Never Interfere With The Enemy While He Makes His Mistakes

[Draggingtree]

7Aug

Never Interfere With The Enemy While He Makes His Mistakes

 

By: Skook

 

Underestimating your enemy and overestimating your own capabilities has been a major reason many battles and wars have been lost. The battle of Hattin in 1187 is a prime example of the mistakes to avoid when facing an enemy similar to the one we face today.

 

The Seljul Turks had defeated the Byzantine Empire, and the Holy Land was now under the control of the Mohammedans. Christian leaders were offended, and Pope Urban II called for a crusade to take back the Holy Land from the control of the Muslims.

 

There were several disorganized crusades and multiple raids, most used the opportunity to enrich themselves if the opportunity arose, despite moral purpose and intent.

 

Several groups carved out kingdoms and had established treaties with the Muslims. They were content and living in harmony, until a new group of crusaders would arrive and create mayhem. The Battle of Hattin was the culmination of a disregarded treaty. The leader of this particular crusade, Reynald Chatillon raided a trade caravan, capturing significant loot and prisoners. The Christian leader of the area, King Guy of Jerusalem, was unimpressed and demanded the return of the loot and prisoners. Saladin, the Muslim leader of the area made the same demand.

 

Reynald refused to comply and Saladin assembled an army.

 

http://floppingaces.net/2013/08/07/never-interfere-with-the-enemy-while-he-makes-his-mistakes/

 

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

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The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam

Thomas Asbridge

Paperback: 448 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 29, 2005)

 

In The First Crusade, Thomas Asbridge offers a gripping account of a titanic three-year adventure filled with miraculous victories, greedy princes, and barbarity on a vast scale. Beginning with the electrifying speech delivered by Pope Urban II on the last Tuesday of November in the year 1095, readers will follow the more than 100,000 men who took up the call from their mobilization in Europe (where great waves of anti-Semitism resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews), to their arrival in Constanstinople, an exotic, opulent city--ten times the size of any city in Europe--that bedazzled the Europeans. Featured in vivid detail are the siege of Nicaea and the pivotal battle for Antioch, the single most important military engagement of the entire expedition, where the crusaders, in desparate straits, routed a larger and better equipped Muslim army. Through all this, the crusaders were driven on by intense religious devotion, convinced that their struggle would earn them the reward of eternal paradise in Heaven. But when a hardened core finally reached Jerusalem in 1099 they unleahsed an unholy wave of brutality, slaughtering thousands of Muslims--men, women, and children--all in the name of Christianity.

The First Crusade marked a watershed in relations between Islam and the West, a conflict that set these two world religions on a course toward deep-seated animosity and enduring enmity. The chilling reverberations of this earth-shattering clash still echo in the world today.

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

As is the case in so much of history there were more than one reason Pope Urban II gave his speech (one of them actually had something to do with "liberating" the Holy Land) 1. to reunite the two branches of Christianity...under Rome of course 2. There was a huge major problem in Europe and throughtout the Medieval age The Church and others kept trying to solve it. The problem being a large number of Barons, Dukes...etc running around fighting each other and destroying everything, oppressing peasants and generally making a mess of things. So the idea was, if they wanted to fight (and they did) lets send them over there, and realistically speaking where Over There was did really matter as long as it wasn't Here where there were those trying to build things back up.

 

 

Something I recall reading Bernard Lewis (?) that up until the start of the XXst century and the raise in Islamism, the Crusades were not a major issue with the Arabs.