Part 2 of the Chronicles of the Christians: The Truth About the Crusades Part 2: How The Crusades Were Launched and How They Became a Response To Islamic Attacks On Christianity Part 1: The Rise of Christianity The First Crusades
00:01:00.000The Crusades were launched after seven centuries of constant Islamic aggression.
00:01:27.780Before the very first crusade was launched in 1095, Muslims had invaded the following Christian lands.
00:01:39.740They 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.
00:02:01.740Christian Armenia, Christian Armenia, Christian Italy, all before the first crusade.
00:02:10.740The Crusades are a legitimate response to Islamic aggression and Islamic violence.
00:02:20.680It has fallen to us to defend Jerusalem.
00:03:21.320And it was a very delayed response, even.
00:03:24.440When you look at the grand sweep of history, the first crusade, I think, is called in 1095, maybe 1096.
00:03:32.860And 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.
00:03:53.600And I think the kind of official label that they would give to a crusade is they would describe it as a pilgrimage.
00:04:01.080Crusaders, they would take a—they were basically taking an oath to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
00:04:08.420So, 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.
00:04:22.300And in the years after that, people took after her example.
00:04:25.200They would also go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
00:04:27.380And this was a very popular thing that you could do in the Middle Ages if you had the means to do so.
00:04:33.720Once 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.
00:04:41.440And they had done this even when it was ruled by Muslims for a long time.
00:04:46.140But what increasingly happened was they were unable to do so.
00:04:49.980There would be violence against pilgrims.
00:04:51.980Pilgrims would be attacked by bandits.
00:04:55.760They would be sold into slavery and then need to be ransomed.
00:04:58.800In 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.
00:05:14.940And so that was the buildup that you had to it was you had Christianity increasingly in the sense that it's under siege.
00:05:20.560And 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.
00:05:30.480And that all built up to, well, OK, let's have an armed pilgrimage to free this place from those who hold it.
00:05:36.520And that led to centuries of crusades.
00:05:40.640And so we're going to get into all that.
00:07:47.460Blake Neff, when we left, we were talking about the Crusades.
00:07:53.260So even before the Crusades, let's talk a little bit about this idea that many of these lands,
00:08:00.960and he mentions countries earlier in the clip we played earlier, but they weren't really countries.
00:08:05.660They were kingdoms and territories of the empire when this was going on.
00:08:10.700But 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.
00:08:23.200But then in northern Africa and what's now referred to as the Middle East or Levant, you get the spread of Islam.
00:08:31.460And Islam didn't exactly spread the way Christianity did, did it?
00:08:54.720And it really has a very shocking rise.
00:08:58.520There'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.
00:09:06.200And suddenly these Arabs burst out, and they just conquer at an incredibly rapid case, almost nothing like it in world history.
00:09:14.620So they conquer what we think of as the Muslim world today.
00:09:17.960So they conquer modern Iraq, they conquer modern Iran, modern Egypt, modern Syria, modern North Africa.
00:09:33.880But this area, when it was conquered, was overwhelmingly Christian.
00:09:38.220And for centuries after, it still remains heavily Christian, even majority Christian.
00:09:42.860And 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.
00:09:58.780So, for example, one of the things that leads up to the Crusades, there's a great Christian city in Antioch.
00:10:05.180There's historically a patriarch, one of the chief bishops, lives in Antioch.
00:10:09.980And Antioch was ruled by the Roman Empire, by the Byzantine Empire, if you'll see it referred to in medieval stuff.
00:10:17.460And only a few years before the First Crusade is that city actually captured by an Islamic army.
00:10:25.360And they also conquer most of modern-day Turkey.
00:10:28.200That had been a very Christian territory, a heartland of Christianity.
00:10:32.740And it's been overrun by a Muslim army.
00:10:36.080And so the First Crusade actually emerges almost by accident, is that the Roman Emperor, Alexius I, is asking knights from Europe, from France, say,
00:10:46.060Hey, 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.
00:10:55.820And he's trying to recruit an army for this.
00:10:57.400And what happens is the Pope at the time...
00:11:30.400So yeah, I say Roman Emperor because technically it's true, but this would have been disputed at the time.
00:11:35.560We don't need to get into all of that.
00:11:37.160But he asks Christian knights, Hey, come out and help me to reclaim lands that should be Christian.
00:11:43.420And 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.
00:11:55.720Their thinking was, it's bad when Christians fight each other.
00:11:59.080There was sort of this early version of a pacifist movement where they promoted movements.
00:12:03.420They called it the peace of God and the truce of God.
00:12:06.920And the peace of God was, it's bad for Christians to fight each other, so we should try to limit when you can fight.
00:13:34.220But there are like 10 different versions of that.
00:13:36.720Like, I've gone to look up the Pope Urban, the second speech, launching the first crusade.
00:13:41.100And there's so many different versions of it.
00:13:43.320It's almost choose your own adventure as to which.
00:13:46.060But it's kind of like the Patton speech, you know, prior to, you know, prior to the great battles in World War II.
00:13:55.340It'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.
00:14:08.460And this ties back to the practice that St. Helena had instituted of pilgrimage to the holy land.
00:14:17.280It's like, hey, remember those holy lands that we're all supposed to be making our pilgrimages to?
00:14:21.440Well, they've been ransacked by infidels, and someone needs to go and save them.
00:14:26.540And that someone is you, dear friends.
00:14:42.260It 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.
00:14:51.340So you have nobles who are selling or mortgaging everything they own to try to go to the holy land on this pilgrimage.
00:14:58.980There's no armed—there's no single commander to it.
00:15:02.520There'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.
00:15:11.040And you have people, like I said, people selling everything they own.
00:15:15.660There 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.
00:15:26.440If they owe you money, you have to settle up with them.
00:15:29.280If you owe someone else money, you have to settle up with them.
00:15:32.340You have to make sure that you go on crusade with a clean conscience.
00:15:36.440And we have remarkable stories of what people were doing.
00:15:39.940There was an ordinary man who he'd—I believe he'd killed his brother or some family member in an argument.
00:15:47.920And 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.
00:16:04.880And, again, it's all popular enthusiasm.
00:16:21.400And 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.
00:16:35.300And yet it does, after several years and after one of the most hard-fought campaigns in human history.
00:16:41.720And 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.
00:16:57.720This was not some cynical—and we'll talk about that in the next segment—but this was not some cynical endeavor.
00:17:05.400This was not this idea that, oh, we're just going to go and get jewels and loot for our own personal coffers.
00:17:13.960And I'm not saying that none of that happened.
00:17:15.840But 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.
00:17:41.840The truth about the Crusades, here on the Chronicles of the Christians, we'll be right back.
00:18:11.840All right, Jack Posobiec, we are back.
00:18:25.600The Chronicles of the Christians, the truth about the Crusades.
00:18:28.600So, Blake, you talked about it being miraculous, and miraculous because of the sense that it was incredibly hard.
00:18:35.460I 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.
00:18:45.980They're doing so as part of this popular movement.
00:18:48.960So 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.
00:19:02.540It was this sort of, like, quasi-volunteer thing.
00:19:05.840So walk me through what that was like.
00:19:09.080Yeah, it really—I really want to emphasize there was almost nothing like this in the history of the world.
00:19:14.640So, first of all, like I said, no centralized planning.
00:19:18.860This was literally the extent to which some of it was planned.
00:19:21.900The 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.
00:19:31.780And so you have guys who—they're all walking there, pretty much.
00:19:35.600So 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.
00:20:01.480You 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.
00:21:31.820So they walk all the way across Anatolia doing this.
00:21:35.680And you get to—anytime you get to a battle, you have to besiege it.
00:21:39.640And 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.
00:21:44.920No, you have to sit outside this city for months, and they have food, usually.
00:21:50.240They have water stockpiled, and you usually don't.
00:21:53.580So trying to take a city is worse than actually being inside of it.
00:21:57.600And they have to do this repeatedly, over and over.
00:22:00.300And the only advantage they have is a ton of enthusiasm.
00:22:04.320What 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.
00:22:12.400And the only advantage the Christians have is they're so gung-ho that they're willing to—they will fight to the death.
00:23:09.480And the emperor shrugs, and he's like, okay, I'll turn around.
00:23:12.500And then it turns out Stephen of Blois was wrong, that they'd won the battle he thought they were doomed in.
00:23:18.200And they truly thought this was a miraculous endeavor from beginning to end, that it never should have succeeded except for the grace of God.
00:23:25.980And so talk to me a little bit more about these types of battles.
00:23:31.760So 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.
00:23:41.380What if you're just like your typical infantry?
00:23:44.000What about the perspective of like a grunt?
00:23:46.260Being a grunt was terrible, and in the crusading areas especially, they didn't have that many of them.
00:23:54.240If you're back in France, yeah, you can raise some peasants who hold spears, but going to the Middle East is really expensive.
00:24:01.460So 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.
00:24:11.940So they'll have armor, they'll usually, they'll often have horses.
00:24:15.820You'll have battles where a pretty high share of the crusader army is mounted.
00:24:19.980But it's some incredible sum of what you have.
00:24:23.020After 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.
00:24:32.860And there's some absolutely wild battles.
00:24:35.580I 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.
00:24:44.100And they mention in this movie that there's a battle where he fought Saladin, the great Islamic warrior.
00:24:48.580And I think the name of the battle is the Battle of Montgisard, I think is the name of it.
00:24:53.460And 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.
00:25:04.980But every single guy in the crusader army is a knight on a horseback, and the Muslim army is on foot.
00:25:11.240And they just look at him and they think, yeah, those odds seem great, let's go.
00:25:14.360And they just charge into him, outnumbered 10 to 1.
00:25:17.060And they don't just win, they totally annihilate the Muslim army.
00:25:21.120Like Saladin himself is almost captured and killed.
00:25:23.800That'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.
00:25:32.020It's just like getting hit by a tank crossed with a steamroller.
00:25:35.820By 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.
00:25:51.180That is like this huge TikTok meme now that Gen Z are like constantly spreading.
00:25:58.620And for, you know, it's just this total and utter rebuke.
00:26:04.460But 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.
00:26:21.880And, you know, so you see this huge Gen Z direct implication and different from, so there's the millennial crusader meme.
00:26:30.640That's the one where it's the crusader night and Davis Vold.
00:26:34.100And, oh, look at the time, you know, it's Davis Vold o'clock.
00:26:37.100You know, that's sort of the millennial crusader meme.
00:26:39.480But 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.
00:26:52.820And it's just incredible that we have this.
00:26:55.240I 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.
00:27:18.000And it truly was a substantive and forceful defense of that faith in a way that you really don't ever see today.
00:27:28.200Yeah, 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.
00:27:48.000I 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.
00:28:01.980They'll say, oh, it's deranged that people would fight and they would, you know, they would kill over something like this.
00:28:07.100And 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.
00:28:20.280And 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.
00:28:37.060That they would say that makes far more sense of something to fight for, to fight for, you know, the nature of the world itself.
00:28:43.920And that is what people did then. And again, we have to emphasize that they had enormous sacrifices for this.
00:28:51.400I said on the first crusade, there's no kings who go on it, but on later ones, kings do go on crusade.
00:28:56.160And let me tell you, it is not a it's certainly not a money making endeavor.
00:29:00.860King 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.
00:29:20.500Yeah, 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.
00:29:29.080And then he thinks, I want to go on crusade again, but crusading is expensive.
00:29:32.660So I have to reform my entire kingdom to be more just and more well run and more.
00:29:39.140And like he basically has to make France in. He almost has to come in on a great again so that it has enough money.
00:29:46.280Quick break here. But did you know that St. Louis and in fact, Louisiana as well are both named after a crusader king of France?
00:29:55.900The more you know. The truth about the crusades, the chronicles of the Christians.
00:30:02.760All right. Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff back here. The chronicles of the Christians.
00:30:29.760Folks, Donald Trump returning to office and Republicans taking control of the House and Senate.
00:30:34.900It's huge news. But the challenges we face as a nation are still here.
00:30:40.320In four years of chaos, the dollar has lost value.
00:30:43.060Inflation runs rampant. Interest rates are through the roof and wars raging across the globe.
00:30:47.860Trump has inherited an economy that's a total mess and the burden to rebuild is huge.
00:30:52.500This isn't going to get fixed overnight, especially with the ongoing assault to our dollar from BRICS nations and our growing national debt.
00:31:00.000Your savings are still vulnerable. Gambling with your wealth is not an option.
00:31:03.840If we learn anything, it's that we need to take action and protect what we've earned, work so hard to earn.
00:31:09.520And that's why I've partnered with Allegiance Gold, a company I trust to help you protect your financial future.
00:31:15.400Gold and silver are time tested ways to hedge against economic chaos.
00:31:19.600They're not just investments. They're peace of mind for your wealth.
00:31:23.960When you start your investment with Allegiance Gold today, you'll get free silver as part of their exclusive offer.
00:31:29.840Just mention that POSO sent you and they'll take great care of you.
00:31:35.380Don't sit on the sidelines. Act today. Secure your wealth.
00:31:37.860Go to protectwithposo.com or call 844-577-POSO.
00:31:44.360And to help you get started, go to protectwithposo.com.
00:31:47.600So, Blake, as we're talking about the Crusades and there's there's sort of that, you know, response, I think.
00:31:55.480And, 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.
00:32:01.360There'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.
00:32:14.400Next year will be a full decade since this has happened.
00:32:17.260And 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.
00:32:32.040But 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.
00:32:47.900They will bring up the Crusades all the time.
00:32:51.980It's like right on the tip of their tongue.
00:32:54.440It is the first thing that they will say for any complaint about, you know, all this, you know, why are we doing this?
00:33:04.520And 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.
00:33:13.560And 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.
00:33:34.300Overwhelmingly, Crusades are basically efforts to take back areas that had at least some at some point been Christian, been ruled by Christians.
00:33:45.480So you have crusading in Spain, you have crusading in the Holy Land.
00:33:50.820These usually aren't counted as like numbered crusades, but they totally were.
00:33:54.300When 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.
00:34:04.300And those crusades mostly end in tragedy.
00:34:06.860They're very they're largely expensive failures, but they were trying to do that there.
00:34:11.440They are very heavily defensive wars in nature, not exclusively.
00:34:16.660There's hundreds of years of this over time.
00:34:19.260But 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.
00:34:30.120Just 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?
00:34:39.900You never quite hear that type of or see any of that type of activity.
00:34:44.540Yeah, well, so the closest you'll get where it's like it's truly much more expansionist is you'll have the northern crusades.
00:34:56.440Well, as a as a yeah, as as a as a guy of Polish descent.
00:35:01.560Yes, 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.
00:35:09.400What are you doing? And the Teutonic Knights are like, you're not Christian enough.
00:35:50.860And 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.
00:36:02.360It's like, no, that's it's the opposite, actually.
00:36:04.880It's the entire opposite of what you're talking about.
00:36:08.240I 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.
00:37:23.600Then, of course, the fall of Constantinople comes in, I think, 1453.
00:37:29.100This is where Constantinople gets converted to Islam.
00:37:32.620The church of the Hagia Sophia gets converted and still remains a mosque today.
00:37:38.460This, 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.
00:37:51.860So it just becomes an incredibly important loss for Christendom.
00:37:56.000Also, as you mentioned earlier, the seat of the Roman Empire, right, the Byzantium at the time.
00:38:01.540And for hundreds of years, they're just pillaging across Europe until they get to until they get to Vienna.
00:38:07.860And someone seems to come down and stop them at Vienna.
00:38:37.700It was Jan Sobieski and the winged hussars of Poland who charged down the hill at Kallenberg
00:38:46.960with the wings attached to their backs, crashing through the Ottoman lines that broke the siege of Vienna,
00:38:56.160completely destroyed them on September 12th, 1683.
00:39:00.820Just a little, you know, just a little piece of history where Sobieski, the king of Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time,
00:39:08.840then gets named the savior of Christendom by the pope and is granted a constellation in the starry sky for his efforts.
00:40:50.820Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, we are back on the Chronicles of the Christians, and we've been talking about the truth about the Crusades.
00:40:58.280And, Blake, you know, look, we've gone through so much here.
00:41:01.960We talked about how the Crusades really are just part of the story of the broader conflict between Christendom and the Muslim world,
00:41:11.080one that started prior to the Crusades for hundreds of years prior to the Crusades,
00:41:15.600and, in fact, extended hundreds of years past the Crusades.
00:41:19.360And we talked a little bit about Spain, but, of course, Spain spent something like almost 1,000 years fighting to liberate Spain from Islam.
00:41:29.140About 1,000 years, like 800 years or something?
00:41:31.500Yeah, you know, it depends how you want to define it.
00:41:34.100But, yeah, they get invaded in the early 700s, and famously they expel the last Islamic kind of kingdom emirate in 1492.
00:41:44.960And 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.
00:41:57.020And 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.
00:42:06.700And that kind of attitude actually defines so much of history.
00:42:10.580And 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.
00:42:22.260And, again, all of that predates the Crusades.
00:42:25.540Yes, that's all well before the Crusades.
00:42:32.820What'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.
00:42:43.760But, yeah, there was a long history before that of warfare for the sake of Christendom.
00:42:52.780And it shaped so much of history because I think a lot of, you know, what we think of as, you know, like Spanish history.
00:43:00.180So 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.
00:43:12.020And 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.
00:43:21.600So very shortly after they discover the New World, after they conquer the Aztec Human Sacrifice Empire, they're sending priests.
00:43:28.740They're sending a bunch of, like, Franciscans and Dominicans and other priests to go there.
00:43:44.960And, 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.
00:44:00.600You know, I hope folks in Louisiana actually know that.
00:44:03.560But 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.
00:44:15.820So 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.
00:44:31.120But 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.
00:44:41.880Like, this is actually part of his pitch.
00:44:45.760And this is what leads to the founding and discovery, well, discovery and then later founding, of the United States of America.
00:44:54.100Yeah, 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,
00:45:11.660it's almost like the defining feature of the European identity and what makes European civilization become this global civilization.
00:45:20.260It'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.
00:45:29.680And so many other things come downstream of that.
00:45:32.060You know, it's like, why, why, you know, why were the pilgrims on the Mayflower?
00:45:34.900Because they wanted to have the ideal Christian society and they thought they could only have it if they went off to America.