Fighting for Christendom - Holy War and the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman

Author:Christopher Tyerman [Tyerman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192803252
Amazon: 0192803255
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-03-01T13:00:00+00:00

15. The medieval ideal of the crusader knight. An English illustration from a mid-thirteenth-century psalter; piety and power.

As holy war addressed fundamental issues of Christian identity and, it was frequently proclaimed, Christian survival, its elements remained embedded in European society as well as providing a cutting edge in the expansion of Latin Christendom southwards, eastwards, and northwards. The habit of crusading died hard; in the fifteenth century crusading formulae were natural appendages for the expansion of European power down the west coast of Africa and into the eastern Atlantic, as they were in the religious wars in Bohemia as well as in defence against the Turks. In the sixteenth century and beyond, the Ottomans kept the images and occasionally the reality of the war of the cross alive while the internal religious divisions in Europe ushered in a period of religious wars no less vicious in commitment and butchery than anything witnessed in previous centuries. Some historians would argue that the period of the Crusades defined Christianity’s affection for holy war — far from it. The Crusades formed only one articulation of Christian holy war, whose origins long pre-dated 1095 and whose legacy refused to fade. Even in a supposedly more secular age, self-righteous, ideologically justified warfare persists. The modern world has embraced, variously with horror and energy, ideological, religious, and pseudo-religious violence as well as racist, nationalist, and anti-Semitic pogroms on an industrial scale, all in the context of justifying moralities. The moral high ground of the twenty-first century, whether shaded by the banners of religion, reason, capitalism, or freedom, still lies pitted with the rank shell-holes of holy war.

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