[Sca-cooks] Crusades and cannibalism

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

> > You underestimate the hypocrisy that the human mind can conjure up, I
> > think. (Otherwise, the Nazis would have been dining on human flesh too.)
> <<<<Well they did have few folks making lampshades  out of human skin, and
> they didn't get to the starvation point.

Actually, Germany was in pretty bad straits toward the end of the war,
which was why the 'lesser races' were limited to a few hundred calories a
day.

> <<<<I did not mean to distort the facts, but I do know that the church when
> faced with the slaughter of whole villages or towns merely stated that it
> was a necessity of the campaign. And the belief that the heathen were less
> than human was widespread and even to the level of the church.

*shrug* and the Romans said the same thing in THEIR campaigns, and
consider Viking raids and Germanic wars against each other. War is like
that. The difference was that the Christian Church objected (unlike, say,
the Norse or the Druids) to people of their religion making war on each
other.

As I've said before, somewhere about 1400 there was a church decision
affirming that the heathen were supposed to be converted whenever
possible, not exterminated.

> > >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.
> >
> > *sigh* The point of the Crusades was to put the *government* of the Holy
> > Land in Christian hands.
>
> <<< and George Bush is going to war aginst Iraq to protect us from nukes and
> nothing to do with oil :) The Crusades were to aquire land and revnue for
> the church and all the bunk about liberation was simply another excuse

Nah. The point of the Crusades was a) to indulge the mad fancies of
Bernard of Clairvaux; b) to get the younger sons and inactive armies out
of Western Europe; c) to conquer more land for the kings and princes that
sent crusaders. There were also people who went on crusade as an
adventure, and people who genuinely believed that the Holy Land needed
saving. Consider the Zionists of recent memory-- nobody claims that those
people who wanted Israel back in Jewish hands were doing it for anything
but religious and ethnic reasons.

>
>  > into the world's largest charnel-house, since there would be no way to
> > dispose of the bodies.
>
> <<<<I have to look up the city, but there was one battle where the Crusaders
> put a whole city to the sword something like 10,000 men women and children,
> I have seen few hundred bodies in one place, believe me 10,000 would be
> charnel-house to say the least.

At one point, whole towns of Christians in Hungary were wiped out 'by
mistake' by Crusaders taking the land route. They were absolved of their
crime because they were on Crusade, not because they got things mixed up.

-- 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