Thank you, Tim,
It's always the soldiers who put things in perspetive for us.
If we object to senseless slaughter in war and reject horrific brutality in its practice, we cannot single out conduct in one historical case over another as particularly more (or less) heinous because its causes and motivations were religious in nature. Condemnations for atrocities throughout history should not now be selectively applied through a prism of modern political views.
Commenting on the recent scholarship of Oxford historian of the crusades, Dr. Christopher Tyerman in his recent, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford, 2005), Professor Steven Ozment of Harvard writes how Tyerman similarly states: “that the four centuries of holy war known as the Crusades are both the best recognized and most distorted part of the Christian Middle Ages. Just liek Prof. Madden he faults scholars, pundits, and laymen on both sides of the East-West divide for allowing the memory of the Crusades to be ‘woven into intractable modern political problems,’ where it ‘blurs fantasy and scholarship’ and exacerbates present-day hatreds.”
Professor Ozment further notes how Dr. Tyerman views the Crusades (just as does Prof. Madden) “as neither an attempt at Western hegemony, nor a betrayal of Western Christian teaching and practice.”
As Dr. Tyerman himself explains, the warriors who answered the pope’s call to aid Christendom in the Holy Land were known as crucesignati, “those signed with the cross.” Tyerman considers the Crusades to have largely been “warfare decked out in moral and religious terms” and describes them as “the ultimate manifestation of conviction politics.” He points out the Crusades were indeed “butchery” with massacres of Jews Muslims and Jews, and that even among their contemporaries, crusaders had mixed reputations as “chivalric heroes and gilded thugs.”
Yet, as Professor Ozment observes, Tyerman also adds that rather than some “simple realpolitik and self-aggrandizement, the guiding ideology of crusading was that of religious self-sacrifice and revival, and directly modeled on the Sacrament of Penance.”
See: www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0RMQ/is_40_10/ai_n14791827.
Finally, any among us here who believe there was a moral equivalence between the crusaders and their opponents who professed that all of them were “al-Dhimma” (i.e. the Muslims’ natural slaves) to be forcibly converted or else killed (and let's not even mention their practice of forced circumcision of young girls), then I think you are living in the wrong culture.
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