History of the Crusades

Charles has collected some good resources about the real history of the Crusades.

I read Professor Thomas F. Madden's essay, The Real History of the Crusades, a few days ago, and it's very good (excerpts below). In addition, the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on the Crusades seems packed with info. I've always been impressed with the Catholic Encyclopedia. I couldn't disagree more strongly with its theology, but generally in factual matters it seems to be top notch.

Conventional wisdom says that the Crusades were wars of imperialism and plunder by medieval Christendom, but in actuality they were largely defensive wars against (what else...) Islam.

While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world.

I've posted about this before, and hey, look at that... I quoted Thomas Madden then too.

What this should teach us is that the current conflict is in no way a new face on Islam. In fact, Islam is in some ways more dangerous than ever, and will become moreso as its followers gain access to weapons of mass destruction. After the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Protestant Reformation, and the ensuing explosion of scientific discovery, exploration, economic growth, and freedom, it seems that Islamic societies were marginalized simply because they couldn't compete anymore. The world had moved on. I think it's telling that the only reason Islam is a danger to us again is because they're starting to gain access to weapons that the west created.

Permalink | 5 Comments | id 4409

23:46 (utc-5)
edited: 2003-11-25 00:36 (utc-5)

 

Four styles of blogging

I'm getting jealous of everybody's link blogs^[1]

As I've been thinking about it, it seems to me that there are about four styles of blogging.

• You have the linkers, the prime example being Erik Thauvin.
• Then, you have the writers, a choice example being Steven Den Beste.
• Then, there are the tweeners, who are really somewhat in between. I'd put blogs like mine, Simon's and Little Green Footballs in this list. You have blogs that are a little bit closer to one side, and some a little bit closer to the other. Sometimes, tweeners just give a link and maybe a quote from whatever we're linking to, but usually we try to say at least a little something about it. Otherwise it doesn't feel worth it.^[2]
• Finally, you have the streamers, the only real example of this I know of is Dave Winer, who uniquely has a constant stream of blogging going on throughout the day. I admire his style, because a lot of times I'd just like to drop little notes or a few quick links that might not be enough content to devote a whole post to, and more importantly usually don't have any more purpose than to say what I was thinking, or post some semi-unrelated links, and this makes it hard to come up with a title and post name in order to blog about it. Dave's style of blog allows for, and encourages, this style of blogging more than, say, mine. To some degree, Adam has a similar style.
• You also have group blogs, like LtU and WHEDONesque, and even Slashdot, which I'm not really considering, since I'm really concerned here with individual blogging habits.

My point in all this is that sometimes, people who generally have one style of blog want to be able to include one of the other styles without disrupting their normal flow. Many bloggers have been integrating linkblogs with their sites lately, Simon being the newest example.

I don't like having the links separate from the main blog, like Mark Pilgrim and Simon do, particularly because it makes it harder to see what's new, and you lose the context of what day something was posted on. I like Leslie's setup, but that works well for him largely because he's a sparse poster and the links will often be the only thing he blogs for the day. If you blog a lot during the day, your link-filled post might get buried under new posts, which makes it less convenient to update the link-post because it won't be obvious that it's been updated.

So, one of the things I'd like to experiment with is having, in addition to my normal blog, a separate section, one per day, that would give me a place to put linker and streamer style stuff without having it get buried under other posts during the day. Something to consider adding to my CMS...

Footnotes:
[1]: I've been wanting to have my own for a while, but I figured I'd finish the next version of my CMS first (first it was just a revision of my PHP CMS, but that failed and now I'm rewriting the whole thing in Python), then I'd finish WeblogNinja along with the backend code (based on the new CMS) that goes with it, and then I'd write a plugin for WeblogNinja to allow me to easily do link-filled posts. Obviously, at this rate I have a long time left before I get there. But I basically refuse to do any more work on my existing PHP codebase.
[2]: If you really want to split it up, you can divide the category into short and long (generally short or generally long posts), dense and sparse (frequent or infrequent posting), as well as self-directed and link-directed (self-directed bloggers blog about what they happen to feel like writing about, while link-directed often see a cool link that they want to highlight or say something about).

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05:22 (utc-5)
edited: 06:08 (utc-5)