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On May 13 2012 18:47 SiroKO wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2012 12:57 Zahir wrote:
Not to mention what these noble Christian knights did to their fellow Christians in Byzantium on their way to the holy land. First of, contrary to what has been said concerning the 4th crusade in this thread, there never had been any premeditated plan to do the Constantinople sacking and a lot among the Christian crusades were against it. The crusaders were in desperate need of a fleet of warships and transports, thus they faced a dilemma, and refused to come back to home with shame. They chose to do a little evil to serve a greater good. The ultimate goal never stoped being Jerusalem. The end was disastrous, but people need to keep in mind that the Pape Innocent excommunicated the Crusaders the second the Crusaders chose to attack a Christian city (zara).
Did the Pope excommunicate the French lords slaughtering the manicheans "heretics" in the south of France? Nope, and that was a crusade.
I wonder why this thread isn't closed, the OP is a fallacious mix of false statements with a clear islamophobic bias (looking at "Islam" as an empire is the first indicator of this).
If any of these points could be adressed there would be some form of debate, but sadly Siroko or Alextrasas or any of these wikipedia scholars has been unable to answer any of the remarks directed towards the blatant mistakes in their posts.
There rarely was a "christianity vs islam" situation (the siege of Vienna is an example but the fall of the Byzantine empire is actually a counter-example), there simply was, as pointed earlier, a struggle for the domination of the Mediterranean sea.
There was also no fight of "good vs evil" (seriously...), atrocities were committed everywhere by everyone. The simple presence of an army was almost a guarantee of looting and pillaging, and many regions lost a good chunk of their population simply too many soldiers stayed there too long.
Remember that the 989 Peace of God was the first medieval movement that tried to temper the actions and behaviour of knights, and it took some time to reach every corner of every land. The year 1000 was particularly violent in Europe and lesser lords had absolute power in their lands. Small conflicts were very common and the whole continent was constantly at war.
In the end, Europe was far more violent than muslim states, simply because there really wasn't any form of unity. For example, the king of France was weak, and even though he was theoretically the highest authority in his country, he had in fact little to no power when it came down to distant lands owned by ambitious bannermen. In contrast, the islamic world was camposed of much bigger states with a greater sphere of influence. Had the king of France had the power to control his own subjects, the situation of the country would've been different.
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The OP is only 3 small sections with very little content?
The crusades were almost entirely not motivated by religion but used religion to rally for the true causes.
Islam was spreading rapidly across the World and was becoming a threat to Europe, but this is nothing different than how Christianity spread also (for the most part).
A lot of the crusades were fragmented and poorly organized. Some of which even completely changed their purpose mid-crusade.
The point is, the crusades are very complicated and cover a wide range of time. They can't be simplified like the OP tries to do. And, to be honest, the OP comes off very Christian biased.
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It's hard enough to get history right in the last century. When we are talking about events happening thousand years ago we really should take a humble approach when trying to lecture others and it's not something that can be summized into one A4 page.
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On May 13 2012 18:47 SiroKO wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2012 12:57 Zahir wrote:
Not to mention what these noble Christian knights did to their fellow Christians in Byzantium on their way to the holy land. First of, contrary to what has been said concerning the 4th crusade in this thread, there never had been any premeditated plan to do the Constantinople sacking and a lot among the Christian crusades were against it. The crusaders were in desperate need of a fleet of warships and transports, thus they faced a dilemma, and refused to come back to home with shame. They chose to do a little evil to serve a greater good. The ultimate goal never stoped being Jerusalem. The end was disastrous, but people need to keep in mind that the Pape Innocent excommunicated the Crusaders the second the Crusaders chose to attack a Christian city (zara).
Sack of Constantinople was a little evil for greater good ? Your morality seems to really come from middle ages if you really believe that. Lets murder thoudands (at the least) so we can reclaim worthless peace of land that never belonged to us. That seems like really something that can be easily justified. Everything not to go back in shame.
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On May 13 2012 18:47 SiroKO wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2012 12:57 Zahir wrote:
Not to mention what these noble Christian knights did to their fellow Christians in Byzantium on their way to the holy land. First of, contrary to what has been said concerning the 4th crusade in this thread, there never had been any premeditated plan to do the Constantinople sacking and a lot among the Christian crusades were against it. The crusaders were in desperate need of a fleet of warships and transports, thus they faced a dilemma, and refused to come back to home with shame. They chose to do a little evil to serve a greater good. The ultimate goal never stoped being Jerusalem. The end was disastrous, but people need to keep in mind that the Pape Innocent excommunicated the Crusaders the second the Crusaders chose to attack a Christian city (zara).
I don't understand when your supposed "greater good" happens? When the crusaders reached Palestine and invaded the area, looting and pillaging?
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I think he was explaining the choice to attack christians from the crusaders point of view.
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On May 13 2012 20:54 gruff wrote:
It's hard enough to get history right in the last century. When we are talking about events happening thousand years ago we really should take a humble approach when trying to lecture others and it's not something that can be summized into one A4 page.
Pretty much this. History is always far more complicated than you can explain in a forum or even in a textbook or history class. There are always severe simplifications and generalizations.
The really scary thing to me is that people apparently are partisan for/against some group of people who lived thousands of years ago. I guess this is caused by all the "religion kills people" militant atheists. If you are partisan about history then you will never have a clear view of any historical event.
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On May 13 2012 13:51 MerdaPura wrote:
No comments on the Cutie Mark Crusaders?
I don't always laugh irl, but when I do it's at a MLP reference in a crusades thread.
Seriously though, this thread has gotten way out of hand, especially the "Woe us poor Christian souls." mentality.
The OP is completely broken, it tries to find an answer to whether or not the Crusades where morally a good thing, which to me, like trying to justify any aggressive war is an incredibly sick thing to do.
The entire question whether or not they where morally justifiable is completely irrelevant, the question is only relevant to people with a invested interest, I.E. Christians and then tries to make an event a thousand years ago conform to modern day morals, which, let me tell you, it never will.
To actually answer the OP though, as a form of excersice, let's first try to define what a just war is, is it the belief of the leader? The belief of his army? His adherence to scripture? Adhering to the morality of those days? Or to ours?
I can tell you that any leader instigating a war usually believes they are morally justified, the human mind is a very bendable thing, finding an excuse for war isn't that hard, and leaders have always found one if they even bothered enough to have one, and projecting your own belief on your soldiers is quite easy if done by charismatic leaders. To summize, belief is just a measure of how good you are at manipulating your own or other peoples minds.
Scripture, this one should be very easy, due to Jesus rather pacifist stance when it came to most things I think we can easily conclude that Jesus would despise any war, be it waged in his name or done without warped logic like that.
Ancient morality, as you might know morals have changed drastically, mostly for the better, to our European and American minds the sheer amounts of death and suffering associated with medieval life are almost unfathomable, but the people who lived then needed ways to cope, death was swift and could come at any time, I belief this drastically changes how you deal with that of others. Practically all wars where morally justifiable in those days because morals where primitive undeveloped concepts only associated with religion, remember, Europe had lost most of it's Greek philosophical heritage at this point.
Modern day, the Crusades are impossible to justify, current day morality does not allow for a religious war, instigated "because god told us to", the conflict was incredibly complex. with blows going back and forth even before the crusade started, what would be the morally justifiable choice here is trying to do all you can to restore peace for the sake of peace, a somewhat alien concept to most medieval rulers, there will always be reasons that piss off a ruler, be it a problematic trade agreement or the destruction of a holy relic, turning that conflict into a war though has according to our neo-morality always been a bad thing.
No war ever has been morally justified, nor will it ever, it won't breed anything but more war, stop trying to morally justify one because these medieval idiots had the same religion as you do, people, and more importantly religious people, have always tried to change history to make them look more glorified, the blatant ignoring of facts by the OP and many of his fellow believers is just sickening, the only analogies I can draw are the Chinese with their refusal to believe anything nasty happened during the last 100 years or many Islamic scholars that refuse to acknowledge any scientific insights made, it's good to know America has it's own Christian contingent of history rewriters these days.
And OP, please learn what a discussion is, if I bring up facts destroying your arguments you're supposed to give a rebuttal, not tell me I am not interested in discussing (seriously, I still don't understand how that made any sense in your diluted mind), if you want to make a thread about a semi controversial subject, make sure you actually know jack shit about said subject.
And if you really wanted to know whether or not the Crusades where justified, just ask your best bud God, I'm sure he can give you an answer and you won't have to bother us with dumb questions only relevant for religious people who feel they need to justify the actions of their co-believers a thousand years ago.
Edit: As a side note, the peacefulness and technological level of the Muslim states in those days is often overplayed, these scientific insights where usually only relevant to the ancient cities of Roman learning, Alexandria, Cairo, Constantinople, Aleppo, Damascus, etc, outside of these centres Muslims and Christians where roughly on the same level, not to mention that when dealing with Islamic history things are even harder to verify then with the dealings in Europe because where in Europe the bigger happenings where all recorded by multiple historic writers, for different languages and countries, this was far less necessary in the Muslim world, a Caliph ruling over north Africa is going to care far less over a little revolt in Tunisia then a Scottish King having to violently supress a revolt in Gowrie.
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On May 14 2012 01:31 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2012 20:54 gruff wrote:
It's hard enough to get history right in the last century. When we are talking about events happening thousand years ago we really should take a humble approach when trying to lecture others and it's not something that can be summized into one A4 page. Pretty much this. History is always far more complicated than you can explain in a forum or even in a textbook or history class. There are always severe simplifications and generalizations. The really scary thing to me is that people apparently are partisan for/against some group of people who lived thousands of years ago. I guess this is caused by all the "religion kills people" militant atheists. If you are partisan about history then you will never have a clear view of any historical event.
So, like, what are you even saying. "History is far more complicated than you can explain in a forum" so like let's not discuss history? What's your view on the crusaders?
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I think it's more a reflection on the level this discussion has evolved into, people are trying to discuss whether or not the Crusades where a "good" thing, which is a completely empty concept because we have practically no parameters which we can apply on a historical situation like this, and this fact only becomes appearant if you read more about it then the couple of pages on Wikipedia, and from the OP's terrible analysis I'm wondering if he even bothered to finish reading that.
What I feel many people here want to turn this discussion into is about how appearantly Christianity is being vilified, an interesting subject but completely unrelated to the Crusades, as an practical Agnostic/Atheist who believes in morality for the sake of itself and our humanity I believe humans kill humans, if there wouldn't have been Crusades people would have thought up another reason to kill other people, I think China and Russia prove pretty well that the absence of religion does not mean the absence of war. It's just an easy rationalization to justify the extremely strong human sentiment of increasing power.
If you want to make a thread about the vilification of Christianity recently do so, dragging the crusades into that discussion is just pointless and will only confuse matters.
Only if we seperate the question of the validity of Christianity from this discussion (I believe OP's main reason for this thread is validating his own belief) and with that the validity of the Crusades, will we be able to have a meaningful discussion about the period in history.
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What a strange OP!
I'm impressed at some of the more intelligent and sourced comments here, where people make an arguement and back it up with 'evidence', whether the source is biased or not. If some of you don't mind, I would like to slightly derail the discussion and pose the question, When was the end of the "Islamic Golden Age" and why did it occur?
Wiki link
The Wikipedia link is vague at best and seeing as some of you actually have knowledge and an interest in history I would be happy to hear what you think!
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On May 14 2012 01:31 liberal wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2012 20:54 gruff wrote:
It's hard enough to get history right in the last century. When we are talking about events happening thousand years ago we really should take a humble approach when trying to lecture others and it's not something that can be summized into one A4 page. Pretty much this. History is always far more complicated than you can explain in a forum or even in a textbook or history class. There are always severe simplifications and generalizations. The really scary thing to me is that people apparently are partisan for/against some group of people who lived thousands of years ago. I guess this is caused by all the "religion kills people" militant atheists. If you are partisan about history then you will never have a clear view of any historical event.
The thread was started not by a 'militant atheist', but by a what appears to be a christian trying to defend his faith based on historical events centuries ago. There's militant atheists for sure, especially on the internet, but there's plenty of militant believers too, both sides have fundamentalists trying to twist history to fit into their worldview. The OP is one of them.
What happened over 500 years ago has no reflection on the way people currently experience a certain religion.
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On May 14 2012 02:25 ChaZzza wrote:What a strange OP! I'm impressed at some of the more intelligent and sourced comments here, where people make an arguement and back it up with 'evidence', whether the source is biased or not. If some of you don't mind, I would like to slightly derail the discussion and pose the question, When was the end of the "Islamic Golden Age" and why did it occur? Wiki linkThe Wikipedia link is vague at best and seeing as some of you actually have knowledge and an interest in history I would be happy to hear what you think!
There are many reasons for that, religious conservatism due to the Sunni/Shiite schism, infighting, incompetent rulers, but the main one, Mongols.
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As someone who is a devout Christian (Protestant) I can say that I do not care what banner was used during the Crusades; it was wrong. The Papacy in those days had a habbit of killing people to keep and maintain power. The Roman Catholic Church, and their their non-Biblican doctrines, should not be looked at as orthodox Christianity. No offense to those who are practicing Roman Catholics, I just detest your leadership and their history.
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On May 14 2012 02:38 ImAbstracT wrote:
As someone who is a devout Christian (Protestant) I can say that I do not care what banner was used during the Crusades; it was wrong. The Papacy in those days had a habbit of killing people to keep and maintain power. The Roman Catholic Church, and their their non-Biblican doctrines, should not be looked at as orthodox Christianity. No offense to those who are practicing Roman Catholics, I just detest your leadership and their history.
The problem is, most people try to judge histrory from todays perspective.
Back then, when land&pesants were property, "state" was nothing more than monarchs personal property,
things were just different. Not right, not wrong, but different.
Things just happened, attempts to paint them in certain colour are always made to get some sort of advantage today.
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good post
User was warned for this post
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On May 14 2012 02:38 ImAbstracT wrote:
As someone who is a devout Christian (Protestant) I can say that I do not care what banner was used during the Crusades; it was wrong. The Papacy in those days had a habbit of killing people to keep and maintain power. The Roman Catholic Church, and their their non-Biblican doctrines, should not be looked at as orthodox Christianity. No offense to those who are practicing Roman Catholics, I just detest your leadership and their history.
The crusades are an interesting time in history to study. Leaders using "God wills it" as a casus belli to conquer and colonize what states instead do in the name of democracy or ideology today. It's just words from politicians/kings that wish to have more power and money.
I'd say the golden age of Islam was when the Mongols was the biggest, didn't they embrace Islam? So I'd say 1300, Ottoman empire and golden horde was huge, also timurid empire and later mughal were successfull. Problem was the countries resisted modernization and fell behind the west. Fighting among and inside the big Muslim countries also was a big factor for their decline. It has to do with their tribal heritage I guess, even today tribes are important for example in Libya.
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A couple of people have said that we should read books instead of Wikipedia, but then neglected to actually suggest any well-respected reading material. I'm actually interested in learning more about the topic, please help me out! All due respect to the people debating in this thread, but I would like to read up on some more respected sources. The Crusades have always been an interesting topic to me, but it's such a far-reaching span of time and place that I don't really know where to begin. So far I've seen these suggestions:
The Crusade through Arab Eyes
The Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh
This Youtube video
Are there any other well-known somewhat entertaining historical books that encompass a good amount of the crusades?
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On May 14 2012 03:13 Node wrote:
A couple of people have said that we should read books instead of Wikipedia, but then neglected to actually suggest any well-respected reading material. I'm actually interested in learning more about the topic, please help me out! All due respect to the people debating in this thread, but I would like to read up on some more respected sources. The Crusades have always been an interesting topic to me, but it's such a far-reaching span of time and place that I don't really know where to begin. So far I've seen these suggestions:
The Crusade through Arab Eyes
The Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh
Are there any other well-known somewhat entertaining historical books that encompass a good amount of the crusades?
Honestly, primary arab primary sources and histories of the Crusade are really, really bad. There are occasional stories or statements that appear to be factual, but the overwhelming majority of it is hogwash. They're extremely interesting to read in order to gain some anecdotes (true or not) and other impressions that the Crusaders made on the Moslims. If that's the type of reading you like, Ibn Al-Athir's The Perfect History is, at the least, an entertaining read.
While less "entertaining", if you want a solid overview of the crusades that is very readable I'd suggest Madden's The New Concise History of the Crusades.
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On May 12 2012 21:44 SiroKO wrote:
But historically and globally speaking, whether they toke place in the Balkans (later Crusades in the XVth century) or the Middle-East, this was nothing more than a fight between Islamic expansionism and Christian resistance to it.
This shouldnt be allowed on TL, end of story. We're talking massacres of civilian populations, and this fucking idiot (who I already saw promoting fascists ideas on the 2012 French Presidential thread) claims that it is RESISTANCE. This is just some random racist nerd, who got slapped by an arab when he was 12 and never accepted it, ever since he's even trying to change fucking history to back up his senseless war against Islam and arabs.
Seriously, dont you have something else to do in your shitty life than going on an international Starcraft forum promoting your xenophobic ideas? This guy even went on Breivik massacre's thread and tried to argue that his ideas were good, that Islam doesnt belong in Europe, and that it will eventually cause a civil war here?
I mean, you guys ban troll alright, but this is just neo-trolling, let this dumb kid open threads like that he'll soon deny Africa's colonization...
User was temp banned for this post.
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EPT
