Facts about the "crusades" piliging, land grabbing and murdering in the name of God.

FIRST CRUSADE (1095-9): Proclaimed by Pope Urban II, motivated by the Turkish occupation of Anatolia and Jerusalem about 50 years earlier, which was interfering with Christian pilgrimages, and had spawned tales of heathens brutalizing and massacring Christian subjects in the East. The Crusaders captured Jerusalem and established several Latin kingdoms. Despite several missteps (like killing communities of Christians by accident, and the Peasants' Crusade, which didn't know where it was going and tended to kill everything in its path), this was the most successful Crusade.
SECOND CRUSADE (1147-9): Led by Louis 7th of France and the Holy Roman Emperor, this Crusade was a disaster.

THIRD CRUSADE (1189-92): Mounted to recapture Jerusalem, which had been retaken in 1187 by Saladin, who would become known as the Islamic forces' greatest general. A personal rivalry between the leaders, Phillip II of France and Richard I of England, undermined this one.

FOURTH CRUSADE (1202-4): This Crusade was initially launched against Egypt, which was in Islamic hands, but it was diverted by the Venetian merchants (who owned the ships the Crusaders were traveling on) to attack Christian Constantinople, a commercial rival of theirs. The Crusaders sacked the city and killed untold of its citizens. This attack permanently weakened the Byzantine Empire, even though the Byzantines retook their capital after 50 years of a weak Latin-backed puppet state.

CHILDREN'S CRUSADE: The Peasants' Crusade would probably have been the worst idea of the whole period except for this one: thousands of children were sent off by themselves across Europe, unarmed, on a divinely inspired mission — it was believed only innocents could retake the Holy Land. The ones that didn't die of disease or hunger along the way were sold into slavery by the flabbergasted Muslims when they got there.

FIFTH CRUSADE (1218-21): Took, then lost, Egypt.

SIXTH CRUSADE (1228-9): Led by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (R. 121-1250). It recovered Jerusalem through negotiations with the sultan of Egypt. The city was lost again in 1244.

SEVENTH CRUSADE (1249-54) and EIGHT CRUSADE (1270-91): Both were led by Louis 9th of France (R. 1226-70) who was inspired by religious visions. Both were disasters, but Louis was later canonized.


EFFECTS OF THE CRUSADES
The overall effects of the Crusades were mixed: they never permanently took Jerusalem, and the results of the Fourth Crusade actually strengthened the Islamic forces by weakening the Byzantine Empire, which had up till this point been able to hold them at bay. While the Byzantines regained their capital 50 years later, the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade was only a shadow of its former self.

More positive effects of the Crusades were felt by the Western Europeans: the extensive travel of the Crusades, which for most was their first time they had gone outside their own homelands, opened the eyes of Western Europeans to the broader world. Exotic goods like Eastern spices that the Crusaders had become exposed to (sometimes through pillaging) created new desires in the West, and encouraged the growth of long-distance trade. The Crusades also helped reintroduce the West to their own literary heritage from Classical Greece and Rome, which had been far more extensively preserved by the Byzantines and even by the Muslims (books were also pillaged, and later translated). The Crusades in the long run helped lead to the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance.

On the more negative scale, the Crusades helped bring in a more militantly aggressive ethos into Christianity, and the pogroms against the Jews which were begun in the Crusades continued throughout the High Middle Ages and into the modern period. The attitudes which the Crusaders had shown toward Jews and Muslims in the Crusades would be repeated in the Christian reconquest of Spain in the 1400s.

[illustration: Medieval illustration of Peter the Hermit leading Peasants' Crusade]

The childrens crusade..

a religious movement in Europe during the summer of 1212 in which thousands of children set out to conquer the Holy Land from the Muslims by love instead of by force. The movement ended in disaster, but the religious fervour it excited helped to initiate the Fifth Crusade (1218).

The first group of children was led by a French shepherd boy named Stephen, from Cloyes-sur-le-Loir, a…

There were two problems associated with our glorious Crusades:

1. We killed Eastern Orthodox Christians, which was wrong, big time.
2. We quit, and gave up the grand fight for the Holy Land.

howabout

3. we were killing people in the name of god

?

yes I guess they should have wiped out those pesky muslims. They are such a pain now in westernizing instead of christianizing the whole world. What is it about humans that we got to make everyone just like us?

Okay, everything before this was just people being assholes and not actual Church approved Crusaders, but why, again, do you take issue with the Crusaders being angry with the Byzantines because of this? This whole thing is looking pretty biased.

Okay, so I didn't see alot other than minor pillaging, basically done by every army at the time, I suppose you expect the reader to come to the conclusion that the Crusades were not okay simply because of their ideal to protect pilgrims and stop the Muslim jihad. Oh, there was also some anti-Semetism, which was not the point of the Crusades and just an unfortunate feature of them, not approved of by the Church, as you admit.

So what's the point, again?

Christian bad, Muslim good, LOL.

The point is Christianity has innocent blood on their hands just as any other religion.
Christianity is certianily not better than other religions.

And this is coming from and atheist? What innocent blood does your religion have on it's hands?

Okay, sorry, but those are not Christian teachings. Didn't the Church condemn the killing of Jews? Unless you wish to cast into doubt the whole validity of the Crusades? Actually, a Muslim writer wrote about how Muslims lived better under the Crusaders than their own people! Imagine that. Pillaging was the way wars were fought at the time, sorry. Land grabbing? Might want to tell that to the Muslims. If not for 'land grabbing,' the only place they would be in is Medina. And one of the things that comes from wars is killing people. The Crusaders were often more merciful than the Muslims, and really it seems the only or at least only outstanding example of Crusader violence is Jerusalem. And of course, merciful Saladin decided to change his original plans of slaughter of the Christians when the Christian ruler of the city threatened to set the city on fire.

While this might be true, the large majority of the Muslims remember the Crusades as a time of horror and death at the hands of Christians. This is one of the reasons that the Muslim world reacted so strongly to President Bush's comment on the Iraqi war being a "crusade". :patriot:

When people are greedy and evil they need to have something to justify their actions. "In the name of God" was their justification.

Don't we experience that today? Look at the handful of soldiers that commit atrocities all in the name of battle.

Look at the violence and riots after court decisions, etc. "We've been discriminated against so we can run out and burn and pillage."

Just because it has been done and supposedly justified doesn't make it right.
Nor does it make us all guilty by association.

Can i compare this to the prisoners at Gitmo? On average they gain ten to fifteen pounds when they are under our custody?