Crusading 101

Catholic World Report ^ | 1/3/18 | Timothy D. Lusch

[marshmallow]

How to Plan a Crusade: Religious War in the High Middle Ages, by Oxford professor Christopher Tyerman, demolishes the legend that Western crusaders were mere irrational rabble from Dark Age rubble.

It is a mark of our hyper-political and hypocritical age that those who are most ignorant of the crusades should condemn the perceived ignorance of medieval crusaders. Sprinkle in accusations of greed, thuggery, and a moral equivalence with ISIS (see former President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015) and it pretty much sums up what many people think they know about the crusades. But popular understanding of the crusades lags decades behind scholars. It is as if a generation of people read Steven Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades (1951-53) a half-century ago and then, along with their progeny, closed their eyes to everything published after.

In How to Plan a Crusade: Religious War in the High Middle Ages, Christopher Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford, demolishes the legend that Western crusaders were mere irrational rabble from Dark Age rubble. Tyerman painstakingly documents the gargantuan efforts involved in crusade organization, recruitment, financing and logistics. He makes the irrefutable case that the crusades were based on faith and reason. He comes out swinging in the book’s Introduction saying,

The crusades have frequently been portrayed as ultimate symbols of of the power of credulity…the blind leading the deluded. What follows argues that in almost all respects this image is false.

Discussion of the crusades is also very often intertwined with skewed perceptions of the broader medieval age. This no doubt leads to consternation for Tyerman and his fellow medieval scholars. Early on he lays the foundation for the existence of medieval rationality and, by extension, the rationality of........

[bagster]

A crusade iz un ugly zing.

UND!

I zink it's about time zat ve had vun!

[ebb tide]

Thanks for posting.

[Bigg Red]

Mark

[Mrs. Don-o]

People forget that it was the Muslims who aggressed against the Christian Middle East --- Christian Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt and the rest --- roaring through with fire and sword to crush the cradles of Christendom for Allah. The Crusades were a counter-conquest: inherently just as defensive as the WWII allies launching the 1944 invasion of Normandy.

[pepsi_junkie]

Since people managed to travel across the known world en mass and without starving, I’d say it is self evident that they were well planned and supplied.

[Flag_This]

"People forget that it was the Muslims who aggressed against the Christian Middle East..."

They conquered Spain and Sicily, attacked Rome and took slaves throughout the Mediterranean. There are some who say the Dark Ages really began with Muslim pirates destroying trade in the Mediterranean.