i need people to understand that persecution and discrimination against copts in egypt is systemic. from mob attacks and burning of coptic homes and churches, to kidnappings and forced conversions and rape of coptic girls and women, to copts not being allowed to have certain jobs, not allowed to join the football team, to instances of the smartest coptic students being failed on purpose just because they’re christians, to falling victim to blasphemy laws and hate speeches. not to mention church bombings… the list goes on. don’t be fooled by sisi’ false and meaningless “solidarity” to copts, the authoritarian sisi regime and egyptian authorities also play a role in suppressing coptic activism. any egyptian dissident speaking out against the regime is jailed that’s not a secret; and coptic activists are also jailed for not only being vocal against the regime, but also because they speak up about the injustice they face for being christians. sectarian attacks against copts are not taken seriously. when muslims attack their coptic neighbors, the police rarely ever arrest the perpetrators, instead often times it’s the copts who are arrested and then are forced into reconciliation sessions and again and again justice is never served. copts, especially in upper egypt, are constantly terrorized and no protection is being served.. the cycle of violence is repeated, it’s state-sanctioned. copts are treated like second class citizens in their ancestral homeland.
are many muslims and copts friends, love and support each other? yes, absolutely. but anti-coptic sentiments is rampant, just because you personally don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. a lot of (egyptian) muslims deny there’s ever any kind of persecution and refuse to acknowledge it.
The crusaders that killed Jews were the ones who ignored the fact that they were STRICTLY TOLD by the Church not to kill the Jews, but did it anyway because, hey, why not kill these non-christians close to home right? Ignoring the fact that of course the Church had said prior “leave the Jews alone, they’re a contributing group to society, k thnx, love and kisses”.
The ‘low crusaders’ caused a lot of problems for the major leaders of the crusades on the whole, being the xenophobic rabble and usually entirely the peasantry, which was the opposite of what Urban II had wanted: he had wanted Knights and nobles to get the heck out of Europe. Notably, those two groups did generally end up being at least if not supportive of the Jews, tolerant, if only because the Jews were their tenants on their land, were a huge money source, and in Outremer tended to be fairly easy to deal with.
So yes. It’s a very complex matter because (as with most of the middle ages), broad brush strokes don’t usually work as in the same context as the anti-Semitic rampages, you have groups trying to defend the Jewish population within a city.
Everytime I see either an uninformed random person talking about the crusaders being objectively evil, or some ultra-right-wing person adopting the crusaders iconography and images to perpetuate the exact attitude of Islamophobic sentiment described by @thecalmissar, I am between a deep sigh, and a drink.
Short answer is: the super Islamophobic image cultivated by the Right-wing that they attach in a Revisionist mentality to the Crusaders within a historical context, is a fiction created by that group. While the Crusaders did have some Islamophobic attitudes, it would not be in the context we recognise today, and was often downplayed between rhetoric (propaganda they put out and preached) and reality (wherein Crusader Lords and factions tried to ally with the various Saracen forces, rented property to them, etc).
The Crusaders were… varied. The bottom rung of them, the armed pilgrims and peasants were notorious for extreme fanaticism and what we would consider racism today, whereas the middling and upper classes were far more practical and friendly outside of a warring context. Like all conflicts, the Good Guys and Bad Guys are a bit more nuanced than we like to think.
Seeing that you reblogged this from wearepaladin, I’m guessing you know who we-are-knight is right? If you do, that means you’ve seen his content, which if you have seen any of his Crusader history posts, you would know that’s not true.
You’re right, they belong to the fanatical Christians who think Muslim people are heretical demons that must be purged from The Holy Land… Like???????? Crusaders weren’t any kind or flavor of Good
It’s probably reductive to reduce anti-Islamic and anti-Judaic (I’m not going to call it antisemitism in the modern sense, because that doesn’t really exist before the 1492 expulsion and subsequent limpieza de sangue laws) to a problem of the uneducated, undisciplined mob. The picture is more nuanced than that; the Rhineland pogroms were led by a count, after all, and in the Holy Land there are recorded cases of very low-level individuals freely mixing with Muslims as they went on mini-pilgrimages along the way to Jerusalem.
But if you look at the accounts by Hebrew chroniclers themselves, the Church hierarchy often did try to protect their Jewish communities from crusaders; sometimes this defense folded almost immediately upon use of force by the crusaders, but at other times crusaders actually had to launch sieges against cathedrals who refused to give up the Jews hidden inside. It seems Christian and Jewish peasants had some friendly relationships too, because there are recorded instances of Christians encouraging Jews to flee and holding onto their neighbor’s wealth until they were able to return (though the Rhineland pogroms were intensely traumatic and would be commemorated in Jewish liturgies for centuries to come, the material damage and loss of life wasn’t as bad as some accounts seem to make out, given the Jewish communities were thriving again within a few decades).
That being said, while these attacks were highly condemned by local bishops, Urban II didn’t seem to feel any need to address them; that only happened when the Holy Roman Emperor said that forced baptisms were not valid, at which point Urban II was like, “Uh, yeah, they do count.” So he didn’t seem too broken up about what had happened.
For further reading, I recommend at least these following books:
– Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages, by Jonathan M. Elukin (who challenges general conceptions of an exclusively hostile relationship between Jews and Christians) – Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe, by Leonard Glick (who traces a history of anti-Judaic thought through medieval Europe) – The First Crusade: A New History, by Thomas Asbridge (who disputes a black-and-white, apocalyptic Muslim vs Christian interpretations of the First Crusade)
MYTH #1: THE CRUSADES REPRESENTED AN UNPROVOKED ATTACK BY WESTERN CHRISTIANS ON THE MUSLIM WORLD.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and even a cursory chronological review makes that clear. In A.D. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.
By A.D. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula. Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.
What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about A.D. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.
Far from being unprovoked, then, the crusades actually represent the first great western Christian counterattack against Muslim attacks which had taken place continually from the inception of Islam until the eleventh century, and which continued on thereafter, mostly unabated. Three of Christianity’s five primary episcopal sees (Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria) had been captured in the seventh century; both of the others (Rome and Constantinople) had been attacked in the centuries before the crusades. The latter would be captured in 1453, leaving only one of the five (Rome) in Christian hands by 1500. Rome was again threatened in the sixteenth century. This is not the absence of provocation; rather, it is a deadly and persistent threat, and one which had to be answered by forceful defense if Christendom were to survive. The crusades were simply one tool in the defensive options exercised by Christians.
To put the question in perspective, one need only consider how many times Christian forces have attacked either Mecca or Medina. The answer, of course, is never.
MYTH #2: WESTERN CHRISTIANS WENT ON CRUSADE BECAUSE THEIR GREED LED THEM TO PLUNDER MUSLIMS IN ORDER TO GET RICH.
Pope Urban II calling for the first crusade
Again, not true. One version of Pope Urban II’s speech at Clermont in 1095 urging French warriors to embark on what would become known as the First Crusade does note that they might “make spoil of [the enemy’s] treasures,” but this was no more than an observation on the usual way of financing war in ancient and medieval society.
As Fred Cazel has noted, “Few crusaders had sufficient cash both to pay their obligations at home and to support themselves decently on a crusade.” From the very beginning, financial considerations played a major role in crusade planning. The early crusaders sold off so many of their possessions to finance their expeditions that they caused widespread inflation. Although later crusaders took this into account and began saving money long before they set out, the expense was still nearly prohibitive. Despite the fact that money did not yet play a major role in western European economies in the eleventh century, there was “a heavy and persistent flow of money” from west to east as a result of the crusades, and the financial demands of crusading caused “profound economic and monetary changes in both western Europe and the Levant.”
One of the chief reasons for the foundering of the Fourth Crusade, and its diversion to Constantinople, was the fact that it ran out of money before it had gotten properly started, and was so indebted to the Venetians that it found itself unable to keep control of its own destiny. Louis IX’s Seventh Crusade in the mid-thirteenth century cost more than six times the annual revenue of the crown.
The popes resorted to ever more desperate ploys to raise money to finance crusades, from instituting the first income tax in the early thirteenth century to making a series of adjustments in the way that indulgences were handled that eventually led to the abuses condemned by Martin Luther.
In short: very few people became rich by crusading, and their numbers were dwarfed by those who were bankrupted. Most medieval people were quite well aware of this, and did not consider crusading a way to improve their financial situations.
MYTH #3: CRUSADERS WERE A CYNICAL LOT WHO DID NOT REALLY BELIEVE THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA; RATHER, THEY HAD ULTERIOR, MATERIALISTIC MOTIVES.
This has been a very popular argument, at least from Voltaire on. It seems credible and even compelling to modern people, steeped as they are in materialist worldviews. And certainly there were cynics and hypocrites in the Middle Ages—beneath the obvious differences of technology and material culture, medieval people were just as human as we are, and subject to the same failings.
However, like the first two myths, this statement is generally untrue, and demonstrably so. For one thing, the casualty rates on the crusades were usually very high, and many if not most crusaders left expecting not to return. At least one military historian has estimated the casualty rate for the First Crusade at an appalling 75 percent, for example. The statement of the thirteenth-century crusader Robert of Crésèques, that he had “come from across the sea in order to die for God in the Holy Land”—which was quickly followed by his death in battle against overwhelming odds—may have been unusual in its force and swift fulfillment, but it was not an atypical attitude. It is hard to imagine a more conclusive way of proving one’s dedication to a cause than sacrificing one’s life for it, and very large numbers of crusaders did just that.
But this assertion is also revealed to be false when we consider the way in which the crusades were preached. Crusaders were not drafted. Participation was voluntary, and participants had to be persuaded to go. The primary means of persuasion was the crusade sermon, and one might expect to find these sermons representing crusading as profoundly appealing.
This is, generally speaking, not the case. In fact, the opposite is true: crusade sermons were replete with warnings that crusading brought deprivation, suffering, and often death. That this was the reality of crusading was well known anyway. As Jonathan Riley-Smith has noted, crusade preachers “had to persuade their listeners to commit themselves to enterprises that would disrupt their lives, possibly impoverish and even kill or maim them, and inconvenience their families, the support of which they would … need if they were to fulfill their promises.”
So why did the preaching work? It worked because crusading was appealing precisely because it was a known and significant hardship, and because undertaking a crusade with the right motives was understood as an acceptable penance for sin. Far from being a materialistic enterprise, crusading was impractical in worldly terms, but valuable for one’s soul.
As difficult as it may be for modern people to believe, the evidence strongly suggests that most crusaders were motivated by a desire to please God, expiate their sins, and put their lives at the service of their “neighbors,” understood in the Christian sense.
MYTH #4: THE CRUSADES TAUGHT MUSLIMS TO HATE AND ATTACK CHRISTIANS.
Part of the answer to this myth may be found above, under Myth #1. Muslims had been attacking Christians for more than 450 years before Pope Urban declared the First Crusade. They needed no incentive to continue doing so. But there is a more complicated answer here, as well.
Up until quite recently, Muslims remembered the crusades as an instance in which they had beaten back a puny western Christian attack. An illuminating vignette is found in one of Lawrence of Arabia’s letters, describing a confrontation during post–World War I negotiations between the Frenchman Stéphen Pichon and Faisal al-Hashemi (later Faisal I of Iraq). Pichon presented a case for French interest in Syria going back to the crusades, which Faisal dismissed with a cutting remark: “But, pardon me, which of us won the crusades?”
This was generally representative of the Muslim attitude toward the crusades before about World War I—that is, when Muslims bothered to remember them at all, which was not often. Most of the Arabic-language historical writing on the crusades before the mid-nineteenth century was produced by Arab Christians, not Muslims, and most of that was positive. There was no Arabic word for “crusades” until that period, either, and even then the coiners of the term were, again, Arab Christians. It had not seemed important to Muslims to distinguish the crusades from other conflicts between Christianity and Islam.
So it was not the crusades that taught Islam to attack and hate Christians. Far from it. Those activities had preceded the crusades by a very long time, and stretch back to the inception of Islam. Rather, it was the West which taught Islam to hate the crusades. The irony is rich.
Thanks for this post. I’m so sick of people spreading misinformation on this topic. It’s also equally stupid when their best example of Christian “terrorism” is an event from over 900 years ago.
🤡🤡 vlad’s brother radu was repeatedly raped and brainwashed by the sultan since he was a little boy to be turned against his own ppl he was ripped from but vlad was the ‘haplessly misguided’ one for hating the ottomans 🤡
“romanian muslim jannissaries” child slaves kidnapped/sold to the Ottoman Empire as a tax for being a tributary state, castrated and forced to convert to Islam and serve the sultan :)))))
at goodwill today i got two marble candlesticks, a lamp with a pretty marble base and green glass decoration, two adorable goose mugs, and then i couldn’t resist picking up this box of vintage doll clothes that was only 5$ for the whole thing. it was taped down so you couldn’t move and see what was inside, but when i got home i found a little fur stole and sneakers and SOCKS and STOCKINGS WITH ELASTIC AND SEAMS UP THE BACK and they’re so adorable i want to die
the doll who owned these clothes…….her drip……….unimaginable
IS…IS THIS AN AMERICAN GIRL DOLL SET?! The clothes in the left look like it’s either from Cecile or Rebecca.
human frailty is a constant theme in giselle—giselle goes mad and her weak heart gives out and kills her; the wilis’ punishment for albrecht and hilarion is to force them to dance until they die of exhaustion.
moral frailty seems to go hand in hand with human fragility—albrecht misuses giselle knowing he cannot offer her anything, hilarion selfishly exposes him without caring for the impact it will have on giselle and is thus also responsible for her death, giselle herself is meant to be a virtuous character but she disobeys her mother both in dancing despite her weak heart and in pursuing loys.
in act i, giselle is fighting against everything that is destined for her. she rebels against her human fragility by dancing despite her weak heart. she rebels against her place in the village by pursuing loys instead of hilarion. you get the sense that she wants something more than what she has—this weak body, this village where she is harvest queen but expected to marry a man she has always known and never loved. she wants the joy of dance despite her weak heart. she wants the joy of true love despite her status as a peasant girl. when she realizes that she will never have the latter, she loses the former as well when her body is so overcome by betrayal that she dies.
in act ii, giselle is once again fighting against everything that is destined for her. she is meant to be a dead shade of a girl which punishes, which looks on as the men responsible for her death meet their own ends, and then she is meant to wander the earth with the other wilis for the rest of time doing the same to others—never placated, never resting, never at peace. but again giselle turns her back on this existence just as joyless and colorless as the one which was waiting for her in the village, and again she chooses to fight for love against human frailty and moral failing: now she is fighting against albrecht’s human frailty against myrtha’s tireless immortality, and she is fighting against the urge to revenge herself and maintain her anger and her hate, and instead she forgives albrecht.
and this time, by rejecting what she is expected to do and instead choosing love, giselle is able to truly free herself. she doesn’t have to wander the earth angry and vindictive like the wilis forever. her spirit can pass on to the next life, where neither physical frailty nor moral failings will touch her.
shout out to the x files for being the only show ive seen actually address the meaning of the inverted cross
This was a fun episode because they deliberately play on the confusion of the general public about the significance of the inverted cross. This sp00ky guy shows up and you think he’s the baddie and he’s got this supposedly satanic image … but he’s actually a good guy and it’s really a legitimate Christian symbol. Very clever.
