Crusades were aggressive and barbaric attacks on Muslims made by the Christians in 1095AD. These crusaders wanted to take back the holy land from the Muslims.

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8-Mar-12

Crusades

Crusades were aggressive and barbaric attacks on Muslims made by the Christians in 1095AD. These crusaders wanted to take back the holy land from the Muslims. These holy lands included primarily Jerusalem. The documents contained in historical records suggest that the Muslims found the European invaders to be physically strong and enormous, but hideous and barbaric in their practices. Many, many things about the Crusaders seem to have revolted the Muslims. For example, in 1099, in the area of Ma'arra, Crusaders consumed the corpses of both Saracens and Turks and of dogs - with the Muslims appalled by such practices. They were equally upset with the Crusader's penchant for trials by ordeal and the cruel and irrational medical practices of the Europeans, whose knowledge of medicine, sanitation, and even personal hygiene were significantly behind those of the Islamic world. The chroniclers suggested that the Europeans were, in some critical ways such as personal hygiene and medical care, significantly improved by their prolonged and intimate contact with Islam and its body of knowledge. (Riley, 243-245)

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What the West remembers as a glorious and epic effort to recapture the Holy Land, the Arab, Islamic world remembers as a brutal, often savage, and largely unprovoked attack. The historical information by Muslims demonstrates that the Muslim world at the time was not "one big, happy family," but a world in which one faction was at odds with another. The Seljuk Turks had conquered many Muslim lands and were quarrelling with Muslims as well as among themselves over dynastic matters. Not only national or cultural rivalries divided the Muslim's dissent over religious heterodoxy were also endemic then (again, as they are now with animosities between Shi'ia and Sunni Moslems). What emerges from this narrative is a recognition that for a brief period of time, these dissenting and hostile factions within the Muslim world overcame (or at least temporarily set aside) their animosities and rivalries to create a unified and ultimately successful front against the Christian, Western attackers. The Muslims, after the Third Crusade, believed that the Christians massacred all their prisoners in Jerusalem either for paying back for the death of the Christians that the Muslims had slain or because the King of England thought it was not good to have so many prisoners when he decided to conquer Ascalon. Both reasons have got nothing to do with religion. Christians were viewed as uncivilized enemies to the Muslims after the Crusades because of the violence. The Crusades, although said it was for Christianity, got the Christians to be viewed very violent and uncultured. Why would this be if it were purely for religion? (Billings, 198-219)

The main contemporary charge against the Crusades, however, is that they did irreparable and lasting damage to relations between Muslims and Christians--even that they "explain" the present conflict between Islam and the West. Tens of thousands of Muslims were killed by the crusaders in the establishment of their states, and over the next two centuries there were crusader incursions throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, from Egypt to Mesopotamia. (Shaw,132-154)

It is also clear that the Crusades were, on both sides of the battlefield, very much a holy war. There is a wealth of valuable information in this text which the student of the history of the middle Ages would be well advised to pursue.

Works Cited

Billings, Malcolm, The Cross and the Crescent(1988); Bam Publications NY; P.198-219

Riley, Smith, Jonathan, The Crusades: A Short History; Boston University Press; (1987) P.243-245

Shaw, M. R. B.; Chronicles of the Crusades; Book Penguin Books, 1963