Keith Devens .com

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.

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