Posted on 08/26/2010 7:10:43 PM PDT by markomalley
I always avoid the crusades when I am time traveling.
Wow! Thanks, this is a great read.
Actually, the Crusades were a response to the first Jihad....at least at first.
Could you please take me back to 5pm this afternoon before my car got totaled by a hit and run driver?
This time Christian was used throughout the article, I have noticed that Catholic is often used in place of saying Christian, or Christians in Catholic articles.
LMAO!
PRECISELY SO. What’s upon us now is a somewhat belated continuation of the centuries long muslim assault on Christianity and Judiasm.
Thanks for the reminder.
Still, most people imagine the events in Spain as being the actual Crusade ~ there they had back and forth warfare for several hundred years ~ but it wasn't unrestricted. The Jews got to be Jews, and the peasantry would be forced to adopt the religion of their prince of the moment ~ whether Moslem or Christian.
Nobles were kind of independent of that and just moved around to whatever principality would pay them the best.
French knights regularly earned their spurs in Spain.
Spain actually developed relatively permanent laws regarding "forced conversions" ~ and one of the last requests by the last Moslem prince was that there be no forced conversions.
His request was, of course, rejected!
Alas, Spain didn't have a crusade, it had the Reconquista. It was interrupted a couple of times by yet more Middle Eastern/North African invaders who sought to enforce a stricter orthodoxy (Sharia law) on the Moslem princes, and that wasn't all that popular with Jews, Christians or Moslems.
Today, now, in this instance, The Knights Templar are to be admired?
The piece would be the size of the Oxford English Dictionary!
It was a simpler time back then, with simple rules: surrender the city or face the consequences after a successful siege. The tradition probably went back all the way to the Assyrians.
I didn’t expect this.
What about the ones in the future? Are those avoidable?
I would say so, absolutely. I hold the templars in very high regard. They were the Special Forces of their day. They also built the first system of what amounts to "travelers' checques" in the world.
Traveling with money was a very dangerous proposition back then. Thieves were everywhere. But what a traveler could do was to deposit a sum of money with their local Templar office, which in return they would get an encrypted document that could only be decrpyted at another Templar office. They would go on their journey and visit the local Templar office when they got to their destination, present the encrypted document... and get their cash paid out on that end. I don't know, but I would assume that the encrypted document included some kind of description and positive ID of the true owner of the deposit. This made the document useless to anyone but the rightful owner, and let many people travel without having to risk losing all their money to robbers.
Ingenious, that. They invented the travelers' check.
Nope. :-)
Of course, it is only the present you have to worry about.
I know all that.
Catholics holding Knights Templar in high esteem is contrary to their history.
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Richard the Lion Hearted would roll over in his grave if he could see London today.
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