[Sca-cooks] Crusades and cannibalism

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> I beleive the decree stated that anyone participating in the Crusades would
> be considered doing the work of God in freeing the Holy Land. Therefore any
> "acts" performed during such Wars would not be sins.  Now though I was being
> sarcastic, you are not really trying to tell me the Cursades were about
> converting people  to Christanity are you?  What I was trying to make point
> of was is the fact that if it was OK to rape kill plunder etc, a little
> cannablism was not to far out of the picture.

You underestimate the hypocrisy that the human mind can conjure up, I
think. (Otherwise, the Nazis would have been dining on human flesh too.)

Furthermore, you purposefully distort the facts in stating that the
decrees of the Crusades declared non-Christians to be not human, if you
are extrapolating from the decrees advocating Crusades to 'free' the Holy
Land. Bernard of Clairvaux was an objectionable cleric who caused a great
deal of damage... but I doubt he would absolve eating horsemeat, let alone
cannibalism, simply because one was on crusade.

>I simply have a problem with
> people who somehow make the Crusaders out to be these God fearing Righteous
> folks doing only what was necessary to "free" the Holy Land.

I don't know of anyone on this list who is advocating that point, Elric.

>And the concept
> that the Holy Church was looking to have all those folks converted or
> expected them to be is ridiculeous.

*sigh* The point of the Crusades was to put the *government* of the Holy
Land in Christian hands. While it is ludicrous to imagine that all the
non-Christians were to be converted, it is still more ludicrous to imagine
that commanders expected to slaughter all the non-Christians: first of
all, there would be no one to do the daily tasks, and second of all,
killing all the non-Christians in the Holy Land would turn the holy places
into the world's largest charnel-house, since there would be no way to
dispose of the bodies. Furthermore, by the time Crusaders reached the Holy
Land, they generally had had to limit their goals considerably, given how
seriously depleted their forces were.

The reason that the Teutonic Knights could set out, over 100 years time,
to exterminate the pagan Prus and start on the Lithuanians-- and succeed--
was because they were steadily, and slowly, conquering the country. This
was not the strategy used by the Holy Land Crusaders. On the other hand,
it doesn't leave you with hundreds of thousands of corpses at a time.

-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa   jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"Words can be your friend or your enemy, depending on who's
throwing the book, so watch your language." Stoppard