two week series on Catholic historical controversies. So this week's on the crusade, next week's gonna be on the Inquisition, which is always fun, and no one expects this man's Inquisition. So anyway, we should start with prayer, but should stop serving coffee. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen. God our Father, you will, I'm in to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Send workers into your great harvest that the gospel may be preached to every creature in your church gathered together by the word of life and strengthened by the power of the sacraments. May it dance in the way of salvation and love through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.
Amen. And Father, Son, I'm scared. Amen. So I thought it was particularly fitting that the first Psalm for evening prayer or best verse tonight in the later to the hours started off with the three lines, blessed be the Lord my rock, who trains my arms for battle, who prepares my hands for war.
So I thought, oh, that's sort of perfect segue into tonight's topic, which is that of the crusade. There we go. All right, now the crusade is probably one of the most misunderstood events, and actually not probably are one of the most misunderstood events in both Catholic history, but as well as just history in general. So there's a reason why when I was thinking of historical apologetics, obviously the first two things that come to mind are the crusades and inquisition.
So that's why what we're going to be doing in the next two weeks. And it's the crusades are something that happened a long time ago. There were countless ones and we'll get into that. But they're still part of the cultural imagination.
They're still popular. People, they make movies about the crusades, such as the horrendously awful Kingdom of Heaven that they made around 10 years ago, which is possibly the most historically accurate movie ever made. It's probably on power, but I haven't seen it unless I can't attest to it. And then, and actually, if you want to see a portrait of every misconception that the modern world has about the crusades, you can watch the movie.
And it's basically a great caricature snapshot of this is what the modern secular world thinks the crusades actually were that has no connection to reality. But the other way that they've been popular in part of popular culture is you have, for instance, the Da Vinci Code, where the Knights Templar, which also have an equally mythological history that people have sort of adopted that has nothing to do with reality. So they've been part of the pop culture. But then also, they've been part of the political world, the last 10 or so years, in regards to the war on terror, or as it's now called officially by our government, the overseas contingency operation, which I'm not sure which is the stupider title, because you can't really have a war against the feeling.
And you can't have, and nobody even knows it, the overseas contingency operation is. But either way, the idea of the crusade has come up since September 11th, when afterwards President Bush, he made the mistake of referring to the war on terror, as it was called at the time, as a crusade. And he was roundly criticized by all the mass media outlets as like, how dare he use a term that is so offensive and hurtful to all the Muslims. Now, the funny thing about that criticizing and for being a hurtful and offensive term is that the Muslims themselves had no problem using the word and were using it left and right.
So Osama bin Laden, for instance, or Mu'la Umar, who's the spiritual leader of the Taliban, whenever they refer to the American armies or the Western armies, they always use the term the crusaders. So if it was so offensive, I'm not sure why they were using it. But anyway, so for decades, the Islamic side of the jihadist frequently just timing again, they always refer to the American soldiers either the Cowboys or the Crusaders, or the Crusader Cowboys, maybe you could say. So anyway, the concept of the crusade is very much alive in the Western world.
And one of the interesting facts is it's we already said alive in the Western world, the Crusades, but their life also in the Eastern world, the Middle East. And the funny thing is that both the East and the West have adopted the same understanding of the Crusades, or a similar understanding. Now, and we can say that they're in agreement, in that their opinion that the Crusades are sort of a black mark on the history of the West, and in particular, on the Catholic Church. And so like I said, that whenever you're arguing with a non-Catholic or a non-Christian, or you see someone criticizing the Catholic Church historically, almost immediately, the first few things that they bring out are the Try to Use those clubs against the Catholic Church are the Crusades and the Inquisition.
Those awful Catholics that were killing those innocent Muslims and torturing all of the people in Europe. Now, so the Crusades are often seen as an example of sort of the evil that organized religion will do. There's people, they sort of equate the Islamic Jihad, which they say, well that's fanatical Islam, and that leads people into flying into buildings. The Crusades, that's just the Christian equivalent of fanatical religion that either way is going to end up in violence, and that's why wouldn't it be better if you just had no religion.
So if you ask the average man on the streets of Cairo or on the streets of New York about the Crusades and what they were, they'd probably give you the same answer, or a pretty similar answer, in that they would say that they are an insidious, cynical, I mean this is a word for word, but this is the general idea of what they would say, probably the most smaller words. This is an insidious, they were an insidious, cynical, and unprovoked attack by religious zealots and greedy European colonialists against a peaceful and prosperous and sophisticated Muslim world. That's sort of the modern understanding of the Crusades. Now, how did we end up getting to this sort of upside down view?
That the first thing we're gonna do is, real quick, is just go through how did the proper understanding of what the Crusades are, like where did the myth come from is basically what I wanna start off with. Now, if you started off, or you went back to the time of the Crusades back into the 11th, 12th century, that if you asked any Christian in Europe about the Crusades, as opposed to going and asking them now, they would not have been critical of the Crusades, but rather they would have believed that they were one of the highest goods in the Catholic church, that going on Crusades was one of the holiest things that you could do. So we went from thinking it was one of the holiest parts of the Catholic church to the black spot in history of the Catholic church. Somehow that idea got turned upside down.
And even if you went back to that time, even the Muslims at the time at least respected the ideals of the Crusades, and they at least the Crusaders, they at least understood why they were fighting, they were perfectly happy to try to kill them, but they at least understood why they were doing what they were doing. Now, the real starting place of the breakdown of the understanding of the Crusades, starting to think of them as something bad rather than good, started with the Protestant Reformation in particular with Martin Luther. And the reason was that Martin Luther, who had already jettisoned Christian doctrines of papal authority as well as indulgences, that for him, that the Crusades, there were nothing more than a power play by the Pope. And so that if one of the things we're gonna get into with the motivation of the Crusades is the idea of going on pilgrimage and trying to get indulgences and all these things that are very crucial to Catholic theology.
That you throw out that whole side of Catholic theology, you don't believe that doing anything here on earth can actually bring graces. Therefore, you don't believe that there's grace involved with pilgrimages. You don't believe that indulgences are possible. You don't believe that the Pope, I mean, it has any authority.
And if you're like Martin Luther, you believe the Pope's the anti-Christ, you're obviously not going to be in line with the ideas behind the Crusades. So that's why at first Martin Luther went so far as to say that to fight against the Muslims was to fight against Christ himself. And the reason he said that was he was saying that it was God, who put the Turks there in their place, that put the Muslims there to punish the evil Christians, because the Christians were not living up to their ideals. So he was saying like, God made those authorities to punish the West, therefore, by fighting them and fighting Christ himself.
Now, he did change his mind, however, about that fact, when the Muslims actually started to get close to Germany. And so, like I said, when Solomon, Silemon the Magnificent, and his armies began to invade Austria and the southern part of Germany, Luther changed his mind and actually started encouraging his followers actually to go and fight the Islamic armies, though. He still had the same criticisms that he had before, but he at least saw the practical necessity. Now, what happened?
So that's where this idea started, of them being bad. And so, as time went on, as Europe divided between Protestants and Catholics, the Protestants viewed the Crusades as bad, the Catholics viewed them as good. It would go on confessional lines if you're a Protestant, or Catholic, they're either good or bad. And there's a lot of history in between then and now, which I'll just briefly go over.
But there's a living in America, which is a Protestant country, that our history books have been written through a Protestant lens. So there's a reason why our culture has adopted those views. But on top of that, when the Enlightenment came in the 18th century, and this is where the really popular, when I say sort of the common view of today really came about, and Philosophs in Europe, such as Voltaire, started viewing Christianity as nothing more than a vile superstition, the idea that someone would actually go and fight on behalf of a religious ideal became absurd to them, because the religious, they had thrown out the idea that Christianity might actually have truth behind it. So for them, the Crusades just became sort of a migration of barbarians led by fanaticism, greed, and lust, because they didn't believe that the Crusaders could have had Christian motivations.
So therefore, they had to try to make up other motivations and what's left as well. They must have been doing it for earthly reasons, agreed, et cetera. Now, since that time, the Crusades have actually kind of become popular for a little while, and then unpopular. And so actually, at different times in history, they regained popularity as being good things, such as in the Romantic period in the early 1800s.
When people, this is the time, when people in England, you had a like a Romantic poet, so you learn about in school and the Romantic period. So they were popular for a while, and actually, in this sort of, this positive, you lasted all the way until the 20th century, until basically World War II. And it was the examples of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, and the idea of what people do driven by ideology, though they were driven by political ideology, what people, the great evils that come about, that people start thinking, well, any ideology has, therefore, it must be bad. And so, who's really responsible for the completely backwards, misunderstanding of the Crusades is one of the most famous historians in the 20th century in Englishmen named Stephen Runciman.
And he wrote this big, three, he was actually, I think he was a member of the English Parliament, he wrote a big three volume work on the Crusades that was really well written, great story, and he had this view that we've already talked about, the Enlightenment view, this view of all of the ideology being bad. And so, he wrote such a good story that everybody has adopted his view, that in his views that he presents in the books are what the modern culture has just accepted. And it's funny, the funny thing is, is that historians, since he wrote this, there's been a lot of other historians studying the Crusades, and countless times they pointed out that everything that most of everything he says is completely false, yet nobody really pays attention because the fact most books that a history professor writes are really boring. The only people that read them are other history professors.
So the history professors in the world all know that the modern understanding of the Crusades is completely wrong, but they haven't ever gotten that message across to actually the popular world and what the average person thinks. And partly is when, because of little things like A&E and the BBC and the history channel, that whenever they make stories about the Crusades, they are entertainment networks, they don't want to show it necessarily how it really was, they want something that people are going to be excited on about and actually tell people what they think the Crusades were about. So they just follow Stephen Runson's view of the Crusades. And a really good example of this is in 1995, the BBC and A&E made this huge, well done production about the Crusades where they just went through the old same storyline about those wicked Europeans, who they were the violent ones, they were the aggressors, the Muslims who were the noble, and they were not as violent, that they were the innocent party in the Crusades and how these guys went not for religious reasons, but they were just there because they wanted to get lands over in the Middle East, that they just presented all of the same tri-arguments that had been proven wrong, and what they did actually in it is they wanted to make it sound actually academic, so they thought, okay, well let's get some history professors in here and they can do their little 30 second sound bites, but what they found was all of the history professors were saying stuff that was completely contrary to what they were producing, so they just spliced and diced and did what you can do with the camera to make them sound like they said things they didn't say.
So right now there's sort of two really famous Catholic historians, actually I think only one of them is Catholic, but two sort of great Crusades historians that have been trying to popularize the proper understanding, one is a guy at Cambridge named Jonathan Riley Smith, who has a couple really good short books on history of the Crusades, and the other is the head of the History Department at the University of St. Louis, which is a Catholic university named Thomas Madden, and so there's sort of the alone two people trying to right the wrong at the moment, but because most people it's sort of almost kind of like a lost battle in the popular understanding. But even that Riley Smith was in that A&E series, and he afterwards famously said very vehemently afterwards that they made me appear to say things I do not believe, that because so that's where we ended up where we are. Jonathan Riley Smith with a hyphen, the other's Thomas Madden, who actually has a lot of very popular history books and like lecture series at all, and they can give it the library even.
He was in the 1950s. Now actually Thomas Madden just wrote a really good, just short history of the Crusades, and it's something like 180 pages, really well just tells the great story dollar, this tells the story of all the Crusades and really succinct and put together book, and actually he's who I stole everything from, because every time I always steal everything from somebody, and it's from him this time. So where are the actual Crusades? Now the term can refer to a bunch of different things.
People always only think about the Crusades being these wars of religion having to do with the Middle East and the Muslims. That actually reality, there was a bunch of different types of Crusades. There was Crusades in Europe against heretics, particularly in Southern France. There was actually Crusades up in modern-day Lithuania against the pagans that were up there.
There was Crusades over in Spain, but people always refer to talking about the Crusades. They usually mean over in the Middle East, and so that's what we're going to talk about. Now, so to start off, if you want to talk about the Crusades, they were in every way defensive wars. That's the first thing to remember.
If you want to go through the list of Catholic just-war theory on what makes a war just, the Crusades was sort of the model example of what a just-war looks like. Now, so like I said, the popular myth is that the Crusaders, or the Crusades, sorry, were unprovoked aggression by the Christians against the peaceful Muslim world. Now, in reality, they were actually a direct response to the other way around to Muslim aggression, and an attempt to defend Europe to turn back, I should say, the Muslim advance, or at least to stop the Muslim advance, and the Christians in the 11th century, that this is when the Crusades are going to start at the end of the 11th century, and it actually will start in 1095, that they weren't paranoid, the Christians in Europe. The Muslims really were gunning for them, and this is something they knew.
That Islam, had conquered two-thirds of the entire Christian world, that you look at the early church, the great patriarchs of the church, the sort of the top bishops in the church, there were, there were, that will bring five great patriarchs in the early church. You had the patriarch of Alexandria, in Egypt, you had the patriarch of Jerusalem, the patriarch of Antioch, the patriarch of Constantinople, and the patriarch of Rome, known as the Pope. Those were the five top bishops in the early church. In the 11th century, three of those five were under Muslim control.
Nowadays, four of the five are, the Pope is the only one that's not. Now, where they're, where they're, where they're C is, I should say, they're not directly the patriarch of Constantinople, it's not controlled by the Muslims, that's not what I mean. But anyway, so in Islam, I'm not going to get too much into theology of Islam, we already had a whole other talk on that, but in Islam, in the, there is the crayons, states that there's sort of, there's two realms in the world, says that there is the abode of Islam, and the abode of war. That's it.
That Christianity, or Judaism, or any of the other states, there's no abode of Christianity. It's the boat of Islam, or the abode of war. So Christians and Jews can, or any other, or other religions can at times be tolerated in Islam, but not as their own state. They can own the goal of Islam in the Koran, in Islamic history, is to create a worldwide caliphate, and you can allow Christians and Jews to live, but only in your state, as basically second class citizens.
And so anyway, and that's why throughout history, Islam has been a history of one conquest after another, and then just with pauses of regrouping. So Christianity, if you went back into, wait, I got a pointer, into the early church, you want to know where most of the Christians lived, that the two most populous Christian places in the world were North Africa and modern day Turkey, Asia Minor. Those were the most populated places in the world. Europe was the backwater.
It was the third world. The civilized world was the Middle East and North Africa. That was where the majority of people lived. That was the civilized world.
So that was all the way back into time, the Roman Empire, so like from around the time of Christ to the Middle Ages. There was more people in 11, I mean at this time, in 1100, there was more people living in the Middle East and North Africa, they were in Europe. Those were the most civilized and more advanced parts of the world. And so starting with Muhammad and his followers, certainly after, one by one they had fallen.
And so you can have days of expansion. That Islamic, Muhammad's death, they conquered almost all of Arabia by 661. They conquered all of the green or angular stripes. By 750, they conquered all the vertical stripes and they were pushing into Europe.
So 720, they tried to push, they actually, they advanced almost all the way to Paris, in France, and they were still trying to conquer this way. So this wasn't, like I said, this idea that Christians were paranoid and the Muslims weren't trying to conquer them. They were constantly trying to conquer. Now, so by the time you get to where we are, which is the 11th century, the 10 hundreds, so after 1000 part, that the Byzantine Empire, which is over here, the successors of the Roman Empire, they had been holding off the Islamic advance in the Middle East for a long time.
Now, what happened at this time was there was a new group of very fanatical Muslims that moved in and took over called the Seljuk Turks. And the Seljuk Turks were particularly brutal. They came in, they conquered Jerusalem, they slaughtered all the inhabitants, destroyed the Church of Holy Sepulchre. They did, they stopped letting Christian pilgrims come and visit.
They quickly conquered all of Asia Minor, so all of modern day Turkey, and so pushing all the way up to within like 10 miles of Constantinople, that things were not looking good for the Byzantine Empire and their defense. The Christians were having a lot of trouble getting to visit the Holy Sites of Jerusalem in peace without being molested by the Islamic forces. And so, that's when the Byzantine emperor, who if you remember, that this would have been an act of great sort of humility, that the great schism, when the Eastern Orthodox broke away from the Catholic Church, happened only in 1054. So this is only 40 years after that.
So 40 years after the great schism, when they actually broke away, and actually interestingly, they broke away and they came back and broke away multiple times in our history, but we sort of forget about that. But only 40 years later, the Byzantine emperor realizes he has nowhere else to turn to the Pope. So he sends messengers to the Pope saying, please can you send us help? And so this is when the Pope famously, Pope urban the second at the Council of Claremont in 1095, he called on the Christian knights of Europe to go and help the Byzantines and to stop the Muslim advances.
Now, and there was a tremendous response. This is when the crowd famously started like chanting, deus vult, god wills it, and they, and what they're going to put together is going to be far more than the Byzantine Empire thought were expected when they were hoping for something like maybe like 10 to 15,000 knights, but instead get a million. But anyway, that's how it started. So, which brings us to the motivation, like how are these individual guys going on crusade?
Why are you going to leave your lands in Europe and actually go on crusade? And this is where one of the biggest myths sort of takes place in that this historical myth that sort of started in the Enlightenment and has become popular since then is that the guys that went on the crusade, someone came up with this sort of crackpot theory. They said that Europe had a problem and that they had started having a little bit better health and they had stopped the Vikings and so they started having more children. And so you start having bigger families in these nobles.
This is the theory they came up with. And so the problem is that when the children get older that the estate passes on to the oldest son. But what do you do with the second son? He doesn't get to inherit anything.
So, though at the crusaders where they were all those second sons that they didn't have estates in Europe and they wanted to go conquer new estates over in the Middle East. And the thing is it sounds good, but not what happened. That when you look at actually who went on the crusades that for the most part it wasn't those second sons or they sometimes will say it's sort of like those also. So you have those second sons or they'll say sort of never do well.
They just want to go and like pillage and get rich quick. But the people that actually went were the firstborn sons that they were the wealthy and the rich that were going on these crusades. And partly the reason is that going on crusade was tremendously expensive. It was ruinously expensive because you didn't, if you sign up you didn't get like here's some like a money or a government stipend that go on your crusade.
No, you have to pay for it entirely yourself. You have to pay entirely for your own armor, your own supplies, all of your soldiers. And there was countless examples of these nobles that they would sell away huge portions of their estates to be able to go on the crusades. And sometimes it even ruined their families to be able to go on their financial success in order to go on crusade.
So, that second son theory is completely bogus and doesn't work. And that because that comes from that idea that they could have been going for religious motivation if religious is just superstition. So people have tried to come up with other motivations of why they would go. But if you look at why they actually went that the rich people went, that the reason is simple in that they were, the Europeans were very, very pious at the time.
They were very devout. There's one of the things that was really interesting about the time. That when you look at the culture of Europe, there's sort of like a study in contrast. You had sort of these big, robust men that were sort of men of passion and everything they did.
They were very violent. They lived in a very violent world and they were violent by necessity. And however, they took their Christianity very seriously. They were very conscious of their sins.
And so there was a joke to the idea of, oh, here's something I can do where I can take these skills that I actually have and I can actually give them to God and I can actually go do something that is going to sort of help make up for all of my sins. And so the idea of the indulgence that the pope, and Ty does actually with the indulgence that you get for going on a pilgrimage that the pope promised an indulgence for knights that go on crusade was very, that was the key motivator. That these men, that they had treasures in Europe, but they wanted treasures that moth and rust cannot touch. And so they thought, you know what, this is sort of the culmination of my life to go and actually earn divine favor.
Does that make sense? All right. Now, so, and an example of this, that this idea while they're just going to go get rich, is that most of them I said did not get rich. A few did, a few got large pieces of land, but it was only a minuscule amount.
Most of them either died or came back poor than when they left. And in particular when you look at the orders like that sprang up during the crusades like the knights' temple are that were formed to protect pilgrims coming to Jerusalem that the idea of men joining the knights' temple are as because they were greedy is absurd. When that, an interesting thing about the knights' temple are there's only around 100 of them ever at a time. And then they, of actual knights and then they'd have basically less assistance who weren't full knights' temple are.
But the average lifespan of a knights' temple are was two months. And that the entire order would basically recirculate every single year as they would all die out and be replenished. Because these rich, and you had to be wealthy to join because they were basically giving everything they had left or got. Now, even the fact that the, one of the things we'll get to in a little bit is that they do when they go over established crusader kingdoms and actually create sort of like these pieces of land that they take over.
But when the first crusades started that the crusaders actually promised and planned on giving everything that they conquered back to the Byzantine Empire, that they were going with this motivation of, oh, we're going to go like conquer lands. That they actually promised the Byzantine emperor, you know what, we'll conquer all this and give it to you. But the only reason they ended up not doing so is that they were betrayed by the Byzantine emperor who started negotiating with the Muslims behind their back and they said, you know what, we're just going to keep it ourselves. But that's something we'll come back to in a little bit.
And if you have any questions, you can interrupt at any time. So what were the goals? The goals were pretty simple. And, so looking at the time, I should speed up a little bit.
Anyway, the goals were pretty simple and simply the first, it will be redundant with the word simple. The first was you rescued the poor Christians in the east. That there was a bunch of Christians in the east, and it's not just in the Byzantine Empire. There was a bunch of Christians still in the Middle East that have been mistreated for a long time by the Muslims.
So for instance, in the Holy Land, the Native Christians there, the Muslims made them walk around with large iron crosses around their next all the time. They couldn't have any public crosses on their churches. They couldn't teach the faith to their children other than in secret. Yeah, they knew that they had healthy Christians in the east.
So their first goal is to go help them and protect them. And also to protect the pilgrims coming from Europe that are trying to get to the Holy Land. And then the second goal was simply to regain the holy sites in Palestine that the Muslims had taken. They figured these places were made holy by the fact that this is where Christ was.
This is where Christ tried, that they wanted to retake. There's a reason it's called the Holy Land from the Muslims for the sake of Christ. And, hold on, I had a quote that I think I lost the quote. Oh, here you go.
So in showing that, this idea that the Crusades were a thought a great act of love that you were doing for the love of your fellow Christians in the east. But also with the love of Christ. And a quote from Innisfope, Innisfope, Innisfthe third. One of the greatest Catholic popes, or I guess non-Catholic popes.
But one of the greatest popes. In 1215 when he was calling the fifth crusade, he said, consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured. Would he not when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice? Look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him.
And similarly, will not Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, who servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with his precious blood, condemned you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help him. So it's this idea that nowadays we think of fighting for religion isn't that silly, but we think about it fighting for politics isn't that far more silly. That they were fighting for like the highest good. Now, we'll skip a little bit.
So one of the other sort of myths too is that the crusaders were going and were practicing forced conversions on the Muslim world. This is false, that there have been a few times in how throughout history that Christians have tried to the baptisms at the point of a sword for conversions such as Charlemagne back in the early ninth century or very briefly in Spain in the 15th century. But the church's timing again said no those are invalid baptisms, that doesn't work. That Islam does spread at the point of the sword.
Christianity for in order to actually be a valid version doesn't. So, and also the historical facts remain that the Christians never forced any of the Muslims to become Christian when they went to the Middle East or on the Crusades. That they were Muslims were viewed as the enemies that needed to be defeated, but they didn't force them to become Christian. And actually the fact remains too that the majority of the people that lived in the Christian kingdoms once they conquered them over in the Middle East during the Crusades, the majority of them were Muslims.
And actually the Muslims that lived in the Christian kingdoms fared far better than the Muslims that lived in the Muslim lands. So much so that some of them didn't want the Muslims to retake the lands from the Christians because the Christians brought with them better methods of farming, etc. And they were flourishing economically and had lower taxes and better liberty than they had under the Muslim rule so that they actually preferred it. Now, that actual attempt at converting the Muslims didn't actually happen until the 13th century with the Franciscans who went over and tried to convert a bunch of the Muslims.
But they never tried to force them, they just tried to do persuasion and it didn't work so they gave up. But anyway, now the other part of the Crusades that people when they're sort of thumping the Crusades or trying to thump the Catholics and the Crusades is being awful is usually has to do with the treatment of the Jews. And this was for instance former president Bill Clinton back in like five years ago or something like that. And Georgetown University where he was trying to argue that the current Muslims, 9-11 that El Qaeda they hate us because the Crusaders treatment of the Jews when they conquered Jerusalem that they slaughtered the Jewish population and he greatly exaggerated his talk.
But that's the reason why they hate us and so that's the black spot of the Crusades. Why the Muslims would care about the Christians killing the Jews, I'm not really sure. But this is an important topic. And now the first thing to remember with this is that the Crusades were wars.
They were not peaceful expeditions, they were violent brutal wars. And that with any war there are mishaps, there's blunders and there are even crimes. And so for instance in the first crusade when the Pope called for the first crusade that the nobles of Europe who are not rationed, they're like all right we're going to go on crusade but it takes planning and they started planning and getting their forces ready and it took them months and months to getting ready. But a bunch of peasants in Germany led by two guys a guy named Peter the Hermit and another named Count Amico of Leinungen that they started saying like we don't need to get ready, let's just get our pitch works and go attack.
But first we need to get money to go and so where's the best place to get money? We'll go and kill all the Jews we can find and take all of their stuff. So they started going up and down the Rhineland massacre in Jews and taking all of their goods. That the church condemned them, the bishops of the area condemned them and actually one of the bishops even hid the entire Jewish population and his diocese inside his house.
But the fact remains they did that. Now and likewise like 50 years later during the second crusade they did it again in the Rhineland and are going around and slaughtering the Jews as well. But it's important to remember that there's nothing unique about the crusades that is leading to this mistreatment of the Jews. It's a sort of a sad truth that anti-Semitism has a large part in European history that has nothing to do with the crusades.
That is true in every country from Russia to France to England that the Jews have been constantly mistreated for a thousand plus years. And actually interestingly if you want to look historically in Europe the place where the Jews would go when they were getting massacred or kicked out of one country, the one safe place they'd always end up going is the papal states because that was the one place where they would actually get treated well. And also so this anti-Semitism is something that keeps coming back in rears its ugly head in Europe. And in particular not to be anti-German but Germany through historically has had more bouts of anti-Semitism.
Germany and Austria actually even Austria today still even struggles with anti-Semitism. I mean but it's not just but it means true most of the countries here. Now anyway in modern times we look at our wars and we call things like that we call it collateral damage. That the fact remains that in America's wars that with all of our good technology and everything far more innocent people have died in our wars than in the crusades.
But nobody ever says that the purpose of the American wars is to go kill the innocent people. No that's an unfortunate consequence that we wish didn't happen. But the fact remains people are people and people behave poorly. Right?
Beat up a little. Now so to sort of give a little brief what happens through the main crusades. The first crusade but it was a bit of a long shot that it was not really well organized. There was multiple leaders leading different armies.
They all sort of converged at a pretty similar time at Constantinople. And so one day basically the actually first that the army that was soldering the Jews showed up of all these peasants. And they started pillaging the Byzantine Empire and not behaving well. So the Byzantine emperor shipped them across the Bosporus Strait into Turkey and said go fight the Muslims.
They were in their very first battle entirely destroyed and enslaved or killed every single one of them. But when the actual army showed up they were sent over as well because any smart emperor is not going to want hundreds of thousands of soldiers just camping out with nothing to do. So he quickly shipped them across after forcing them to swear and oath they'll give everything back to him. And this time they quickly started defeating the Muslims left and right.
So they called reconquered Nicaea and gave it back to the Byzantine Empire. They reconquered almost all of Asia Minor. And they went down. They reconquered Antioch.
When they showed up the patriarch of Antioch was in a cage hanging from the walls. They reconquered Antioch and then finally they came down and they successfully reconquered Jerusalem. Now that one of the things the crimes, this like with the slaughter of the Jews that has always pointed out about the Crusades is that the first crusade when they finally reconquered Jerusalem, that there is very graphic accounts of them going through and slaughtering all the inhabitants of the city. That accounts that always get more embellished as the history has gone on.
And so the number has grown bigger and bigger and bigger. Or as I remember learning a class that the professor put at, they slaughtered all the inhabitants or so says all the survivors. But anyway, it's important to remember that it was a terrible thing that they didn't behave well. But there is also important to remember there is a context of where they are coming from.
And before you judge them too harshly. So for instance, the Muslims themselves had several different times slaughtered all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. That only a hundred years before they had reconquered Jerusalem again, one Muslim group from another, and slaughtered every Christian in the city and destroyed the Holy Sepulchre and all the Christian churches. The Christians had been allowed to come back later.
They had rebuilt the churches. And then only 20 years before this, a new group of Muslims swept in. And so only 20 years before the first crusade. And they promised safe passage to all the Christians, but instead slaughtered them all.
And had once again destroyed the church of the Holy Sepulchre and captured the true cross. And so, and you have to remember too, that they had been fighting, they had been at war. Majority of the army had died before they got there. They had seen all their friends die.
But they were not going to necessarily be merciful, merciful conqueror after the end of the long bloody war. Now, I mean that doesn't excuse any of it, but it's important to remember as well. So anyway, when they conquered, the end result was that they actually kept sort of splitting off and taking different stuff. They set up what were called like these crusader states, basically states of where the majority of the population is either Muslim or native Christian, and then run by the crusaders.
And they set up a little patchwork, you have the kingdom of Jerusalem down here. A little county of Tripoli, the principality of Antioch, Armenia, and then the county of Odessa. And they were small, they were outnumbered, but the fact remains they were, the Muslims were very disorganized, that there's a truth of history that when the Muslims are united, they fight against Christians, but most of the time they're more busy trying to kill each other. So that's why they were very successful for a while.
But it was a short lived success in that very shortly after they had conquered these things only around 40 years later, the Muslim armies started to actually be united, that they were, and the more united Muslim armies started to turn back the tide and reconquer these places. And actually at their height, there's something only like 10,000 live Europeans in the Holy Land fighting in all these places. But one of the, I mean, it says a military history fact that the heavily armed Europeans with all their armor, like the European night, was basically an unstoppable force on the battlefield. So much so that one night was equivalent to something like a thousand foot soldiers in these battles.
So there's a reason why 10,000 of them were able to hold off armies of hundreds of thousands. Now, quickly, the county of Odessa was conquered, Muslims retook it. And so that, so the first crusade is when they retook the Holy Land. So what the second crusade was when they retook Odessa, things were looking bad, the Pope called for reinforcements.
And so this time, see the first crusade was no-bolds, but no kings or anything like on it. So this time the king of France, Louis VII, and Conrad III, the Holy Roman Emperor, they were going to come to their aid, but it was a complete disaster and their armies were entirely wiped out in Asia Minor before they could get even there to help. And so the Muslims continued to grow in strength and they were eventually unified by a Kurd living in Egypt. Oops, that was the second crusade tonight.
A Kurd living in Egypt named Saladin, who was successful in reuniting all of the Islamic forces. And he started one by one conquering the Christian lands. Now, he is also another main part of this myth of the Crusades that somehow he has been turned into this sort of noble historical figure as the good guy and the Christians as the bad guy. You just watch that movie, King of Heaven.
He's the noble kind hero and the Christians are the Templars. They're the treacherous barbarous ones. And it's kind of strange. And part of it, the reason why that is, is that when he conquered Jerusalem, which we'll get to, he doesn't slaughter all the inhabitants and we'll talk about why in a second.
The other was that he was also had the strange, even though he was perfectly happy slaughtering large portions of people, he did have sort of a strange ideas of chivalry, which were equally true of the Europeans and him. So there's actually lots of funny stories such as when he was conquering one city where his dreaded enemy was in the city who had captured his sister. That there was a wedding going on while they were laying siege to the city. So the Christians, they sent part of the wedding cake to Saladin and Saladin in return promised that when the siege was going on, he wouldn't fire on the tower where the honeymoon had couple less.
And then likewise, like in the later battles with Richard the Lionheart, they had a very famous spars back and forth with chivalry on each side. So one battle when Richard got sick, they delayed the battle until he was better, and Saladin sent him carts of fresh lemonade. And then likewise, in another battle, Saladin's horse got killed, and so Richard had one of his horses sent to him so that he could have any horse. But then they went around trying to kill each other after that.
It's kind of like those old newbies when the guys sword falls on the ground and they give it back before they try to run each other through. Now, so anyway, but the factor means they did reconquer Jerusalem and he was, and first, actually the important part is he destroyed the entire Christian army in a very famous battle, the Battle of Hateen. And after the battle, they chopped off the heads of all of the captives because they have good records of this because the crayon, the famous verse about says to strike the necks of the infidel. And so using that, all of his imans and him, they actually, with great joy, went and sliced off all the heads of all the captives.
And then they went and conquered Jerusalem. They did not slaughter the whole population, but that's because the Christian who was in charge of the city basically sent a note when they were laying siege saying, guarantee us safe conduct, or we're going to burn the city to the ground and you'll get nothing. So he said, he said, fine, we won't kill you all, so instead they just enslaved them all. Now, so Jerusalem fell, and I should say that second crusade was even preached by the great St.
Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the greatest saints in Catholic Church. So if you ever want to see good reasons of what the good moral side of the crusade, you just have to look at his speech when he calls for a second crusade. So this leads to the most famous of all the crusades in that the pope again called for help to retake the sites, retake Jerusalem. And this time, in what's called the King's Crusade or the Third Crusade, the King of England, Richard the Lionheart, who kind of humorously outside of Parliament, they have the statue of the king who spent the least time in England of any king.
Richard the Lionheart of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. Yes, it was in the Third. In the Third is sort of the greatest medieval pope that he was the last pope that whenever he said jumped, the King's for the most part said how high. And so he's, yes, he was the pope at the time.
So Frederick Barbarossa and his armies, they went over land and sadly he died, he was 80 years old, but he was trying to cross a river and full armor to show how robust he was. He had a heart attack and died. And so most of his army went home because they were loyal to him not more than to the crusade. And which is sad because he had the greatest army in Europe with the most experience.
But so most of his army left and interestingly some of his army continued because out of loyalty to him his great wish was to go on crusade. So they actually they pickled him in Brandy in a big barrel and they took his body to Jerusalem. But Philip and Richard who hated each other, they both came over water and they landed in Holy Land, they quickly conquered some of the coastal cities. And then Philip said, all right, have fun, I'm out of here.
And he went back to France so that he could spend the rest of his life trying to conquer all of Richard's lands in France while Richard's fighting the Holy Land. And so Richard stayed and had his famous sort of duels with Saladin and one but Richard time after time got the upper hand. He was enormous. He was around six foot eight.
He carried on and he famously carried a battle ax on his horse and would just ride at the front of his troops and just demolish people. But he did not have a lot of supplies. He did not have a lot of reinforcements. And so he was never able to retake Jerusalem but instead ended up signing a truce whereby Saladin said, all right, Christians become the Jerusalem again.
But the Muslims get to keep the city. And it was really hard for Richard and he always vowed to come back but he never got a chance. He died trying to retake his lands in France from Philip. So which leads us to the fourth crusade.
And this is when it isn't the third said, well, we still need another crusade to accomplish these goals that have not really been accomplished. And so this time the kings and Europe are busy fighting with each other and they don't go. The Holy Roman Emperor says, oh yeah, I'll go. And never does.
So the pope actually excommunicated him and that the only people that are willing to go were some French nobles in the city of Venice. So the French nobles came down. The Venice had all the boats. So they said, all right, we'll pay you, you take us and we'll sort of team up together.
And when they were going down, they decided to stop off at Constantinople because what had happened was that this former emperor who had been outstated because they're the Byzantines that were there. The Byzantines, their politics make modern politics seem not complicated. There's always webs of intrigue and murder and taking over and uprisings and insurrections left and right. So anyway, this guy though, he promised, hey, if you make me emperor again, I'll give you a whole lot of money.
I'll reunite the entire Eastern church back with the Catholic church and help you on your crusade. So they said, all right, this sounds good. So they went and did it. They reconquered Constantinople basically for him, made him emperor again, started waiting around for their promises.
They didn't come. And then to make it worse, the guy they helped got murdered and there was a whole lot. They didn't count on all the intrigue. They didn't understand everything that was going on.
And so finally they got fed up and said, you know, this is ridiculous. We're just going to take the city ourselves. And so they conquered Constantinople and made French noblemen, the new emperor. They made a bishop from Venice, the new archbishop of Constantinople, and they presented the city to instant to third and said, hey, the great skism, it's done.
And the pope in the sand was a little shocked by this. He was upset about it. He condemned it. But there's nothing he could really do about it.
And however, the crusade part kind of got petered out because they were now busy trying to run the Byzantine Empire, which was a whole lot more work than they expected. So they just started spending all their time trying to put out the uprisings, et cetera. Now, the bad part about this is this is sort of what cemented the great skism. That before this, the east had actually been going to skism and coming back, actually since the very early church.
And that the interesting fact of history that the archbishop of Constantinople up until 1054 has spent more time excommunicated than not since the church was the first century. And skism and back over and over again. And this is what really cemented it, is that they were bitter, that the western Latin Christians would dare to take over their great Christian city. And so this is why Pope John Paul II famously apologized for the conquest of Constantinople by the Venetians.
And going back to that myth, one of the myths that people always, Catholics who always are quick to apologize for the crusade and think that they're bad, will say, well, Pope John Paul II apologized for them is no. He apologized for the conquest of Constantinople and time again, people tried to get him to apologize for the crusade and he always refused it. He never apologized for the crusade. And then there's even more, I think I should say later, but anyway, there's more and more crusades.
There's something like nine of them. But they just become less and less successful. And they're usually smaller. So the fifth crusade they managed to take a city, Damietta, in Egypt, but then the Muslims retook it back.
King Louis IX, St. Louis of France famously launched multiple crusades. He tried to capture part of Egypt, but then it got taken back. He tried to conquer Tunis over in North Africa, but then he got taken back and he got sick and died.
So there was multiple attempts over and over. And one after one, they were not successful. And so even so around the 13th century, the Christian, there was a new group of Muslims that came in and were launched a brutal jihad against all the Christians still in the Holy Land, the Crusader kingdoms. And so finally, the last Crusader kingdom fell in 1291.
And there was no Christians left. I mean other than the native Christians, there was no European Christians left in the Holy Land. Now, an ironic, just interesting fact that I found kind of neat was that the wasted opportunity was at the end of the 1200s right before the Crusader kingdoms fell. There was a new force coming over in the east called the Mongols who had conquered Iraq and were not Muslim at the time.
And there was the leader of them in Iraq, was actually a Buddhist with a lot of Christian friends that hated the Muslims. And he actually sent a lot of messengers to the kings of Europe and to the Pope offering to make an alliance against the Muslims and help them reconquer all the Holy Land. And they would give it to the Christians, but their Christian kings were too busy fighting and they never could advantage of it until the last Crusader kingdom fell. And then so after this, the crusades, did you have a hand up for Sam?
Okay. The crusades keep continuing, but they're not offensive. It's now Europe on the defensive because through the 14th, the 15th, and 16th centuries, the Muslims didn't get weaker. They got stronger and stronger and stronger and it's actually going to be Europe merely onto the defensive.
And I don't have to get into too much detail about it because we got into a lot of this when we went to the history of Islam, that the Turks who took over the Islamic world and became the most powerful Islamic empire that they pushed all the way into the middle of Europe. So that by the time you get to the 15th century, it was very skeptical whether Europe would even survive and not become Muslim. When they pushed all the way in 1480 to, in 1480 they actually had taken a beach hold in Italy and Rome had to be evacuated because they thought Rome was going to fall. But the only reason it didn't was because the Sultan at the time died.
There was a famous poem at the time that summarized this fear that most Christians living in Europe thought this is a real possibility that we might get conquered, which was called the Ship of Fools by Sebastian Runt. We're talking about the situation, he says how our faith was strong in the Orient, it ruled in all of Asia, in Moorish lands in Africa. But now for us these lands are gone to even grieve the hardest stone for sisters of our church you find, they're of the Patriarchate kind, Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antiochia. But they've been forfeited and sacked and soon the head will be attacked.
So you're talking about that idea of the patriarchs. I skipped over the fact that in 1454 the conquered Constantinople slaughtered huge amounts of the population. They came into the church with Holy Sepulchre during Mass and just started slaughtering everyone. The bulwark in the east was done.
All four patriarchs had been conquered and they knew Rome was next. And so by 1529 they laid siege to Vienna and the heart of Europe and Austria, which I saw the other day that there are now more in the schools of Vienna, there are now more Muslims and Christians. This is an interesting side to note. It's because the city is the head of OPEC is where it is.
But anyway, but then by 1571 you had the famous Battle of L'Hapanto where they barely stopped the invasion of Italy and all the way to the 1600s, laying siege to Vienna again. And I think so the last armed invasion of Europe was in the end of the 1800s. But why did the Muslims lose? Or at the time ultimately the Christians didn't stop them through arms but through science and economics.
That you had starting with the Renaissance in the 14th and 1500s as the result of the Christian ideals which led to ideas like entrepreneurism, whatever. And ultimately lead to the scientific revolution that Europe started advancing and advancing and the Islamic world which has a tradition of anti-science and the sort of not wanting to advance too far intellectually. Because it's just a distraction from true Islam that the Islamic Ottoman Empire started falling farther and farther behind until it was known as the sick man of Europe that sort of limped on into the 20th century until it expired and broke away into the mess of the modern Middle East. So the last slide that, so why the crusades are good and that the greatest reason why they are good is because if there was not a crusades we would probably not be here, we'd probably be Muslims.
But also furthermore that nowadays it's easy for us to look back and go fighting for religion like so silly is the same reason people look at the religious wars in Europe between the Protestants and Catholics in the 1600s and they go what silly thing to fight about with religion. But to the medieval mind they would have looked at us and said oh like fighting the name of politics now that's silly. At least they were fighting for things that were eternal and true not for temporal matters. And then if you want to see what would have happened if it were not for the crusades the fact is that Christianity probably would have ended up like Zoroastrianism, another one of Islam's rivals which is basically extinct.
So there we go. Now does anyone have any questions or comments or anything good at?