What was the “political reasoning” for the Christian countries going into the muslim countries during the crusades?
The Middleeast was doing very well at that point when it came to many things, and Europe was not.
Well, getting a bunch of trained warriors out of the country to spend their energy and violent inclinations elsewhere seems to be one good political reason.
Getting back the holy land.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos appealed to the Pope and Western Christendom in general to send knights and volunteers to help reverse the success of Seljuk expansion in Anatolia. It snowballed into an effort to reconquer all of the lost Eastern Roman Empire for Jeebus as princes, lords and bishops realised how easily they could raise massive armies without having to properly pay for them by promising them both spiritual salvation and the spoils of conquest overseas.
Why doesn’t the US start a Crusade? It would be a nice way to go down in flames, and think of the advertising revenue.
Have you watched the news lately Crazycoot?
(Hint: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya)
Yes, but Obama clothed in white armor with a fiery cross on his chest while riding atop a tank adorned with eagles impaling Mohammed with his talons would make things more stylish.
i watched the old robin hood (with Errol Flynn) recently, and at the begining, it had a document that was trying to justify the christian crusades…
it called the muslims infidels. i just thought that was ironic.
““In the year of Our Lord 1191, when Richard, the Lion-Heart, set forth to drive the infidels from the Holy Land, he gave the Regency of his Kingdom to his trusted friend, Longchamp, instead of to his treacherous brother, Prince John. Bitterly resentful, John hoped for some disaster to befall Richard so that he, with the help of the Norman barons, might seize the throne for himself. And then on a luckless day for the Saxons…””
And a little bit more honest too. Although the true intentions of the crusade were not just religion.
The first crusade, if I remember rightly, was fought to secure pilgrimage rights for Christians to the Holy Land.
That’s not wikipedia says:
“In March 1095 at the Council of Piacenza, ambassadors sent by Byzantine Emperor Alexius I called for help with defending his empire against the Seljuk Turks. Later that year, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called upon all Christians to join a war against the Turks, promising those who died in the endeavor would receive immediate remission of their sins.”
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/cru2.htm
More details can be found at the above. What you quote in above is clearly true although pilgrimage played a large part.
While we are on the subject, I just wanted to say that “Kingdom of Heaven” is one my all time favorite films. And that’s despite the fact that I’m an atheist. The movie was just so beautifully done. The story, the dialouge, the scenery, it was all incredible. Ridley Scott really is the master of these eic type movies.
Hmm, that’s a questionable statement. Jerusalem was captured from the Romans by forces of the undivided Arab Caliphate in 638. It was Muslim for over four centuries before it was captured, in 1073, from the Egyptian Fatamid Caliphate by the Turkish Seljuk Empire.
The Seljuks were expanding against both the Orthodox Christian Byzantines and the Arab Fatamids. This is what truly precipitated the First Crusade in political terms.
No doubt many Franks believed that they were liberating the Christian Holy Land from intolerant Islamic oppressors, but it’s simply not true that Jerusalem was only very recently captured by “Muslims”. Maybe many people in Western Europe believed it at the time, but it wasn’t true.
The Fatamid Caliphate had a love-hate relationship with Christians in Jerusalem, as was typical with religious minority groups at the time. The Caliph Al-Hakim had reactively ordered the destruction of all Christian churches in Palestine in 1009, though they - including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - were restored under his successor Ali az-Zahir in 1030, by treaty with Byzantine Emperor Romanos III.
The First Crusade did not come a few years after the Holy Land was lost to Muslims, nor did it coincide with any particularly outrageous persecution of the Christian population or pilgrims. It coincided with a change in the balance of power in the region - the rise of the Seljuk Empire against a decaying Byzantine Empire and Fatamid Caliphate.
Another important factor was the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Orthodox Catholic Churches under the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope respectively, which had finally come to a head in 1054 after centuries of tension between the Eastern Roman Emperor and the Bishop of Rome. The Pope saw immense opportunity for reestablishing Rome’s curial prominence over the Eastern Churches at a moment when the Byzantine Emperor’s power in the Christian Holy Land was waning fast.
Finally, both the Pope and the Byzantine Emperor had strong motivations to find something to occupy the blood-thirsty Norman and Frankish knights who had become a serious threat to imperial/curial influence in areas under their control. Southern Italy in particular, which was an area of disputed control between Pope and Emperor in any case, had very recently been conquered (“liberated” from Saracen control) by a pack of bloodthirsty Norman knights, placing severe pressure on the Papal States’ southern border as well as Byzantine influence in the West.
Lies.
Listen, between 1050 to 1080, Selijuk Turks were murdering Syrian Christians ruthlessly. These were the oldest Christians in the world, supposedly tracing origins down to the original community of Christ himself. Between 1050 to 1070, Western Europeans chose to ignore these killings in the other part of the world, where men, women, children, and elderly were all stripped naked, tied to chains, marched across deserts, and sold as slaves after all their property was stolen and looted.
Eventually, they said enough was enough, and English, Frankish, and Greek soldiers went in to save whatever little was left of the oldest Christian community in the world.
Remember, they didn’t just free Christians. Selijuk Turks were barbarians who happened to be Muslims and wouldn’t blink in murdering another Muslim. The truth is that many Muslims gladly lived in the French-speaking Crusader regions of what is now northern Syria. They were better protected, better taken care of, and less likely to be oppressed by nomadic warlords. Even those Muslims in Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus were glad enough to live in stability rather than endless civil war.
Read ARAB HISTORIANS OF THE CRUSADES and AN ARAB-SYRIAN GENTLEMAN. Both these first-hand historical sources show Arab, Turkish, Syrian, and general Muslim admiration for Christians and living in Christian regions.
That is an, unfortunately widespread, myth. The high middle ages were an era of economic and cultural burgeoning for the west.
"While we are on the subject, I just wanted to say that “Kingdom of Heaven” is one my all time favorite films. And that’s despite the fact that I’m an atheist. The movie was just so beautifully done. The story, the dialouge, the scenery, it was all incredible. Ridley Scott really is the master of these eic type movies. "
An atheist friend of mine, who is a scholar of the era, despises that film for its inaccuracies and Hollywood archetypes. I don’t know much about the subject but he rails against it often. The same with The da Vinci Code, Agora, etc.
The middle east was still flourishing between 8th and 13th centuries regaurdless, that was the Islamic golden age. It would’ve been a good time to ransack the place.
Not to sound racist as hell, but Prateek is right there. The Turks were more insane then they were Muslim. I remember reading something about one of their Capital punishment methods, tying you to two palm trees tied close together, then cutting the rope to let it rip you apart. Yuk.
While as a rule I don’t trust the History Channel, they claim that part of the motivation for the Crusades was to divert the attention of the various warring kings/noblemen/knights of Europe away from infighting among Christians and towards some outside force, like the Muslims.