The Truth about the Crusades

Most people have a distorted view of the Crusades. History revisionists have led them to believe the Crusades were an unprovoked assault by Christian Europeans against peaceful Muslims. Nothing could be further from the truth.

From the time Islam was founded in the 7th century A.D. Muslim armies began invading the lands around them in the name of jihad. Beginning in the Arabian peninsula, they conquered eastward as far as India, northward throughout the Middle East into modern day Turkey, westward through northern Africa and into Spain, at which point they had become the largest empire on earth.

Many of the lands they overran were Christian territories at the time, including modern day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, all of northern Africa, and Spain. From the Christian perspective the Islamic Empire was executing a massive pincer movement, encircling the Mediterranean and preparing to take over all of Europe. In the west Roman Catholic Europeans fought against the invaders in Spain, while the Eastern Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire battled relentlessly with Islamic forces in the east.

 

In 1071 the Byzantines lost a major battle to Islamic forces near Manzikert in Turkey, which was falling more and more into the hands of the Muslims. This eventually led Alexius I, Emperor of Byzantium, to send word to the Pope in western Europe seeking reconciliation between the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church. He also requested assistance from western European forces to repel the Islamic armies in the east. The capital of Byzantium, Constantinople, was situated at the crucial passage between Asia and Europe. European leaders realized that if Constantinople, the great bulwark to the east, was to fall, nothing could hinder a great flood of Islamic troops from penetrating into Europe. All of Christianity could be eradicated.

In 1095 Pope Urban II launched a rally cry to go and fight in the east to defend all of Christendom and to reclaim the lands that had been taken in the Middle East, including and especially the Holy Land of Israel.

Admittedly, the motives of many kings and nobles were for their own personal gain of glory, lands, and wealth. Most of those who fought were probably not even true Christians since it was the law throughout Europe that you must be Christian or face death. The Crusades, undoubtedly, were brutal and violent. Nevertheless, the primary impetus for the Crusades was self-defense against a relentless onslaught of attacks against Christian lands and the preservation of Christendom itself. The other major motive was the reclamation of Christian territories that had been taken by force by Muslim invaders.

Therefore, the Crusades were not an unprovoked attack, but a reaction to hundreds of years of Islamic invasions, conquests, and attacks against Christian lands and people.

Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica
Byzantium by John Julius Norwich

History of Western Civilization (textbook)

 

(Update 11/1/2015)

Bill Warner, PhD: Jihad vs Crusades - I found this YouTube video that demonstrates this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_To-cV94Bo&feature=youtu.be

 

Origin

When in labor the artist, beginning, imagines. Mia always created beauty…the starry heavens above, and below, the fertile earth. Portraying the splendorous earth…it was not without pain. Form worlds and fill empty canvasses and capture darkness. She was riding on waves, the restless face, foaming of tides, the ocean deep, cold and mysterious, the undulating spirit, womb of creation. Mia miraculously moved brush on canvas, the artist’s face full of inspiration, the turbulent waters rising and falling. Mia once said, ”Contrasts let whatever there is, be.” Bright light, darkness and shadow; there always was intense light illuminating and defining. Mia truly saw through the blinding light into that which it really was…the good: truth and purity. Mia skillfully divided shadows, the glimmering light arising from within the impenetrable darkness. If Mia ever called for the sun, light of day appeared, and likewise the moon. Darkness, even he, when called, obeyed…night fell.

[ Mia is an anagram for I am, the name of God. To discover the secret hidden within the poem read every other word beginning with the second word, then the fourth and so on.]

By Sling

Non-Eclidean Geometry and General Relativity

(I studied these two subjects independently at different times, then realized that they complemented each other. So I wrote this analysis.)

Euclid lived around 300 B.C. and wrote a work called the Elements. In it he described the geometry that we all learned in high school. Euclid began by giving 5 axioms or propositions which were considered to be self-evident. From these 5 axioms he deduced many theorems. The result was Euclidean geometry, which was considered to be a true and accurate description of the world in which we live.

However, a problem continually arose for mathematicians concerning Euclid’s geometry. The 5th axiom did not seem self- evident. In simple terms the 5th axiom states that parallel lines will remain equidistant from each other and never meet or diverge from one another. Mathematicians questioned how the properties of something that extended to infinity could be self-evident.

In the 19th century non-euclidean geometry emerged when some mathematicians tried assuming that parallel lines do meet or diverge from one another, which actually is true on curved surfaces. For example, lines that are parallel at the equator converge at the poles on the surface of the Earth. They found that coherent geometries could be created with a change in the fifth axiom. In these geometries, triangles, for instance, have more than or less than 180 degrees. Whereas Euclidean geometry says that all triangles have exactly 180 degrees. These new geometries were considered an irrelevant oddity of mathematics.

In the 20th century Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity, which stated that the presence of massive bodies such as a planet or star causes the space around it to be curved. Einstein's theory was first proved experimentally by scientists who observed, during a solar eclipse, the emergence of a star from behind the sun sooner than possible unless the light was curving around the sun. This bending of light is now known as the gravitational lensing effect. Since gravity was known to only affect objects with mass, this was proof that space itself was curved because light has no mass. According to Einstein, the moon revolves around the Earth, not because an invisible force pulls on the moon, but because the mass of the Earth curves the space around it. The moon is moving in a straight line at constant speed in accordance with Newtonian physics, but the space it is moving in is curved. This can be demonstrated by drawing a straight line on a flat piece of paper (representing the moon’s movement through space), then bending the paper into a tube until the ends of the line meet. The straight line has now become a circle on the curved paper.

The advent of Einstein’s Relativity reveals that non-euclidean geometries are actually the most accurate description of our universe because space, itself, is curved. Euclidean geometry is still suitable for small scale applications like constructing buildings and surveying, but on a cosmic scale, it is not valid.