Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - The Chronicles of the Christians - Part II： The Truth About the Crusades

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00:00:25.780 The Poso Daily Brief.

00:00:30.000 This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.

00:00:40.560 A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.

00:00:46.980 This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.

00:00:50.420 Christ is King.

00:01:00.000 The Crusades were launched after seven centuries of constant Islamic aggression. 0.96

00:01:27.780 Before the very first crusade was launched in 1095, Muslims had invaded the following Christian lands. 1.00

00:01:39.740 They had invaded Christian Syria, Christian Jordan, Christian Palestine, Christian Egypt, Christian Algeria, Christian Libya, Christian Morocco, Christian Portugal, Christian Spain, Christian France, Christian Sicily, Christian Turkey. 0.90

00:02:01.740 Christian Armenia, Christian Armenia, Christian Italy, all before the first crusade. 0.75

00:02:10.740 The Crusades are a legitimate response to Islamic aggression and Islamic violence. 1.00

00:02:20.680 It has fallen to us to defend Jerusalem. 0.83

00:02:27.640 Assemble the army.

00:02:29.680 No!

00:02:45.680 You have chosen wisely.

00:02:49.100 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to part two of the Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.

00:02:59.620 My co-host today is Blake Neff.

00:03:02.320 So, Blake, you saw the clip just there played that went pretty viral, I think, earlier this year, that the Crusades were a response.

00:03:09.560 The Crusades were a response. 0.90

00:03:11.120 The Crusades were a response. 0.90

00:03:13.160 Is that true?

00:03:14.160 Is that accurate?

00:03:15.160 Is that accurate?

00:03:16.160 That's not what I was told about the Crusades.

00:03:18.160 It's definitely true, Jack.

00:03:21.320 And it was a very delayed response, even.

00:03:24.440 When you look at the grand sweep of history, the first crusade, I think, is called in 1095, maybe 1096.

00:03:32.860 And it arrives after many hundreds of years of Christianity being rolled back by a tide of Islamic conquest and by increasing breakdown between those two faiths, even in times of peace. 0.91

00:03:53.600 And I think the kind of official label that they would give to a crusade is they would describe it as a pilgrimage.

00:04:01.080 Crusaders, they would take a—they were basically taking an oath to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

00:04:08.420 So, we talked during our episode on ancient Christianity, the rise of Christianity, how St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, that she creates the practice of Christian pilgrimage by going to the Holy Land.

00:04:22.300 And in the years after that, people took after her example.

00:04:25.200 They would also go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

00:04:27.380 And this was a very popular thing that you could do in the Middle Ages if you had the means to do so.

00:04:33.720 Once in your life, you would try to travel to the Holy Land, to the place where Christ had walked and where he had ministered to people.

00:04:41.440 And they had done this even when it was ruled by Muslims for a long time. 0.97

00:04:46.140 But what increasingly happened was they were unable to do so.

00:04:49.980 There would be violence against pilgrims.

00:04:51.980 Pilgrims would be attacked by bandits.

00:04:54.520 They would have their ships attacked.

00:04:55.760 They would be sold into slavery and then need to be ransomed.

00:04:58.800 In fact, this was one of the first sort of international charitable things that we have in history is you would have Christians who would raise funds to ransom captives who had been taken by the Muslims in the Middle East and so on.

00:05:14.940 And so that was the buildup that you had to it was you had Christianity increasingly in the sense that it's under siege.

00:05:20.560 And also that, you know, that the homeland, that the place where the Savior had walked was ruled by those who rejected him and would attack those who followed him.

00:05:30.480 And that all built up to, well, OK, let's have an armed pilgrimage to free this place from those who hold it.

00:05:36.520 And that led to centuries of crusades.

00:05:40.640 And so we're going to get into all that.

00:05:43.240 How did the crusades start?

00:05:45.160 What was this rise of Islam?

00:05:47.300 In a sense, the sacking of the Holy Land, the taking of the Holy Land and the response, their wherewithal. 0.74

00:05:55.700 This is the truth about the crusades in the series, the Chronicles of the Christians.

00:06:02.720 Jack Posobiec, Blake Nath.

00:06:03.880 We'll be right back.

00:06:04.280 We'll be right back.

00:06:12.520 We'll be right back.

00:06:17.060 We'll be right back.

00:06:29.820 All right, Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, back here.

00:06:40.060 The Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.

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00:07:47.460 Blake Neff, when we left, we were talking about the Crusades.

00:07:53.260 So even before the Crusades, let's talk a little bit about this idea that many of these lands,

00:08:00.960 and he mentions countries earlier in the clip we played earlier, but they weren't really countries.

00:08:05.660 They were kingdoms and territories of the empire when this was going on.

00:08:10.700 But many of them had been Christianized, and we did a whole episode the other day in part one about how Christianity spread throughout the regions of the Roman Empire.

00:08:23.200 But then in northern Africa and what's now referred to as the Middle East or Levant, you get the spread of Islam. 0.98

00:08:31.460 And Islam didn't exactly spread the way Christianity did, did it? 0.68

00:08:35.200 It did not.

00:08:38.120 So Islam emerges in the early 600s. 0.86

00:08:43.720 So this is about 300 years after Constantine, and it's therefore like 300 years after the Mediterranean area becomes Christian.

00:08:53.140 It comes out of Arabia.

00:08:54.720 And it really has a very shocking rise.

00:08:58.520 There's kind of what happened is the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire had a very long war with each other, and they were just totally exhausted by it.

00:09:06.200 And suddenly these Arabs burst out, and they just conquer at an incredibly rapid case, almost nothing like it in world history. 1.00

00:09:14.620 So they conquer what we think of as the Muslim world today. 1.00

00:09:17.960 So they conquer modern Iraq, they conquer modern Iran, modern Egypt, modern Syria, modern North Africa. 0.91

00:09:25.020 They get all the way out to Spain.

00:09:26.700 And this becomes the Ummah, the Islamic world. 0.99

00:09:29.880 It's initially all under one empire.

00:09:32.160 It eventually breaks apart.

00:09:33.880 But this area, when it was conquered, was overwhelmingly Christian.

00:09:38.220 And for centuries after, it still remains heavily Christian, even majority Christian.

00:09:42.860 And it's over time that you start seeing more and more aggressive limitations on Christianity in those places, and also where you see a renewed expansionism that sort of inspires a backlash against it.

00:09:58.780 So, for example, one of the things that leads up to the Crusades, there's a great Christian city in Antioch.

00:10:05.180 There's historically a patriarch, one of the chief bishops, lives in Antioch.

00:10:09.980 And Antioch was ruled by the Roman Empire, by the Byzantine Empire, if you'll see it referred to in medieval stuff.

00:10:17.460 And only a few years before the First Crusade is that city actually captured by an Islamic army.

00:10:25.360 And they also conquer most of modern-day Turkey.

00:10:28.200 That had been a very Christian territory, a heartland of Christianity.

00:10:32.740 And it's been overrun by a Muslim army. 0.87

00:10:36.080 And so the First Crusade actually emerges almost by accident, is that the Roman Emperor, Alexius I, is asking knights from Europe, from France, say,

00:10:46.060 Hey, come out, help me fight against Muslims, and you can feel like you're serving Christ when you fight, rather than just fighting against each other. 1.00

00:10:55.820 And he's trying to recruit an army for this.

00:10:57.400 And what happens is the Pope at the time...

00:10:59.200 And by the way, that Alexius...

00:11:01.400 Blake, that Alexius, so even though he would refer to himself as the Roman Emperor, he's actually in Constantinople.

00:11:08.780 So he's in what we would now refer to as Byzantium.

00:11:12.460 Yes, and he's in the modern-day city of Istanbul.

00:11:15.540 Today, a Muslim city, unfortunately. 1.00

00:11:17.660 But this was the largest city in the Christian world for a thousand years.

00:11:22.400 It would be a rival to...

00:11:24.420 It would consider itself a rival to Rome, and it was a rival to Rome in terms of Christian importance.

00:11:29.060 And that is where the Emperor lived.

00:11:30.400 So yeah, I say Roman Emperor because technically it's true, but this would have been disputed at the time.

00:11:35.560 We don't need to get into all of that.

00:11:37.160 But he asks Christian knights, Hey, come out and help me to reclaim lands that should be Christian. 0.99

00:11:43.420 And it seems that a pope, Urban II, he takes that and he sort of, I don't want to say distorts it, but he evolves it for his own reasons, where the church, they had this thought.

00:11:55.720 Their thinking was, it's bad when Christians fight each other.

00:11:59.080 There was sort of this early version of a pacifist movement where they promoted movements.

00:12:03.420 They called it the peace of God and the truce of God.

00:12:06.920 And the peace of God was, it's bad for Christians to fight each other, so we should try to limit when you can fight. 0.93

00:12:12.520 Don't fight on Sundays.

00:12:14.400 Don't fight during Lent.

00:12:15.960 Don't fight during holy times so that there's less fighting.

00:12:18.900 And they would also do the truce of God, which was sort of early human rights law.

00:12:22.840 It was don't attack women.

00:12:24.580 Don't attack children.

00:12:26.060 Don't desecrate holy places.

00:12:28.100 So it was trying to say, yes, warfare, it's the Middle Ages.

00:12:31.200 Warfare's inevitable, but we should limit how much of it there is and who it hurts.

00:12:36.120 And so what the pope seems to have thought is, well, instead of having, these men have to fight.

00:12:41.100 They're professional fighters.

00:12:42.440 Why not have them fight to protect Christians, to protect Christian churches, to protect Christian places, 0.59

00:12:48.620 and to fight against people who are enemies of Christians, rather than have them fight amongst each other?

00:12:54.180 So he apparently gives a speech in, I think, in Constance.

00:12:59.020 Constance, it's the Council of Constance, I think is where it was, city in France.

00:13:03.000 And we don't know what he said, but whatever he said, it was apparently the greatest speech of all time.

00:13:08.360 Because you have all of these knights, all of these lords who are present.

00:13:11.760 There's like, and they just come out and they're like, yes, I want to go, let's go.

00:13:16.580 And you have these rich guys, these are the most powerful lords in Europe.

00:13:19.200 Well, Blake, they don't just say, let's go.

00:13:20.740 What do they say?

00:13:21.560 What do they say?

00:13:22.900 Deus volt.

00:13:24.120 God will.

00:13:24.700 Deus volt.

00:13:25.260 That's what they reportedly say.

00:13:26.720 Deus volt.

00:13:27.140 And of course, Kingdom of Heaven is a very accurate film depicting all of this.

00:13:33.380 And there's this myth about it.

00:13:34.220 But there are like 10 different versions of that.

00:13:36.720 Like, I've gone to look up the Pope Urban, the second speech, launching the first crusade.

00:13:41.100 And there's so many different versions of it.

00:13:43.320 It's almost choose your own adventure as to which.

00:13:46.060 But it's kind of like the Patton speech, you know, prior to, you know, prior to the great battles in World War II.

00:13:55.340 It's like a general Patton speech, but rallying around the cross and specifically talking about the defense of not just these former Christian lands, but really Jerusalem, the holy land, the holy sites.

00:14:08.460 And this ties back to the practice that St. Helena had instituted of pilgrimage to the holy land.

00:14:17.280 It's like, hey, remember those holy lands that we're all supposed to be making our pilgrimages to?

00:14:21.440 Well, they've been ransacked by infidels, and someone needs to go and save them. 1.00

00:14:26.540 And that someone is you, dear friends.

00:14:29.680 Yeah, and it's amazing.

00:14:31.100 It really is one of the great decentralized outpourings of public enthusiasm ever, because no kings go on the first crusade.

00:14:39.640 This is not a government endeavor.

00:14:42.260 It is, you know, this guy gives a speech, and they just rapidly—it's just the level of mass public enthusiasm for it is off the charts.

00:14:51.340 So you have nobles who are selling or mortgaging everything they own to try to go to the holy land on this pilgrimage.

00:14:58.980 There's no armed—there's no single commander to it.

00:15:02.520 There's different lords, and they end up—it ends up being this, like, campaign by committee like we've never seen before, because they can't agree on who should be in charge.

00:15:11.040 And you have people, like I said, people selling everything they own.

00:15:15.660 There were all these rules that were kind of designed to encourage Christian behavior, where they would say, before you go on crusade, you can't be trying to escape debts, so you have to settle all your debts with any people that you have.

00:15:26.440 If they owe you money, you have to settle up with them.

00:15:29.280 If you owe someone else money, you have to settle up with them.

00:15:32.340 You have to make sure that you go on crusade with a clean conscience.

00:15:36.440 And we have remarkable stories of what people were doing.

00:15:39.940 There was an ordinary man who he'd—I believe he'd killed his brother or some family member in an argument.

00:15:47.920 And so he was witnessed where he had—he was, like, holding the weapons that he had done this with, and he was like, I am going to travel to Jerusalem to lay these weapons at the tomb where Christ rose from the dead as, like, my penance for what I had done.

00:16:04.880 And, again, it's all popular enthusiasm.

00:16:09.880 No king orders this crusade.

00:16:11.700 No one is really ordered to go on this crusade, unless they're, you know, a knight who's working directly for someone else who does it.

00:16:17.180 It's all people volunteering to go on this.

00:16:19.920 It never should have succeeded.

00:16:21.400 And you really—if you read the details of it, you really understand why people in the Middle Ages thought that the first crusade, which took Jerusalem, had to be a miraculous endeavor, because it never should have succeeded in a million years.

00:16:35.300 And yet it does, after several years and after one of the most hard-fought campaigns in human history.

00:16:41.720 And this really goes to show you, again, as we talked about in the first episode, I certainly encourage people, if you haven't listened to it, please go back and do so, that people really believed in Christianity back then.

00:16:57.720 This was not some cynical—and we'll talk about that in the next segment—but this was not some cynical endeavor.

00:17:03.520 This was not a political power play.

00:17:05.400 This was not this idea that, oh, we're just going to go and get jewels and loot for our own personal coffers.

00:17:13.960 And I'm not saying that none of that happened.

00:17:15.840 But what I'm saying is there really was a widespread, deep belief that this is the type of thing that Christians should do, that Christians should fight for the Holy Land, that the liberation of Jerusalem is itself a worthy endeavor and one that was taken upon by thousands of individuals, not even kings at first, that it was a mass popular movement.

00:17:41.840 The truth about the Crusades, here on the Chronicles of the Christians, we'll be right back. 0.97

00:18:11.840 All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back.

00:18:25.600 The Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.

00:18:28.600 So, Blake, you talked about it being miraculous, and miraculous because of the sense that it was incredibly hard.

00:18:35.460 I mean, keep in mind, we're talking about fielding armies that are all the way on the other side of the world and not really doing so with state backing, per se.

00:18:45.980 They're doing so as part of this popular movement.

00:18:48.960 So it's not like you've got—and certainly there were sponsorships, but it wasn't like the King of England or the King of the Franks have sent you all of this—their entire army over.

00:19:02.540 It was this sort of, like, quasi-volunteer thing.

00:19:05.840 So walk me through what that was like.

00:19:09.080 Yeah, it really—I really want to emphasize there was almost nothing like this in the history of the world.

00:19:14.640 So, first of all, like I said, no centralized planning.

00:19:18.860 This was literally the extent to which some of it was planned.

00:19:21.900 The pope and a few other guys say, hey, let's have everyone—let's meet at Constantinople on this day about, you know, two years from now.

00:19:31.780 And so you have guys who—they're all walking there, pretty much.

00:19:35.600 So you have guys who are walking from Italy, guys who are walking from France, guys who are walking from Germany, some guys who cross the channel from England.

00:19:42.660 They're coming from all over.

00:19:44.400 And the enthusiasm is so great.

00:19:46.560 They're actually putting out notices.

00:19:48.180 For example, a lot of Spaniards want to join, but they're fighting Muslims in Spain. 0.89

00:19:52.260 And they're saying, guys, we need you to be fighting the infidel in Spain. 0.99

00:19:56.920 There's a lot of warfare.

00:19:57.520 It would not work if all the knights left there.

00:19:59.900 We'd lose.

00:20:00.720 Please don't.

00:20:01.480 You guys—the pope puts out a thing where he says any remission of sins, any, you know, kind of spiritual good you get doing it there in Spain, you get it equal to the guys who go to Jerusalem.

00:20:14.600 It's okay.

00:20:16.200 And so—but then on top of the knights, you have ordinary people.

00:20:20.340 Tens of thousands of ordinary people are joining in on this, noncombatants.

00:20:26.820 And so you end up with these people who end up in Constantinople.

00:20:30.560 And it's a ton of ordinary people, ordinary men and women.

00:20:33.220 And they have an incredibly hard time of it.

00:20:35.540 Like, we'll just be objective.

00:20:36.880 A lot of them—a lot of them go and they cross into Anatolia, that's modern-day Turkey, before the knights do.

00:20:44.440 And they get there, and there's Muslim armies there, and a lot of them get massacred. 0.65

00:20:48.960 It's a very ugly and hard thing.

00:20:51.680 But some of them stick it out.

00:20:52.920 They attach themselves to the army.

00:20:54.820 And these—it's an army so big, you can't afford to have it go just sail to the Holy Land.

00:21:00.260 They have to walk there.

00:21:01.180 They have to walk there across Anatolia, which is this rugged, highland type of place.

00:21:06.700 I'm trying to think of what a comparison in America would be.

00:21:09.940 It's—a lot of it is probably, like, walking across, like, northern Arizona, actually.

00:21:14.500 You know, there's trees, there's a few rivers, but it's very hot, and it's a very tough place.

00:21:19.580 And then you have all these Muslim armies. 1.00

00:21:21.400 And what are the Muslim armies in this period?

00:21:22.860 It's guys—it's horse archers on horseback.

00:21:25.320 So they ride, and they shoot a bunch of arrows at you, and then they ride away, and you can't really catch them.

00:21:30.440 And it's just awful.

00:21:31.820 So they walk all the way across Anatolia doing this.

00:21:35.680 And you get to—anytime you get to a battle, you have to besiege it.

00:21:39.640 And you think of Lord of the Rings, like, oh, okay, you walk up, you siege, and it's a thing that's over in a day.

00:21:44.920 No, you have to sit outside this city for months, and they have food, usually.

00:21:50.240 They have water stockpiled, and you usually don't.

00:21:53.580 So trying to take a city is worse than actually being inside of it.

00:21:57.600 And they have to do this repeatedly, over and over.

00:22:00.300 And the only advantage they have is a ton of enthusiasm.

00:22:04.320 What stands out is they'll fight these battles where if you listen to a historian, he'll just say, yeah, this battle doesn't make any sense to fight.

00:22:12.400 And the only advantage the Christians have is they're so gung-ho that they're willing to—they will fight to the death. 1.00

00:22:20.480 They will go all out.

00:22:21.540 And we just have battles where they're outnumbered 5 to 1, 10 to 1, and they'll just win.

00:22:26.960 And they do have one big advantage, which is this is the period where knights on horseback are like a super weapon.

00:22:33.520 You know, like a guy who's on armor on a horse.

00:22:36.420 It's like a battle tank.

00:22:37.860 And they're just able to plow through guys left and right if they're able to hit them.

00:22:41.980 But they fight battle after battle.

00:22:44.780 They have no unified command.

00:22:46.540 They often don't have water.

00:22:48.080 There's people who abandon it.

00:22:49.360 There's an incredible story where one of the chief lords in the campaign, Stephen of Blois is his name, Blois.

00:22:55.860 And he gives up.

00:22:57.980 He despairs, and he runs away, and he runs into actually an army of the Roman emperor who says he wants to help.

00:23:04.860 And he says, it's too late.

00:23:06.240 We've already been overrun.

00:23:07.760 Everyone died.

00:23:08.780 Just turn back.

00:23:09.480 And the emperor shrugs, and he's like, okay, I'll turn around.

00:23:12.500 And then it turns out Stephen of Blois was wrong, that they'd won the battle he thought they were doomed in.

00:23:18.200 And they truly thought this was a miraculous endeavor from beginning to end, that it never should have succeeded except for the grace of God.

00:23:25.980 And so talk to me a little bit more about these types of battles.

00:23:31.760 So you mentioned cavalry, and they're sort of like these tanks, especially with armor that's able to stand up to arrows, but they're not.

00:23:41.380 What if you're just like your typical infantry?

00:23:44.000 What about the perspective of like a grunt?

00:23:46.260 Being a grunt was terrible, and in the crusading areas especially, they didn't have that many of them.

00:23:54.240 If you're back in France, yeah, you can raise some peasants who hold spears, but going to the Middle East is really expensive.

00:24:01.460 So other than the first crusade where you have that rabble of ordinary people tagging along, most of the people who do the fighting are pretty, they're pretty professional about it.

00:24:11.940 So they'll have armor, they'll usually, they'll often have horses.

00:24:15.820 You'll have battles where a pretty high share of the crusader army is mounted.

00:24:19.980 But it's some incredible sum of what you have.

00:24:23.020 After the first crusade, we have what's called the Crusader States, and it's this kind of little European state that's trying to cling on to Jerusalem, and it's surrounded by hostile enemies.

00:24:32.860 And there's some absolutely wild battles.

00:24:35.580 I think if you've ever seen the movie Kingdom of Heaven, there's the leper king who hides behind his mask because he's deformed. 1.00

00:24:44.100 And they mention in this movie that there's a battle where he fought Saladin, the great Islamic warrior.

00:24:48.580 And I think the name of the battle is the Battle of Montgisard, I think is the name of it.

00:24:53.460 And it's a battle where this crusader army of maybe 2,000 men runs into a Saladin army of about 20,000 men, outnumbered 10 to 1, like I said.

00:25:04.980 But every single guy in the crusader army is a knight on a horseback, and the Muslim army is on foot. 0.99

00:25:11.240 And they just look at him and they think, yeah, those odds seem great, let's go.

00:25:14.360 And they just charge into him, outnumbered 10 to 1.

00:25:17.060 And they don't just win, they totally annihilate the Muslim army. 1.00

00:25:21.120 Like Saladin himself is almost captured and killed.

00:25:23.800 That's what it's like if you're a guy on foot, if you're out of position, and you get hit by a European knight in this time.

00:25:32.020 It's just like getting hit by a tank crossed with a steamroller.

00:25:35.820 By the way, I don't know if you know that King Baldwin of Jerusalem IV and that scene of him from the movie where he's sort of raising his hand and saying, stop.

00:25:51.180 That is like this huge TikTok meme now that Gen Z are like constantly spreading. 1.00

00:25:58.620 And for, you know, it's just this total and utter rebuke.

00:26:04.460 But a bunch of like the, you know, a bunch of like the traditional conservative Catholic or Orthodox believers have now taken Baldwin to be like a big avatar for them.

00:26:21.880 And, you know, so you see this huge Gen Z direct implication and different from, so there's the millennial crusader meme.

00:26:29.760 And we all know that one.

00:26:30.640 That's the one where it's the crusader night and Davis Vold.

00:26:34.100 And, oh, look at the time, you know, it's Davis Vold o'clock.

00:26:37.100 You know, that's sort of the millennial crusader meme.

00:26:39.480 But the new Gen Z crusader meme is all based around Baldwin and all based around, you know, it started with him just saying silence, but it's definitely branched out into more deeper territories.

00:26:52.820 And it's just incredible that we have this.

00:26:55.240 I think there's something about the time of the crusades that resonates with us even today because of what you're saying, because this core essence of what the crusade was really was just something that was completely unique throughout history where people from Europe and Christians decided to get up and defend the faith.

00:27:18.000 And it truly was a substantive and forceful defense of that faith in a way that you really don't ever see today.

00:27:28.200 Yeah, it's, you know, it's what we said in the rise episode that true people like critics and haters and losers on the Internet really struggle to grasp that someone could care that they truly believe it and they care about it and they will invest that they'll invest their whole life in something that they believe in.

00:27:48.000 I read a history of the crusades once and I can't remember who it was by it might have been by Thomas Madden, who's a pretty good historian, but he's talking about the crusades and he would say, you know, that they would say that modernists will be like judgmental.

00:28:01.980 They'll say, oh, it's deranged that people would fight and they would, you know, they would kill over something like this.

00:28:07.100 And he says, well, you know, a medieval person would turn around and they would say, you guys in the present, you have wars over, you have wars over oil, you have wars over your geostrategic position, you have wars over territory.

00:28:20.280 And how is that moral? Yet it's immoral to to fight over, you know, the very, you know, fight for your God, fight for what you believe is most right and important in the entire world, to fight for your immortal soul, to fight for the people who are in your fellow community of believers.

00:28:37.060 That they would say that makes far more sense of something to fight for, to fight for, you know, the nature of the world itself.

00:28:43.920 And that is what people did then. And again, we have to emphasize that they had enormous sacrifices for this.

00:28:51.400 I said on the first crusade, there's no kings who go on it, but on later ones, kings do go on crusade.

00:28:56.160 And let me tell you, it is not a it's certainly not a money making endeavor.

00:29:00.860 King Richard, the Lionheart, the most famous king of England, he basically bankrupts his country to be able to go on a crusade to try to reclaim Jerusalem after it's captured the king of France and is still remembered as a great king of England and is still considered a great king of St. Louis, the guy that St. Louis is named after.

00:29:20.500 Yeah, he's Louis that Louis the ninth of France. He goes on crusade twice and he basically what's funny is he goes on a crusade as a young man and doesn't work out.

00:29:29.080 And then he thinks, I want to go on crusade again, but crusading is expensive.

00:29:32.660 So I have to reform my entire kingdom to be more just and more well run and more.

00:29:39.140 And like he basically has to make France in. He almost has to come in on a great again so that it has enough money.

00:29:46.280 Quick break here. But did you know that St. Louis and in fact, Louisiana as well are both named after a crusader king of France?

00:29:55.900 The more you know. The truth about the crusades, the chronicles of the Christians. 0.72

00:30:01.900 Jack was over with Blake Duff.

00:30:02.760 All right. Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff back here. The chronicles of the Christians. 0.98

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00:31:47.600 So, Blake, as we're talking about the Crusades and there's there's sort of that, you know, response, I think.

00:31:55.480 And, you know, let's go back to the clip of, you know, we're not going to play it, but just remembering that clip that started this whole thing off.

00:32:01.360 There's there's this Muslim who is and this is in the context of the current migrant crisis that's going on in Europe since 2015, almost a full decade, by the way.

00:32:14.400 Next year will be a full decade since this has happened.

00:32:17.260 And he's saying to him that, oh, well, Europe deserves essentially this this sort of new, you know, like a neo colonization through migration because of the Crusades.

00:32:32.040 But and just to say there's something, by the way, I noticed this and I don't usually talk about this, but when I've had any dealings with, you know, the Muslim world or people who are from there, not Muslims in the United States, but people who are from the Middle East.

00:32:47.900 They will bring up the Crusades all the time.

00:32:51.980 It's like right on the tip of their tongue.

00:32:54.440 It is the first thing that they will say for any complaint about, you know, all this, you know, why are we doing this?

00:33:00.560 Why is this happening?

00:33:01.280 So, oh, you did the Crusades to us.

00:33:03.300 And so we have to do this.

00:33:04.520 And it's like this was so many years ago and there has been so much history, like a thousand years of history separates now and then.

00:33:13.560 And and yet you are still bringing this up, even when you and I have have documented here that this was totally in response to things that were happening to, again, these lands that had been up to that point Christian.

00:33:31.480 Yeah, it was it was largely reactive.

00:33:34.300 Overwhelmingly, Crusades are basically efforts to take back areas that had at least some at some point been Christian, been ruled by Christians.

00:33:45.480 So you have crusading in Spain, you have crusading in the Holy Land.

00:33:50.820 These usually aren't counted as like numbered crusades, but they totally were.

00:33:54.300 When the Ottoman Empire, the Turks, they start taking over Greece, Bulgaria, like these Christian countries in southeastern Europe, they have crusades to try to defeat them.

00:34:04.300 And those crusades mostly end in tragedy.

00:34:06.860 They're very they're largely expensive failures, but they were trying to do that there.

00:34:11.440 They are very heavily defensive wars in nature, not exclusively.

00:34:16.660 There's hundreds of years of this over time.

00:34:19.260 But also another thing that's just wild about it is in the grand scheme of things, let me ask you that, let me ask you the Muslim world.

00:34:27.860 And yeah, let me ask you about that.

00:34:30.120 Just on that, do you ever see crusaders going further and saying, oh, we need to take over Persia or we need to go all the way down through the Arabian Peninsula?

00:34:39.900 You never quite hear that type of or see any of that type of activity.

00:34:44.540 Yeah, well, so the closest you'll get where it's like it's truly much more expansionist is you'll have the northern crusades.

00:34:52.140 This is the famous Teutonic Knights.

00:34:53.740 Those are those German guys.

00:34:55.340 They go.

00:34:56.440 Well, as a as a yeah, as as a as a guy of Polish descent.

00:35:01.560 Yes, I'm very familiar with the northern crusade, which is which is like which, of course, the Poles are sitting there going, wait a minute, we were already Christian.

00:35:09.400 What are you doing? And the Teutonic Knights are like, you're not Christian enough. 0.99

00:35:14.540 Yeah. And they get really deranged.

00:35:16.760 They they try to crusade against the city of Novgorod, which is Eastern Christian, where they eventually like they're schismatic. 0.89

00:35:23.160 They're they're even worse than the pagans.

00:35:24.880 They get, you know, the Teutonic Knights are German. 0.60

00:35:27.380 Germans have a slight tendency towards getting a little too intense about things, you might say.

00:35:33.700 And you're not doing it right.

00:35:35.960 An example of it.

00:35:37.060 But yeah, they're they're not they do have a great slogan.

00:35:39.900 But again, not in the way.

00:35:41.280 Oh, what is it?

00:35:43.260 The slogan of the Teutonic Knights that they repeat is the sword is our pope.

00:35:49.500 Yeah.

00:35:50.860 And then, you know, but again, you just don't hear of it in the way that this this guy in the debate is talking about, you know, these these acts of conquest against Muslim lands.

00:36:02.360 It's like, no, that's it's the opposite, actually.

00:36:04.880 It's the entire opposite of what you're talking about.

00:36:08.080 Yeah.

00:36:08.240 I mean, when there is a kingdom of Jerusalem in the modern Holy Land, they the entirety of its existence, it's likely that the majority of the people they ruled were Muslim and they did not forcibly convert them.

00:36:22.380 They did not genocide them.

00:36:24.820 They like just ruled over them.

00:36:26.680 And that's pretty much the case there.

00:36:28.960 You know, there are selective cases where there's where there's atrocities.

00:36:32.060 The worst one is when they actually take Jerusalem for the first time. 0.79

00:36:34.800 A lot of innocent people die and we shouldn't ignore that.

00:36:38.380 But ultimately, like this was not an act of like religious genocide.

00:36:42.400 This was a response to a perceived sense of Christianity under siege.

00:36:47.160 It was an effort to redirect Christians from fighting against each other.

00:36:50.860 And it was an effort to protect Christians and protect Christendom.

00:36:54.780 And when they came to rule over Muslim communities, they do not wipe them out.

00:37:00.280 They do not exterminate them.

00:37:01.260 They try to rule over them justly for the most part.

00:37:03.820 By the way, when the when the Ottomans were making their way through Europe, I believe they made it. 0.99

00:37:13.020 And this this is, you know, fast forward in quite a bit.

00:37:15.340 You know, this is not just in medieval times.

00:37:18.520 We're talking about, you know, really into the modern era.

00:37:20.780 They first evade in the 1300s.

00:37:23.600 Then, of course, the fall of Constantinople comes in, I think, 1453.

00:37:29.100 This is where Constantinople gets converted to Islam.

00:37:32.620 The church of the Hagia Sophia gets converted and still remains a mosque today.

00:37:38.460 This, of course, is right on the geostrategic strait of the Bosphorus, which connects the Black Sea and all of the Black Sea nations or, at the time, Black Sea kingdoms into into the Mediterranean.

00:37:51.860 So it just becomes an incredibly important loss for Christendom.

00:37:56.000 Also, as you mentioned earlier, the seat of the Roman Empire, right, the Byzantium at the time.

00:38:01.540 And for hundreds of years, they're just pillaging across Europe until they get to until they get to Vienna.

00:38:07.860 And someone seems to come down and stop them at Vienna.

00:38:11.180 Who was that again, Blake?

00:38:14.060 I can't recall.

00:38:15.360 Sad to say.

00:38:15.900 A lot of them were.

00:38:17.140 A lot of them, you know, there were some Austrians there.

00:38:19.980 I think there were some Germans there.

00:38:22.000 You know, Austrians and Germans, of course.

00:38:22.320 Yeah, but who was in charge?

00:38:23.600 Who was in charge of that thing again?

00:38:26.320 Ah, man.

00:38:28.260 Um, yeah.

00:38:30.620 I'm going to have to get back to you on that one, Jack.

00:38:33.020 Ah!

00:38:34.040 The one piece of history that Blake doesn't seem to recall.

00:38:36.940 Oh, that's right.

00:38:37.700 It was Jan Sobieski and the winged hussars of Poland who charged down the hill at Kallenberg 0.97

00:38:46.960 with the wings attached to their backs, crashing through the Ottoman lines that broke the siege of Vienna,

00:38:56.160 completely destroyed them on September 12th, 1683.

00:39:00.820 Just a little, you know, just a little piece of history where Sobieski, the king of Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time,

00:39:08.840 then gets named the savior of Christendom by the pope and is granted a constellation in the starry sky for his efforts.

00:39:19.600 Ah, yes.

00:39:20.460 It's the winged hussars.

00:39:22.740 But just a point to say there that this is something that goes on for hundreds of years.

00:39:29.400 It's like, it's not like it just ends with the Crusades.

00:39:31.500 Yeah, no, this is, there's about maybe a 600-year period where this is a big, a passion of Christendom.

00:39:41.520 It's something that they invest a huge amount of effort in.

00:39:43.800 And, you know, most of the time, let's be truthful, most of the time it fails.

00:39:48.180 It has a lot more failures than successes.

00:39:50.640 There are people who sacrifice their lives for this.

00:39:53.280 It's a very hard endeavor.

00:39:56.120 Indeed, it is.

00:39:57.460 But there are moments of great glory.

00:39:58.080 Okay, quick break.

00:39:59.140 Moments of absolute glory, like the winged hussars crashing down.

00:40:03.960 And, yes, I have been there multiple times outside of Vienna to the top of the hill as well as the battlefield itself below.

00:40:11.880 Right back, Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, and Chronicles of the Christians.

00:40:23.280 All right.

00:40:50.820 Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, we are back on the Chronicles of the Christians, and we've been talking about the truth about the Crusades.

00:40:58.280 And, Blake, you know, look, we've gone through so much here.

00:41:01.960 We talked about how the Crusades really are just part of the story of the broader conflict between Christendom and the Muslim world,

00:41:11.080 one that started prior to the Crusades for hundreds of years prior to the Crusades,

00:41:15.600 and, in fact, extended hundreds of years past the Crusades.

00:41:19.360 And we talked a little bit about Spain, but, of course, Spain spent something like almost 1,000 years fighting to liberate Spain from Islam. 0.98

00:41:28.720 Do I have that right?

00:41:29.140 About 1,000 years, like 800 years or something?

00:41:31.500 Yeah, you know, it depends how you want to define it.

00:41:34.100 But, yeah, they get invaded in the early 700s, and famously they expel the last Islamic kind of kingdom emirate in 1492. 0.97

00:41:44.960 And one of the ways they decide to celebrate is they decide, oh, okay, this crank from Genoa, yeah, okay, he wants to sail some boats to see if he can find India. 0.55

00:41:54.120 Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

00:41:55.480 Let's blow money on that.

00:41:57.020 And so, yeah, it covers a good, like, a 700-year period from where, like, the Muslim high tide peaks to when Spain fully expels them. 1.00

00:42:06.700 And that kind of attitude actually defines so much of history.

00:42:10.580 And that initial invasion also includes what they tried to make it into France, and that's Charles Martel when he comes up and the very famous Battle of Tours.

00:42:22.260 And, again, all of that predates the Crusades.

00:42:25.540 Yes, that's all well before the Crusades.

00:42:29.900 There's a lot of conflict about it.

00:42:32.820 What's really important with the Crusades is that idea of armed pilgrimage, that it was a pilgrimage they were undertaking where, you know, if you had to fight, you know, the Saracen because he was in the way, well, you had to fight the Saracen.

00:42:43.760 But, yeah, there was a long history before that of warfare for the sake of Christendom.

00:42:52.780 And it shaped so much of history because I think a lot of, you know, what we think of as, you know, like Spanish history.

00:43:00.180 So the Spanish, they managed to complete the Reconquista, and, like, their entire worldview has been shaped of we have to go and, like, we have to fight to try to, you know, protect the faith and expand the faith.

00:43:12.020 And so when they discover all of that land in the New World, that attitude bleeds over, and they think it's a big obligation to evangelize all of the peoples they've come across.

00:43:21.600 So very shortly after they discover the New World, after they conquer the Aztec Human Sacrifice Empire, they're sending priests. 0.90

00:43:28.740 They're sending a bunch of, like, Franciscans and Dominicans and other priests to go there.

00:43:32.660 You have to convert these people.

00:43:34.140 It's all an outgrowth, actually, of that Crusader ethos to say Christianity is we have to make it. 0.91

00:43:42.020 Go span the entire world.

00:43:44.960 And, in fact, when Columbus, and this obviously gets into the founding of America itself, which we mentioned briefly, though, that the places that bear the name of King Louis, St. Louis in Louisiana, are named after a Crusader king.

00:44:00.600 You know, I hope folks in Louisiana actually know that.

00:44:03.560 But Columbus, when he goes, and famously he goes to Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain and is, like, you know, telling them that, you know, I want to go to the New World and get this gold.

00:44:15.820 So usually the textbooks, and especially, like, your modern, like, Reddit atheist, lib-coded textbooks, when they talk about Columbus, they'll say, oh, well, you know, they just wanted to get rich and they wanted to, you know, make money and get some slaves because they were all evil.

00:44:31.120 But Columbus actually says to them, and then we can use the gold to fund a new crusade because we need to go back to the Holy Land and liberate it from the Saracens. 0.98

00:44:41.880 Like, this is actually part of his pitch.

00:44:44.520 They say yes.

00:44:45.760 And this is what leads to the founding and discovery, well, discovery and then later founding, of the United States of America.

00:44:54.100 Yeah, it's, the desire, like, the true and authentic belief in Christianity and the belief that it should be spread to all the nations is such a core part of European history that it really,

00:45:11.660 it's almost like the defining feature of the European identity and what makes European civilization become this global civilization.

00:45:20.260 It's the attitude of, we have this special thing, this thing that's so special that we should be able to share it and spread it to the entire world.

00:45:29.680 And so many other things come downstream of that.

00:45:32.060 You know, it's like, why, why, you know, why were the pilgrims on the Mayflower?

00:45:34.900 Because they wanted to have the ideal Christian society and they thought they could only have it if they went off to America.

00:45:40.740 What did America start as?

00:45:42.200 It started as this experiment in Christianity. 0.72

00:45:46.520 And I'll even, you know what, I'll even throw out there.

00:45:49.400 You know what I'll throw out, which one I'll throw out?

00:45:51.740 Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

00:45:53.340 I know, I'm sure you know this one, that when Buzz Aldrin was part of the first mission that lands on the moon,

00:45:59.020 and this was something that NASA, not to go fully down the NASA cut the tapes rabbit hole,

00:46:04.640 but one thing that NASA did not broadcast as part of that, and Buzz Aldrin's talked about it for years since,

00:46:11.100 was that he actually brought a consecrated communion host with him, as well as consecrated wine,

00:46:19.420 and he conducted a communion service on the surface of the moon.

00:46:25.340 And in the sense that the moon mission, the lunar mission, was sort of a mini crusade as well.

00:46:31.800 It also goes into that explorer spirit.

00:46:34.760 So you've got the discovery of the new world, the discovery of a literal new planet, right?

00:46:40.720 The first humans on another surface.

00:46:43.200 And they're both doing so with this Christian message in their heart.

00:46:47.620 And I certainly hope that in this episode, that that's something that you can take from it,

00:46:52.360 that the spirit of the Crusades isn't just conquest and pillage and riches and warfare.

00:47:00.120 And yes, you know, that's all involved, and we talked about it at length.

00:47:03.460 But it's also this sincere spirit and belief that Christianity should be spread.

00:47:10.000 And whether you agree with that or not, it's actually true.

00:47:13.960 Final word to you, Blake Neff.

00:47:15.140 You know, it's, oh man, you put me on this, but it's truly, it's a part of our heritage

00:47:23.360 that everyone should understand that the importance to, it goes back to Christianity offers something

00:47:31.840 special to the world, and the world has never been the same since Christianity arrived on the 1.00

00:47:38.140 scene and began changing people's world.

00:47:41.780 I love that.

00:47:42.740 Go and check out Blake Neff on our series from last year, The Chronicles of the Revolution.

00:47:48.880 This has been The Chronicles of Christianity, The Truth About the Crusades. 0.74

00:47:53.620 Ladies and gentlemen, as always, we have our permission to lay ashore.

00:47:56.520 I love you.

00:47:56.720 I love you.

00:47:57.460 I love you.

00:47:59.380 I love you.

00:48:15.620 10 years later.

Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - December 27, 2024

The Chronicles of the Christians - Part II： The Truth About the Crusades

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