... And thus was born the 11th-century Hammer writ large: the Crusades.Like Martel's campaigns before them, the Crusades were defensive actions designed to stave off Muslim aggression. Oh, this isn't what you learned in college, I know. It's not what we hear from the media. It isn't what's portrayed by Hollywood. But it is the truth. And it was explained well by Thomas Madden, Chair of the History Department at Saint Louis University. In "The Real History of the Crusades" he wrote:
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.
... [But] 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.... 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.
... [The Crusades] 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.And that is why I defend them today. No, they weren't perfectly executed, nor could they achieve all their objectives any more than the Cold War truly vanquished the left. Evil is always afoot. But note that the Mideast and North Africa had more Christians than Europe at the time of the early Muslim invasions -- but no one to Crusade for them. Thus, it's easy to imagine that, were it not for our hammering medieval heroes, we could well be what the Mideast is today. And unless we shelve multiculturalism and become what those crusaders were yesterday, we may not have a tomorrow.
Read it all...
The uninformed myths of the Crusades always blame European Imperialism and paint the Muslims as poor nomads being slain by a well armed Christian Knight. Along with this people always parrot the misinformed line" Religious wars killed more people than any other wars in the history of mankind" Again, all of this is false Urban Legend.
ReplyDeleteMuhammad proclaimed himself a prophet of god in 622 AD. He was a trader on the route from Syria to Mecca, his home town, where his people rejected his new found Muslim cult. He moved to Medina and gained great political influence as he converted the entire city and built a big army. In 624 he marched his army on Mecca, and conquered it converting all to Muslim by the power of the sword. Before he died in 632 he conquered all of Arabia to Muslim. within 100 years his followers led by the Caliphs conquered north Africa to the Atlantic and all other territory West to China. They then started to move across the Straights of Gibraltar into Spain and from Syria into Turkey. Jerusalem fell to the Muslim Caliph, Abu Ubaidah in 637 who was aided by the Persian Jews. The Crusaders only reacted about 400 years later at which time Constantinople [Istanbul]was under siege. Much of Spain had already been taken by Muslims starting in 711 AD on. So the fact is that the Muslims from their inception are imperalist. They always used warfare as a way of expanding. Today we are seeing a resurgence of military imperialism which can be traced back to their founder, Muhammad.