Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
An excellent book and anodyne to the general secular and even Catholic ignorance about the Crusades. After 400 years of Musulman conquests of Christendom, after endless Jihads, sex slaving, destruction, plunder and death, the rump called the ‘West’ finally fought back. As the book explains the Crusades were initially against the satanic cult of Muhammad but also included crusades against the pagan Wends and Lithuanians in the Baltics and the heretical Manichean sect or Cathars in Provence. These efforts to save Christendom and extend it, cover some 500 years. They are an important reason why Europe rose to world dominance. No crusades, no Byzantium, no Christianity would mean no modern world which is now being destroyed by 19th century materialism, the Globalist New World Order and the cult of ‘science’.
The book gives voice to scholars and experts in the history of Crusading who argue against the persistent and mendacious myths which permeate the study of the Catholic crusades, including Jonathan Riley-Smith, William Urban, Thomas F. Madden, Jessalynn Bird, and Paul Crawford.
Some important points of emphasis emanate from this eminently readable and learned dissertation:
-The pagan, warrior cult of Islam and its endless Jihad against Christianity
-The religious fervour at the heart of the Christian response to the Muslim Jihad
-The fact that the Crusades had nothing in common with ‘colonialism’ and that 90% of the men either died during the Crusade or returned home
-The so-called atrocities of the Crusades pale in comparison with the Musulman Jihad, the millions of Christians killed and enslaved over the first 400 years of the moon cult’s ascension to empire, and the innumerable massacres of Christians during and after battles, sieges and raids
-Jews, the erstwhile and long time allies of Muslims, were always in the frame for revenge and violence
-No Crusades, no Byzantium (which has its own history of religious crusading against the Musulmans), no Europe and modernity
Crusading to the East included:
· The First Crusade of 1096–1099 that captured Jerusalem;
· the ill-fated Second Crusade of 1147–1149 that unsuccessfully attacked Damascus;
· the Third Crusade of 1188–1192, known as the Crusade of Kings, which pitted Richard the Lionheart against Saladin;
· the Fourth Crusade of 1202–1204 that captured Constantinople;
· the Fifth Crusade of 1217–1221 to Damietta that ended in disaster in the Egyptian Delta;
· and the Sixth Crusade of Emperor Frederick II, 1227–1229;
· the Seventh (or Sixth) Crusade of Louis IX of France, 1248–1254, which also experienced a disaster in the Nile Delta;
· the Eighth (or Seventh) Crusade of Louis IX and Prince Edward of England, 1270–1272
Other Crusades include the Teutonic incursions into the Baltics and Russia during the 12th to 15th centuries and the Albigensian crusade from the 1220s to 1240s.
Myths. Despite crusade historians’ best attempts, crusade myths continue to live on, repeated endlessly as fact.
Probably the most pervasive of all is the Grand Myth that the crusades were an assault on a peaceful, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and tolerant Eastern world by fanatical barbarians from the West who managed to deal a mortal blow to Byzantine civilization and taught the Islamic world to fight savage assailants in a like manner—giving no quarter. In the end, the crusades produced nothing but failure and hate.
Runciman’s sympathies lay with the Byzantine Empire, and he viewed the crusaders as intolerant barbarians who destroyed the foundations of this ancient and brilliant civilization, thereby making it mortally vulnerable to the Ottoman Turks who eventually conquered Constantinople and the last remnants of Byzantium in 1453. [There is some truth to this view of course. Runciman however, was a crusade historian from the 1950s, who hated Catholicism and the very idea of crusading against Muslim exotics, and much his work has been discredited as ahistorical]
Muhammad the warring totalitarian. Not much diversity or tolerance within the Meccan cult.
Indeed, as Rice University religion scholar David Cook has pointed out, Muhammad personally participated in or sanctioned no fewer than eighty-six military campaigns or raids against various opponents, including Jews, pagans, and Byzantine Christians, as he and his early followers established political control over the Arabian Peninsula. Because Islam theoretically forbids warfare between Muslims, for the deeply entrenched razzia tradition of Arabia to continue, raiding activity had to be turned against non-Muslims.
The Quran identifies Jews and Christians as enemies to be exterminated.
As Cook has further pointed out, the Qur’an contains a well-developed doctrine of military jihad (jihad of the sword), with one of its primary goals the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and Hadith (the collection of sayings and actions ascribed to the Prophet and his companions) established holy war as a tradition within Islam from a very early date.
Qur’an 9:29 states, “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day…until they pay the jizya [the poll tax paid by non-Muslims] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”; this principle was re-affirmed by Caliph Umar I, as quoted by the early Muslim historian al-Tabari: “Summon the people to God… those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.” As recorded in the Qur’an (the eternal word of God, which Muslims believe was dictated to the Prophet by the angel Gabriel), Muhammad declared that non-Muslims were to be attacked “until religion becomes Allah’s in its entirety.”
As Carole Hillenbrand has noted, significant “discriminatory measures” against Christians and Jews had become “enshrined” in Islamic legal books by the later eleventh century, on the eve of the First Crusade no less, although the degree to which these discriminatory measures were enforced by Islamic authorities varied from place to place….the status was the payment of the jizya, an annual head tax placed on all non-Muslim adult men ... Combined, the jizya and the kharaj—the levy on dhimmi-held land—usually exceeded twenty percent of a person’s wealth; this was very high for a pre-modern tax, but they could be set at much higher levels if the Muslim authorities chose to do so. Muslim women were not allowed to marry non-Muslim men, but the reverse was encouraged, for obvious reasons.
Crusaders were a mix of men and motivations
Research on crusading charters by Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull, among others, has demonstrated how rather than blindly rushing off to the East in a religious frenzy, individual crusaders of means carefully considered the costs and logistics of crusading as they made preparations for the management of their affairs in their absence. The greater lords who wished to go had to arrange financing for themselves and their followers, often borrowing the funds from local moneylenders or mortgaging their estates to obtain the necessary funds. Furthermore, leaders had to be designated, travel routes determined, and large amounts of equipment and animals to transport men and materials acquired and organized.
Today the considered judgment of most historians who study the chronicles, letters, songs, charters, and art works of every sort from the crusade period is that the Christian spirituality and religious fervour of the Middle Ages, rather than elements evident in European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was the dominant factor in a complex mix of motives for crusading.
Religion was absolutely central to the Crusades. Runciman’s nonsense vs Tyerman’s scholarship
Christopher Tyerman’s massive new history of the crusades, which he offers as a corrective and update to Steven Runciman’s equally monumental history of the crusades places religion squarely at the centre of the crusading movement from start to finish. Reflecting the general consensus of today’s crusade historians, his Preface begins: Violence, approved by society and supported by religion, has proved a commonplace of civilized communities.
The crusades were wars justified by faith against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful. The religious beliefs crucial to such warfare placed enormous significance on imagined awesome but reassuring supernatural forces of overwhelming power and proximity that were nevertheless expressed in hard concrete physical acts: prayer, penance, giving alms, attending church, pilgrimage, violence.
Riley-Smith and the religious dimension of crusading
1986, Riley-Smith wrote under the assumption that crusading was a form of armed pilgrimage and compared the documents he examined with similar ones for those departing on a more traditional pilgrimage as an act of penance. He found “a serious and purposeful devotion on the part of would-be crusaders,” “a pious desire to arrange for intercessory prayer,” sometimes by those whose previous “cruelty” had “astonished” local clerics.
Yet Riley-Smith has highlighted … by showing that, far from being “an economic safety valve” for landless and impecunious male members of a family, the prospect of any member of a family participating in a crusade resulted in significant financial sacrifices on the part of the family. Moreover, Riley-Smith has shown that such financial sacrifices were usually made to send the head of the family or the eldest son on a crusade, rather than younger sons.
Jews had always allied themselves with the Muslims
…the association of Jews with the Muslim enemy, followed by the first major persecution of Jews in Western Christendom; a lingering sense of fear and injury that resurfaced in many First Crusade chronicles; and the gradual refocusing of Christian spiritual energy on the salvation narrative and the physical places associated with it.
The fact is Jews had figured for centuries in Christian writing and in liturgy in ways that preserved Christian resentment for their supposed role in the Crucifixion.
Anselm’s famous defence of the Christian faith, Cur Deus homo (Why God Became Man), whose “adversaries” were almost certainly meant to be Jews and which was most likely written while the First Crusade was underway. This growing sensitivity to Jewish criticisms of the doctrine of the Incarnation, among other points of faith, is perhaps best reflected in twelfth-century crusade historian Guibert of Nogent’s vicious attack on the count of Soissons, who was suspected of being a “Judaizer.”
In fact, the papacy reiterated the doctrine of toleration for Jews and took steps to prevent, or at least discourage, persecutions during subsequent crusades. After 1096, the most pressing issue was deciding what to do with the Jews forced to convert to Christianity.
No, the Crusades were not an early form of Colonialism
Thomas F. Madden is among those who see its application as totally inappropriate. In one of his several essays on crusade myths, Madden assails “Myth 4: The Crusades were just medieval colonialism dressed up in religious finery” by stating: It is important to remember that in the Middle Ages the West was not a powerful, dominant culture venturing into a primitive or backward region.
The Crusader States, founded in the wake of the First Crusade, were not new plantations of Catholics in a Muslim world akin to the British colonization of America. Catholic presence in the Crusader States was always tiny, easily less than ten percent of the population. These were the rulers and magistrates, as well as Italian merchants and members of the military orders. The overwhelming majority of the population in the Crusader States was Muslim.
They were not colonies, therefore, in the sense of plantations or even factories, as in the case of India. They were outposts. The ultimate purpose of the Crusader States was to defend the Holy Places in Palestine, especially Jerusalem, and to provide a safe environment for Christian pilgrims to visit those places. There was no mother country with which the Crusader States had an economic relationship, nor did Europeans economically benefit from them. Quite the contrary, the expense of Crusades to maintain the Latin East was a serious drain on European resources. As an outpost, the Crusader States kept a military focus.
A final and compelling reason to conclude that the vast majority of persons who left on the First Crusade had no intention whatsoever of colonizing eastern lands is that most of the surviving veterans, their pilgrimage to the Holy City completed, returned to their homes in the West shortly after the capture of Jerusalem in July 1099, leaving a small minority of Westerners to govern a vast majority of Muslims and Eastern Christians. There were probably not more than 5,000 crusaders, many of them noncombatants, left in the then-three crusader states in late 1099.
No profits from the Crusades
…in a 1998 review of Riley-Smith’s The First Crusaders, Professor William Chester Jordan of Princeton University effectively summed up the view of many current crusade historians of Riley-Smith’s research, when he wrote, “Riley-Smith has, I hope, laid to rest for all time the contention that crusaders profited monetarily from the wars. They did not, or at least the vast majority did not. Nor did they say that they expected to profit materially.”
This is not to say that crusaders expected nothing in the way of an earthly reward. They were well aware that crusading brought with it considerable social capital at home. Crusading families, especially those for whom crusading became a multigenerational tradition in the years after the First Crusade, were highly regarded in their communities. The charters are silent, however, on this all too human expectation of prestige. It is a rare person who openly admits to such desires.
A third crusade historian, Giles Constable, anticipated and even laid the basis for Riley-Smith’s and Bull’s work in 1982 with an insightful essay on the financing of crusades in which in pointed to the enormous cost of crusading, the ways in which many crusade lords mortgaged the future and imperilled their heirs’ patrimony in order to crusade, and how crusaders did not expect to return richer in the goods of this life.
There is much more in this book, but the above were some important themes gleaned from this scholarship and which rectify the incorrect aspersions and indignities heaped upon the Crusades by modern culture, which appears to be mostly unacquainted with historical reality and perspective.
Raymond Ibrahim in his seminal study ‘Defenders of the West’, has a chapter on Skanderbeg the 15th century Christian warrior and hero. How many in the demoralised, confused, perverted and self-loathing ‘West’ even know the name of Skanderbeg? In centuries past including as late as the 19th century, he was well known, feted in songs, poems, and stories. Today nary a person would recognise his name or associate him with the correct century. This is indicative of a culture that has lost its roots and history.
Ibrahim quoting Skanderbeg, “I will judge your merits, when I see your swords smoking with the blood of the Turks…Let Muhammad, as long as he will, seek peace. As for us, we will purchase our peace with the sword.” Without fighting back against the Musulman Jihad and preserving Albanian Christian independence for some 25 years, quite likely eastern Italy, Rome and other areas of Europe would have been conquered and Koranised. Without Skanderbeg most of central Europe if not parts of Germany and Poland would likely still be Mahometan.
White Slaves
The primary fact of the Musulman Ottoman state, was as Ibrahim emphasises, White slavery. White slaves powered the Musulman navies, armies, economy and domestic services. White slaves populated the sex harems, sex depots and sex slave centres. White slaves were mutilated into eunuchs to guard the palaces, the women and the Sultan and other worthies. White Christian slaves made up the feared Janissaries, the most potent part of the Ottoman army. White slavery was the engine of the Ottoman empire.
As Ibrahim states, ‘A second function of slavery revolved around empowering the Ottoman state. Any Christian exhibiting any ostensible talent – physical or mental, strong body or mind – was enslaved and made use of, usually as an Ottoman soldier or administrator…it was also meant to weaken and bleed dry the Christians.’
Skanderbeg
Skanderbeg’s real name was George Kastrioti and his father was John Kastrioti an Albanian land-holder in Croya or central Albania and leading nobleman. The Ottomans conquered Albania in 1415 and to ensure good behaviour took the sons and daughters of leading men as prisoners. George Kastrioti aged 10 born in 1405, was sent to the Janissaries to be trained as a Musulman warrior and to have the Christian faith effaced from his memory and conscience. He apparently ended up with the Sultan Murad II when he was first sent as a prisoner and quite likely he was raped as a young boy by the Sultan and others at the Topaki Palace. The name Skanderbeg was given to him by the Ottomans, on account of his massive physical presence, Herculean strength and resemblance in blonde hair and blue eyes to Alexander the Great or Skander-beg, which means Lord Alexander.
The Albanian Christians were hauled away en masse each year by the Turks, to be retrained as Ottoman solders or used as sex slaves or working slaves. After a rebellion in 1435, the Turks destroyed Albania erecting pyramids of Albanian skulls and sending to Constantinople, countless slaves and plunder. Now 30, Skanderbeg had been rising in the ranks of the Ottoman military, fighting many battles in the east and north. He rose rapidly and became a favourite of the Sultan and his court and was considered one of the Ottoman’s best warriors. His father died in 1437 a broken man given the Ottoman carnage enacted in Albania and the fact that all 4 of his sons were Ottoman prisoners. After his father’s death family and others from Albania urged him to take over his father’s lands and raise a Christian revolt. Some time later, for unknown reasons, the Sultan appointed Skanderbeg governor of Croya – his father’s territory.
In 1443 at a battle against the Christian Transylvannians led by John Hunyadi, Skanderbeg the great Ottoman champion, defected in the midst of battle taking his men with him. They went into Croya and took the famous castle and fort from the Ottomans. Thus began the long Christian war against the Musulman occupation in Albania. Skanderbeg had always remained a secret Christian even as an Ottoman military star. His rebellion was suffused with Christian symbols, flags, masses and dedications to Christ.
Skanderbeg’s success was premised on unifying the various Albanian nobles and lords into one cohesive and singularly-led enterprise. Using bribery, political skill, flattery and force, he was able to meld together a disciplined force of some 20.000 full time warriors he trained, along with 10.000 militia or part-timers. The Ottomans routinely confronted Skanderbeg with 80.000 or more men. In 25 years of warfare, Skanderbeg lost one battle, winning most against great odds, using the mountainous and forested terrain to his advantage and destroying many Turkish armies. By so doing he save the rest of Europe by delaying the Ottoman advance by 2 generations and crippling its military fighting strength. General James Wolfe said Skanderbeg exceeded all other generals, from any era, in defensive warfare using a small army. Few military feats in history can compare to what Skanderbeg accomplished.
As Ibrahim states, Skanderbeg relinquished a life of wealth, riches, plenty, and fame, to lead a revolt, in a small state, against the world’s most powerful empire. He won at least 24 battles and sieges, with death the only enemy able to defeat him when he died at the age of 58 from fever or dysentery. Ibrahim states correctly that Skanderbeg’s relentless warring and defence saved Rome buying 30 years or more of time for the ‘West’ to organise a defence. After he died the Turks unleashed a massive army and destroyed resistance and began a process of Islamification and the erasure of Christianity which turned the Christian country of Albania into a majority Musulman country we see today.
Albania sits directly opposite Italy on the Adriatic and once Skanderbeg was dead, the Ottomans mopped up the Christian resistance with their usual cruelty and malice and set about the invasion of Italy. They invaded Otranto in 1480 and held the area around that key port until 1481, pushed out by combined Italian forces, who had been allies of Albania an alliance and political strategy created by Skanderbeg. The Turkish plan was always to use Albania as a launching pad to attack Rome and to fulfil the ambitions of Muhammad II who predicted he would take Rome and then Western Europe with his Musulman hordes.
Without Skanderbeg the ambitions of Muhammad II might well have been realised.
St Ferdinand III of Castile (1200-1252) is largely unknown. El Cid (1045-1099) who did far less to eject the Musulmans from Spain, has far greater renown than Ferdinand. Yet it was the latter who decimated the Muhammadans in the early-to-mid-13th century, ensuring that the Jihad and Sharia, which had destroyed Spain, was erased barring the statelet of Granada which after repeated raids into adjoining Christian territory and endless horrors and murders was finally effaced in 1492 by Isabella and Ferdinand. During his time, San Fernando was named the ‘terror of the Saracens’. His lineage as noble, chivalrous Christian knight was impeccable, being the maternal grandson of Alfonso VIII the hero of Las Navas de Tolosa, and related to Alfonso VI the conqueror of Toledo and the mighty El Cid, with Richard the Lionheart a grand-uncle by marriage.
San Fernando was raised in part by his grand-father the famous Alfonso VIII, who impressed upon the boy the need to eject the Musulmans from Spain, reclaim the peninsula for Christ and end the endless persecutions, destruction, murders, rapes and sex enslavement enacted by the cult of Muhammad upon Christians. From an early age Fernando practiced the arts of war, and observed the political skills of his grandfather. His mother and entire family were pious Catholics and love of God and Christ was central to Fernando’s character and education. He was convinced that Christ was calling on him to spread the Holy Cross and ensure the safety of Christians from the Musulman menace.
Alfonso VIII died just 2 years after his famous victory at Tolosa, in 1214, during an engagement with the Almohads. His son Enrique inherited the crown but died 3 years later. The burden of government fell to his eldest sister who passed it on willingly to Ferdinand in 1217. For reasons of land and power, his own father Alfonso IX, the King of Leon, declared war on his son and Castile. The son did not react and wrote to his father that he would not strike against his own ‘lord’ and father, and would wait until Alfonso regained his senses. The father relented and a treaty was made.
Ferdinand married Beatrice of Swabia in 1219, who between 1221 and 1234 bequeathed him seven sons and two daughters. In the same year as his marriage Ferdinand knighted himself with the ‘sword of war’ an ancient weapon which symbolised knighthood. As he consolidated his power, Ferdinand read the history of the Musulman Jihad in Spain, planning and contemplating his own actions and campaigns. He was greatly influenced by Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo who provided advice, books, material and guidance, and had been a friend of Alfonso VIII and a combatant at Las Navas de Tolosa. Rodrigo translated the Koran and spent time and energy educating people as to what the book actually meant and what it said about Christians. He also wrote a ‘History of the Arabs’ outlining the history of Muhammad and his cult dedicated to world domination and the fusion of the church and state in the form of a pagan celestialism and totalitarianism.
By 1224 Ferdinand was ready. The Musulman state in the south of Spain was in disarray and disunity. The hardened warrior Christian monks of Spain, from the battle-ready military orders including Santiago, Calatrava, Montesa and the Temple and Hospital were told to take the cross for the great Crusade. The Castilian army and nobles were enjoined to take the crusading oath along with mercenaries from beyond Castile. Near the end of 1224 Ferdinand personally led the army against the important Musulman fortress of Quesada, formerly a Christian fort, not far from Toledo. He was the first over the wall and the first to scale the town’s mosque, planting a Cross on top of the minaret. It was the first of many victories.
By the end of 1228 much of the frontier had been reclaimed for Christianity. Many Muslim emirs or Lords paid tribute and confirmed vassalage to Ferdinand. On campaigns through Jaen and Granada, thousands of Christian prisoners were freed, many near death from starvation. Mosques were converted into churches and religious triumphalism was everywhere apparent. This was payback for the Musulmand destruction of thousands of churches, monasteries and abbeys. In 1230 his father died, leaving Ferdinand as King of Leon as well as Castile. The consolidation of the 2 realms occupied his time for a few years and obstructed his Holy Crusade which was reduced in intensity and volume for a time.
In 1236 a small party of Christians and Muslims who had renounced their cult, took over an area of Cordoba, the Musulman capital. Word was sent to Ferdinand to help. Cordoba was a large Muslim majority city, containing perhaps some 50.000 people, not the apocryphal 1 million of Musulman and modern day atheist propaganda (If the city had 1 million Musulmans there was little chance that Ferdinand’s comparatively small force would have taken it and the city's ancient medieval walls now excavated, reveal a place of some 40-50.000 or the same as under the Visigoths). The few Christians and Musulman collaborators could not hope to hold out for long. Some 30.000 Musulmans were encamped near the city. Ferdinand suddenly appeared before the city with a much smaller Christian force but his name and his well-known ferocity impressed the Musulman army to retire to Sevilla to the north east. Ferdinand invested the city and after 5 months took it, dealing a shattering blow to Musulman prestige.
Unlike the Musulman conquests of the previous 500 years, Ferdinand always granted generous terms to the defeated, allowing Musulmans to leave unmolested, or remain and practice their cult as long as they were good citizens under the Castilian regime. Under Ferdinand and his leadership, there was never wanton destruction, rape or pillaging of Musulmans, their assets or their cities once they were defeated. Yet curiously this chivalric example is little commented upon by Western historians. The reason is simply the Catholicity of Ferdinand and his deep Christian piety, which offends the modern ‘secularist’ and ‘academic’.
The great mosque of Cordoba was rightly converted into a Church, and given that it was built from the destroyed Christian basilica of St. Vincent, this represented simply a return to what existed before the Mahometan Jihad. The great bells of Santiago de Compostela, taken some 250 years earlier by the Muslim Jihadist Almanzor, transported to Cordoba from Santiago on the backs of Christian slaves, was sent back to its cathedral of origin, on the backs quite rightly, of Musulman slaves.
With Cordoba secured Ferdinand took the almost impregnable fortress of Jaen to the east of Cordoba in 1245 and forced the emir of Granada to accept the suzerainty of Ferdinand in 1246. The only unconquered Mahometan kingdom left was that of Sevilla, the most opulent and prosperous of Musulman cities and statelets. Its position on the Guadaliqivir river and its access to the Mediterranean and North Africa made it an important strategic asset and trading entrepot. Its ringed set of walls possessed some 166 towers, staffed by a large fanatical Musulman army. Ferdinand attacked Sevilla in 1246, assaulting the area around the town, taking one by one, the ring of fortresses near to the city, and devastating the surrounding countryside.
Sevilla was put into a tight and effective siege. A single bridge, well defended by men and chains, protected the main supply route from the surrounding countryside. Christian ships on the river were unsuccessful in cutting off this supply and communications channel. Fasting, praying, sleeping and eating with his men, doing the same work as they did, Ferdinand fell ill. The siege affected both the besieged and the besiegers. By the summer of 1248 disease was rife. The siege was entering its second year. Incredibly Ferdinand decided to turn his camp into a Christian city complete with hospitals, stores, churches, artisans and civilians. He built a city around Sevilla. Eventually the Christian ships were able to break the heavy chain across the river and decimate the Musulman ships. The end was nigh, the Musulmans now had no recourse to food, supplies or communications.
On November 23 1248 Sevilla surrendered to Ferdinand. It was a monumental victory and signalled the collapse of Mahometan pretensions in Spain. Only Granada, a statelet paying Castile a yearly ransom had escaped the Christian Reconquista. Musulmans in Sevilla and elsewhere, were permitted to sell their properties and leave with their movable goods. No Musulmans were raped or murdered. Their property and goods were unmolested. Thousands of Mahometans left Sevilla and the surrounding areas. Ferdinand replaced them with Christians who flocked to the liberated city and its environs. As with Cordoba, the golden age of Sevilla was to begin with both cities leading the way to Spanish hegemony over large parts of the globe during the 16th century.
In Crusading lore, St. Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon, is accounted as the foremost warrior. A pious man, dedicated to Christ, an ascetic, a governor of moderation, a law giver and honest broker, a warrior and a father, a husband and a leader, Ferdinand III is simply an icon of what a man can be and can do. Without doubt Ferdinand was both a Crusader and a Saint.