Inside What Passes For The Right-Wing Mind

The very premise is a crock:

Stop Apologizing for the Crusades!

Perhaps a better title would be something like Don't Allow the Crusades to be Thoughtlessly Added to a Parade of Christian Horribles without Knowing More about It, but I wanted to get your attention.

See, it worked!

The typist then goes on, not to point out why the Crusades were a wonderful thing, & absolutely nothing to apologize for, but to excuse them. Why? Because they weren't successful.

What becomes clear is that the Crusades failed for three reasons.

First, despite the fact that the westerners regularly decimated their Muslim rivals in combat thanks to superior tactics and technology, they were always on the wrong end of a numbers game. The western armies arrived in the Holy Land already diminished from disease and harrying attacks along the way. They never had large enough armies to begin with. And whenever they secured their objectives, a substantial number of troops and/or nobles would return home leaving ridiculously small numbers to hold on, which amazingly, they did for decades at a time.

This is the Shinseki excuse: "We just didn't send enough troops to the land of Holy Oil."

Second, Crusading was expensive. Although it has been suggested the Crusades were about wealth, nobles didn't get rich on them. They borrowed, scraped, and imposed heavy taxes just to be able to afford equipping, paying, and feeding their armies. When they captured an area, the land was not revenue-producing in the same way their European farm land was.

The Crusaders were unable to get any money out of their conquests, even though they kept the debt off the books, so it's OK! We aren't there for oil!

Third, the Byzantines never came through with the help they promised. Crusaders regularly expected help from the Comnenus family of rulers which began the Crusades by appealing to the pope for help. But the help was virtually never forthcoming. Had the Byzantine empire allied itself with the Crusaders, the Holy Land might still be in Christian hands today.

Never trust your allies. Dirty Euro-trash. If they'd come through, that would be Christian oil to this day!

As one might imagine, this was not an original thought on the part of typist "Hunter Baker," but a review of a book.

Read for yourself. I found the book highly enjoyable. Rodney Stark has reached the point to which many academics aspire. He writes about things that interest him for a mass audience with the aid of a major publishing company (Harper). And the books come to us rather than sitting staidly in university libraries.

We can add laziness to why the Jesus freaks didn't take & hold the "Holy" Land. Imagine having to go to a library to get a book! No decent Christian conservative would go into a university library under his own power.