Tagged: crusades

Why the Crusades began

About 450 years before the first crusade began, a new religion was born in the Middle East. At the time, the Middle East was mostly made up of Christians and Jews.

Before Islam began, there were five main centers of Christianity: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

As Islamic warriors conquered the Middle East and North Africa, three of those centers were lost. Most of what was once “the Christian world” became what is now “the Muslim world.”

Two of the centers of Christianity remained, and one of them was the new Islamic target: Constantinople (now known as Istanbul). Constantinople was a huge walled city, and it was being threatened by the now powerful Islamic empire.

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A timeline of Islamic expansion

By Dan McLaughlin

Let me put down here some facts that are worth returning to from time to time, as arguments over the history of Islam and Islamism are back in the news with today’s beheading in London. In debates over the history of tension between Muslims and Christians, the Crusades are often cited, out of their historical context, as the original cause of such clashes, as if both sides were peaceably minding their own business before imperialist Westerners decided to go launch a religious war in Muslim lands.

This is not what actually happened, and indeed it is ahistorical to treat the fragmented feudal states of the West in the Eleventh Century as capable of any such thing as imperialism or colonialism (although, as Victor Davis Hanson has noted, even in the centuries after the fall of Rome, Western civilization retained a superior logistical ability to project force overseas due to the scientific, economic and military legacies of ancient Greece and Rome). Moreover, when Islam first arose, much of what we think of today as Islamic ‘territory’ in Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa was Christian until conquered by the heirs of Muhammad, such that speaking of one side’s incursions into the other’s territory requires you to ignore how that territory was seized in the first place. That entire region had been part of the Roman and later Byzantine empires, and was culturally part of the West until it was conquered by Muslim arms – Rome is closer geographically to Tripoli than to London, Madrid is closer to Casablanca than to Berlin, Athens is closer to Damascus than to Paris.

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