The Crusades: Today’s Fictions vs. Yesterday’s Facts

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The Crusades: Today’s Fictions vs. Yesterday’s Facts

By: Ausonius (Diary) | January 29th, 2015 at 06:54 PM

Some members have requested that I compose an essay on the Crusades. I have been reluctant because of the size of such a subject, and for other reasons.

 

Today, since I had some time, and because a few good people have asked, I have written the following.

 

The History of the Crusades cannot possibly be addressed properly in an essay for a website. The purpose here is to give quick summaries of what the Crusades were, and especially, in general, what they were not. A secondary purpose is to intrigue the reader enough to find and read a basic history of the 1,000 years which we call the Middle Ages or the Medieval Era, running roughly from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. For Eastern Europe and the Afro-Asian remnants of the Roman Empire, one must look to the 1,000 years known as Byzantine History. http://www.redstate.com/diary/ausonius/2015/01/29/crusades-todays-fictions-vs-yesterdays-facts/

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

 

 

Besieged in such ways, the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, appealed to the pope for some military aid. Pope Urban II, seeing an opportunity to tame the growing number of unemployed, landless knights, and to harness the energies of constantly feuding aristocrats (it was not called the “feudal system” for nothing) for something worthwhile, decided to answer the Byzantine appeal in his own way. Alexius was expecting perhaps 5,000 mercenaries who would join the Byzantine army.

 

 

A point often missed in articles written about the Crusades by the Right. This was a huge problem for both the king/s and The Church, throughout the Medieval period. Going off the top of my head the letter written to The Pope was 40 years old(?), and written to a different Pope....but I could be wrong on this.

 

 

 

To conclude, one can see that the Crusades were a highly complex phenomenon involving assorted issues in the West: social problems (primogeniture, for example, whereby the oldest son inherits everything, was a tradition which caused the growing number of landless, warlike knights errant), political problems between the pope and the increasingly powerful aristocracy (an aristocracy still more pagan than Christian in its clinging to the warrior ethos of Germanic mythology), political and religious issues between the pope and the Byzantines, and as always economic factors. Ignorant people who think that the Crusades were an unwarranted, out-of-the-blue attack on Islam, and therefore are to blame for our current troubles, are easily contradicted by someone who knows the facts. Without the Byzantines constantly acting as a buffer against Islamic advances, without Charles Martel in 732 in France, without the Crusades, without the men under Don Juan at Lepanto in 1571, without the men under Nicholas of Salm at Vienna in 1529, and without the men under John Sobieski of Poland again at Vienna in 1683, all of them blunting the advance of Islamic armies, it is indisputable that our present lives would be quite different today, and not for the better: this is true even with accepting that spreading their religion was not the primary aim of the Arabic and Turkish armies. For it is the Western Tradition of freedom for the average person, first practiced by the Greeks, Romans, and the early Celtic and Germanic tribes, and not always practiced perfectly, but always evolving to include as many people as possible, which would have disappeared under such an Oriental force as Islam.

 

 

In historical studies there is a very technical term for this kind of paragraph.....UNDERSTATEMENT Always Bolded Underlined and in CAPS.

 

Also it was not just in the Holy Land The Jews did not have it well from the Crusaders. Mainz comes to mind.