{FAH}Q wrote:
It's amazing that 800 years later that we are still feeling the effects of the Crusades. After seeing a special on the Crusades (Hosted by Monty Python's Terry Jones) I really felt bad for anyone who lived in that region of the world, especially the Muslims. The Crusaders were a pretty terrible lot. Of course it is somewhere around 700-800 years since the last crusade so maybe these folks should get over it already.
I love history. Some of the most riveting story's of all time lay in this worlds history. The Crusades (to which there were many) were in most cases a "Taking Back" of territories (such as Spain and France) that where taken by force by the Muslims. The transition was cataclysmic.
Virtually all Westerners (except me) have learned to apologize for the Crusades, but less noted is the fact that the Crusades have an Islamic counterpart for which no one is apologizing and of which few are even aware.
Here is a contemporary account of the Muslims’ arrival in Nikiou, an Egyptian town, in the 640’s:
Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches — men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found. . . .But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou. . .
Not only did this involve massacres, but exile and enslavement — all based on a broken treaty:
Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gaining a victory, he did not allow them to stay there. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners. . . .The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.
Once the Muslims were entrenched in power, they began to levy the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims:
. . . Amr’s position became stronger from day to day. He levied the tax that had been stipulated . . . But it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.
So what is called the Crusades was pretty much the way of the worl at that time. It's true some of the Crusades and Crusaders were in it for their own ends. But I doubt you can find a war that there were not some less than pure participants.
I do not apologize for the history of the world. It is what it is and I wasn't there to create it. I will take responsibility for any donations I make (good or bad) to history in my life time.
Enjoy, Skank
