True Crusades, what modern textbooks don't tell us
A true account of history
shows that Islam repeatedly attacked Christian
lands, desecrated sanctuaries and tortured
Christians who fought back without desecrating
Mecca in return. Yet Houghton Mifflin and modern
historians would rather vilify Christians than
give the truth.
A Deadly Give and
Take
Crusaders fought many
terrible battles in the Middle East, but Muslims
started—and won—the war.
by Paul Crawford,
assistant professor of history at Alma College in
Alma, Michigan. He specializes in ecclesiastical
history with emphasis on the crusades and military
orders.
Osama bin Laden called America's response to
September 11, a "new crusade and Jewish campaign
led by the big crusader Bush under the flag of the
cross." He clearly meant to link the military
campaign to European campaigns from a millennium
ago, during which, the prevailing mentality holds,
Christian warriors unjustly attacked Islamic
possessions in and around Palestine.
By establishing this
connection, though, the fugitive fanatic admits
more than he alleges. In the Middle Ages, as in
2001, Islam struck first—and in such a way that
the West would certainly respond.
Waves
of conquest
Jerusalem has changed hands many times over the
centuries, but the seventh century was
particularly tumultuous. Pagan Persians stormed
the city in 614. Eastern Christians, led by
Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, reclaimed it by 630.
Within a few years, though, Islamic forces had
broken the Byzantine military and chased them out
of Palestine.
Jerusalem surrendered to a
Muslim army in 638. Construction began soon
afterward on a mosque at the Temple Mount.
Sophronicus, the patriarch of the city, is said to
have burst into tears and wailed, "Truly this is
the Abomination of Desolation spoken of by Daniel
the Prophet!"
After capturing Jerusalem, the
Muslim armies poured through the eastern and
southern provinces of the reeling Byzantine
Empire. In the 640s Armenia in the north and Egypt
in the south fell to Islam. In 655 the Muslims won
a naval battle with the Byzantines and very nearly
captured the Byzantine emperor.
By 711 Muslims controlled all
of northern Africa, and a Muslim commander named
Tariq had set foot on European soil—on a rock that
took his name (Jebel al-Tariq, corrupted into
Gibraltar). By 712 Muslims had penetrated deep
into Christian Spain. At the battle of Toledo that
year, they defeated the Spanish and killed their
king. The Spanish kingdom promptly collapsed.
Surviving Christians retreated
into the mountains of northwestern Spain and dug
in their defenses. The Muslim armies bypassed them
and began raiding across the Pyrenees into France.
Meanwhile, in the East, Muslims
continued to push into the Byzantine Empire. By
717 they had landed in southeastern Europe, and
they besieged the Byzantine capital,
Constantinople. Had they taken the city, they
might have conquered the entire continent. But the
Byzantines resisted. Their capital would not fall
to Islam until 1453.
Western Christians stopped the
Muslim advance into their territory in 732 at the
Battle of Tours (or Poitiers), France. Charles of
Heristal, Charlemagne's grandfather, led a
Frankish army against a large Muslim raiding party
and defeated them, though Muslim raiders would
continue attacking Frankish territory for decades.
For his victory, Charles became known as the
Hammer—in French, Charles Martel.
After regrouping, Muslim forces
began to move into south central Europe, lauching
invasions of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica in the
ninth century. They mounted operations on the
Italian mainland as well, sometimes at the
invitation of quarrelling Christian powers.
In 846 Muslim raiders attacked
the outlying areas of Rome, the center of western
Christianity. This act would be comparable to
Christians sacking Mecca or Medina, something they
have never done.
Toward the end of the ninth
century, Muslim pirate havens were established
along the coast of southern France and northern
Italy. These pirates threatened commerce,
communication, and pilgrim traffic for a hundred
years or more.
During the tenth century,
however, the tide began to turn. In the East in
the 950s and 960s, the Byzantines mounted a series
of counterattacks. They eventually recovered the
islands of Crete and Cyprus and a good bit of
territory in Asia Minor and northern Syria,
including Antioch. They lacked the strength to
retake Jerusalem, though they might have struggled
harder had they known what terrors the city would
soon face.
New
threats
In 1000, much—perhaps even most—of the population
of the Holy Land was still Christian, of one
affiliation or another. This was about to change.
One reason was the rise of a
local Muslim ruler named Hakim, who was possibly
insane and certainly not an orthodox Muslim (he
claimed to be divine). Hakim persecuted Christians
and Jews fiercely. In 1009 he ordered the
destruction of the rebuilt Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Christian population
of the Holy Land began to shrink under his
tyrannical rule.
Hakim aroused great hostility
even from other Muslims, and his reign was soon
over. The Byzantines, distressed by the damage to
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, negotiated with
the Muslims and in 1038 were allowed to begin
rebuilding it again. But the losses to the local
Christian (and Jewish) communities were harder to
repair.
Another, and perhaps more
serious, cause of distress for the local
populations of all faiths was the intrusion into
the Middle East of the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuks,
pagan nomads from the steppes of central Asia,
made steady inroads into the more sophisticated
world of the Muslim Arabs in the early eleventh
century.
In 1055, the Seljuks captured
Baghdad, destroying a long-lived Muslim dynasty
and seriously disrupting the stability of the
Middle East. This might have provided an
opportunity for the Christian Byzantines to
recover their lost provinces, but even as the
Seljuk Turks conquered the Arabs, they converted
to Islam. The Muslim Arab overlords of the region
were thus replaced by harsher, coarser Muslim
Turks.
Pleas
from the East
In 1071 Byzantine Emperor Romanus Diogenes
confronted a Turkish invasion force in the far
eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire. The two
armies met at the village of Manzikert, near Lake
Van, and the Byzantines were utterly defeated. As
a result of this disaster, the Byzantines lost all
the territory that they had recovered,
painstakingly, in the ninth and tenth centuries.
This included the entirety of Asia Minor, the
breadbasket and recruiting ground of the empire.
Succeeding Byzantine emperors
sent frantic calls to the West for aid, directing
them primarily at the popes, who were generally
seen as protectors of Western Christendom. Pope
Gregory VII received these appeals first, and in
1074 he discussed leading a relief expedition to
Byzantium himself. But this proved impractical,
and no aid was offered. The Byzantines continued
sending appeals, however, eventually finding an
audience with Pope Urban II.
Go to Page 2
See also Quotes
from the Quran
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