What was happening at the time to get The Christian Crusaders to take up that war and fight so ferociously?

The following was written in part By Thomas F. Madden

from his paper titled The Real History of the Crusades

As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude

of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors,

and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get

the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked.

When were they? Just how insensitive was President

George W. Bush for using the word "crusade" in his

remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct

impression that they already knew the answers to their

questions, or at least thought they did. What they

really wanted was an expert to say it all back to

them. For example, I was frequently asked to comment

on the fact that the Islamic world has a just

grievance against the West. Doesn't the present

violence, they persisted, have its roots in the

Crusades' brutal and unprovoked attacks against a

sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other

words, aren't the Crusades really to blame?

Many historians had been trying to set the record

straight on the Crusades. They are not revisionists,

like the American historians who manufactured the

Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering

the fruit of several decades of very careful, very

serious scholarship. For them, this is a "teaching

moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while

people are actually listening. It won't last long, so

here goes.

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common.

The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of

holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and

fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to

have been the epitome of self-righteousness and

intolerance, a black stain on the history of the

Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization

in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the

Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the

peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened

Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on

this theme, one need not look far. See, for example,

Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of

the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The

Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible

history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are

still working some of that out. But much can already

be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to

the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a

direct response to Muslim aggression-an attempt to

turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of

Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid

fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While

Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and

grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the

means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim

thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode

of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity-and for

that matter any other non-Muslim religion-has no

abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a

Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional

Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed

and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging

war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity

was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the

faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire

Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was

born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime

target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain

so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out

against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death.

They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and

Egypt-once the most heavily Christian areas in the

world-quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim

armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and

Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks

conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been

Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman

Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine

Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In

desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word

to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid

their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not

the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious

knights but a response to more than four centuries of

conquests in which Muslims had already captured

two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point,

Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend

itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that

defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom

to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of

Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many

thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and

prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to

that question has been badly misunderstood. Many

believe in the wake of the Enlightenment, it was

usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands

and ne'er-do-wells who took advantage of an

opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The

Crusaders' expressed sentiments of piety,

self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to

be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker

designs.

However, scholars have discovered that crusading

knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of

their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly

gave up everything to undertake the holy mission.

Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could

easily impoverish themselves and their families by

joining a Crusade. They did so not because they

expected material wealth (which many of them had

already) but because they hoped to store up treasure

where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were

keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to

undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a

penitential act of charity and love. Europe is

littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting

to these sentiments, charters in which these men still

speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they

were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be

had. But the truth is that the Crusades were

notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich,

but the vast majority returned with nothing.

They were ordered to by the Vatican (which was at that time the only Christian authority apart from a few very small and illegal groups). It was to keep the 'Holy Land' (what is now called Israel or Palestine) out of the hands of the Turkish Empire, who were Muslim.

The Crusaders had a different mentality to modern day Christians. The Crusaders were happy to be martyred (as some members of Al Queda are today) and indeed between 50 to 90 % were killed, depending on the Crusade.

The crusades' main purpose was to gain more land for them, weather they're Mongolians, Europeans, or Christians. At the time the Church and Government were tied together, so the highest holy man was the leader of the not only the church but the kingdom also. Because they were as one, the Christians went on Crusades to conquer new lands and spread the Christian faith with others.

Muslims were threatening Christendom...if it weren't for the Crusades the Muslims would have taken over Europe and there would be no Christianity today. Sure, human sin got mixed in with a noble cause...but the Crusades weren't unprovoked.

some sort of internal problem, nothing to do with Islam, Jews or Jerusalem. It was a complot between some church leaders of the time. that the idea came up to distract the attention of the people, and also they wanted to get the bounties from Jerusalem. The Pope promised each crusader they will go to heaven if they kill any enemy of the church and they Church enacted a special absolution for murdering a Jew...

Power plays by popes and ruling monarchs. They twisted the Christian faith for their own ends, and many who were truly faithful were caught up and used. In addition, there was the fear that the Holy Land would not ever be accessible to Christians after the Muslims invaded the lands, especially after they started building over parts of Judeo-Christian archaeological areas.

as a friend of mine put it.... in feudal times, only the first-born son could inherit dad's land and wealth....

this created a few generations of young men with lots of testosterone and nowhere to go with it... so, to channel the energy, the Church sent them off to kill the "infidels" in "The Holy Land" and search for the "Holy Grail." .... tasks which would burn off their energy, kill off lots of them, and occupy them for a LONG time, especially looking for the Grail....

and yes, gee, isn't it deja vu all over again that the Muslims are still holding a grudge about that and are using pretty much the same arguments to try to take over the world?

...... well, just the fundamentalist Muslims, imnsho, anyway.... but hey, doesn't almost every religion desire to convert EVERYONE to their beliefs.... OR ELSE?

common thread here...?

The Muslims invaded Europe and killed many of the Christians. They say that payback is hell- and that's what the church did. They went after the ones who so violently attacked them.

The Muslims were getting ready to invade Jerusalem

Ask me again in 1 month and 3 days at 3pm and I'll give you an extremely precise answer.