Crusades = Bad. It's that simple, isn't it? Join us for a deep dive as we explore the Crusades from multiple angles from three historians. First, Larry Marvin explores how the Crusades were not primarily an attempt to convert Muslims. Next, Kelsey Rice discusses the Crusades from the vantage point of medieval Muslims. Finally, Christy Snider discusses the ways that Crusade rhetoric is used in more recent history, especially in the wake of 9/11.
Later in the podcast during our "Leftovers" segment, we discuss the motivations behind those embarking on the Crusades, and we also discuss the motivations of modern-day historians. There's a lot of meat at this church potluck, so put on your thinking caps* and get ready to dig in!
*Feel free to disregard the custom of removing one's hat when at the dining table.
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
Crusades = Bad. It's that simple, isn't it? Join us for a deep dive as we explore the Crusades from multiple angles from three historians. First, Larry Marvin explores how the Crusades were not primarily an attempt to convert Muslims. Next, Kelsey Rice discusses the Crusades from the vantage point of medieval Muslims. Finally, Christy Snider discusses the ways that Crusade rhetoric is used in more recent history, especially in the wake of 9/11.
Later in the podcast during our "Leftovers" segment, we discuss the motivations behind those embarking on the Crusades, and we also discuss the motivations of modern-day historians. There's a lot of meat at this church potluck, so put on your thinking caps* and get ready to dig in!
*Feel free to disregard the custom of removing one's hat when at the dining table.
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
So do you feel like you are fully enmeshed in the semester now? Have we started enough, or did the Labor Day break throw you off already?
Speaker 2:It's nared. It's nared. Yeah, I don't match that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was exhausted yesterday. It was the first time I taught since Labor Day and, for some reason, you felt it.
Speaker 1:You felt it Well. Welcome everyone to Church Potluck, where we are serving up a smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity. I'm your host, dale McConkey, sociology professor and United Methodist pastor, and I'm turning this next section over to Kristi Snyder, who has been a recurring guest and she's an avid listener, so let's see if she can get this right. Kristi, there are two keys to a good Church Potluck. What are they?
Speaker 3:Good food and good conversation.
Speaker 1:Yes, but instead of food, it's food for thought. Right, that's right.
Speaker 1:So plenty of variety and engaging conversation, and that is exactly what we try to do here on Church Potluck Sitting down with friends and sharing our ideas on a variety of topics from a variety of academic disciplines and a variety of Christian traditions. All right, so let us set the table. What are we talking about today? I'm not smiling and laughing. I've used this before, but I'd love to approach it the Crusades, needless bloodshed or necessary defense? Pious intolerance or religious perseverance? Pious fanaticism or political ambitions? Shameful history or pathway to interfaith and intercultural exchange? Let's find out from our esteemed Potluck guests. First, we have the Doctor, larry Marvin no booze, no booze, no boo buddhins. Today, larry Marvin, tell us about yourself.
Speaker 2:I am a professor of history at Berry College and my scholarly specialty is the Crusades, though I did want to ask what do I get for being on here the third time?
Speaker 1:No, it's the fifth time SNL, the fifth time jacket, so you have to be the fifth time host.
Speaker 2:All right, so I'm working towards the jacket, that's right, you know what?
Speaker 1:But what we do have for you is I have decided, you know, because I use that music for you last previously, so this is now your walk in music. Ladies and gentlemen, Doctor Larry Marvin, I'm going to sit outside your classrooms when you walk into the class. This is your walk up music.
Speaker 2:Please, please, please, please.
Speaker 1:You don't have to do it, because I won't be able to that has much more Crusade feeling, at least from movies, than this is actually an album that I found called the Music of the Crusades. This is what was the first one on that album. It doesn't feel very Crusade-like.
Speaker 3:Maybe more historically after it, I don't know, maybe Crusade, maybe All right, anyway.
Speaker 1:So that's a little finish that up, but thank you very much. And our next guest, a first-timer, so she gets no jacket yet we have Dr Kelsey Rice. Kelsey, tell us about yourself.
Speaker 4:Hi, I'm an assistant professor of history at Berry College, where I teach Middle Eastern and Soviet history.
Speaker 1:All right, and I know you've leased of all of our panelists and our paths have not crossed a whole lot in the short time that you've been here at Berry. So tell us a little bit more Something none of us at this table might not know about you that you're comfortable telling you that was a very nervous laugh there.
Speaker 3:Kelsey doesn't have tenure yet.
Speaker 4:Dale.
Speaker 3:Maybe not everything.
Speaker 4:I am a proud native of the great state of Washington. All right, I came here from, not from Washington. I was living in New York when I came down here, but I've come from the north.
Speaker 1:My brother and sister ended up fleeing for the great northwest and lived in Tacoma. My sister still lives in Tacoma and my brother lived there for a long time. Anyway, thank you very much. You get another applause. Yay, kelsey, for joining us today and, like I said earlier, we have a recurring guest, more than three times so, outpacing Larry. She's wearing the jacket, that's right. We have Dr Christy Snyder.
Speaker 3:Oh great, I'm delighted to be here again, and I also teach in the Department of History. I teach US history and, perhaps most importantly for this class, us art class for this podcast US diplomacy and my faith tradition is Roman Catholic.
Speaker 1:Great, we are so glad to have you on the episode and I'm glad to get you this morning because I know I would not be able to talk to you this evening.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, no chiefs.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right. Christy is a big time Kansas City cheese fan and having a she's in the golden age of her football fandom.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I really. I have never lived through such a successful fandom before, Not just successful.
Speaker 1:But you got Patrick Mahomes, which just lights up, you know the, the anything, and I was fortunate enough that I got both. Maybe not fortunate now, but I was fortunate enough to get both Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelsey on my fantasy football team. So that may not be good for tonight.
Speaker 3:We'll see if you tell me, is Kelsey gonna play?
Speaker 1:I don't know, all right, thank you for your that that definitive statement there.
Speaker 1:Let's go ahead and let's let's dig in here, let's dig in. Let's start off with with a game show, all right. So this game show. It's a bad name, but I couldn't think of anything better. This is crusader or crew nader. Nay, as in that statement, is wrong. So crusader or crew nader, all right. So here we go around. Larry, we'll start with you. We'll just work our way around left to right. For this first couple of ones, the crusades were more about politics than religion.
Speaker 2:Crusader or crew nader, crew nader. The original genesis of them had really had very little to do with politics Cool.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you. Not cool, but okay, but thank you for that. So all right, kelsey crusader or crew nader, same question.
Speaker 4:Oh, I will go with crew nader.
Speaker 1:Also.
Speaker 4:So really think that you can easily separate politics and religion in the era we're talking?
Speaker 1:about. That's a very good point. Unfortunately, and Christy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm just going to steal my colleagues' answers and go it's crew nader as well, there you go.
Speaker 1:That's how we put you in the third seat for this part, thank you. So there you go. All right, larry, we'll start with you on this one again. Crusader or crew nader. Do crusades get a bum rap and unfairly characterized in modern society?
Speaker 2:Crew nader, I guess. Yeah, I mean they get a bum rap. I mean I think it's a misunderstanding of what they were trying to do and the result of them.
Speaker 1:All right, we'll learn more about that, I am sure, here in a second, and Kelsey.
Speaker 4:I'll just go with crusader. One doesn't need to glorify violent periods of war, although people do generally misunderstand the crusades today.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, thank you, and Christy, you don't know where to go because they spin it.
Speaker 3:I know exactly, I think I am going to go with if you're a crew, nader, I said it's misunderstood.
Speaker 1:No crusader. Is this misunderstood All?
Speaker 3:right, crusader, all right, I think it's misunderstood. Yeah, I agree, it's misunderstood. So.
Speaker 1:Larry's changing his answer. That was kind of confusing. Not a very well thought out game show on my dad. All right, let's see who we're going to. Actually, we're going to turn the table. We're going to start off you, christy, because of the story I just heard right before we started here. High schools and universities should stop using crusaders as their mascots.
Speaker 3:I would say yeah, crusader, they should stop using. Because, Because I think there is a negative connotation that if you're trying to bring a whole community together, that's not a great way to do it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that and go ahead and tell your story.
Speaker 3:My son is going to Valparaiso University and I don't know when they switched, but he started last year and they are no longer the crusaders, they are now the beacons, which is a lighthouse motif. But he does go to the thrift store in town and he is very fond when he finds some of the old crusader gear or that. So I think it was a cooler mascot perhaps then.
Speaker 1:Although they've gone complete 180, different from crusader, they've got two dogs right Like a chocolate lab and a golden retriever, beacon and blaze as their mascots. Now we can't get much more opposite.
Speaker 3:It is very family friendly now.
Speaker 1:All right, All right, Kelsey crusader, crusader. We should get rid of the mascots.
Speaker 4:Crusader. I don't think we need people mascots just to find a cool animal.
Speaker 1:There you go. And they did two cool animals, so Valparaiso and Larry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, get rid of them, get rid of all of them.
Speaker 3:Who even needs sports right, larry? Exactly, get rid of them, get rid of them all.
Speaker 1:That's another topic for another day. We'll talk about Larry. 20 colleges this is the data might be a little bit outdated, but about 20 colleges still use crusader as their mascot in about 100 high schools.
Speaker 3:And I do think it's hard right to make a change just because you have all your alumni who grew up with that mascot and it is a big shift.
Speaker 2:Case in point our own.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yet another podcast for another day. We only talk about our beloved berry Vikings and where that may or may not be going. All right, let's go ahead and get into some depth. Now We've got some of the silliness aside. Larry, this was your idea and, as you said you are, this is something you have devoted your life to learning about the crusades. So tell us what should we know about the crusades, why is it interesting and what does it mean for us today?
Speaker 2:I think the crusades are misunderstood because they people often think that they were about converting Muslims, and that was never the case. So the original Genesis for what was called the first crusade although it wasn't called anything really for a long time afterwards is that Jerusalem in particular had fallen into Muslim hands and the Pope at the time, urban II, believed that the land of Christ's birth and passion should be in Christian hands, and so that really was the Genesis of the crusade. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's usually seen as the trigger for initiating the first expedition. They say they didn't even have a name for this until about a century afterwards. So that first expedition these people rightly or wrongly thought what they were doing was liberating the birth and passion right, the land of Christ, for Christianity.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I'd always thought of crusades not so much as trying to convert Muslims, but as like a holy war of Christians just defeating Muslims or fighting Muslims, would you say? That's a misunderstanding as well.
Speaker 2:Right. I mean, what they wanted was Jerusalem. Now, as it turns out, there's always a difference between the people who sort of put these in motion than the people that were fighting them on the ground. I mean, after a three-year death march, and most of the people in that first expedition didn't even make it to Jerusalem. Those guys, once they got there, some of them realized that, you know, we've led a lot along the way and we're not going to just sort of simply let things go. I mean, in the next couple of decades they established some buffer states, but again, the idea was to protect Jerusalem, to keep that in Christian hands. And I mean, as I say, everything is always more complicated than it first appears. But that's essentially, I think about, as accurate as I can.
Speaker 1:And let's take a moment to just talk about some of the logistics of the Crusades, because even when you were talking there, you said most people didn't even get to Jerusalem for this expedition. Were they dying because of warfare along the way, or were they dying because of lack of resources? Just how do you mobilize something like a crusade in medieval times?
Speaker 2:So that was part of the problem. I mean, how long do you have? There was no name for this, there was no commander in charge of it, the people that went on this were from all social ranks, at least six different major languages, so people didn't understand each other. They left at different times. The best estimate of the numbers of people who participated the first time around were about 100,000. And, of course, a lot of people who shouldn't have been on a military expedition started too, so they weren't really well equipped. So there was no central place to equip them and logistics of course and this is true really for all pre-modern armies you basically ate your way through. So, in other words, that's why warfare didn't happen 24, 7 days a week, 12 months a year, because there wasn't enough food anywhere. So, basically, armies consumed what the produce from the lands they went through, and so you had 100,000 people. They left at slightly different times.
Speaker 2:They decided to take the land route across the Bosporus, eventually along the southern coast to what's now Turkey and into the Holy Land. They encountered various Muslim groups, seljuk, turks and others, and they ended up besieging cities because they couldn't really get past them and then being besieged in turn. But the upshot is that, again, of the 100,000 people who went about, 10,000 made it to Jerusalem. In other words, the 9th Tent died along the way. So it was a terrible journey for them. Not to say that they didn't inflict a lot of misery on the people that they attacked, because they certainly did, but most of them just didn't make it.
Speaker 1:So, how many expeditions, how many Crusades were there, and were there so many because they kept losing Jerusalem? Or did the motives and the goals change?
Speaker 2:over the centuries, a little bit of both. So again they didn't have a name for it and they couldn't really have a name until maybe they tried it again and there were no numbers assigned to any of them, until maybe the 16th century people started numbering them. So the term Crusade started to appear in the records in the late 12th century, and it came from Latin, cucas ignatos, which is the sign of the cross. So pilgrims, those people who were making a religious journey, used to sew cross on their left shoulder and, again in a roundabout way, those guys on that first expedition thought they were making a pilgrimage, in other words, that's what they considered to be. So there was no word for Crusade, but a century into it or so, then that word began to make its way into the records and it depends on what Crusade you want to pick. There are typically among Crusade historians. They number about seven or eight, but after the first five it's kind of up in the air as to you know, whether they deserve numbers. Now the fact is they were Crusades in between.
Speaker 1:Kind of like Pluto and being a planet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Is this a Crusade or is this not so in?
Speaker 2:other words, nobody in the 12th or 13th centuries in the Middle East was saying oh yeah, this is, you know, this is the third Crusade. They didn't do that. That came a lot later and, as I said so, for example, the first Crusade traditionally ended in 1099 when they took the city of Jerusalem. But there was a Crusade in 1101. It was a big disaster and most of the people didn't even make it, so it never got a number. And then the second Crusade happened about 50 years after that, and so they all have sort of different, slightly different genesis for it. The third Crusade was preached because Christians lost Jerusalem and they never got it back after 1187. So it fell in 1187 and other Crusades were launched to get it, but they never got it back.
Speaker 4:Okay. It's worth noting that Muslims in the Middle East did not experience the Crusades as the first Crusade being a first encounter with European armies. They had started the Fatimid Caliphate, which had previously held Jerusalem and only recently lost it to the Seljuk Empire, had been losing territory to European militaries previous to that in Sicily, and then the continuation of the Cordoba Caliphate, which is very important to understand here is, there is not one Muslim polity in this period. There are several. They are sometimes at war with each other, but the one that had been holding Spain was losing territory in Spain as well. So for periodizing the Crusades from the Muslim perspective, the first Crusade was not a first encounter.
Speaker 1:You jumped in at the exact right time because I was going to come to you and say, Kelsey, I'm so appreciative that you would come and be part of the podcast because you come from a very different angle than Larry and just probably most Americans and people listening to this podcast that you come at from a more Islamic perspective and what was happening in the Muslim world at that time. So what's the big picture? What was the big picture? How did Muslims understand what was going on here during the Crusades?
Speaker 4:So a big picture was Syria had been fairly recently had changed hands, so it had been part of what was known as the Fatimid Caliphate, which was centered in Egypt. This was a Shia Muslim Caliphate, although the majority of the people being ruled were Sunni.
Speaker 1:Muslims and we probably won't be able to get details on everything but very quickly Shia, Sunni, so within Islam, there's two major branches of Islam Sunni and Shia.
Speaker 4:The majority of the world's Muslims are Sunni, anywhere between 85 and 90 percent. Well, between 10 and 15 percent are Shia. But the Fatimids were at the end of what was kind of called the Shia century, where you had several really powerful Shia states rise up and conquer large territories. However, the majority of the Muslim populations being conquered remained Sunni. All right, wait and define Caliphate real quick, so real quick.
Speaker 4:Sorry, we did just have a lesson on this in my upper level class. So after the death of Muhammad, who was considered the seal of the prophets and therefore the final prophet, leader of the Ummah, the community of believers transitioned to a Caliph who was both a religious and political leader. By the time we are talking about, the Caliph no longer has widespread religious authority and there are multiple competing claimants to the title Caliph. But the use of the term Caliphate is a claim of legitimacy, kind of a religious legitimacy that rulers in the Muslim world would use. So the Fatimid Caliphate is not the only Caliphate. You also have the Abbasid Caliphate at this time, which is Sunni, then headquartered in Baghdad and no longer actually in control.
Speaker 1:Would this be akin to different claims on the papacy at different times? I know it's not exactly the same, but Ish yeah.
Speaker 4:At this point the most religious authority had transferred to scholars, members of the Ummah, so religious scholars, but the title of Caliph still came with a certain amount of currency and so you see it used in various. The Caliphate only fully was abolished in 1924. So you have various competing claims to the Caliphate and the Fatimid Caliphate was one of. If you look at the history of kind of Caliphate, the Fatimid Caliphate is one of the long lasting Caliphates but it is coexisting with the Abbasid Caliphate, which is under the rule of the Seljuk Turkish Empire. So the Seljuk Turks had come out of Central Asia. So what we have in this period of time are two major competing Muslim empires, the Seljuk Turks headquartered in Baghdad and the Fatimids headquartered in Cairo. The Fatimids had held Syria but lost it to the Seljuk Turks and so Syria had fairly recently come under Seljuk rule. The Fatimids are very much in decline. So one of the things happening here is when the Crusades are getting to Egypt, they're arriving to a empire in decline, so it's quite vulnerable to incursion For the Seljuks.
Speaker 4:It was notable to take Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a holy city in Islam as well, but where the center of the economy, the culture is for the Seljuk Turks is in Baghdad, so it's in Mesopotamia and Persia. So modern days, iraq and Iran, that's where most of the people are, that's where most of the political concerns are. So when the Crusaders took Jerusalem, the Sultan of the Seljuk Turks really didn't respond because he was not that concerned. Syria was a new acquisition. It was a bit of a backwater compared to where the cultural center was for that empire. Eventually they do decide that they need to go get this holy city, but again, you call it a holy city.
Speaker 1:It's a holy city, but it is not the holy city.
Speaker 4:No, it's the. If we're ranking, it's the third holiest city within Islam. So if Europeans had showed up and tried to seize Mecca or Medina in the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, modern-day Saudi Arabia, there would have been just a sea of military response. But that was safely still in Fatimid hands at the time. Europeans did not want to go there. They did not try to go there, unless Larry's the expert here.
Speaker 2:I think that your response is really an excellent one, because it very much oh they got the applause yeah.
Speaker 2:It outlines the very different perspectives that people had at the time. As I say, this idea of this fixation, this obsession with Jerusalem for the West, whereas Muslims are looking at things very differently. And it's true that people have suggested that crusade-like activity began before the first crusade in the Iberian Peninsula. For sure, Although I guess I could say is that part of their argument for that reconquest in the Iberia was because it had been Christian first. So it really gets down to these kind of weird arguments of who had things first. But I would say, as I say, for the West it was an obsession with gaining and retaining the city of Jerusalem. But the first expedition succeeded because the very reasons that Kelsey stated is that the Muslim world was split and really didn't have a united response. And so what happened in the third crusade, when it was reunited under Saladin, who abolished the Fatima caliphate?
Speaker 1:is. I wouldn't do this to Kelsey because she was new, but I'm going to go ahead and do it to you, that's giving me a headache.
Speaker 2:There you go. Oh, okay, there's no way to get around it. Yeah, In any event, once the Muslims were slightly more on the same page politically, it was impossible for a Western army to get at Jerusalem again. And in fact, as I say, some of the later crusades the fourth and the fifth crusades the actual target was not Jerusalem. Actually, the strategy was to take Jerusalem, but to do it via backdoor. But that's partially because, as I say, the Muslim world appeared to be more unified, at least in the Western part of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Speaker 1:So, if I'm gathering this right, if I'm processing this right, religious intolerance wasn't at the core. They weren't going to convert Muslims, but it was still bloody and it was still. We can still say that the crusades were wrong in some kind of historical scope, or is that something that?
Speaker 2:historians don't want to say, I guess I would say, is that from their standpoint it wasn't. I mean, from our standpoint obviously it was, and there were people that, especially as time went on, that criticized. So I guess there were some people in Western Europe that thought it was wrong. But I think one of the reasons why again they say that hey, this first one succeeded because it really was very improbable that it succeeded is because those people, that 10,000 of people left, they really believed in what they were doing. Again, it's something we can't understand, but they really believed it and it allowed them to sort of persevere over everything that was against them. So I guess it just depends on how you want to judge things.
Speaker 3:So my kind of question is so there's warfare going on all over at this time, right Between European states, I assume there's warfare going on between Muslim states at the same time. So is the fact that they have a crusade name when they're fighting against a different kind of religious perspective. Is that significant at all? Does it mean something that the Muslims have some way of referring to these wars also? That was different than when they're fighting each other, or no?
Speaker 4:So from the Muslim perspective the crusades were something different. Initially it was interpreted as punishment right Divine punishment for somehow falling away. Why would you lose a holy city unless God had deemed you not good stewards of that holy city? From the Muslim perspective, there was some sort of divine punishment at play that you wouldn't necessarily experience if you were at war with another Muslim state. Certainly they didn't call it crusades. They tended to refer to the crusaders as infidels or infidel dogs for some of the more colorful chroniclers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they called everybody Franks. I mean, they basically assumed they were all sort of French or French-esque.
Speaker 1:Now the question that Michael Bailey would ask if you were here, was that the bigger criticism?
Speaker 2:I mean.
Speaker 2:I guess I should put in here is that when we're talking about crusades in the Middle East, again there's that obsession with Jerusalem. But even the reconquest in the Iberian Peninsula they didn't try to convert people there once they took the territory, that didn't happen really until the 15th century when basically it was virtually in Spanish hands. But the other crusade that nobody would talk about I guess there's no real reason to in the United States is the Baltic crusades. So there were crusades in the sort of northwest part of Europe, in places like parts of modern-day Germany, poland, latvia, and those crusades they did try to convert the population because the populations there prior to the 12th century were pagan. So I think one of the things that sometimes people don't understand, even about the crusades, is that Christians, christian thinkers, grudgingly gave Muslims credit for their religion, even though they thought it was wrong, but they gave no credit at all to a pagan religion. So in the Baltic region in the 12th and 13th, 14th, 15th century they seized territory and they also converted the population.
Speaker 1:So this is very interesting. So there was some level and maybe columns isn't quite the right word, but some level of Christian accommodation. To Muslim at least it wasn't top priority and Muslims, as far as I understand, had that same kind of approach when they would conquer Christian areas that they allowed Christians to continue worshiping with their faith.
Speaker 4:Is that?
Speaker 1:a fair characterization.
Speaker 4:One thing we need to be really clear on is that Syria was not just the Muslim population. When it was conquered by the crusaders, it had a large native Christian and Jewish population, so there were a lot of Arab Christians or a lot of Arab Jews. The crusaders weren't always very good at telling the difference between Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.
Speaker 1:I should be laughing, but yeah, that's a good point and killed plenty of them.
Speaker 4:So there was already, and Jerusalem has historically been, a plurality in terms of what religion was dominant, had Jewish, christian, arab populations and, at least in the 19th century, the largest of that plurality was Christian. I can't say at the time of the crusades.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think that's right.
Speaker 4:But yes, within Islam, if you are a people of the book, which would be Christians and Jews, a fellow Abrahamic religions, you cannot be compelled to convert. You pay a different tax than Muslims pay, and there was higher or lower? So there was in fact a bit of discouragement towards conversion for certain populations who were Christian and Jewish, because that was a valuable tax base. So there are histories, various, certain empires that would not allow conversion to Islam for conquered Christian and Jewish populations, because it always comes down to money, doesn't it oh?
Speaker 2:So I think, as you say, there are cases where I mean, and the Latin Christians who went on this crusade, they did have questions and concerns about native Christians, like whether it was the right kind of Christianity, but I think, generally speaking, as you say, they were not wars of conversion, now individuals and individual attempts. Of course those kind of things happened when you see the movie Saving Private Ryan and you have American soldiers wants to get up on the beach and they end up shooting prisoners that they've captured. And we think Americans don't do that. We take prisoners. You know, in the middle of things sometimes the rules get thrown out the window.
Speaker 1:So not to say I remember the first time I was kind of awakened to just how frequently friendly fire happens.
Speaker 2:You know, and just Well, that's very unfriendly fire.
Speaker 2:Oh, I misunderstood, I'm sorry, yeah, somebody's put their hands up and then you shoot them, as they show in that movie. And I think that very often in American responses we just don't. We didn't do that. Of course we did. And so, as you see, on the crusades, there are times when obviously people were slaughtered because of their religion. But again, it was not the intent, at least initially, to ever convert the population, but it was to have Jerusalem in Christian hands, and then crusades in the Iberian Peninsula was to take territory back. They didn't really care too much about conversion until after it was all in their hands, centuries later.
Speaker 1:Well, larry, I'm speaking for that student in the back row, kind of distracted. Who cares? But why have you devoted your life to studying something like the Crusades? What is the importance for?
Speaker 2:us today. I guess, at least from my standpoint as a historian, there doesn't have to be any relevance whatsoever.
Speaker 1:Where is that boo button? That is not a good answer for that student in the back of your class.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's.
Speaker 2:I see history as art with rules, and when we look at a piece of art, it doesn't have to have some kind of meaning for us today, it just sort of stands in for itself.
Speaker 2:I think understanding things is always valuable, and trying to be sympathetic and understand both sides is good. I do believe particularly going back to 9-11, that there's this idea that Christians and Muslims have always hated each other, and it goes back to the Crusades, and I think that's a gross oversimplification to actually just being factually wrong. And so understanding why these things happen, even if we can't agree and can't even totally sympathize, I think is still a valuable exercise. So knowing that these things, the tensions between Muslims and Christians, really are much more complicated than just going back to the Crusades I mean, after all, one of the things I tell my classes when I talk about them is that at the end of the day 1291, even though Christians tried a little bit after that to occasionally take Jerusalem, the reality is the Muslim world won. They defeated Christians, they were essentially out, and so in that sense, this was a big defeat for Christianity, if you want to see it that way. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And Kelsey, how about you? I know Crusades aren't your particular area of focus. So just in general, studying history and looking back, what are some of the lessons that we ought to draw or understand from the Crusades or anything else in your professional studies here?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I am primarily a historian of the modern Middle East, where the Crusades are also leveraged in anti-Western rhetoric, in the same way that Westerners especially after 9-11, have leveraged the Crusades in anti-Islamic rhetoric, and what I see in the value of this is people with power often like to take history and try to use it to make arguments for their actions and for why they should control things, why power structures should exist the way they are, and so if history is a powerful weapon in the hands of authoritarians, then it is in the interest of all people who want to be responsible citizens to be able to actually analyze and understand history and be able to counter those simplistic, weaponized rhetorics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good answer. Kelsey gets a good answer.
Speaker 4:And yeah, we should be able to, when we see people using the Crusades to say Christendom and Islam have been at war with each other for a millennia, and be able to say that's simply not the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great. Thank you, kristi. You've been interjecting nicely, but we've been keeping you on the sidelines because you're going to talk to us about modern Crusades. Yeah, although From modern, being a historian's perspective of modern.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I guess, like there, the war on terror is probably kind of the biggest idea that here is. There's a book called Crusade 2.0 by John Feffer and he very much Wait, wait. We got the Citation.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 3:And he very much presents the war on terror as kind of a reassurgence of western warfare on the Islamic world and he talks about kind of why it's again problematic to see it that way, but also why in some cases it's beneficial to think about it or for leaders to use this rhetoric because it can motivate your population to accomplish your military goals.
Speaker 1:We're going to Kelsey and Larry's point that's kind of wrongheaded, though right To be thinking of this as Crusade 2.0, because it was very different. Yeah Well, I think I'm just behind it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think you see that, even in the way the US government talked right after the 9-11 attacks, president Bush at the time I think he made a couple of he used the word I think.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he did use the word Crusade, did he really? Oh yeah, in fact I can give you the quote here real quick. He uttered the phrase this Crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while, but he also quickly backed off after that to explain that this is not a war on all of Islam, that the people that we are fighting are extremist Muslims right. That it's not a general war on Christianity against Islamic terrorists.
Speaker 1:Because, as I remembered, his initial address kind of made that point in a big way. So I'm very surprised to hear that rhetoric. That rhetoric was used even before. Yeah, I think it was.
Speaker 3:Because I really believe it was a mistake in yeah it seems that way.
Speaker 3:Because they really, I think, tried to avoid it afterwards, and part of that is because I mean 2001,. There's large Western populations of Muslims, right, and we don't want it to be, and there are nations in the Middle East that we needed as our allies if we want to use their air bases and things like this, so it cannot be a general religious war. I think that becomes, at least in Phefer's argument, the new Crusade, right, this war on terror. And especially because it lasted so long, right Over 20 years, because in the United States, you know, you have reassurgences, like after Barack Obama is elected, you have some states passing laws against any type of. What was it? What is the term for the?
Speaker 4:Sharia law.
Speaker 3:Sharia law right, and you know, whenever community centers were being built, there's a backlash around that time period as well, and so I think you know there's something going on underneath, even if the leaders are refusing to refer to it as a religious war, that it's hard to break away from.
Speaker 1:I'm going to pause here for a second because I lost my thought, so this will get edited out, because the whole point is to make me look good and not to stutter over these thoughts.
Speaker 2:Did Samuel Huntington's book have an impact too?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was going to talk about, yeah, samuel Huntington. In 1998, he had, or 1996, sorry, he published a book called the Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order. So this is after the fall of the Soviet Union. And he was like, yeah, then the next big fights in the world aren't going to be between like superpowers or over political, economic, ideology, it's going to be a clash of civilizations. And he, you know until 2001,.
Speaker 2:I think he was pretty much mocked maybe for that argument that really got big after 9-11.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but it seemed to resonate a lot afterwards.
Speaker 4:It is still one of the most assigned books in college curriculums, even though almost no political scientists consider the arguments valid. Oh really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not very impressed by it.
Speaker 4:No, it's colonialist essentially in its worldview.
Speaker 2:And it's very superficial. I mean it reflects somebody who probably knows just enough history to be dangerous really.
Speaker 4:And knows nothing of the immense diversity of the Islamic world by the modern era, you know, a quarter of the world's population is Muslim. It's hard to say that there's going to be some grand clash that's going to involve Indonesia and Saudi Arabia and Iran, right?
Speaker 1:So do you think the ways Muslims were perceived in the Middle East has changed? Not much, then. In terms of how we perceive Muslims today in the Western world, do we still have kind of a blanket caricature?
Speaker 4:Not from the Middle Ages, no, I think contemporary perceptions of Islam that are problematic can mostly be traced to the 19th century and European colonization of the Middle East. That's where we really see.
Speaker 1:And Larry's shaking his head yes, yeah, that's right, it's out of cessation and racial hierarchies really being cemented.
Speaker 4:In terms of the Middle Ages, these states encountered each other as military equals in a lot of ways, yeah.
Speaker 2:And occasionally Christian crusaders had a lot of respect for Muslims, I mean they were very clean compared. King Richard De Lionheart. I mean he had sort of romance going on with salad they really, we waited until the end of the podcast to get to this.
Speaker 2:Let's hear more about this here. I mean they respected each other as warriors and so they exchanged letters. I mean I don't think they actually ever met, but Saladin's brother was used as an envoy for Richard and they really got along famously, and I think that there was even this rumor that Saladin was going to marry one of Richard's sisters. Muslims and Christians weren't always, as they say, sort of death or a war to the knife, I mean even during the Crusade. I mean that's just one example but there are plenty of other times of what you might call, I guess, for lack of a better term, a sort of accommodation or a grudging respect for each other.
Speaker 3:Okay, and you wonder whether that is continuing, kind of. So not only have our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ended, but you have the professional golf tournament now. Right, the PGA is allied with the Saudi Arabian.
Speaker 1:To hear some people, though that's very problematic.
Speaker 3:I think it probably is problematic but it's not problematic for religious.
Speaker 4:Very good point.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And likewise in some of the recent protests you've seen happening in communities over what our kids being taught to sexual material in schools. Right, those protests seem to contain very conservative Christians and very conservative Muslims like marching together, and it suggests that maybe there are some connections and things that are today bringing. You can't easily today all put paint the world as being separated by religion any longer as well, I think that's a good point, and, larry, whenever we get together, I always pick your brain on this.
Speaker 1:and Kelsey, you jump in too, just whenever religious ideology and political power seem to come together. It seems like the religious ideology gets used as a pawn in this. But you said that with the Crusades, at least at the beginning, that was not the case, that there was a true religious motivation for going down there and taking Jerusalem. But with these armed forces, there must be some political power behind it, yes or not?
Speaker 2:No. So I mean, the Pope had to corral that kind of support and obviously political leaders did what they wanted and they didn't necessarily go along with what the Pope wanted. So, for example, on the 5th Crusade, that was one of the backdoor ones where, instead of trying to get at Jerusalem because they knew they couldn't take it, they decided to go. They attacked Egypt, the idea being they wanted to threaten the city of Cairo, hoping that the Muslim world would see it. It's better to have Cairo, which was a big, vibrant, economically important city, and get rid of Jerusalem, sort of a backwater.
Speaker 2:And what happened is that the Pope wanted the ruler of Germany, the emperor, holy Roman Emperor for those who would recognize that term, I guess to go there and to kind of lead up the effort. And he kept delaying and it partially caused that crusade actually to collapse. But it was partially because the Pope couldn't get a secular ruler to do what he wanted. But for the most part, the crusades were not really led by political leaders. I mean, they were and they weren't. So yeah, again, I think the religious motivations were more important. But when the state got involved, as I said earlier the last podcast the state almost always wins.
Speaker 1:What haven't we said yet? Kelsey, christie, larry, what hasn't been said yet, that needs to be said before we wrap up here?
Speaker 3:Kelsey isn't All right, so this is my again. My weak understanding Is Jihad a religious war against Christians?
Speaker 4:No, no, all right. Jihad means struggle. It translates to struggle and within Islamic theology you have two forms of Jihad. You have the greater Jihad, which is the personal struggle to stay on the straight path and be a good Muslim, and then you have the lesser Jihad, which is religious war. So Jihad can be used shorthand for religious war and has historically been used in by Muslim states for kind of anymore. But in the same way that George Bush accidentally called the invasion of I don't know if it was Iraq or Afghanistan a crusade, is the same way that secular leaders of Muslim states might use the term Jihad when almost no religious scholar would designate the conflict to be a Jihad. So again, it translates to struggle. It's a given name in the Arab world. It can be a person's first name, it's not and it does not specifically mean fighting Christians.
Speaker 3:So you could use it fighting other Muslims as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah, if you think you have, if you're right, yeah, I'm not right.
Speaker 2:The thoughts on your side, yeah, and nobody would go to war thinking they were wrong.
Speaker 4:Exactly yes, jihad has been certainly the understanding of fighting the crusaders. The term Jihad was used by the Muslims fighting the crusaders and in a similar way to which you pointed to contemporary Westerners using crusades for these geopolitical reasons, muslim commentators will also point to the crusades and use that and in fact Osama bin Laden in the 90s said I was statement calling for Jihad against Jews and crusaders and the crusaders meant the West. So crusader can be used in shorthand in the Middle East as well in anti-Western rhetoric I guess I was going to say something to Christy or ask her about.
Speaker 2:Is that how the use of crusade has been used in the 20th century? And again, this is not my field for sure, but crusade against alcohol or sex trafficking or that kind of thing, it seems like it's used pretty frequently.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there definitely was a temperance crusade against alcohol, and I think it is that it was purposely used, that this is a holy war against this evil. It didn't necessarily mean that the evil was Muslim. It could just be an evil in society that we need to bring down, and God is on our side in this fight, and I do think that was the way that, especially in the 19th century, it is used throughout American history.
Speaker 2:And, as I said before, we started that. Dwight Eisenhower used it in his D-Day speech when they were about ready to attack the shores. Now we're embarked on the great crusade, and again it was against evil.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting because I was about to say it sounds like the word crusade is used whenever you want to make sure that there's a religious connotation to it. I'm not sure if Eisenhower meant it that way, or certainly wanted to at least give it that there's a transcendent, that God is on our side, yeah, and it's almost a sacred mission.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about the Crusades. I learned a lot, and I guess we can sum it up by what. The Crusades are more complex than than our tiny little usage of the term Everything always is that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3:So Maybe be careful when you use the term we know.
Speaker 2:I think that's right, actually, yes, very good. Don't use it. Just don't use it. Don't have it as your mascot.
Speaker 1:Use beacon and blaze as your mascot, chocolate Lab and Golden Retriever to replace the Crusaders. So Well, I want to thank our audience today for sitting around the table with us. I hope that we have provided you with some food for thought and something to chew on. But we aren't done yet. After we finish the music, we always have some leftovers for you to enjoy, some additional thoughts we share with one another after we wrap up. So feel free to continue listening. We appreciate your support and, as part of that support, please consider subscribing rating reviewing. This is when I feel the most like a podcaster. I come most alive. Subscribe rate and review to Church Potluck, wherever you are downloading it, until we gather around the table next time. This has been Church Potluck and thank you for listening.
Speaker 2:Do you time that music at the end? How long you're going to make it last?
Speaker 1:No, yeah no.
Speaker 2:I just have. I might figure out a button here, that's right.
Speaker 1:You know what? I don't know that kind of out trod at the right time. So yeah, Do you mean in terms of the where it is in the song?
Speaker 2:Well, I was just wondering whether you had sort of a timer, like you're counting off 1001, 1002.
Speaker 1:I am such a seasoned professional at this now that there's just an internal clock. Okay, that feels right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, I learned a lot on that one. I've got many blind spots in my intellectual life, and the middle ages is certainly one of them.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess one of the things that if he had more time or was another subject was talk about why they went in the first place. I mean, besides trying to take Jerusalem back, I mean because their sins would be forgiven. So, again, it was worth their while to die along the way if their sins would be forgiven, which also tells you how important religion was to them at that moment. So, and the whole concept of the indulgence you know, eventually that morphed into the same problems they had during the Reformation. So that was a product of their crusades.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I never really asked. I guess I'm not such a seasoned podcaster after all, because a seasoned podcaster would have asked you about why would they even, why would so many people even go in the first place to do such a thing?
Speaker 2:So that's why they did it.
Speaker 1:They were guaranteed to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that is you know they weren't going there on behalf of a state, right, and they weren't going there serving government, unless you count the papacy as a government, which you could kind of. But we'll just say no for the moment. But yeah, they were going because they thought that this was important, but also, too, that in the end, the sins that they'd committed would be forgiven and they'd have a chance of going to heaven. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Plus, I don't need to leave soon, so just you should feel free to just bounce up and get. This is just a debriefing time where we just kind of say here's what we should have said or this other thought set coming to mind.
Speaker 2:No, no, I thought it was nice and productive and I liked all our positions.
Speaker 3:Well, it was nice to have. I was glad that Kelsey was able to come just to get like that the Muslim point of view from the, because I don't know that I've ever heard that like it presented. Well, this is what the Muslims were thinking at the time, and so it was very Something.
Speaker 1:you may have said it and I just I just missed it, but you said that wasn't even the major conflict, that they were most worried about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it did not come up. In the 13th century the Mongols arrived.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they were much bigger.
Speaker 4:And the Mongols won. Islam still won because the Mongols converted. But the Mongol invasions were significantly more traumatic, hit all of the major population centers. Certain cities were gone forever after the major cities Merv, nishapur and Baghdad was sacked and the Abbasid Caliphate was ended by the Mongols. So when you look at Muslim histories and chronicles about this area, the Crusades were a sideshow and then the true traumatic wave came in the form of the Mongol invasions and that is what takes a lot more focus than the Mongols did not take Egypt.
Speaker 3:But from a Christian perspective I don't know if that's we should feel better or worse about yeah that's kind of like yeah, so, yeah, we were so bad, right, so that's one, we're not so bad, or man, we're pathetic that we're not even the major threat.
Speaker 2:It is amazing to read Muslim sources to see really how little impact it seemed like the Crusades had at the moment. But yeah, when you write them, mongols came. It was all hands on deck.
Speaker 4:If you read Muslim sources about the Mongols, it's like this is the end of the world. This is God's judgment. The end is now, but in the end, almost all the Mongol states ended up embracing Islam.
Speaker 1:So what would be your explanation for that?
Speaker 4:For their embrace of Islam.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially since they're coming in as winners, right.
Speaker 4:The Pope is in Mongolia right now and just gave a speech. Oh really.
Speaker 3:I didn't realize that we buried the lead.
Speaker 1:I know we should have opened the episode.
Speaker 4:Actually the Pope is in Mongolia. And he just gave a speech where he praised the Mongol Empire for its religious tolerance and referred to the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol peace that happened after the very devastating invasions, as something perhaps aspirational, which, I have to say, amazing spin on that history for the audience Very clever.
Speaker 4:So the Mongols had their religion, which was Tangrism. So Tangri is the great sky god, but the Mongols had there's a long history of nomads from Central Asia embracing Islam because they are culturally flexible peoples. If you're a nomadic people, you tend to be able to absorb diverse influences, and what you get with the Mongols is they settle in Persia and Persia similar to China. Right, the Mongols that conquer China don't become Muslim, they become essentially Chinese and they were Chinese. Persia is similar to China where it has this really long history of literate culture, of bureaucracy, of empire, and it gets invaded a lot. China and Persia share this. Why do they get invaded a lot? They have all the nice stuff.
Speaker 4:So what tends to happen when you invade Persia and set up a new empire in Persia is you persify, you become more Persian because the structures are already there for the civilization, the language, for the bureaucracy is there. So like are you going to? You know the Mongols don't have words in their language to run a complex empire, but Persia is already there. You're going to co-opt the Persian elites to run the empire for you. So what happens is Persia will absorb its invaders and make them look like Persia, and so the Mongols get in there and they settle in and just and for a long time they resisted. There were explicit policies of some of them sons of Genghis Khan. Some of them really didn't like Islam, but it was just inevitable if they were going to stay there and build their empires. The Islamic tradition and the Persian tradition had been there for so long that if you were going to stay there, you were going to end up Persian and Muslim.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that initial antagonism again maybe a topic for another day. But you know, christian leaders, including Louis IX, king of France in the 13th century, thought that the Mongols might become an ally, you know, and so they. He sent representatives, a couple of Franciscan friars, to one of the Khans, hoping that they would just join forces together and then they would destroy Islam and, of course, the Mongols weren't entrusted in partnership.
Speaker 3:Did we not bring a lot to the table, or the Westerners not bring a lot to the table?
Speaker 2:Those monks when they went there. I think the Khan was surprised that they weren't there to submit. He was just expecting that they would. But yeah, so that was going on in those early days too. So yeah, there's an awful lot going on and it's really pretty exciting. It tells you how vibrant this whole region is for historical study.
Speaker 1:I almost pressed you on your image as art with structure.
Speaker 2:Art with rules.
Speaker 1:Art with rules that I didn't want to be flipping about and say are you saying the Crusades were beautiful? I'm not saying that, I'm not saying I'm quite excited to go there, but I liked your, I liked that imagery, even if I didn't fully understand it. You know the thinking about what you're doing is an art, even though you're dealing with facts and figures, and I would guess maybe you do tell your students that your students would be surprised to hear you referring to what you're doing as being artistic.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm fairly honest about it Again. History has rules that we follow or protocols, but I do see it as a kind of art for art's sake and maybe that's. It isn't kind of really, really, really, really old-fashioned.
Speaker 4:I would say Larry and I are generationally different in how we interpret the purpose of our disciplines.
Speaker 1:How would you say?
Speaker 4:Well, I do think. I think history has always been used as a political tool. So the job of the historian is not to politicize history, but history does have significance politically.
Speaker 1:So speaks truth to power.
Speaker 4:And sometimes the truth to power isn't what people want to hear. For instance, I don't subscribe to the thesis that the arc of history bends towards justice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't either.
Speaker 4:It's a nice thought, but sometimes some realism is helpful. Even if you are engaged in a social justice project, Perhaps acknowledge you don't want to become complacent.
Speaker 1:I don't know if this is another podcast or just a conversation you and I can chat about. I agree that it doesn't naturally bend, but would you say, looking at the broad scope of history, that we are less brutal than we once were? Am I? So I'm being too polyannish in terms of and I would say that too.
Speaker 3:I was actually.
Speaker 2:We make kind of things from a totally different perspective. But I mean we all are together Because, yeah, how can you say an atomic bomb is more just and modern warfare and cluster bombs?
Speaker 3:Well, especially now, the use of drones, where you don't even have to risk your own life to destroy other lives. That's right.
Speaker 1:Sorry, dale, you can't say something more than the king quote Not allowed.
Speaker 3:Well, it's actually not tonight, when Bernice King is standing at the campus.
Speaker 2:It's a great saying but, it just really isn't true.
Speaker 4:I think in the end, I don't criticize him for saying it. He had a different goal. Martin Luther King Jr was not a historian. His project was not a close analysis of history. He was mobilizing people. But you also need that and you need the historians pushing up their glasses and getting down to the documents and being like well, actually.
Speaker 1:All right, we might have more conversation on this, because I still want you to be wrong, but Then there's more than one.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'd be wrong too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and Christy, so you and the plural I mean.
Speaker 2:I.
Speaker 1:You want all of us to be wrong. That's right On that particular point.
Speaker 3:Well, except as a modernist, it's easy to say oh yeah, things were just awful back then. So because I don't know enough about ancient history.
Speaker 1:And hopefully, if I'm being honest with myself, I don't know enough about the kinds of things we're doing to one another now either, yeah, I ignore it and I hear about it and I don't pursue just how brutal we are to one another still.
Speaker 4:If it was the 10th century and you were born and died in the center of the Abbasid Caliphate during a time of peace, you lived a I mean, unless you needed some antibiotics, then you were, but you lived a fairly long, stable, meaningful life 12th century France the same thing.
Speaker 2:You could have lived into your 60s and 70s and had a pretty prosperous life.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and you never knew what a meme was. You never had to get piled on on social media. There's certain bliss in the limited information networks people used to exist with.
Speaker 1:You're not nasty, brutish and short, come on.
Speaker 4:We actually are going to discuss that in my next class.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Yes, so he was wrong too.
Speaker 4:I will say Barry students on average. So we look at how Hobbes, locke and Rousseau all conceptualize the state of nature and it's the rare Barry college student who will make an argument for the Hobbesian state of nature.
Speaker 1:All right, Well, thank you all so much Thank you. Dale.
Speaker 2:That was fun that was great.
Speaker 1:It's always fun.
Speaker 2:Looking forward to the jacket.
Speaker 1:And now we exit, larry. We are done recording.