The Crusades?

[Axion]

Contarini:

Could you give me a reference for this? Are you talking about the final fall of Acre at the end of the 13th century?

Yes.

Eyewitness account of the Templar of Tyre
On Friday 18th May 1291, before daybreak, there came the loud and terrible sound of a kettledrum, and as the drum sounded, the Saracens assaulted the city of Acre on every side. The place where they first got in was through this damned tower which they had taken…
That day was appalling, for nobles and citizens, women and irls were frantic with terror; they went running through the streets, their children in their arms, weeping and desperate; they fled to the sea shore to escape death, and when the saracens caught them, one would take the mother and another the child, they would drag them from place to place and pull them apart; and sometimes two Saracens would quarrel over a woman and she would be killed; or a woman was taken and her sucking child flung to the ground where it died under the horses hooves.

Arab account of the taking of Tripoli.
On Tuesday 26th April 1289 the Sultan’s army entered the city by force, it population fleeing towards the harbour. A few of them escaped by boat, though the majoroity of the male population were killed, while the children were led away into captivity. The Muslims took with them a huge amount of booty. When the Muslims had ceased killing and plundering the people of Tripoli, the Sultan ordered it be razed to the ground. In the sea near Tripoli there was an island, on which stood a church named the church of St Thomas. when the Muslims took Tripoli, many of the women fled to the church there.
Defying the sea, the Muslim army made the crossing to the island, swimming with their horses. They killed the menfolk who were there and claimed as booty the women and children and property. After this island had been cleared of all plunder, I crossed over in a boat. I found it covered in corpses which were putrefied to such an extent that the stench made it impossible to remain there.
Abu al-Fida

Other accounts include Michael the Syrian reporting the massacre at Edessa in 1144. And Sultan Baybars letter reporting the destruction of Antioch.

One always hears the comparison between the sack of Jerusalem in the First Crusade and Saladin’s capture of the city, which was apparently far more humane. I’ve always suspected that Saladin may have been more exceptional than is often admitted, but I don’t have solid evidence.

Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem was a negotiated surrender rather than a storming, which accounts for the difference. even so, the terms were harsh.

The terrified and craven mob kept running to the Patriarch Heraclius and the Queen Sybilla, who were at that time in charge of the city. They complained tearfully and urged that negotiations be started with Saladin immediately about handing over the city. The pact that followed was more to be deplored than commended. For each person a ransom was paid: 12 sovereigns for a man, five for a woman, one for a child. Anyone who could not pay was taken captive. So it happened while a good many people were able to find the payment for their safety, fourteen thousand who could not pay went under the yoke of perpetual slavery… On that day, 2nd October 1187, the queen of all cities was taken into bondage.
Itinerarium regis Ricardi

When the Turks captured Jerusalem from the Christians again in 1244, 5,700 of 6,000 Christians were killed or enslaved as they fled the city,

At last these heathens entered Jerusalem on 11 July 1244 and brutally disembowelled before the Sepulchre itself, all the Christians who had stayed behind.
Robert, Patriarch of Jerusalem.

 

[Axion]

Contarini:

The problem with this view is that you assume that the medieval Seljuks were as formidable as the later Ottomans. Muslims in the Crusading era were divided. They did a good job of overrunning Anatolia (which the Crusaders did not permanently recapture), but whether they could have captured Constantinople is far from certain.

The Ottomans were really a dynasty of the Seljuks. They were the same people. Muslims may have been divided among various local rulers, but there were only two or three leading Sultan’s who ruled vast areas as overlords and who could command their vassals to join them in battle. At the start of the Crusades, the “Times History of the World” shows the Abbasid Caliph ruling over an Empire that stretched from Mecca and Oman in Arabia, through Syria, Persia, the Holy Land, Iraq, Afhanistan, the Punjab and central Turkey.

Compare this to the divided states of Christendom: England, France, the German Empire, the city states of Italy, all working against each other most of the time.

As for capturing Constantinope, the Seljuks could have done what the Ottomans did two centuries later - bypass and isolate the city, and march into Greece and the Balkans.

Right. So your claim that except for the Crusades I would “be a Muslim” is clearly unfounded. I might be, but I might not, even if (which I find highly doubtful) the divided Muslims of the 12th century could have conquered Europe. (More realistically, I suppose they might have captured Constantinople, and thus given the Ottomans a stronger base.

The Muslims were not that divided in the 12th century. And Jihad would certainly have pulled them together.

The fact that a few Christians have survived in Egypt as a small minority, does not bode as well for European Christian survival as you think.

Again, according to the “Times History”, Muslims were beginning to outnumber Christians in Spain by 950. In the 11th and 12th Centuries the Almohads “extinguished the last vestiges of Christianity in north Africa.” Christianity has been virtually entirely wiped ot in Turkey, home of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Churches of Revelation, where John, Peter and Paul preached. Christianity is a small minority in all the other Muslim conquered lands.

The best survival rate for Christians in lands conquered by Islam is 40% in tiny Lebanon. After that comes 8% in Egypt, 5% in Syria and the Holy Land, 2% in Iraq and far less than 1% in Turkey, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morroco etc. So that averages about 4% survival of Christians across lands nearly 100% Christian before the Muslim conquest. Repeat that in Europe, and the chances are 96% you’d be a muslim without the crusades.

One final note–you refer to Christendom in the 12th century as “divided,” but one of the major reasons they were divided later was the Crusades. Clearly at the time of the First Crusade the division was not a hard and fast one, or Alexius’s appeal would not have been possible.

Christendom was very divided then. The problems of getting a multinational Crusade going were immense. Most crusades were built around one or two countries efforts. Mostly France in the 1st. Mostly Germany and England in the 3rd.

 

[Contarini]

Axion:

The Ottomans were really a dynasty of the Seljuks. They were the same people.

They were ethnically the same but they were a different political power altogether.

Axion:

Muslims may have been divided among various local rulers, but there were only two or three leading Sultan’s who ruled vast areas as overlords and who could command their vassals to join them in battle. At the start of the Crusades, the “Times History of the World” shows the Abbasid Caliph ruling over an Empire that stretched from Mecca and Oman in Arabia, through Syria, Persia, the Holy Land, Iraq, Afhanistan, the Punjab and central Turkey.

Yes, but the Caliphs had no power at this point. The Seljuks did have a unified power at the beginning of the Crusading period, but in the 12th century they collapsed into a bunch of smaller units. Saladin, the greatest opponent of the Crusaders, was an Ayyubid from Egypt, and the Mamluks (the later rulers of Egypt) were the ones who finally drove out the Crusaders. So it’s not clear to me that the Seljuks were as powerful as you think. It was only with the use of gunpowder that later Islamic empires were able to establish extensive, long-term control. (I recommend Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam.)

Axion:

The fact that a few Christians have survived in Egypt as a small minority, does not bode as well for European Christian survival as you think.

I didn’t say it boded well. I said that they have survived.

Axion:

Christianity has been virtually entirely wiped ot in Turkey, home of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Churches of Revelation, where John, Peter and Paul preached…

Only since the early 20th century, when there was a large-scale exchange of population between Greece and Turkey (after the Greeks nearly conquered Turkey). Under the Ottomans there were a lot of Greek-speaking Christians in Asia Minor.

Axion:

Christendom was very divided then. The problems of getting a multinational Crusade going were immense. Most crusades were built around one or two countries efforts. Mostly France in the 1st. Mostly Germany and England in the 3rd.

Nation-states didn’t really exist. Sure, Europe was politically decentralized–but from what I understand so was Islam. Both societies were dominated by the local aristocracy rather than a centralized state power (which had collapsed in the Islamic world in the mid-10th century and didn’t revive again till the rise of the Ottomans).

You make some good points, but it’s all hypothetical. It still seems to me that the Crusaders did far more serious and permanent damage to the Byzantines than they did to Muslim power.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Axion,

That’s an excellent point BTW about the difference between the negotiated surrender to Saladin and the sack by the Crusaders. I’ll make that point when I next teach the Crusades (I’ve already covered them for this semester). I totally agree with you that many textbooks select material in such a way as to emphasize Christian atrocities and downplay those of the Muslims.

Edwin

 

[bluezone7]

The first Crusaders who were uncorrupt and followed the Church were great. The Crusaders, who were immoral, greedy, plundered, sacked, raped Jewish and Arab women, murdered innocent Jewish and Arab citizens, and disobeyed the orders of the Church were evil. They were lucky if they made it to Purgatory!