Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands since 1187. After some initial delays, recruitment for the Crusade picked up in earnest in France, crystallizing around a few powerful barons. In order to avoid trouble with the Byzantine Christians, who were by now no longer so happy to have Crusade armies marching across their fields and meadows, they decided to sail to the Holy Land. But there was a problem: The barons had no boats. To remedy this they gave blank parchments (the medieval equivalent of blank checks) to six agents and sent them out to contract a fleet.

In 1201 the six went to Venice where boats were, of course, plentiful. The Venetians, led by their aged and blind Doge Enrico Dandolo, agreed to join the Crusade themselves with a fleet of war galleys. In addition they agreed to provide transportation and provisions for all of the French Crusaders and their horses for one year. Since much of the fleet would have to be constructed, the Venetians naturally needed to know how many Crusaders it would transport...a question for which the agents did not have a good answer. Taking a guess, the agents ordered transportation and provisions for 33,500 men and 4,500 horses. The pope confirmed the contract and all was in readiness for the Crusade.

A year passed and the Venetian people fulfilled their end of the contract to the letter. A vast fleet and tons of provisions stood ready. Yet the Crusaders were not so conscientious. It must be remembered that a Crusade was an amalgamation of many different military groups, who were not bound by the oaths sworn by powerful barons. If those groups could find cheaper or more convenient transportation in other ports, there was nothing to stop them from taking advantage of it.

This was bad news for the main body of the Crusade. With so many leaving from other ports, only about 12,000 showed up in Venice. That meant the Crusaders could not pay for the fleet, while the Venetians, who had poured enormous resources into the project, could not renounce payment. A stalemate ensued that lasted throughout the summer of 1202. Finally, the Venetians agreed to loan the money to the Crusaders in return for their assistance in subduing Zara, a rebellious city on the Dalmatian coast. The Crusaders agreed. But Zara was not only a Catholic town; its nominal ruler, the king of Hungary, had taken the Crusader's vow and therefore his lands were under the protection of the Church. With the only alternative being the dissolution of the Crusade, the Crusaders attacked and conquered Zara...whereupon the whole Fourth Crusade was excommunicated.

In time the French Crusaders received papal absolution for their part in the business at Zara, but the Venetians did not. Nevertheless, in spring 1203 the Crusade was again ready to sail...or almost ready. There was the problem that only a few months remained on their lease of the vessels. There was also the problem that they had eaten all of their provisions.

At this point a young Byzantine prince stepped into the unfolding drama. Young Alexius Angelus was the son of Emperor Isaac II Angelus, who had been blinded and deposed by his brother, the current Emperor Alexius III Angelus. The young man claimed, plausibly enough, that his uncle was a usurper and that the people of Constantinople longed to be free of his tyranny. If the Crusaders would champion the young man's righteous cause by bringing him to the imperial city, the Byzantine people would respond by overthrowing the tyrant and restoring to the young Alexius Angelus his rightful throne. In return for this act of charity, the young man promised oceans of riches, thousands of troops to join the Crusade, and the subjugation of the Byzantine Church to the pope in Rome. With much dissent in the ranks, the Crusade leaders accepted the deal.

When the Crusaders arrived at Constantinople they were surprised to discover that they were not hailed as liberators. Greeks wanted no Westerners telling them who to have as their emperor. After a brief attack on the city, though, Emperor Alexius III fled. So the young man was finally crowned as Alexius IV. But he could only come up with half of what he owed the Crusaders, and his unpopularity among his subjects made him fear for his life. So the Crusaders agreed to remain at Constantinople over the winter in order to give the new emperor time to consolidate his power and come up with the remainder of their reward. But Alexius IV did not survive the winter. A palace coup toppled him, putting on the throne the anti-Latin candidate, Alexius V Mourtzouphlus. Faced with this treachery and betrayal, the Crusaders decided to attack Constantinople once again. In April 1204 they entered the city, captured it, and put it to the sack. Later Baldwin of Flanders was elected the first emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. Thus ended the Fourth Crusade, having never reached Jerusalem.

Popular accounts of the Fourth Crusade have traditionally painted it in the darkest, most anti-Western colors. Those who think little of the papacy or the Catholic Church can blame Pope Innocent III. While it is true that the pope had thrice forbidden the Crusaders to sail to Constantinople, demanded that they do no harm to Christians, and bitterly rebuked them for the sack of the city, one could dismiss these protestations as merely "for the record." Deep in his heart, it has been argued, Innocent wanted the Crusade to conquer Constantinople. Many have also blamed the Venetians. Venice, you see, was a city of merchants. Surely, no flame of piety, idealism, or self-sacrifice could burn in the cold hearts of its citizens. Doge Enrico Dandolo, it is said, feigned devotion to the Cross, but in truth he sought a way to harness the holy enterprise for his own profane goals. Although Venice did an enormous amount of very lucrative business in Constantinople, many authors have insisted that bringing a war to Venice's closest trading partner did, in fact, make good business sense.

During the last thirty years historians have learned much more about this complex Crusade. We now know that there was no secret villain scheming to divert the Crusade. Instead, there were many actors and accidents that led the enterprise step by step to a conclusion that no one wanted or could have foreseen. That story has been told in scholarly monographs, but until the publication of Jonathan Phillips's The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, it hadn't appeared in an accessible, popular style.

Having devoted much of my professional career to the study of the Fourth Crusade, I am a tough critic when it comes to this subject. I have never read a popular treatment of this Crusade that is not riddled with errors of fact and laughable assumptions. That is, until now. Phillips' book is a story well told, and the story is all the better for being true. Phillips has no need for made-up villains or half-baked conspiracies in order to craft a compelling and exciting read.

Based on the best research and a thorough reading of the primary texts, Phillips uses the Fourth Crusade as a gateway to the Middle Ages. It is a teaching tool, a way of introducing the general public to a world very different from our own. He cleverly engages his readers' interest and imagination by finding apt modern analogies. Consider this description of medieval sea travel: "Three-decked versions of the round ship were approximately 110 feet long and 32 feet wide. In comparison, a modern airplane such as an Airbus A320 is 120 feet long and its fuselage is about 16 feet wide. It carries up to 150 passengers and eight crew on flights of (usually) no more than four-and-a-half hours' duration. By the end of such a flight, most passengers are cramped and fidgety. As we look over a medieval ship, perhaps the equivalent of a jet as the main mode of transport, and consi der that journeys lasted many weeks, such figures are sobering."

Rather than discussing one of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman uses his recent book to treat the entire Crusading movement. His approach in Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades is not chronological but conceptual. He means for this book to be a "brief introduction" to the "history and historiography of the Crusades and what could be called their post-history."

Given the lack of footnotes or comprehensive bibliography, Tyerman clearly intends Fighting for Christendom for a popular audience. Yet, unlike Asbridge and Phillips, he makes no attempt to introduce his reader to the medieval world; nor, for that matter, does he provide them with much information about the Crusades themselves. In a book of almost 250 pages, Tyerman devotes only thirty-two to the events of all the Crusades. The descriptions are so schematic that they would be useful only as a refresher for those already familiar with the campaigns. Those seeking an accessible general introduction to the Crusades will not find it here.

Like most Crusade historians, Tyerman is frustrated by the image of the Crusades in the popular media. "Most of what passes in public as knowledge of the Crusades is either misleading or false," he writes. "The Crusades were not solely wars against Islam in Palestine. They were not chiefly conducted by land-hungry younger sons, nor were they part of some early attempt to impose Western economic hegemony on the world. More fundamentally, they did not represent an aberration from Christian teaching."

All of this is quite true. Yet Tyerman's frustration can sometimes lead to splenetic rants. When decrying pseudo-histories of the Knights Templar, Tyerman writes, "The Templars occupy a prominent place in the pantheon of Alternative History of the 'what they have tried to conceal from us' genre, championed by obsessive swivel-eyed anoraks and conspiracy theorists allied to cool money sharks bent on the commercial exploitation of public credulity."

This passage neatly sums up the book's attitude to both the medieval and modern worlds. In Tyerman's view, both are made up of cynical deceivers and guileless fools. Referring to the 2001 book Warriors of God, a popular and very poor history of the Crusades by James Reston, Jr., Tyerman sneers, "A recent best-selling book on Saladin and Richard I, apparently the bed-time reading of American presidents, in its psycho babble, inaccuracy, and dramatization reads like a screenplay."

Although Tyerman provides a good explanation of the development of the Christian concept of just war and holy war, he clearly sees that development as a warping of a pacifistic faith. He twice refers to Christian holy war as an "oxymoron." The "so-called Church Fathers" helped to bring this distortion about, thus preparing the way for someone like Pope Urban II. Like Asbridge, Tyerman sees only cynical secular motives in Urban's call for the First Crusade. The pope "seized on the opportunity to promote papal authority in temporal affairs. From its inception, crusading represented a practical expression of papal ideology, leadership, and power."

Did the Muslim threat have anything to do with the Crusades? Not at all: "Crusading exemplifies the exploitation of the fear of what sociologists call 'the other,' alien peoples or concepts ranged against which social groups can find or be given cohesion: Communism and Capitalism; Democracy and Fascism; Christians and non-Christians; Whites and Non-Whites; Them and Us." Thus, in Tyerman's view, the Crusades were the result of a papal desire to build worldly power through fear-mongering.

Given the frequency with which Tyerman refers to medieval anti-Jewish pogroms, one might well conclude that the purpose of the Crusades was to annihilate Jews. Indeed, he uses these massacres as evidence of the brutal nature of the Crusades and the success of the Church in whipping up hatred for "the other." Nowhere does he mention that these attacks on Jews were isolated incidents in direct violation of Church law and condemned by churchmen and secular leaders alike. Anti-Jewish attacks were seen as a perversion of crusading, and people like St. Bernard of Clairvaux worked hard to keep them from hap pening at all.

Tyerman's Fighting for Christendom is a difficult book to read. Aside from its general tone of condescending superiority, there is also an over-reliance on the language of easy indignation: the frequent use of such words as "shocking," "appalling," "brutally," "butchery," "vicious," "barbarism," and "atrocities" undermines the sobriety of the author's arguments. Nevertheless, parts of the book are genuinely praiseworthy. Tyerman offers one of the best short explanations of Islamic jihad and its relationship to Crusade, and his description of the place of Crusade within Christian society gives an excellent overview of the current scholarly consensus. He points out that the Crusades were not an economic boon for Europe and that Italians, far from being traitors of the crusading ideal, were among its most enthusiastic devotees.

His account of the scholarly controversy regarding the colonial nature of the Latin East is also quite good, as is his overall description of that unique society. He rightly points out that while a distorted memory of the Crusades may engender animosities in the Middle East and breast-beating in the West, those memories have little to do with the facts. In his characteristic tone he writes that "the re-entry of the Crusades into the politics of the Near East is baleful and intellectually bogus." As a counterpoise to Edward Said, Tyerman refers to a troubling "Occidentalism" in the Middle East that "assumes an inherent conflict of power and victimization that elevates a wholly unhistorical link between modern colonialism and medieval crusading." He wisely concludes, "The Crusades can only be understood on their own terms, in their own time." It is a conclusion that both Phillips and Asbridge would surely endorse.

As historians of the Crusades begin to present their research to the general reader, the common caricature of these events is finally beginning to dissolve. Unlike most older popular histories on the subject, these new books are fastidious about the facts, and they are less inclined to patronize the past or flatter the modern reader's prejudices. While their arguments about what motivated the Crusades are sometimes question able, they are never anachronistic...and that alone constitutes an important improvement.

Thomas F. Madden is Chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. His recent books include The New Concise History of the Crusades (2005), The Crusades: An Illustrated History (2004), and Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (2003).

Een lezenswaardige tekst die vele misverstanden over de kruistochten wegwerkt.
Vooral het stuk over de 4e kruistocht is verhelderend.

[Johan217]

Dat moet lukken, ik ben net die boeken van Asbridge en Philips aan het lezen. Echte aanraders
Een goede inleiding/overzicht van de kruistochten is:
God Wills It!: An Illustrated History of the Crusades. W. B. Bartlett, Sutton Publishing 1999. ISBN: 0750918802

Iets lichtere kost maar zeker de moeite waard is de BBC reeks Terry Jones The Crusades

Weet iemand nog een goed historisch werk over de Arabische kalifaten in de periode van de kruistochten?

[eno2]

Niet gelezen, jouw tekst, wel Amin Maalouf herlezen onlangs: De kruistochten, les croisades vue par les Arabes. Hét standaardwerk.

Mij scandaliseert wel zijn ophemelen van Hassan, stichter van de secte van de Assasins, de uitvinder van de politieke terreuraanslagen, en naar wie het woord assasin gevormd is.[edit]
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[size=1]After edit by eno2 on 24-08-2005 at 11:49
Reason:
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Niet gelezen, jouw tekst, wel Amin Maalouf herlezen onlangs: De kruistochten, les croisades vue par les Arabes. Hét standaardwerk.

Mij scandaliseert wel zijn ophemelen van Hassan, stichter van de secte van de Assasins, de uitvinder van de politieke terreuraanslagen, en naar wie het woord assasin gevormd is.[/size]

[size=1]Before any edits, post was:
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Niet gelezen, jouw tekst, wel Amin Maalouf herlezen onlangs: De kruistochten vue par les Arabes. Hét standaardwerk.[/size]

[/edit]

[Webcrusader]

Amin Maalouf ? Waardeloos, veel te partijdig, alsof de moslims allemaal onschuldig waren en slechts slachtoffers van westerse agressie... in werkelijkheid was het net andersom.

[lombas]

Dat schrijft Maalouf helemaal niet, plebejer.

[Webcrusader]

The Real History of the Crusades
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), poring 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 scholarship. For them, this is a "teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won’t last long, so here goes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support 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 punishing 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 support 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 ports 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 support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support 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.

* * *

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 Ship 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 A Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople.

[system]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Webcrusader

Amin Maalouf ? Waardeloos, veel te partijdig, alsof de moslims allemaal onschuldig waren en slechts slachtoffers van westerse agressie... in werkelijkheid was het net andersom.

Maalouf is een knap schrijver die eens een andere invalshoek laat zien dan de christelijke versie die wij altijd kenden. Natuurlijk, hij bekijkt het kruisvaardersgebeuren vanuit de moslimkant. En dat mag best, want die opvatting moeten we ook kennen. Moslims zijn nu nog altijd getraumatiseerd door deze, in hun ogen, westerse barbaarse invallen. En terecht getraumatiseerd mag men wel zeggen.

[Basy Lys]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door system

... En terecht getraumatiseerd mag men wel zeggen.

Terwijl niet veel hoger staat:

The Real History of the Crusades
By Thomas F. Madden

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.

Waarom de christelijke wereld zich niet meer getraumatiseerd voelt voor het verlies van het ganse Midden-Oosten en West-Afrika door het zwaard van Mohammed en zijn volgelingen valt niet te begrijpen.

[slobodan]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door system

. Moslims zijn nu nog altijd getraumatiseerd door deze, in hun ogen, westerse barbaarse invallen. En terecht getraumatiseerd mag men wel zeggen.

Ocharme ocharme toch, die arme uit zandland geimporteerde Moslims die nu onze europese steden onveilig maken, ze handelen uit gerechtvaardigde rancune voor de daden van Godfried van Bouillon die ze vanuit zijn burcht in de Ardennen zomaar een kopje kleiner kwam maken in 1099! ("de kruisvaarders waadden tot hun enkels is moslimbloed" volgens de kronieken...).
Bullshit natuurlijk die door zelfhatende westerlingen zomaar wordt aangenomen. Om dezelfde redenen zouden wij dan wrok moeten koesteren tegen de Scandinaven(die smerige Vikingen weetjewel), de Romeinen, en de Duitsers dan! Die zijn 2 keer hier binnengevallen(3 keer als we de oorlog van 1870 erbij rekenen).

lees de geschiedenis van de kruistochten s, de verschillende moslimpartijen heulden mee met de kruisvaarders als het hen uitkwam om andere "afvallige" moslims een kop kleiner te maken. In Irak blazen de Soennieten en de Sjiieten elkaar toch ook op?

[system]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door slobodan

Ocharme ocharme toch, die arme uit zandland geimporteerde Moslims die nu onze europese steden onveilig maken, ze handelen uit gerechtvaardigde rancune voor de daden van Godfried van Bouillon die ze vanuit zijn burcht in de Ardennen zomaar een kopje kleiner kwam maken in 1099! ("de kruisvaarders waadden tot hun enkels is moslimbloed" volgens de kronieken...).
Bullshit natuurlijk die door zelfhatende westerlingen zomaar wordt aangenomen. Om dezelfde redenen zouden wij dan wrok moeten koesteren tegen de Scandinaven(die smerige Vikingen weetjewel), de Romeinen, en de Duitsers dan! Die zijn 2 keer hier binnengevallen(3 keer als we de oorlog van 1870 erbij rekenen).

lees de geschiedenis van de kruistochten s, de verschillende moslimpartijen heulden mee met de kruisvaarders als het hen uitkwam om andere "afvallige" moslims een kop kleiner te maken. In Irak blazen de Soennieten en de Sjiieten elkaar toch ook op?

Maar wat er nu allemaal aan geweld gebeurt in de moslimlanden, is alles behalve fraai natuurlijk. Maar we hebben het nu over de westerse kruistochten (zeg maar strooptochten) en die waren zeker niet fraai.

[system]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Basy Lys

Terwijl niet veel hoger staat:

The Real History of the Crusades

By Thomas F. Madden

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.

Waarom de christelijke wereld zich niet meer getraumatiseerd voelt voor het verlies van het ganse Midden-Oosten en West-Afrika door het zwaard van Mohammed en zijn volgelingen valt niet te begrijpen.

Goed, maar zijn de christenen met het zwaard naar het Jeruzalem getrokken of niet? Hoe lang heeft dit(zogenaamd) christelijk geweld niet geduurd? Eeuwen. Eigenlijk waren het gewoon rooftochten in de naam van Jezus en het Heilig Graf. Dat moet men toch erkennen indien men de kruistochten op een zo obectief mogelijke wijze probeert te bestuderen.

Of de islamitische horden met vuur en zwaard de islam hebben verspreid, daar is geen twijfel over. Dit is zo geweest in vele gebieden. Maar daar hebben we nu niet over. We hebben het nu over de kruistochten.

[circe]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door system

Maar wat er nu allemaal aan geweld gebeurt in de moslimlanden, is alles behalve fraai natuurlijk. Maar we hebben het nu over de westerse kruistochten (zeg maar strooptochten) en die waren zeker niet fraai.

LEES jij ook wel eens iets?

Ik neem aan dat de moslims zo getraumatiseerd zijn omdat Constantinopel nu Istanboel heet en de Aya Sofie een moskee is geworden in plaats van een byzantijnse kerk?

Tot voor een paar decennia waren de kruistochten het vermelden niet waard voor de moslims: ZIJ hadden het gebied veroverd!

Een nederlandstalige uitleg vind je hier (voor het geval aan aan je engels ligt dat je geen teksten kan lezen).

[system]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door circe

LEES jij ook wel eens iets?

Ik neem aan dat de moslims zo getraumatiseerd zijn omdat Constantinopel nu Istanboel heet en de Aya Sofie een moskee is geworden in plaats van een byzantijnse kerk?

Tot voor een paar decennia waren de kruistochten het vermelden niet waard voor de moslims: ZIJ hadden het gebied veroverd!

Een nederlandstalige uitleg vind je hier (voor het geval aan aan je engels ligt dat je geen teksten kan lezen).

En vóór de moslims had de keizer van Byzantium het gebied veroverd. En daarvoor de Romeinen, en daarvoor de Grieken en daarvoor voor een stuk Babyloniërs, enz enz.

Lees eens een paar degelijke boeken over de kruistochten in plaats van dat internetproza.

[Vorenus]

Men moet de kruistochten elks apart bekijken.

Zo waren er zelfs kruistochten waar geen enkele moslim doodviel.

[circe]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door system

En vóór de moslims had de keizer van Byzantium het gebied veroverd. En daarvoor de Romeinen, en daarvoor de Grieken en daarvoor voor een stuk Babyloniërs, enz enz.

Lees eens een paar degelijke boeken over de kruistochen in plaats van het internetproza.

och ja.. en waren al die overwinnaars even getraumatizeerd als de overwinnende moslims?

[Dycore]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door system

Maalouf is een knap schrijver die eens een andere invalshoek laat zien dan de christelijke versie die wij altijd kenden. Natuurlijk, hij bekijkt het kruisvaardersgebeuren vanuit de moslimkant. En dat mag best, want die opvatting moeten we ook kennen. Moslims zijn nu nog altijd getraumatiseerd door deze, in hun ogen, westerse barbaarse invallen. En terecht getraumatiseerd mag men wel zeggen.

Dus zijn wij ook terecht getraumatiseerd met de moslims door hun invallen in Europa.

[Bhairav]

Wat zouden we toch graag allemaal in een "Lords of the Rings"-achtige wereld willen leven.

[Basy Lys]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door system

Goed, maar zijn de christenen met het zwaard naar het Jeruzalem getrokken of niet? Hoe lang heeft dit(zogenaamd) christelijk geweld niet geduurd? Eeuwen. Eigenlijk waren het gewoon rooftochten in de naam van Jezus en het Heilig Graf. Dat moet men toch erkennen indien men de kruistochten op een zo obectief mogelijke wijze probeert te bestuderen.

Of de islamitische horden met vuur en zwaard de islam hebben verspreid, daar is geen twijfel over. Dit is zo geweest in vele gebieden. Maar daar hebben we nu niet over. We hebben het nu over de kruistochten.

Om het heel eenvoudig te houden (hierboven staan langere teksten): de Kruistochten waren niets anders dan zelfverdediging van de Christelijke Wereld tegenover de mohammedaanse agressoren.

[system]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Dycore

Dus zijn wij ook terecht getraumatiseerd met de moslims door hun invallen in Europa.

'Van de Vikings, verlos ons Heer' was een gekend christelijk gebed uit de tijd en in die streken waar de Vikings strooptochten organiseerden. Een bevolking is altijd getraumatiseerd door een oorlog of door brutale invallen. Dit komt natuurlijk omdat de burgerbevolking vaak het grootste slachtoffer is en dikwijls machteloos staat. De leuze 'nooit meer oorlog!', is niet zomaar bedacht.

[system]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Basy Lys

Om het heel eenvoudig te houden (hierboven staan langere teksten): de Kruistochten waren niets anders dan zelfverdediging van de Christelijke Wereld tegenover de mohammedaanse agressoren.

Een simplistisch uitleg, vaak te vinden bij simplistische geesten.