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Oct. 22, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
40:32
Rambling About： The Crusades and Religion
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So, I'm going to have a ramble because I keep hearing people talk about the Crusades and people don't know what they're talking about when they talk about the Crusades.
By and large, there are a very small percentage of people who are better informed than most.
And I'm one of those people.
And there are so many people who just, oh, they don't know what they're talking about.
They just, there are two narratives to the Crusades, depending on your position politically.
The first position is that they are the sacred defenders of Christendom, who do no wrong, if you're a Republican.
Or they're the terrible baby-eating monsters that the progressives will describe them as.
Now, you're going to be surprised to hear that for an institution that lasted, I don't know, three or four hundred years, something like that, and spanned the distance from North Africa to the Baltic Sea, there were a lot, and took up the livelihoods, the life of hundreds of thousands of men, and women and children, over the course of, yeah, three or four hundred years.
It's going to come as no surprise to you that, believe it or not, there is no one solid narrative.
There's a lot of narratives, because a lot's happened.
And I'm going to have a bit of a ramble talking about it, because I really want just people to understand the tenor of what was going on, rather than the minutiae.
So, people always think that the Crusades begin with the First Crusade, in, what is it, 1195, when Urban II gives his great address after the Byzantine Emperor requests small, say, 4,000 or so knights to come over and help them fight the Turks.
This is not where the Crusades begin.
Religious wars for Christianity predate this by hundreds of years.
Charlemagne had the religious backing of the church, fighting the Muslims and the Saxons, both non-Christian groups.
Absolutely had religious dimensions.
William the Conqueror had the Pope's blessing to invade England.
Again, religious dimensions.
So, you can't really just say, right, that was the origin of the Crusades.
The Crusades, militant Christianity is something that has existed for quite some time, because Christianity had been under attack for quite a long time.
But the First Crusade is where really it was kind of codified into the Christian imagination.
And what the first Crusaders would do is sew a cross onto their clothes to say that they've taken the cross and that they're now going to go and fight the infidels in the name of Christ.
that's how Jesus works.
So one thing that the first counter-narrative to this that people will espouse is it was all about money And I'm very tired of hearing this as well.
People seem to forget that Northern Europe, in fact most of the world, was about as religious as ISIS.
They thought that a trial by combat to let God decide who the winner is was a legitimate form of justice.
They thought that trial by ordeal was a legitimate form of justice.
If you were innocent, you would walk across hot coals or be dunked in water or whatever, and God would make that come out in your favor if you were innocent.
So, don't tell me it was about money.
These people were fucking idiots.
Most of them couldn't read.
Almost all of them couldn't write.
Most of them had very little conception of the world outside about a 50-mile radius of where they were born.
Don't be wrong, there were a lot of people who did travel, but most of them didn't travel very far because travel wasn't easy.
And they were all illiterate, and they were all absolutely fucking backwards.
They were all wildly violent as well.
You know, children would enjoy cockfighting and whatnot.
It was such a barbaric time.
It really was.
Compared to modern sensibilities, it was such a fucking horrible time.
So, don't sit there and go, well, it was all about economics.
No, these people weren't bright enough to know about macroeconomics, okay?
These people, don't be wrong, they will have understood that there would have been riches to be gained by doing these things, but there would have been riches to be gained by invading your neighbors anyway.
Why go all the way to the Middle East to do this?
Why go all the way to the north to do this?
They do these things, I think, primarily for religious reasons.
Now, there are lots of examples that I'm going to ramble through, and I'm sure I'll get some of the fine details wrong.
So, if I do, do leave a comment and let me know, because I'm just pulling this off the top of my head from what I remember.
So, the first crusade.
Byzantine Emperor asked for an elite force of knights to help him with the Turks.
What he gets after Innocent preaches his crusade initially is something like 70,000 peasants, led by Peter the Hermit, a pseudo-prophet who leads them literally tens of thousands of idiotic half-wits over to from all across Europe, all the way down to Constantinople.
And on their way, they're murdering Jews like no one else's business.
This is, again, another symptom of a crusade.
If a crusade starts, a lot of Jews die on the way to wherever they're heading.
But yeah, they get there, and the Byzantine Emperor's like, this is not what I'm asking for.
Over to Asia with them.
They go over to Asia, and unsurprisingly, the Turks, being, you know, very, very elite, professional tribesmen who know exactly how to fight, massacre them utterly.
In fact, this is actually a good thing for the rest of the Crusade, because when, and I think, we don't know exactly how many people, but it may well, he may have been up to 100,000 fighting men who travelled to Constantinople.
And these all happened later, though, after Peter the Hermit's peasant brigades go and get slaughtered.
But they all start arriving in Constantinople, and the Byzantine Emperor craps his pants.
He's like, what the fuck are you sending me hundreds of thousands of fighting men for?
I just followed 4,000 knights.
Proper elite men who could do the job I was asking to.
Now I'm at risk of losing my fucking empire, my kingdom, to these barbaric northerners who do nothing but fight and are clad in iron.
And so he has to play the game of politics.
He has to really, really, you know, make sure that he knows what he's doing.
And as soon as a group arrives, he does his best to shove them over to Asia as soon as possible.
He doesn't want them hanging around on Europe, in Europe, because they are just a danger to him and his kingdom.
So he gets them across eventually, and after the eventually there's so much goes on.
It's, you know, I'm brushing with such broad strokes.
I'm not telling you about the Norman soldier.
Is it the Norman?
I think it was a Norman, who went and sat on the Byzantine Emperor's throne to disrespect him.
I'm not talking about Anna Komneni Komneni Komnenes.
I can't remember how to pronounce her name on the top of my head.
But I'm not telling you about her Lady Bola for Beaumont, one of the premier men of the Crusade.
And it's funny, the way she writes about him, she has clearly got the heart.
But yeah, so they get across to Asia and they fight the Turks.
And the Turks think about brilliant war European idiots.
And they get whipped.
The Turks are not prepared for the Knights of Europe.
They are just not prepared.
And so they end up cutting a swathe down through Edessa or Antioch and just along the coast, establishing what become the Crusader states.
The Crusader States.
Eventually capturing Jerusalem and slaughtering everyone in there.
Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike.
They don't care.
But the thing is, this wasn't some act of just callous barbarism.
I know it sounds like it is, but you have to understand that by the time they get there, the Crusaders are fucked.
They are starving.
They are absolutely, they're dehydrated.
They're starving.
They think they're all going to die on this quest.
And so, you know, these insanely violent people from Northern Europe, much like almost everyone else on earth, who have just fought their way through hostile territory against great empires to arrive at Jerusalem fucked.
You know, ragged.
They haven't got any horses anymore.
They've eaten the horses.
They're walking.
They've got barefoot.
This is like a march through hell.
And they finally get there and they're not even happy to see that.
We're to liberate you from the Muslims.
We don't care.
Get lost.
You know what?
Fuck you.
Fuck everyone.
That's it.
So, you know, you can say, oh, there were such monsters.
Well, were they?
You know, I think, A, they were a product of their time, and B, they were suffering quite a lot.
But it wasn't good what they did, don't get me wrong, you know, it was fucking barbaric, but it's kind of understandable.
And I think that if you had been given their upbringing, and you had gone through this, and this is preached for the average soldier, for the average, you know, man-at-arms, as a way of redeeming your soul.
Reconquering Jerusalem.
It doesn't even matter what you do to these heathens on the way or when you get to Jerusalem.
Once you've conquered Jerusalem, you're going to heaven.
This is redemption for you.
So, you know, you can't judge the past by the morals of the present.
It's unfair.
You know, you would be a different person.
You would be doing these things.
I mean, in 100 years' time, they'll probably think that eating meat was the most barbarous thing in the world, and you're there tucking into a Big Mac.
Like, it doesn't matter.
So, you know, you don't want people thinking you're some sort of evil savage.
So, you know, it's not fair to think of these people in the same way.
They thought they were doing the right thing, and so this, the whole point of the crusade, the reason it started, was essentially, technically, it was because the Byzantine Emperor was having his kingdom attacked by the Turks.
But the reason a lot of people went, and one of the primary methods that Innocent and Urban II preached it, was that the Turks weren't allowing Christian pilgrims to go to Jerusalem.
Because Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for hundreds of years by this point.
And the Christians knew who the Muslims were.
These weren't strangers, you know, all of the south, any Mediterranean country was very familiar with the Muslims.
They'd twice besieged Constantinople.
They'd sacked Rome.
They'd conquered Sicily.
They had become a massive, massive nuisance all across the Mediterranean.
Muslim piracy was a huge, huge problem.
And they had all but conquered Spain.
And so it's not like, it's not like, you know, they had been driven out of France by Charles Martel.
And Charlemagne, it's not like these people, it's not like Europeans didn't know who Muslims were, what they thought and why they were doing what they were doing.
Everyone knew who they were.
And they were initially defensive wars.
That's true.
But they didn't stay as defensive wars.
They very quickly became, well, tools with which to bludgeon one's opponents.
So at the same time that the Second Crusade began, let me just check.
I actually, off the top of my head, can't remember what the reason for the Second Crusade was.
Let me just check this, right, it was the response to the fall of the county of Edessa to the forces of Zengi, which I presume is a Turkish, yeah, the Seljuk Turk, right.
Yeah, so it was a response to the fall of Edessa.
And at the same time, this was in 1147, 1145, sorry.
And in 1147, there was another crusade called in the north against the Wends, who were basically a tribe in sort of northern Germany, near Prussia, sort of that area.
A Slavic tribe who were pagan.
And yeah, the Wendish Crusades went on for like 400 years.
And they were part and parcel of what became the Northern Crusades to Christianize the Baltic.
And the Lithuanians weren't Christianized until like the 15th century.
These people fought really hard to retain their indigenous religions.
And you can't tell me that they're not.
They're in no way defensive wars.
These people were quite backwards.
They weren't very technologically advanced.
They weren't socially advanced.
They didn't have great empires.
They were still fucking tribesmen.
And so you ended up with the sort of premier powers of Europe.
Or at least one of them, the Germans, the Holy Roman Empire, stomping all over them for hundreds of years.
Not a war of defense.
Not a defensive campaign at all.
It was a war of aggression.
To conquer a foreign enemy who happened to be a different religion and therefore be a valid target.
It's not like these lands were rich.
There was nothing there.
There was nothing you particularly want.
It's objectively worse land than where you started.
But you wanted some sort of land and you had a good excuse to do it.
and it was going to end up with your soul being saved at the end, because the Pope, why would he not?
So, yeah, and so this goes on.
And then you have the Crusades to reconquer the reconquista, to reconquer Spain.
that is something again took hundreds of years and took hundreds of thousands of men and many many many many battles to eventually drive the Muslims and everyone else out of Spain who wasn't a Christian.
The thing is, sorry So, yeah, okay.
The Spanish Crusade, the legitimate response to aggression.
Spain had been conquered by the Almoravid.
Al-Movid?
I don't know.
I never see these words written down.
I never hear them spoken.
The Moorish dynasties of North Africa.
Had conquered these and they were again one of the world's premier military powers.
At the time when Charles Martel turned them back at Tours, everyone was shocked.
You know they did.
They thought the, the Franks, were barbarous idiots and they didn't think that this was going to happen.
So you know, it was a real, real shock.
They didn't even have like proper heavy cavalry.
But the thing is, you had um Peter Ii of Aragon, who was a famous crusader king.
He defeated the Muslims at I can't remember the name of the battle off the top of my head, but he was, he was um, he was like, he was insanely um Catholic.
You know that.
He was very, very like orthodox Catholic.
You know he was a.
There was no touching him.
He had a pristine reputation among Catholics because he spent all his life fighting Muslims and the Albigensian Crusade was called during his lifetime, during his rule in Aragon, and while he was fighting the Muslims.
The Albigensian Crusade was a crusade against southern France because there was a heresy there called the Cathar heresy, and uh, I think Cathar directly comes from the term cats anus in German.
I can't, I think that comes from propaganda.
They called themselves the Good Christians right, and actually I have a book that I have read about the Cathars and I have another book that I have read about the Crusade To destroy The Cathars and I have another book downstairs to describe what life was like in Languedoc at the time.
So i'm pretty well read on this um, and it's essentially I was, i'm gonna do, I was gonna do a podcast about it, but I just don't have the time because it's a really fascinating thing.
You've got this guy called Simon De Monfort who is leading the crusade and he is a beast.
And i'm sure it starts with good intentions.
I'm sure it starts with the intention of driving out the heresy, because the thing about Catharism is that it's a Gnostic heresy and it's fascinating.
Everything about Catharism is it's it's like postmodernism for Catholicism.
It's amazing.
It's it's everything about it is designed to destroy Catholicism.
They think that the world and everything in it is made by an evil god.
The god of the Old Testament and the god of the New Testament is a ethereal far, far off god who you can never contact.
He doesn't take any interest in worldly affairs, he doesn't care about that.
But the point is that he's the good god and you need to get to him by like, transcending all of this nonsense, but you obviously can't do that while you're trapped in the flesh.
The flesh is evil sinful, everything in the world is sinful.
The Catholic church is the church of the devil.
It was made by the Demiurge, the evil god of the Old Testament.
Of course it's evil.
Man's physical being is evil.
Everything about the world is sinful and bad.
And the luxury, the opulence of the Catholic Church just proves it.
And so what they did, they called themselves the good Christians because they acted like Christ.
They went around in rags.
They went barefooted.
They prayed constantly.
They were non-violent.
They were vegetarians.
They were supremely egalitarian.
no gender hierarchy women could become what they have are things called the perfect ones who were people who effectively renounced worldly pleasures and goods and lived like Christ They went around barefooted, they didn't eat meat, they prayed all the time, they were the priestly caste of Catharism, and they were the perfect ones.
There was a reason they called themselves the good Christians.
And there was nothing the Catholic Church could do to persuade them otherwise.
Very few people.
Because the Catholic Church spent a long time before this crusade trying to persuade people.
Just come back to Catholicism.
We're actually not evil.
We worship the same God.
Come on, you've gone too far.
Nobody bought it.
Nobody bought it.
It was just something that people, I guess, once you started believing that maybe the world is evil and everything in it was made by an evil God, it's hard to go back.
And eventually it accumulates in the Albigensian Crusade, which is led by a bunch of crusaders from Europe.
And they descend on Languedoc and come to a city called Baziers.
I'm probably pronouncing terribly.
Because fuck the French.
But yeah, so what they thought was going to turn into a long, drawn-out siege was actually a very, very short siege.
As some idiot went down, like, opened the gate and sort of like, I don't know, pulling down his trousers and showing him his ass or something.
And a bunch of like camp followers went up and started beating his ass with sticks.
And then suddenly they were inside the city.
And then suddenly, the entire crusade was inside the city.
And suddenly, everyone was burning the city down.
Well, the camp followers were burning the city down, in fact, because the knights were like, hey, we get first dibs on everything.
And the camp followers were like, well, sorry, we are the ones who took the city.
Why should you get first dips?
And they were like, well, because we're knights and we're lords.
And fuck yourselves.
And they were like, haha!
Burn the thing.
But so 20,000 people are killed in a day, practically.
And it's a resounding shock to Christendom.
And to France and to Languedoc.
Everyone is just like, holy shit.
And one thing to understand about Languedoc as well, it's a lot more like Italy than it is like France.
Northern France had been very much tempered by the Viking invasions.
It turned into strongholds.
Strongholds and small villages that, if they were plundered, wasn't a great loss.
Strongholds where people could retreat to when Vikings just sailed up your river.
That wasn't really so much the problem for the south of France and Languedoc.
So they had very much more like a sort of city-state model that Italy and, well, northern Italy and Languedoc basically established.
The terrain was in their favour, basically.
They allowed this.
And so they weren't militaristic.
Not in the same way that the North was.
They didn't really have...
They had knights, but what do they call them?
Oh, crap, I can't remember the name of these.
They had knights, but they weren't the equals of the northern knights, and they certainly didn't have the numbers of the northern knights.
And so, when asked why, and the thing is, Catharism had been allowed to infest the area for decades, decades and decades and decades, to the point where when the Pope asked, look, knights, just why don't you do something about these heretics?
The knights are like, look, these heretics are like our mums, our sisters, our family.
You're asking us to kill people we love.
You know, we can't do this.
And so, but the thing is, the heresy itself absolutely undermined Catholicism.
Everything about it was going to destroy Catholicism.
And so there was simply no way you could be allowed to live.
This is not, I guess technically this, in a roundabout way, this could be considered a defensive war.
But realistically it's not a defensive war.
You know, this was a religious war, entirely.
And it's for religious dominance of the area.
That was the reason for it.
And in this war, Peter II of Aragon, the great Crusader king against the Muslims, ends up getting slaughtered by the Crusaders.
A man who is a crusader and who's crusaded against the Saracens is killed by the Crusaders crusading against heretics in Languedoc.
Simon de Montfort kills him.
oh no, he personally probably doesn't kill him, but his knights, kill him in a battle.
And, again, you can't, where is the argument for this being a defensive war or a religiously justified war?
At points, the Pope's trying to rein them in.
He knows that they are going far too far.
They're not conquering heretics anymore.
They're just trying to conquer land.
So there is always, you know, in this situation, in this crusade, there absolutely is the argument that the crusade is.
It may well have started about religion, but it certainly developed into land grabbing.
So this is the major theme I want to get past.
There are definitely times, definitely times.
now the children's crusade I'm just gonna Wikipedia this quickly I don't know whether it's true And I don't think we know in general if it's true.
It may well be apparently multiple bands of wandering poor from Germany or France.
But the point is, there would have definitely been multiple bands of wandering poor who were going because they were very religious.
The poorer people were, the dumber they were.
And the dumber they were, the more likely they are to be fucking zealots.
You know, Peter the Hermit didn't go for land.
He didn't go.
He didn't take all his peasant idiots across to Asia Minor because they thought they were going to set up a new kingdom.
They were going, you know, they didn't think, oh, we're going to grab a desk or we'll take Antioch.
We'll have so many revenues.
They weren't thinking that.
They were thinking, we're going to reconquer the city of God because God wills it.
Deus Volt or Low Vault or however it is.
God fucking wills it, it's going to happen.
The Turks aren't going to stop us, and well, sorry, my Christian friends.
God didn't.
He will do it for a different group.
But, you know, fuck Peter the Hermit.
So this is my point.
can't just say the Crusades were this or the Crusades were that because the Crusades really were a lot of different things to a lot of different people and it's not it's not something you can easily sum up you know.
I mean, the third crusade may well have been legitimately religious and have legitimately religious goals because Saladin reconquers Jerusalem.
takes Jerusalem and shit, the Pope I think it was Urban, Urban II I'm just going to check to make sure I've got the right bloody Pope I'm just going to check to make sure I've got the right bloody poop.
Who was it?
Oh, I don't bloody know.
Oh, no, Gregory VII, sorry.
You know, Gregory VIII, even.
A huge cry goes up around Europe.
And the kings of France, England, and Germany say, yeah, we're all going to take the cross.
And between us, I mean, Richard the Lionheart can get about 25,000 men.
His smallest retinue.
My army, not retinue.
You know, the king of France can probably get about 40,000, 50,000.
The Holy Roman Emperor is like, I can bring 100,000 fighting men.
You know, lead them down across Europe.
And he does.
And Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart, they sail around from England to France, around Spain.
And they get there.
And the Holy Roman Emperor has died crossing a stream.
He has drowned in like a foot high stream.
And 100,000 Germans turn around and go home.
Apart from a tiny percentage that carry on down to Jaffra or wherever it was.
one of the remaining Crusader cities on the coast and I guess, I mean I'd have to quickly check but But Philip Augustus and King Richard are related.
They know each other very well.
And they don't like each other.
Richard's a twat, basically, and he thinks he should be in charge.
Despite having the smallest army in the smallest kingdom, he thinks he should be in charge.
They have an argument, and Philip Augustus just settles home with his army.
And so Richard's left with his 25,000 men, which is a powerful army.
Richard's an excellent general.
He spent his whole life fighting.
He's an amazing warrior.
And he just does it himself, or at least tries.
He defeats Saladin at the Battle of...
Oh, what was that?
Uh...
Arsuf.
That's it.
Well, he's travelling to the city of Jaffa.
He's going along the coast.
And Saladin brings his army up to harass Richard's army as they're marching in a formation.
And they start peppering them with arrows.
And it's really starting to piss the Crusaders off.
And Saladin, you can see it's working, so he gets in a dismount and fire more accurately because they're horse archers.
And at this point, the hospital knights, if I recall correctly, basically, coincidentally, just turn and start charging after the Muslims on this hill.
And the Muslims completely, completely taken back.
Oh, shit.
And Richard's just like, right, there's nothing you can do.
He's got to either support them or lose them.
And he's just like, right, now everyone in.
And it's a fantastic victory for Richard.
He just gives Saladin such a bloody nose that Saladin refuses to do battle with Richard at this point onwards.
He's too afraid to do it.
Because Richard is just such a beast and he's such a good general that he just doesn't, Saladin knows his army isn't a match for Richard.
However, he has home field advantage.
It's his land.
They are his emirs.
He owns these towns.
Richard is the one who's fighting against the clock.
And so what Saladin does is he adopts Fabian tactics.
He just decides, well, I don't need to fight him to win.
So he just, I mean, like, the approach to Jerusalem, I can't remember how many miles around, he just scours it.
He removes all the trees, any shade, you know, any water sources he can destroy, he does.
So there's just simply no way of Richard sieging Jerusalem.
He doesn't, there's nothing around to sustain an army with.
Richard knows this.
He is a very, very experienced general.
He knows this.
You know, he marches towards Jerusalem, sees how barren everything is, and realizes that he can't win this.
And so, heartbroken, and his army are almost revolting at the point where he's like, look, we're not going to go to Jerusalem.
We're not going to do it, because we're all going to die if we go to Jerusalem.
We're not going to do it.
God is actually not with us.
The best we can do is a treaty.
And he tries to get his sister to marry Saladin's brother.
She refuses because women are chattel and they can do that.
No, obviously she's not chattel.
She just refuses though.
I'm not going to marry Muslim.
I'm sorry, tough.
And yeah, so he just gets a treaty with Saladin to say, look, all I want is for you to allow unarmed Christian pilgrims to be able to visit the Holy Land.
And Saladin says, yeah, sure.
And problem solved.
On the way back, he starts heading back to the coast, obviously, and he gets to the coast and he's walking down with part of his army and part of the army is sailing.
And they get word that at the Crusader Citadel or city of Jaffa, it's been taken by the Muslims.
And there is a bunch of Crusader knights trapped in the citadel.
And so he heroically sails down, leaps out of the boat with, I know, 2,000 crossbowmen and like 50 knights.
And he ends up beating Saladin's army of about 10,000 horsemen out in the plain before.
And to the point where it's his personal bravery that is described as winning the day.
But at the end of the day, it changes nothing.
All it does is it means he gets a few extra knights saved.
They still have to sail back, and they still don't really achieve anything other than the treaty.
It's, yeah, a sad thing, but it was obviously for religious purposes.
You know, everyone in the Crusade, when you read about it, the Crusaders are just disheartened that they're not going to attack Jerusalem.
They really want to, even though it's a stupid move.
It's dumb, which is why Richard doesn't do it.
But they really want to because they're fucking zealots.
They think God will provide.
They think Moses will come along, crack open a fucking stone, and water will spring out because they're stupid.
They're stupid medieval fucking peasants.
And so that one, yeah, pretty fucking religious motivation.
Absolutely certain of it.
Come to the fourth crusade, and it's a bad one.
It's not.
I mean, there are men there who are obviously going for religious reasons, but there are also a lot of men there who are obviously going for financial reasons, for the reasons of prestige and wealth and power.
And the Venetians take advantage of them.
The Venetian doji, I can't remember which one it is off the top of my head, but you can Wikipedia it.
He basically, they don't have enough money to pay the Venetians to get them to, I think they're going to Egypt.
And so basically what the Venetian doge says is, okay, well, you have to do something for me, and I will get you there.
You know, I'll waive the thing.
And he effectively ends up sort of persuading the Crusaders to attack Constantinople, which they do.
And they actually take and sack Constantinople.
And this sets up the Latin Empire.
Constantinople never recovers from this.
It never is back on its feet.
It's always just a shadow of its former self after this.
And the Latin Empire lasts, I don't know, 100 years or something.
It's not very long at all, really.
And that, you know, collapses in itself, and the Byzantines never recover.
And, you know, if there was any religious motivation to the Fourth Crusade, it's gone by the time they reach Greece.
It's gone.
You can't possibly say these men are sacking Constantinople for God.
stupid you know so yeah let me just quickly remind myself about the fifth crusade I should have done some sort of preparation for this, but I didn't.
So, what are you going to do?
But yeah, at the same time as all of this is going on, there are also many other Crusades in other places, you know, there are, oh yeah, the Fifth Crusade is the attempt to conquer Egypt, sorry, and.
And yeah, as I recall, that went very, very badly.
But you can look it up, it's, yeah, it was, oh yeah, this is where Francis of Assisi was taking part.
But yeah, the whole thing was fucking, you know, a catastrophe.
If I recall correctly, this is the one where they get suckered into a city.
I can't remember what city off the top of my head.
But the Muslim forces, they retreat to their towns and their walls in Egypt, and they get, was it in Cairo itself, was it?
I can't remember.
But there was one crusade in Egypt where basically the crusading army gets suckered into fighting into a city, which is not ideal when there's an enemy army in the city.
And they basically end up getting butchered in the streets.
And that's the end of that crusade.
It doesn't go well, basically.
But they understood that Egypt was a stronghold of Muslim power and to defeat it would be the key to defeating the Muslims in the south of the Levant and the Middle East.
And I mean, if you've ever played Total War, if you've ever played Medieval Total War, if you go and try and conquer Jerusalem for a crusade, you will get stack after stack after stack of dipshits coming out of Egypt.
And that's exactly the problem they were having.
They knew that Crusader armies, jihadi armies, would come out of Egypt.
And, you know, they would be on, again, on their home turf.
Would be fighting for a religious cause and there would be a problem.
So that's what they were trying to do, but um, didn't work because they didn't have the planning or the expertise.
But anyway, so that's my opinion of the crusades, which I think is a relatively informed one.
There is no right or wrong, good or bad.
There are people who were probably freakishly religious.
There were people who were probably very religious and interested in worldly goods.
There were people who were probably pretty damn religious and very interested in worldly goods.
And then there were people who weren't really part of the crusades but were taking advantage of crusades to get what they wanted in this life and were happy to use the crusades to do it.
Each crusade had a different mix of these people and each crusade has a different tenor depending on this mix of people.
But ultimately you can't just say they were good or bad.
That's.
It's a false dichotomy.
You can't you know it's too much has happened over too long a period, over too many differing places, to say that the crusades were good or bad.
So if you're going to talk about things in history, religious things in history regarding Islam, regarding Christianity, don't bring up crusades, don't bring up Jihads, because invariably, you're going to make yourself look like a fucking idiot.
You don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know.
I don't know very much of what I'm talking about.
You know, but I know I know more than these people who are saying these things.
Because if you reduce it to a good or bad narrative, you've failed.
You have failed in any way to accurately encapsulate what the Crusades or the Jihads were about.
You don't know.
You don't know.
Stop doing it.
Stop bringing up the Crusades.
Stop it.
Please.
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