There has been a series of Christian bashing letters to the editor in the local paper culminating today with a letter saying Christians aren’t all nice people and are hypocrites because of the Crusades and the Inquisition. This made me furious. If you’re going to insult me at least be creative. I mean the crusades and the inquisition? Every one brings those up. Its like there is a hand book some where that says “Rule 1. Always bring up the crusades and inquisition when a Christian tries to say that Christianity is about love and forgiveness and trying to be basically nice to the other guy.” The fact that you shouldn’t extrapolate actions of a large group of people from evens that happened a few hundred years ago aside, hearing people bring these things up over and over again is just so boring. So to help I’m going to include a list of items you can use to make gross generalizations with besides the crusades and the inquisition.
Those nuts who put up wanted of abortion doctors on their websites.
Those shameful examples of humanity that actually shoot the abortion doctors.
The pedophilia cover up in the Catholic Church
Hopefully this list will help all those who enjoy making generalizations about an immense group of people from events that involve very few of them vary their routine some. Also a small bit of advice. If your going to offend someone at least entertain them at the same time and you will be much more successful. Just look at Jerry Springier.
Y’see that’s why I don’t like football(soccer to you); all the supporters are mindless violent hooligans, every single one.
Oh and I got a ball kicked in my face thirty years ago, I mean if I got a ball kicked in my face by a football player thirty years ago then I expect they are all at it now.
Oh, Ireland. Hand grenades being thrown at school girls. . . . . (right before September 11th too, anybody else remember that story? No? Didn’t think so. . . .)
Then there is the whole entire Serbs VS Croats thing, Christians on both sides. . . . Lovely shit going on there Bleh.
Then there is also the Christian Suicide Club of The Month . . . .(always good for a few laughs on Letterman/Leno)
The crusades charge really gets me. Certainly atrocities occurred by European christians, (particularly against jews and christians), but the primary purpose was to rescue Christians from death and persecution and restore access to holy sites that were put in peril by the islamic conquerors. A few unsanctioned incidents should not be charged to Christianity as a whole.
Uh, last I checked, on at least ONE of those Crusades, the x-stians being ‘saved’ where NICE HAPPY CIVILIANS who where enjoying MORE rights and freedoms then they would have under most western European countries.
The Crusaders (after having proceeded to slaughter the x-stians friends and neighbors) found out that the x-stians did NOT want to go hope, they promptly KILLED the people who they where purportedly there to ‘save’.
And…certainly the major purpose (stated, we’ll leave plunder out of it for the moment) of the Crusades was to return holy sites to Christian control. But on what do you base the statement that said sites were put “in peril” by the Muslim who lived there?
As far as I know, they were in no peril and Christians still had access to them. Cite?
I agree, Christianity, as a philosophy, as a faith, should not be blamed for the Crusades or for any other stupidity performed by any particular Christian or any part of a Christain culture. (To address the OP, I think the only time this sort of argument is valid is against people who claim Chritianty is some how inherently good and moral and professing Christianity makes you automatically more moral than the heathens who don’t. This idea does crop up.)
That said, on what do you base the statment that the …ahem…excesses were in fact not sactioned by the church/govenments that sent them there? Just wondering.
There was in fact some genuine concern about access and the safety of pilgrims in Europe at the time. However this has to do with a combination of factors, slow communications and very imperfect understanding of contemporary situations being the chief one.
One can generally say that from the period of the Muslim seizure of Jerusalme in the 630’s through the early 10th century the access of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land was generally open ( leaving room for anomalies and the occasional bigoted harassment ). However concommitant with the winding down and fracture of the Pax Islamica in the 10th century there was also an increase in anti-Christian intolerance ( this was a little less severe with the Jewish and Zoroastrian comunities which were smaller and were not represented by hostile independant nations outside the Dar al-Islam ). In particular the sixth Fatimd Caliph ( or anti-Caliph if you prefer, as he sat as the Is’maili Shi’ite opposite to the Sunni Abbasid Caliph, who were rather curiously puppets under the control of the Imami Shi’ite Buyids at this time ), al-Haqim, a raving and intolerant eccentric ( if not an out and out loon ) launched a series of anti-Christian pogroms early in the 11th century in both Egypt and Syria/Palestine ( then under Fatimid control ), including the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre. Stories of this were widely disseminated in Europe and caused some alarm. Muslim as well as Christian visitors to the Holy Land in the early 11th made particular note of sectarian tension in the area.
However this appears to have wound down by the middle of the century, with visitors noting a more relaxed atmosphere of tolerance and general prosperity. However from the 1050’s on the Levant was roiled up by the eruption of the Seljuq Turks into the region. Burning with the fervor of the recently converted and considering themselves the defenders of strict Sunni orthodoxy, they first ousted and replaced the Shi’ite Buyids as masters of the Abbasid Caliphate and the preceded to shatter the weakened Byzantine ( the famous battle of Manzikert in 1071 and its aftermath ) and Fatimid frontiers. Syria/Palestine became a battleground between the Fatimids and Seljuqs and suffered heavily as a result, with a great deal of disruption ( including to pilgrimages ).
In the 1090’s, right before the Crusades, things got even worse. The death in the early 1090’s of the last effective Fatimid Caliph and the last Seljuq Sultan to hold unified power, led to wholesale anarchy and chaos. Particularly in the region that had been the centerpiece of their struggle - Syria/Palestine, which was soon divided into a variety of petty principalities and city-states under a hodgepodge of Seljuq princes and Fatimid ‘governors’. The level of disruption in the Muslim world at this particular point was profound and nowhere more so than in the Holy Land. In fact just as Muhammed’s immediate successors were phenomenally lucky to have erupted out of Arabia at a point when the Byzantine and Sassanian states were at a low ebb, so the Crusaders were exceptionally lucky to have set out when they did. Ten years earlier and they would have run smack into the enormously powerful Seljuq Sultan Malikshah and almost certainly have been crushed before they got out of Anatolia.
At any rate, what I’m getting around to with all this background is there was some blocking and harassment of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land in the years immediately preceding the First Crusade. However it does not seem to have been either directed or universal. Quite possibly not even very common. Visitors to Jerusalem in the 1090’s commented on the thriving Christian community with its well-appointed churches. There was certainly no threat of destruction at the hand of whatever Muslim magnates happened to be on hand, nor any threat of forbidding Christian pilgrims as a matter of policy ( the only time I’m aware of that happening during the history of Muslim rule in Jerusalem was 1948-1967, with the banning of Israeli Jews by Jordan ).
However the Europeans at the time didn’t have a very good handle on what was going on from decade to decade over there ( or even century to century ), let alone year to year. What they heard was oft-repeated tales about depredations of rulers like al-Haqim and tales from individual returned pilgrims of being turned back at Lebanese ports. So there was real concern, though one rooted at least partially in ignorance ( not stupidity, just lack of knowledge ).
The Pope had at least three motives for calling for the Crusades:
1.) Concern over pilgrims.
2.) A desire to bring the Orthodox church back in the fold by bringing aid to the threatened Byzantine Emperor. The brilliant young Alexius I Comnenus, severely threatened by the Turks ( both Muslim Seljugs and pagan Patzinaks/Pechenegs on the Russian steppe ) and holding only a ramshackle shell of the old Byzantine state, had made a desperate plea for help years earlier, offering that possibility out as incentive. However by the time the Crusades actually roled around, he had beat back his enemies, stabilized his state and was actually rather negative about the this dubiously “allied” Latin army arriving on his doorstep asking for transport, with a goal of seizing territories he himself claimed.
3.) The conquest of Jerusalem, which seems a little odd in retrospect, but made perfect sense at the time, as it was perceived as the literal center of the world and had enormous evocative value as the seat of Christendom.
My point, is that the threat to Christians pilgrims and the Holy Sites were a little more imagined than real, but they held a grain of truth and it was hard to discern the real situation in those days.
However’s the Pope’s motivations were one thing, the individual Crusader’s was quite another. Some were genuinely just pious ‘soldiers of God’. However a goodly large chunk were younger sons and other ambitious men, who, pious or not, were often most interested in acquiring lands and estates, or even just a bit of glory and plunder. It is pretty impossibly to categorize them as a single group.
And I certainly agree here. It is a common Islamist apologia for example and it is a bit silly.
Well the worst of them, such as rapine and the mass slaughter of non-combatants were generally not socially approved behavior. Certainly there were notions of good Christian conduct imbedded in ideas such as chivalry, that the slaughtering women and children, for instance, was wrong. Not that necessarily ever stopped it from happening. A little more problematic were less “spur-of-the-moment” abuses like the expulsion of Muslim inhabitants from certain regions, some of which was quite systematic, especially in the early days of the Crusader states. But in the morality of the time that fell into a much grayer area. But at any rate it is worth mentioning that there really weren’t any “governments” sending troops, at least at first, let alone the Church. This was the period of high feudalism and there was nobody so exhaulted as a King among the First Crusade. Instead it was an unwieldy ( and sometimes mutually hostile ) conglomeration of independant agents led by a few counts and barons. But I don’t discount some of those nobles ( and later Kings ) being quite bloodthirsty at times - It is a factor of wars, especially religiously motivated ones ( look up ‘Madgeburg Quarter’ under the heading of the Thirty Years War for a good Christian on Christian example ).
There are a ton of good books on the Crusades. The classic detailed narrative history is Runciman’s three-volume work ( it’s pretty decent, especially for detail freaks ). But for a more modern analytical approach on this issue in particular, I’ll plug Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives ( 2000, Routledge ). Very well-done. Even has a lot of nice illustrations for such a scholarly work ;). Don’t buy it if you are looking for a narrative account though - That’s not the focus.
Err…Any of this helpful? Or am I once again being tediously long-winded and pedantic for no good reason :D?
Now, hell, Tamerlane, what kind of a Pit rant is that?
Next time, try “the sixth Fatimid Caliph, that goat-felcher al-Haqim”…“a variety of petty little fucknugget principalities and asswipe city-states”…“run smack into the enormously powerful Seljuq Sultan Malikshah, a real badass mothafucka”.
I mean, c’mon, let’s get with the program here, m’kay?
I’ve also heard suggested the notion that the Pope and other important people were concerned about all the younger sons of the nobility who weren’t going to get any inheritance under the rules of primogeniture, and sending them off to inflict on the infidels was a good way of getting them out of everyone’s hair.
Although I don’t mean to say they were entirely officially sanctioned, the anti-Semitic pogroms which erupted back home in Western Europe in conjunction with some of the crusades may have been easier to sell as being somehow a religious duty than ordinary random rape and pillage would have been.
I do. You on the other hand don’t remember it that well. No grenades were thrown at anyone. A pipe bomb did go of close to the kids but grenades are a wee bit different to a homemade pipe bomb.
The Pit? Damn! I thought it was GQ. Ah, I can never keep these forums straight :D.
Probably. I seem to recall something like that as well. Certainly some dynasts were looking to expand their standing by having family members establish a territorial foothold in the Levant. But I suspect it was secondary reason at best, at least for the Pope.
Oh, definitely. Always easier to slaughter and abuse the enemy if they are some godless “other” and therefore less than fully human. But it doesn’t have appeared to have been universal. One good indicator of that is the seemingly genuine respect in the Christian world expressed towards Saladin, based on the widespread stories of his chivalrous conduct.
Look, there’s plenty people can attack Christianity for, but the fighting in the former Yugoslavia? Get real!!!
Yugoslavia is no more “Christian” a country than any other in Europe. Like most European nations, religion in the Balkans has receded to the point where it’s almost meaningless.
In analyzing the Balkan crisis, P.J. O’Rourke summed up the supposedly religious conflict well: “The Serbs are the ones who never go to Orthodox services. The Croatians are the ones who never go to Mass. And the Moslems are the once who, five times a day, forget to face Mecca and pray.”
I missed this thread earlier, but can you give us a cite for this. I’m surprised that a newspaper would run anti-Christian editorials and risk alienating and upsetting a majority of their readership.
In regard to the OP:
As soon as Christians deny the eternal goodness of their timeless morality, and admit that apologies for atrocities like the Crusades are based upon reasonable humanistic principles, I’ll avoid bashing them on the subject.
Frankly, the treatment of the godless heathens of the New World by the Christian/Spanish conquistadors gets far to little press.