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Interesting Info on the Crusades


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THE CRUSADES
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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.

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