The moors, the huns the 400, 300, 200 BC.
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I thought they were the "Moops"... |
Posted on 11/07/2005 7:55:59 AM PST by Wuli
“It will help people to understand why the world is the way it is today,” said Richard Bradley, founder of Lion Television, which has produced The Crusades: Crescent and The Cross — a documentary series that will premiere in 130 countries on The History channel on November 13 and 14.
The Crusades: Crescent and The Cross unfurls two centuries of war about two cultures impassioned by belief. The series will be an epic of human drama against the back drop of the holy.
It was a collision of two great faiths and of two of the the world’s most enduring and powerful religions. These religions fought for nearly two decades seeking control over what each claimed as the rightful holy lands of their people.
"Galvanized by People Urban II, waves of Christian warriors fought their way from Europe to the Holy Land intent on wrestling it away from Arab occupiers."
"What did drive the thousands of crusaders to travel from Western Europe to Central Asia in the quest of unknown? Dr Jonathan Phillips, a senior lecturer at University of London and one of the world’s leading authorities on many aspects of crusading history, said, “They must be brave or mad or highly motivated or greedy or may be all of them."
The above paragraphs highlight the constant historical revisionism of most discussion of the crusades. The story always opens just before the crusades begin. It takes that snap shot in time as though you can dismiss everything that set the stage for the crusades and then judge what happened next.
And what happened before the crusades?
A dominant Christianity with a minority of Jews and various pagan sects held eastern and western branches of the former Roman empire, stretching all of western Europe, most of central Europe, through most of Anatolia (now Turkey), down through Damascus, Jerusalem and across norther Africa in a polyglot and cosmopolitan mixture of culutures and ethnic groups, for over 500 years.
Beginning almost immediately upon the death of Mohammed, the entire known world of "western civilization" is besieged, by Arab armies marching on a jihad to conquer the known world.
In 632 A.D. Mohammed dies. Within a year Arab Muslims are attacking Persia (Iran) and Muslim armies have taken the cities of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria.
By 644 A.D. Muslim armies conquer the eastern edge of the Christian Byzantine Empire - from the Levant (Lebanon) down through Syria and Palestine, and solidified their control across all of Mesopotamia (Iraq), the southern half of Persia as far as the Zagros Mountains, south to the Persian Gulf, across all of Arabia and north Africa as far west as Libya. Although it took a decade, it was a blitzkrieg by conventional history of the day.
By 661 A.D. the Islamic Jihad has spread Muslim control north from the Levant to the Taurus Mountains in Armenia, and east throughout all of Persia to the Caucasus across the southern rim of the Caspian Sea, and as far as the western edge of India.
By 750 A.D. the Muslim armies control what they had not previously held across all of northern Africa and they have conquered and hold the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal.
In the short span of 120 years, the Muslim Jihad has carved an Empire by the sword out of the Eastern reaches of Christendom, across the entire Middle East, throughout Arabia and north Africa and up into western Christian lands in Iberia.
It is nearly two hundred years later, 931 A.D. before armies of the Christian Byzantine Empire begin the re-conquest of Syria and twenty years more before John I Tzimisces retakes Syria and Palestine, restoring part of the eastern limits of Christian control, but only briefly. Meanwhile, the Byzantines have been defending their northern borders from various central European tribes and ethnic groups while also in the midst of disputes with the Holy Roman Empire in Rome.
By 1055 A.D., Muslims under the Seljuk Turks retake Syria and Palestine and by 1071 A.D., they capture all of Asia Minor from the Christian Byzantines.
By the time of the crusades, after nearly three hundred years of constant warfare, Muslims succeeded in conquering most all of the eastern half of the Byzantine Empire (Orthodox Christianity) and were threatening the western Empire (Holy Roman Empire) of central and western Europe as well.
As history shows, both past and present, the Crusades did not begin, and were not the cause of the clash of cultures, between Islam and the west, nor did they end it.
Yet, the frequent telling of the story of the crusades never begins with the Arab military conquest of Christian dominated lands. The story always begins after those facts, when, after hundreds of years of the advance of militant Islam, the west begins to respond in a real concerted way.
Oh, the west was supposed to "turn the other cheek" some more, is what the historians want to say.
It is the worst and most long running and prevalent case of historical denial that western intellectuals have ever committed against their own culture.
They also deny that what the Islam armies and scholars brought to Europe came from Europe - the revival of Greek and Persian science that Arab scholars rediscovered. Yet, it was an intellectual revival that was dying again within Islam by the time of the crusades.
While much is made of the "religious" sentiments of the Crusaders, religion does not comprise the central differences. The central differences are from the well spring of very different values and value systems which time and history brought to dominate the two cultures. And, Islam is antithetical to core western values, no less today that it was in 1096.
The clash of western civilization and Islam did not begin with the crusades and any attempt to accurately depict that clash by beginning with the crusades fails, in all historical respects. The affect is no less than the presentation of a lie, for by the year 1096 over half the story has been left out.
Great! It is a series? I watched about one minute of it. Plot summary: BAD BAD Christians kill everyone who is not an infidel. See, the Christians are even worse."
I had the history channel on in background all day and you had to watch all day to put 1,000's of years of history together.
The moors, the huns the 400, 300, 200 BC. It was a pretty amazing day watching it off and on and you really needed it before the Cross/Crusades came on.
We only rec'd one hour here - more tonight.
Thank you for the post. I hope you have advised the otherwise fairly good History Channel people.
That show was crap last night. It told only of the Christians and the deceit that was used to lure them into battle. There was precious little about the Muslims at all. They sounded like the perfect little people.
This is just another Hit Piece on the USA guised as history.
You are absolutely correct, but it's worth noting that the Islamic conquest would never have succeeded were it not for the Byzantine Orthodox imperial persecution of the Monophysite Christian heretics..
Right on! Outside of the Arabian Peninsula (and not all of that in the beginning), every scrap of "muslim" territory was gained at the point of the sword. To say otherwise is to accept the Islamofascist view that "Islam" predates both Judaism and Christianity, and that the entire world was "Islamic" before it was perverted by Jews and Christians.
How does something that happened well before the advent of the USA become a hit piece on the USA?
Christianity in Europe during the Crusades does not equal the USA.
The moors, the huns the 400, 300, 200 BC.
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I thought they were the "Moops"... |
"They also deny that what the Islam armies and scholars brought to Europe came from Europe - the revival of Greek and Persian science that Arab scholars rediscovered."
How could Persian "science" have originally come from Europe?
via Alexander the Great, I presume
The History Channel's "The Crusades" special should have at least included one
caption...
"We would have produced a special about how the Muslims took over the
Middle East and parts of Europe. But it would be 'Rated XXX' for gore and violence.
Hence, we're going to show you the nasty 'Rated X' things those awful Christians
did during the Crusades.
Besides, we know the lives of our staff at The History Channel would be at risk
if we aired a realistic representation of the Jihad that started in the 600s
and has yet to run its' course."
I don't recall much of any "science" originating in Persia (which doesn't mean none did), but in any event Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great and the elite of the Hellenistic Seleucid and Parthian empires that followed were Greeks. Once the Sassanid Persians took over in around 226 CE they undertook the eradication of Greek cultural influence.
They should've saved production costs...and just set up a webcam in France.
The New Concise History of the Crusades, Revised Edition (Hardcover) by Thomas F. Madden
Didnt realize that the USA fought in the Crusades.
Of course they did not...But it appeared to me anyway that they were correlating what is going on now to what happened in the 10th century.
The explained nothing of the Muslim philosphy and mindset but went into great detail as to how corrupt the Christians were.
Of course they did not...But it appeared to me anyway that they were correlating what is going on now to what happened in the 10th century.
The explained nothing of the Muslim philosphy and mindset but went into great detail as to how corrupt the Christians were.
The episode last night seemed fascinated by the alleged cannibalism committed by the crusaders after the fall of Marat. It's a nice, grisly page to highlight, but it does little to balance the tale, since the Turks committed their share of atrocities as well, and the rule of warfare in those days was somewhat less ... civil ... than today's.
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