Re: When the Seljuk Turks converted to Islam, the campaign against Byzantium alarmed the Byzantine Emperor and he requested help from Urban II. In 1095 Urban gave his famous speech at Clermont-Ferrand and called Western Christendom to take up arms and liberate the Holy Land. It was not a crusade for forced conversion but a crusade to defend besieged Christianity from centuries of external Moslem aggression and an internal Jewish alliance with the Moslems.
Why don't you tell us about the FOURTH Crusade, in 1204, orchestrated by the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo and blessed by Pope Innocent III? The Crusades were as much a commercial war as they were a spiritual enterprise... Venice (and, later, Genoa) wanted to hold its grip on the trade routes to the Far East. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Western Europeans were compelled to see other routes to (profitably) trade with Central/Eastern Asia --hence the transatlantic journeys and the "discovery" of America.... Besides, did you know that one of the many bones of contention between Venice and the Byzantine Emperor was the former's trade with the Turks (in Alexandria, Syria,...) Egypt and Syria were good customers for Venice because they lacked the wood to build ships --including warships. See, nothing has changed since the 1200s: the Christian Republic of Venice used to sell strategic military supplies to the "Infidels" just as today the US sells AWACS and other military gear to Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc...
Gus |
