Connecting the Dots in World History, A Teacher's Literacy Based Curriculum by Edwards Chris;

Author:Edwards, Chris; [Edwards, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Before the Crusades

Dot 1: Origins

Traditional narratives about the Crusades begin in 1095, with the notorious speech that Pope Urban II gave in France calling for the “liberation” of the Holy Land. Some narratives go back further than this by looking more deeply into acts of provocation by Fatimid caliphs or to the rise of militant Christianity with the arrival of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman emperor.

There is nothing wrong with these narratives per se, in that they tell the story well enough. But when one studies a larger view of the medieval era, the Crusades present a glaring question: What happened to relations between the Muslims and Christians in the ninety-five years between the year 1000 and 1095, when the First Crusade was launched?

At the turn of the first millennium, relations between the leaders of Christendom and the leaders of Dar-al-Islam could be downright cordial. Charlemagne, who allotted no mercy to pagans or misbelievers in Christendom, lavished gifts on his contemporary Harun al-Rashid in the ninth century and received respect and riches in return. By the turn of the millennium, Pope Sylvester II flirted with multiculturalism, viewing Islam and Islamic science favorably.

Events transpired in the near century between Sylvester II and the development of the First Crusade that dissolved the bonds of respect between Catholicism and Islam. Islam became less philosophical, and Christianity became more militant.

Christians, once content to pray in their European shrines to the decaying skeletons of long-dead saints, suddenly found it intolerable that Muslims should control the land of Jesus, even though Jerusalem had been in Islamic hands for nearly five centuries by this time. Something or some things shifted, and in order to understand this change, one must begin with the millennium.

Dot 2: Hugh Capet

The Holy Roman Empire had gone German since the time of Otto. To its west, the descendants of Charlemagne, the Carolingians, continued to bicker. Lothair IV, king of Western Francia, died before he could challenge Otto III for supremacy. His son went by the unenviable name of “Louis the Sluggard.”

It’s likely that Louis’s own mother poisoned him. By this time, the nobles in France appear to have become fed up enough to assert that their age-old and long-forgotten right to elect their kings still had validity. They decided to abandon the bloodline of Charlemagne and elect a king from a new family. The new king was named Hugh Capet, and the new dynasty would become known as the Capetian line.

Capet’s election depended upon the understanding between him and the nobility that he would not try to act too much like a real king. The nobility reserved the right to fight with each other as much as they chose to. Without a strong central authority, the French kingdoms turned against each other in bitter internecine warfare. Terrified peasants flocked to the large estates, seeking protection, thus creating a new system.

The root word of feudal, after all, is feud. Perpetual war butchered the peasantry. They died in droves, screaming mutely against the sealed walls of history.

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