Most people (especially atheists) are unaware of how irrelevant religion was to the Crusades. How irrelevant was it? Well... at various times, groups of Crusaders (who were never, ever united under a single banner, Catholic or otherwise) would ally themselves with pagans or Muslims and fight other Christians. The Knights Templar managed to get rich through plunder, made the mistake of loaning money to the Vatican, then they were condemned as heretics and every last one of them was put to death to avoid paying the debt. So... yeah... religion doesnt appear to even be a driving factor in the quintessential religious wars. If anything, religion was the recorded rhetoric, but it doesnt even appear to be what the common individual was interested in. Most Crusaders were poor serfs whose neighbors had just fallen ill with some horrible plague, so it didnt take much faith to pick up and get the hell out of Europe for a bit, especially with the prospect of coming home with some loot. Hell, guys brought their whole families Crusading. To say the Crusades were about religion is to say that 9/11 was about terrorists hating our freedom. Its an idea that got repeated a lot, though it wasnt why it happened, nor is it why most people think it happened.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 07:06:50 +0000