Why The Crusades Were Awesome, Actually | History Teacher Reacts | Pax Tube

Hey there, welcome back to another History Teacher Reacts video. Alright, today's video I'm checking out was recommended to me, I think way back when it released which looks like a year ago. I never got around to it, but then I noticed it had been recommended to me a couple more times just recently. So I thought I'd finally get around to it. So the title of this video is, Why the Crusades were Awesome, Actually. So this is from a channel called PaxTube, and it's got 3.2 million views, and it was only posted a year ago. So I'm interested to see what the take is here. Alright, video is linked down below, you can support it there. By the way, Tuesday I'm doing a live stream of the election night. So come on over to hang out with some other History Buffs, I've got live guests coming on to see the night unfold. Alright, let's get started. Alright, you can see I got my Crusader gear on. I wear this anytime we're doing like Middle Ages stuff. Let's see what's up. In 2005, the film Kingdom of Heaven was released to the world. The film takes place during the major historical conflict between the Christian world and the Islamic world that we today call the Crusades, beginning in 1096, Catholic Europeans embarked the globe. You would think that in a historical drama like this, we would get a fair portrayal of both sides with the nuances of the conflict being shown. Well, then you're wrong right away, because that's not how movies work. And yes, going in saying the goal was to spread your faith. That's an interesting way to frame it, I guess. Now after the First Crusade, the First Crusade was basically the only successful one here by the Crusaders. Coming into that movie, you had the establishment, I guess, of this Latin Empire. You've got them, you know, trying to hold it down. And if you know the movie, I mean, I don't know how much this is like a movie review necessarily, but Jerusalem is going to be retaken here. And so you get that with Saladin. We don't. The film portrays the Christian Crusaders as bloodthirsty barbarians while their Islamic opponents are shown as intelligent and peaceful. Some of them. Now it should be said that Ridley Scott, the director of the film, is an atheist. So we can see why he deliberately decided to portray things this way. But regardless of Scott's motive, why, if you're an atheist, then you generally feel the same thing about because you're talking about two religious groups, it wouldn't be skewed, I guess, to one area necessarily saying this one is, I don't know, religion. I mean, you could say, I mean, an atheist could say for sure, like which, I guess, religion they think is more harmful in this. But we also know that the Crusades is a lot more than religion. There is a lot. It's land territory. I mean, yes, you're going to have these, these maybe religious, religious motivations. People talk about, of course, the religious significance of a lot of these lands, but a lot of these lands too, I mean, you had Jerusalem, but also in areas outside of it. So was it some era of imperialism at this time, whatever. Now the context here of the Crusades, of course, is well, first off, the Christians hadn't controlled Jerusalem in centuries. Okay. You got to go back centuries before the Crusades started there and, but some of the other areas around like Turkey and some of those paths, I mean, not to get into a whole like history of the Crusades thing, but there are a lot of things, and especially in the second Crusade and further Crusades, you had more motivations that weren't just religious. I mean, I don't know if the first one would be considered the most religious of them, but you definitely had people coming in, you had mercenary types, you had people trying to get land and fame, and there's reasons for that coming out of what was going on in Europe at this time. But let's go through. I can tell he's, he didn't like that video or the movie. ... motivation, the portrayal, deliberately decided to portray things this way. But regardless of Scott's motivation, the portrayal of the Crusades in Kingdom of Heaven reflects how they've been understood by a majority of Westerners for decades. Documentaries like the History Channel's Mankind, the Story of Us, single out the Crusades. I show this. It's a uniquely evil chapter of human history. I think of all the wars fought over religion, the Crusades belong in their own category. It is one of the most shameful undertakings ever embarked upon by our species. Okay. I have seen Mankind, I don't know how many times. I show it to my classes all the time. It's great for little bits, the students get into it and stuff. That clip did, those clips did not exclusively talk about what the Christians did as being bad. He said, in general, I've seen that countless times, saying that it was brutal on both sides and saying the biggest shame was it, the biggest shame they were referring to in that, in that episode was the use of religion for it. So this was completely cherry-picked. Okay. I'm starting to see this is kind of interesting. We got kind of a hot take and I'm ready for it. Okay. Is this why this thing's popular? Is this why it's been recommended to me for the past year? I thought we're only a minute in. In all of these cases, the same narrative is presented. One day, crazy Christians decided to attack the peaceful and enlightened Islamic world just because they could. The events are held as a staple of why we need separation of church and state and why Catholicism should have no place in government. We're led to believe that if Christians have power again, they'll start unnecessary wars of religion, just like the Crusades. Well, that period of time, up until the Crusades, soldiers come in and did mess up a lot. But they had lived in relative peace and pilgrimages had come into that area. Again, even though it was Islamic rule, it was still had the right to protect Christians as well as Muslims. Yes, there were hostilities off and on, but it was most hostile during the Crusades. But in reality, there are few events in history more misunderstood than the Crusades. This is why I'm making this video. Let's hear the facts. The popular understanding of the Crusades is dead wrong. And I'm here to explain why. In this video, I mean, it's one of the most covered subjects in history. We'll see if he's got anything groundbreaking here, but we'll see why the Crusades were not only morally justified, but were actually a historic achievement. Buckle up, because there's a lot to cover. OK, let's try. So I do, I do. I mean, I'll find out here, obviously, here is this clickbaity. I have no idea who this person is or what their background is, but is it is it supposed to be like that? Is that was that the deal? I mean, we'll see. OK, so. All right. So justified and a success. That is an interesting thing, because that's something you never hear. So the Crusades were a success, especially if you're talking about the Western perspective. 600 AD. All right. You're going to get what? You're going to get the birth of Muhammad, et cetera. Travel back in time to 600 AD, roughly 500 years before the first crusade. Right. This is a map of the Christian world at that time. All the highlighted areas show where Christianity had spread and become the majority religion. Wait a minute. Is that the Middle East and North Africa? Yes, it is. These two areas used to be Christian. People today think of these as Muslim lands. Well, there's non-Christians, too. Everybody here was not a Christian. It was ruled by like, you know, maybe like Christian governments are talking about like the Byzantine Empire here talking post, you know, like Justinian. So even at this time, Christianity has also been divided. OK, not officially. You're going to get the Great Schism in in 1050, about 1050 Muslim lands. Yeah, that didn't exist because Islam didn't exist yet. But to say that like there was just like they didn't believe in things, you had actually quite a diversity of a lot of different beliefs at this time. There was, you know, others. But that was not always the case. It all began when Christianity spread far and wide after being legalized by Emperor Constantine the Great with the Edict of Milan. This led to the Christianization of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire. Even as the western part of the empire fell to barbarians, Christianity remained and most of the barbarians also converted. So if that happened in Europe. Well, yeah. Well, not. Yeah, eventually. OK, that's going to be a lot of that with the Franks. But that's not the point here. What happened in the Middle East and North Africa? In the mid 600s, Arab warlords sprang out of the Arabian Peninsula and began conquering everything in their path. They brought with them their own was a lot of Islam. And unlike European barbarians, they did not convert to Christianity. The Middle East at the time was dominated by two super plenty had before that. The area was quite diverse. Arabs, though, mostly like a lot of polytheistic beliefs amongst those first people. But a lot of those first converts were, again, people of, you know, pre Abrahamic beliefs, but also, you know, Jews, some Christians converted as well. So, I mean, there's a lot of converts as well to go along with military conquests. Powers to Christianity. The Middle East at the time was dominated by two superpowers, the Christian Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire and the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire. Unfortunately for them both, they just fought each other in a gigantic war lasting 25 years and a drain themselves of key resources. And yeah, I mean, the Persian, like their state was Zoroastrian. That was kind of their, you know, the origins of their power. You can see that going back for a long time, but also a multi faith empire as well. But yes, that time was these two sides have been fighting for centuries at this time. It's one of the things that led to actually the Arab conquest successes was, you know, going into these areas that might even be seen as liberators. There were areas that saw Muslim groups coming in through conquest or whatever. But some of them, a lot of them came in and were kind of perceived also as liberators, especially in both sides, basically, of both the Byzantine and the Sasanian part there. But again, it's very diverse. There's a lot of different ways that a lot of this stuff happened. Because of this, neither was prepared for the invasions that hit them. That's true. The Byzantines lost all of Africa and the Levant, while the Sasanian Empire collapsed completely. Yeah. The most important loss for the Christian world, though, was the loss of the Holy Land. By 900 A.D., Islam had expanded by conquest all the way to France and southern Italy. I would not I would not call that their biggest loss. That would be losing Constantinople or even Rome at this time. So and neither of those happened anywhere near this time. So, yeah, I mean, these Muslim people also believe, though, that in the same stuff that they believed about about Jerusalem. All right. They're Abrahamic. They're coming in saying, yes, this was the home of Christ and all the other dealings that go with, you know, the like Old Testament as well. You know, big difference, obviously, for Muslims is not seeing, you know, like Jews do, though, but not seeing Jesus as a Messiah character. But as, you know, a prophet going to be sacred to them going into it. Now, I'm not going to moralize about this. Conquest and wars of expansion have been common all through history, and Islam followed in that same mold. However, Islam did take things a step further with its concept of jihad or holy war. Muhammad was a conqueror who took slaves. Some of this, would you guys say the Franks, like with their conquests and spread of Christianity of that was like a Christian version of that? In some way, I mean, with jihad kind of holy war, definitely an argument. They're necessarily unique, right? And Islam has sought to emulate his example ever since. As a side note, this is also why slavery has always been common in the Islamic world and continues to be practiced there to this very day. But regardless of the morality of the Islamic conquest, yeah, historically, slavery allowed in in the Islamic world. Big rule for that, though, is you cannot enslave another Muslim. Weren't necessarily always transmittable by property with the chattel slavery that you might understand. But yes, slavery permitted. Yes, that is true. Conquests, they were nonetheless invaders who invaded the Christian world. Christians in conquered lands were second class citizens and many were taken as slaves. Christian inhabitants had to pay an enormous tax called the dhimmi tax, and their churches were often shut down. Christians conquered that area as well. They conquered it before. Because of Islamic policies over the centuries, Christianity in the Middle East and North Africa shrunk from a large majority to a tiny minority. But it actually gets even worse. I mean, yes, we know that conquest is kind of everything. So before the Muslims had conquered it, you also had Persians there. You had the Roman Empire there. All you know, the Roman Roman Empire was Christian by then. And with the Byzantine Empire, obviously Christian conquered that area as well. During the days of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean Sea was a breadbasket of commerce and trade. The Romans had successfully stamped out piracy and created some of the safest waterways in the entire world. Islamic piracy brought all of this to an end. From bases in North Africa and the Middle East, they turned the Mediterranean into an unsafe hellhole. This crashed the European economy and made Europe a miserable place for commerce for almost 400 years. OK, I want to see this. A lot of it will kind of be hijacked. I guess you would say in a lot of way for centuries, Arab traders were the middlemen of trade in the entire oceanic world. The Indian Ocean Basin was the same thing there. It was extremely efficient at that time. But yeah, so I kind of wanted to see, though, what he's saying here with this article. So Byzantine Emperors struggled with the incursion from invading Muslim eras in the 7th century, leading to fierce competition to build up a fleet and war galleys of increasing size. Soon after conquering Egypt and Lebanon, Arab rulers built ships highly similar to Byzantine Romans with the help of local Coptics. OK, blah, blah, blah. By the 9th century. So this is what he highlighted. By the 9th century, the struggle between Byzantines and Arabs had turned the eastern Mediterranean into a no man's land for merchant activity. Arab culture was built upon trading activity. It was their livelihood. And yes, battle for trade routes has been something as old as time. Islam's so-called Golden Age came at Europe and Christianity's expense. This is the true reason that many consider the year 600 A.D. to 1000 A.D. a dark age for Europe. They call it that because a lot of the Greco-Roman classics were being ignored in Europe. It was actually the Islamic world under the Abbasid Caliphate that preserved that stuff until it was re-accepted into European society with the Renaissance in the 1314 and 1500s. So, yes, that was kind of it was called Dark Age by proponents of people that think the Roman Empire was the peak of European society. The Dark Age is literally a reference to a rejection of European classical thought that was replaced with what a lot of people will, you know, people that propose this dark age idea with religious dogma. From Christianity, it was literally cut off from the entire world and constantly under attack. It was in this they were under attack by themselves. There was infighting. This is the era of feudalism. They were fighting themselves. Hellish environment that Christendom finally started to have enough. The first rumblings for a crusade came in 846 when an Arabic expedition to Sicily sailed up the Tiber River and sacked St. Peter's in Rome. A synod in France called for Christian sovereigns to rally against the enemies of Christ and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. But it was around 1000 A.D. when things really escalated on multiple fronts. Is that a form of Christian jihad? OK, 1000. Yep. Big things happen here. You're going to get the great schism. I hope he brings that up because that's really important. In the West, the Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba and Iberia began expanding north. It conquered, burned and enslaved its way through multiple Christian cities, including Barcelona and Leon. It was this expansion campaign that finally provoked the Christian kingdoms to launch the Reconquista to retake Iberia from Islam. 700 years later, 700 years later. I mean, the stop it's going to stop up. I mean, Battle of Tours was kind of the famous one. The Reconquista was an interesting time because it's it's when the Reconquista happens that a lot of religious groups ended up leaving. There was a mass mass exodus of the Jewish population, by the way, where Jews and Christians that actually lived pretty well in in Spain with each other. So I place like Cordoba was very, very advanced when it came to a lot of education because Jewish, Christian, Muslim intellectuals that all lived fairly peacefully there. But yeah, you are talking, of course, a peace established after brutal warfare. That's definitely true. This is because this is going to bring in the Inquisition. But if things looked rough in Western Christendom, they were even worse in the east. In the late 900s, a Central Asian Muslim group called the Seljuk Turks began migrating into Anatolia. This did mess things up. They completely conquered Armenia and sacked its capital, Ani. The city never recovered from this brutality and remains a ruin to this very day. Almost all of the army. There's a lot of reasons that Armenia has not recovered in a lot of ways. They've been a target for many groups of people that we don't have time to get into. But yes, the Seljuk Turks really did mess things up because those relative peace between Christian pilgrims and Jews, as well as as well as Muslims at this time. This did. They did mess things up for sure, because it became violent, especially on some of these pilgrimage routes and things like that. I mean, the the Muslim groups that had come in and kind of governed here in the Levant had a lot of reasons to actually want to protect like, you know, religious pilgrimages because you could tax it. You could make a lot of money off of it. So it was pretty well protected. But yeah, the Seljuk Turks did kind of mess things up. Armenian population had to migrate southeast to Cilicia, creating an entire new kingdom called Cilician Armenia. In other words, Islam had made the Armenian homeland unlivable. The Turks then turned their expansion into the Byzantine Empire. They began invading western Anatolia and Drozd. The Byzantines tried to launch counterattacks, but were ultimately defeated at the Battle of Manzikert. After this defeat, Turks began mass migrating into Anatolia, completely altering its demographics. Another region of the Christian world had just become Islamic by force. Here's how historian John J. O'Neill describes the circumstances. These then are the major political events which prefigured the First Crusade. True. Within a span of 35 years, the Turks had seized control of Christian territories larger than the entire. And he just lumped in all Muslims together with that, like the Seljuks. And then you had previously like the Abbasids, like very different. They were enemies of the Abbasids. They were enemy. The Seljuk Turks were enemies of the people that were there as well. They were they were enemies of many different people. But he just he lumped all of them together there, but is not lumping in all Christians necessarily together because you had the Byzantines, you had the Catholics. I don't know if there's a lot of consistency there. All right. This video is interesting. You can see there's definitely a motive here. Again, I want to understand maybe his background, too. Going to understand his POV region of France. And now they were a real legal back of Christian territories. Larger back to the whole quote. Within a span of 35 years, the Turks had seized control of Christian territories larger than the entire region of France. And now they were a real threat to Europe. Now, by this point, the Byzantine Empire realized it was incapable of stopping the Islamic hordes by itself. Right. Emperor Alexius Comnenus made a desperate appeal to the pope and Western Christendom for aid. This was a major deal because Eastern and Western Christendom had been in schism for almost 50 years. By this point, the Catholic pope and the Orthodox patriarchs did not get along, to put it lightly. But the issue had become that serious that they were now willing to cooperate. The what the pope was willing to cooperate because he also wanted control over the east, basically losing the authority over those Christians in the east officially was a major motivation. It was a win win situation with that. I don't know if it would be as much nearly as much just solely about Islam if this was because this this could happen. There could have been a crusade before the schism and a better one. And probably one that had done a lot better. But things have changed a lot. And that schism made it way more likely that sort of the Western Latin Catholic world under the pope would with Pope Urban would want to move into the east there. There are a lot of other motivations here rather than just stop Islamic incursion just because they are a different type. They're Christians or different types of Christians. What made matters even more urgent was the Turks had begun persecuting Christian pilgrims in the holy land. That is true. Like Peter the Hermit, who had become one of the greatest advocates of the Crusades, witnessed this firsthand. Yeah, this is this perfectly shows you why this Seljuk Turk group is different than the others that have lived in this area where things were a lot better. A political environment that led to the first crusade being called. Now, does it seem unreasonable when you get all this other context? This is what Catholic Europeans knew about Islam. He missed the most some of the most important context here. This is very much framed a very framed context. I can tell the eve of the first crusade Muslims were enemies of Christ. They waged wars against noncombatants and enslaved women and children, and they had conquered all of Iberia, Anatolia and threatened France and Italy. Not by that time. That time it had ended by then. But yeah, it was important that this all happened at the turn of the first millennia. By this time, the elites of Europe were finally starting to become much wealthier and better educated. They were developing a much stronger grasp of history and world affairs. Europe was safer and more. That's because the population's increasing after the fall of the Roman Empire. So you're talking 500 years before this. There was about a 90% reduction in population as a result of as a result of a lot of the depopulation population that had come with the later Roman Empire. A lot of reasons for that. But there were new technological advances, agricultural things, Western Europe specifically was starting to grow grand. The East here, Byzantine Empire had been doing trade, had been doing all this stuff. You got Silk Road trade. All this stuff had been happening uninterrupted. The Seljuk Turks didn't, you know, mess a lot of that up, but had actually been dealing with them economically quite well at this time. Now, the growing population of Western Europe forced itself to now create more trade relationships. And obviously, your trade relationships are going to extend into your neighbors, which meant, OK, different Islamic groups. And like they were saying, a lot of the trade was going on. There was a lot of favorable trade still going on in the Mediterranean. I know you did talk about how it was kind of messed up because, yeah, they were fighting for different trade routes and things. But I understand healthy trade is still important. You want healthy trade regardless of who necessarily the people are that you're going to be trading with. And there was a lot to offer for both sides there. So this coincided with the context of the population explosion with an agricultural revolution in Western Europe. More interconnected than any time since the Roman Empire. Europe was safer and more interconnected than any time since the Roman Empire. They were beginning to truly understand just how much damage Islam had done to the Christian world and how much of a civilizational threat it still represented. Not Western Europe. They're very ignorant to this stuff. All the pieces were now in place for the Crusades to be launched. In 1095, the moment had arrived. Pope Urban II called for the first crusade to retake the Holy Land and drive back Islam. It would be the first of many. An excerpt from Urban's crusade speech reads, Your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has been promised them. The heathens have killed men every year for many years in my classes and devastated the Greek empire. If you permit them to continue with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account, I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank to carry aid promptly to those Christians. Let therefore hatred depart from among you. Let your quarrels end. Let war cease and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Now, what's interesting with this, too, is that it's going to be these lords that especially come out of like the France, France and what today would be like Belgium region that are going to end up leading this. And again, there's a lot of motivations for people to come into this. And you can read this in the letters with with crusaders out there of of all rank, too. I mean, even nobles, you had primogeniture laws, which kept basically any any male, any male that wasn't the firstborn in a royal family did not get to inherit the land of their family. And so with that, to keep your kind of lordship, there was also this idea that you're going to have to go and potentially conquer it as well. So again, but the first crusade, you could say, had decent religious motivation there. But there are so many social and economic ones. And for the pope here, this is a way also for him to gain sort of authority and influence over there because he has no political, doesn't have a lot of political authority of a lot of these groups. This is still the era of feudalism. Now there is the kind of consolidation of power happening at this time. You're starting to get more of the creation of the European states that we started to think of here today. And this was a way to be able to kind of unify people. There was a lot of different things that could weaponize this. And the pope definitely knew that for sure. But let's remember trying to heal the schism. That's a major part. Big reason why a lot of this wasn't happening earlier. Yes, you had the Seljuk Turks there. But in his framework about how these Islamic groups were always bad from the beginning, there was plenty of motivation to have a more unified and probably a better executed crusade years before this, if it had not been for the schism. It's important to point out how Pope Urban's speech emphasized not only the defense of Christendom, but also the end of internal wars between Christian kingdoms. The pope envisioned an international brotherhood of Catholics who fought not each other, but their external threats that he that he will see over, although there has been a split in the east, rejects all authority from the pope. See, this is where we're getting to those other motivations. In any case, the call for crusade was extremely well received. The news spread through all of Europe like wildfire. Tens of thousands of faithful Catholics all across Europe answered the pope's call. Lowly peasants, ambitious knights, even kings, French, English, Flemish, German, people from all walks of life and betting on the nationalities were inspired to fight for Christendom. It's not really appreciated how much of an accomplishment that this alone was. It's really something entirely unique in human history. The Catholic, another another thing that that recruitment would not have happened without the feudal structure and how the European way of life and social structure was so rigid that for so many people coming on this crusade, it was seen as the only way to have any kind of social mobility. The church had created a multinational network that united Europeans of all stripes and that the church did not run a common faith with common goals. But the church did not really organize this. This was led by these guys, Raymond of Toulouse and Robert of Flanders and etcetera. These other guys. So many different European popes not out there. Tips and ethnicities under a common faith with common goals. So many different Europeans being united by one religion and engaging in a civilization wide struggle had not happened before and has not happened since. But it should have. It could have. Catholicism achieved what hundreds of other religions and ideologies could not. And this guy's Catholic, right? I'm not saying that's a bad thing or anything like that, but that's kind of what I'm thinking. The perspective of this is, is he a Catholic? Perhaps this is why our modern secular system demonizes the Crusades. Oh, secularism bad. He already took this totally on. He didn't watch this episode. Every crusade always go the best it could have gone. No, of course not. Some crusades were huge successes like the Reconquista, while others were dismal failures like the Fourth Crusade. But even the failures that Reconquista brought in the inquisition end up being terrible for people outside the in-group and the Fourth Crusade, total disaster. We all know about that. That's what Christians are fighting. He's ignoring. Yeah, he's ignoring the ignoring the Fourth Crusade. That is like the exact opposite of what the Crusades were supposed to be. Start attacking each other. They're not unified. That was not a success. That's an epic failure. Reconquista, while others were dismal failures like the Fourth Crusade. But even the failures are understandable in context, which destroyed going halfway across the world to fight unfamiliar enemies on their own home turf. The logistics of the Crusades alone were a monumental undertaking. And despite all these challenges, the Christian forces still often came out on top. The first only in that one really only be qualified as a roaring success. Crusaders defeated almost every Muslim army they encountered and captured Jerusalem for the first time in hundreds of years. The Holy Land was back under Christian. Not for long, man. That was with a few decades. It's going to happen within one generation. Some of the old heads, you know, they talk about when when some of the old heads, we should say, where the story has been passed down about like how that siege of Jerusalem went. A lot of primary sources. We don't read a lot. I do actually a pretty, pretty good sized activity where students read a lot of the sources there and like what happened there, Jerusalem was, you know, very bad. And again, it's war, whatever. You can make those cases, but especially brutal for a lot of these these civilian populations, which definitely gave a heated response in the second crusade. One of the things that people will talk about with like Saladin or whatever. And what ends up happening is when Jerusalem is going to be retaken because they can't the Latins there, they can't they can't hold on to it anymore, was offered a deal, basically a peace deal that anyone that wants to leave freely, you can. And that was actually disagreed on by a lot of people within those that were advising people like Saladin, because they know what happened that first time when Jerusalem was taken. And of course, you can go back. OK, what about when Jerusalem was taken the first time, like way back when, when you had that and again, you had some Christians there. But again, a lot of other people were there basically saying that, yeah, like like letting them just go out peacefully again. I'm talking about this perspective of people that dissented against Saladin within the Islamic community, citing how bad things were for Muslims in that first crusade. But Saladin ends up offering basically a escorted exit pretty much out of Jerusalem. And the old heads, basically Jerusalem, like, yeah, you should probably take this deal because these younger folks and stuff like this next generation, they don't understand actually how brutal it was. We're actually getting off pretty easy when they're just going to let them pretty much walk. The first crusade also established crusader states that would remain in the Middle East for another century. Yeah. One crusade I personally like was the Sixth Crusade. Jerusalem had fallen back into Muslim hands, but they had started to fight each other in a civil war. Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire, just like how Christians did in the Fourth Crusade, negotiated a peaceful transfer of Jerusalem back into Christian rule. Jerusalem was retaken without a single drop of blood being spilled. A decisive diplomatic victory, even if the Muslims would eventually take it back. Diplomacy. As you can tell, during this time period, it was hard for just about anybody to hold on. That's why you could say the Second Crusade was also a diplomatic victory, especially for, well, for both sides. On to Jerusalem for long. In the end, the crusade secured Christendom's western flank and bought its eastern flank another 300 years. It wasn't until the emergence of the Ottoman Empire in the 1300s that Islam once again threatened Europe. Sorry, I'm like, I'm pausing so many times. The Fourth Crusade doomed the East more than anything, because the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Christian Empire keeps using, I think, like a lot of terms interchangeably here. But never recovered from the Fourth Crusade. Never recovered from how devastating that was. That's the biggest thing that ruined things in the eastern area of Christendom was the infighting. But even when that happened, crusaders once again went out to stop them. The Crusade of Nicopolis and the Crusade of Varna are two big examples of this. While they didn't succeed in stopping none of them matter, they don't matter. They could show that Christendom was still capable of uniting to fight common threats in the name of God. No, they weren't. And in the end, 300 years later, in the 1600s, Ottoman power would be broken by what was basically a crusade. The Christian Holy League of Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia united to defeat the Ottomans and drive them back from Europe. Despite all of this, some people say the Crusades failed. But did they? Yes. Europe was Christian when the Crusades were launched. And it's still majority Christian today. One thousand years later, Europe was Christian when the Crusades were launched. And it's still majority Christian today. That wasn't the Crusades. That wasn't the Crusade was to protect the heartland of Christian Europe. That expansion. What? OK, if is he now bringing in like the Ottoman Empire was a crusade, like they're saying that was the Crusades. So I guess, again, if there's so many different groups interchangeably being used here, that's not what people talk about with the Crusades. I guess if he wants to talk about the Ottoman Empire moving into southeastern Europe. Yeah. And there was some unification there for sure. He is right there. One thousand years. We're redefining, although it is secularizing due to modernist ideologies. Ironically, it's only after the pope lost his power to call crusades that Christianity started to decline in Europe. No. But when we look back at these, wow, he's a man. Yeah, OK, he's definitely Catholic. He's he's a big pope guy. OK, OK. Of some extent, maybe he's not practicing Catholic or whatever. But yeah, that's that's the vibe. Not a shameful chapter of Catholic history, but the total opposite. The Christian world defended itself and spread the faith abroad after hundreds and hundreds of years of abuse. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the Crusades were awesome. Indeed, this is impacts. And thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to see more videos, please consider supporting the channel. Also leave a comment letting me know your thoughts on everything as all. All right. All right. So I haven't seen the comments on this original video. I assume, you know, a reason why this video also is going to have such high views, like it has over 300 or three million views right now in just about just over a year was there's probably a lot of engagement in the comments. I'm going to assume here. I haven't even looked yet. But this seems like one of the videos where you're going to have the people that are going to look on both sides of this and argue. There's probably going to be a lot of arguments here. I mean, the first comment I'm seeing, France, Germany and England getting along. Yeah, it got real. Yeah, those countries didn't exist. Those weren't those. Those didn't exist yet. But anyway, it would probably be interesting to check out. OK. Anyway, yeah, I guess it was kind of a spicy video. Had to kind of infer a little bit of his POV, his point of view, but not a very, I think, accurate really telling of the Crusades. I think it's definitely being told in a certain way that ignores a lot of history, especially on a lot of what he would say Islamic history, which is much more than just Islam. There are multiple different groups that come in and out of each other. The infighting so much of the Crusades in a lot of way in the Islamic world was infighting. It's Shia Muslims. You had Sunnis. Someone like Saladin wasn't even necessarily like he was like a Kurdish Egyptian. And like there was so so much of that going on. There's so many things going on in a very, you know, emotionally charged area area that all views. OK, yes, this this area is important religiously, but it ignores so many of the other factors here. But it does show you how easy you can make arguments historically like this if you want to. You can interpret things in a lot of certain ways, especially if you come in with a goal and a sort of predisposition. And but there's got to be counter arguments put up here. One of my favorite things that is part of like what I teach with the curriculum of like an AP oral history class is how students are required to bring up counter arguments when they are arguing something. And it makes it seem, again, of course, less biased, a little more almost scientific in the way that you provide some falsifiability. And a lot of that really lacks with kind of this video essays and things is that idea of being required to sort of bring up again counter arguments and those those type of requirements. But again, it's also put out publicly and you got 30. I'm looking at thirty five thousand six hundred comments here. And I guess in a lot of way, there's your peer review. So with that, I think I said enough. What do you guys think of this video? I just watched. Let me know. Maybe I'm off on some things, whatever. Let's see what you got. We'll see you guys later. Bye.