Posted on 04/22/2011 12:12:16 PM PDT by marshmallow
This article appears in the Spring 2011 edition of the Intercollegiate Review. See the issue’s Table of Contents here.
In 2001, former president Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown University in which he discussed the West’s response to the recent terrorist attacks of September 11. The speech contained a short but significant reference to the crusades. Mr. Clinton observed that “when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount.” He cited the “contemporaneous descriptions of the event” as describing “soldiers walking on the Temple Mount . . . with blood running up to their knees.” This story, Mr. Clinton said emphatically, was “still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”
This view of the crusades is not unusual. It pervades textbooks as well as popular literature. One otherwise generally reliable Western civilization textbook claims that “the Crusades fused three characteristic medieval impulses: piety, pugnacity, and greed. All three were essential.”1 The film Kingdom of Heaven (2005) depicts crusaders as boorish bigots, the best of whom were torn between remorse for their excesses and lust to continue them. Even the historical supplements for role-playing games—drawing on supposedly more reliable sources—contain statements such as “The soldiers of the First Crusade appeared basically without warning, storming into the Holy Land with the avowed—literally—task of slaughtering unbelievers”;2 “The Crusades were an early sort of imperialism”;3 and “Confrontation with Islam gave birth to a period of religious fanaticism that spawned the terrible Inquisition and the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the Elizabethan era.”4
The most famous semipopular historian of the crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, ended his three volumes of magnificent prose with the judgment that the crusades were.....
(Excerpt) Read more at firstprinciplesjournal.com ...
Summary: The four myths
Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians
Not that he embarrasses me ~ personally, but the gullible ~ from the writer of this piece, to to Bill's friends, to your typical Democrat voter ~ they are embarrassing.
Otherwise the writer's piece is pretty accurate but he should have noted that Arabia was simply the first place to come out of the quite serious Economic Depression most of the world had fallen into with the coming of the Dark Ages event (up to a 7 year long Fimbul Winter in places). These guys were hit so suddenly with OPPORTUNITY they didn't even bother inventing the religion of Islam on a formal basis for 300 more years.
Didn't mean they were good guys, but their motives were not exactly religious.
Then, the Seljuk Turks came into the Middle East. Earlier Turks had gone into Europe. Even earlier Turks had gone into Western India, and far, far earlier than that Turks had shown up in Eastern India, Northern Asia, Western Asia, and so forth.
There's a reason why Saddam Hussein looked so terribly Turkish and only so vaguely Arabic. Then, too, the Chinese had their own problems with these guys. Finally a Far Eastern group known as the Mongols organized a number of Turkish speaking tribes and proceeded to more or less conquer the known world ~ except Europe which was then dismissed as possibly not worth it since at the time it was occupied mostly by warrior priests who were exceedingly nasty and aggressive. All of today's "problems" in the Middle East derive from the Mongol experience of the 1200-1400 period. Add to that the fact the Mongols spread knowledge of the use of gunpowder, firearms and heavy artillery ~ it's easy to see that whatever happened during the Crusades, NO ONE COULD POSSIBLY CARE if they'd look at what's happened since then.
The Middle East has passed from conqueror to conqueror, disaster to disaster, and turmoil beyond belief to yet more turmoil. The Arabs, who made a flash in the pan fame back in the 7th and 8th century ended up as a TAX FARM for the Seljuks and the Ottomans.
Frankly, in the context of ME history something like the Inquisition has got to be at the bottom of the pile. Hardly anyone was killed, and certainly no one of interest to Moslems!
Again, Bill Clinton used a sort of anti-Catholicism to get votes. He certainly used the degradation of a Jewish woman as a way to get votes. What he knows of ME history is irrelevant ~ unless he thought he could get some votes by screwing around with something in the ME.
Interesting choice of screen name. Former scribe of Mohammed who rose to the position of the first Caliph of the Umayyad Dynasty in 666 AD. First entry of Islam into Spain.
You wrote:
All of today’s “problems” in the Middle East derive from the Mongol experience of the 1200-1400 period. Wouldn’t most of those “problems” have initiated much earlier with the loss of Asia Minor to the Muslims?
Following up on that, it's interesting that ALL of the top leaders of the Seljuk Turks have Gaelic names ~ which may well have some relationship (or not) to the particular Turkish languages the Seljuk's favored as well as "politics" that happened long before the first armed foray into Anatolia. The Turks were quite sophisticated when it came to the use of politics as part of foreign conquest. Life was much less expensive that way.
Turkish, like English, can sop up foreign words and names at the drop of a bottle of cognac too.
The loss of ALL of Asia minor to the Seljuks actually happened when the Byzantine Empire was finally shut down by their successors, the Ottomans in the early 1400s.
NOTE: Most Westerners forget that the Moslem expansion in the West actually sucked under Greece, which prides itself in some manner as the foundation of the West. To a degree it can be argued that Islam destroyed the West in the 1400s leaving it to far more recent cultures to drive them out of Greece, et all.
An alternative to that argument is that Persia, in a new guise as Judeo-Christian culture as that had been transported to Europe managed to stop Islam in its expansion, and actually drive it back towards Arabia a bit.
You wrote of a military loss of Asia Minor. But wouldn’t a loss of formerly Christian territory, even if by conversions (forced or willingly), cause bad blood between Christians and Muslims (which would pre-date the Mongol invasions) thus causing the “problems”?
I guess I’m not sure what modern day “problems” you are referring to
It's when the Arabs sent the Mongol ambassadors back dead that got it off to a nasty start. The Mongols then killed everybody in Baghdad ~ at the time quite possibly one of the largest cities in the world.
Afterwards Arabs were dealt with as a sort of rag tag bunch of not much worth.
Mongol power withdrew from the region and was replaced by Seljuk and other Turkish power, that part of the world (the Steppes) being in the ascendancy.
The Saudis continue to pretend they are philosophically important to Islam ~ which they aren't. Egypt has the largest group of Arabic speaking Moslems anyway, and I believe India and Indonesia are pretty close in terms of numbers of Moslems living in a particular country.
The Saudis are only important in respect to their foreign investments (purchased with oil income).
The point was that even if the Crusades were terrible, the Arabs had been driven so deeply into servitude by the Turks none of that could possibly account for their modern malaise and poverty.
Suppose some Christians attack and capture ‘Muslim holy land’. Imagine the uproar that it creates. I bet many liberals will agree that the Muslims have ‘rights’ to organize themselves and to recapture those lands.
“The Moslems sent out missionaries who converted the Seljuk Turks BEFORE they got to Asia Minor.”
The Arabs in which Islam originated were rewarded with centuries of subjugation by the Turks, which didn’t end until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918-1919.
There's a very strong suggestion in this that once you've been Islamicized you are only fit to live as someone else's slave.
All of those places had once been Christian or partly Christian, and they were recovered.
We've subsequently let some of the territory backslide into slavery at the hands of an Islamic "upper class".
You find a substitute for OIL and these guys will collapse like a house of cards.
The Arabs had their part in tying down Turkish troops while the British made gains in the Middle East; I think the friction started when rather than being granted the independence they thought would follow, the Arab portions of the Ottoman Empire were divided between France & Britain.
Under their own leaders, especially religious ones, Muslims are a docile lot.
Not one of the biggest one: the Second Rome, Constantinople. Although briefly during the Balkan Wars in the beginning of the 20th century, that part was under Bulgaria I believe.
Yup, the Greeks didn’t get it back ~ still, in my experience Greeks (except those from Crete) look so much like the Turks it’s very difficult to understand them as different peoples. It’s more like differentiating between Canadians and Americans, or if you are an African, trying to figure out the difference between Americans and Mexicans (or so I’ve heard)
Placemark for a gotta read.
I have read somewhere—where I cannot recall—that in 1096, the Levant still had a large, in some places a majority Christian population, because the Arabs preferred to tax Christians and Jews rather than convert them. In other words, it was a bit like Ireland under the British.The difference was that the Christians and Jews in these Arab land provided the skills that kept civilization going. Lots of such folks died at the hands of the Mongols.
The Mongols, in particular, hired on foreign nationals from conquered territories to administer affairs of state, serve in Mongol armies, and so on.
They viewed themselves as a "leadership elite" and acted accordingly.
The Turks were into colonization but they had far larger populations than the Mongols.
To a considerable degree the Turks and Mongols invented the model for the modern secular state. The Islamic Caliphate was a throwback to the old Roman Empire with its Emperor worship.
Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians
--> well summarised
Greeks may not like to hear it but the blood/genetic differences between them and the Turks is very small now. Especially West Turkey Turks who have a lot of Greek, Albanian etc. blood. In the East they have Armenian, Assyrian etc. blood and in both areas Hittite, Lydian, etc blood is present. They have very little actual Turkic blood, far less than the Uzbeks (30-40% Turkic blood) and much less than Turkmen (90+%)
“Mr. Clinton observed that “when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount.” He cited the “contemporaneous descriptions of the event” as describing “soldiers walking on the Temple Mount . . . with blood running up to their knees.”
The truth is that when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, they whacked pretty much everybody.. Muslim, Jew and Christian alike. Nobody was spared.
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