[big'ol_freeper]

You betcha:

CRUSADE MYTHS

The Real Inquisition

[ksen]

Thanks for the links big'ol_freeper.

From your first link:

It was not always so. During the Middle Ages you could not find a Christian in Europe who did not believe that the Crusades were an act of highest good. Even the Muslims respected the ideals of the Crusades and the piety of the men who fought them. But that all changed with the Protestant Reformation. For Martin Luther, who had already jettisoned the Christian doctrines of papal authority and indulgences, the Crusades were nothing more than a ploy by a power-hungry papacy. Indeed, he argued that to fight the Muslims was to fight Christ himself, for it was he who had sent the Turks to punish Christendom for its faithlessness. When Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his armies began to invade Austria, Luther changed his mind about the need to fight, but he stuck to his condemnation of the Crusades. During the next two centuries people tended to view the Crusades through a confessional lens: Protestants demonized them, Catholics extolled them. As for Suleiman and his successors, they were just glad to be rid of them.

It was in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the current view of the Crusades was born. Most of the philosophes, like Voltaire, believed that medieval Christianity was a vile superstition. For them the Crusades were a migration of barbarians led by fanaticism, greed, and lust. Since then, the Enlightenment take on the Crusades has gone in and out of fashion. The Crusades received good press as wars of nobility (although not religion) during the Romantic period and the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, however, opinion again turned decisively against the Crusades. In the wake of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, historians found war of ideology—any ideology —distasteful. This sentiment was summed up by Sir Steven Runciman in his three-volume work, A History of the Crusades (1951-54). For Runciman, the Crusades were morally repugnant acts of intolerance in the name of God. The medieval men who took the cross and marched to the Middle East were either cynically evil, rapaciously greedy, or naively gullible. This beautifully written history soon became the standard. Almost single-handedly Runciman managed to define the modern popular view of the Crusades.

I never knew Martin Luther felt that way about the Crusades, although it does say that he changed his mind when Austria was overrun.

The second paragraph though I think is more relevant in that it states that the current thoughts about the Crusades come from people who hate Christianity in general.

In all my talks with people I have never seen a Protestant use the Crusades against the Catholics. I have seen over and over unbelievers using the Crusades against Christianity in general.

Your second link is about the Inquisition, not the Crusades.

[mike182d]

Thank you for that link on the Inquisition. I had never seen it in that light. Excellent work, my friend. :-)

[topcat54]

From the NR Online article:

"Now at last the scholars have made their report, an 800-page tome that was unveiled at a press conference in Rome on Tuesday. Its most startling conclusion is that the Inquisition was not so bad after all."

Yeah, right. By Vatican "scholars" from Vatican sources. I'm surprised they didn't just come out and say the protestants got what they deserved.