rambone
01-27-2012, 04:07 PM
I did not see this posted. From February 2011.
“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
-- Rick Santorum, 2/22/2011
Santorum: Left hates 'Christendom' (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/50054.html)
Noted Historian Rick Santorum Retcons The Crusades (http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/noted-historian-rick-santorum-retcons-the-crusades/)
There is a narrow sense in which one could make this argument with a straight face: The Crusades began in response to requests for help by the Christian Byzantine emperor Alexios I in defending against incursions into Anatolia by Muslim Seljuk Turks. A century of fighting such advancement along the borders of Christian Europe certainly created the conditions for Pope Urban II to agree. But that’s about as far as it goes.
Over the course of two centuries and nine crusades, Catholic forces launched campaigns not only to “defend Christendom,” but also for purely economic and political reasons. Crusaders not only fought Muslims in Palestine, but “pagan Slavs, pagan Balts, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemies of the various popes.” Even leaving aside the depredations within Europe (not to mention without) that Crusaders committed from the very start, by the time they were petering out, they’d long since stopped being primarily about defending Christendom in any but the purely rhetorical sense.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Crusades_Map-570x367.gif
“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
-- Rick Santorum, 2/22/2011
Santorum: Left hates 'Christendom' (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/50054.html)
Noted Historian Rick Santorum Retcons The Crusades (http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/noted-historian-rick-santorum-retcons-the-crusades/)
There is a narrow sense in which one could make this argument with a straight face: The Crusades began in response to requests for help by the Christian Byzantine emperor Alexios I in defending against incursions into Anatolia by Muslim Seljuk Turks. A century of fighting such advancement along the borders of Christian Europe certainly created the conditions for Pope Urban II to agree. But that’s about as far as it goes.
Over the course of two centuries and nine crusades, Catholic forces launched campaigns not only to “defend Christendom,” but also for purely economic and political reasons. Crusaders not only fought Muslims in Palestine, but “pagan Slavs, pagan Balts, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemies of the various popes.” Even leaving aside the depredations within Europe (not to mention without) that Crusaders committed from the very start, by the time they were petering out, they’d long since stopped being primarily about defending Christendom in any but the purely rhetorical sense.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Crusades_Map-570x367.gif