A fresh look at the crusades

  • Thread starter Thread starter ontheway1
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
I can’t recall what state my memory is in.

On this particular point, I’ll go look. If I find anything, I’ll report.
 
Yes, I agree. Setting the record straight is one thing, whereas revisionist history is quite another.
 
Report.

Nothing found in ON SAILING THE SEA that fits that description. Now appox. 1/3 through a cruise on the NONA. Nothing sighted yet. But the trip is fun.
 
@GKMotley

Ok, here it is. I don’t have a copy of the text right now, my book is at home, but I had copied it to quote in an essay I wrote many many years ago, and I am copying from that, my notation in that paper is that it is from the Cruise of the Nona (contained in the book “On Sailing the Sea”, which was a published collection of his Sailing prose and poems). So you may have to verify my source. I will try to do so tonight at home, if I remember. At any rate, here it is for all to enjoy:
Indeed, the cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens to the soul of a man in a larger way. We set out for places which we do not reach, or reach too late; and, on the way, there befall us all manner of things which we could never have awaited. We are granted great visions, we suffer intolerable tediums, we come to no end of the business, we are lonely out of sight of England, we make astonishing landfalls - and the whole rigmarole leads us along no whither, and yet is alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril and repose.

On this account, I have always thought that a man does well to take every chance day he can at sea in the narrow seas. I mean, a landsman like me should do so. For he will find at sea the full model of human life: that is, if he sails on his own and in a little craft suitable to the little stature of one man. If he goes to sea in a large boat, run by other men and fill of comforts, he can only do so by being rich, and his cruise will be the dull round of a rich man. But if he goes to sea in a small boat, dependent upon his own energy and skill, never achieving anything with that energy and skill save the perpetual repetition of calm and storm, danger undesired and somehow overcome, then he will be a poor man, and his voyage will be the parallel of the life of a poor man - discomfort, dread, strong strain, a life all moving. What parallel I shall find in the action of boats for a man in the middle sort, neither rich nor poor, I cannot tell. Perhaps the nearest would be the travel at a fixed price upon a steamer from one port not of the passenger’s choosing to another not of his choosing, but carried along, ignorant of the sea and the handling of the vessel, and having all the while no more from the sea than a perpetual, but not very acute, discomfort, and with it a sort of slight uncertainty, which are precisely the accompaniments throughout the life of your middle sort of man.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
This quote, BTW, is a good example of why I find myself many times enjoying Belloc more than Chesterton. Chesterton has an ornery tone, that can be extremely humorous, and very cutting. Belloc has a better sense of prose that borders on poetic. But one rarely finds oneself chuckling when reading Belloc. But he can stir one’s emotions at times. Both are wonderful to read, just styles are different.

Another interesting thought, despite this I almost always prefer Chesterton’s verse. But I am admittedly not much if a reader of poetry.
 
Last edited:
Now I remember another paragraoh from him where he uses a well sailed boat as a metaphor for the virtue of temperance. I will try to find that tonight also.
 
In the Mariners Library edition/1951 of ON SAILING THE SEA, which is what is in my collection, that occurs in the excerpt from the dedication to THE CRUISE OF THE NONA, and appears on p.20. I had read it over (literally in the first 10 mins of starting my search) while looking for what I thought I was searching for, but did not recognize it in this setting. In CRUISE, it is on pp. xxxvii-xxxviii in my 1955 edition.

I get a kick out of seeing if I can source quotes and stuff, from folk like GKC and Belloc. I don’t have everything Belloc published (weak in his fiction) but I have nearly all between hard covers. For GKC, I have all (with certain caveats).
 
rosejmj said:
Well the crusaders were promised money to get that emperor on the throne and out of greed they abandoned their mission to fight the Muslims to help the emperor to be. It’s no wonder they didn’t get the money after he died so suddenly. Maybe if they had been focused on fulfilling their mission it would have been avoided
Click to expand...
There was a lot of blame to go around. The Franks had been hornswoggled by Venetian Frederico Dandolo (who had been looted and blinded by the Byzantines) into believing Venice would ship them to the Levant. On arriving, they didn’t have the price. Dandolo promised, then, to transport them if they would retake a formerly Venetian city which is now part of Croatia. They did. The Pope excommunicated the whole lot for making war on Christians. The deposed emperor of the Byzantines’ son promised funds if they would put his father back on the throne. So off to Constantinople they went in Venetian ships. The Byzantines closed the gates against them but were foolish enough to send their army out to destroy the Franks, who were then without food. The Franks were the Delta Force of medieval warfare and defeated the Byzantines. 8,000 Franks then poured into the city of a million people, and took it.

Byzantium recovered, but about 200 years later was conquered by the Ottomans who had 200,000 fighters and cannon capable of knocking down the walls. Hungary tried to go to the city’s aid but was conquered in its turn by the Turks. The city never had a chance.
 
I never enjoy either more than the other. I enjoy them differently for different reasons. I am more drawn to GKC, but I would have liked to have met either/both of them. And I do think I’d pick Belloc first, talking over a bottle of his wine at King’s Land. And listening to him sing. I have a record (found it long before the internet existed) of him singing a couple of his songs. Now there is the internet, and all can hear it here:


I marvel that you could find Chesterton ornery. And I chuckled all through ON SAILING THE SEA, again.

Yes, different styles.
 
Last edited:
Wow, I thought I knew a lot about Belloc, had read that he loved to sing while out at sea, but never new that he recorded anything. Thanks for that!!!. I cannot imagine a more enjoyable dinner and bottle of wine than sitting down with the two of them.
 
On the risk of further thread drift, one pamphlet the Belloc published I believe is really fascinating:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BKM3YIC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

The Catholic and the War. This was written in early 1940, before Dunkirk, and when support of the war in England was by no means a universal opinion, indeed the was still quite controversial. Lots of people remember WWI and didn’t want to go there again. In addition there was not an small number of fascists in England itself. But Belloc wrote a defense of the War for Catholics. It is very good. And it should put an end to much of the anti-semetic accusations against Belloc. At that time, people knew Jews were persecuted by the Germans, but did not in anyway know the extent that it would end up taking. Yet the treatment of the Jews was one of the reasons why the war was a just cause in his mind.
 
I doubt if it’s self loathing.

Both radical Muslims and western intellectuals for the most part have as their goal the destruction of Christianity.
 
I don’t think I have that one, though I’m familiar with it. My Belloc pamphlets pile is much inferior to my Chesterton. OTOH, I do have the 1915 “Map of the War” put out by LAND AND WATER, while Belloc was editor.

Maybe I should look around for a copy. I haven’t bought a Chesterton or a Belloc authored book since I finally got the GLASS WALKING STICK a year or so ago.

But I fear that what I know of that Belloc paper, good as it is on the Germans and the Jews, as far as was known at the time, does not erase the larger issue. Which I rarely discuss.
 
GKMotley said:
But I fear that what I know of that Belloc paper, good as it is on the Germans and the Jews, as far as was known at the time, does not erase the larger issue. Which I rarely discuss.
Click to expand...
Well that got my curiosity up.

The pamphlet is available on Amazon both in the Kindle format and a printed format.
 
It sure is. And there’s one fewer of the printed copies available, as of about 3 minutes ago.

Kindle we shall ignore.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top