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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:38
The Truth About The Crusades
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Wouldn't it be great if when society faced a real crisis, it could just shine out the big H flashlight, the searchlight.
We need a historian!
We need a historian out here to give us some perspective.
Well, of course, there are a lot of Middle Eastern people on the move.
Of course, the majority of them Muslims.
This is not the first time in history this has happened.
I'm not saying this is exactly the same as the past.
But those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it as the saying goes.
So we need to put things in perspective because there's this kind of general historical principle which goes like this.
Europeans!
Bad!
Bad Europeans!
Slavery!
Colonialism!
Smallpox blankets!
Genocide!
Bad Europeans!
And historically, it really doesn't hold up as well as you'd think.
So let's dig back into history, figure out how Europe and the Muslims have got along in the past, and see if we can untangle some potentials for a different future from the past.
That's really the point of history, to take us off the train tracks of ignorant inevitability and give us some free will in the matter.
So this is an important and essential presentation This is the truth about the Crusades, really the truth about Christians and Islam in history.
So, Islam of course developed in the Middle East in the early 17th century, 622 to be exact.
Now, it's kind of weird because Not a lot of history in Europe in the Dark Ages, and so we kind of start in the Quattrocento, we kind of start in the 11-1200s, so it's kind of weird.
I mean, when I say 622 rather than 1622 it almost feels like a stardate, but let's just swallow that and keep going.
Now, early in the 7th century, Islam developed.
By the end of the 7th century, it had conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa.
This was not the most peaceful conversion the world has ever seen.
So let's get started.
See, before Islam, the Middle East was populated by millions of Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians and Arab polytheists.
It was home to some of the largest centers of Greco-Roman civilization in Christianity.
Zoroastrianism, the greatest religion, because it gave us Farouk Bulsara I, Freddie Mercury.
Nonetheless, The Christian Church back in the day had five, count them, five major jurisdictions or patriarchates, whose capitals were the following cities.
Alexandria in modern-day Egypt.
Antioch, located in modern-day Turkey, and known as the cradle of Christianity.
Constantinople, yes, it's a tongue twister of a song, and is located in modern-day Istanbul, Turkey.
Jerusalem, of course, the holy ground of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
And number five, Rome.
So this is where it started.
Now in 613, Zoroastrian Persians captured Antioch in modern-day Turkey.
Several decades later, the Persian Empire was conquered by the Muslims, and Antioch came under Muslim rule.
637, Jerusalem was captured by invading Muslims, creating great fodder for Christoberg songs.
In 641, Alexandria fell in Muslim hands, into Muslim hands, during the Muslim conquest of Egypt.
Now, Christianity.
Kind of a Middle Eastern religion.
Not really Christian countries left in the Middle East.
You could argue Lebanon with its sort of split power, but Christianity's kind of fading there.
So, one historian has noted, quote, less than a generation after the prophet's death, Christian North Africa, home of theologians such as St.
Augustine and martyrs like Saints Felicity and Perpetua, who were central to the development of Christian tradition and thought, and rich with Christian history, had fallen to Islam.
Right?
Christian North Africa.
Think of Christianity in North Africa?
Not anymore.
In short, North Africa, from Egypt to present day Morocco, was a vibrant part of the pre-Islamic Christian world.
How many Christians are there in North Africa today?
And what happened to all the millions of the rest?
Let's get into Constantinople.
Sieges, plural of Constantinople.
Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire, was first besieged by Muslim forces in 674.
After four years of fighting, the Muslims were finally repelled.
Quote from one historian, the Arab attack was the fiercest which had ever been launched by the infidels against the Christian stronghold.
And the Byzantine capital was the last dam left to withstand the rising Muslim tide.
The fact that it held saved not only the Byzantine Empire, but the whole of European civilization.
So, Roman Empire 101, of course, there was an eastern part and a western part of the Roman Empire.
The western part, of course, fell with the fall of Rome.
The eastern part lasted several hundred years longer.
The Muslims returned to Constantinople with vengeance.
Apparently they'd left their keys and scimitars behind in 717 and laid siege to the city once more.
The Byzantines, aware of the Muslim threat, had signed a treaty with the Bulgarian Emperor Tervel the previous year.
Under terms of the treaty, Tervel was bound to help repel the Muslims at Constantinople.
And so the Bulgarian army attacked the invading Arabs and forced them to fight a war On to France, as happened to Germany in the First World War and again in the Second World War.
Not a very easy thing to survive.
Now Bulgarians, by the way, did convert to Christianity two centuries later, largely because of the strong cultural influence of the Byzantine Empire.
Now sandwiched between the walls of Constantinople and the Bulgarian forces, the Muslims were gradually worn down and eventually lost to a Bulgarian onslaught.
The successful defense of Constantinople was one of the two great victories of the 8th century, and the barbarian Christian alliance prevented Muslims from entering Europe and doing to Europe what they had done to the Middle East and North Africa.
Indeed, when the Byzantine Empire was finally conquered by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453, there were Muslim armies at the gates of Vienna in the heart of Europe within less than a century.
Within less than a century.
So this idea that you kind of got to keep them out, otherwise they're going to overrun you, well, it was proven true in 1453, after 1453.
So, Italy.
Muslims first invaded southern Italy, which was then a part of the Byzantine Empire, in 667, and relentless raids continued until the island of Sicily was eventually fully conquered in 902.
An Islamic state, the Emirate of Sicily, was established on the island, and Muslims would remain in control of it for 264 years.
264 years.
Now, when the Muslims get an island or get access to the sea, at least at this point in history...
Well, they kind of went raiding and took millions of Europeans into absolutely brutal slavery, which we'll get into more of in a few minutes.
So, using Sicily as the base of their operations, Muslims began to raid the southern parts of the Italian peninsula for hundreds of years.
The islands of Corsica and Sardinia were also repeatedly ravaged by Muslim raids.
In 846, the Muslims launched an attack on Rome, but were stopped by Emperor Aurelian's walls around the city.
I guess he was the Trump of his day.
Muslims back then clearly weren't as proficient in the use of ladders as modern-day Mexicans along the southern US border.
The invading Muslims sacked the outskirts of the city, killing men and women regardless of their age, but most importantly, with regards to Christianity at least, they looted St.
Peter's and St.
Paul's Basilicas.
A basilica is a kind of church where you go as a pilgrimage.
These basilicas were located outside the city walls.
Not only did the Muslim invaders desecrate the burial sites of St.
Peter and St.
Paul, but they also pillaged two of the holiest places in all of Christendom.
I don't know where you are in your Christian theology.
St.
Peter and St.
Paul kind of up there in terms of importance.
So a second attack on Rome was thwarted in 849 after a coalition of maritime cities joined the papal forces to defeat an invading Muslim fleet.
The Muslim occupation of Italy posed a serious threat to Rome for centuries.
The last Arab strongholds in southern Italy fell in 1091.
Ah, look at that!
Four years before a Pope preached about the First Crusade.
I wonder if that's a coincidence or not.
In the early 10th century, a Christian alliance, an early precursor to the Crusades, was formed between Rome, the Franks, the Byzantines, the Lombards, who are a Germanic tribe, and the Italian city of Naples.
Well, the reason you probably haven't heard about it is because the goal of the alliance was to repel the Muslim invaders of Italy.
Indeed, Christian forces led by Pope John X successfully destroyed a key Muslim fortress in central Italy in 915.
This is one of the few times in history when a pope has led an army into battle.
Pope X, of course, Pope X, I imagine a forefather of Malcolm X, so Malcolm X. I guess I'll look that up later.
So let's just do a quick brief summary here.
We talked about five key Christian capitals.
Well, by the end of the 7th century, three of the five Christian capitals were under Muslim control.
Constantinople was besieged twice by Muslims and Rome was attacked and had its holy shrines pillaged and desecrated.
So you could see why the Christians might be rather Upset by these continual Muslim onslaughts and predations and the stealing of wide swaths of populations and selling it into brutal slavery.
But wait!
There's more.
Let's get into it.
And the reason why this is important is that the Europeans, you know, have gone through a fairly self-critical phase, at least since the beginning of the 20th century.
You know, let's review colonialism.
Let's see whether it's a good idea.
Let's look at our participation in slavery and see whether that was a good idea.
Kind of gone through a self-critical phase.
I'm not sure.
I am quite sure that Islam has not gone through the same phase of saying, gosh, I wonder if repeatedly assaulting and attacking and desecrating Christian neighborhoods and lands and people and basilicas was really the right thing to do.
Guess we're kind of sorry.
What about slavery again, which we'll get to in a minute or two.
In 711, Muslims invaded Spain, which was inhabited by Christian Visigoths, and they conquered most of Spain in about nine years.
And they established the first Islamic state on European territory, the Emirate of Cordoba.
The Reconquista, or the period in which the Christians tried and tried to retake Spain and Portugal in an endless series of bloody battles, lasted for approximately 770 years.
Indeed, the Muslim stranglehold over the Iberian Peninsula and Europe didn't loosen until the 12th century, and the Muslim rulers were not fully expelled until 1492.
So, of course, when the When ISIS and so on, they talk about going to take Rome, well, they're referring to historical attempts that have happened in the past.
See, they have a history.
Europeans have self-hatred, but everyone else gets a history.
Now, once the Muslims secured control over the Iberian Peninsula, they tried to conquer the rest of Europe.
However, oh look, it's Muslims and French people again.
The Franks stood in their way.
In 732, one of the most important battles in the history of the world took place near the city of Tours, France.
Frankish forces, led by Charles Martel, defeated an invading Muslim army and put an end to Muslim expansions into Europe from the southwest.
Western historians regard the Battle of Tours as the battle that saved European Western Christian civilization.
The victories at Tours and Constantinople halted Muslim conquests in Europe for several centuries.
Ah, let's break it up with a little visual, shall we?
This is the end of the Reconquista.
Battle of Tours.
I think there's a woman in there somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps it's an angel.
And last but not least, let's have a look at the spread of the Muslim caliphate from 622, the founding of Islam, to 750.
That's not a lot.
It's not a big time slice in history.
And that's quite a lot of non-gray in the map here.
So there were, of course, this is a caliphate just basically means empire.
So what was life under Muslim rule?
Well, for the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, and perhaps soon to be Europe, well, quite brutal, I think is the phrase we're looking for.
So here's how it worked.
If Christians somehow survived the Muslim onslaught and weren't forcibly converted to Islam, they were given the status of zimis, non-Muslim second-class citizens, and were required to pay exorbitant taxes.
The most common method of subjugating the Christian population were the jizya, a religious head tax imposed on non-Muslims, and the qaraj, a non-Muslim land tax.
Many Christians chose to convert to Islam to avoid, say, starving to death, the crushing tax burden.
The jizya alone was more than 20% of a person's wealth.
This is back when there really wasn't that much wealth in the world, well above the norm of taxes for the time.
And, of course, this particular tax could be set much higher depending on the whim of the Muslim rulers.
Now, of course, it was a slow train of news in the middle to ancient world, so news of the Christian suffering reached The West in the late 10th and early 11th century, when a Muslim emperor ordered the persecution and forced conversion of many Christians in his empire.
The oppression of the Zemes culminated in the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the most revered church in the Christian world.
So, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the site of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection.
Kind of key, kind of important, kind of central.
A historian has noted, word reached the West fairly quickly of the Christians' suffering and vulnerability, of the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and of the difficulties encountered by pilgrims to the Holy Land.
That news would colour and inform Western attitudes towards Jerusalem and Muslims throughout the 11th century and into the era of what we call the Crusades.
Even though the Christian Byzantines repelled the second Muslim attack on Constantinople, the fight for the survival of their homelands was far from over.
Indeed, the bloody battle between the Byzantines and the Muslims continued for centuries, and both sides had various degrees of successes and failures.
Despite their desperate attempts, the Byzantines never succeeded in recapturing their territory.
As devout Christians, they tried to reclaim Jerusalem, but failed repeatedly.
Of course, Jerusalem incredibly important to the Christian world, so as one historian puts it, the Byzantines were demonstrably trying very hard to recover it more than a century before the First Crusade.
In 1071, the Christian Byzantines suffered a crushing defeat by the Muslims, lost a large part of their territory, and even allowed their emperor to be captured.
Between 1073 and 1095, the Byzantines desperately begged members of the Western nobility and Christian leaders for military aid.
And remember, if the Muslims get through the Byzantines, they're at the gates of Vienna before you know it.
In 1095, ambassadors sent by the Byzantine Emperor appeared before Pope Urban II to request Western help in dealing with the Muslims.
Later that year, the Pope put forward the idea of a Christian crusade for the first time in history.
So, big picture time!
We have over four centuries of Muslim aggression towards Christians and their territories.
Three out of the five Christian centers are in the hands of dominant Muslims.
Rome was attacked.
Two of its holy sites desecrated.
Finally, Constantinople, one of the last remaining capitals of Christianity, is facing a Muslim threat that is almost impossible to contain.
So given this background, the idea that the Christian Crusades were some unprovoked act of random aggression on behest of bloodthirsty Christians is madness!
It's blowback for 400 years of ever-expanding, ever-invading Islam.
Now, ask your Muslim friends, what's their view of the Crusades?
Is this view at all accepted?
Not really, in general.
Nobody mentions the fact that Jerusalem, whose capture was the goal of the first Crusades, was first conquered by the Muslims, and the Christian Crusaders just wanted to take back what was theirs to begin with.
You know, it's funny how 400 years of throwing endless waves of people at the Christians will eventually get blowback, and I'm telling you, when Europeans get annoyed, they So, you've heard a lot about Western colonialism.
You know, one of the interesting things about Western colonialism, and we've got a whole presentation about this, which we'll link to below, generally the life expectancy went up, the rule of law was established, and generally corruption diminished and so on.
And, you know, when the British left, for instance, in Pakistan, a lot of people fled because the Muslims were coming.
So, have you heard much about the Muslim?
colonialism, the Muslim imperialism, Islamic caliphates, the empires.
Well, at the height of its power, the first Muslim empire, the Rashidun Caliphate, spanned a territory of 9 million square kilometers.
That's close to the size of the modern United States, so not particularly small.
The second Muslim empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, was one and a half times larger, clocking in at 15 million square kilometers.
That's close to the size of modern-day Russia, which if I remember rightly is a little bit tough to pogo stick across in one week.
So let's compare the Roman Empire, which of course most Europeans have heard of.
The Roman Empire in its prime encompassed only 5 million kilometers square, the kind of thing that you lick and put on a postage stamp.
Now, after 800 years, the Roman Empire had 5 million square kilometers.
The Umayyad Caliphate became three times larger than the Roman Empire in less than 130 years after Muslim conquests began in the Middle East.
So it took less than 130 years for the Muslims to do three times what the Roman Empire took 800 years to do.
So, it was spreading, is kind of what I'm saying.
I guess they were just very convincing.
Now Muslim conquests weren't limited to the pre-Christian Crusade times – they continued well into the 17th century.
The Ottoman or Turkish Empire captured Constantinople in 1453, putting an end to the Christian Byzantine Empire, conquered the Balkans and eventually attempted to capture Vienna, located right in the middle of Europe in both 1529 and 1683. located right in the middle of Europe in both 1529 In 1878, after Russia won a Russo-Turkish war, Bulgaria was the last European territory to be freed from Muslim rule.
Ah yes, those counting, that's 1,122 years after the Emirate of Cordoba was established.
And again, to get a sense of what life was like for Christians under the Muslim rule, take a look at the history of the Balkans.
Not only were Christians massacred every time they opposed their Muslim overlords, but they were also forced to pay this religious tax, the jizya, in exchange for keeping their religion and, say, what they were sentimentally attached to, which was their heads still being on their bodies.
Now, interestingly, ISIS is currently forcing Christians in Syria to pay this jizya, this particular religious tax.
And the Turks also imposed what is not euphemistically called the blood tax.
Now, under the Turkish Muslim Ottoman rule, The Christian boys aged 8 to 18 were routinely abducted from their parents, forcibly converted to Islam, and then enrolled in the Ottoman military, which formed the elite Janissary Corps.
So, stolen from your parents, forcibly converted to Islam, thrown into the military.
That is quite a tax.
It's a little tough to put that on your 1040.
Now, of course, every time you hear about Europeans in sort of the mid-last millennia... SLAVERY!
Domination, imperialism, slavery, you European bastards!
Well, did you ever hear about Islamic slavery?
You should have, because it was really quite a lot, very big, and exceedingly brutal.
And we've got a whole presentation on this channel called The Truth About Slavery.
We go into this in more detail.
But Islam dominated the slave trade between the 7th and 15th centuries.
The Christians entered the market of human flesh much later, 1519 to 1815 is the period of Christian slave trading.
The death toll from 14 centuries of the Muslim slave trade in Africa is estimated at over 112 million souls.
Now the Muslim slave trade typically dealt in the sale of castrated male slaves called eunuchs.
Unix, later to be renamed as an operating system, were created by completely amputating the scrotum and penis of eight to twelve-year-old African boys.
As you can imagine, the survival rate of this savage mutilation was very, very low.
And Africans, of course, in Africa are constantly complaining about Western imperialism, European imperialism, even though life expectancy more than doubled when Europeans took over South Africa.
Do you see a lot of people from Africa going to the Islamic countries complaining about the much longer and much more brutal Islamic slave trade?
No!
Because Muslims are not self-critical.
Europeans have gone from self-criticism to pathological civilization and soul-destroying self-hatred.
But not a lot of people going out to Saudi Arabia saying, hey man, you owe us reparations for slavery.
Because they'd be like, hey, you'd be a good slave.
Historian Robert Davis estimates that North African Muslim pirates abducted and enslaved more than a million Europeans from coastal towns between 1530 and 1780 alone.
The practice of kidnapping Christians to be sold to slaves dates back to the 7th century.
Now, of course, when Christian Europeans went to Africa, they couldn't go inland because they couldn't survive the bugs, right, the viruses and so on.
And so they bought black slaves from other blacks who'd captured them and who were selling them to the whites.
But the Muslims bypassed the middleman, went directly and caught the slaves themselves or simply stole them from Christian families.
One historian noted, quote, it was the perpetual raiding of Muslim pirates and slave traders that brought about the abandonment throughout southern Europe of the scattered settlements of classical times and the retreat to defended hilltop fortifications, the first medieval castles.
The same rating led to the abandonment of the old agricultural systems with their irrigation dikes and ditches.
So, hey, if you ever wondered why there were castles originally in Europe, it's because of Muslim slave traders.
And this meant, of course, couldn't do any fishing, couldn't go down to the shore, couldn't spend a day at the seaside, and oh, also couldn't engage in the kind of large-scale irrigation and agriculture that helped stop Europeans from starving to death in the winter.
This is one of the things that Jefferson had to deal with when he became president was, yes, that's right, Muslim slave traders constantly infesting the sea lanes.
So the barbaric slave raiding activities of Muslim pirates continued to have a telling effect on Europe throughout the centuries.
France, England and Spain lost thousands of ships, devastating to their seaborne trade.
Long stretches of the coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants until the 19th century.
Long dying people!
Now, the Ottoman penetration into Europe in the 1350s and their capture of Constantinople later in 1453 opened new floodgates for the slave trade from the European front.
In their last attempt to overrun Europe in 1683, the Ottoman army, although defeated, returned from the gates of Vienna with 80,000 captives.
An immense number of slaves flowed from the Crimea, the Balkans, the steppes of West Asia, to markets in Islamic countries.
Historian David Brian Davis laments that, quote, the Tartars and other Black Sea peoples had sold millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Circassians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Slavs and Turks.
Have you known much about this slave trade, which vastly dwarfed anything that happened in the Atlantic?
No.
Crimean Muslim Tatars enslaved and sold some 1,750,000 Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians between 1468 and 1694.
And again, we've got the truth about slavery on this channel.
You've got to check it out.
So, the reason why we want to talk about this is that Like racism, like sexism, colonialism is all Western badness and slavery, all Western badness and so on.
But before Western colonialism, there was Muslim imperialism.
Before the Christian Crusades, there were a myriad of Muslim Crusades which were enormously successful and kept battering down the door of Europe and taking over vast swaths of Europe, Sicily, Portugal, Spain, and so on, which took sometimes upwards of half a millennia to dislodge.
And what bothers me so much about all of this is that the Europeans, seems to me, are the only culture left in the world that is never allowed to have a history.
The only thing they're allowed to have is guilt and self-castigation.
What utter nonsense.
Next time someone comes to you and complains about slavery, just ask them, hey, how about Muslim slavery?
Ever hear of that?
Ever care about that?
No!
Because the Muslims don't self-attack on it and therefore nobody wants to install the big giant guilt button that people repeatedly pound so that Europeans cough up money and resources so you'll stop making them feel guilty about things they never did individually.
And which European civilization such as slavery actually ended.
It was European civilization, particularly the British, who spent immense amounts of blood and treasure to end slavery around the world.
So this is a history that you need to know.
There's an enormous amount to be incredibly proud of in European history.
And that, of course, is a great challenge to the world who don't want a confident Europe because then they can't come on the welfare state and slowly infiltrate the society as a whole.
So Christianity kind of became a European religion in many ways because it was driven out of its home in the Middle East.
And when it tried to go back and get some of its home, ah, evil Christian crusades of nastiness!
And people, I mean, this is true for everyone.
You have a history.
This history is important.
Europeans, by hacking at the roots of their history and destroying any respect for the source of their culture, if you don't have a history, you're like a tree without any roots just plopped down there on the ground.
The first breeze or a guy leaning against you, you're just going to fall over.
And it's hard for people in Europe, and even in North America to some degree, but particularly in Europe, it's got kind of secular, it's got kind of lazy, it's got kind of like, hey, am I going to get that promotion?
I wonder if that new video game's coming out?
There's this girl, I really like it, the cafe.
It's become very sort of small-minded and personal and hedonistic.
There's a place for all of that.
But because Europe has become so secular and has become so self-hating, it really doesn't have much luck understanding The mindset of religious people who believe they are genuinely hooked into a much larger plan, who have a much deeper sense of history, and who have a much bigger purpose.
That is a big, big challenge.
And if there is to be a civilization in the future, in other words, if we're going to keep what largely white Western European Christians have developed, You know, scientific method, the free market, philosophy, reason, evidence, you know, equality for women, a separation of church and state, rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, you know, all those nice little things that make life worth getting out of bed for.
If we're going to keep that, I have a message to all Europeans and even those of us in North America.
Stop apologizing!
Please, dear God, you've got to stop apologizing.
By any objective standard, Europe ranks very low on the list of criminal enterprises throughout history and, as I gave off a brief list off the top of my head, has an enormous amount to be incredibly happy and proud of.
So the next time someone starts talking to you about slavery or colonialism and so on, Say, hey, how does Europe rank relative to all of the other cultures throughout history?
And they won't have a clue.
They pick on the Europeans because Europe has a history of self-criticism and revisionism and a willingness to own up to that which was wrong in history and work to make it better.
Now, if you're self-critical among healthy people, that's really, really good.
How wonderful, how helpful, how great.
However, if you are, say, awash in a world of pretty sociopathic and destructive cultures, self-criticism is a giant weakness and those cultures will pound you down until you bounce back hard or go right through the bottom of the earth.
Let us stop apologizing.
It's so ridiculous, it's so embarrassing, and it's so unnecessary.
If Europe is so bad, if North America is so bad, why is everyone trying to get in?
Because there's great wealth and great value and great civilization and great treasure that for 2,500 years, since the days of the pre-Socratics, has been slowly evolving and pushed along by the West, by Europe, by North America.
Stop apologizing.
Stop defending.
Start pushing back.
Everything that we have inherited we will lose if we continue to attack ourselves.
And the light in the world so briefly sparked over the past 2,000 years will be gone.
Possibly forever.
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