Monday, March 20, 2006
They are re-exmining the history...or at least trying to re-shade how we view them: Vatican change of heart over 'barbaric' Crusades
“The debate has been reopened,” La Stampa said. Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II.
He said that the Crusaders were “martyrs” who had “sacrificed their lives for the faith”. He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades “do not know their history”. Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott’s recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as “utter nonsense”.
Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was “historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” It fuels Islamic fundamentalism by propagating “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”.
He said that the Crusaders were sometimes undisciplined and capable of acts of great cruelty. But the same was true of Muslims and of troops in “all ideological wars”. Some of the Crusaders’ worst excesses were against Orthodox Christians or heretics — as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204...
This new Pope is an interesting cat.
Oddly enough, Robert Spencer, quoted in the article, says he wasn't at the conference.
(via Miss Kelly)
Good. Much like the Middle Ages and Scholastics, this is a discussion which needs to be opened and vetted much better than it has been. Obviously, barbarities and excesses occurred, obviously as well it is a truism that histories tend to be written by the victors and other protagonists, so any specific historical telling needs to be critically assessed; but such truisms and the historical accounts they reflect themselves can devolve into massive equivocations, bigotries and reductionistic categories which fail to serve valid and critical distinctions, sometimes critically and even grotesquely distorting the history in question.
Too, if interested, Benedict's Europe and Its Discontents, at First Things, is now available online. It's a solid and thoughtful probing and apparently it's a chapter in a forthcoming book written by both Benedict and Marcello Pera, the latter being an Italian politico and apparently, if I have it right, an avowed non-Christian and thorough-going secularist, both privately and politically/publically.