Deconstructing a meme [Crusades as defensive wars]

[Dalton]

I want to see Thanas' take at least

[Rogue 9]

Seems a more concise (and less nuanced) version of this.

[Darth Nostril]

Hidden behind a paywall.

[Rogue 9]

Really? Huh. Let me right in. Try this.

[Darth Nostril]

That works.
An interesting read, would be good to get a real historians take on it.

[Rogue 9]

It's been around for awhile; I asked my world history professor about it in college after class one day (I actually came across it here through Shep years ago, though then it was posted on the St. Louis University website - Google didn't find that first, though). He was the type to ask questions right back at you and let you form your own conclusions before he'd say, but the eventual conclusion of our discussion was that Dr. Madden (the author is a history professor himself and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University, which is a Catholic institution) has an obvious religious bias, but the essay isn't fundamentally false.

Of course, my undergraduate professor wasn't a great luminary in the field, so he might have missed something, but that's the best professional opinion I've got. As Dalton said about the OP, Thanas' opinion is probably the best we'll get on this board.

[Thanas]

I reconstructed this post after it was deleted by testing (before I could move it). If I attributed a post wrongly, please tell me.

Moved to history.

[Thanas]

That works.
An interesting read, would be good to get a real historians take on it.

It is biased as hell and would not be considered a legitimate publication if I were to judge it. I mean, the guy has the gall to state that Steven Runciman of all people was a horrible historian. That is rich coming from Madden.

I mean, let us look through his article:

Many historians had been trying for some time to set the record straight on the Crusades—misconceptions are all too common. For them, current interest is an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention.

Yeah, except for all the documentaries I see flooding my TV....

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.

Hard to argue that, with the Templars and all, but I am sure that will not stop him from attempting that.

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.

Here we see the giant strawman being erected which he will then proceed to knock down. Nobody, least of all Steven Runciman, who was very much aware of the Muslim aggression due to being an eminent scholar of the Byzantines, believes it was so simple as "good muslim, bad christians". As an aside, he can go shove right off for this character assassination on a great scholar.

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.

Wait, so who were they defending again? A nebulous muslim mass in general? Or the actual powers ruling in Palestine (who did not attack western Europe at that point though).

They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Like....?

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.

OK. Full stop here. This is very disingenious. He paints this as one series of Muslim aggression, which the Christians were powerless to stop. But this is not true. Fact is, the Muslims showed remarkable little interest in Southern France after Karl Martell stove their heads in at Tours in 732. Even more, they never subjugated all of Spain and the reconquista was already in full swing. And in the east, the Byzantines enjoyed a remarkable revival until the arrival of the Seljuk Turks. They were so successful at that time that even the muslims recognized the Byzantine superiority in battle. The Byzantine empire, within less than 200 years, went from
this
to
this.

So you can see how it is very bad and in fact almost outright lying to characterize this as a massive chain of universal muslim aggression. In fact, for almost 300 years before the crusades, the Muslim world was on the defensive against renewed christian attacks and counteroffensives. Heck, the Romans even retook Antioch.

The arrival of the Turks did diminish the Byzantine Empire (though not to little more than Greece, as Madden exaggerates). They also diminished the traditional muslim powers in the region. This is the central point: The Turks were not the same muslim states who had gone up against the westerners. The Seljuks attacked Muslims and Christians alike.

It was against the Seljuk threat that the Romans called for help. Not against the muslim states it had handled for centuries before. Madden is doing the equivalent of a Chinese historian lumping in all trade partners of China over 300 years as "the west", composition, changing societies and different states be damned. I mean, no difference between the USA and Nazi Germany, if we would be applying the same standard here. I mean, they all have the same general religion.

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.

All of Christianity was under threat. Righto. (Let us ignore how the Muslims were still getting pushed back in Spain for a moment). What is generally accepted is that the Byzantines did not call for crusades. They called for soldiers. Mercenaries. Allies. As usual, and as had been done many times before. The pope then changed that simple request into a call for a crusade. This was not some "THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE GATE" situation, this was a pope using a situation for numerous reasons (including papal power).

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.

How nice that he doesn't cite a single one of them.

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.

Unless of course you were a member of the 4th crusade, which was all about plunder. Also, the sheer number of sacked cities (including Byzantine cities during the pre-4th crusades) speaks a different language as to what the aim was. Certainly very brotherly to rape Christian women, for sure.

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.

...except when they were easy picking for plunder, Byzantine sources are rife with stories of Byzantine troops having to deal with crusaders.

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.'”

he 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?

But...these quotes do not support a giant rescue mission for the Byzantines. Innocent III wrote at when the first four crusades were already over. The Byzantines had been conquered (by the very crusaders themselves) at this point already. This is purely about reconquering places in the Holy Land - and guess where the fifth crusade was aimed at? Egypt. It had nothing to do with defending christians living in muslim lands.

The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one’s love of God.

This sentence cannot be improved upon. It shall stand as a monument to itself.

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.

He is correct about the broad narrative here, but there are a few facts curiously missing - the crusaders were not some noble servants trying to help their neighbours. The Byzantines had to use force to get them to respect the laws of the land. They had to use force to compel them to keep treaties they signed. They had to support the crusades with logistics or otherwise the incompetent crusaders would never have taken over the Seljuk holdings in Nicaea. And the crusader state in Antioch had to be compelled by force to recognize Bzantine overlordship. If the crusades were this noble endeavour aimed to reconquer lands previously held by the Byzantines, the crusaders showed a worrying tendency of being unwilling to hand them over to their "rightful owners". And they never finished off the Seljuks either, leaving the job half-finished and bolting for the Holy Land.

Also, for some reason he leaves out the giant massacre that happened after they took Jerusalem. Bathing in the blood of muslims and jews up to their ankles and all that. No no, mustn't paint them in a bad light.

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.

I think he is exaggerating the feedback loop here.

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.

Though not before sacking Byzantine cities on the way to the Holy Land. Mighty neighbourly, those Christian crusaders.

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.

My opinion of this colossal arrogant failure of a King is well known, so I shall not dwell on it any further.

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.

Holy blame shifting, Batman. It is almost as if the Venetians played no role at all in this, no no, it was all a betrayal by those dastardly "Greeks". The true events were a bit more complex. Suffice to say that when given the choice, the Crusaders opted for an all-out conquest of Constantinople and the territories of the Byzantine Empire. In fact, their first act - before even reaching Constantinople - had been to sack other Catholic holdings for their Venetian paymasters. And it seems as if the Venetians at least were always pushing for an attack on Constantinople. No, this wasn't a story of "naive" crusaders getting stuck in a web of politics they couldn't understand and being betrayed by Greeks. This was a massive mercenary army doing the bidding of its masters and then committing the greatest atrocity of the middle ages. Take the word of another historian:

The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. Constantinople had become a veritable museum of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that the Latins were astounded at the riches they found. Though the Venetians had an appreciation for the art which they discovered (they were themselves semi-Byzantines) and saved much of it, the French and others destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine, violation of nuns, and murder of Orthodox clerics. The Crusaders vented their hatred for the Greeks most spectacularly in the desecration of the greatest Church in Christendom. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church's holy vessels. The estrangement of East and West, which had proceeded over the centuries, culminated in the horrible massacre that accompanied the conquest of Constantinople. The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians.

And then they divided the Empire among themselves. This is the true face of the Crusades - not a noble defensive undertaking as Madden wants you to believe.

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.

Note the language here. When crusaders commit horrible acts, they were "betrayed" and drawn "into a web". When muslim states retake territory from the plundering soldiery, they are "ruthless" and wage a "brutal djihad". This language would not pass in a paper I would grade.

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.

I really doubt that. People who did what they did to Constantinople and untold other cities would think us to be giant pussies.

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.

HAHAHAHAHAHHA. You mean, Christianity would not have survived without the war that destroyed the greatest Christian empire of its time and the greatest bullwark against Muslims that ever existed? Also, respect for women and antipathy toward slavery? Who were the greatest slave traders in History again? Their names look mighty Christian too me. Geez, that is one case of major bias and whitewash.

[Thanas]

I want to see Thanas' take at least

It is really bad stuff. The dates are all correct, but presenting numbers without a context is pretty terrible. (see the previous post of mine in this thread for a bit more context). I mean, I could easily make up another graphic:

The truth about Terror
Christianity is not a religion of peace.
The first terror attack on US soil happened in 2001
509 years after the first western conquest of a Muslim country
509 years after the holy city of Granada, the apple of Muslim culture, fell
488 years after the first muslim city in Arabia was conquered and colonized by Westerners
480 years after the west first plundered muslim countries
11 years after the western troops occupied the country of Mecca and Medina
and only after centuries of enslavement, forced conversion and the burning of Muslim cities
So much for being the aggressor.

and it would just be as valid as the original image.

[Channel72]

truth about Terror
Christianity is not a religion of peace.
The first terror attack on US soil happened in 2001
509 years after the first western conquest of a Muslim country
509 years after the holy city of Granada, the apple of Muslim culture, fell
488 years after the first muslim city in Arabia was conquered and colonized by Westerners
480 years after the west first plundered muslim countries
11 years after the western troops occupied the country of Mecca and Medina
and only after centuries of enslavement, forced conversion and the burning of Muslim cities
So much for being the aggressor.

That's pretty hilarious actually, and puts things in perspective nicely. But this can improved, because I don't like how it skips from 480 years to ultra-recent history. Include some stuff about British and French colonialism, like "200 years after France conquered Algeria, Egypt, and sacked Cairo, etc, 70 years after the British conquered Palestine", etc.

Anyway, I think the biggest element of bullshit about the OP narrative is basically the idea that a grand "East vs West" / "Muslim vs. Christendom" conflict is even meaningful over large periods of time on an international scale. The political landscape that has evolved over the last 1,000 years across both Europe and the Middle East is just as much (probably moreso) a result of inter-Christian and inter-Muslim conflicts and wars than some kind of grand Christian/Muslim Holy-War. I mean, Ghengis Khan and the Mongols probably had more of an impact on the outcome of the Muslim world than anything Medieval Europe did.

[Simon_Jester]

The biggest element of bullshit is the part where they portray a war as defensive because it's being done in response to a series of things, the earliest of which happened about 250 years ago. Revenge is not a defensive emotion, as anyone who's ever watched squabbling children get into fistfights over trivia can tell you. Especially not when it's "revenge" for something that stopped happening a couple of centuries ago.

[Steve]

By the 11th Century, most Muslim attacks on Christian Europe were raids instead of outright conquest attempts, IIRC, at least when not counting the aftermath of Manzikert and the overrunning of Anatolia, and until the rise of the Ottoman Empire reversed the tide again for a couple hundred years, it was usually Christians on the offensive. The Reconquista in Spain, Robert Guiscard and Roger de Hauteville's conquest of Sicily in the late 11th century, Roger II of Sicily's attacks on North Africa and brief conquest of Mahdia (I believe it was Mahdia), and of course the Crusades. Even the Byzantines were able to reclaim some of their lost territory in Asia Minor, at least until the 4th Crusade broke the Empire.

Ironically Muslim soldiers would indeed sack Rome in 1084.... but they were Sicilian Arabs in the Norman army and under the command of their Christian ruler, Robert Guiscard, so, well,.... ha. Rather ironic IMHO, especially since they committed the sack along with the Christians in Robert's army.

[Thanas]

It's like the two past posters feel the need to repeat what I posted four posts above.

[PainRack]

Well, as whitewash, it's better than this children guide to history that portrayed the entire Crusades as greedy Europeans wanting access to spices so that they can disguise old meat......

I mean sure , Venice and other commercial entities wanted to have control of the spice routes but it was hardly a casus belli

[Steve]

Venice was lukewarm to the Crusades at best, and we all saw what happened when they got a commanding voice in one....

It's like the two past posters feel the need to repeat what I posted four posts above.

Hey! I was elaborating by adding more information on the period!

[Replicant]

I want to see Thanas' take at least

It is really bad stuff. The dates are all correct, but presenting numbers without a context is pretty terrible. (see the previous post of mine in this thread for a bit more context). I mean, I could easily make up another graphic:

It is also a pretty bankrupt thought process. The argument used is no different than saying a wife is not allowed to defend herself from an abusive husband if she did nothing the first three times he beat her, or if she does it is assault or murder depending on the results instead of self defense.