Hilaire Belloc Quotes
I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
Belloc, Hilaire. Letters from Hilaire Belloc. Edited by Robert Speaight, Hollis & Carter, 1958, p. 264.
In addition to the Muslim world during the Crusades losing control of the Holy City for the first time in 400 years, the Christians stabled their horses on the Al Axa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, two of Islam’s holiest places. In addition, the Crusaders, after taking the city, slaughtered most of the inhabitants—Muslims, Jews and even fellow Christians who were Eastern Orthodox—more than 30,000 in just a day or so. It was a reign of terror on a scale that even today, it is shocking to most. So where as to us the Crusades were an interesting of aberrant part of history, to many Muslims of the Middle East the thought or discussion of the Crusades is traumatic even today.
Christians of 1 thousand years ago were barbarous and immoral compared to Christians of today, even though their Bible is the same. He argued that Islam may well also reform. In looking at Islam compared with Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, it is useful to remember that these are much older religions than Islam. They have had more time to reform and develop. Compare Christians 700 years ago to Christians today. They were pretty barbaric in comparison. They burned heretics at the stake and "witches" also. But Islam is 700 years younger than Christianity and thousands of years younger than the other 3 religions mentioned. It may well need more time to develop and reform.
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. Early in his career, as Secretary to the Emperor, he was assigned to oversee the education of the young king of Bohemia.
See {582893} for Saladin's Reply. King Richard was the leader of all the Christian forces in the Holy Land for the Crusade. There was a belief, that a wooden cross in the possession of the Muslim force was the true cross of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ
The Bull was directed at French King Louis VII. On Christmas Eve the year before Zengi had broken into the city of Edessa and massacred the French inhabitants. This was the Proclamation of the start of the 2nd Crusade. Note that the Pope, in order to raise troops and money for the Crusades, used the remission of previous sins to motivate Pietro dei Paganelli di Montemagno
Different Christian European powers moved in and out of alliances with each other and with the Islamic Ottoman Empire. So Christians were not unified and whenever a Christian country was at war with the Muslims some Christians perceived it as an assault on Christianity—except that there were Christian allies of the Muslims. Later many Muslims would see any conflict with a Christian country as an attack in Islam even when Muslim nations were allied with the Christians as was Turkey at the end of the 20th century. Turkey was a member of NATO and was therefore seen as traitors to Islam by some Muslims. There has always been this tendency to see conflict in terms of religious or ethnic hostility where convenient.
When the Turks defeated the Christians, the only explanation many Christians could conceive of was that God was on the side of the Turks.
The Christian Crusaders and the Muslim extremists through this day are not the only peoples who described atrocities as “Holy war.”
The two were cousins. Wilhelm was a very dominant personality and his cousin quite weak. This quotation shows the tyrannical view of the German Kaiser. The letters were secret but after the execution of the Czar, the Russians released the letters to show the dominant and warlike history of Germany under the Kaiser who was furious that the Russians had made such personal and secret letters public. Russia was in conflict with Japan in what would be called the Russo-Japanese War. The racist views of the German aristocracy was shared with respect to Asians in remembrance of the Mongol invasions of Russia.
The Papacy was at one of it’s lowest points. Two men, Clement and Urban, both claimed the Papacy and each had raised an army to fight the other. Each was promising indulgences to those who would fight, and in a modality similar to the Muslim terrorists of the 21st century, the soldiers were promised ascendancy to Heaven if they fell in battle for such a holy cause. The armies of the popes marched under the cross as their banner, and Wycliffe found that obscene and actually wrote a treatise saying so. See {618087}.
The Muslims had internal wars but they had—and still have--two sets of morality as to the laws of war. This illustrates the classic Islamic discrimination against non-believers to which the minority of Muslim terrorists still adhere,
Ottoman Turkish Sultan Mehmed II Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. 6 years earlier, the Ottoman Turks, had captured Byzantium (Constantinople, later Istanbul), the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Pope had called together the rulers and leaders of Christendom to organize a common defense in this war of civilizations. This was the period where Christian Islamophobia began. The Muslims had a religious duty to convert the rest of the world to Islam and adopt Islamic law (Sharia). However, so did the Christians. Sultan Mehmed II, when he conquered Byzantium, did not require the conversion of the Christians in the great city. He took the greatest churches, but by and large left the Christians to worship in their own Churches. The Muslims at the time were far more tolerant of Christians (and Jews) than the Christians were of Muslims (and Jews). Like in the 21st century, there was much Islamic doctrine and reality to be worried about, but not all the Muslims were as rabid and extreme as Eastern paranoia suggested in the 15th century or the 21st.
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was a British-French writer and historian and one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong impact on his works. He was President of the Oxford Union and later MP for Salford South from 1906 to 1910. He was a noted disputant, with a number of long-running feuds. Belloc became a naturalised British subject in 1902 while retaining his French citizenship.
