I just bumped up the Myths thread, which includes a lot of historical myths. I thought about adding this one to it, but it deserves its own thread, so here it goes.
Depiction of the Sarcens outside of Paris in 732. That's right, outside of Paris. The Islamic invasion of Europe in this early Caliphate stage advanced this far north, which it would do again (outside Vienna) 700 years later.
One of the most often repeated lines about history is George Santayana's observation that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This is often changed to "those who have not learned from history are doomed to repeat it", and similar variants, all of which are true. Probably something that can be added to that is that those who learn history incorrectly, or who misunderstand history, get to repeat it as well, frequently to their horror.
And so we have the Crusades.
The Crusades weren't called the Crusades at the time that they occurred. That's a term tagged on them in later years, post Reformation, when they were understood as sort of a singular episode. Even that understanding isn't really correct, as it seems to assume, quite falsely, that the Church declared war on Islam, and then the Crusades happened, and then they ended. None of that is really right. Looking at what really happened is worth doing, as we didn't learn the history, and now we are in fact repeating it.
The Crusades were once more or less accurately understood, but over the past several decades there's been a lot of hand wringing in the western world about how awful we (Europeans) were, or sometimes how awful the Catholic church was, for picking on the Moslems in the Middle East. That's the current view now, backed up in self-righteous statements people have issued over the years, seemingly assuming that we enlightened folks would never do something like that now, and we just failed to comprehend Islam. None of that is even close to being historically accurate.
The First Crusade was "called" in 1095. By that time, however, the Christian world had endured Islamic armed invasion for about 400 years. The first waive of it had come during Mohamed's lifetime when he expanded his new religion by the sword, taking over the Arabian peninsula in the process. This lead him into Christian lands, which would remain Christian for decades thereafter, in spite of the invasions, and whose remnants even today still exist. In the following decades Islam was spread by Arab armies in wars of conquest all over North Africa and into Spain. The Moslems' armies of conquest then spread over the Pyrenees and into France, until Charles Martel arrested their progress, and turned them around, in the Battle of Tours in 732, just mere decades after Mohamed's death. This arrested the progress of Islam's advance by the sword, all the way up in central France, and the process began of rolling the Islamic tide back in Spain, a process that wouldn't be complete until 1492.
In Middle East, Moslem forces, by the 11th Century, were oppressing the Christian residents of that region, which in many instances constituted the majority of the population and were pressing into the Byzantine Empire. The Great Schism had not yet occurred, although the differences that would lead to it in culture were starting to manifest themselves, and the Byzantines called for help. The result was the Crusades.
We have tended to view that as some sort of unwarranted invasion for some time, but in reality, in an era when history generally progressed slowly, it wasn't seen that way at all. It was an armed expedition to help a Christian Ally, the Byzantines, and to protect the Christian population of the Middle East, which was often the majority in any one region, all against an aggressive Islam that was an unwanted and unrelenting invader. It was seen as a massive existential threat to the region, and to the safety of the Western World.
In other words, the Arab Islamic Armies (and later the Ottoman Turks) were seen pretty much the way we're seeing ISIL right now. In taking on ISIL, we're pretty much doing what they started doing in the 11th Century.
Well, we might want to quit picking on the Crusaders, I suppose, given that.
And we might want to consider that the defensive wars of the Crusades were initially a success, but ultimately failed. As a defensive war, they succeeded in arresting Arab Islamic invasion of the Byzantine Empire and in removing Islamic over-lordship of Christian lands. They no doubt also occupied some Islamic territory as well. But ultimately, they failed. The reason is simple. It wasn't because Europeans were trying to control a foreign culture. Recent research has shown that the majority Christian population in those regions where they were the majority adapted to the Europeans pretty quickly and even generally welcomed the European immigrants that came along after the armies. No, what happened is that after the initial successes, the Europeans generally lost interest in the region and when it fell again, viewed it as a far off distant threat. The threat wasn't even appreciated again until the Turks invaded Anatolia and took Constantinople in 1453. Ultimately, the Moslem armies would be turned around in Vienna, in 1529.
So what can we learn from this? Well, a variety of things I suppose. One thing is that before condemning our own culture for taking on a military project, perhaps we ought to consider what they were really thinking and why. The other may be that when regarding a threat, just because it was in antiquity doesn't mean that it really has fully gone away, but maybe just gone smaller or larger. The Battle of Tours was 300 years distant from the First Crusades, and 1400 years from the Siege of Constantinople. We're about 500 years from that Siege, and the similar one at Vienna, making us closer in time to those events than Charles Martel was.
I'm not saying that those who have invaded Iraq and who contest for Syria are fully analogous to Mohamed's armies of the 7th Century, nor to the Ottoman Turks of the 15th. But they see themselves that way, and we would be pretty naive to at least not appreciate their world view, and the world view of those faced with similar or at least somewhat similar threats in the distant past, and learn by them.
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