phatcatholic Posted June 19, 2005 Share Posted June 19, 2005 THE CRUSADES [url="ftp://members.aol.com/kcc1tim/Crusades.txt"]ftp://members.aol.com/kcc1tim/Crusades.txt[/url] Since the crucifixion of our Lord, the Apostles passed on to the Early Fathers, the Faith. The later Emperors and Monarchs accepted the Creed: their subjects followed them. The Roman Empire was converted. It never fell. This Empire stretched from the Scottish mountains to the Euphrates River, from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara Desert. All who lived in the great mass of land were gradually converted to the New Universal Religion, the Catholic Faith. Unfortunately, a vast creative change came too late to save altogether a society perishing of pagan despair in its old age. One of the first assaults was that of the Arian Heresy, later followed by Islam. There have been many heresies but the Mohammedan is the one we will be referring to in this class. Mohammed died in 634 AD. Not long after his death, his fellow Arab followers broke forth and swarmed northward converting people wherever they passed. Those who joined Islam, whether they were slaves or debtors, recovered their freedom and could hence forward boast of their independence of the imperial government. They were more enthusiastic of their new creed because it seemed to them so simple of comprehension after the Christian affair of sacrifice and renunciation and difficult strain: its hierarchy of priests and it mysteries. The new enthusiasm swept through the oriental world preaching one God. It revered Jesus Christ as the greatest of the prophets, but rejected the complication of the Trinity. It revered our Lady highly, far the highest among women, but not the Mother of God. It offered comprehensive worship to the Deity, but swept away the Mass with its Communion and all the rest. It had hardly a ritual; only prayers that all could follow, and a social system which men could easily adopt and find just. Within a century, Islam had conquered, garrisoned, and governed Syria, North Africa, and much of Spain. They thrust into France for a while. They extended themselves eastward, seizing the very fertile plain and wealth of Mesopotamia, flooding with its religion and arms, Persia and the tangle of mountains on the borders of India and up into the steppes of Asia; it was here that Islam, this new power and expansion, did its most fatal thing: it introduced the Mongol: it opened the gates to a racial force of murder and destruction. The Moslems, Mongols, Turks, Islam, Mohammedans , took their destructive wave to combat Christendom in the east. These savage horseman battled for Byzantium. These Mongols became fanatic Mohammedans, and through their military power what had already begun to be the decline of Mohammedanism recovered. The Turks were possessed with a fierce lust for cruelty and mere destruction. They burnt and unroofed and massacred everywhere in their campaigns. This successive force continued by their perpetual intermarriage. Their function was the function of the Destroyer, and from the first of the great names among them, Attila the Hun, to the very last modern massacre of the remaining Christians in Asia Minor, they have brought with them nothing constructive, only death. I will now quote the great Hillaire Belloc in his book The Crusades: "Of these successive Turkish waves, of this Mongol abomination to which the original Arabian Islam had opened the door, the one which here concerns us was the Seljuk, for this it was, coming forward out of Asia in the eleventh century, which almost overwhelmed what was left of the Christian mast and which provoked the Crusade. The Seljuk clan took their name from a chieftain three generations back from the moment of which I am here writing, the last part of the eleventh century. He had extended his power as the leader of all those bands one after the other until starting from the steppes around the Ural Inland Sea, he had built up a sort of loose empire based on nothing more than the terror of small but fierce garrisons, the commanders of which soon quarreled among themselves but, in coalition, could bring forward formidable armies. Being the latest of the Mongol hordes, the Seljuk Turks had least benefited by intermixture with more civilized people. They were still dwarfish, slant-eyed Tartars, crouched on the saddle of their small, swift horses, riding with the absurd short stirrup of nomads, kneeling over the horse's neck, as do (or did) certain jockeys of our own day. Their tactics were simple. Thousands of them came on, not in a close- line, but in a sort of thin extended flock, galloping closely at top speed, shooting with their short bows from the saddle then wheeling back again, while a second relay did just the same thing and then a third. Only when the enemy thus attacked was thoroughly shaken would they all come forward and charge with the curved, thin-bladed, very sharp sword, which, with their light bows, was their chief weapon. Mounted, mobile, and not dependent upon exact dressing, they would in this final charge work to envelope either wing of the strict, dense Byzantine line. The Byzantine Christians regrouped and recruited an army, (about 60,000 men). They tried to counter-attack the Turks. They were successful in reaching halfway down the Syrian coast. There was a moment when it threatened Mesopotamia. The fighting and destruction continued. The Mongols over- ran, devastated, and destroyed all the land of Asia which had been the solid foundation of the Byzantine power; the reservoir of Byzantine landed wealth, the nursery of our religion. The victorious Turks pillaged and killed wholesale. They overthrew permanent buildings wherever they went. Including the desecrating of the Sepulcher of the Lord. They so cut at the roots of all civilization that it withered before them. Belloc: "In such strongholds as remained, Turkish garrisons and governors established themselves. The menace came to the gates of Manzikert, the shock that launched the Crusade, would have destroyed us-but for the Crusade. Constantinople would have fallen; all Europe would have been involved-but under that stimulus the West moved. Gaul and the Rhine, Normandy, Flanders, Aquitaine, Lorraine, armed, faced east, and west forward. The issue was the life or death of Christendom." The occasion which launched the War of the Cross, the Crusade, was the action of one man. This man was Pope Urban II, the successor of Pope St. Gregory VII (Hildebrand) the Greatest of the Popes. He so willed and acted to continue the work of Pope Gregory the Great he had taken the title of Urban II, on November 8, 1095, the center of the Gauls at Clermont in Auvergne, he gave the word. The pagan assault on Christendom had been beaten off for nearly a hundred years. The Church had survived many trials and tribulations, heresies and heretics. Christendom has seen many of its Saints martyred for the Faith. Now, members of the Mystical Body of Christ were being slaughtered by perhaps the greatest of all heresies, the Muslims. Belloc: "St. Gregory VII, the greatest or the popes, he who had in the midst of the century reorganized and restored the Church, had, in the midst of his mortal anxieties and strains, dreamt of a universal Christian tide swelling through the Levant and rescuing the Sacred Land. But the moment had not come. It came now ten years after Gregory's death. But the man who continued Gregory's work and confirmed the strength of the Papacy as Gregory had confirmed the structure of the Church. Urban II, ruled by no accident but with deliberate choice of generalship. He gave the call. The Council had been summoned to Clermont to deal with very different things, largely with the condemnation of the King of France and his irregular divorce, more with the new details of ecclesiastical discipline. The Abbots and Bishops met there on November 18, 1095. For the first nine days not a word was heard of any matters other than those which the Great Assembly had been convened to debate. The tenth day, of set purpose, Urban II rose to preach, not to his fellows of the hierarchy, but to the huge crowds of knights, adventurers and merchants, pilgrims and wandering folk, who filled the streets of Clermont. The story of what followed is famous. The loud cries of, "God wills it!" "Dieux le volt!" were taken up, repeated, swelling from the multitude below, roused by that impassioned oratory from the man who was the chief of Christian men. It was this speech which made, in a moment the Crusade. It made not the material but it set the material afire; and the fire was lit deliberately by Pope Urban II. It spread throughout the west, and the air was filled with the name "Jerusalem." Urban, having roused the world, continued: a month after second Council at Limoges which filled Clermont he called a the last days of the year-up to December 31, 1095, and thence onwards all winter, spring and summer he spoke in the west of France and the south, from Carcassonne to Angers, from Tours to Bordeaux: one man doing one man’s work." THE PEASANTS CRUSADE The speech at Clermont rallied many zealous and confused mobsters without any framework of military experience. This was led by Peter the Hermit, the Picard, of Walter the German Knight, or Leisingen, of the Tubingen lord, and of Volkmar. These incompetent robbers went off half cocked and caused great havoc for the regular Crusaders. They pillaged town after town and killed many Jews. They were wiped out by the outraged peasants of the Danube whom they despoiled, or at the hands of the Turks in the salty dust of Anatolia. In the military story of the Crusades they count for nothing. THE CRUSADING ARMIES After the departure of those wastrels, the true army of the Crusades was organized. It was led by Godfrey, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who took on a second name from his long Ridge Castle of Bouillon, in the Ardennes. He set out with his ordered host, and with that the Crusade begins. The feudal officers (using modern terms) each had their own well armed knights and foot soldiers. The forces of these men were made up of two sorts, the second much larger than the first. The first sort of formed one coherent body of a few hundred strictly attached to, partly paid by, one wealthy chieftain. The second was a crowd of feudal nobles, some with half a dozen dependents, some with score. These dependents would not be family members, rather vassals, serfs, mercenaries, etc. These men were bound in honor to his overlord. THE CHIEFTAINS 1. GODFREY of BOUILLON-Duke of Lorraine led the Walloons an army of 80,0O0 men. 2. BOHEMOND-Antioch was to be his prize. He was a man or great physical strength, famous for his: fluent French eloquence, and careful political talent. The led the Italian army. S. BALDWIN of FLANDERS-the younger brother of Godfrey, would eventually end up with Edessa as his booty and Jerusalem as his Kingdom. 4. ROBERT OF NORMANDY-William the Conqueror's son, also the man of greatest power. At his side was his brother-in-law Stephen of Blois. Led the Normans. 5. TANCRED-a manorial lord of Hauteville; the nephew of Behemond. 6. RAYMOND IV COUNT OF TOULOUSE-Also called St. Gilles-was the only chieftain not to swear loyalty to Alexis, the Emperor of Constantinople. He led the southern French army. 7,000 knights, 30-40,000 men in all. He Financed a large portion of the crusade. THE ADVANCE The capturing of Constantinople was the first thing the Crusaders did. From there they marched to Nicea. A walled city with a large Christian population, however garrisoned by the Seljuk Turks. It took six weeks but the Turks surrendered. In June 1097, Nicea was liberated from the Turks. The Norman Knights led by Robert of Normandy were the heroes of this battle. The next stop was a three days march to the city of Dorylaeuum. This was to be the life or death test of the Dorylaeum Crusades. Our Crusaders came within an ace of extinction, a thousand miles short of their objective (Jerusalem). The commander of the Turks, Oilij Arslan, the Seljuk, during the siege gathered up every available man he could to destroy the Western effort. Belloc: "The western men, our people, had not yet met the light-armed, swift riding Nomadic hordes from the steppes of Asia which had so recently all but destroyed Eastern Christendom. They had no experience of the Turkish tactic, which had destroyed the Emperor's army those few years before at Manzikert. The Norman vanguard was taken completely by surprise, and outnumbered altogether by the swarms of mounted Turkish archers. These came in by every issue of that hill country in clouds upon the plain, dust rising from their gallopade over the far left and north and round all the half circle and more to the right and south of the Christians who suffered a complete surprise. They were very nearly surrounded at once by this mass of horse dashing forward in small groups, shooting from the saddle with their light short bows, killing the horses of the heavy armed knights, and then galloping back at top speed to be replaced by fresh levies, one after the other; each wave harassing and weakening more and more the heavy western figures in their mail, under the fierce heat of the rising morning. The shock was taken before nine, it was pressed till far beyond noon, and the knights attempting to charge again and again could never get home against that hail of arrows and perpetually repeated lightening advances and retirement. The Christians: fell back between the repeated charges, still seeking to avoid the envelopment that seemed inevitable and beginning to bunch and lose formation. Bohemond in the morning, at the first sight at the great concentration appearing before him, had sent urgent messengers to bring up the rear guard, with Godfrey and Raymond from the second column seven miles to the south; they came up only just in time. Of those Godfrey of Bouillon was on the field first, with fifty knights about him. The rest of his command -the mounted part of it- coming on at a gallop. Immediately afterwards, Hugh with the rear guard and the men of Provence came up in support. But it was almost mid afternoon, between two and three o-clock, before the reinforcements - far superior in number to the original forward column- could make its weight felt; and already that advanced body had been pushed back against its baggage train and was defending itself as: best as it could, partly covered by the vehicles. Turks were already outflanking either end of the original. The Christian line, now hardly a line any longer but rather a scrum; they would have surrounded and annihilated it in another hour or less, when the large second echelon began to arrive. These sufficed to turn the tide of the battle. It would seem from the confused accounts which remain to us that they succeeded in doing so by extending rapidly upon the left wing of the enemy until the Turks themselves were exhausted by their six- hour fight. At last, as more and more of the southern French came up the Turks were threatened with envelopment in their turn, and gave way. Once they had given way, it was a rout. The immense concentration of the Turkish forces (which their enemies estimated as a force as large as all the Crusaders and pilgrims together) turned into isolated mounted bands flying eastward and northward through the hills. Though there was no destruction of the enemy force, Dorylaeum, as the sun sank somewhat lower in the bronze and dusty sky of that broiling afternoon, had proved to be a complete decision. The Seljuk Turks could attack no more: the long way to Syria was open, and, what was more, the west had proved, after so many generations, its superiority over the East. Loosely knit as these Crusading bands were, they had discovered sufficient energy in action to throw back the Seljuk menace to Christendom; they proved themselves capable of advance against Mohammedan armies in an ordeal to which the two religions had each summoned all the force at its disposal. The victory was won. After two days or rest, on the fourth of July, the Crusaders set out again on their March. They reached the Iconium Plain, where they received good counsel from the Christians there and were told somewhat of the lands and deserts that were to come. They were urged to take provisions of water, for they had several days of desert marching in front of them. It took our Crusaders 30 days to cover a little more than 120 miles. They reached Heraclea, of which the Turks have made "Eregli." The Turks made one last effort to stand at Heraclea. After the victory, the Crusading March took on another character. It had been wholly a religious thing. Then politics came into play. The chiefs of the Crusade, the great territorial princes, Tancred, the Count of Toulouse, Baldwin of Flanders, Godfrey's younger brother, all of them except Godfrey himself, remembered their private fortunes alongside with the recovery and holding of the Holy Sepulcher. They began to think of the crusade as a feudal thing. They began to think of settlement, of revenue, of taking root after feudal fashion in the soil. This is why the Crusades eventually failed. The first Crusade, the one we have been talking about and will finish talking about before the class is over was a huge success. If it were not for this Crusade, the world we know today would not be the one we now know. It is possible to assume that perhaps the world would have ended long before anyone now living on this Earth was ever born; had Islam totally annihilated Christendom. Jesus did say that He would be with us until the end of time. My reasoning is, there is nothing without the Church The next large city the Crusaders were to conquer is Antioch. This was of extreme importance. They passed right by the City of Aleppo. By ignoring this city, Islam was able to communicate and send troops and arms to their people. If we had taken Aleppo, Islam would be dead today. We would read about it as we do the Arain Heresy. Here is where the politics comes into play. The city wasn't valuable enough for a feudal state. Feudalism bred kingship everywhere as a corrective to itself and had the power to do so through the traditions inherited from the Roman Empire. To put it simply, Aleppo did not have the means to make money. Had we taken and garrisoned this city, our history would be quite different. After the success of Antioch, the Crusaders marched south to liberate the Syrian city of Damascus. Our Crusaders marched over the hot sands of the desert, through the Rift valley the highland of the desert. The Crusaders came within reach of Mecca, the Muslim holy land. They had an opportunity to rock their world, but they proceeded on to Jerusalem to regain the Sepulcher of the Lord. Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders and held for over ninety years. This is proof the first Crusade was successful. THE SURRENDER TO SALADIN Edessa was recaptured by the Turks in the spring of 1146. Pope Eugenius III called for the Second Crusade. St. Bernard (a Doctor of the Church), also preached the Crusade, but doubted whether it would work. The second Crusade started too late, at the end of May 1147. Damascus fell into the hands of Islam. The whole blundering affair took just four short days for our Crusaders to get whipped. They pitched their tents July 28; by August 1147, what was left of them limped home. The Muslim counter-attack was alive and well. None of this would have ever happened if our First Crusaders had taken garrisoned the city of Aleppo. This truly came back to haunt Christendom for all time. One of the last battles was that of Hattin. There Saladin, tugging his beard, infatuated with what he thought was "doing God's will," that is wipe out Christendom from the face of the Earth, attacked. He slaughtered and took prisoners by the scores. He said, "Kings don't kill Kings." But he had murder in his heart. He murdered every Templar and Hospitaller Knight. This ended the day at Hattin, and with it the glory of the Crusade. The True Cross was gone. Later, men saw that fragmentary beam of wood dragged at a horse's tail through the streets of Damascus. I will quote the great Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc, one last time from his book the Crusades: "The task remained to rid the Holy Land of Christ, of Christ as God, and our worship of all that for which we had gone out into Asia and to the rescue of the Sepulcher. All the ports went, one after the other, for their garrisons had been reduced to next to nothingness: in the effort to gather every available man for the last struggle with Saladin: all save Tyre. King Saladin rode into Acre to desecrate the Church there which had replaced the former mosque. He sent his horsemen to hold Nazareth, others swept down the seacoast through Haifa onwards:, and Saladin's subjects from Egypt came up to join them taking Jaffia by storm. Bayrouth went, and Sidon, Ramleh and Darum, and then with the Egyptians helping, Ascalon was entered two months after the victory. There remained Jerusalem. Jerusalem without the means: for defense, yet attempted defense. It hold out for a week, with the Sacrament borne in procession through the streets and desperate men, newly levied, trying to hold a great breach which had been made in the walls. It was not till the twelfth day after the first appearance of Saladin's army before the Holy City that surrender was admitted. All the ransom and toll that could be taken was taken, save that the very poor were not all enslaved. The liquidating of the victims: and the gathering of that spoil took up the whole month and more, and by the early day of October the thing was over. Nor has Jerusalem since returned to Christian men, though today after a fashion their descendants hold it precariously in fee-but not for themselves." CONCLUSION The Third Crusade had been called. It proved to be the confirmation of failure. King Richard "the Lion-Heart" Plantagenet of England was to be Jerusalem's reinforcement. He had the Holy City in view, but knew he was: out manned, out numbered, out armed. He did the only intelligent thing he could do; that was; to save him and his men, he turned back. He signed a three year’s truce with Saladin. This is the same King Richard in the story of Robin Hood. And so the great Crusades were over. There have been other attempts: at defeating the Muslims, and these attempts have also been called "Crusades." I realize that in an hour covering eight short pages, you could not possibly begin to know all that has happened. I thought it best to highlight some of the particulars to give you an overview as to what happened. We Catholics can be very proud of the Crusades. Despite their worldliness and desire to capitalize on the efforts they were successful in maintaining Christendom through the ages. I think the most important thing for you and I to fully comprehend here is that the Crusades were necessary. The murdering Turks had to be stopped. Reclaiming the Holy Cross and the Sepulcher of the Lord were of extreme importance to the Church and the Crusaders. It all sounds so terrible that by passing by one little city, Aleppo, everything was lost. Well, not everything. Because of the efforts put forth by the First Crusade you and I still take part in the Mass, sacrificed daily by priests who are part of the True Church that Jesus Christ our Lord founded, the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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