LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

into the Byzantine Empire, finally retaking Constantinople from the Franks in 1261.

      Somewhere in the midst of all of this activity, the whole business of attacking the Saracens completely slipped everyone’s mind.¹²

       Children’s Crusade

      In 1212 a new outbreak of crusading fever swept Europe as a couple of wandering child evangelists stirred up the youth of France and Germany with impassioned pleas and sermons. Enthusiastic mobs of young people followed them in devotion from town to town. As with most medieval history, we have only a few sentences written at the time and many pages of embellished tales written a generation later as our source of information, so no one is sure exactly what happened, but apparently thousands of children—teenagers, more likely—ran away from home and took to the road, determined to free the Holy Land after their elders had failed. Many never made it out of Europe, and most were never seen again.

      The most common story is that a column of 20,000 eager French children descended on the port of Marseilles, where they were told transportation awaited them. They embarked on ships and sailed off to do God’s bidding—except that it was a trick: the shipmasters sold them all in Mediterranean slave markets instead. Another wave of 30,000 German youngsters made the hazardous crossing over Alpine passes; many were lost along the way. Some drifted over to Genoa, where they gave up and settled down. Others pressed on. When the survivors gathered in Rome to be blessed by the pope, he thanked them for their piety, but seeing their pitiful condition, sent them home.¹³

       Fifth Crusade and Beyond

      By now, the crusader movement was fizzling out, and the European presence on the Levantine shore was down to three coastal enclaves—Acre, Tripoli, and Antioch. A new outburst of crusaders under King Louis of France (later Saint Louis) tried to conquer Egypt. They took the port of Damietta and won some battles as they moved deeper into Egypt, but in the end, they simply lacked the stamina to keep moving forward. While withdrawing from Cairo, the king and his army were captured and held for ransom.

      The next Crusade, the Sixth, was a disappointment for everyone involved. With Mongols bearing down on the Muslim world from the Far East, the Saracens had to keep their armies freed up and ready to meet the next raid from the east. They needed to keep the crusader states in their rear quiet, and the price for this was returning control of Jerusalem to the Franks.

      So the crusaders got Jerusalem back, but they got it through diplomacy and didn’t get to kill anyone. Even so, it was a temporary measure and Jerusalem was shortly back in Muslim hands. Meanwhile, the crusader state of Antioch fell to the Mongols.

      In 1289, Tripoli fell to the Egyptians, leaving only Acre in crusader hands. Then in 1291, a band of Christian pilgrims from Acre brawled with Syrian merchants, and the sultan of Egypt demanded compensation for the Muslims killed. When the price proved beyond the means of the Christian community, the sultan attacked and removed this last crusader state from the map.

       Legacy

      Some historians say that the Crusades drove a wedge between Christianity and Islam that still exists to this day, but let’s be realistic. Neither of these religions gets along with anybody. It would be difficult to find any time in history when their followers weren’t killing each other—and even if you could, that would only be because they were resting up and getting ready for another round.

      However, by putting huge numbers of western European aristocrats in close contact with the sophisticated Orient, the Crusades were able to jump-start Western Civilization—in a happy history book that would be the main legacy of the Crusades. For our purposes, however, the main legacy was a harshening of the Christian religion. For the next five hundred years—until the Enlightenment tamed it—western Christianity had an unfortunate tendency to direct violence against unbelievers.

      We will see other religious wars in this book, but those will be wars about people—people trying to impose their beliefs, people wanting to be left alone, people being punished, people being rescued. The Crusades were about a place: the Holy Land.¹⁴

      While fighting over land is quite common, the land in dispute usually provides some practical resource—minerals, crops, harbors, farms, strategic location, exploitable labor, or sheer size. Palestine has none of these. The sole resource of the Holy Land is heritage. There’s no gold, no oil, very little fertile land, and few natives, nothing but sacred sites, so in essence, the Crusades killed 3 million people in a fight to control the tourist trade.

RELIGIOUS KILLING

      THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS IS THAT SOME PEOPLE deny they ever happen. They will say the Crusades were about economics and the Inquisition was a consolidation of power. They will deny that anyone fights over religion, despite the fact that the participants freely admit to fighting over religion.

      Obviously, no war is 100 percent religious (or 100 percent anything) in motivation, but we can’t duck the fact that some conflicts involve more religion than others. So how can we decide when religion is the real cause of a conflict and not just a convenient cover story?

      Well, for starters, if the only difference between the two sides is religion, then it is a safe bet that the conflict is religious. Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs are basically the same people except for religion. Ditto the Dutch and the Flemings. In the French Wars of Religion, the partition of India, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the war in Lebanon, people who looked alike, spoke the same languages, and lived in the same communities were at each other’s throats only because they followed different religions.

      Another consideration: How easily can you describe a conflict without mentioning religion? The American Civil War certainly had religious elements to it—John Brown’s fanaticism, Lincoln’s inaugural address, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—but you could easily write a detailed history of the war without mentioning any of these. Contrast that with, for example, the Crusades. Could you even get one paragraph into it without mentioning the pope, the Holy Land, or Jerusalem? You can argue that the Crusades were about something other than religion, but try writing two pages without bringing it up.

      Finally, if the parties declare religious motives, we should at least consider the possibility that they are telling the truth. Religion is so central to a person’s worldview that most big decisions have some sort of religious consideration. Even if the warmonger-in-chief is using religion only as a convenient and cynical excuse to stir up the masses, the main reason he does that is because it works. You never see warmongers rallying armies to destroy an enemy that spells or shaves differently, because those are stupid reasons to fight a war. A different religion by contrast is usually accepted as a perfectly fine reason to kill someone. If it weren’t, why would people rally behind it?

      Still, not every conflict between different religions is a religious conflict, especially when there are multiple differences between the conflicting groups. In the European conquest of the Americas, the desire to convert the natives fell far behind the desire to rob them. The Pacific war between the Japanese and the Americans is easily explained as a geopolitical power struggle. When the Turks pushed into Europe, religion played a role in motivating both attackers and defenders, but it was secondary to the simple empire-building that was occurring along all the borders of the empire.

      For this list, let’s count only conflicts and oppressions in which religion is widely considered the primary reason for the conflict, along with human sacrifices and ritual killings.

       The Thirty Deadliest Religious Killings

       Taiping Rebellion (1850–64)

      Twenty million died in a messianic uprising of Chinese Christians.

       Thirty Years War (1618–48)

Скачать книгу