BUT THEN WE RELIEVED THEM OF JERUSALEM AFTER ALL:

Crusades shouldn't be so painful a topic: Down through history, it's the losers who harbor grudges. Muslims got over the Middle Ages conflict the easiest way: by winning (David M. Perry, 10/01/06, Minneapolis Tribune)

From 1095 to 1291, medieval western Christians carved out small kingdoms along the eastern Mediterranean shore. They were weak, constantly endangered and eventually doomed. Once they were gone, the Muslim world focused on the expanding Islamic states in Egypt, Persia, the Ottoman Empire and later India. The Ottomans, in particular, kept right on winning against the Christian West, twice reaching the walls of Vienna with massive armies. They did not forget their history, but the Crusades receded to the status of a brief blot on the record of Muslim expansion, a blot that had created both heroes and villains, but not anything to get worked up about.

It's the Christian Europeans, the losers, who preserved the memory and emotions of the Crusades. For hundreds of years afterwards, they constantly invoked the Crusades, not only when fighting "infidels" (Muslims, Protestants and heretics, not to mention political rivals), but also while exploring and colonizing America, Africa and Asia.

Christopher Columbus, for example, promised to dedicate a healthy percentage of his profits toward the "liberation" of Jerusalem. In the 19th century, Emperor Louis Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm I compared their nation's colonial endeavors to the deeds of medieval figures such as Richard the Lion-Hearted, Philip Augustus and even Saladin. In 1898 the kaiser, dressed in a costume that he imagined medieval, had a hole knocked in the walls of Jerusalem so he could enter in just the same spot as a German medieval emperor, Frederick II, did more than 600 years previously.

The reemergence of the language of "anti-Crusade" in the Muslim world appears only during the modern era. It is a postcolonial phenomenon now being accelerated by a new breed of jihadists who believe they are fighting a holy war.

It reappears after we won the Crusade.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 6, 2006 9:46 PM