Compare and contrast

The Crusades met the criteria for a just war.  Below is an excerpt from Oriana Fallaci’s “The Force of Reason,” a book which I highly recommend, and a link to it at Amazon is provided below as well.  Fallaci’s historical knowledge is vast, but the conciseness of her story-telling makes this excerpt especially valuable.  I only quote from her history of Islamic expansion up to the time of the Crusades.  There’s more, but you’ll have to read the book.

     But before we get to that I want to talk a little about the expansion of Christianity.  See, after Jesus was crucified, the disciples and a few stragglers attacked the town of Cana, in Galilee, and executed anyone who refused to believe in Jesus.  Later, they realized it made much more economic sense to tax the non-believers, so they did that instead of executing all of them.  They executed some, of course, for the terror-factor, but most they left alone and just took their money.  So as the religion slowly ….  Oh.  Wait.  None of that is true.  

     In fact, the Christian religion forswore violence of any kind.  Love of neighbor and fellow congregant was the rule.  The Christian religion spread by word of mouth, and by example.  As those who witnessed what the Christians were doing for each other, for the sick and poor, became enamored of this New Way, and became Christians themselves out of free choice.  It wasn’t until the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine on October 28, 312, as the result of an omen before his victory in the Battle of Milvian Bridge, that Christianity acquired military arms.  This is what he saw:






And in retrospect, thank God Christianity acquired military power when it did.  Apparently, God knew exactly what new religion was coming down the pike.  Suffice to say, of course, after acquiring secular power and military strength, the Church immediately began to do the kinds of things all humans do with them, much to our chagrin perhaps – but we Christians looking back might want to be careful about condemning our forefathers in the faith.  But anyway there you go.  The expansion of early Christianity.  Here, is Oriana Fallaci to compare the expansion of Islam up to the time of the Crusades:

“It was in 635 AD, that is three years after Mohammed’s death, that the armies of the Crescent Moon invaded Christian Syria and Christian Palestine.  [Emphasis added; Tee hee. An unfortunate historical fact.  Ed.]  It was in 638 that they took Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre.  It was in 640 that after conquering Persia and Armenia and Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, they invaded Christian Egypt and overran Christian Maghreb.  That is, the present Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco.  It was in 668 that for the first time they attacked Constantinople and laid a siege that would last five years.  It was in 711 that after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar they landed in the most Catholic Iberian Peninsula, took possession of Portugal and Spain where despite the Pelayos and the Cid Campeadors and the other warriors engaged in the Reconquest they remained for no less than eight centuries.   And whoever believes in the myth of the “peaceful co-existence that marked the relationships between the conquered and the conquerors” should reread the stories of the burned convents and monasteries, of the profaned churches, of the raped nuns, of the Christian and Jewish women abducted to be locked away in their harems.  He should ponder on the crucifixions of Cordoba, the hangings of Granada, the beheadings of Toledo and Barcelona, of Seville and Zamora.  (The beheadings of Seville ordered by Mutamid: the king who used those severed heads, heads of Jews and Christians, to adorn his palace.  The beheadings of Zamora, ordered by Almanzor: the vizier who was called the-patron-of-the-philosophers, the greatest leader Islamic Spain ever produced!).  Christ!  Invoking the name of Jesus meant instant execution.  Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation or hanging or impalement.  Ringing a bell, the same.  Wearing green, the colour exclusive to Islam, also.  And when a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside.  To bow.  And mind to the Jew or the Christian who dared react to the insults of a Muslim.  As for the much-flaunted detail that the infidel-dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam, not even encouraged to do so [emphasis added], do you know why they were not?  Because those who converted to Islam did not pay taxes.  Those who refused, on the contrary, did.
“From Spain, in 721 AD, they passed into the no less Catholic France.  Led by Abd al-Rahman, the Governor of Andalusia, they crossed the Pyrenees and took Narbonne.  There they massacred the entire male population, enslaved all the women and children, then proceeded towards Carcassonne.  From Carcossonne they went to Nimes where they slaughtered nuns and friars. From Nimes they went to Lyons and Dijon where they pillaged every single church… And do you know how long their advance in France lasted?  Eleven years.  In waves. In 731 a wave of three hundred and eighty thousand infantry and sixteen thousand cavalry reached Bordeaux which surrendered at once.  Then from Bordeaux it moved to Poitiers, from Poiters it moved to Tours and, if in 732 Charles Martel had not won the battle of Poitiers-Tours, today the French too would dance the flamenco.  In 827 they landed in Sicily, another target of their voraciousness. Massacring, beheading, impaling, crucifying as usual, they conquered Syracuse and Taormina then Messina and Palermo, and in three-quarters of a century (which was what it took to break the proud resistance of the Sicilians) they Islamized the island.  They stayed for over two centuries, in Sicily:  until they were cleared out by the Normans.  But in 836 they landed at Brindisi.  In 840, at Bari.  And they Islamized Puglia too.  In 841 they landed at Ancona.  Then from the Adriatic they moved back to the Tyrrhenian Sea and in the summer of 846 landed at Ostia.  They sacked it, they burned it, and moving upriver from the mouth of the Tiber they reached Rome.  They laid siege to it and one night they burst in.  They plundered the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, sacked both, and to get rid of them Pope Sergius II had to stipulate an annual tribute of twenty-five thousand pieces of silver.  To prevent further attacks, his successor Leo IV had to erect the Leonine Walls.
“Having left Rome, though, they descended on Campania.  They stayed there for seventy years destroying Montecassino and tormenting Salerno.  A city where, at one time, they amused themselves by sacrificing a nun’s virginity every night.  Do you know where?  On the cathedral’s altar.  In 898 they landed in Provence.  To be precise, in present-day Saint-Tropez.  They settled there, and in 911 crossed the Alps to enter Piedmont. They occupied Turin and Casale, set fire to all the churches and libraries, killed thousands of Christians, then went to Switzerland.  Here they reached the Graubunden valley and the lake of Geneva.  Then, put off by the snow, did an about-turn and returned to the warm climate of Provence.  In 940 they occupied Toulon where they settled and…  Today its fashionable to beat our breast over the crusades.  To blame the West for the Crusades.  To see the Crusades as an injustice committed to the detriment of the poor-innocent-Muslims.  But before being a series of expeditions to regain possession of the Holy Sepulchre that is of Jerusalem, (which had been taken by the Muslims, remember, not by my aunt), the Crusades were the response to four centuries of invasions and occupations.  They were a counter-offensive to stem Islamic expansionism in Europe.  To deflect it, mors tua vita mea, towards the Orient (meaning India and Indonesia and China) then towards the whole African continent and towards Russia and Siberia where the tartars converted to Islam were already crushing the followers of Christ.  At the conclusion of the Crusades, in fact, the sons of Allah resumed their persecutions as before and more than before.
“By the hand of the Turks, this time.  The Turks who were about to prepare the firth to the Ottoman Empire.  An empire that until 1700 would concentrate on the West all of its greed:  turn Europe into its favourite battlefield. Interpreters and bearers of that greed, the famous Janissaries who still today enrich our language with the synonym of killer fanatic assassin.  And do you know who the Janissaries actually were?  The chosen troops of the empire, the super-soldiers as capable of self-immolation as of fighting and massacring and sacking.  Do you know where they were recruited or rather pressed into service?  In the countries subjugated by the Empire.  In Greece, for example, or in Bulgaria ,in Romania, in Hungary, in Albania, in Serbia.  Often in Italy too, along the coasts plied by their pirates.  Those coasts where still today you can see the remains of the watchtowers used for spotting their arrival and warning the towns and villages.  And where still resounds the echo of the scream which today is used as a mockery but at that time was a cry of terror and despair:  Mamma, li turchi!  Mother, the Turks!  They abducted those killers to be at the age of eleven or twelve, together with even younger children to put in the seraglios of the sultans and viziers given to paedophilia, and they chose them from the best-looking and strongest of the important families’ firstborns.  After the conversion they shut them in the military barracks and here, forbidding them to have any kind of amorous or affectionate relations, marriage included, they indoctrinated them as not even Hitler would indoctrinate his Waffen SS.  They turned them into the most formidable fighting machine the world had been since the Roman times.”

Oh, and here is a recent photograph of Ms. Fallaci: