The Crusades were mostly a defensive war that Europe lost, the west carries around deep guilt over this for some reason. The only effective agent in history against the invaders was Genghis Khan, the most Charles Martel accomplished was to turn them back.
“Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Tibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.” G.K. Chesterton In The Meaning of the Crusade, 1920
“Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.” Dr. Thomas Madden
“The first point to be made in defense of the Crusades is that they were initially a response to Islamic aggression. Islam, from its inception, had espoused the use of force. Where Jesus had died for his beliefs, the Prophet Mohammed had wielded a sword. Though Christianity was later to be exploited for political ends, the Christian religion as such had, in the first three centuries of its existence, spread peacefully--thriving, in fact, on the blood of its martyrs. I say this not to score a point in favour of Christianity but to emphasize an historical truth: The spread of Islam from the Arabian peninsula to south-western France in the eighth century; and to the gates of Vienna in the seventeenth, came as a result of conquest by Islamic armies.” Piers Paul Read
[Dr. Paul Halsall to CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann]” I think there is just as much bad information, for instance, in Christiane's [Amanpour] report or in your previous segment, than is in the film. For instance, the idea that the Muslim world has this memory of the Crusades is very largely incorrect. It is a recovered memory. The idea that Jerusalem is Islam's third holiest place, Islam has many third holiest places. The idea that the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 was particularly horrific. All of these things are truisms repeated repeatedly on television, but they are not in fact correct.” Dr. Paul Halsall
“The story we tell about the crusades is that of ambitious nobles and merchants; intolerant Christians who kill innocent Jews, peaceful Arabs, and non-conventional Christians [heretics]; and scheming popes. Most of these villains are half competent fools and knaves who enrich themselves through taxes and trade, excusing their excesses through pious hypocrisy. In these stores the Turks are somehow forgotten, as though they were not a dangerous enemy at that time, or are confused with Arabs, while the Armenians, Byzantines, and other near-Eastern Christians are ignored for lack of time and space to discuss them. What is emphasized most strongly is the moral superiority of "natives," non-Christians, and non-traditional Christians. Secondly, the victimization of culturally superior Moslems by ethnocentric Westerners whose crudeness is equalled only by their love of violence and cunning. Lastly, any questioning of this thesis is dismissed as racism. In short, an aging collection of anti-colonial sentiments has merged with mild political correctness (opposition to violence, scepticism toward Western religious traditions and practices, concern for social issues reflecting race, gender, class, and ethnicity) to dominate current historiography of the Crusades.” Dr. William Urban
“If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldn't they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades. During the peak of European colonialism, historians began extolling the medieval crusades as Europe's first colonial venture. By the 20th century, when imperialism was discredited, so too were the crusades. They haven't been the same since. In other words, Muslims in the Middle East — including bin Laden and his creatures — know as little about the real crusades as Americans do. Both view them in the context of the modern, rather than the medieval world. The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.” Dr. Thomas Madden
“As Vincent Carroll so eloquently explains, only a historical ignoramus--or, I would add at the risk of redundancy, a tendentious PBS editor --could produce the claptrap statement that the Crusades marked the first time Islam and the West met on the battlefield. Islam began with one man in Mecca and, within less than two centuries, encompassed territory from the Iberian Peninsula to the Hindu Kush. This expansion did not happen peacefully. The Arab Muslim armies attacked and conquered Byzantine Christian territories in Syria and Egypt and, a bit later, Arab-Berber Muslim forces conquered the formerly Roman, but still Christian, cities and towns across North Africa and into what is now Spain and Portugal, ruling there for seven centuries. Muslim armies invaded the Frankish Kingdom, later to become France, in 732 and were defeated by Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles Martel. Over the next three centuries the Sunni Muslim Seljuq Turks further dissected the Byzantine Empire, beginning a process that would be completed by their cousins the Ottomans, who conquered Constantinople in 1453 and ruled south-eastern Europe for centuries. So the Crusades, far from being the first time Muslims and Christians fought, were actually merely the first time that Christians, after four centuries of defeats, really fought back. “ Dr. Timothy Furnish |
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