How the Christian Crusades Saved Civilization
The siege of Antioch during the First Crusade – ( Photo: Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Not too long ago I had a conversation with a millennial who criticized the Crusades carried out by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, arguing that they were both unprovoked and immoral. He sustained, without any convincing evidence, that they were launched by the popes against innocent Muslims for the sole means of imposing papal hegemony. There is quite a bit of misunderstanding, especially from revisionist historians and people who willfully choose not to inform themselves, as to the reality of the Crusades and how close the then-civilized world was almost conquered by Muslims.
Raymond Ibrahim in his article Just War vs Plain-Old Jihad states that “[w]herever one looks, the historic crusades against Islam are demonized and distorted in ways designed to exonerate jihadi terror. Unless we get on our high horse,” Barak Obama once chided Americans who were overly critical of Islamic terror, “and think this [beheadings, sex-slavery, crucifixion, roasting humans] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Islamic scholars and activists who insist that Islam is a religion of peace go so far to say, if not equate, the Crusades to the jihad carried out by ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic terrorist gourps.
There is, however, a clear and substantial difference between the Crusades and jihad. A jihad is based upon an Islamic political doctrine justifying looting, killing, and conquest of non-Muslims with the aim of imposing the sharia as the rule of law. The Crusades were a collective response to the ongoing conquest that began with the taking of the Holy Land (Jerusalem) by Muslims in 638 and other Christian territories. Even if some of them were unjust, such as the sack of Constantinople of 1215 (which was condemned by Pope Innocent III, not to mention that he also excommunicated the Venetians who carried out the raid), they were not doctrinal in the literal sense, as jihad is to Islam. Also, contrary to popular opinion, when Pope John Paul II made an apology on March 12, 2000, for the sins and crimes committed by those who represented the church in its history, he never offered one to the Muslims for the Crusades.
Ibrahim goes onto say that “[t]he great irony concerning the mainstream condemnation of the historic crusades is that a closer examination of them — what they meant, what inspired them, how they were justified, who could participate — in comparison to the requisites of jihad, not only exonerates the crusades but exonerates the West of any wrongdoing against Islam, past or present.”
The First Crusade, which was called by Pope Urban II in 1095 (457 years after Jerusalem was overrun by Muslim armies), came at the behest of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus. He had asked the pope in Rome for assistance to turn back the Muslim Turks, who were invading what is now Turkey; they took property as they went, turned churches into mosques, and forced Christians to convert to Islam. Approximately two-thirds of the ancient Christian world had been already conquered by Muslims by the end of the 11th century, including the important regions of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia. It was also that time that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the place traditionally held where Jesus Christ was buried, was destroyed by Abu ‘Ali Mansur. Soon thereafter all Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land were cut off by Muslims. While Mansur did not attack Christendom directly, he demonstrated scorn for the religion, in addition to destroying 30,000 churches in the Middle East.
The goal of the Crusades, as already mentioned, was to retake and ensure that Christianity could continue to be practiced without any type of Islamic imposition. Attempting to check this advance, they initially enjoyed success, founding a Christian state in Palestine and Syria, but the continued growth of Islamic states ultimately reversed those gains. By the 14th century the Ottoman Turks had established themselves in the Balkans and would penetrate deeper into Europe despite repeated efforts to repulse them. By the mid 1550s they had slowly conceived of a long-term offensive, a pincers movement first by sea and then by land, to conquer the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean. Their ultimate aim was to take all Italy; then all Europe. It was not until the victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 that, under the coalition of Pope Pius V, the Islamic onslaught began to be turned back as Western civilization was saved — the Crusades were formally over by the 16th century, though the spirit of defending Christendom against Islamic jihad was still in place.
The Crusaders, for their part, kept their military operations within lands that were Christian, for their goal was never to overthrow the Turkish Empire, which is why they never attacked Saudi Arabia, specifically Mecca, unlike what the Muslims had done to Constantinople in 1453. That being said, in order to appreciate the necessity of the Crusades, one has to understand how comprehend the 1,400-year-old Islamic threat of jihad subjugate humanity
Detail from miniature painting The Prophet Muhammad, Ali, and the Companions at the Massacre of the Prisoners of the Jewish Tribe of Beni Qurayzah, illustration of a 19th-century text by Muhammad Rafi Bazil. Manuscript now in the British Library. (Image: Public Domain)
Islamic jihad or holy war was initiated on what we today define as terrorism carried out by the Prophet Muhammad. He used terror tactics by ensuring discipline among his followers by making public examples of traitors and backsliders. In Muhammad’s day the penalty for apostasy in Islam was death. He also ordered some of his political enemies assassinated, including poets and singers who had publicly ridiculed him. After Muhammad’s famous victory at the Battle of Badr in 624, the Jewish clan Bani Qainuqa were stripped of their goods and expelled from Medina. In 626, the other two remaining Hebrew tribes, the Bani Nadir and the Bani Quraiza, were besieged. After their unconditional surrender, the Jews were slaughtered, had their riches confiscated, and their women and children enslaved. In 628, surmising that his forces were still not strong enough to overcome the rival and once-native Quraysh tribes, Muhammad agreed to the Hudaybiyya Accord, named after the place in which the ten-year treaty was signed; he reneged on this pact less than two years later, after consolidating his power. The Prophet eventually ordered all the tribe’s adult males, some nine hundred, beheaded in the city square, the women and children sold into slavery, and their property distributed among his Muslim followers.
History demonstrates that as Muslims grew in power, their use of violence changed from skirmishes to outright warfare. We see this during the last nine to ten years of Muhammad’s life, when he personally participated or deputized eighty-six battles: an average of nine-plus battles a year, and they culminated in intensity until he died. According to Patricia Crone, the renowned Islamic historian, after the capture of Mecca in 630, “Muhammad’s God endorsed a policy of conquest, instructing his believers to fight against unbelievers wherever they might be found; and if we accept the testimony of non-Muslim sources, he specifically told them to fight the unbelievers in Syria [the Caravan raids], Syria being the land to which Jews and Arabs had a joint right by virtue of their common Abrahamic descent. In short, Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer.”
The first legitimate jihad after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, according to various Islamic scholars, occurred when Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr, suppressed the many Arab tribes who rejected his authority. Bakr’s intransigent and belligerent response towards those who refused his governance, historically known as the ridda (apostasy) wars (632-33), paved the way for the Arabs to attack and conquer most of the areas bordering the Arabian Peninsula: Iraq, Syria, Egypt, etc. These jihadist conquests (from 634 to ca. 740) transmuted the Middle East by causing a linguistic shift from Aramaic and Greek to Arabic and transforming Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism to Islam (over a period of centuries), thereby creating an Islamic empire that would last until the fall of the Ottoman dynasty in 1924.
We know from history that the once powerful Roman and Christian North Africa, the land that gave birth to a number of great Catholic heroes and heroines, such as saints Cyprian, Augustine, Felicity, and Perpetua, vanished under Muslim assaults. Except for their moral and intellectual accomplishments, those great figures might as well never have existed in present-day North Africa. Those who still criticize the Crusades should be reminded that discussing peace in the Middle Ages with the Muslim jihadists — as the United States is doing with the Taliban — would have been as effective as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938; a peace treaty the latter reneged just as the Prophet Muhammad did with the aforementioned Hudaybiyya Accord. What followed afterwards on both Islamic and Nazi fronts were onslaughts to “purify” society. Just as it was necessary for America to enter World War II to stop Hitler, had it not been for the Crusades, unsuccessful as many of them were, perhaps Islam would have already taken over the rest of the world since there would have been no opposition to the Muslims’ ambitions of Islamizing society.
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N. B. Quotations and sources can be found in my book k Islam: Religion of Peace? The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up, unless, unless otherwise noted.
Muslims DO NOT live in harmony with non-believers.
Because, it is not in their genetics.
Whenever and wherever Muslims attain majority, Muslims implement Islamic Shariat for all to follow.
Judaism invented fictitious one and only “God” (but, not “Goddess”).
Islam took Judaism into further and deliberate subjugation of all non-Muslims whenever and wherever Muslims went.
Only thing that stops Muslims is brute force from the non-believers.
When Pagan warlords Genghis Haan and his grandson Hulegu Haan massacred millions of Muslims during the 13th century A.D., Islam was halted for good.
From the seventh century the Muslims created a beautiful multicultural society from India to the Pyrennees Mountains. No more were Islam’s multicultural ideals more fully realised than in al-Andalus where for centuries years Muslims, Christians and Jews off all sexes and sexual persuasions lived like brothers and sisters sitting under shady horseshoe-arched cloisters amidst fragrant orange-groves and crystal fountains playing the lute, reciting poetry, doing algebra and dicussing the latest discoveries in science. They also practiced gay sex out in the open. Seeing what the Muslims achieved the jealous backward christians of western Europe repaid Muslim tolerance and elightenment by launching the crusades which culminated in a bloody massacre of tens of thousands of Jews and innocent Muslims taking part in an international conference on the physics of black holes which Muslims invented centuries before the west. Then Saladin came along and liberated the middle east from the western proto-colonialist crusaders and taught them a lesson in chivalry and forgiveness they long remembered..etc etc
That pretty much sums up the state of western historiography on the crusades.
‘Eight centuries ago, during the Middle Ages, some European Christian children were seized by visions.
Jesus Christ appeared to them, urging them to redeem their people by marching to the Holy Land and peacefully converting the Muslims to Christianity.
Their preaching inspired tens of thousands of idealistic European youth, who undertook the arduous journey to the Levant.
The great majority died on the way — whether of starvation or disease — and most of the remaining gave up and chose to return home.
A few managed to reach the Mediterranean sea, perhaps hoping to walk across, as did Moses and Jesus, but in the event were sold into slavery, ending up miserably in Tunisia.
Meanwhile back in Germany, angry parents whose Christian children had died following these boy-preachers arranged for one of their fathers to be arrested and hanged.
Thus ended that most idealistic adventure known as the Christian Children’s Crusade.’
LINK
http://www.unz.com/gdurocher/the-childrens-climate-crusade/
Christianity and Islam are two sides of the same coin.
Reality is, medieval Christians did not complete the Crusades, which required complete annihilation of Islam from Middle East; because, medieval Christians realized that, Saracens (i.e., Muslims) were doing the dirty work of Christianity by murdering, raping, looting, and arsoning all non-believer Pagans of Middle East.
History had to wait until Pagan war-lords — Genghis Haan and his grand-son Hulegu Haan — emerged on the world stage in the 13th century A.D. in order to halt progression of Islam on earth.
So, that’s enough for Christian Crusaders saving the “Western Civilization” from Saracens (i.e., Muslims) during medieval time!
Christianity, in fact, almost destroyed Western Civilization by bringing in Middle Eastern Jewish barbarism in European continent.
‘From WILLIAM EDELEN
The Contrary Minister (2002)
“For the understanding of religions… a complete understanding of myth is mandatory.” — Mircia Eliade
[…] When Professor Alfred North Whitehead was the Chairman of Philosophy Dept.
at Harvard University, he made this observation:
“Christian theology has been the greatest disaster in the history of the human race.”
Was Professor Alfred North Whitehead correct?
A BRIEF REVIEW:
391 A.D.: Christians burn down one of the greatest libraries in the world in Alexandria. Over 700,000 scrolls were destroyed.
500 to 1000 A.D.: The church takes over and brings with it the cancer of the Dark Ages, destroying almost everything that defined civilization. The Christian church all but wiped out education, technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce. During this period the church amassed enormous wealth.
1099 A.D.: Christian Crusaders take Jerusalem and massacre Jews and Muslims. In the streets were piles of heads, hands and feet. Millions were killed as a result of the Crusades.
1208 A.D.: Pope Innocent orders a crusade against the French Cathars. Over 100,000 were killed by Atnaud’s men at Beziers.
1231 A.D.: Pope Grebgory IX establishes the Christian Inquisition. Inquisitors were given license to explore every means of horror and cruelty. Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive. Ovens built to kill people, made famous by Nazi Germans, were first used in the Christian Inquisition of Eastern Europe.
Adolf Hitler, by the way, said he admired Christian Martin Luther more than any other German, because Christian Martin Luther despised the Jews.
Gruesome tortures used on hundreds of thousands of non-Christians in the Christian Inquisition were so repugnant and horrible that I cannot even describe them to you.
The Christian Inquisition spread as far as Indian subcontinent.
1377 A.D.: The Pope’s army descended on the Italian town of Cessna. For three days and nights beginning on February 3, the slaughter continued. The squares were filled with blood.
Women were violently raped, a ransom was placed on children, and priceless works of art were destroyed.
Over 5,000 people were butchered.
1497 A.D.: The Christian Church began an enormous burning in Florence. The works of Latin and Italian poets, illuminated manuscripts, women’s ornaments, musical instruments and paintings were all burned.
1500 A.D.: The Witch-Hunts are going full speed ahead. Members of the Christian clergy proudly report how many were killed. The Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpazov bragged that he had killed over 20,000 devil worshippers.
Historians estimate more than 9 million people were executed after 1484 A.D., mostly women.
1572 A.D.: On St. Bartholomew’s day more than 10,000 Protestants are slaughtered in France. Wrote Pope Gregory XIII: “We rejoice that you have relieved the world of those wretched heretics.”
TODAY:
George W. Bush, when he was President: “I don’t consider atheists to be citizens of America.”
Randall Terry, of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion fanatics: “It’s us against them. It is the God-fearing people against the Pagans of the United States.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “Christian theology has been, and is, a disease of the intellect.”
In 1995 A.D., Pope John Paul II sent a letter to his cardinals. He wrote: “How can one remain silent about the many forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the Christian church, wars of religion, tribunals of the Inquisition and all other forms of violations of the rights of human beings?”
Pope John Paul II does not have enough days left in his life to say, “For my part, I am sorry” to all of the millions and millions of human beings slaughtered by the Christian Church, to all new discoveries of truth slaughtered by the church, or to a legacy that has promoted sexism, racism, the desecration of the natural environment and the intolerance of other world spiritual traditions from Buddhism to the American Indian.
The United Church of Canada put their apology to the Indians in these loving and tender words: “Long before our people journeyed to this land, your people were here, and your understanding of the Mystery that surrounds us all was deep, and rich, and to be treasured. We did not listen to you. We were closed to the value of your spirituality. We tried to make you like us. We destroyed your vision. As a result the image of the Creator in us is twisted and blurred and we are not what we were meant to be. We ask you to forgive us.”
One of my Anthropology professors at the University of Colorado would spend an entire week documenting the horrendous damage done to people around the world by Christian missionaries.
There is no word for religion in any American Indian language. They had no need for artificial, man-made, religion.
Their every moment of every day was lived as an expression of the spiritual and sacred dimensions of existence.
It was a living mythology always pointing toward the Mystery, rather than an artificially retained mythology that exists only to support the institution, the Christian church.
Prof. Joseph Campbell often made this point in his lectures.
Jean Baptiste De Bienville, upon meeting the Nez Perce for the first time, wrote these words in his diary:
“Their honesty is immaculate and their purity of purpose most remarkable. They are more like a nation of saints… than ‘savages.’”’