The crusades are Spanish Inquisition is quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Most of what passes for public knowledge about it is either misleading or just plain wrong. Misconceptions about the Crusades are Inquisition is all too common. The Crusades are Inquisition is generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam atrocities against Christian heretics 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.
So what is the truth about the Crusades Spanish Inquisition? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were Spanish Inquisition was in every way defensive. 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.
From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades Spanish Inquisition. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over...
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 and the Inquisition. 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 and Inquisition were that defense.
Bottom line... what is forgotten about the Spanish Inquisition is that following the retaking of Spain by its Catholic monarchy, the Moors (muslims) tried to remain to undercut their power. The Church was called upon to root out the imposters... the Moors who claimed to be Christian (as they are in the current European invasion)... from the Spanish government. However, what began with good intentions quickly turned political and when the Church no longer participated, the Spanish government continued for 500 years. That is the true history that so many so easily broad-brush into the canon of evils of the Catholic Church history. Thank you for the spring board into this refutation of the charge.
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