Christian Crusaders never fought any Arabs -- The Real Crusaders were the Mongols

THE REAL CRUSADERS

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Tuesday, 10 February 2015

[This was written in 2005.  We are republishing it in light of Zero's idiotic Prayer Breakfast speech last week, comparing Medieval Christians to Moslem terrorists of today who want the whole world to live in their world of Dark Ages barbarism.  This is the real history of the Crusades in summary form.  It is not taught in schools or universities today, and certainly never learned by Zero.  He claims to have been educated at Harvard and Columbia, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and his words and deeds have never provided any evidence he is educated in any way.]  It’s amazing how much the Arabs complain about the Crusades when they had so little to do with them. The Crusades were their great trauma, they constantly moan, the bottomless source of their resentment of the West and Christianity. Mysteriously, they never condemn the Real Crusaders who wiped out their entire civilization. There were eight separate Crusades over two hundred years, from 1095 through 1294. The Arabs played no significant role in any. The first was caused by the Seljuk Turks, who had swarmed out of Central Asia to conquer the Middle East, and seized Jerusalem in 1070. The Holy City had been part of the Fatimid Empire of Ismaili Shia Berbers from North Africa, who provided Christian pilgrims unhindered access to their holy places and freedom to worship in their churches. The Seljuks conducted pogroms on the Christians and desecrated their churches. They also terrified Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, who had lost much of his empire to them, so much that he pleaded with his rival in Rome, Pope Urban II, to call for all Christendom to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Islamic infidels. The French answered the call and conducted the First Crusade, culminating in their sack of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. Led by Godfrey of Bouillon, they slaughtered 70,000 Moslems (the majority Berbers and Turks), and herded every Jew into a synagogue to burn them alive. Thus was formed the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. After this initial atrocity, the European citizens of this new kingdom (almost all men) began marrying local ladies, adopting local customs, dress, and speech, many Christian-Moslem friendships and alliances formed, and there was over 40 years of peace. Then a Kurdish army out of Mosul (now in northern Iraq) overran a remote Christian stronghold called Edessa (now in southeastern Turkey) in 1144, and somehow this prompted Pope Eugenius III to call for a Second Crusade. Two armies set out separately, one French, one German, and in 1148 on their way to Edessa in the middle of Turkey, were slaughtered almost to a man by Seljuk armies. Forty more years of peace for the Kingdom of Jerusalem passed. By that time, the legendary Saladin (Salah al-Din Al-Ayyubi 1137-1193), leading that Kurdish army that had taken Edessa, had become Sultan of Egypt, replacing the Berber Fatimid dynasty with his Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin’s defeat of a Crusader army at the Horns of Hittin on July 4, 1187 above the Sea of Galilee was the most famous battle of all the Crusades. When Jerusalem surrendered to him on October 12, there was no sack and slaughter, and the Holy Sepulcher remained open to Christians. Nonetheless, Jerusalem’s fall led to the 67 year-old Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Red Beard) to call for a Third Crusade in 1189. He led a French army into Turkey where he drowned crossing a small river, and most of his men subsequently wiped out by the Seljuks. Then the new King of England, 31 year-old Richard the Lion Heart sailed to the Holy Land with an army of Norman knights. He captured Acre and Jaffa, and defeated Saladin at Arsuf. Showing the utmost chivalry and respect for each other, Richard and Saladin signed a peace treaty on September 2, 1192, leaving the Holy Land’s coast in Christian and Jerusalem in Moslem hands. Saladin died the next year and Pope Innocent III called for a Fourth Crusade. It ended up having nothing to do with Jerusalem, or any Moslems at all. The Crusaders, most of whom as before were French, gathered in Venice and were paid (downpayment, 200,000 silver marks) by the son of the recently deposed Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus to sack Constantinople and restore his father to the throne. Innocent III forbade it, the armada sailed anyway, when the Roman Catholic Crusaders entered Constantinople the Greek Orthodox populace revolted, and the sack was on. Not many Greeks were killed, but for three days, April 12-14, 1204, the pillage was unrestrained. Most of the Crusaders returned home with their spoils, and the recapture of Jerusalem forgotten. Innocent III’s successor, Honorius III never forgot and insisted on a Fifth Crusade, with the Crusaders (this time mostly Germans and Hungarians) sailing to Egypt in 1217 (thinking to reach Jerusalem from the south), wasted three years in fruitless fighting with the Kurdish Ayyubids in the Nile Delta, and sailed back. Through all of this there still was a Kingdom of Jerusalem, no longer possessing the Holy City itself but ruling the Holy Land coast from the city of Acre (north of Haifa in Israel). In 1225 it was ruled by John of Brienne, whose daughter, Isabella, married the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (grandson of Barbarossa). Claiming he now had a title on Jerusalem, Frederick called for a Sixth Crusade. Frederick II (1194-1250) was one of the most extraordinary personalities of the Middle Ages, so extraordinary he was known in his own time as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. He spoke nine languages, could read and write in seven, had a working understanding of all the science of his day, was a renowned warrior, and advocated a medieval version of free market economics. He conducted the Sixth Crusade peacefully, without a single battle or casualty. As their armies faced each other at Nablus north of Jerusalem, Frederick sat down with Ayyubid Sultan Malik al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew who had defeated the Fifth Crusaders in Egypt), and impressed him with his knowledge of Islamic literature, science, and philosophy. They signed a ten-year treaty, with Sultan Kamil ceding Jerusalem (excepting the Enclosure with the Dome of the Rock) plus Nazareth and Bethlehem to Frederick, who was crowned King of Jerusalem (deposing 80 year-old John of Brienne in the process) in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on March 18, 1229 with the blessing of the Sultan standing by. Christians and Moslems in the Holy Land rejoiced. Pope Gregory IX, who hated Frederick, denounced the treaty as an insult to Christendom and refused to ratify it. Sultan Kamil died in 1238. The Ayyubid army was now dominated by mameluks, captured and enslaved soldiers (mostly Slavs and Turks). One of them, a huge Kipchak Turk from Russia named Baibars, began seizing power. Leading a Mameluk army, in October 1244, he sacked Jerusalem, killing its citizens indiscriminately. King Louis IX of France (St. Louis 1214-1270) declared a Seventh Crusade. Marching up the Nile towards Cairo, his army was destroyed by Baibars, and he himself was subsequently captured in March of 1250 and held captive for four years. Baibars completed his seizure of power in 1260 when he killed the last Ayyubid Sultan and became Sultan himself. Dedicating himself to destroying the remaining Christian cities along the Holy Land coast (the Levant), he sacked Caesara in 1265, Safad in 1266, Jaffa in 1267, and ancient Antioch, “The Queen of the East,” in 1268, killing and enslaving tens of thousands of Christians. This roused Louis IX to declare an Eighth Crusade. He was persuaded to launch it in Tunis in North Africa as an approach to Egypt. He died of dysentery a few days after his arrival on August 25, 1270. The last remaining Christian city in the Holy Land was Acre with its impregnable walls. Baibars died in 1277. A Mameluk successor, Sultan al-Asraf Khalil, assaulted it and after a siege of 43 days, Acre fell on June 17, 1291. 60,000 Christians were slaughtered or enslaved. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was extinguished and the Crusades were over. You’ll notice that in this entire struggle of two centuries, the Christian Crusaders never fought any Arabs. They fought Berbers, Turks, Kurds, and Mameluks - none of which were Arab. So where were these guys? Off in Baghdad. This was the seat of the Abassid Caliphs whose rulers claimed descent from Abbas, an uncle of Mohammed, and had run the Arab Empire since 750. The most famous of them was the fifth, Harun al-Rashid (763-809), whom Scheherezade entranced with her Tales of a Thousand and One Nights. When Moslem refugees from Godfrey of Bouillon’s sack of Jerusalem in 1099 fled to Baghdad begging for their Moslem Arab brethren to help them recapture the sacred city, Caliph al-Mustazhir ignored them. As a Sunni orthodox Moslem, he couldn’t be bothered with the plight of these Fatimid Ismaili Shia heretics. When Saladin appealed to the Abbasid Caliph An-Nasir in 1191 for help against Richard, the Arab caliph ignored him. No Arab ruler, no Arab Caliph in Baghdad, ever fought the Christian Crusaders, or ever offered help to their fellow Moslems who did. Right up to 1258, when the Real Crusaders arrived and obliterated Arab civilization. The Real Crusaders were the Mongols. To this day, much of Central Asia and the Middle East - the Heartland of Islam - has never recovered from their depredations. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongol invasion of Islam began in 1219. The great Central Asian Silk Road cities were razed to the ground, Bukhara, Khiva, Nishapur, Rayy, and Merv, slaughtering every man, woman, child, cat, and dog - in Merv over 700,000 people, over 1,000,000 (yes, one million human beings) in Nishapur. Genghis returned to Mongolia and died in 1227. Thirty years later, his grandson Hulagu, decided to finish the Moslems off. On February 10, 1258, his giant Mongol army broke through the gates of Baghdad beginning forty days of pillage and massacre. 800,000 people were put to the Mongol sword, libraries with hundreds of thousands of volumes burned down, the entire city turned to rubble, Caliph Al-Mustassim (the last of the Abbasids) wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by Mongol horses, the capital of Arab civilization and culture smoldering in Mongol ashes, and with it Arab civilization itself annihilated for centuries. But you never hear a word of this from the Jihadis, from Osama and other Arab terrorists fanatics crazed with hate for... us? We, the Christians, the Crusaders, the West, we had nothing to do with the destruction of Arab civilization. All this Al Qaeda fulminating about “the Crusaders” is just a phony rationale for their pathological hatreds. Hopefully, this history will enable those liberals not inextricably buried in self-mortification to resist their perennial call for America and the West and the Vatican, et el, to “apologize” for the Crusades. Apologize... to whom? Certainly not the Arabs. Certainly not the Turks. We should make the Moslems a deal. We won’t demand an apology from them - Arabs in particular - for conducting a Moslem Crusade that conquered the Christian Middle East by the sword in the 7th Century (a crusade that killed vastly more Christians than all the 8 Crusades together killed Moslems). In return, the Arabs should feel free to demand an apology from the Mongols. If they don’t take the deal, then from now on we’ll point out that they, the Arab Moslems, were the real Real Crusaders. What right did they have to swarm out of the sands of Arabia and spread their religion by the sword over lands that had been Christian for centuries, over places that had been Holy to Christians for centuries? Ultimately, the Arabs are the Real Crusaders, and until they stop whining about “the Crusades,” we should never let them forget it.