The Crusades: Have We Forgotten Why?

[Cleisthenes]

I have heard some very ignorant things being said on the main forum in the Gunpowder thread by those disparaging the Crusades. Have we forgotten the aggressive early expansion of Islam and its intolerance toward other religions? Do we actually now think that the Muslims were doing nothing to provoke an armed invasion? Have we become so ignorant of history and dependent on modern pundits and politicians to tell us what to think?

I am asking that those who posted that the Muslims were the good guys in the history of the Crusades to defend that position in light of the violent expansion of Islam by the sword in the 400 years leading upto the First Crusade. Please do your research and do not post until you have fully understood the circumstances leading up to the First Crusade:

• The complete destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest of Christian sites, in 1009 by the Fatimids.
• The further intolerance toward Christians that was encoded in the Pact of Umar that has remained a source for Islamic law toward non-Muslims.
• The payment of a tax levied especially against non-Muslims, the jizya, which was larger than the zakat, the charity tax paid by Muslims. If the tax could not be paid by a Christian family, the selling of a child into slavery would be ordered.
• The Battle of Manzikert in which the Byzantine defenders lost much of their army and appealed to the Western Pope for aid against Muslim Turk incursions.
• The 400-year history of military expansion that had engulfed many previously Christian countries and subjected the Christians therein to fines and humiliations (See Pact of Umar before arguing Islam was tolerant of others)
• A history of mass-killings of Christians in Muslim-conquered lands, including the massacre of the entire population of Carthage when Muslims first seized North Africa and other prosperous Christian towns in Egypt.

These things were well-known to Christians of that day, although we now seem to forget why Islam spread so quickly. Can you honestly say these things are not grounds for retaliation? Granted, the Crusades were a clumsy instrument of retaliation, but up until the Crusades the Muslims had the initiative and seemed impossible to stop. They had already invaded France once and were just barely beaten back, and were clearly not intending to leave Western Europe unconquered once they had gotten finished dissecting the Byzantine Empire. The Crusades made them get a taste of the conquest that they had been dealing out to others for 400 years.

BTW... Why is there such hatred for the Crusades when the Mongols brought unquestionably more destruction and death to the Muslim territories? The Crusades were insignificant compared the the damage wrought by Hugulu Khan and the sack of Baghdad and the complete slaughter of many eastern cities that made the massacre of Muslims at Jerusalem in the First Crusade (and the earlier massacre of Christians at Carthage) look like the work of rank amateurs. Why is there no mention of that rampage alongside all the hostility for the Crusades? Doesn't it make you wonder a little bit why there is such emphasis on the Crusades?

Please, no dumb responses that spew obvious falsehoods such as the Muslims were more tolerant. I'm sure the Christian crusaders knew what had happened to Carthage centuries earlier, and what had happened at Ani just recently, when they were massacring the population of Jerusalem.

For the record, I'm an atheist and do not believe in the Christian god... but I'm not blind to historical facts, either. Christian Europe was not wrong in launching the Crusades, and given the momentum of Islam up till then, if they hadn't hit back, it would have continued spreading rapidly by force.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Now that you mention it the muslim armies invaded Romania just for the hell of it and they kept up a constant war trying to invade India for many years. So I guess every type of race or creed of human is guilty of horrible acts. But what can you do? Mean people suck and nice people swallow.

 

[Cleisthenes]

You are so correct about India. I hadn't even thought to mention the vast genocides of Hindus there, because my focus had been on the relationship of Islam to the West rather than to Central Asia.

I apologize for my tunnel-vision.

 

[Temujin]

IIRC Byzantium asked the pope for about 500 men to help protect the city, The pope saw this as a chance to have a grand pappal army and called for the Crusades in hope of the crusaders swearing loayalty and giving conquered lands to him.

the reasons for the crusades where more political then Religious really.

also let's not forget that the first victims of the crusaders where Jews and eastern europeans. As most christians interpreted the Popes words as: "if you kill a non christian you go to heaven" and since in Christianity the Jews are the murderers of Christ manny decided that it was easier to kill Jews to go to heaven instead of going all the way to Jerusalem.

 

[compfreak]

^^ Come on, this is a thread about the motivations of war. Don't be immature.
I have't researched the Crusades yet, so I have nothing to say except the above.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Whole mobs of crusaders were more interested in loot or personal gain than any religious ideal I think. It seems like most wars are about land and money and the religion is used as a morale booster.

 

[Cleisthenes]

First of all, what wealth were the crusaders taking in the Near East that hadn't belonged to Christians shortly before? In fact, the larger share of the revenues of the Islamic caliphs were collected from Christians paying the jizya, a tax levied against non-believers. Yes, most of the region was still Christian, and was paying taxes to a small upperclass of Muslims. Edessa overthrew its Muslim governor when a small band under Baldwin was reported to be approaching it. You sound as though the Muslims had a greater claim to that land and its wealth than the tenuous rights of a recent conqueror would support.

But actually, the crusades were a tremendously expensive enterprise to undertake, and the need for money instead of feudal service led to the erosion of the feudal system of crop- and service-based payments from tenant farmers in favor of money taxes, and to the granting of charters to towns and cities that put them outside the law of local nobles in exchange for a money payment. Raymond of Toulouse actually sold away all his lands in order to lead the First Crusade. The evidence is that many other noble families impoverished themselves in financing what they considered a chance at everlasting reward in the afterlife.

You see, the crusader armies where not a bunch of primitives who could live off the land, but rather they had extensive supply routes and huge support costs. Men, however zealous, still need armor and weapons, and their horses still require feed. Faith does not feed bellies, and the nobles had to see to that point at great expense. Those that actually profited from the crusades were the Venetian traders who first transported and supplied the armies, and then set up a lucrative trade with the cities taken by the crusaders and made great riches on trade from the Near East. It need not be pointed out that the Venetians themselves did not have many of their own nobles leading crusades...

We moderns are tired of the Christian faith, so we strike a world-weary pose and pretend that our ancestors had the same position. The historical evidence is much difference, and at several points when the Crusaders were exhausted, the bishop accompanying them "found" miraculous relics that foretold the triumph of their armies. You know what? It reversed the morale of the army in each case. You and I know that the bishop planted those relics, but the common soldiers back then didn't. They believed. Most Christians back then really did believe and made great sacrifices in wealth in order to go on a Crusade. Don't transfer your own opinion on religion to people living long ago in a culture that was much different.

So anyway, it is as ridiculous to say that the Christians reconquered the Near East for material gain as to posit that the initial Islamic conquest of those regions was also for material gain. Neither were. Quit thinking like a post-Christian westerner if you truly wish to understand the circumstances of the crusades properly, or even the Jihad that preceded them.

 

[Sir Prince]

Jerusulim (or however you spell it) was taken by the Christians from the muslims, who then promptly slaughtered many of the citizens, mostly non-christians but some christians were killed as well. When Saladin re-captured the city 80-100 years later he spared everyone and gave the soldiers passage to the coast to go home. Of course, in 80 years things changed quite a bit. Mostly with the muslims more than the crusaders.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Every war is very expensive, and of course many true believers were behind the cause of claiming Jerusalem for Christianity but what I said wasn't all wrong either because landless knights and mercenaries would jump at a chance like that to make a name for themselves. I shouldn't have said that people don't fight wars for religion though and I'm sorry about that because they did. And probably will for as long as people are on Earth.

 

[Cleisthenes]

Jerusulim (or however you spell it) was taken by the Christians from the muslims, who then promptly slaughtered many of the citizens, mostly non-christians but some christians were killed as well. When Saladin re-captured the city 80-100 years later he spared everyone and gave the soldiers passage to the coast to go home. Of course, in 80 years things changed quite a bit. Mostly with the muslims more than the crusaders.

Saladin may have spared Jerusalem, but the citizens of Ani in Armenia were not spared by the Muslim Seljuks when that city was conquered shortly before the battle of Manzikert in 1071, and neither were the Christian inhabitants of Carthage and wealthy Egyptian cities including Fayum, Behnesa, and Nikui when they were first conquered by Muslims: the massacre was utter in each of them. In Tripoli, mass enslavement substituted for murder when the Muslims seized it.

Do you think the Christians in the Crusades were not aware that Muslims had been slaughtering whole cities for centuries, when the Crusaders breached the walls at Jerusalem? Did you know that many of the Christians in Jerusalem itself had been put to the sword when the Seljuks seized it from the Fatimids a decade earlier. (The Seljuks as new converts to Islam were anxious to prove that they were better Muslims, whereas the Fatimids knew that the Christians paid very rich taxes if they were left alive and only moderately harassed. Thus the Fatimids were content to only destroy the churches and to leave the actual Christians themselves alive to keep paying the jizya tax. No such luck when the Turks entered the city. Apologies to Armagan--I am speaking of the historical Turks, not modern ones, who are quite secular... although the new Islamic party in power is a bit worrying.)

The Christians had many precedents to go by when they conquered Jerusalem, all those examples given to them by Muslim conquerors in the preceding 400 years and many were quite recent.

 

[Sir Prince]

Well, actualy, everyone committed massacres, romans and their enemies, muslims (wich is a pretty big and diverse group like all religions really). I guess I'm pointing out that no one and everyone is to blame, hence there is no reason to argue as their is nothing and everything to argue about. Er, I'll just stop arguing now.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Did you know that Richard the lionheart only spoke french?

 

[Cleisthenes]

Well, actualy, everyone committed massacres, romans and their enemies, muslims (wich is a pretty big and diverse group like all religions really). I guess I'm pointing out that no one and everyone is to blame, hence there is no reason to argue as their is nothing and everything to argue about. Er, I'll just stop arguing now.

Yes, I agree. But pointing out the massacre at Jerusalem commited by the Crusaders without mentioning the earlier massacres committed by Muslims against Christian cities in the centuries leading up to the first crusade is a bit of a imbalanced version of events that does not inform people of the context in which the Crusaders were acting at the time. To them, it was an eye for an eye. Perhaps that is not the way the world should work, but it often does work that way regardless.

Gandhi famously said that the policy of an eye for an eye would simply leave the whole world blind. But I am inclined to think that without a policy of an eye for an eye, the whole world would be blind except for one ******* with a big grin on his face and lot of eyeball fluid dripping from his index finger. When people strike you, strike back to show them to keep away. The Crusades came at the end of 400 years of Muslim military expansion.

You are also right to point out that Muslims were not a homogeneous mass but were constantly fighting amongst themselves as well. Half the success of the Crusades lay initially with the recent wars between the Seljuks and Fatimids in which the Muslims had exhausted themselves by fighting each other. Also, there were the frequent rebellions of Sunni Muslims to be put down by the Fatimid Caliphate which was Shia. Yes, there were many internal divisions and infighting among the Muslims and that deserves as much of the credit as the armies of Crusaders themselves. Thanks for bringing that point up. However, whether it is the Seljuks or Fatimids or Ummayyads or the Abbassids, two things bind these diverse nations together: all these empires were Islamic, and each of these extended the territories under Islamic control and persecuted non-Muslims. To a Crusader who could not pull up a wikipedia entry on each of these in a moment, all these empires would have seemed suspiciously similar in nature.

 

[Cleisthenes]

Did you know that Richard the lionheart only spoke french?

Yeah. And rarely stepped foot in England. He nevertheless wins the comparison to John Lackland, his idiot brother, who ended up spending too much time in England, if only because he managed to lose all of the continental holdings during his reign.

 

[Sir Saladin]

HA HA, charade I am.

 

[Moose]

"Have we forgotten the aggressive early expansion of Islam and its intolerance toward other religions?"

Sorry don't know how to use the qoute function (new to forums). But seriously I get your point however there is no "good" side in this argument, the Muslims were intolerent to other religions, but so were the christians. The horrors, depreviteis committed against the so called "pagan" religions was horrific in it's subtlety and thouroghness. Have you read Dan Brown's the Divinci code? All the back ground information in it is accurate and well researched and only the main storyline is fictous. The point is that Christianity makes any other religion look like sweet innocence, not in it's violence (of which there is plenty) but in it's subtle destruction of other religions and cultures. And theres evidence aplenty of this assimilation from the dates of "christian" holidays such as christmas and in the subtle symbology like Satans pitch fork.

In short there is no right and just side to this argument. And we must always keep in mind that history is always writen by the vicor and to never trust everything you read (i.e Jesus's real name Is actually Yeshua bin Miriam wich was then turned into Joshua and then "greekenised" to Jesus).

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

I want the names of the people who started this influx of religious frea...... members, and their worst fears. They will also need to free up their calendars from monday until the forseeable future.

 

[Temujin]

It's an interesting topic.

who knows, maybe we can all learn something from eachother.

fear of a fiesty argument should not prevent interesting topics to be discussed. form time to time

 

[Cleisthenes]

Pharaoh, some people say that Atheism is just another religion filled with people desiring to convert others to their viewpoint at any cost. If that is the case, then I am so far from being a religious freak, that I would even be considered a heathen by my fellow atheists since I have never tried to convince anyone that their faith is baseless and destroy something that they may need on a level that I simply cannot appreciate.

However, there are good ways to demonstrate this need for faith and bad ways to demonstrate it. To say that Christianity has always demonstrated its faith the wrong way and Muslims demonstrated theirs the right way ignores facts that are blatantly obvious to anyone who does a casual inspection of the historical fact. The Muslims were responsible for many acts of intolerance during the militaristic spread of early Islam, including mass-killings in non-Muslim cities centuries before the first massacre in the name of Christianity, which would be the Saxon conversion by Charlemagne in 800 unless you know of an earlier event. The Christian religion deserves no special amount of scorn in this regard, and the Muslim religion has earned no special amount of praise for its own often-bloody actions.

As for suggesting that discussion of the relations between Islam and the West is solely the domain of religious freaks, consider that debate among the two cultures will never progress so long as the freaks are controlling the debate without the guidance of those willing to be more rational. The first step in starting a more rational debate is making BOTH sides aware of the shameful actions of their religions, so that neither hides from a serious self-assessment by assuming a fake victim status. Indeed, it seems the Christians are already well-aware of their intolerance since it has been mentioned to them so often by others--it remains to put the actions of the armies of early Islam up to the light of rational censure and make the Muslims as ashamed of these actions as most Christians are of the Inquisitions.

 

[Gabriel]

@Cleisthenes:
Some points I’d like to make regarding your first post:

1. You repeat that “Islam did this, Islam is that”…you’re sounding like Islam is a person or something….its not, it’s a religion, or rather a way of life. You can’t blame a whole religion based on the acts of its followers or people who claim to be its followers. Islam didn’t do anything. Muslims did.

2. Regarding your statement on the ‘jizyah’ – Yes, it was used but this was only an innovation – nowhere in the Qur’an does it state that there is some special jizyah. Even IF it did state that jizyah must be imposed on non-muslims, it is even less than the tax payed by muslims to the state for the benefit of the poor, which is around 2.5%. Therefore non-muslims were better off than muslims as they had to pay less tax! The name ‘jizyah’ is only used for non-muslims because of course they can’t use the word ‘zakat’ which is alms-giving/charity paid to the poor by muslims. The Qur’an never permitts discrimination of Jews and Christians; rather, it states that they should be respected as they are the ‘People of the Book’ and so have a special bond with Muslims as fellow believers.

3. The first three caliphs after the Prophet Muhammed were never supposed to be his successors. Before his death he wanted to write his will (as is a duty of a muslim before their death) so that he may decide who will succeed him. This was supposed to start with his cousin Ali and follow with a further line of his descendants in the family who were supposed to be divinely guided. However, some surprisingly opposed this and wanted to reign as caliphs.

4. After the death of the fourth caliph, the Ummayad ruler Muawiyah came to the caliphate by force and the Ummayad Dynasty was formed, paving way for the further forced expansion of arab territory.

5. The Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Turks, etc etc. were all violent rulers that had no legitimate justification for their actions anyway. For example one of the rulers, Muawiyah, came to the caliphate by force, not election, and maintained his position through his ties with the Arab army in Syria. So close were the ties between the Umayyads and the Arab military class that almost nine decades of Umayyad rule has been called the period of the Arab Kingdom. Arabism came to rival, if not dominate Islam as the organizing principle of the state. This trend troubled traditional Muslims and the growing population of non-Arab Muslims. It’s sad that the true face of Islam was so quickly tarnished after Muhammed’s death.

As SirSaladin said above:

Whole mobs of crusaders were more interested in loot or personal gain than any religious ideal I think. It seems like most wars are about land and money and the religion is used as a morale booster.

This was also the case for the so called ‘muslim’ armies. The rulers were not interested in adhering to their religion and simply used as a tool to bring themselves more power and lived very lavish lives. Sadly, most muslims were stupid enough to play along and saw the whole conquest as a ‘hooah we’re God’s army against evil.

Overall, I don’t think anybody would say the muslims were any better than the Christian in the Crusades regarding morality, if not worse. I think the only reason why some regard the muslims in the Crusades as ‘the better side’ is because of Saladin’s character in battle and when treating prisoners of war. To be quite frank, Saladin was the least oppressive of the Arab conquerors. There is no right or wrong side to the conflict of the Crusades.