Dec. 27, 2024 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
47:53
The Chronicles of the Christians - Part II: The Truth About the Crusades
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This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
Christ is King! Hosanna! Hosanna!
Hosanna! Hosanna!
Fio, love thee!
Benedictus qui bendit in nomine et domine, The Crusades were launched after seven centuries of constant Islamic aggression.
Before the very first Crusade was launched in 1095, Muslims had invaded the following Christian lands.
They had invaded Christian Syria, Christian Jordan, Christian Palestine, Christian Egypt, Christian Algeria, Christian Libya, Christian Morocco, Christian Portugal,
Christian Spain, Christian France, Christian Sicily, Christian Turkey, Christian Armenia, Christian Italy, All before the First Crusade.
The Crusades are a legitimate response to Islamic aggression and Islamic violence.
It has fallen to us to defend Jerusalem.
Assemble the army.
You have chosen wisely.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to part two of the Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.
My co-host today is Blake Neff.
So, Blake, you saw the clip just there played that went pretty viral, I think, earlier this year, that the Crusades were a response.
The Crusades were a response.
The Crusades were a response.
Is that true?
Is that accurate?
That's not what I was told about the Crusades.
It's definitely true, Jack.
And it was a very delayed response, even, when you look at the grand sweep of history.
The first crusade, I think, is called in 1095, maybe 1096. And it...
Arrives you know after many hundreds of years of Christianity being rolled back by a tide of Islamic conquest and by Increasingly like increasing breakdown between those two faiths even in times of peace I think The kind of official label that they would give to a crusade is they would describe it as a pilgrimage.
Crusaders, they were basically taking an oath to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
So we talked during our episode on ancient Christianity, the rise of Christianity, how St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, That she creates the practice of Christian pilgrimage by going to the Holy Land.
And in the years after that, people took after her example.
They would also go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
And this was a very popular thing that you could do in the Middle Ages if you had the means to do so.
Once in your life, you would try to travel to the Holy Land, to the place where Christ had walked and where he had ministered to people.
And they had done this even when it was ruled by Muslims for a long time.
But what increasingly happened was they were unable to do so.
There would be violence against pilgrims.
Pilgrims would be attacked by bandits.
They would have their ships attacked.
They would be sold into slavery and then need to be ransomed.
In fact, this was one of the first sort of international charitable One of the things that we have in history is you would have Christians who would raise funds to ransom captives who had been taken by the Muslims in the Middle East and so on.
And so that was the buildup that you had to it, was you had Christianity increasingly in the sense that it's under siege and also that You know, that the homeland, that the place where the Savior had walked was ruled by those who rejected him and would attack those who followed him.
And that all built up to, well, okay, let's have an armed pilgrimage to free this place from those who hold it.
And that led to centuries of crusades.
And so, we're going to get into all that.
How did the Crusades start?
What was this rise of Islam?
In a sense, the sacking of the Holy Land, the taking of the Holy Land, and the response, their wherewithal.
This is the truth about the Crusades in the series, The Chronicles of the Christians.
Jack Posobiec, Blake Maff, we'll be right back.
.
All right, Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff back here.
The Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.
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Blake Neff, when we left, we were talking about the Crusades.
So even before the Crusades, let's talk a little bit about this idea that many of these lands, and you know, he mentions countries earlier in the clip we played earlier, but they weren't really, you know, countries.
They were kingdoms and territories of the Empire when this was going on.
But many of them had been Christianized and we did a whole episode the other day in part one about how Christianity spread throughout the regions of the Roman Empire.
But then in Northern Africa and what's now referred to as the Middle East or Levant, you get the spread of Islam and Islam didn't exactly spread the way Christianity did, did it?
It did not.
So Islam emerges in the early 600s, so this is about 300 years after Constantine, and it's therefore like 300 years after the Mediterranean area becomes Christian.
It comes out of Arabia and It really has a very shocking rise.
There's kind of what happened is the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire had a very long war with each other and they were just totally exhausted by it and suddenly these Arabs burst out and they just they they conquer at an incredibly rapid case almost nothing like it in world history so they conquer What we think of as the Muslim world today.
So they conquer modern Iraq, they conquer modern Iran, modern Egypt, modern Syria, modern North Africa, they get all the way out to Spain, and this becomes the Ummah, the Islamic world.
It's initially all under one empire, it eventually breaks apart, but This area, when it was conquered, was overwhelmingly Christian.
And for centuries after, it still remains heavily Christian, even majority Christian.
And it's over time that you start seeing more and more aggressive limitations on Christianity in those places, and also where you see a renewed expansionism that sort of inspires a backlash against it.
So, for example, one of the things that leads up to the Crusades, There's a great Christian city in Antioch.
There's historically a patriarch, one of the chief bishops, lives in Antioch.
And Antioch was ruled by the Roman Empire, by the Byzantine Empire, if you'll see it referred to in medieval stuff.
And only a few years before the First Crusade is that city actually captured by an Islamic army, and they also conquer most of modern-day Turkey.
That had been a very Christian territory, a heartland of Christianity, and it's been overrun by a Muslim army.
And so the First Crusade actually emerges almost by accident, is that the Roman Emperor, Alexius I, is asking knights from Europe, from France, Say, hey, come out, help me fight against Muslims, and you can feel like you're serving Christ when you fight, rather than just fighting against each other.
And he's trying to recruit an army for this, and what happens is the Pope at the time...
And by the way, that Alexius, Blake, that Alexius, so even though he would refer to himself as the Roman Emperor, he's actually in Constantinople, so he's in what we would now refer to as Byzantium.
Yes, and he's in the modern-day city of Istanbul.
Today, a Muslim city, unfortunately, but this was the largest city in the Christian world for a thousand years.
It would be a rival to, it would consider itself a rival to Rome, and it was a rival to Rome in terms of Christian importance, and that is where the emperor lived.
So yeah, I say Roman emperor because technically it's true, but...
This would have been disputed at the time.
We don't need to get into all of that.
But he asks Christian knights, hey, come out and help me to reclaim lands that should be Christian.
And it seems that a pope, Urban II, he takes that and he sort of I don't want to say distorts it, but he evolves it for his own reasons where the church, they had this thought.
Their thinking was, it's bad when Christians fight each other.
There was sort of this early version of a pacifist movement where they promoted movements.
They called it the peace of God and the truths of God.
And the peace of God was, it's bad for Christians to fight each other, so we should try to limit when you can fight.
Don't fight on Sundays, don't fight during Lent, don't fight during holy times, so that there's less fighting.
And they would also do the truce of God, which was sort of early human rights law.
It was, don't attack women, don't attack children, don't desecrate holy places.
So it was trying to say, yes, warfare, it's the Middle Ages, warfare is inevitable, but we should limit how much of it there is and who it hurts.
And so what the Pope seems to have thought is, well, instead of having...
These men have to fight.
They're professional fighters.
Why not have them fight to protect Christians, to protect Christian churches, to protect Christian places, and to fight against people who are enemies of Christians, rather than have them fight amongst each other?
So he apparently gives a speech in, I think, in Constance.
It's the Council of Constance, I think, is where it was.
City in France.
And we don't know what he said, but whatever he said, it was apparently the greatest speech of all time.
Because you have all of these knights, all of these lords who are present.
And they just come out and they're like, yes, I want to go.
Let's go.
And you have these rich guys, these are the most powerful lords in Europe.
They don't just say, let's go.
What do they say?
What do they say?
Deus Vult.
Deus Vult!
Deus Vult.
And of course, Kingdom of Heaven is a very accurate film depicting all of this.
And there's this myth about it.
But there are like 10 different versions of that.
Like, I've gone to look up the Pope Urban II speech, launching the First Crusade, and there's so many different versions of it.
It's almost choose your own adventure as to which.
But it...
It's kind of like the Patton speech, you know, prior to, you know, prior to the great battles in World War II. It's like a general Patton speech, but rallying around the cross and specifically talking about the defense of not just these former Christian lands, but really Jerusalem, the Holy Land, the holy sites.
And this ties back to the The practice that St. Helena had instituted of pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
It's like, hey, remember those Holy Lands that we're all supposed to be making our pilgrimages to?
Well, they've been ransacked by infidels and someone needs to go and save them.
And that someone is you, dear friends.
Yeah, and it's amazing.
It really is one of the great decentralized outpourings of public enthusiasm ever because no kings go on the first crusade.
This is not a government endeavor.
It is, you know, this guy gives a speech and they just rapidly It's just the level of mass public enthusiasm for it is off the charts.
So you have nobles who are selling or mortgaging everything they own to try to go to the Holy Land on this pilgrimage.
There's no armed, there's no single commander to it.
There's different lords and it ends up being this like campaign by committee like we've never seen before because they can't agree on who should be in charge.
And you have people, like I said, people selling everything they own.
There were all these rules that were kind of designed to encourage Christian behavior, where they would say, before you go on crusade, you can't be trying to escape debt, so you have to settle all your debts with any people that you have.
If they owe you money, you have to settle up with them.
If you owe someone else money, you have to settle up with them.
You have to make sure that you go on crusade with a clean conscience.
We have remarkable stories of what people were doing.
There was an ordinary man who, I believe he'd killed his brother or some family member in an argument, and so he was witnessed where he was holding the weapons that he had done this with, and he was like, I am going to travel to Jerusalem to lay these weapons at the tomb where Christ rose from the dead as my penance for what I had done.
Again, it's all popular enthusiasm.
No king orders this crusade.
No one is really ordered to go on this crusade unless they're, you know, a knight who's working directly for someone else who does it.
It's all people volunteering to go on this.
It never should have succeeded.
If you read the details of it, you really understand why people in the Middle Ages thought that the First Crusade, which took Jerusalem, had to be a miraculous endeavor, because it never should have succeeded in a million years, and yet it does, after several years and after one of the most hard-fought campaigns in human history.
And this really goes to show you, again, as we talked about in the first episode, I certainly encourage people, if you haven't listened to it, please go back and do so, that People really believed in Christianity back then.
This was not some cynical, and we'll talk about that in the next segment, but this was not some cynical endeavor.
This was not a political power play.
This was not this idea that, oh, we're just going to go and get jewels and loot for our own personal coffers.
And I'm not saying that none of that happened, but what I'm saying is There really was a widespread, deep belief that this is the type of thing that Christians should do, that Christians should fight for the Holy Land, that the liberation of Jerusalem is itself a worthy endeavor and one that was taken upon by thousands of individuals, not even kings at first, that it was a mass popular movement.
The truth about the Crusades here on the Chronicles of the Christians.
Be right back.
All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back.
The Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.
So, Blake, you talked about it being miraculous and miraculous because of the sense that it was incredibly hard.
I mean, keep in mind, we're talking about fielding armies that are all the way on the other side of the world and not really doing so with State backing, per se, they're doing so as part of this popular movement.
So it's not like you've got, you know, and certainly there were sponsorships, but it wasn't like the King of England or, you know, the King of the Franks have sent you all of this, you know, their entire army over.
It was this sort of like quasi-volunteer thing.
So walk me through what that was like.
Yeah, I really want to emphasize there was almost nothing like this in the history of the world.
So first of all, like I said, no centralized planning.
This was literally the extent to which some of it was planned.
The Pope and a few other guys say, hey, let's have everyone, let's meet at Constantinople on this day about two years from now.
And so you have guys who, they're all walking there, pretty much.
So you have guys who are walking from Italy, guys who are walking from France, guys who are walking from Germany, some guys who cross the channel from England.
They're coming from all over.
And the enthusiasm is so great.
They're actually putting out notices.
For example, a lot of Spaniards want to join, but they're fighting Muslims in Spain.
And they're saying, guys, we need you to be fighting the infidel in Spain.
There's a lot of warfare.
It would not work if all the knights left there.
We'd lose.
Please don't.
You guys, the Pope puts out a thing where he says, any remission of sins, any kind of spiritual good you get doing it there in Spain, you get it equal to the guys who go to Jerusalem.
It's okay.
But then on top of the knights, you have ordinary people.
Tens of thousands of ordinary people are joining in on this, non-combatants.
And so you end up with these people who end up in Constantinople, and it's a ton of ordinary people, ordinary men and women, and they have an incredibly hard time of it.
We'll just be objective.
A lot of them go and they cross into Anatolia, that's modern-day Turkey, before the knights do.
And they get there, and there's Muslim armies there, and a lot of them get massacred.
It's a very ugly and hard thing.
But some of them stick it out.
They attach themselves to the army.
And it's an army so big, you can't afford to have it go just sail to the Holy Land.
They have to walk there.
They have to walk there across Anatolia, which is this rugged, highland type of place.
I'm trying to think of what a comparison in America would be.
A lot of it is probably like walking across northern Arizona, actually.
There's trees, there's a few rivers, but it's very hot and it's a very...
Tough place.
And then you have all these Muslim armies.
And what are the Muslim armies in this period?
It's guys, it's horse archers on horseback.
So they ride and they shoot a bunch of arrows at you and then they ride away and you can't really catch them.
And it's just awful.
So they walk all the way across Anatolia doing this.
And...
Anytime you get to a battle, you have to besiege it.
And you think of Lord of the Rings, like, oh, okay, you walk up, you siege, and it's a thing that's over in a day.
No!
You have to sit outside this city for months!
And they have food, usually.
They have water stockpiled.
And you usually don't.
So trying to take a city is worse than actually being inside of it.
And they have to do this repeatedly, over and over.
And the only advantage they have is a ton of enthusiasm.
What stands out is they'll fight these battles where if you listen to a historian, he'll just say, yeah, this battle doesn't make any sense to fight.
And the only advantage the Christians have is they're so gung-ho that they're willing to They will fight to the death.
They will go all out.
And we just have battles where they're outnumbered 5 to 1, 10 to 1. And they'll just win.
And they do have one big advantage, which is this is the period where knights on horseback are like a super weapon.
You know, like a guy who's on armor on a horse.
It's like a battle tank.
And they're just able to plow through guys left and right if they're able to hit them.
But...
They fight battle after battle.
They have no unified command.
They often don't have water.
There's people who abandon it.
There's an incredible story where one of the chief lords in the campaign, Stephen of Blois, is his name, Blois, and he gives up.
He despairs and he runs away and he runs into, actually, An army of the Roman Emperor who says he wants to help, and he says, it's too late, we've already been overrun, everyone died, just turn back.
And the Emperor shrugs, and he's like, okay, I'll turn around.
And then it turns out, Stephen of Blah was wrong, that they'd won the battle he thought they were doomed in, and they truly thought this was a miraculous endeavor from beginning to end, that it never should have succeeded except for the grace of God.
And so talk to me a little bit more about these types of battles.
So you mentioned cavalry, and they're sort of like these tanks, especially with armor that's able to stand up to arrows, but they're not.
What if you're just like your typical infantry?
What about the perspective of like a grunt?
Being a grunt was terrible, and in the Crusading areas especially, they didn't have that many of them.
You know, if you're back in France, yeah, you can raise some, you know, some peasants who hold spears, but going to the Middle East is really expensive, so other than the First Crusade where you have that rabble of ordinary people tagging along, Most of the people who do the fighting are pretty professional about it.
So they'll have armor.
They'll often have horses.
You'll have battles where a pretty high share of the Crusader army is mounted.
But it's incredible some of what you have.
After the First Crusade, we have what's called the Crusader States, and it's this kind of little European state that's trying to cling on to Jerusalem, and it's surrounded by hostile enemies.
And there's some absolutely wild battles.
If you've ever seen the movie Kingdom of Heaven, there's the leper king who hides behind his mask because he's deformed.
And they mention in this movie that there's a battle where he fought Saladin, the great Islamic warrior.
And I think the name of the battle is the Battle of Montgisard, I think is the name of it.
And it's a battle where this Crusader army of maybe 2,000 men runs into a Saladin army of about 20,000 men.
Outnumbered 10 to 1, like I said.
But every single guy in the Crusader army is a knight on a horseback, and the Muslim army is on foot.
And they just look at him and they think, yeah, those odds seem great, let's go.
And they just charge into him, outnumbered 10 to 1, and they don't just win, they totally annihilate the Muslim army.
Like, Saladin himself is almost captured and killed.
That's what it's like if you're a guy on foot, if you're out of position, and you get hit by a European knight in this time.
It's just like getting hit by a tank crossed with a steamroller.
By the way, I don't know if you know that King Baldwin of Jerusalem IV and that scene of him from the movie where he's sort of raising his hand and saying, stop.
That is like this huge TikTok meme now that Gen Z are like constantly spreading.
And for, you know, it's just this total and utter rebuke.
You know, a bunch of like the traditional conservative Catholic or Orthodox believers have now taken Baldwin to be like a big avatar for them.
And, you know, so you see this huge Gen Z direct implication and different from so there's the millennial crusader meme and we all know that one.
That's the one Where it's the Crusader night and Davis-Vold, and oh, look at the time, you know, it's Davis-Vold o'clock.
You know, that's sort of the millennial Crusader meme.
But the new Gen Z Crusader meme is all based around Baldwin and all based around, you know, it started with him just saying silence, but it's definitely branched out into more deeper territories.
And it's just incredible that we have this I think there's something about the time of the Crusades that resonates with us even today because of what you're saying.
Because this core essence of what the Crusade was really was just something that was completely unique throughout history where people from Europe And Christians decided to get up and defend the faith and it truly was a substantive and forceful defense of that faith in a way that you really don't ever see today.
Yeah, it's what we said in the Rise episode, that true people, like critics and haters and losers on the internet, really struggle to grasp that someone could care, that they truly believe it, and they care about it, and they'll invest their whole life in something that they believe in.
I read a history of the Crusades once, and I can't remember who it was by.
It might have been by Thomas Madden, who's a pretty good historian.
But he's talking about the Crusades, and he would say, You know, they would say that modernists will be, like, judgmental.
They'll say, oh, it's deranged that people would fight and they would, you know, they would kill over something like this.
And he says, well, you know, a medieval person would turn around and they would say, you guys in the present, you have wars over oil, you have wars over geo-strategic position, you have wars over territory, and how is that moral, yet it's immoral to fight over, you know, the very, like, Fight for your God.
Fight for what you believe is most right and important in the entire world.
To fight for your immortal soul.
To fight for the people who are in your fellow community of believers.
That they would say that makes far more sense as something to fight for.
To fight for the nature of the world itself.
And that is what people did then.
And again, we have to emphasize that they had enormous sacrifices for this.
I said on the first crusade, there's no kings who go on it.
But on later ones, kings do go on crusade.
And let me tell you, it's certainly not a money-making endeavor.
King Richard the Lionheart, the most famous king of England, he basically bankrupts his country to be able to go on a crusade to try to reclaim Jerusalem after it's captured.
The king of France.
And is still remembered as a great king of England.
And is still considered a great king of England.
St. Louis, the guy that St. Louis is named after.
He's Louis IX of France.
He goes on crusade twice.
And he basically, what's funny is he goes on a crusade as a young man and it doesn't work out.
And then he thinks, I want to go on crusade again.
But crusading's expensive.
So I have to reform my entire kingdom to be more just and more well run and And he basically has to make France great again so that it has enough money.
Quick break here, but did you know that St. Louis and in fact Louisiana as well are both named after a Crusader King of France?
The more you know.
The Truth About the Crusades, the Chronicles of the Christians.
Jack Posobiec, Blake Ness.
All right, Jack Posobiec, Blake Jack Posobiec, Blake Ness.
Back here, the Chronicles of the Christians.
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So, Blake, as we're talking about the Crusades, and there's sort of that, you know, response, I think, and, you know, let's go back to the clip of, you know, we're not going to play it, but just remembering that clip that started this whole thing off, there's this Muslim who is, and this is in the context of the current Migrant crisis that's going on in Europe since 2015, almost a full decade, by the way.
Next year will be a full decade since this has happened.
And he's saying to him that, oh, well, Europe deserves essentially this sort of new, you know, like a neocolonization through migration because of the Crusades.
And just to say something, by the way, I noticed this, and I don't usually talk about this, but when I've had any dealings with, you know, the Muslim world or people who are from there, not Muslims in the United States, but people who are from the Middle East, they will bring up the Crusades all the time.
It's like right on the tip of their tongue.
It is the first thing that they will say for any complaint about, you know, oh, this, you know, why are we doing this?
Why is this happening?
Say, oh, you did the Crusades to us, and so we have to do this.
And it's like, This was so many years ago, and there has been so much history, like a thousand years of history separates now and then, and yet you are still bringing this up, even when you and I have documented here that this was totally in response to things that were happening to, again, these lands that had been up to that point Christian.
Yeah, it was largely reactive.
Overwhelmingly, crusades are basically efforts to take back areas that had at some point been Christian, been ruled by Christians.
So you have crusading in Spain, you have crusading in the Holy Land.
These usually aren't counted as numbered crusades, but they totally were.
When the Ottoman Empire, the Turks, they start taking over Greece, Bulgaria, these Christian countries in southeastern Europe, They have crusades to try to defeat them, and those crusades mostly end in tragedy.
They're largely expensive failures, but they were trying to do that there.
They are very heavily defensive wars in nature.
Not exclusively.
There's hundreds of years of this over time.
But also, another thing that's just wild about it is, in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty minor to the Muslim world.
And yeah, let me ask you about that.
Just on that, do you ever see crusaders going further and saying, oh, we need to take over Persia or we need to go all the way down through the Arabian Peninsula?
You never quite hear that type of or see any of that type of activity.
Yeah, well, so the closest you'll get where it's like, it's truly much more expansionist is you'll have the Northern Crusades.
This is the famous Teutonic Knights.
Those are those German guys.
Oh, well, as a guy of Polish descent, yes, I'm very familiar with the Northern Crusade, which is like, which of course the Poles are sitting there going, wait a minute, we were already Christian.
What are you doing?
And the Teutonic Knights are like, you're not Christian enough.
Yeah, and they get really deranged.
They try to crusade against the city of Novgorod, which is Eastern Christian, where they eventually are like, they're schismatic!
They're even worse than the pagans!
You know, the Teutonic Knights are German.
Germans have a slight tendency towards getting a little too intense about things, you might say.
You're not doing it right.
That was definitely an example of it.
Yeah, they do have a great slogan, though.
But again, not in the way...
Oh, what is it?
The slogan of the Teutonic Knights that they repeat is, the sword is our Pope.
Yeah.
And then, you know, but again, you just don't hear of it in the way that this guy in the debate is talking about, you know, these acts of conquest against Muslim lands.
It's like, no, it's the opposite, actually.
It's the entire opposite of what you're talking about.
Yeah, I mean, when there is a Kingdom of Jerusalem in the modern Holy Land, the entirety of its existence, it's likely that the majority of the people they ruled were Muslim.
And they did not forcibly convert them.
They did not genocide them.
They just ruled over them.
And that's pretty much the case.
There are selective cases where there's atrocities.
The worst one is when they actually take Jerusalem for the first time.
A lot of innocent people die, and we shouldn't ignore that.
But ultimately, this was not an act of religious genocide.
This was a response to a perceived sense of Christianity under siege.
It was an effort to redirect Christians from fighting against each other.
And it was an effort to protect Christians and protect Christendom, and when they came to rule over Muslim communities, they do not wipe them out, they do not exterminate them, they try to rule over them justly, for the most part.
By the way, when the Ottomans were making their way through Europe, I believe they made it, and this is, you know, fast forwarding quite a bit, you know, this is not just in medieval times.
We're talking about, you know, really into the modern era.
They first evade in the 1300s.
Then, of course, the fall of Constantinople comes in, I think, 1453. This is where Constantinople gets converted to Islam.
The Church of the Hagia Sophia gets converted and still remains a mosque today.
This, of course, is right on the geostrategic strait of the Bosphorus, which connects the Black Sea and all of the Black Sea nations, or at the time, Black Sea kingdoms, into the Mediterranean.
So it just becomes an incredibly important loss for Christendom.
Also, as you mentioned earlier, the Yeah, but who is in charge of that thing again?
Man.
Yeah.
Gonna have to get back to you on that one, Jack.
Ah!
The one piece of history that Blake doesn't seem to recall.
Oh, that's right.
It was Jan Sobieski and the winged hussars of Poland who charged down the hill at Kallenberg with the wings attached to their backs, Crashing through the Ottoman lines that broke the siege of Vienna,
completely destroyed them on September 12th, 1683. Just a little, you know, just a little piece of history where Sobieski, the King of Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time, then gets named the Savior of Christendom by the Pope and is granted a constellation in the starry sky for his efforts.
Ah, yes.
The winged hussars.
But just a point to say there that this is something that goes on for hundreds of years.
It's not like it just ends with the Crusades.
Yeah, no.
There's about maybe a 600-year period where this is a big passion of Christendom.
It's something that they invest a huge amount of effort in.
And most of the time, let's be truthful, most of the time it fails.
It has a lot more failures than successes.
There are people who sacrifice their lives for this.
It's a very hard endeavor.
Indeed, it is.
But there are moments of great glory.
Okay, quick break.
Moments of absolute glory, like the winged hussars crashing down.
And yes, I have been there multiple times outside of Vienna to the top of the hill as well as the battlefield itself below.
Right back, Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, the Chronicles of the Christians.
E trinitate in unitate.
E trinitate in unitate.
you Thank you.
All right, Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, we are back on the Chronicles of the Christians, and we've been talking about the truth about the Crusades.
And Blake, you know, look, we've gone through so much here.
We talked about how the Crusades really are just part of the story of the broader conflict between Christendom and the Muslim world, one that started prior to the Crusades, for hundreds of years prior to the Crusades, and in fact, extended Hundreds of years past the Crusades, and we talked a little bit about Spain, but of course Spain spent something like almost a thousand years fighting to liberate Spain from Islam.
Do I have that right?
About a thousand years?
Like 800 years or something?
Yeah, you know, it depends how you want to define it.
But yeah, they get invaded in the early 700s.
And famously, they expel the last Islamic kind of Kingdom emirate in 1492. And one of the ways they decide to celebrate is they decide, okay, this crank from Genoa, okay, he wants to sail some boats to see if he can find India.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
Let's blow money on that.
And so, yeah, it covers a good, like, a 700-year period from where, like, the Muslim high tide peaks to when Spain fully expels them.
And that kind of attitude actually defines so much of history.
And that initial invasion also includes what they tried to make it into France, and that's Charles Martel when he comes up, and the very famous Battle of Tours.
And again, all of that predates the Crusades.
Yes, that's all well before the Crusades.
There's a lot of conflict about it.
What's really important with the Crusades is that idea of armed pilgrimage, that it was a pilgrimage they were undertaking where, you know, if you had to fight, you know, the Saracen because he was in the way, well, you had to fight the Saracen.
But yeah, there is a long history before that of...
Of warfare for the sake of Christendom.
And it shapes so much of history because I think a lot of, you know, what we think of as, you know, like Spanish history.
So the Spanish, they managed to complete the Reconquista and like their entire worldview has been shaped of we have to go and like we have to fight to try to, you know, protect the faith and expand the faith.
And so when they discover all of that land in the New World, that attitude bleeds over, and they think it's a big obligation to evangelize all of the peoples they've come across.
So very shortly after they discover the New World, after they conquer the Aztec human sacrifice empire, they're sending priests, they're sending a bunch of Franciscans and Dominicans and other priests to go there.
You have to convert these people.
It's all an outgrowth, actually, of that crusader ethos.
Christianity is, we have to make it Go span the entire world.
And in fact, when Columbus and this obviously gets into the founding of America itself, which we mentioned briefly, though, that the places that bear the name of King Louis, St. Louis and Louisiana are named after a Crusader King.
You know, I hope folks in Louisiana actually know that.
But Columbus, when he goes, and famously, he goes to Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain and is like, you know, telling them that, you know, I want to go to the New World and get this gold.
Usually the textbooks, and especially like your modern, like Reddit atheist, lib-coded textbooks, when they talk about Columbus, they'll say, oh, well, you know, they just wanted to get rich and they wanted to, You know, make money and get some slaves because they were all evil.
But Columbus actually says to them, and then we can use the gold to fund a new crusade because we need to go back to the Holy Land and liberate it from the Saracens.
Like this is actually part of his pitch.
And they say yes.
And this is what leads to the founding and discovery and the later founding of the United States of America.
Yeah, it's the the desire like the true and authentic belief in Christianity and the belief that it should be spread to all the nations is such a core part of European history that it really it's almost like the defining feature of the European identity and what makes European civilization become this global civilization.
It's the attitude of We have this thing that's so special that we should be able to share it and spread it to the entire world.
And so many other things come downstream of that.
It's like, why were the pilgrims on the Mayflower?
Because they wanted to have the ideal Christian society, and they thought they could only have it if they went off to America.
What did America start as?
It started as this experiment in Christianity.
We see that over and over again.
You know which one I'll throw out?
Buzz Aldrin on the moon.
I'm sure you know this one, that when Buzz Aldrin was part of the first mission that lands on the moon, and this was something that NASA, not to go fully down the NASA cut the tapes rabbit hole, but one thing that NASA did not broadcast as part of that,
and Buzz Aldrin's talked about it for years since, was that he actually brought uh a consecrated communion host with him as well as consecrated wine and he conducted a communion service on the surface of the moon and in the sense that the moon the moon mission the lunar mission was sort of a a mini crusade as well it also goes into that explorer spirit so you've got the discovery of the new world the discovery of a literal
new planet right the the first humans on another surface And they're both doing so with this Christian message in their heart.
And I certainly hope that in this episode that that's something that you can take from it, that the spirit of the Crusades isn't just conquest and pillage and riches and warfare.
And yes, you know, that's all involved.
And we talked about it at length.
But it's also this sincere spirit and belief that Christianity should be spread.
And whether you agree with that or not, it's actually true.
Final word to you, Blake Neff.
You know, it's a It's truly it's a part of our heritage that everyone should understand that this the importance to it goes back to Christianity offers something special to the world and The world has never been the same since Christianity arrived on the scene and began changing people's world I love that.
Go and check out Blake Neff on our series from last year, The Chronicles of the Revolution.
This has been The Chronicles of Christianity, The Truth About the Crusades.
