[Claud]

Deus Vult PING!

[SkyPilot]

Yet another movie I won't see, nor rent.

And Hollywood wonders why box office recipts are down.

[mainepatsfan]

I saw it. Not only was it bad history but it was also a bad movie. Orlando Bloom plays a good elf but not a sword swinging warrior.

[montag813]

Why bother to even comment on a movie no one will see.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Production Cost: $115 million
Revenues after 8 days: $200.5 million

Kingdom of Heaven
Production Cost: $130 million
Revenues after 22 days: $41 million

With estimates of no more than $50 million total. KoH is one of the biggest box-office bombs in Hollywood history.

[LS]

There is quite a bit more to it than that. Urban preached the crusades, in part, because he thought Europe was overpopulated and needed to ship people out. Also, having had two failed attempts to control violence among knights in the "off season" (i.e., when there was no war) the Church, through the "Truce of God" (900s) and "Peace of God" (1000) sought to exert control over what was the equivalent of Medieval gunfights. Neither worked, and Urban saw an opportunity to send the more antisocial of western Europe to the Holy Land. If they were successful, terrific. If not, he had thinned out the population of knights.

A good source on all of this is anything by the historian Lynn White.

[The Duke]

I was eager to see this movie (and take the family) until I heard these things. I've had no trouble keeping my money in my pocket.

[chaosagent]

bookmark

[Truthsayer20]

"...and in the case of the Crusades to lend assistance to fellow Christians in the East who found themselves under a similar threat..."

It seems Mr. Woods is also quilty of historical revisionism despite getting many of the facts correct. Western Christians stabbed the Byzantium in the back during the Crusades, for example, with the ransacking of Constantinople from which the city never really recovered.

[Katya]

"None of this is an attempt to whitewash the truly despicable and inexcusable aspects of the Crusades. There were plenty of atrocities on all sides, though that is a wartime phenomenon that is not exactly unknown to the modern world."

There is NOTHING to whitewash. Our modern definition of "what" an atrocity is would clearly be different one thousand years ago. Sorry, burning people alive, ripping their limbs from their bodies was the normal course of punishment. These would not have been considered atrocities.

[SeaBiscuit]

Interesting, as my wife and I were just discussing this as to how so many people don't have a true picture of the Crusades. True to form, leftist Hollywood 'crucifies' the truth. It was the other way around.

[Paul Ross]

Great review. Good Post.

[Sprite518]

The left loves to reinvent history. I guess so it will help their agenda. The latest I head from the leftist is that Leonardo da Vinci was a homosexual. Of course I asked them to back it up, and they could not.