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From: gd8f@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Gregory  Dandulakis)
Subject: Re: XX cty glagolitic
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Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 02:04:05 GMT
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In article <3nh7lr$mi3@ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>,
Marek Konski <marek1@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

[much deleted]

>The crusades were organized because the Byzantine Empire lost Palestine
>to the Turks, not the other way around. Don't twist the history! 



I'm afraid that _you_ twist things around.


I said that the (overwhelmingly) Germanics, (in the form of Crusaders,
and the Venetians as leaders), destroyed the Eastern surviving part of
the Roman Empire, as they had done earlier to the Western part of the
Roman Empire. You reply above with an irrelevant/rhetorical answer. That
is, what was the publicly proclaimed rational that the Crusades were o-
rganized for. Well, the publicly proclaimed rational included not only
"noble causes", but also booty extravanganza. And the public proclama-
tion had little to do with the real reasons (see below).


Anyway, I have the following text in my file from before, so it is easy
to post it. Due to time constraints, I will leave the rest of the "work"
in history that you need as a homework. (You need work over WHEN and HOW
the CATHOLICISM-DISTINGUISHING/DEFINING DOCTRINE was CREATED/ADOPTED, plus
HOW CATHOLICISM acquired its VOCALLY BRUTAL CHARACTERISTICS during the
Middle Ages. Was it due to the Roman Empire ("Byzantium") or due to the
GERMANICS (as early on as the 4th century)?).


Enjoy the following, and tell me if the reference is OK with you...


Gregory

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


pp 171-173

"   In the mid-eleventh century, however, the Saljuk invasions 
changed the balance of power in the Near East by permanently de-
taching Asia Minor from Byzantium.  In 1060 the Saljuks had taken 
Baghdad and gained control of the Abbasid caliphate.  Under the 
Saljuk sultans, Sunni Islam underwent a revival which was mani-
fested, in part, in a new offensive against Byzantium and, during 
the 1060s, Turkish raids thrust deep into Armenia, Georgia, and 
Anatolia.  The decisive defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert in 
1071 deprived the empire of its Asian territories and opened the 
way for the Turkish migrations into the Anatolian plateau.  In the 
wake of Manzikert, Byzantium appealed to Latin Christendom for as-
sistance against the Turks.  Twenty-five years later, Western 
Europe's response was the First Crusade.

   The crusades were born, were sustained, and eventually declined 
because of currents deep within European society: Christendom's 
assault against the Muslims had less to do with the relationship 
between Christianity and Islam than with the internal stresses and 
strains of Christian Europe.  And yet, the European historical 
tradition has tended to portray the relationship between 
Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages in terms of military 
conflict, and has concentrated upon the crusades as the most sig-
nificant manifestation of that conflict.

   The military threat posed by Islam (and by the Vikings) to 
Western Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries prompted the 
church to adapt and to extend Augustine's doctrine of just war.  
While it remained the responsibility of secular leaders to defend 
Christendom, the church encouraged them and their followers to do 
so by promising eternal life to those who fell in battle against 
the heathen.  Later, when the external threat to Christendom had 
declined, leaving unoccupied an increasingly brutal and lawless 
warrior-class, the reforming papacy sought to harness its violent 
energies.  The so-called "Peace of God" movement was, in fact, 
just one of several means by which the church came to organize the 
warrior-class in order to secure its own political ends.  But the 
transformation of the brutalized warriors of the tenth century 
into the Christian knights - the _militia Christi_ - of the 
eleventh, was to have a crucial impact upon Christianity's rela-
tionship with Islam: the responsibility for the conduct of just 
war was removed from the secular powers of Christendom and as-
sumed, instead, by the church through the agency of its Christian 
knights.  But, right at the beginning of the crusading movement, 
the papacy lost control of its agents, and the conduct of war 
against Islam thus passed from the relatively cautious and well-
informed papal, imperial, and royal statesmen of Mediterranean 
Europe, into the hands of violent, ignorant, and impressionable 
warriors from the North.

   During the second half of the eleventh century, the papacy ex-
tended the Peace of God movement beyond the bounds of Christendom, 
to Spain, Sicily, and North Africa, and lent its support to mili-
tary expeditions against the Muslims.  Now, in addition to the 
promise of a martyr's crown to those who fell in battle, the pa-
pacy offered all participants the remission of any penance imposed 
by the church.  At the Council of Clermont, in November 1095, the 
papacy itself took the initiative and Pope Urban II urged his au-
dience to undertake another "just war" against the Muslims, in de-
fense of the Christian churches of the East.  Urban's exact words 
can no longer be recovered, but it is quite clear that either the 
pope himself, or the preachers who carried his message from 
Clermont, implanted two potent ideas in the hearts and minds of 
the knights of Europe.

   The first was that the object of the planned expedition was to 
be Jerusalem.  The potency of this image, in which the earthly 
city was subsumed under the heavenly Jerusalem, was great and, if 
later propagandists of the crusade are to be believed, Jerusalem 
was the physical and spiritual objective upon which the unsophis-
ticated apocalyptic and eschatological beliefs of the mass of par-
ticipants was focused.  But no less powerful was the combination 
of the ancient Christian tradition of pilgrimage to the Holy City 
with the more recent concept of just war against the Muslims.  The 
early crusaders described their expedition as a "pilgrimage" 
(_peregrinatio_), but unlike mere pilgrims the crusaders carried 
weapons and, in turn for their preparedness to fight, they re-
ceived special privileges from the church.

   The second and the more powerful idea which spread from 
Clermont was that the pope had offered crusaders not just the re-
mission of penance, but nothing less than the full remission of 
the temporal penalties due to sin, or - perhaps - even the full 
remission of the sins themselves.  Whatever Urban really said at 
Clermont, and whatever he actually meant by his words, there can 
be no doubt that the majority of crusaders at Clermont and 
throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed that in 
doing so they had made a contract with God and had assured them-
selves of a place in Paradise.

   This "good deal", to which repeated reference is made not just 
in crusading songs but also in the works of such distinguished 
preachers and theologians as Bernard of Clairvaux, was just part 
of the package of benefits which knightly participants hoped to 
acquire in joining the crusade.  At Clermont, Urban had promised 
that those who went on crusade would be able to keep as their own 
the lands which they conquered, and the prospect of material gain, 
with the economic and social independence which it would bring, 
was a powerful incentive in land-hungry Europe.  The lure of 
booty, of an adventure shared with comrades in arms, and of the 
mysterious Orient, with its fabulous wealth and exotic luxuries, 
all played their part amongst the heady mixture of religious and 
worldly motives which drew the knights of Christian Europe into 
battle with Islam.

   The eastern crusades never posed a military threat to Islam. The
thin line of Latin States which clung to the Syrian coast in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries constituted only a minor, local
nuisance within the Muslim world as a whole, and they were swiftly
crippled by the Muslim counter-crusade which culminated in the vi-
ctories of Saladin (1169-93).  The only lasting military gain for
Christendom was that it retained naval control of the Mediterranean
and its islands: a control that the Ottomans were to challenge but
never to win.  The principal long-term strategic consequence of the
crusades, however, derived from conflict within Christendom, between
the Latins and the Greeks, which led to the Fourth Crusade (1204)
and to the destruction of the Byzantine defences of Europe's ea-
stern border, opening the way for the Muslim conquest of the Balkans,
Greece, and Eastern Europe."



pp 180-182


"   The military successes of Western Christendom in the eleventh 
century, in Spain, in southern Italy and Sicily, and in the Near 
East, created a massive social problem for which Christianity was 
wholly unprepared.  Western Christian society suddenly had to cope 
with the presence within its frontiers, not merely of the plethora 
of Greek and Oriental Christian sects and of a greatly increased 
Jewish community, but also of many tens of thousands of Muslims.  
Whereas, as we have seen, the Islamic socio-religious system had 
inbuilt mechanisms for the accommodation of Judaism and 
Christianity, Western Christian society, since the fourth century, 
had been perfecting its own machinery for the extermination of all 
internal heterodoxy.  Only the Jewish communities of Western 
Europe had been permitted to remain, and these had been the vic-
tims of frequent persecutions, one of the most ferocious of which 
had immediately preceded the First Crusade.  The accommodation of 
the Jews in Western Christian society derives largely from the 
fact that Judaism could be located on a lower rung of the hierar-
chy of revelation which led to Christianity, in much the same way 
that Islam placed both Judaism and Christianity amongst its an-
tecedents.  In contrast, Christianity as a whole rejected Islam's 
claim to be the religion of Abraham and, instead, regarded it as a 
new and perverse mutation.  The church, secular government, and 
the society at large all reacted differently to their new neigh-
bors, but the ultimate inability of Western Christendom, as a 
whole, to incorporate its non-Catholic citizens, constitutes one 
of the most dismal failures in European history.

   The attitude of Byzantium to its Muslim subjects was wholly 
different.  Indeed, the principle of autonomous organization for 
minority communities was enshrined in Byzantine law and thence had 
been adopted by Islam.  The long experience of Byzantium in deal-
ing with its Arab neighbors, pagan, Christian, and finally Muslim, 
largely determined the nature of the relationship between Greek 
Christianity and Islam.  In the lands won back from the Arabs dur-
ing the tenth century, Byzantium induced Muslims to settle and 
successfully encouraged many to convert to Christianity.  While 
the Greek church had a specific ritual which enabled Muslims to 
reject Islam and embrace Christianity, no similar rite is known 
from the West.  In Norman Sicily, where the Greek and Latin 
churches existed side by side, only the Greek made any significant 
number of converts outside the closed and particular circle of the 
royal court.  While Muslims or Muslim converts were fully inte-
grated into Byzantine society, the non-Catholic subjects of Latin 
Christendom constituted an inferior class and were systematically 
exploited by the Catholic rulers.

   For the most part, the Western church had shown an extraordi-
nary lack of interest in the fate of Christian communities under 
Muslim rule... Moreover, when the church did take notice of 
Christian communities under Muslim rule, it showed itself pecu-
liarly insensitive to their plight.  When Gregory VII replied to 
the bishop of Carthage, who had been tortured for his refusal to 
accept uncanonical ordination by the Muslim ruler, the pope 
pointed out that the bishop would have done better had he at-
tempted to convert his persecutors and suffered martyrdom at their 
hands...

   ... Even within Latin Christendom, Muslim communities 
proved extremely reluctant to convert.  This was largely because 
Western rulers, unlike the Byzantines, did not actively encourage 
conversion... Anselm was forbidden to convert the Saracen soldiers 
of Roger of Sicily, who, presumably, was seeking to exploit reli-
gious antagonism in employing Muslim troops against his Christian 
enemies.  Again, the baptism of a Muslim slave could impose limits 
upon his master's rights and could lead to manumission...

   The attitude of Latin secular governments towards their Muslim 
subjects had encouraged social polarization by enforcing a sort of 
apartheid... Elsewhere on the island [Sicily], Muslim communities 
suffered from the increasing pressure of Latin immigration and 
colonization, combined with the advance of the hostile Latin 
church and the corresponding retreat of the comparatively sympa-
thetic Greek church... During a baronial rebellion in 1161-2, 
Latin settlers in central Sicily massacred their Muslim neighbors 
and seized their lands... a series of papal decrees steadily re-
stricted the social contacts which might legally take place be-
tween the two communities.  Pope Clement V (1305-14) even went so 
far as to decree that even the presence of Muslims on Christian 
soil amounted to "an insult to the Creator".

   In Sicily and Spain, the marginalization of Muslim subject com-
munities by the church and by secular government strengthened 
their own sense of cultural identity, and sometimes led them to 
revolt against their Christian masters... in 1221, Pope Honorius 
III gave his full support to Frederick II in his campaign "to ex-
terminate completely from the island the Muslims of Sicily"... The 
papacy had secured the assistance of secular authority in the per-
secution of heterodoxy at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and 
with the establishment of the papal inquisition by Gregory IX 
(1231).  The inquisition was not, of course, specifically aimed at 
the Muslims of Christendom but, nonetheless, it soon came to be 
used as an instrument for the persecution of Muslim apostates from 
Christianity.  There was also the tendency to identify Muslims, 
and especially Muslim rebels, with Christian heterodoxy... In 
Castile, however, King Alfonso the Wise refused to permit the in-
troduction of the inquisition, and it was not until 1478 that 
Ferdinand and Isabella allowed it into the kingdom.  Its presence 
within a kingdom did not necessarily lead to the persecution of 
Muslims: thus, Muslims in the kingdom of Aragon seem to have fared 
very much better than those in Castile.  Nonetheless, the inquisi-
tion did play a major role in the final extermination of Islam 
from both the kingdom of Sicily in the early fourteenth century 
and from Spain in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

----------------------------------

Taken from the book: "The Oxford Illustrated History of 
Christianity", edited by John McManners (prof. at Oxford).  Oxford 
U Press, Oxford, 1992.
