Back on September 2nd [this has been loitering in my todo box for a while], Michael Savage turned history on its head again.
He described the Crusades as “Spain and France repelling the Islamic Invasion of Europe” – that the Crusades were wars defending Europe from evil Islam. He seems to be confusing the Crusades with the Reconquest.
The Islamic invasion of Europe happened very early in Islamic history from 711 to 732 AD – France and Spain didn’t exist yet as countries. The Muslim invaders were conquering the Germanic tribes of the Visigoths who ruled the former Western Roman Empire – but the Moors were eventually repulsed from France:
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t12w11franceislam.htm
Charlemagne in the last part of the 700s was firming up the Frankish Empire that would rule France and Germany – but the area south of the Pyrenees mountains remained under Islamic control, and Spain flourished from the knowledge of architecture, mathematics and irrigation techniques introduced by the Moors.
The Reconquista to assert Roman Catholic control over Spain would continue for 200 years before the first “Crusade” was ordered Much of the work of the Reconquista was done by importing people from Northern Europe and then having them “outbreed” the Moors (sound familiar?) and create infighting among Islamic rulers – rather than overt wars and battles.
The Crusades was a series of wars of OFFENSE 300 years after Islam took control of most of the Iberian peninsula – the Crusaders had as their objective to “retake the Holy Lands” for Christianity – most importantly Jerusalem and the Church of the Sepulchre . The Pope did incorporate the already ongoing Reconquista into the campaign to push back Islam, but the Reconquista predates the Crusades and continued 200 years after the end of the last Crusade.
Islam had filled the vacuum in Western Europe left by the collapse of the ancient Roman Empire. The Moors ruled Spain and Portugal but gradually lost control over the next 700 years until they were finally overtaken by Christians in the Granada war from 1482-1492 (does the year 1942 ring a bell?). 1492 was the year the all Jews were expelled from Spain and the Spanish Inquisition started.
Among the first targets of the Crusades were the Jews living in what is now Germany who were murdered and their property taken. By the Fourth Crusade, the Roman Catholic church was attacking the heretical Eastern Orthodox Christians (“The Byzantine Empire”).
See also: http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Crusades_Jews.htm
In 1204, the the Holy Roman Empire sacked Constantinople and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire would open the door for the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the creation of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The wounds of the church in Rome trying to destroy the “heretical” Greek Christian church have still not healed.
The Crusades laid the foundation for the Dark Ages – when European civilization almost vanished. The BBC series “Civilisation” and Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” focus a lot of attention on how the Roman Church repressed knowledge during the Dark Ages, and that much of what Western civilization had learned from the Greeks was only kept alive because the Islamic Moors in Spain kept copies of the ancient works. The Moors did not expel Christians and Jews and civilization thrived under their rule. The Cosmos series begins with the Roman Empire (not the Muslims of the 7th century) destroying the priceless Library at Alexandria in Egypt – which had contained many of the irreplaceable writings of ancient human civilization, like the works of Homer.
