Posted on 09/25/2020 7:53:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Today in history, on September 25, 1396, a major military encounter with Islam that demonstrated just how disunited Christendom had become took place.
In 1394, the Ottoman Turks "were doing great injury to Hungary," causing its young king, Sigismund, to appeal "to Christendom for assistance." That appeal came at an opportune time. The hitherto quarreling English and French had made peace in 1389, and a "crusade against the Turks furnished a desirable outlet for the noble instincts of the Western chivalry."
Matters were further settled once "men of all kinds" pilgrims, laymen, and clerics returning from the Holy Land and Egypt told of "the miseries and persecutions to which their Eastern co-religionists were subjected by the 'unbelieving Saracen,' and ... appeal[ed] with all the vehemence of piety for a crusade to recover the native land of Christ."
Western knights everywhere mostly French but also English, Scottish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Polish took up the cross in one of the largest multiethnic crusades against Islam. Their ultimate goal, according to a contemporary, was "to [re-]conquer the whole of Turkey and to march into the Empire of Persia ... the kingdoms of Syria and the Holy Land." A vast host of reportedly some one hundred thousand crusaders "the largest Christian force that had ever confronted the infidel" reached Buda in July 1396.
But numbers could not mask the disunity, mutual suspicions, and internal rancor that were evident from the start. Not only did the French spurn Sigismund's suggestion that they take a defensive posture and forgo the offensive, but when the king suggested that his Hungarians were more experienced with and thus should lead the attack on the Turks, the Frenchmen accused him of trying to take away their glory
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The Hungarians arrived only to witness the grisly spectacle of a vast Muslim army surrounding and massacring their Western coreligionists. Sigismund boarded and escaped on a ship in the Danube. “If they had only believed me,” the young king (who lived on to become Holy Roman Emperor thirty-seven years later) later reminisced; “we had forces in plenty to fight our enemies.” He was not alone in blaming Western impetuosity: “If they had only waited for the king of Hungary,” wrote Froissart, a contemporary Frenchman, “they could have done great deeds; but pride was their downfall.”
Religion of Peace!
“On the morning after the battle the sultan sat and watched as the surviving crusaders were led naked before him, their hands tied behind them. He offered them the choice of conversion to Islam or, if they refused, immediate decapitation. Few would renounce their faith, and the growing piles of heads were arranged in tall cairns before the sultan, and the corpses dragged away. By the end of a long day, more than 3,000 crusaders had been butchered, and some accounts said as many as 10,000.”
The Christian army consisted of heterogeneous masses, which represented the various and conflicting aspirations of their countries and nascent spirit of nationality therein. The sense of unity and universality that had been the foundation of Empire and Papacy in the early Middle Ages was passing away, and in its place the separatism of independent kingdoms was arising. This new separatist tendency demonstrated itself amidst the crusading medley before Nicopolis. There was no unity of purpose, no unity of arms and companies, and no common tactics in the camp of the Christians. The Turkish army was, on the other hand, a perfect example of the most stringent discipline, of a rigorous and even fanatic unity of purpose, of the concentration of supreme tactical power in the sole person of the Sultan. For an increasingly isolated Constantinople, such developments boded ill.
The former sounds much like what the US is being reduced to in its post-Christian liberal declension vs China.
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