The Crusades, defensive conflicts.

[brachy-pride]

At the moment of the first crusade the idea of a christendom to which both eastern and western christians belonged was still valid because the schism between eastern orthodox christians and roman catholics was still fresh and recent, only a few decades old, and during the first millenium many times were the roman pope and patriarch of constantinople in schism to later re-unite.
No one knew in 1054 the church would still be divided 1000 years later.


And I think many people put modern prejudices on the crusaders, that dozens of thousands of men could fight mainly due to religious reasons seems incredible to most modern men who think, that was just an excuse, they did it for the money, they had to.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I am currently writing an argumentative essay on the Crusades.
There are three main points that I would like to establish in this essay:

*The Crusades were not an unprovoked European invasion against the Muslims.

*The Crusades were not an act of Christian imperialism, rather they were fought to recapture Christian lands.

*The Crusades were not utilized to convert Muslims to Christianity by force.

These points are further elaborated in a rough draft of my thesis below:

The Crusades were not acts of unprovoked aggression by Europe against the Islamic world, but were a delayed response to centuries of Muslim aggression.
These were wars for the recapture of Christian lands and the liberation of Christians, not an act of religious imperialaism.
Further more the Crusades were not called in order to convert Muslims or any other religious sects to Christianity by force.

My idea is to demonstrate this with logical reasoning and an objective yet critical observation of theological narratives and credible historical sources.


Maybe some of you history experts can contribute an opinion.
Be as critical as you would like, I don't mind.

Yes thats about right.
unfortunity the crusades took a life of its own.

Once the first crusade was launched a new type of warfare came to the for, Relifous warfare with for the first time violent conversions and genocide. This can easily be seen as many cities had surrended in negosiations with byzintine rather then to the crusader. Which was an old "established" war fare method at that time. The crusaders then procceed to take cities for themselves with there own "means" (i.e killing all the muslims in sight)

The Byztinians had provided at that time most of the naval power (still the dominate navel power until viennic suppased it.) and provided logistic and small military force could not control the crusaders.

After which the normal sets of rules for warfare had changed. Byxatine would no longer negosiate with the turk. As the amount of bad blood had been spilt which was an affrount to the muslim nations. Not to mention the different fiefdoms which the crusaders carved out for themselves.

Prior to this though most christains iirc was simply treated as second class citiizens by the Turkish empire and no effect was made to convert them. No had the concept of holy wars been fought. But rather a fight between the two empires.

I think Emporer Alexi had full intended to control the crusaders as an ally subject to byztine to recover her lost empire. (as she had often done iin the past). Byztine also had invested heavily by spreading its culture and chirstain faith to the north and west previously. it had previously used mercany and allied amries to fight the turks.

 

[Mott1]

Ok Plotinus, to conclude my rebuttal to your first point we see that the understanding of jihad has remained unchanged since the founding of Islam. Jihad was an essential principle shared among the Muslim scholars and leaders of that time, therefore we must acknowledge that the principle of eternal jihad in Islamic dogma was the driving force in Muslim military expansion.


Moving on to your next point you state that there must be a distinction between expressed motive and actual motive and the judgement of history in relation to the crusades.
I understand your reasoning and this is something I have already considered.
I decided to approach this argument from a logical standpoint, just for the sake of argument lets consider the general philosophy of cause and effect. For example if X (Islamic aggression) is the cause of Y (crusades), then Y will only occur if preceded by X.
Using the philosophy of cause and effect, I must first demonstrate that Islamic expansion was religious and militarily aggressive by appling necessary and sufficiant conditions. In this case the founding of Islam being the necessary condition and the military principles in the Islamic doctrine being the sufficient condition. Establishing Islamic aggression using these conditions, I must now demonstrate that Islamic aggression was the cause of the crusades and that the crusades could only have occured with the actualization of Islamic aggression. This I have already demonstrated.
Without the invasion of Islam, history would not have known the Crusades.

This is not to say that I cannot maintain my argument using your reasoning by drawing distinctions between expressed and actual motivations, it just becomes a little more complex.
We see in the first Crusade that the expressed motivations do not deviate from the actual motivations. This becomes apparent when examining Pope Urban's speech at the council of Clermont after recieving the plea of military aid from Byzantine Emperor Alexius in 1095.
At the council Pope Urban explained, that he was calling for the Crusade because without any defensive action "the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked" by Muslim forces. After admonishing the Christians to keep peace among themselves, he turned their attention to the East:

For your brethen who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them aid which has often been promised them. For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania[Byzantine] as far west as the shore of the mediterranean and the Hellespont. They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.

Note the pope says nothing about conversion or conquest. The Crusades came together as pilgrimages: Christians from Europe made their way to the Holy Land for a religious purpose, Many took religious vows.
Of course, not every Crusader's motives were pure. More than once, many fell from the ideals of Christian pilgrims.
Pope Urban didn't envision the Crusades as a chance for gain. He decreed that the lands recovered from the Muslims would belong to the Byzantine Empire. The pope saw the Crusades as an act of sacrifice rather than profit.

Nothing indicates that the Crusades were an early form of predatory imperialism.
Crusading was, in fact, extremely expensive. Crusaders sold their property to raise money for their long journey to the Holy Land, and did so knowing they might not return. As Brachy-pride stated in his post, secular society today cannot grasp the mind set of 11th century Christian Europe. The average Christian laymans first and formost concern was God and the kingdom of heaven. To avoid sin and act in the service of God ensured them a place in heaven. A perfect example of this is the phenomena of the pilgrim crusade were thousands upon thousands of Christian non-fighting men and women left their homes and took up the popes decree of the crusade and journeyed to the Holy Land.
A vast majority of Crusaders were not "second sons" looking for a profit and estates in the Middle East. Most were like Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, who sold off many of his properties in order to finance his trip. Godfrey clearly planned to come home after the pilgrimage because he did not give up his title or all his holdings.
Nobles in the Crusades had their own estates and had a great deal to lose.
However some Crusaders did very well for themselves after the first Crusade, but most who return to Europe came back with nothing material to show for their efforts.
Their were no colonial arrangements with the coming of the Crusades. Broadly, a colony is a land that is ruled by a far-off power. But the Crusader states were not ruled from Western Europe; the governments they established did not answer to any Western power. Nor did the Crusader rulers siphon off the wealth of their lands and send it back to Europe. They had no economic arrangements with any European states. In fact, many Crusaders ceased to think of themselves as European.
The chronicler Fulcher of Charters wrote:

Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transferred the West into the East. For we who were once Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who was Roman or a Frank is now Galilaean, or inhabitant of Palestine. One who was a citizen of Rheims or of Chartres now has been made a citizen of Tyre or of Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned.

have to take a break, I'll continue in another post. I Don't feel like rewriting all this again.

 

[Plotinus]

I can see some of your points, but you're definitely on shaky ground with some of them. From a purely philosophical point of view, you've got cause and effect the wrong way round. When X is the cause of Y, that doesn't mean that if you have Y you must have had X - it means that if you have X you must have Y. That's what is usually understood by causation - cause entails effect, not effect entails cause. For example, imagine that a house is destroyed because I set it on fire. My fire-setting is the cause and the destruction is the effect. But it doesn't follow from that that any destroyed house must have been burned by me. All that follows from that is that if I burn a house it will be destroyed.

This is relevant to your argument since you seem to be trying to show (a) that Muslim aggression was the sole cause of the Crusades, and, because of this, (b) the Crusades couldn't have existed without Muslim aggression, since the presence of the effect entails the presence of the cause. It seems to me that all you've shown, if anything, is that (c) there was Muslim aggression, and (d) it was one of the causes of the Crusades. But no-one would deny (c) or (d). You haven't shown (a) at all. On the contrary, there were plenty of other causes, such as the view of many Christians that it was undesirable for Muslims to control the Holy Places (irrespective of their aggression in acquiring it), or the view of many Christians that all Muslims were much of a muchness and one bunch of Muslims could be attacked for the crimes of another bunch of Muslims. To put it another way, it's perfectly possible to imagine Muslim aggression occurring without any Crusades happening in response, which means that Muslim aggression can hardly have been the sole cause. Again, you certainly haven't shown (b), partly because the understanding of causation that underlies it is fallacious, and partly because we can see counter-examples in history. The real first Crusade was fought by Heraclius against the Persians, and that hadn't been caused by any kind of Muslim aggression, since it happened while Muhammad was still sitting in a cave somewhere. Or, if you prefer, you can go even further back and take the Battle of the Frigidus, when Theodosius the Great defeated the (largely pagan) armies of Eugenius. These are examples of wars that were viewed by many Christians as righteous struggles against the unbelievers. In other words, we can see precedents for this sort of thing before the Muslims even came on the scene; Christians were already used to the idea of holy war, having fought them on a number of occasions in the past. So you can hardly point to Muslim aggression as the sole cause of the Crusades even on the most simplistic reading of it. For example, if Islam had never happened there still might have been Crusades against other powers (perhaps more holy wars against Zoroastrian Persia, for example). In particular, you can't use nice, neat logical categories such as necessity and sufficiency when dealing with history, because everything is far more complicated than that. The existence of Islamic aggression is established by examining history and seeing how Muslims actually behaved, not by drawing conclusions from what they believed in a Cartesian sort of way. At least, that's how I see it!

Don't take the criticisms the wrong way - I do think you're right to point out Muslim aggression as a factor in the causes of the Crusades (especially given that we often hear the Crusaders criticised disproportionately more than the architects of the Muslim invasions of earlier centuries) - I just think that you're going too far in what you're trying to establish, in particular the claim that Muslim aggression was the sole cause of the Crusades, that the Crusades were "defensive" in any serious sense of the word, and the application of suspect philosophical principles to an analysis of history. I don't think anyone's successfully managed the latter!

 

[Mott1]

Plotinus,
You have misundertsood the manner in which I have applied the philosophy of causality in relation to my argument. But the fault is mine, in my haste I did not clearify the term crusade and failed to elaborate on its application; so I can certainly understand why my use of cause and effect may have seemed
faulty.
My use of the philosophy of causality is determined by my argument on the historical "Crusades", not the general use of the word "crusade". My argument is substantiated on the actual historical Crusades that had transpired, not on an alternate probability.
So by applying causality under those terms, we see that if Muslim aggression(X) is the necessary cause of "the first Crusades"(Y), then yes, the first Crusades(Y) will only occur if preceded by Muslim aggression(X). What I must demonstrate is "IF" Muslim aggression is in fact the necessary cause or as you stated above: "to show (a) that Muslim aggression was the sole cause of the Crusades". By applying the Crusades in its historical context I have demonstrated this in a previous post.
In short, emperor Alexius sent a plea to Pope Urban for military aid against Muslim aggression which launched the first Crusades.

I may be wrong but your example of causality may be a bit shaky too.
You stated:

When X is the cause of Y, that doesn't mean that if you have Y you must have had X

Logically, I believe it does.
Actually the presence of X does not ensure that Y will occur, but the presence of Y ensures that X must have occurred.

You validate this by your statement below, however the latter part is flawed:

To put it another way, it's perfectly possible to imagine Muslim aggression occurring without any Crusades happening in response, which means that Muslim aggression can hardly have been the sole cause.

Here you state that it is possible that Muslim aggression could have occured without the materializtion of the Crusades, however Muslim aggression IS the sole cause because the presence of the Crusades ensures Muslim aggression existed.

However I must concede that according to logic, other events may have also triggered a crusades, and thus the presence of a crusades does not ensure the presence of Muslim aggression.
But again, by employing the Crusades in its historical context (i.e. Crusades: a holy war fought by Christians against Muslims) then we can deduce that the above logic does not apply.


In actuality the philosophy of casuality is irrelevant to my agrument, my intention was to apply casuality to maintain my agrument not to deviate from
it. And thats exactly what happened. I should have known not to use philosophy to validify my argument, philosophies are rarely ever agreed upon.
In any case, I appreciate all your criticizim and I am truly grateful for your time. From what I gather we seem to disagree on two points, the Crusades being a defensive and delayed response to Muslim aggression. I can still go on and attempt to prove my argument but only if you are willing.
Thanks again.