“Al-Hurub al-Salibiyya/Wars of the Cross.”
On the 18th, November 1095, Pope Urban II (1088-99) opened the Council/Synod of Clermont, France. On the agenda was the Emperor of Byzantium Alexius I Comnenus, asking for help against the Muslim Turks, who were raiding Byzantine lands in Asia Minor. On the 27th of November, Urban II calls for a crusade, in what became a famous or an infamous speech, the rest is history. Alexius was present, and was probably gobsmacked or even dumb struck, as the assistance he wanted against the marauding Turks, was not forth coming. Instead, Pope Urban II, asked for a holy crusade (“Arabic: al-Hurub al-Salibiyya/Wars of the Cross”) to save Jerusalem for the pilgrims. (It was a bloody Catholic campaign that was to last for 200-years.) It was the start of what is called an intifada or intiˈfadeh, which has lasted from the 1096, the year the crusade started in Europe for the Holy Land, and to the present. Even before leaving Europe, the crusaders had slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent European Jews. A repeat of which would see European Jewry almost annihilated some 850-years later during WWII. The crusaders finally conquered the city of Jerusalem in 1099. Chroniclers at the time wrote about the innocent slaughter of the people of Jerusalem, where the blood in the streets was ankle deep.
We know that the Jews and Muslims got on together, it was in Al-Andalus, Spain in huge Muslim universities, that attracted scholars from all over Europe, where Muslim, Jews, and Christians came to learn. It was here that the Catholic hierarchy refused Christians to mingle with the infidels (Jews, and Muslims).
What Christianity did to the Middle-East reverberates to this day. Jerusalem was first conquered by the Muslims in 638 CE, some 461 years before the Catholic armies of Europe conquered Jerusalem from the Muslims. The Muslims were and are more tolerant of other faiths than Christianity. In addition, it was the papacy that allowed the destruction of Christendom’s “Jewel in the Crown” with the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453. (In 1929 the name Istanbul replaced Constantinople, after 1,600 years.)
The fourth Crusade (1202-4) was formed to recapture Jerusalem for Christendom. Instead, the Crusaders attacked Constantinople (Greek Orthodoxy). The greatest city in Christendom was ransacked, pillaged, and tens of Thousands of its citizens were butchered by the Latin (Catholic) crusaders of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216). (It must be remembered, that the great east-west schism of 1054, pitted Western Catholic Christians against the Eastern Orthodox Christians, a schism which is still in place today. There were Catholics vs Orthodox conflicts in Poland’s Chelm region between (1918-1939), where Poland’s Catholic government destroyed over a 100 Orthodox Churches that they stated were superfluous. But the last bloody conflict between Catholic’s and Orthodox was between 1941-45, during WWII, where Croatian Catholic Ustaše (English: Ustashi) imprisoned, and slaughtered 750,000 Serb Orthodox Christians (as well as 60,000 Jews, and 26,000 Roma) in the 4-year period. During what is known as the Vatican Holocaust.)
During the fourth crusades four consecutive Byzantine emperors were either exiled, poisoned, strangled, murdered or blinded before Emperor Theodore I (1205-1221) who organized a Greek (Orthodox) resistance to the Latins (Catholicism). Theodore I, also stopped the advance of the Latins in Asia, and repelled the Seljuk Turk attacks. But the rot had set in, and Constantinople was never the same after the fourth crusade, its power had waned; and its art and treasures were pillaged, to adorn the great houses of Venice, Rome, and other major cities of what is now Italy. What was bad, was the Children’s crusade of 1212, probably the lease known crusade, although it was not officially sanctioned by the Papacy, however, no one stopped the children of Europe from venturing so far afield, and their eventual doom. The Children’s Crusade set out for the Holy land in 1212, and never arrived.
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