The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, Jonathan Riley-Smith (2008)

In 2008 Crusader and Medieval historian Riley-Smith compiled a brief pamphlet (80 pages) on the important topic of the Crusades and the interactions with the cult of Submission.  It is well worth reading, including 24 pages of sources and references he supplies.  The ‘clash of civilisations’ is one of the major issues in our times, along with the civil war destroying what is left of ‘Western Civilisation’.  One of the benefactors of the imploding West will be the Musulman states bordering post-Christian, post-truth Europe.  They will have ample opportunity through emigration, demography and Western suicide through ‘woke’ and ‘politically correct’ cultural Marxist zeitgeist to take over vast swathes of Europe which had previously defeated the Jihad for some 1200 years.

Riley-Smith looks at the era of Crusading starting from 1095 to 1300 and picks up the story again from 1800 to 2007.  Writing and speaking in 2007, he states that the ‘politico-religio’ hostility has a long history, much of it unknown in the ‘West’ ignorant as most of the masses are about history and reality.  The terms Crusader and Crusading are used with aplomb to define this 1400-year conflict with few cognisant of what they mean or why they occurred. 

In fact, as Riley-Smith proves, ‘Arab Nationalism, and Pan-Islamism…share perceptions of crusading that have more to do with 19^th century European imperialism than with actuality.’  He is right of course.  The corruption by Walter Scott in the 19^th and later using the same corroded untrue strains by historian Steve Runciman in the mid-20^th century, have given the ‘West’ and ‘Musulmans’ an inaccurate and ridiculous declaration of Crusaders and Crusading.  Neither of these two men was a historian in the real sense of the word.  And neither had any real idea about the subject matter.  Their output is grossly inaccurate and prejudiced but it is popular because it serves the secular society and feeds the anti-Christian, anti-Catholic culture of our times.

The above is a key insight from Riley-Smith and often appears in his other works as well.  In this short work he elaborates on the lie that the Crusades were barbaric, unprovoked, and of no value.  Catholics had suffered 400 years of endless Musulman Jihad, war, sex enslavement, destruction and the annihilation of men, women and some 30.000 churches from 630 AD to 1095 AD; not to forget the thousands of unarmed pilgrims raped and slaughtered by Musulmans.  2/3 of Christianity was taken over and wiped out by the Mahomentan Jihad and Spain and France were at risk of permanent Mahometan occupation.  The entire fabric of the political-economy and the continuity of the Catholic world around the Mediterranean basin was destroyed.

“The Crusades themselves were deeply embedded in popular Catholic ideas and devotional life.  They were not thoughtless explosions of barbarism.  The theory of force that underlay them was relatively sophisticated and was considered to be theologically justifiable by a society that felt itself threatened.  It is hard now to conceive of the intensity of the attachment felt for the holy places in Jerusalem, the concern aroused by heresy and physical assaults on the church, and the fear Westerners had of Muslim invaders who reached central France in the 8^th century, and Vienna in the 16^th and again the 17^th century.”

The Crusades were a part of an all-out war to save civilisation.  Not just the Holy Land, but in Spain and in Provence against the demonic evil of the Albigensians.  Internal and external enemies – much the same as we have today – were rending and tearing at civilisation.  Without the Byzantine Crusades which were never called as such but starting in the 8^th century the Eastern Christians were the first to fight back against the Musulman hordes, and as Riley-Smith illustrates, without the muscular, uncompromising Catholic response starting in Spain the 8^th century and continuing for almost 570 years, Europe would not exist.

As Riley-Smith warns, the cultural degradation now apparent in 2023, was manifestly obvious in 2008, and was premised on ‘secular Marxism’, or cultural-Marxism, dressed up as ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’ and other nice sounding political-platitudes, none of them accurate or true.  He wrote that our own ‘values’ would be as foreign and ridiculous to anyone from the past, as it will be to anyone from the future.  They are not the ‘right values’, and do not represent our civilisations or cultural history.  What we have today as a ‘culture’ is historically anomalous, insidious and quite evil.  The anti-Catholicism and hatred of Christianity which permeates the ‘West’ is the rejection of reality, history and real culture.  Musulmans suffer no such anxiety about their cult.  Our weakness due to our ignorance is their opportunity.  Herein lies the core of the problem cited by Riley-Smith.  Hating and debasing the Crusades without knowing much about them just highlights our own ignorance and febrility.