Crusades were not Evil

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ScottH:
God expects his people to defend themselves.

1 Samuel would be a good read on this topic.
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Maybe, but God’s relationship with his people in the Old Testament was certainly different from his relationship after he sent his Son to fulfill the Law. Thus, Christ instructed us to love our enemies, to offer no resistence to an evil doer, but instead turn the other cheek–Mt. 5.38-44 is an equally interesting read on the topic.
 
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Brendan:
Of course they were not evil.

They were defending Christians from outside invaders.

The Turks were from central Asia, all of Asia Minor was Christian Greek.

All of North Africa was Latin speaking Roman Christian.

They were invaded by Arabians, Moors and Turks, and the Crusades were the fighting back of the invasion.

If the Apache came down to help the Aztec fight off the Spanish, would we consider that evil in any way. Would we talk how terrible it was for the Indians to be attacking the Spanish??
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IF Christians were mainly concerned with defending from outside invaders, that might justify the wars. However, much of the Crusades was for profit and ambition.

Another good book on the Crusades is a History of the Knights Templar. Many of the nobility who went to battle and bought many of their vassals to war were essentially soldiers of fortune. these were princes or relatives of European rulers who had no territory of their own to rule.

They saw conquest of the holy lands as a way for them to crave out their own territory and build a kingdom for themselves, not to mention plunder and pillage for riches, treasures and slaves.

The politics and intrigue intertwined in the Crusades is far too involved to describe here, but it is worth investigating. The Christians often shot themselves in the foot with back stabbing, petty quarrels, and sometimes treasonous behaviour.

We often think of the Crusades as a complete failure but at one point the Christians did control most of the Holy Land. But that did not last due to lack of support and political infighting.

Recovery of the Holy Land was always secondary (at least in reality. It may have been advertised as primary), and although the Popes wanted Christianity to control the Holy Land for safe passage of its pilgrims, greed and hunger for power were more often the major reasons for launching the Crusades.

Overall it was a tremendous waste of lives and resources. The lack of planning, and sometimes outright stupidity was appalling. In one instance a huge army was gathered and marched across Europe, but failure to secure supplies (such as food!) totally decimated the army. By the time they reached the Holy Land, this force was a total non factor.

Taken in total, the Crusades was a huge lesson in how not to run a war. There may have been some good intentions mixed in with all the greed and power grabbing, but it was totally lost and overwhelmed by some pretty evil and greedy folks.

There was one French king who was declared a saint because of his support for the Crusades, I think it was Louis X. And I think one of the Knights Templar may have been canonized also.

wc
 
For those claiming the Crusades as self defense against a surging Islam, keep in mind that the target of the Crusades was the Holy Land. Your defense might be more credible had the target been the Turks or Morocco and southern Spain (for instance, turning back the Turks at the gates of Vienna was most certainly self defense, but unfortunately for the apologists of the Crusades, also well after the crusading era).

For those who point out the Pope excommunicated those who sacked Constantinople, this does not absolve him of responsibility. When you spur people to action, you also have a responsibility in the consequences. I’m not saying the Pope was “evil,” as the actions of those who sacked Constantinople were. However, it’s clear his call for a crusade was a grave mistake. Even spiritual leaders can make poor temporal judgments (as in fact seems to be the line held by those Catholics who have disregarding the late Pope’s condemnation of the Iraq war).
 
Argh…
I agree with a Roman Catholic Pope -Urban II, (which is a shocker…)

Only to find that many of you don’t! Argh…!

Are we to be “wilting flowers of peace” in the face of Islamic aggression? Ah, if only the RC’s and the Prots would have had such a pacifistic stance against one another during the reformation!

Is defending the Holy Land wrong? If Roman Catholicism is the mother of our faith, would Judaism not be our grandmother?​

Crusade Propaganda
The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars.

By Thomas F. Madden, the author of A Concise History of the Crusades and coauthor of The Fourth Crusade, is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.
November 2, 2001 8:00 a.m.

http://www.nationalreview.com/images/S.gifince September 11 the crusades are news. When President Bush used the term “crusade” as it is commonly used, to denote a grand enterprise with a moral dimension, the media pelted him for insensitivity to Muslims. (Nevermind that the media used the term in precisely the same way before the “gaff.”) Attempting to capitalize on this indignation, the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, crowed “President Bush has told the truth that this is a crusade against Islam.” Yet clearly the crusades were much on the minds of our enemies long before Bush brought them to their attention. In a 1998 manifesto, cosigned by the leaders of Islamist groups in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Osama bin Laden declared war against the “Jews and the Crusaders.” If you didn’t guess, the Americans are the crusaders here. On the day the U.S. strikes on Afghanistan began, in a live-from-a-cave address, bin Laden declared Bush to be “the leader of the infidels” in a worldwide war against Islam. He previously warned that “crusader” Bush would lead the infidel forces into Afghanistan “under the banner of the cross.” So, what do the medieval crusades have to do with all this? After all, doesn’t the Muslim world have a right to be upset about the legacy of the crusades? Nothing and no.

The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Ask a random American about them and you are likely to see a face wrinkle in disgust, or just the blank stare that is usually evoked by events older than six weeks. After all, weren’t the crusaders just a bunch of religious nuts carrying fire and sword to the land of the Prince of Peace? Weren’t they cynical imperialists seeking to carve out colonies for themselves in faraway lands with the blessings of the Catholic Church? A couch potato watching the BBC/A&E documentary on the crusades (hosted by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame no less) would learn in roughly four hours of frivolous tsk-tsk-ing that the peaceful Muslim world actually learned to be warlike from the barbaric western crusaders. No wonder, then, that Pope John Paul II was excoriated for his refusal to apologize for the crusades in 1999. No wonder that a year ago Wheaton College in Illinois dropped their Crusader mascot of 70 years. No wonder that hundreds of Americans and Europeans recently marched across Europe and the Middle East begging forgiveness for the crusades from any Muslim or Jew who would listen. No wonder.

(continued…)
 
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Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.

Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095. Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy. As it happened, the First Crusade was amazingly, almost miraculously, successful. The crusaders marched hundreds of miles deep into enemy territory and recaptured not only the lost cities of Nicaea and Antioch, but in 1099 Jerusalem itself.

The Muslim response was a call for jihad, although internal divisions put that off for almost fifty years. With great leaders like Nur ed-Din and Saladin on the Muslim side and Richard the Lionheart and St. Louis IX on the Christian side, holy war was energetically waged in the Middle East for the next century and a half. The warriors on both sides believed, and by the tenets of their respective religions were justified in believing, that they were doing God’s work. History, though, was on the side of Islam. Muslim rulers were becoming more, not less powerful. Their jihads grew in strength and effectiveness until, in 1291, the last remnants of the crusaders in Palestine and Syria were wiped out forever.

But that was not the end of the crusades, nor of jihad. Islamic states like Mamluk Egypt continued to expand in size and power. It was the Ottoman Turks, though, that built the largest and most awesome state in Muslim history. At its peak in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire encompassed all of North Africa, the Near East, Arabia, and Asia Minor and had plunged deep into Europe, claiming Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia. Under Suleiman the Magnificent the Turks came within a hair’s breadth of capturing Vienna, which would have left all of Germany at their mercy. At that point crusades were no longer waged to rescue Jerusalem, but Europe itself. Christendom had been shrinking for centuries. The smart money was all on Islam as the wave of the future.

Of course, that is not how it turned out. But surprisingly the rise of the West was not the result of any military victory against Muslims. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire survived largely intact until the end of World War I. Instead, something completely new and totally unpredictable was happening in Europe. A new civilization, built on the old to be sure, was forming around ideas like individualism and capitalism. Europeans expanded on a global scale, leaving behind the Mediterranean world, seeking to understand and explore the entire planet. Great wealth in a commercial economy led to a fundamental change in almost every aspect of Western life, culminating in industrialization. The Enlightenment turned Western attention away from Heaven and toward the things of this world. Soon religion in the West became simply a matter of personal preference. Crusades became unthinkable — a foolishness of a civilization’s childhood.

(continued)
 
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Which brings us back to the crusades. If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldn’t they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades. During the peak of European colonialism, historians began extolling the medieval crusades as Europe’s first colonial venture. By the 20th century, when imperialism was discredited, so too were the crusades. They haven’t been the same since. In other words, Muslims in the Middle East — including bin Laden and his creatures — know as little about the real crusades as Americans do. Both view them in the context of the modern, rather than the medieval world. The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.

That’s the thing about bin Laden, he is a troublesome mix of the modern and the medieval. He and his lieutenants regularly fulminate about the “nation,” a reference to a Muslim political unity that died in the seventh century. They evoke an image of the crusades colored with the legacy of modern imperialism. And they call for jihad, demanding that every Muslim in the world take part. In short, they live in a dream world, a desert cloister where the last thousand years only partially happened.
 
I don’t think I have read enough about the Crusades themselves to have an opinion on whether or not they were politically justified, so I will reserve my judgment on that account. I am not going to claim that the Muslims did not commit atrocities of their own in their conquest of Asia Minor, but I do contend that the Crusades themselves have made the Muslim world, and Turkey specifically, less receptive and more hateful towards Christianity.

I born and raised in Turkey, and as such received some education in the Turkish school system and had several Turkish friends (my parents are still missionaries over there). I can tell you that the Crusades are a still a major sore spot when it comes to discussing Christianity with a Turkish Muslim. It is undeniable that some of the Crusaders themselves (although not authorized to do so) raped and pillaged on their way through Turkey to the Holy Land. Picture a man with a Cross emblazoned on his gear murdering your father. What kind of picture does that give you of the Christian faith?

I know it is not rational, nor is it fair to equate the faith with those who abused it, but it is still a painful memory in the mindset of the Turkish people as a whole. The fact that the results of the Crusades have caused millions upon millions of Turkish Muslims to hate the Christian faith gives me reason to believe they were not of God.
 
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ScottH:
Crusade Propaganda
The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars…
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And the right accuses the left of historical revisionism! Defensive war my foot!
 
Philip P:
And the right accuses the left of historical revisionism! Defensive war my foot!
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So you are saying the Muslims were invading Christian lands (such as Spain and Constantinople) with nothing more than harsh language and mean looks?

Oh those crazy Christians! Aren’t they just awful for fighting back?

Gimme a break.
 
Philip P:
And the right accuses the left of historical revisionism! Defensive war my foot!
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Were you there? Look at the evidence.

So you are saying the Muslims were invading Christian lands (such as Spain and Constantinople) with nothing more than harsh language and mean looks?

Oh those crazy Christians! Aren’t they just awful for fighting back?

Gimme a break.
 
During the time of the Crusades, it was Western Europe that invaded Constantinople. The Muslims didn’t come to Constantinople until much later. The sacking of the city, and the West’s subsequent refusal to support the Eastern Empire when they were, in fact, in a defensive war, made the Turk’s conquest much easier (and consequently imperilled Vienna and central Europe).

As far as Spain, the Spanish were pretty much on their own. France, Italy, England, and the rest were more interested in playing in the sand and proclaiming themselves kings of Jerusalem. Again, if the Crusades had been directed at places where Muslims actually WERE invading Europe, you might have a case. They weren’t. So cut the revisionism.
 
Philip P:
During the time of the Crusades, it was Western Europe that invaded Constantinople. The Muslims didn’t come to Constantinople until much later. The sacking of the city, and the West’s subsequent refusal to support the Eastern Empire when they were, in fact, in a defensive war, made the Turk’s conquest much easier (and consequently imperilled Vienna and central Europe).

As far as Spain, the Spanish were pretty much on their own. France, Italy, England, and the rest were more interested in playing in the sand and proclaiming themselves kings of Jerusalem. Again, if the Crusades had been directed at places where Muslims actually WERE invading Europe, you might have a case. They weren’t. So cut the revisionism.
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As a non-catholic, I usually have no problem saying that Catholics were wrong on any given issue. But I cannot say that on this one. I would urge you to read the article and the book by Thomas Madden, a professor in medeival Studies, associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.

However, my apolgies to you in advance if your certifications trump his on the subject of medieval crusade history, and know better.
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Where did the article come from? It’s not a part of the book, is it?
 
Well I think that crusades are good, speaking in ideas, but in facts there were bad, it had been a armed help to the spanish and greeks brothers against muslims, but the truth was very different, nevertheless.
 
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Franze:
Well I think that crusades are good, speaking in ideas, but in facts there were bad, it had been a armed help to the spanish and greeks brothers against muslims, but the truth was very different, nevertheless.
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But the Muslims WON the crusades. The Christians lost, and lost BIG. They have nothing to complain about, other than the fact that we licked our wounds, gave up Christian land to them, and built more advanced societies- while they stayed at a comparative standstill in terms of society & technology. (They spent this time warring with themselves too, incidentally- with such things as the Sunni and Sheite conflicts- which still go on.)

So then it becomes a sort of socio-economic jealousy now. They are like “You folks have, and we don’t have, how dare you! And…uh…you fought with us a millennia ago! You have some audacity!”

But they cannot complain about the crusades. Other than eventually being kicked out of Spain (Which they attacked, incidentally) they kept everything from their land-grabs. They hate us for battles they won? It makes no sense. However, its all part of the “spin campaign” by conservative muslim schools (in Saudi, they are called “Madrassas”- where young muslims are taught that the west is the root of all evil, and attacked them viciously, without cause- 1000 years ago, and caused these problems. (Never mind the part of them slaughtering us and winning the crusades.)

Why is that lie important though? I’ll tell you why- It deflects attention away form their own governments, and deflects the blame for their standard of living, and it deflects blame for the rich, ruling class sheiks. Its an ingenious marketing sham. Most muslim countries are more than happy to do it too, as long as the attention is focused away form their own faults, greed and governmental corruption.

They think that we are the “man” keeping them down. And those who are really keeping them down are more than happy to keep them thinking that.
 
Muslims don’t hate Christians for the Crusades. Although there may be some residual bad blood over the atrocities commited by both sides, I think muslims mainly hate Christians because we usually side with Isreal.

The whole Palestine issue is a bit bizarre. Prior to establishing the Isreali state, the muslims could care less about Palestine. They treated Palestinians like dirt and if it were not for the fact of there being some holy sites in Palestine they would have totally ignored them.

The creation of Isreal has been a real sticking point for muslims. They see a rival religion stuck right in the middle of one of their holiest sites, plus several muslim countries have lost territory to them. The US policy has been one sided in that region, so of course muslims see the US as the enemy. Without US aid, Isreal would have been wiped out long ago.

PLUS now they see the US as an occupying force in a muslim state. They see us as a real threat to their precious oil, and a threat to all the monachys in the region. IF I’m a muslim, the last thing I woud want to see is a US oil company taking over a muslim oil field. Given the circumstances, it’s lucky we don’t have an all out muslim-US war in the whole region.

We’ve got no buisness meddling in internal politics in the region, once we toppled Sadam, we should have left right away. Let the Sunnis, Shites and Kurds fight among themselves. They don’t want us over there, we shouldn’t be there. We don’t have the support of the people and that is what got us into trouble in SE Asia during VietNam.

IF we were not meddling in the middle east, most muslims would not even give the Crusades a second thought. It was over 500 years ago, it has very little with what is going on now.

wc
 
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