Why are we suprized??

http://www.crisismagazine.com/april2002/cover.htm

The Real History of the Crusades
By Thomas F. Madden

With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.
As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the word "crusade" in his remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn’t the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades’ brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren’t the Crusades really to blame?
Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so. In his various video performances, he never fails to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation’s editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president’s fundamental premise.
Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a "teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won’t last long, so here goes.
Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman’s famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.
So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.
During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.
* * *
Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:
How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? ...Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one’s neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.’"
The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors...unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? ...And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood...condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one’s love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself—indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:
Again I say, consider the Almighty’s goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself.... I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.
It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders’ task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.
The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews’ money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.
Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:
Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered.... Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."
Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.
It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.
By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.
* * *
But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.
When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.
Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.
The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard’s French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard’s lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.
The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further—and perhaps irrevocably—apart.
The remainder of the 13th century’s Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis’s death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.
* * *
One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled "Of the Decline of the Faith":
Our faith was strong in th’ Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
’Twould even grieve the hardest stone....
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They’re of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they’ve been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.
Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.
Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.
From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam’s rivals, into extinction.

Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works, including A Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of
Constantinople.

naasseem told us of their long term plans yesterday??

Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and ALL who Fight with her give them Strength,Sight,Wisdom, and Courage to stay the course to Victory [FREEDOM] to Defeat ALL Islamic Terrorist and ALL who Support them Open the Worlds Eyes to their Threat Amen

Posted by: Catherine at December 2, 2004 10:45 AM

Good on you Catherine. I have read that article a few months back but its good that you posted it here.

This might be slightly off topic but since we are at it on the topic of Christian History I think we might as well discuss the Inquisition.

This is important because liberals, atheists, and Islamists among others like use the Inquisiton to paint a bad picture of Christianity.

So here it is.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/madden200406181026.asp

June 18, 2004, 10:26 a.m.
The Real Inquisition
Investigating the popular myth.

By Thomas F. Madden

When the sins of the Catholic Church are recited (as they so often are) the Inquisition figures prominently. People with no interest in European history know full well that it was led by brutal and fanatical churchmen who tortured, maimed, and killed those who dared question the authority of the Church. The word "Inquisition" is part of our modern vocabulary, describing both an institution and a period of time. Having one of your hearings referred to as an "Inquisition" is not a compliment for most senators.

But in recent years the Inquisition has been subject to greater investigation. In preparation for the Jubilee in 2000, Pope John Paul II wanted to find out just what happened during the time of the Inquisition's (the institution's) existence. In 1998 the Vatican opened the archives of the Holy Office (the modern successor to the Inquisition) to a team of 30 scholars from around the world. Now at last the scholars have made their report, an 800-page tome that was unveiled at a press conference in Rome on Tuesday. Its most startling conclusion is that the Inquisition was not so bad after all. Torture was rare and only about 1 percent of those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were actually executed. As one headline read "Vatican Downsizes Inquisition."

The amazed gasps and cynical sneers that have greeted this report are just further evidence of the lamentable gulf that exists between professional historians and the general public. The truth is that, although this report makes use of previously unavailable material, it merely echoes what numerous scholars have previously learned from other European archives. Among the best recent books on the subject are Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988) and Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition (1997), but there are others. Simply put, historians have long known that the popular view of the Inquisition is a myth. So what is the truth?

To understand the Inquisition we have to remember that the Middle Ages were, well, medieval. We should not expect people in the past to view the world and their place in it the way we do today. (You try living through the Black Death and see how it changes your attitude.) For people who lived during those times, religion was not something one did just at church. It was science, philosophy, politics, identity, and hope for salvation. It was not a personal preference but an abiding and universal truth. Heresy, then, struck at the heart of that truth. It doomed the heretic, endangered those near him, and tore apart the fabric of community.

The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions. Yes, you read that correctly. Heresy was a crime against the state. Roman law in the Code of Justinian made it a capital offense. Rulers, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw them as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath. When someone was accused of heresy in the early Middle Ages, they were brought to the local lord for judgment, just as if they had stolen a pig or damaged shrubbery (really, it was a serious crime in England). Yet in contrast to those crimes, it was not so easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. For starters, one needed some basic theological training — something most medieval lords sorely lacked. The result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent assessment of the validity of the charge.

The Catholic Church's response to this problem was the Inquisition, first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184. It was born out of a need to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges. From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and the king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep who had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring them back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community.

As this new report confirms, most people accused of heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

During the 13th century the Inquisition became much more formalized in its methods and practices. Highly trained Dominicans answerable to the Pope took over the institution, creating courts that represented the best legal practices in Europe. As royal authority grew during the 14th century and beyond, control over the Inquisition slipped out of papal hands and into those of kings. Instead of one Inquisition there were now many. Despite the prospect of abuse, monarchs like those in Spain and France generally did their best to make certain that their inquisitions remained both efficient and merciful. During the 16th century, when the witch craze swept Europe, it was those areas with the best-developed inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches' sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.

Compared to other medieval secular courts, the Inquisition was positively enlightened. Why then are people in general and the press in particular so surprised to discover that the Inquisition did not barbecue people by the millions? First of all, when most people think of the Inquisition today what they are really thinking of is the Spanish Inquisition. No, not even that is correct. They are thinking of the myth of the Spanish Inquisition. Amazingly, before 1530 the Spanish Inquisition was widely hailed as the best run, most humane court in Europe. There are actually records of convicts in Spain purposely blaspheming so that they could be transferred to the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition. After 1530, however, the Spanish Inquisition began to turn its attention to the new heresy of Lutheranism. It was the Protestant Reformation and the rivalries it spawned that would give birth to the myth.

By the mid 16th century, Spain was the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe. Europe's Protestant areas, including the Netherlands, northern Germany, and England, may not have been as militarily mighty, but they did have a potent new weapon: the printing press. Although the Spanish defeated Protestants on the battlefield, they would lose the propaganda war. These were the years when the famous "Black Legend" of Spain was forged. Innumerable books and pamphlets poured from northern presses accusing the Spanish Empire of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities in the New World. Opulent Spain was cast as a place of darkness, ignorance, and evil.

Protestant propaganda that took aim at the Spanish Inquisition drew liberally from the Black Legend. But it had other sources as well. From the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants had difficulty explaining the 15-century gap between Christ's institution of His Church and the founding of the Protestant churches. Catholics naturally pointed out this problem, accusing Protestants of having created a new church separate from that of Christ. Protestants countered that their church was the one created by Christ, but that it had been forced underground by the Catholic Church. Thus, just as the Roman Empire had persecuted Christians, so its successor, the Roman Catholic Church, continued to persecute them throughout the Middle Ages. Inconveniently, there were no Protestants in the Middle Ages, yet Protestant authors found them there anyway in the guise of various medieval heretics. In this light, the medieval Inquisition was nothing more than an attempt to crush the hidden, true church. The Spanish Inquisition, still active and extremely efficient at keeping Protestants out of Spain, was for Protestant writers merely the latest version of this persecution. Mix liberally with the Black Legend and you have everything you need to produce tract after tract about the hideous and cruel Spanish Inquisition. And so they did.

In time, Spain's empire would fade away. Wealth and power shifted to the north, in particular to France and England. By the late 17th century new ideas of religious tolerance were bubbling across the coffeehouses and salons of Europe. Inquisitions, both Catholic and Protestant, withered. The Spanish stubbornly held on to theirs, and for that they were ridiculed. French philosophes like Voltaire saw in Spain a model of the Middle Ages: weak, barbaric, superstitious. The Spanish Inquisition, already established as a bloodthirsty tool of religious persecution, was derided by Enlightenment thinkers as a brutal weapon of intolerance and ignorance. A new, fictional Spanish Inquisition had been constructed, designed by the enemies of Spain and the Catholic Church.

Now a bit more of the real Inquisition has come back into view. The question remains, will anyone take notice?

— Thomas F. Madden is professor and chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author most recently of Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice and editor of the forthcoming Crusades: The Illustrated History.

Posted by: Informed Christian at December 2, 2004 11:21 AM

"..Nicolei, who points out that this practice resembles the seizure from their Christian homes, forced conversion to Islam, and military training of the janissaries of the illustrious Ottoman Empire."

Can't be right, I heard that in Islam, "there is no complusion in religion", what gives here???

Useful Idiot mode
/

Posted by: Andrew at December 2, 2004 12:04 PM

They did the same with the Mamlukes. Slavery is a prominent feature of the Islamic ideology. Slavery is as much an integral element of the Islamic ideology as it was in the Roman economy or antebellum American South. The west African slave trade in the heydays of the 17th through 19th centuries, thrived because of Muslim slaver raids into the African interior. So in a way, the Islamic ideology enabled the slave-based economy of the Confederacy to exist, thus leading to the economic, social and political chasm with the industrialized North that eventually resulted in civil war.

Posted by: Hulegu Khan at December 2, 2004 12:21 PM

EVERYONE please read the two aritcles posted above by me and Catherine on the Crusades and the Inquisition.

They mayb be a bit long but it is worth it.

As for Andrew's Post

Well Andrew

Concerning your comment here

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/004136.php#c57389

"Can't be right, I heard that in Islam, "there is no complusion in religion", what gives here???"

You either are being sarcastic or you have not herd of "abrogation" in Islam.

That no compulsion verse was "revealed" to Muhammad while he and his followers were weak in Mecca.

No compulsion then because if there was compulsion they (the muslims) were the ones who were going to be compelled.

But later on when Muslims became stong then other jihad verses were revealed such as to behead and to make war.

These later verses abrogate the earlier no compulsion verse.

So there is compulsion.

Anyone who comes around saying "no compulsion" is either don't know what they are talking about or they are doing taqiyya (religious lying).

Posted by: Informed Christian at December 2, 2004 12:26 PM

Shoot, the Palestinians have been training their children for Jihad for years -- and kidnapping isn't even necessary. They just have the crudest, most venomous incitemente on television 24/7 available for them. That and lots of comaraderie building public displays of Jew hatred. Of course suicide bombers and other miscreants have streets and parks named after them along with their murdering mugs plastered all over the place.

Well, I gotta go. I have to get to work -- I'm off to al Jazee --- er, the office....

Posted by: Kemaste at December 2, 2004 12:38 PM

Locust Plaque in Egypt, click on photo to see big Pink Locust!

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002093986_locusts18.html

Posted by: cross at December 2, 2004 12:45 PM

Check the new movie filmed in Pakistan.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/943613.cms

A little anti-islamic isn't it? Hypocrits!

Posted by: cross at December 2, 2004 1:23 PM

Some more copy & paste fun with Locusts

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20041129/capt.mad80611291845.spain_locusts_mad806.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20041129/i/r1008879869.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20041129/i/r1943751692.jpg

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20041127/capt.jj80211271608.spain_locusts_jj802.jpg

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20041117/i/r2753479869.jpg (Egypt pyramids in back)

Posted by: cross at December 2, 2004 1:51 PM

Living a lie dulls and clutters the brain. Didn't Hitler try just about the same method? Maybe the jihadis need a lesson in history.

Posted by: flameon1 at December 2, 2004 5:38 PM

Cross

The movie for which you provide the link is an Indian movie. You do know the difference between India and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim, dont you?

The Pakistani movie is on the next page. It is about the partition of India and actually won an international award I believe.

Posted by: Kaffir Boy at December 2, 2004 5:44 PM

Thanks for pointing that out. Just when you think you've stumbled onto to islamic porn, o well. Do you know where one can find it, KaffirB?

Posted by: cross at December 2, 2004 8:00 PM

Informed Christian, Catherine:

Thanks for the Madden articles. I'm also very much aware that the numbers of victims of Crusades and Inquisitions are fewer than those of scientific positivism when it's in a hurry (see the unlamented 20th century).

However, one reason Protestantism contributed to the Black Myth of the Inquisition was the Dominican Inquisitors who followed the Duke of Alva's army in the Netherlands. These were a pitiful bunch who hanged whole villages of Anabaptist-oriented Dutch Protestants, driving the survivors to a Calvinism that allowed them to fight back.

As for the jihadi medressehs, they are similar to the cadre and guerrilla schools Communist parties ran in a lot of the world during between the world wars, and later (where they were fighting wars of national self-enslavement). However, the Communists had a more sympathetic media to report on them.

Posted by: Kepha1 at December 3, 2004 4:45 AM

Cross

I dont know much about Islamic porn, but due to societal taboos and restrictions the fact of the matter is that there is not a thriving industry of porn production in Islamic societies.

However, the consumpton of porn amongst internet savvy Muslims is extraordinarily high. This becomes a metaphor for the Islamic worldview and hypocrisy of their culture...denouncing the West for its immorality whilst slavishly lusting after the freedoms and the benefits of liberalism that it brings. You can see the same pattern in the mindset that says, we can prosletyse in your nations, but you cannot prosletyse in ours, we can struggle to make infidelas leave their religions but the death sentence for those who leave ours; and so on and so on. The hypocrisy and menadcity is colossal.

Anyway, of course, much of the Jihad rage is the rage of neutered men, it is a sexual rage, and the sexual repression of Muslims is an eternal source of fascination and in its most blustering aspect, amusement. Here is an extremely interesting article by Salman Rushdie about pornography and its relation to our civilisation and Islamic societies.

{{Salman Rushdie claims that pornography is vital to freedom and supports his argument with statistics about the volume of porn traffic on the Internet in Pakistan.

The controversial author argues that a free and civilised society should be judged by its willingness to accept pornography.}}

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040809/asp/nation/story_3601148.asp

Posted by: Kaffir Boy at December 3, 2004 6:33 AM

AND DA BEAT GOES ON

Getting to the Root of Islamic Radicalism in Indonesia
By Leonard C. Sebastian
Dr Leonard C. Sebastian is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.
NOW that the Asean-United States joint declaration to combat international terrorism signed in Brunei last week is formalised, the spotlight will once again focus on Indonesia's position in the war on terror.

Indonesia's neighbours will no doubt watch events unfold there closely and hope that Jakarta placates their anxiety over the presence of terrorist cells in the sprawling archipelago.

The arrest of two terrorist suspects and the revelation on July 17 by Police General Da'i Bachtiar that a terrorist network, identified as Nusantara, had been located are encouraging signs.

Since these allegations surfaced, Muslim leaders have reacted defensively by reiterating the message that Indonesia's mainstream moderate Muslim community is not interested, nor likely to be interested, in anything remotely connected with terrorism.

Stressing that tolerance and freedom of expression are the offshoots of the reformasi experience, they point out that unorthodox Islam should not be equated automatically with terrorism.

However, the empirical evidence pointing to the rise of Islamic radicalism is troubling.

What explains the rise of formalistic Islamic groups in Indonesia?

Is it purely a phenomenon brought about by the opening up of a society constrained and ossified for decades under the grip of New Order authoritarianism?

Perhaps the best place to start is an assessment of the Islamic education system.

There are two broad groups of madrasahs (Islamic schools) in Indonesia where students are trained to live according to the strictures of Islam.

There are the madrasahs run by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which adopt a liberal education curriculum, and the private madrasahs under the tutelage of tolerant Islamic leaders.

Then, there is a second type of madrasah, privately run, that adopts a more radical agenda propagated by Islamic clerics with radical inclinations.

In the case of Indonesia, there are more private madrasahs than state-supported institutions.

Data from the Ministry of Religious Affairs' Office of Education Management Information System (Emis) support this evidence.

According to Emis data, there are 37,362 madrasahs in Indonesia, of which only 3,226 (8.6 per cent) are run by the state.

Private organisations control the remaining 34,136 (91.4 per cent).

Interestingly, statistics highlight that for the academic year 2001-02, there are 5.6 million students studying in madrasahs, of which one million (19 per cent) are enrolled in madrasahs controlled by y the state, while the remaining 4.6 million are enrolled in private madrasahs.

The significance of such statistics should not be underestimated, particularly when the educational agendas of the private madrasahs vary according to the agenda of individual clerics.

Religious education in a madrasah is of the utmost importance. Emphasis is placed on the afterlife, not life in a 'perverse and decadent world'.

Science and technology education is alien to the traditional madrasah curriculum as conservative clerics feel that science will reduce the students' belief in God and the religious norms governing their lives.

While attempts have been made to rectify this situation, such efforts have been partially successful in madrasahs run by the state and by liberal-minded clerics.

Doctrinal opposition notwithstanding, the reality is that many madrasahs are hampered by the lack of qualified teachers in English, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, leaving many students disadvantaged.

Students remain unbalanced in their attitude towards life.

To their detriment, many remain illiterate or semi-literate in matters pertaining to science and technology.

Without a balanced curriculum, the Indonesian madrasah becomes an environment where implanting beliefs is more important than the instilling of factual knowledge, and where deductive thinking is nurtured to the detriment of inductive thinking.

Inadvertently, such a condition leaves students studying in Indonesian madrasahs vulnerable to religious conservatism and fanaticism.

From this type of mindset, the leap to radicalism is but a small step. Yet, the process is not inevitable.

It requires further factors for radical - or worse, militant - movements to become attractive to these students.

These include economic hardship and the sense of being politically oppressed - factors that are being manipulated by conservative clerics and religious movements that breed on economic discontent.

One such group is the Hizbut Tahrir with its plans to push for the implementation of Islamic law in 21 cities across the country.

Ascribing to utopian sentiments, the leaders of Hizbut Tahrir feel that Islamic law alone offers a solution to Ascribing to utopian sentiments, the leaders of Hizbut Tahrir feel that Islamic law alone offers a solution to Indonesia's multi-dimensional crisis.

Many madrasah students are also attracted to the Partai Keadilan (PK) whose support generally comes from devout urban Muslims.

In one of its strongholds in the Bangka area of South Jakarta, almost every female from toddling age to the elderly wear the jilbab, or Islamic headscarf. PK is now attempting to extend its reach to the rural heartland of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in East Java.

In rural West Java, villages in areas such as Garut were the strongholds of the Darul Islam (the movement that fought for an Islamic state in the 1950s) and now have become important recruiting grounds for the Laskar Jihad.

A recent edition of Tempo magazine investigated the Al-Zaytun madrasah at Indramayu and alleged that it had links to the Indonesian Islamic State, Regional Command 9.

Tempo went on to add that this secret movement involves people from all walks of life who are initiated into the group on the understanding that they will take part in Quran recitations, accept the idea of an Islamic state and disavow the Republic of Indonesia.

The magazine estimates the strength of the community at 100,000 people.

Many former madrasah students have also joined the Wahabi-inspired Tarbiyah movement, which has also attracted a following among students in several prestigious state universities, such as the Bandung Institute of Technology.

Their goal is also to establish an Islamic state.

The rise in Islamic radicalism and militancy in Indonesia is worrying. The appeal of such 'back to basics' Islamic groupings may suggest that within the Indonesian Islamic community exists grave doubts about the value of existing organisations and movements.

The recent controversial fatwa or religious ruling issued by NU clerics in support of suicide bombings - though disavowed by the NU leadership - is a symptom of the confusion that reigns on where established groups like the NU should stand on the link between Islam and terrorism.

This article was first published in The Straits Times

Posted by: shiva at December 3, 2004 6:37 AM

Kaffir Boy he smart. He know big words. He know all about sexual rage in repressed muslim. When I get smart I want to be just like Kaffir Boy. Thank you Kaffir Boy.

I'm just teasing ya KB. Your repsonse about muslims and porn may have some valid points rooted in fact.

Posted by: cross at December 3, 2004 1:00 PM