| robbo180265 |
02-11-07 07:59 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Avon Lady
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Channing
2) "ask yourself who hated whom first?"
Well, when Richard the Lionhearted arrived in the Middle East and did not find the gold that God promised him in a dream he came to the only logical conclusion he could. Clearly the local's had swallowed it to hide it from him. Soooooo, he had over 3,000 women and children publically put to the sword to get it back (unsucessfully, of course).
Is that first enough for you?
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I'll just copy and paste what I had to write to another history revisionist poster here about a month or 2 ago:
Quote:
Why the Crusades Were Called
The Crusaders' sack of Jerusalem in 1099, according to journalist Amin Maalouf in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was the "starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West." Islamic scholar and apologist John Esposito is a bit more expansive - he blames the Crusades ("so-called holy warriors") in general for disrupting a pluralistic civilization: "Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust."
Maalouf doesn't seem to consider whether "millennial hostility" may have begun with the Prophet Muhammad's veiled threat, issued over 450 years before the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, to neighboring non-Muslim leaders to "embrace Islam and you will be safe." Nor does he discuss the possibility that Muslims may have stoked that "millennial hostility" by seizing Christian lands - which amounted to two-thirds of what had formerly been the Christian world - centuries before the Crusades. Esposito's "five centuries of peaceful coexistence" were exemplified, he says, by the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638: "churches and the Christian population were left unmolested." But he doesn't mention Sophronius' Christmas sermon for 634, when he complained of the Muslims' "savage barbarous and bloody sword" and of how difficult that sword had made life for Christians.
PC Myth: The Crusades were an unprovoked attack by Europe against the Islamic world
Wrong. The conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood at the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression, and Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution. A few examples: Early in the eighth century, sixty pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies - except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn't pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the anti-religious tax (jizya) that Christians had to pay and forbade Christians to engage in religious instruction of others, even their own children.
Brutal subordination and violence became the rules of the day for Christians in the Holy Land. In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered the hands of Christians and Jews to be stamped with a distinctive symbol. Conversions to Christianity were dealt with particularly harshly. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of Saint Theodosius, killing many more monks. Other monasteries in the region suffered the same fate. Early in the ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christian cities. More persecutions in 923 saw additional churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a Palm Sunday rampage in Jerusalem, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.
In reaction to this persecution of Christians, the Byzantines moved from a defensive policy toward the Muslims to the offensive position of trying to recapture some of their lost territories. In the 960s, General Nicephorus Phocas (a future Byzantine emperor) carried out a series of successful campaigns against the Muslims, recapturing Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and even parts of Syria. In 969, he recaptured the ancient Christian city of Antioch. The Byzantines extended this campaign into Syria in the 970s.
In Islamic theology, if any land has ever belonged to the House of Islam, it belongs forever - and Muslims must wage war to regain control over it. In 974, faced with a string of loses to the Byzantines, the Abbasid (Sunni) caliph in Baghdad declared jihad. This followed the yearly jihad campaigns against the Byzantines launched by Saif al-Dawla, ruler of the Shi'ite Hamdanid dynasty in Aleppo from 944 to 967. Saif al-Dawla appealed to Muslims to fight the Byzantines on the pretext that they were taking lands that belonged to the House of Islam. This appeal was so successful that Muslim warriors from as far off as Central Asia joined the jihads.
However, Sunni/Shi'ite disunity ultimately hampered Islamic jihad efforts, and in 1001 the Byzantine emperor Basil II concluded a ten-year truce with the Fatimid (Shi'ite) caliph.
Basil, however, soon learned that to conclude such truces was futile. In 1004, the sixth Fatimid caliph, Abu 'Ali al-Mansur al-hakim (985-1021), turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother and uncles (two of whom were patriarchs), ordering the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years, thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim gave his most spectacular anti-Christian order: He commanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh century after the Persians burned and earlier version, marks the traditional site of Christ's burial; it also served as a model for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Al-Hakim commanded that the tomb within be cut down to the bedrock. He ordered Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks (and for Jews, heavy blocks of wood in the shape of a calf). He piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the order that they accept Islam of leave his dominions.
The erratic caliph ultimately relaxed his persecution of non-muslims and even returned much of the property he has seized from the Church. A partial cause of al-Hakim's changed attitude was probably in increasingly tenuous connection to Islamic orthodoxy. In 1021, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances; some of his followers proclaimed him divine and found a sect based on this mystery and other esoteric teachings of a Muslim cleric, Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Darazi (after whom the Druze sect is named). Thanks to al-Hakim's change of policy, which continued after his death, the Byzantines were allowed to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1027.
Nevertheless, Christians were in a precarious position, and pilgrims remained under threat. In 1056 the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When the fierce and fanatical Seljuk Turks swept down from Central Asia, they enforced a new Islamic rigor, making life increasingly difficult for both native Christians and pilgrims (whose pilgrimages they blocked). After they crushed the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and took the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes prisoner, all of Asia Minor was open to them, and their advance was virtually unstoppable. In 1076, they conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. The Seljuk emir Atsiz bib Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once his men had entered the city, they murdered three thousand people. The Seljuks established the sultanate of Rum (Rome, referring to the New Rome, Constantinople) in Nicaea that same years, perilously close to Constantinople itself; from there they continued to threaten the Byzantines and harass the Christians all over their new domains.
The Christian empire of Byzantium, which before Islam's wars of conquest had ruled over a vast expanse including southern Italy, North Africa, the Middle East, and Arabia, was reduced to little more than Greece. It looked as if death at the hands of the Seljuks was imminent. The Church of Constantinople considered the popes schismatic and had squabbled with them for centuries, but the new emperor Alexius I Commenus (1081-1118), swallowed his pride and appealed for help. And that is how the First Crusade came about: It was a response to the Byzantine Emperor's call for help.
- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), by Robert Spencer
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What? They didn't tell you any of this in history class? What? That's not the story you were told by Hollywood when you watched last years screen farce "Kingdom of Heaven"? I am shocked, utterly shocked, I tell ya! :roll:
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"Try something more recent, like today, yesterday, the day before, last week, last month, last year, the past several years, past decades, even centuries".
You posted it hun, not me:D |
