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Were Christians pilgrims really being massacred or was it something to stir the emotions of Crusaders?
I was watching the History Channel special "The Crusades: The Crescent and the Cross" and also I read up on wiki that the reason the Crusades came to the mind of Pope Urban II was that the Byzantine Emperor sent a plea for help to push back the Seljuks and so it came to the Pope that they could wage a war on the Muslims in general to take the Holy Land and increase the political power of the church.
In the documentary but not so directly in the wiki, it says that Urban gave a speech detailing exaggerated atrocities against Christian pilgrims and that God has said that the Infidels should be punished and what not but there was no mention of helping the Byzantine Empire in his speech.
So essentially, my question is were there really mass atrocities against Christian pilgrims by the Seljuks that have been stated in real life Christian accounts of those who traveled there and I mean on the scale of thousands, not just a few people attacked here and there, or was it something that the Pope came up with to rally the masses b/c helping the Byzantines, who were not much closer to the Church b/c they had separated years ago, wasn't much of a reason to do a Crusade for most people?
Please be respectful.
2 Answers
- Giovanni TLv 61 decade agoFavorite Answer
I don't know if Christian pilgrims were really massacred.
I say that any war is against the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and, more than this, the temporal power of the Pope is against the Gospel as well.
Pope Paul VI said that has been a good thing for the Church to lose the temporal power.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
The early Crusades were directed towards atrocities committed against Christians in the holy land by the Seljuk Turks. How ever once Altra Mare (the christian kingdoms of the holy land) was established it gained a momentum of it's own. future Crusades were targeted at protecting these collections of states.
In the field of blood 700 christian Pilgrims were either killed or made into slaves.
Scale? who knows judging from this far away in time. All we have to go on is the written accounts.
how ever one thing is true, the Christian reason for the Crusades was christian based and had to be justified by the protection of fellow Christians,
Islam had no such impediment and their proposed subjugation of the west was pure conquest and forced Islamiforcation of all Christians. they even set up a sultanate 'Rum' for this task.
Source(s): edit.. if you agree with the Crusades or not one fact is true, the muslim reconquest of the holy land and Byzantium delayed their march westward, so that when they were in a position to enslave a continent, western technology was able to reduce their fleets to match wood as at Lepanto. so the Crusades gave the west breathing space leading to it's freedom and triumph.oh! and yes to America :)