The Second Crusade: Debacle at Damascus

The Second Crusade was sparked by the loss of Edessa in December 1144, to the forces of Imad al-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul. But instead of reaching Edessa, this crusade landed outside the walls of Damascus, one of the largest and oldest cities in the Levant.

The decision to attack Damascus was taken at a Latin assembly held at Acre on June 24, 1148. Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, the two kings who were leading the Second Crusade, were at the assembly. But some of the local crusader elite—including the heads of Antioch, Edessa, and Tripoli—were not present. The King of Jerusalem, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and the Grandmaster of Templars were present.

It is not clear how the assembly reached the decision to attack Damascus, which was an ally of the crusader held Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Second Crusade did not have enough soldiers and armored siege towers to lay siege to a large and well-defended city. The chroniclers of that time give no explanation for this decision. It is possible that the assembly felt that Damascus could come under the control of Emir of Aleppo Nur ad-Din and so they decided to conquer it first.

In July 1148, Louis VII and Conrad III marched their crusader army to Damascus. The governor of Damascus Mu'in ad-Din Unur sent frantic calls to the two Emirs of the Zengid Dynasty, Nur ad-Din and Saif ad-Din. On July 24, the crusaders approached Damascus from the western side where richly irrigated and dense orchards stretched about five miles outside the city.

The orchards provided much needed shade and water, which was a good thing from the point of view of the crusaders, but the problem was that the dense orchards provided cover in which the city's defenders could launch surprise attacks. Hundreds were killed during the skirmishes in the orchards. After crossing the orchards, the crusaders established their camp in an open area in front of the city, close to the Barada river.

Damascus seemed vulnerable since it was protected by low walls on the side where the crusaders had made their camp. When the crusaders tried to scale the low walls and enter the city, a desperate hand to hand combat broke out in the overcrowded outlying suburbs of the city. The defenders put up a heavy fight, and the crusaders were bogged down in the narrow streets which were barricaded with rubble, large rocks, and wooden beams.

The crusaders had to fight for every bit of advance that they made in the narrow streets. The fighting went on for three days. Both sides butchered each other in merciless hand to hand combat and the streets were red with blood and piled with dead bodies. The crusaders were running out of time—Nur ad-Din had dispatched an army to relieve the city.

Having failed to make progress beyond the narrow streets of the outlying areas of the city, Louis VII and Conrad III held a council of war on July 27. The decision was made to move the crusader army to the eastern side of the city which was relatively open and barren. They believed that it would be easier to launch a direct attack from the east side. But they failed to take into account the fact that the east side of the city was a rocky desert—it had no shade and water.

The resolve of the Second Crusade melted quickly under the unforgiving desert sun from which the east side of Damascus offered no protection. The crusaders had no water to drink. On July 28, the panicked decision was taken to abandon the siege and retreat from Damascus before Nur ad-Din’s army arrived. As the crusaders fled, they were chased by the defenders of Damascus and many crusader lives were lost in the skirmishes that followed.

With the failure at Damascus, the Second Crusade came to an effective end. Most of the crusaders were dead or badly injured. The two kings, Louis VII and Conrad III, who had marched out of Western Europe with thousands of troops hoping to transform the character of the Levant, were greatly humiliated. They spent some time in the Levant, not as crusaders for the Holy Land but as pilgrims, and then they sailed for Western Europe. 

William Blake’s English Jerusalem

The dream of liberating the Holy Land of Jerusalem was the zeitgeist of the medieval period in Western Europe. But in practice, the liberation of Jerusalem, and the imposition of Latin Christian rule on it, was an incredibly complicated, expensive, and perilous exercise. 

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, a large number of men from Western Europe made the long journey to Outremer to participate in the holy war for liberating Jerusalem. They promised their families that they would be back in six months. Most of them never returned. 

In the nineteenth century, poet William Blake suggested that it would be preferable to build a Jerusalem in a safe and convenient location, such as England’s countryside. In his poem, “Jerusalem,” he wrote:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.”

Churchill: On The Soviet Iron Curtain

Immediately after the Yalta Conference (held February 4–11, 1945), Churchill said to a member of his staff: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I am wrong about Stalin.” By the end of the year, he realized that he was wrong about Stalin, possibly as wrong as Chamberlain was on Hitler. He was convinced that the Soviets were acting like a Great Empire and were after world domination. He wanted to develop a strong policy to counter the Soviet threat, but he no longer had the power. He had lost the election. Clement Attlee of the Labor Party had become the Prime Minister in July 1945.  

As head of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition, Churchill tried to build public opinion against the Soviets. On 5 March 1946, he gave his “Iron Curtain” speech. He said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.” He noted that the expansive and evangelical philosophy of the Soviets was a threat to the West.

Anna Komnene’s Contribution to Ancient Greek Philosophy

The first major study of Aristotle and Plato was commissioned by Anna Komnene, daughter of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, in the twelfth century. While much of the work was done in Byzantine Greek, she had Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and some of Plato’s Dialogues translated into Latin for the benefit of the scholars in Western Europe. The translation of Nicomachean Ethics eventually found its way to Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Anna is the famous author of the twelfth century masterpiece of history, the Alexiad, but her contributions to the study of Ancient Greek philosophy are often ignored by modern scholars. In twelfth century Constantinople, she was seen as a philosopher and a scholar of Plato and Aristotle.

Zengi and the Fall of Edessa

Imad al-Din Zengi first made a name for himself in Outremer in 1126, in the conflict between the Abbasid Caliph and the Sultan of Baghdad. Zengi fought on the side of the Sultan and defeated the forces of the Caliph. But he conducted himself tactfully and earned the trust of both the Caliph and the Sultan, and with their support he became the atabeg of Mosul in 1127. Till 1130, Zengi exploited the factionalism in Northern Syria to defeat a number of Islamic warlords and seized control of towns like Aleppo, Homs, and Shayzar.

With his exploits in the battlefield, and the cruelty and capriciousness that he showed in his personal dealings, Zengi earned the reputation of a merciless warlord. By the 1130s, he was the most dreaded and powerful figure in Outremer. During this period he made several attempts to capture Damascus, which had an alliance with the Kingdom of Jerusalem, then under King Fulk.

In December 1139, Zengi laid a siege to Damascus but he did not dare to launch a full scale attack, probably because the city was of great historical and religious significance. He preferred to force Damascus into submission by applying an economic chokehold. Instead of yielding to Zengi, the ruler of Damascus Mu'in ad-Din Unur turned towards its non-Islamic ally, King Fulk, for help. Fulk dispatched his army to Damascus and Zengi was forced to lift the siege and retreat to Mosul. Throughout the 1130s, Zengi had shown little interest in attacking the crusader states, but that changed in the 1140s.

On April 1, 1143, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire John II Komnenos died when he was injured by a poisoned arrow while hunting wild boar. In the same year, King Fulk died after falling from his horse while he was hunting rabbits. These two hunting deaths led to the Byzantine Empire and Kingdom of Jerusalem getting bogged down in a succession crisis.

Zengi took advantage of the chaos to attack the Kurdish warlords in Diyar Bakr. One of these Kurdish warlords had a mutual defense treaty with Jocelyn II, count of Edessa. Edessa was the first crusader state, established by Baldwin of Boulogne on 10 March 1098. Jocelyn II had little sense of Zengi’s capabilities and intentions. He thought that Edessa was safe from attacks, and marched out with a large force (almost his entire army) to help his Kurdish ally. But Zengi had informants inside Edessa. When he learned that Edessa was largely undefended in Jocelyn’s absence, he force-marched his troops to the city.

With continuous bombardment and use of armored seize towers, Zengi devastated the life of the city’s inhabitants. Jocelyn tried to muster a rescue army to save his city, but it was too late. Zengi’s miners collapsed a section of the city’s walls on 24 December 1144, and his troops rushed into the city. The Christian inhabitants fled towards the city’s citadel, but such was the rush that hundreds got crushed to death (among them was the Latin archbishop). Zengi’s soldiers massacred the men and enslaved the women and children. Edessa was lost to the crusaders—the first of the four crusader states to fall.

The fall of Edessa and the reports of the massacre and enslavement of the city’s inhabitants sent shock waves through the remaining three crusader states and Western Europe. In 1145, Pope Eugenius III launched the Second Crusade. In 1147, the armies of Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany left for Outremer. But they would not have the chance to extract vengeance from Zengi since he was assassinated in September 1146 by one of his Frankish slaves. Zengi’s territories were divided between his two sons: Saif ad-Din (who got Mosul and eastern territory) and the younger son Nur ad-Din (who got Aleppo and western territory).

Nur ad-Din became a legendary ruler, known for his shrewdness, competence, and ruthlessness. He decisively defeated the Second Crusade. During his reign, from 1146 to 1174, he conquered large parts of Asia Minor and Egypt.

The Natural State of Mankind: Barbarism

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” ~ Robert E. Howard in his story Beyond the Black River. 

This is a good insight by Robert E. Howard. In the short term, a civilization dominated by intellectuals might score some victories, but barbarism always triumphs in the end. By barbarism, I mean the political and cultural forces that are ruthless, realistic, religious, passionate, energetic, ambitious, tradition-bound, and innovative. Barbarism does not entail mindless destruction. 

From history we learn that the greatest acts of mindless destruction have been caused by the civilizations which were dominated by the intellectuals (the most recent examples are communism, nazism, fascism, and neoliberalism). Mindless intellectualism is the death sentence for a civilization.

The Last Crusade of Bohemond I of Antioch

When Bohemond arrived in Europe in late 1104, he had a hero’s welcome wherever he went. The story of his exploits in the First Crusade had turned him into a living legend. Tales of his bravery in fighting the heathens during the battles of Antioch and Jerusalem (though he never fought in Jerusalem) had made him more popular than any other leader of the First Crusade. In his letters to the Pope and European monarchs, he introduced himself as the “Prince of Antioch.” In his meetings, he distributed the relics which he had brought from the Holy Land. 

Bohemond was in Europe on a mission. He was planning a new crusade, whose goal would be to secure Jerusalem but along the way the crusaders would also conquer the Byzantine Empire. When he reached Italy, he was received by Pope Urban’s successor, Pope Paschal II. It seems that he managed to convince the pope. At the Council of Poitiers in 1106, Paschal II launched a new crusade. He granted Bohemond the banner of St Peter to carry into the battle and a legate to help him gain support for his cause.

Since Bohemond was unmarried, eligible heiresses were being lined up for him. He decided to marry the most powerful woman of his time: Constance, daughter of the French king, Philip I. Meanwhile, he was recruiting men for his new crusade. His marital connection with the royal house of France, helped him gather a large number of men. 

Bohemond toured Europe, promising his followers more spectacular victories in the Levant than those that the First Crusade had achieved at Nicaea, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Fighters from all over Europe flocked to be part of his holy war. Only England refused to pay heed to his call. King Henry I refused to allow Bohemond to cross the English Channel. It is not clear why Henry I did not want to have Bohemond in England—perhaps it had something to do with Bohemond’s connections with the French royal house. 

With an army of 34000 men, Bohemond set out from Europe in October 1107. Despite the high expectations, the crusade against the Byzantine Empire went badly. The Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos knew about Norman tactics. When Bohemond’s troops arrived in Epirus, in south-western Balkans, Alexios refused to get drawn into a pitched battle. With the help of his Venetian allies, he cut off the supply lines of Bohemond’s troops and then allowed the siege to drag on. Famine and disease began to spread in Bohemond’s camp.

By 1108, the condition in Bohemond’s camp was desperate and he was forced to sue for peace. In her book of history, the Alexiad, Anna Komnene, the daughter of Emperor Alexios, gives details of the humiliating peace agreement that Bohemond was forced to sign in Diabolis (modern Albania). The agreement made Bohemond the liegeman of not only Alexios but also his son and heir John Komnenos. Humiliated by the crushing defeat, Bohemond never returned to Antioch. He died in Italy in 1111.

The Delusion of Intellectuals

The intellectuals can invent the solutions to the world’s most intricate problems in ten minutes, but to expect them to solve the problems in their personal life is like asking them to live on vodka and morphine.

The Fall of the Crusader States: Jerusalem and Acre

In 1244, the Ayubid Sultan granted the Khwarazmiyya the permission to attack Jerusalem. The Khwarazmiyya forces began their siege of Jerusalem from 11 July 1244. The city’s defenses fell rapidly. On 15 July 1244, the Khwarazmiyya entered the city. There was extensive looting and killing and by the time the Khwarazmiyya left, the city was in such bad shape, with the streets choked with rotting corpses, that the place seemed unfit for human habitation. When the news of the pillaging and massacre at Jerusalem reached Western Europe, King Louis IX tried to organize a Seventh Crusade to the Levant. But the crusaders would never be able to retake Jerusalem.

The remaining forces of Jerusalem rallied around the Crusading orders and they clashed with the army of the Ayubid Sultan in the Battle of La Forbie (also known as the Battle of Hiribya), which began on October 17, 1244. After the experience of Khwarazmiyya’s sack ofJerusalem, the crusaders realized that no mercy would be shown to them if they lost. They fought bravely, since they knew that defeat meant death or enslavement, but the Sultan’s forces had overwhelming numerical superiority, and the crusader resistance collapsed on October 18. Over 5,000 crusaders had died, 800 prisoners were taken, including Walter of Brienne, William of Chastelneuf, Master of the Hospital, and the Constable of Tripoli.

After the fall of Jerusalem and the decisive defeat in the Battle of La Forbie, the remaining Crusader states in the Levant were in a bad shape. But instead of becoming united to face the external enemy, in Acre, they became embroiled in an internal war. This was the War of Saint Sabas, which pitted the shipping interests of Venice against the shipping interests of Genoa. The  Venetians and the Genoese quarters in Acre were separated by a neutral stretch of land belonging to the monastery of Saint Sabas. For several years, the Venetians and the Genoese had been petitioning the Papacy in Rome to be granted possession of the monastery and its territory. 

It is not clear to which party the Papacy had granted the monastery’s territory, since the Papal records of this momentous decision are missing. But both Venetians and the Genoese were able to flourish in Acre the papers which showed that they had the exclusive papal grant to the territory of Saint Sabas. Each side accused the other side of foul play and a war broke out. By 1256, the people in the Kingdom of Acre had forgotten that they faced the threat from the Islamic forces—they were too busy choosing sides in the battle between the Venetians and the Genoese. The Teutonic Knights sided with the Venetians while the Hospitallers sided with the Genoese. Between 1256 and 1260 most intense fighting took place. Many sections of Acre were ruined. Most of its defensive towers were destroyed. 

The final fall of Acre came in 1291. The Mamluks besieged Acre in April 1291, and by May 18 they had breached its defenses. The crusaders, their families, and the local residents made a mad dash for the harbor to escape the invading army, but most were killed or enslaved. Many of those who made it into the boats drowned when the boats capsized due to overcrowding. A Templar stronghold was the last to fall. It held out till May 18, when the Templars surrendered after accepting a truce offer. But they were promptly executed.

Churchill's Perspective

When British politician and socialite Violet Asquith, aboard the HMS Enchantress in 1912, looked out at the Mediterranean coastline and exclaimed, "How perfect!”, Churchill, who was with her, replied, "Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect—If we had got some six-inch guns on board how easily we could bombard …” (based on David Fromkin’s book A Peace to End All Peace)

This exchange does not depict Churchill as a warmonger who would love to bombard every piece of land on which he had set his eyes. His thinking is typically masculine. He is taking a realist, practical, and masculine view of what he is before his eyes. 

Throughout history it has been the responsibility of the men to defend their land and their family from invaders. Churchill was following the masculine tradition of being prepared to defend one’s land when he said to Asquith: “Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect—If we had got some six-inch guns on board how easily we could bombard …” 

I support Churchill’s perspective.

The Imperial Ambitions of Anna Komnene

Anna Komnene, the author of the twelfth century masterpiece of history, the Alexiad, harbored imperial ambitions from her childhood. 

She was born on 1 December 1083, the eldest of the seven children of Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina. Her younger siblings were Maria, John II, Andronikos, Isaac, Eudokia, and Theodora. Her father Alexios had seized the imperial throne of the Byzantine Empire on August 15, 1081, in a violent coup, during which his troops had sacked Constantinople. His reign was hardly stable and there were frequent attempts to overthrow him, but he managed to survive and ruled for nearly four decades, till he died on August 15, 1118.

Since John was the eldest son, he had been designated as the heir to the imperial throne by Alexios. But Anna wanted the throne to go to the man whom she had married in 1097, Nikephoros Bryennios, a descendent of the Bryennios family that had held the imperial throne before the accession of Alexios.

Anna began to dispute John’s right to succession while her father was alive. Queen Irene Doukaina too preferred to see Nikephoros on the throne. According to the accounts of that period, Irene "threw her full influence on [Anna's] side” and tried to coerce Alexios into nominating Nikephoros as the next emperor. But Alexios could not be moved. He continued to insist that John would be his successor.

At the funeral of Alexios, Anna and her mother tried to get John murdered. When this attempt failed, they made a second attempt to have him murdered. But the second attempt too failed, possibly because Nikephoros did not fully cooperate with the coup plotters. Anna was outraged by her husband’s weakness. She is reported to have exclaimed that “nature had mistaken their sexes, for he [her husband] ought to have been the woman.”

A cleric in Hagia Sophia, the patriarchate of Constantinople and a principal setting for Byzantine imperial ceremonies, proclaimed John II Komnenos as emperor. He would rule until 1143, when he died of natural causes.

Anna was only thirty-six years old when she plotted to get her brother murdered, but with the failure of her plot, her life was over. She was banished to the monastery of Kecharitomene, which was founded by her mother. She would live at the monastery for the rest of her life, consumed with pain, jealousy, and hatred. She outlived John by a few years. The exact date of her death is not recorded, but it is generally believed that she died in the 1150s.

The Alexiad was written during the period when Anna was imprisoned at the monastery. There is no mention of her failed coup attempts in the book, but her pain at her thwarted political ambitions is visible in some of the passages.

George and Clemenceau: Dividing the Middle East

After the First World War, the British and French governments started the process of identifying the territories in the Middle East that they wanted to control. In December 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had a meeting with his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau in London to have a blunt conversation on how the Middle East was to be divided among the allies. Here’s how their conversation went:

Clemenceau: “What do you want?”

George: “I want Mosul.”

Clemenceau: “You shall have it. Anything else?”

George: “I want Jerusalem too.”

Clemenceau: “You shall have it.” 

Clemenceau wanted to establish a protectorate over Syria, to which George agreed. George identified Palestine as the territory which he must control if he was to protect the Suez Canal. Clemenceau agreed to let George have Palestine. (Source: The Papers of Lord Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Imperial War Cabinet and top aide to David Lloyd George)

In light of the knowledge of the disastrous fate of the interventions in the Middle East from 1918 to this day, this exchange between Clemenceau and George seems naive, arrogant, and quixotic.

If Clemenceau and George knew history, they would have realized that the West had been failing in the Middle East for more than two thousand years. The Western Roman Empire failed to control the Middle East. The Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantines) failed. The three centuries of crusaders could not make any headway in the Middle East.  

The policy of Clemenceau and George failed, not only in the Middle East but also in Europe, with the result that there was a Second World War.

On Complete Independence

At a dinner in Baghdad in 1920, Gertrude Bell, an English writer who had been recruited to work for British intelligence, said to Jaafar Al-Askari, soon to be appointed Prime Minister of the new country of Iraq, that “complete independence is what we [the British] wish to give to Iraq.” Jaafar Al-Askari replied: “My lady, complete independence is never given—always taken.”

(Source: Gertrude Bell: Complete Letters; Page 224)

The Fallout of the Battle of Manzikert

When Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched his military into Asia Minor, he thought that he would decisively defeat the Turkish forces and prove to his enemies in the region that the Byzantines, and not the Seljuk Turks, were the preeminent military power. The Byzantine and Turkish forces met at Manzikert on 26 August 1071. The spies employed by Romanos had conveyed to him that the Turkish forces at Manzikert were modest and were led by a minor commander. Romanos thought that they would be easy to defeat. But the intelligence that he had received was flawed—the Turkish forces at Manzikert were under the personal command of Sultan Alp Arslan (who had established himself as the leader of Sunni Islam in Asia Minor) and were part of the main Turkish army. 

The Byzantines were employing a significant number of mercenaries and Anatolian levies who fled when the Seljuk Turks began their onslaught. The professional Byzantine soldiers tried to put up a stand. They managed to inflict heavy casualties on the Turkish forces but they were eventually overwhelmed by the superior fighting tactics of the Turks. Romanos himself was injured and captured. When he was brought before Sultan Alp Arslan in a disheveled, bloodied, and tattered state, the Sultan could not believe that the exhausted man who was barely able to stand before him was the Emperor of the great Byzantine Empire (which was then known as the Roman Empire). According to one famous account, Arslan placed his boot on Romanos’s neck and forced him to kiss the ground. This is the exchange that took place between them: 

Alp Arslan: "What would you do if I were brought before you as a prisoner?"

Romanos: "Perhaps I'd kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople."

Alp Arslan: "My punishment is far heavier. I forgive you, and set you free."

Romanos and the survivors of his army were set free by the Sultan. But a great damage had been done to the prestige of the Byzantine Empire. As the news of the defeat of the Byzantine army and the capture of its Emperor spread through the Levant, there was a panic among the orthodox Christians. They realized that in Asia Minor they were no longer safe. They started fleeing towards Constantinople, which they thought was the only place where they could be safe from the Turkish raids. The influx of refugees put a strain on the economy of Constantinople. There was massive inflation—by the middle of the 1070s, the price of wheat had risen by twenty times. The economic meltdown was accompanied by political upheaval. Several leading magnates rebelled and Constantinople was plunged into a civil war. 

The neighbors of the Byzantine Empire took advantage of the chaos. With no military to oppose their advance, the Seljuk Turks marched into Asia Minor. Advancing at great speed, leaving a trail of slaughter and destruction in their wake (according to the account by Anna Komnene, written a few decades after the war), they reached the shores of the Bosphorus, and the surrounding areas became exposed to their raids. By the 1080s, the Seljuk Turks had captured an area of 78,000 square kilometers. There was trouble for the Byzantines in Europe too. The Normans started eying the Empire’s western territories. The dynasties in Croatia and Duklja cancelled their alliance with the Byzantines and sought a new alliance with the papal establishment in Rome.

The Age of Excommunication of Monarchs

In the eleventh century began the age of intense disputes between the papal establishment in Rome and the monarchies of Christendom. The Popes started excommunicating the monarchs to force them to obey the tenets of religion and the papal directives on political issues.  

Several major figures of the eleventh century were excommunicated by the Popes: Henry IV of Germany (excommunicated by Pope Alexander II), Philip I of France (excommunicated by Pope Urban II), King Harold of England (excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII), Alexios I Komnenos of the Byzantine Empire (excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII), the Norman Duke Robert Guiscard (excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII). When the monarchs made the appropriate conciliatory gestures, the Popes allowed them to return to the communion but when another dispute emerged, the monarchs were excommunicated again.  

Towards the end of the eleventh century, the Popes realized that the threat of excommunication was not a significant deterrence for the monarchs, and they conceived the idea of having an army that would be under papal control and could be used to subdue the recalcitrant monarchs. The idea of crusades was conceived. In principle, the crusaders owed allegiance to the papal authority. But the situation was different in practice and the crusaders often obeyed the monarchs. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries crusades were called against several excommunicated Christian monarchs.

Why Did Alexios I Komnenos Invite the First Crusade?

Alexios I Komnenos had not attained the throne of the Byzantine Empire through the legitimate method of inheritance. He had seized the throne in a military coup in 1081. He was appointed as a general by Emperor Michael VII Doukas 1071. Since Alexios had served with distinction in campaigns against the Seljuk Turks, Nikephoros III Botaneiates, the next Emperor who took power in 1078, retained him as a general.

In 1081, Alexios was entrusted with a significant military to counter the Norman threat, but he used this military to besiege Constantinople. On 1 April 1081, Alexios and his men broke through the walls of Constantinople and sacked the city. Botaneiates was forced to abdicate and retire into a monastery where he spent the rest of his life as a monk.

Alexios became the emperor but a significant part of the Byzantine political establishment despised him. They viewed him as a traitor who had acquired the throne through a coup. During his reign, Alexios was battling external threats from the Seljuk Turks and other Islamic forces and internal threats from his political enemies in Constantinople. He maintained his grip on power by promoting his family members to key positions in the government. But the questions regarding the legitimacy of his government would not go away.

By the 1090s, his position in Constantinople had become precarious. He could not be sure of the loyalties of even his family members. Since he could trust no one in his kingdom, he had to look westwards to save his throne. In 1095, he sent his envoys to Pope Urban II to plead for military assistance.

If Alexios needed military assistance then why did he choose to plead before the Pope, the leader of a religious institution, which does not maintain a military. Alexios had good connections with the monarchies of Western Europe. He could have asked for military assistance from them. But he didn’t. I think this is because Alexios did not want a real military from Western Europe to march into the Levant.

Alexios knew that if he allowed the European monarchs to march into the Levant with their military, then his days as emperor would be numbered. Once the European monarchs became aware of the factionalism in Byzantine politics and his weak position, they would be tempted to usurp his throne. Alexios must have thought that the Pope’s crusaders would pose less threat to his regime than with the real militaries owned by the European monarchs.

By sending his envoys to plead before Pope Urban II, Alexios bears the primary responsibility for triggering the First Crusade. The ostensible purpose of the First Crusade was to free the Holy Land, but the real purpose was to save Alexios’s throne from his political rivals in Constantinople.

The Consequence of Richard Lionheart’s Death: Magna Carta

The unexpected consequence of the sudden death of Richard Lionheart, the hero of the Third Crusade, in April 1199, due to an arrow injury that he received while trying to suppress a revolt at the castle of Châlus-Chabrol, in southwestern France, was the Magna Carta in England. Richard was a courageous, jealous, and ruthless monarch. He had a traditionalist view of the institution of monarchy. He was convinced that he possessed the divine right to rule. He would have never allowed the nobles of England to coerce him into accepting the Magna Carta. He would have viewed the nobles who dared to present the Magna Carta before him as traitors and rebels whose just punishment was execution.

John Lackland (he was nicknamed Lackland because, being the youngest son of King Henry II, he lacked significant lands to inherit) became the King of England after Richard’s death. But he was unpopular with his subjects who viewed him as a coward because he had not participated in the Third Crusade, and as a traitor because when Richard was fighting the forces of Sultan Saladin in the Third  Crusade, John tried to usurp the throne of England. Richard’s contemptuous reflection on John’s treachery is preserved in the account of Roger of Howden, the twelfth century English diplomat and chronicler: “My brother John is not a man to conquer a land if there is someone to resist him with even a meagre degree of force.” There was so much hatred and suspicion between the two brothers that if Richard had not died in 1199, he would have ordered the execution of John for betraying him.

Most historical accounts of that period are critical of John. One source, identified as the Anonymous of Bethune, writes: “[John] was a bad man, more cruel than all others; he lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. Whenever he could, he told lies rather than the truth.” In the chronicles of two thirteenth century monks at St Albans Abbey, Roger of Wendover and his successor Matthew Paris, John is presented as a cruel and godless tyrant. They claim, without any evidence, that John had sent a message to the Emir of Morocco offering to convert his Kingdom to Islam. Paris concludes his assessment of King John with this verse:  “England is still fouled by the stink of John; the foulness of Hell is defiled by John’s foulness.”

John accepted the Magna Carta on 15 June 1215. The monarchs of Europe were horrified by the Magna Carta, and so was the papacy at Rome. Pope Innocent III annulled the Magna Carta but that led to a civil war in England, the First Barons' War ((1215–1217). John was defeated in the civil war (he died in 1216), and that was the end of the Angevin Empire which was founded by his father King Henry II in 1154.

Erich Hoffer: On the Elites

“But the elites are finally catching up with us. We can hear the swish of leather as saddles are heaved on our backs. The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.” ~ Eric Hoffer in “The Young and The Middle Aged" (1970). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the elites did catch up with us. The global power grab by the elites in the name of a strange pandemic will not have a happy ending. The unexpected consequences of this power grab are now starting to reveal themselves. I wonder, how devastating will be the tsunami of consequences which the elites have failed to anticipate?

The Consequences of Constantine’s Conversion

Persia was a rival of the Roman Empire since the third century BC. When Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 AD, the Persians started regarding Christianity as a Roman religion. While Constantine had not made Christianity a state religion, his personal ambition was to be the protector of all Christians, including those who were living outside the borders of the Roman Empire. He adopted a strident attitude towards Persia, which was then being ruled by the Sasanian dynasty (224-651 AD) who were Zoroastrian. Zoroastrianism was deeply rooted in Persia, having arrived in the country in the second millennium BC.

In the final years of his life, Constantine began to contemplate a military campaign against Persia. In a letter to Persian Emperor Shapur II, Constantine declared that he was delighted to know that Persia was home to a significant number of Christians whose faith was like his own and that he would advise Shapur II to treat his Christian subjects well. Constantine’s letter sounded like a threat. He was eliding the promotion of Rome’s geopolitical interests with that of his new Christian faith. Shapur II was incensed. 

There was no cause for Constantine to believe that the Christians were being mistreated in Persia. While Zoroastrianism was the state religion of Persia, other religions were not facing persecution in the country. Moreover, there were too few Christians in Persia in that time for the Persian regime to take note of their existence. The Romans and the Persians had been fighting wars for more than six centuries. The Romans had contempt for Zoroastrianism, and the Persians were contemptuous of Roman paganism. But their wars were over geopolitical issues and not religious differences. In 297 AD, Narseh of Persia and Diocletian of Rome had signed a treaty (Peace of Nisibis) which led to a period of peace between the two empires.

Before he could march his troops into Persia, Constantine fell ill and died in 337 AD. But in his letter to Shapur II, he had already created a convincing casus belli against the Persians. Most historians agree that it is Shapur II who broke the peace treaty of 297 AD by moving into Roman Mesopotamia. The two empires became embroiled in long drawn wars (337–350 AD and 358-363 AD). The Persians blamed Constantine’s conversion to Christianity for the conflict, and they started viewing the Christians living in their land as the secret supporters of Rome. Shapur II and his successors launched a series of persecutions which made martyrs of several Christians.

Blindsided by their obsession with destroying each other, the Romans and the Persians failed to take timely action to curb the barbarian tribes: Goths, Alans, Huns, Vandals, Suebi, and the nomadic Turks. By the fifth century, some of these tribes had become a serious threat to Rome and Persia. Rome was conquered by the Visigoths in the fifth century. Persia was destabilized and economically ruined by the barbarians but they survived till the seventh century, when a new force arose: Islam. The Sasanian dynasty was toppled by the groups fighting under the banner of Islam. Zoroastrianism was overthrown. By the eighth century, Islam had conquered almost the entire Levant, and significant parts of North Africa, East Asia, and Southwestern Europe. 

Constantine’s conversion was good for Christianity in the West, but it proved to be a disaster for Christianity and Zoroastrianism in the East. According to a 2011 census, there are 25,000 Zoroastrians living in modern day Persia (Iran)—in Constantine’s time, ninety-seven percent of Persia was Zoroastrian.

The Controversy Over Silk in Ancient Rome

Silk from China started flooding into the Roman Empire as early as the third century BC. The popularity of the fine flowing silk garments among the Roman elite class horrified the traditionalists. 

Seneca the Elder declared that silk garments could barely be regarded as clothing since these garments would not hide the curves and the decency of the Roman ladies. He declared that the foundation of Roman morality was being undermined by silk garments, which allowed men to see through the light fabric which clung to the female form and left little to the imagination. Here’s an excerpt from Seneca’s Declamations (Volume One):

"I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes... Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body."

In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder complained about the high cost of silk. He said that the Roman economy was being drained for enabling the “Roman lady to shimmer in public.” He calculated that the Roman economy was losing 100 million sesterces annually in importing silk. 

The Roman political establishment made repeated efforts to discourage their people from wearing silk. Emperor Aurelian forbade his wife from buying a mantle of Tyrian purple silk. Laws were passed to ban men from wearing silk since it was seen as effeminate and antithetical to Rome’s militaristic culture.

Caesar and Constantine: Movement of Capital City to the East

If Julius Caesar was not assassinated in 44 BC, he would have moved the Roman Empire’s seat of Imperial Power out of Rome. Caesar believed that the seat of Imperial Power should be based in a region which would improve the governance of the lands where the best interests of Rome lay. He had in mind two places: Alexandria and the site of Ancient Troy in Asia Minor. The seat of Imperial Power was ultimately moved by Constantine in 324 AD to Constantinople, a city that was strategically located at the Bosphorus strait and was a testament to the fact that the aim of the Romans was to dominate both Europe and Asia.

The Eastward March of Alexander and Octavian

When Alexander became the King of Macedonia in 336 BC, he had no doubt in which direction he had to march his military for gaining everlasting glory: East. He didn’t waste a moment in thinking of marching into Western Europe. East was where all the fabulous cities were located. East was where he would go. 

Tutored by Aristotle and other great teachers of Macedonia and Athens, Alexander knew about Herodotus’s glowing account of the wealth and splendor of Persia, and the grandeur of Egypt, which was conquered by the Persians in the 6th century BC. He knew about plays like The Bacchae (by Euripides), in which Dionysus says: “I have come to Greece from the fabulously wealthy East.” According to Dionysus, the lands of the East were dancing with the divine long before the Greeks. Alexander knew about the reports of the travelers, sailors, traders, and military adventurers on the treasures and culture of the East. “March eastwards” (because there was nothing worth conquering in the West) became the clarion call for his military. 

The “march eastwards” theme can be seen in the empire which inherited the legacy of Alexander and his great general Seleucus I Nicator: Rome. The Romans did not become an empire when they established their control on much of Europe (which the Romans regarded as the land of barbarians) but when they turned their focus on Eastern Mediterranean, and under Gaius Octavius (later named Caesar Augustus by the grateful Roman Senate) managed to conquer the great empire in the east, Egypt. 

Cleopatra made a major miscalculation when she got involved in a Roman civil war and decided to support the faction led by Mark Antony. When Antony’s forces were routed in the Battle of Actium in 30 BC, the shrewd and ruthless Octavian had the opportunity to bring his troops to Egypt. Despite the fall of Mark Antony, Cleopatra had enough military strength to cause serious damage to Octavian’s forces, but she played a series of bad political moves and was outfoxed by Octavian. She committed suicide and Octavian became the master of Egypt. He had arrived in Egypt as a Roman general; he left as a Roman Emperor. He had turned Rome into an Empire.

Our Apocalyptic Media

Reading a newspaper is like being waterboarded by a stream of apocalyptic water (propaganda masquerading as news). Here’s Michael Crichton’s take on the mainstream media: “The media is like the guy going down the street with a sign that says 'The End of the World is Near,' and he picks a date and the day comes and goes, and the world doesn't end. So he doesn't stop with the sign. He goes home, makes another sign, puts a new date on it, and starts marching again. That's the way the media is.”

Napoleon and the Making of Modern Egypt

After the fall of Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty in the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Sultanate became the masters of Egypt. The Mamluks were overthrown by the Ottomans in the Ottoman–Mamluk war of 1516 and 1517. But after the war, the Ottomans retained the Mamluks as an Egyptian ruling class. The Mamluks were allowed to retain their influence in Egypt though they remained the vassals of the Ottomans. 

When Napoleon attacked Egypt in 1798, the country was out of direct control of the Ottomans and was being dominated by the local Mamluk elite. In the Battle of the Pyramids, fought on 21 July 1798, Napoleon’s French forces decisively defeated the Mamluk cavalry. The battle was over in an hour, with the French suffering just 300 casualties while inflicting more than 6000 casualties on the Mamluk cavalry. The Mamluk power in Egypt was finished. The Mamluk survivors moved into Syria, leaving Egypt in the hands of Napoleon who, three days later, triumphantly marched his troops into Cairo.

With his quick victory in Egypt, Napoleon had created the impression in Western Europe that he would achieve what all the crusades of the past had failed to achieve. But ten days later, the British Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson shattered Napoleon’s dream of founding a French Empire in the Levant. In the Battle of the Nile, between 1st and 3rd of August 1798, Nelson obliterated Napoleon’s navy at Aboukir Bay on the Mediterranean coast off the Nile Delta of Egypt. With most of his ships destroyed, Napoleon was now cut off from France and basically stuck in Egypt with his 35,000 troops. He remained in Cairo for three years, till 1801. 

Napoleon’s three year stay in Cairo wrought profound, long-term consequences for Egypt. He had not arrived in Egypt to merely conquer and loot—he believed that it was his destiny to liberate, reform, and bring modern ideas to the backward nations of the world. He had brought with him a team of more than 160 scholars. In three years, he gave Egypt the kind of reforms that this country had not seen for several centuries. He turned the traditional Egyptian society on its head. 

Egypt got a postal service. In Cairo and other urban areas street lighting and sanitation was created. A modern mint was established. A French trading company came up. There was creation of plague hospitals, and printing presses with typescript for French, Greek, and Arabic. Slavery was abolished. The dhimmi system was abolished, and the Ottoman and Mamluk social hierarchy came to an end. Though the Egyptian elite remained unconvinced of Napoleon’s intentions, many of his tectonic reforms worked so well that they were not abolished after he left the country. 

It can be argued that Napoleon led to the rise of Egyptian nationalism through his support of Egyptian scholarship. He encouraged the study of Egyptian culture before the time of the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire. He funded several scholarly works on ancient Egypt. This led to the rise of the new discipline of Egyptology. In July 1799, a young engineering officer, Pierre-François-Xavier Bouchard, who had arrived in Egypt with Napoleon, discovered the Rosetta Stone, which played a significant role in the deciphering of ancient Egyptian language.

Genghis Khan: The Excellent, Noble King

The historiography of Genghis Khan in the West shows that he was viewed as an “excellent, noble king,” before the onset of the Age of Enlightenment (eighteenth century), when the Western historians started presenting him as a “brutal pagan.” The Mongols were not savages. They did not cause death and destruction purposelessly—they had a political plan to build a great empire. After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire did become the largest contiguous empire in history. The Mongols usually killed the ruling classes in the places that they conquered in order to subdue the local population, but such a strategy was being used by all cultures in the Middle Ages. 

In his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Prof. Jack Weatherford offers a different perspective on Genghis Khan. Weatherford argues that it is a mistake to see Genghis Khan as a savage and sadistic warlord who caused death and devastation wherever he went. He attributes several aspects of the Renaissance to Genghis Khan, such as the spread of paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder, paintings, and musical instruments such as the violin. He says that Genghis Khan was religiously tolerant and deeply interested in learning about the moral philosophy of other religions. He used to consult Buddhist monks, Christian missionaries (Nestorian and Catholics), Islamic preachers, and Taoist monks. In Mongol culture men and women had equal rights. There are several instances of women acquiring powerful positions in the Mongol political establishment. Weatherford suggests that the Mongol Empire was an important inspiration for the Age of Discovery in Europe. 

Here’s an excerpt from Weatherford’s book: “The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003.”

Galileo and The Medici

The Medici family played an important role in Galileo’s life. Galileo was the son of a poor descendent of a Florentine noble family. He wanted to become a painter but his father felt that painting was not a worthy profession for a man of noble birth, and he studied medicine instead. Galileo began his career in 1589 as a teacher of mathematics in the University of Pisa. His colleagues were unable to bear his sarcasm and independence, and they made it clear to him that if he decided to resign, they would gladly accept his resignation. 

In 1592, Galileo moved to the University of Padua where he taught geometry, mechanics, and astronomy for eighteen years. Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had once been Galileo’s student, invited him to Florence where he could do his studies and experiments in a rich environment without having to worry about the interference from his detractors. Galileo accepted the offer and he spent the final years of his life under the protection of the Medici. Cosimo gave Galileo the title of court mathematician. This position brought to Galileo the freedom to advance the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus using mathematics. 

In his 1610 book Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo honored his Medici benefactors by naming the four moons of Jupiter, which he had discovered through his telescope, Medicea Sidera (Medicean stars), in reference to Cosimo and his three brothers.

The Ottoman-Safavid Wars

In the sixteenth century, the foremost commitment of the Ottoman sultans was not the wars with their European enemies but their religious wars with Safavid Iran. The Ottomans and the Safavids had an apocalyptic view of the conflict between them—each power was convinced that the religious truth was on its side and that the other side was indulging in heresy and had to be annihilated. Both sides wanted to claim the religious leadership of the Islamic world. Safavid Iran arose in the early sixteenth century after the fall of the Timurid Empire, which was founded by Tamerlane. Ironically, Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, contributed to the rise of the Safavid dynasty by his victories over Uzun Hasan, one of the descendants of Tamerlane. Once the Timurid Empire was swept away, the Safavids had the space to grow their power. 

The Safavids wanted Shiaism to be recognized as the fifth school of Islam, but that was not acceptable to the Sunni Ottomans. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottomans and the Safavids fought several major wars over religious reasons, and over the control of the South Caucasus and Mesopotamia. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East today is to some extent influenced by the conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids.

In 1514, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I issued a fatwa in the name of Sunni Islam against Shia Iran, then ruled by Shah Ismail. Selim transformed his war against Iran into a Holy War by declaring that the Safavids were heretics and must be annihilated. As he marched through the cities in Anatolia, his forces beheaded every Shiite between the age of seven and seventy. This led to the greatest massacre in Ottoman history. The forces of Shah Ismail fought bravely but Selim’s forces had the upper hand in the battle. The Safavids survived the defeat by moving their capital to Qazvin in 1555 and then from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1598—this ensured that the Safavid ruling elite was beyond the reach of the Ottoman forces. The Safavids adopted the strategy of continuous guerrilla warfare which was immensely damaging to the Ottoman economy. 

In 1548, Suleiman the Magnificent launched a campaign against Iran. His army laid waste to large parts of Persia and conquered most of modern Iraq, including the city of Baghdad, the historic seat of the Abbasid caliphate, which was of religious importance to the Shi'ites. In 1555, Suleiman the Magnificent and Shah Tahmasp, the Iranian Emperor, negotiated the Treaty of Amasya to draw a border between their empires and end their conflict. But in 1577, the Ottoman sultan Murad III became determined to destroy the Safavid dynasty. His ambition condemned the two empires for fifty years of bloodshed. Between 1578 and 1639, the Ottomans and the Safavids fought three major wars. For a  brief period, 1588–1629, Baghdad came under direct Safavid rule. 

In 1638, Murad IV himself took the leadership of the Ottoman military and he took Revan and Tabriz from the Safavids. In 1638, he conquered Baghdad after a siege of forty days. On 17 May 1639, both sides agreed to the Treaty of Zuhab which settled the Ottoman–Persian frontier, with Iraq ceded to the Ottomans. The Safavid Empire went into decline towards the end of the seventeenth century, and the Ottomans took advantage of their problems to usurp several territories in Georgia, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Armenia. But in the eighteenth century there was the rise of Nadir Shah who deposed the last members of the Safavid dynasty and became a Shah himself. During the Ottoman–Persian War of 1730–1735, Nadir Shah forced the Ottomans to accept Persian hegemony over the Caucasus.

Weakened by the unending conflict with the Safavids and other powerful forces in the Levant, the Ottomans could not defend their lengthy northern border in Europe which they shared with the Habsburg empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Orthodox Russia. They were doomed after the eighteenth century (perhaps from the middle of the seventeenth century). It is surprising that they continued to be a geopolitical power in the twentieth century and it took a tectonic event like the First World War to break apart their empire.

Civilization is a Children’s Project

The average life expectancy four thousand years ago was twenty-five years. Before that it was even less. This means that the world we live in is the creation of young adults (many of them were children by modern standards). 

Mankind’s achievements in the prehistoric age—from the invention of wheel, to the discovery of agriculture, domestication of cattle, development of languages, rise of the world’s first primitive religions, mythologies, philosophies, and political systems—was the outcome of the labor and enterprise of people who would be of ten to thirty-five years. A few people in the prehistoric age would live to the age of fifty or even ninety, but the lifecycle of most would plateau at thirty-five. 

This implies that in the prehistoric period, which comprises 99% of human existence on this planet, the young adults were the driving force of civilization. 

In the modern age, the situation has changed. In the last three hundred years, there has been a rise in average life expectancy and the forces of civilization have gone into the hands of older people. The average age in Japan is currently forty-eight years; in the USA it is thirty-eight years; in Germany it is forty-five years; in UK it is forty years. But when Japan, the USA, Germany, and the UK were in a high-growth phase, their average age was quite low. The rise of average age can be a cause of economic, militaristic, and political stagnation. 

The young adults are often the best barbarians. The older generations are often the best utopians.  History tells us that the barbarians are often the creators of new civilizations, whereas the utopians are often the destroyers of old civilizations.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement to Divide the Ottoman Empire

After capturing power in Russia, the Bolshevik government led by Lenin and Trotsky went to extraordinary lengths to discredit the policies of the deposed government of Tsar Nicholas II. Trotsky, then People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, published some of the dirtiest secrets of the Tsar’s regime in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. In late November 1917, he published all the documents related to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between Russia, England, France, and Italy to partition the territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The agreement signed on 16 May 1916 was based on the premise that these four nations would manage to conclusively defeat the Ottoman Empire and its allies in the First World War.  

The Sykes-Picot Agreement stipulated that the Ottoman territory outside the Arabian Peninsula would be divided along the Sykes-Picot line into areas of British and French dominance. Britain would get the areas where today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq are located—they would get the ports of Haifa and Acre to enable them to have direct access to the Mediterranean. The areas where southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are located today was to be France’s share. Russia was to get Western Armenia in addition to Constantinople (which was of great importance to the Orthodox Tsarist regime for religious and historical reasons) and the Turkish Straits. Italy was to receive southern Anatolia.  

Under the secret Constantinople Agreement (also known as the Straits Agreement), ratified by Russia, England, and France in 1915, the territories of Constantinople and the Dardanelles had already been promised to Russia in the event of their victory in the First World War. The leaking of the Sykes-Picot Agreement caused a major political scandal in Europe, Asia, and the USA.

The Sick Man of Europe

In the nineteenth century, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia coined the phrase the “sick man of Europe” to define the Ottoman Empire. He used this phrase in a series of confidential letters that he exchanged in 1853 with British ambassador Sir George Hamilton Seymour. 

Nicholas I was the first world leader to realize that the Ottoman Empire had become ossified and weak. He asserted in his letters that the Ottomans do not possess the military capability to defend their vast territory and economic interests, and that the fall of their empire was imminent. He invited the British to join his government in the exercise of drawing plans for dividing the Ottoman territory among the traditional European powers and the emerging powers in the Levant. 

The British Establishment of that time was taken by surprise by the Tsar’s view. They, like the French and other West European powers, believed that the Ottomans were a powerful empire and, notwithstanding the few military defeats that they had suffered in the last two centuries, they would continue to exist forever.

The Russo-Ottoman Wars of the Eighteenth Century

During the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774, Catherine the Great, Tsarina of Russia, concocted the orthodox Greek and Russian plan of driving the Ottomans out of the territory held by the former Byzantine Empire and placing her grandson Constantine on the imperial throne of Constantinople. 

More than three centuries after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans were defending themselves against another orthodox Christian power: Tsarist Russia. The Russian forces were largely victorious in the war and they were in a position to annex significant Ottoman territory in Europe and the Levant. But the complexities of European politics of that time were such that the West European powers feared that the balance of power in Europe could tilt permanently in orthodox Russia’s favor if they allowed the Russians to dominate large sections of Ottoman territory. Austria and other West European states intervened diplomatically to place a limit on the territorial gains that the Russians could expect from their victory.

The Ottomans and the Russians signed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. Russia returned the territories of Wallachia and Moldavia to the Ottomans. But Catherine the Great negotiated and got the guardianship of the Orthodox Christian holy sites and the right to protect Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire—this provision ensured that the Russians had a readymade excuse to interfere in Ottoman territory whenever they thought that the time was ripe. A second war between the Russian and Ottoman empires was inevitable.  

In 1783, Russia annexed Crimea and Kabardia. In May and June 1787, Catherine the Great, and her new ally, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, held a triumphal procession in New Russia and the annexed Crimea. The Ottomans saw the triumphal procession as a violation of their territory—they ordered the Russians to evacuate Crimea. In August 1787, the Ottomans declared a war on Russia with the aim of reversing the losses of the earlier Russo-Turkish war. While this war was being fought, the Ottomans became involved in another war with Austria in 1788. Both wars were fought concomitantly till 1792. Caught between two wars, the Ottoman situation became militarily hopeless. Their logistics collapsed, and they were forced to negotiate. 

The Treaty of Jassy, signed between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1792, established Russian dominance in the Black Sea region. The Ottoman aim of reclaiming Crimea had failed. If the West European powers and the Orthodox Russian Empire had not been distracted by the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, the fate of the Ottoman Empire could have been much worse during the second Russo-Turkish War.

Ottomans, Seljuks, and their Land of the Rum

When Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he adopted the title Qayser-i Rum (Caesar of the Roman Empire), and he gave the name “Rumelia” (land of the Romans) to the Ottoman Empire’s possessions in southeastern Europe (the Balkans). The Seljuk dynasty, which can be seen as a geopolitical predecessor of the Ottomans in the Levant, used the title “land of the Rûm" (land of the Romans) to refer to Anatolia (much of modern-day Turkey), which they had conquered after defeating the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

The Qayser-i Rum: The Caesar of the Roman Empire

The Ottomans had been trying to conquer the Byzantine Empire since the early 14th century. Osman Ghazi had laid a siege to Nicaea in 1301. He annihilated the Byzantine army but failed to capture Nicaea because of the arrival of a mercenary army of 8000 troops led by Roger de Flor. Osman was succeeded by his son Orhan in 1324. Orhan captured several cities belonging to the Byzantines in northwest Turkey. He took advantage of the civil war, which followed the death of the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos in 1341, and captured the peninsula of Gallipoli which he fortified to gain control of Dardanelles. Orhan’s son Murad I became the sultan in 1362 and continued to pursue the policy of expanding the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. 

When Murad I was killed in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the sultanate passed into the hands of his son Bayezid I Yildirim, who took the title Sultan-i Rum (Rum being an old oriental name for the Roman Empire). Bayezid had his brothers strangled to prevent any disputes regarding his succession. He blamed the death of his father to Byzantine and Serbian treachery, and was determined to conquer Constantinople. In 1394, he laid siege to Constantinople and ordered the Byzantine emperor to surrender. The Byzantines pleaded before Pope Boniface IX who called a crusade to vanquish the Ottoman forces. Sigismund of Luxembourg, the King of Hungary, who later became the Holy Roman Emperor, and knights from France, Germany, Venice, and Genoa, answered the pope’s call. But Bayezid managed to defeat the crusader forces in the Battle of Nicopolis and then he resumed the blockade of Constantinople. 

Bayezid's heavy artillery could not cause much damage to the ancient wall which protected Constantinople but he would have found a way to enter the city if he had not been forced to lift the seize in 1402 due to the appearance of the massive army of Tamerlane, the Prince of Destruction, who had fought several wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe and was never defeated. 

Tamerlane and Bayezid had been insulting each other in letters for sometime. In one of his letters, Tamerlane wrote: “Believe me, you are but pismire ant: don't seek to fight the elephants for they'll crush you under their feet. Shall a petty prince such as you are contend with us? But your rodomontades (braggadocio) are not extraordinary; for a Turcoman never spake with judgement. If you don't follow our counsels you will regret it.” Tamerlane’s army marched into Syria in 1400, killing most of the inhabitants of Aleppo and Damascus. They sacked Baghdad in 1401, slaughtering 20,000 people, and on July 20, 1402, they marched into Anatolia where they were confronted by Bayezid’s forces. But Bayezid was defeated and captured. He subsequently died in Tamerlane’s prison. 

With Bayezid death, there was a period of respite for the Byzantine Empire since the Ottomans became entangled in a succession related civil war. Four of Bayezid's sons, Süleyman Çelebi, İsa Çelebi, Mehmed Çelebi, and Musa Çelebi, were the main contenders for the throne. Mehmed Çelebi was victorious. At his coronation in 1413, he took the name Mehmed I. When Mehmed I died in 1421, the power went to his son Murad II who began his reign by besieging Constantinople. But the Byzantines managed to coerce Murad’s younger brother Küçük Mustafa, who was only thirteen years old, to rebel against the sultan and besiege Bursa. Murad was forced to abandon the siege of Constantinople and rush to Bursa to deal with his rebellious brother. He defeated Mustafa’s army and executed him. 

In 1451, Murad II was succeeded by his son Mehmed II who achieved the dream of his ancestors by conquering Constantinople in 1453. After the conquest, Mehmed II took the title, Qayser-i Rum (the Caesar of the Roman Empire). According to some historical accounts, Mehmed II used to say: “I have conquered the New Rome. Now it is time to conquer the Old Rome.”

The Split in the Orthodox World

In the fourteenth century, the Orthodox Russians realized that the Byzantine Empire had surrendered itself to not just papal authority in Rome but also the Ottoman sultans. They accused the Byzantine Emperors of abdicating their leadership of the Orthodox world by accepting papal and Ottoman overlordship. 

The Byzantine Empire of Nicaea had recaptured Constantinople in 1261, but their military power was inadequate for settling the territorial disputes in which they were involved in the Levant and southeastern Europe. Their weakness forced them to solicit military support from the Ottoman sultans. The Ottomans arrived in Europe on the invitation of the Byzantines—in the Byzantine civil war between 1341 and 1347, one of the Byzantine factions used the support of Orhan Ghazi, the Ottoman Sultan, to gain an upper hand in southeastern Europe. Once the Ottomans had got a taste of European politics and warfare, they decided to expand into Europe. In 1354, they captured  Gallipoli, and in 1360s, they won Adrianople in the Balkans. 

In 1274, Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, the founder of the dynasty that would rule the Byzantine Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, pleaded before the Latin Church for military assistance. In 1366, John V Palaiologos visited the Hungarian Kingdom and pleaded for help. The Hungarian King agreed to help on one condition—John V should convert to Catholicism. In October 1369, John V became the first Byzantine Emperor, in seven hundred years, to travel to Rome, where he converted to Catholicism in St Peter's Basilica and acknowledged the pope as the supreme head of the Church. But his acceptance of Catholicism did not hinder John V from accepting the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan Murad I in 1371. In 1376, Murad I helped John V suppress a civil war. 

The Russians were appalled by the Byzantine attempts to merge Orthodox Christianity with Catholicism, and they were suspicious of the Ottoman sultans. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Orthodox Christianity was split into Russian and Greek (Byzantine) branches. The Russians claimed that they were the true representatives of Orthodox Christianity and the inheritors of the Roman Empire. The Russian Emperors started viewing Moscow as the third Rome, and they assumed the title of Caesar (Tsar in Russian).

The Submergence of Dwaraka

The Mausala Parva, Book 16 of the Mahabharata, describes the events which transpire thirty-six years after the Kurukshetra war: the demise of Krishna, the demise of his brother Balarama and their father Vasudeva, the civil war in which every member of the Yadava clan is killed, and the destruction of the kingdom of Dwaraka. Arjuna arrived in Dwaraka to find out what had happened to Krishna and his clan and he saw the submergence of the kingdom in the sea. 

Here’s an excerpt from Arjuna’s description of Dwaraka’s final moments: 

“The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. I saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the city. Dwaraka was just a name; just a memory.”

The end of Krishna’s clan leads the five Pandava brothers to renounce their own kingdom and begin their march towards heaven.

On Richard Lionheart’s Crusade

After mentioning that Richard Lionheart’s life came to a close when he was hit by a stray arrow shot from a rebel castle in France on 26 March 1199, Steven Runciman delivers his judgement on Lionheart’s life in a single sentence: “He was a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier.” (A History of the Crusades III: The Kingdom of Acre; Chapter III, “Coeur-de-Lion”)

Lionheart was not fully committed to the war for the Holy Land since his priority was to safeguard the interests of his empire in England and France. He arrived in Acre on 8 June 1191 and departed for Europe on 9 October 1192. During his sixteen months in the Levant, Lionheart acted like a shrewd political operator and a pragmatic military commander—he carried out extensive negotiations with Emperor Saladin while fighting to defeat him in several battles. He and Saladin delighted in being respectful and generous to each other. Lionheart realized that with the kind of military commitment that Western Europe was in a position to make in the Levant, Saladin and other oriental forces could not be defeated. 

After a siege of about two years (started by King Guy in August 1189), the crusaders conquered Acre on 12 July 1191. Lionheart played a decisive role in the success at Acre. In September 1191, Lionheart defeated Saladin in a battle north of Arsuf. Towards the end of May 1192, the crusaders had taken all the coastal areas that they had lost to Saladin. In January 1192, and then for the second time in June 1192, the crusaders were just ten to twelve miles from Jerusalem, which was largely undefended since most of Saladin’s forces were committed to other parts of the battlefield. On both occasions, Lionheart refused to besiege Jerusalem. Apparently he believed that even if the crusader forces managed to conquer Jerusalem, they would not be able to hold it while Saladin continued to be the ruler of Egypt and Syria. 

Lionheart’s struggle to make it back to England proved as perilous as his struggle against Saladin. The ship in which he left Acre was wrecked by a storm near Venice, forcing him to continue his journey overland. To evade his European enemies, he was traveling in disguise, but he was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria. Leopold accused Lionheart of the murder of Conrad of Montferrat and locked him in a castle. On 28 March 1193, Lionheart was handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in a castle in Germany. After the payment of a huge ransom, Lionheart was released on 4 February 1194. On his release, King Philip of France sent a message to John, Lionheart’s brother: “Look to yourself; the devil is loose"

The Outcome of the Crusades

In November 1095, when Pope Urban II called for a crusade to the Holy Land, he believed that the crusaders would win resounding victories, and that in his lifetime the day would come when Western Christendom would take control of not just Jerusalem and other holy sites but entire Levant. But the First Crusade, and the subsequent crusades, became bogged down in a series of wars, massacres, conspiracies, riots, and assassinations which went on for two centuries, till 1291. 

The high religious and political rhetoric of the crusades was not backed by wisdom, political prudence, and astute military planning. Even the high-ranking crusaders, the kings and the nobles, had a naive view of the region where they were going to fight. They were mostly clueless of the ruthlessness and military capabilities of their oriental rivals. Whenever the crusaders scored a military victory, they failed to build on it. With the result that the fruits of that victory would get frittered away. The crusades ended in a colossal failure: all the Christian kingdoms in the Levant, including the Byzantine Empire and the four crusader kingdoms which the First Crusade had won, were lost. There was a massive desecration of places of historical and religious significance, and a thorough decimation of the minority communities (Jews and Orthodox Christians) which had been living in the Levant for centuries before the crusades were even conceived.

The crusades in the East were undoubtedly a geopolitical and religious disaster for Western Christendom. The irony is that the only geopolitical success that the crusades achieved was in the heart of Western Europe. Pope Urban II had enjoined the Spaniards in 1096 that instead of marching eastwards, towards the Levant, they should complete the conquest of the Spanish territories. The reconquista went on in Spain till the second half of the fifteenth century when the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II, won the kingdom of Granada. But Isabella and Ferdinand were not committed to taking back Jerusalem. Their priority was European internal politics. Another crusade in Western Europe that was successful in religious terms was the Northern Crusade, which pitted the crusaders against the pagan Slavs (Wends) and Balts and led to the expansion of Christian forces in the Northern parts of Europe. 

The Spanish reconquista and the movement against the pagans might have happened even if there were no crusades to the Holy Land. It is not clear if the crusades to the Holy Land can be credited with the victories that Christendom achieved in Western Europe.

A View of the Mahabharata’s Lunar Dynasty

The Mahabharata is the history of the Chandravansha (the Lunar dynasty), which originated with Soma, the Moon God. The son of Soma was Chandra. Chandra had a son called Pururava who ruled the kingdom of Prayaga, whose capital was located at Pratisthana. Pururava’s eldest son Āyu had a son called Nahusha. Nahusha married Viraja and they had six or seven sons. The second son was Yayati. According to another legend, Nahusha married Ashokasundari, the daughter of Shiva and Parvati, and she gave birth to Yayati and a hundred daughters. 

Yayati had five sons: Yadu and Turvasu through his first wife Devayani, and Druhyu, Anu and Puru through his second wife Sharmishtha. When Yayati became old, he continued to lust for the pleasures of a youthful life. He summoned his five sons and asked them to temporarily loan him their youth. Four of the sons refused and they were cursed by Yayati that they would never be kings—this curse impacted the Yadava dynasty too, since one of Yayati’s five sons was Yadu. Puru, Yayati’s youngest son, agreed to loan his youth to his father. After enjoying the pleasures of the senses for a thousand years, Yayati returned to Puru his youth and made him the king. The lunar dynasty goes forward with Puru. 

Puru’s son Duhshanta married Shakuntala and they had a son called Bharata (the founder of the empire called Bharatavarsha). Bharata had a grandson called Kuru, whose descendent Pratipa had a son called Shantanu. Shantanu married Satyavati and they had two sons, Chitrangada and Vichitravirya. Krishna Dvaipayana (Veda Vyasa) was already born through a union between Sage Parashara and Satyavati. A union between Shantanu and Ganga had already resulted in the birth of the powerful warrior Bhishma. Krishna Dvaipayana fathered Dhristarashtra on Vichitravirya’s first wife Ambika, and Pandu on Vichitravirya’s second wife Ambalika. He also fathered a son called Vidura on Vichitravirya’s maid. 

The hundred Kourava brothers were the sons of Dhristarashtra, and the five Pandava bothers were the acknowledged sons of Pandu. Since Kuru was the common ancestor of both the Kouravas and the Pandavas—in terms of bloodline, the five Pandava brothers too were Kouravas. Krishna was born in the Yadava branch of the Lunar dynasty.

The Fourth Crusade: The 1204 Sack of Constantinople

The claim that the crusaders “sacked” Constantinople in 1204 is not the complete truth. The crusaders didn’t sack Constantinople—they engineered a regime change in the Byzantine Empire, at the behest of a powerful faction in Byzantine politics and some Venetian and French nobles. Here’s a brief account of the Fourth Crusade:

Pope Innocent III was elected on 8 January 1198, and on 15 August 1198, he launched a new crusade (the fourth one). By the summer of 1200, a sizable crusading army had taken shape. Instead of taking a land route, which experience of the past crusades had shown was fraught with danger, the crusaders decided to take the route that Richard Lionheart and Philip II Augustus had taken during the Third Crusade. They planned to sail across the Mediterranean to Palestine.

The French Barons who were leading the Fourth Crusade entered into an agreement with Enrico Dandolo, the half-blind octogenarian Doge of Venice. Dandolo agreed to build ships for ferrying about forty-thousand crusaders, including the knights and their horses, across the Mediterranean for 85,000 silver marks. Pope Innocent III had exhorted the crusaders to conquer the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but without informing the Pope, the French Barons and Dandolo decided that the crusaders would conquer Egypt first. 

The crusaders had to arrive at the Venetian port no later than June 1202, but most of them were late. By August 1202, only eleven thousand men had gathered, and to make matters worse, they didn’t have enough money to pay the shipping charges to the Venetians. The Venetians suggested that they would postpone the payment if the crusaders helped Venice conquer its enemy, the Croatian port town of Zadar. Zadar was under a Christian king, and several crusaders, who thought that they were going to fight for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, were appalled by the idea of attacking a Christian state, but others went ahead. They conquered Zadar for the Venetians in November 1202. 

From Zadar, the crusader ships should have gone to Egypt—that is what the general mass of crusaders had been expecting. But the crusaders found themselves in Constantinople. Who made the decision to navigate the ships towards Constantinople is one of the great mysteries of history. A powerful faction of Byzantine politics certainly had a role to play. 

Alexius Angelus, the son of the deposed and blinded Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelus, had reached Europe before the Fourth Crusade departed from Venice. He offered to clear the Fourth Crusade’s entire debt to Venice, and equip the crusaders with enough manpower and funds to ensure the success of their campaign to conquer the Kingdom of Jerusalem, if they reinstated his father on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. He also offered to end the schism between Orthodox Christianity and Latin Christianity. 

A deal must have been struck between some leaders of the Fourth Crusade and Alexius Angelus. The deal certainly had Venetian support, since they controlled the shipping routes and without their cooperation the ships carrying the crusaders could not be diverted to Constantinople. The Venetians were in a position to gain a lot of commercial benefits if the regime change operation in Constantinople was successful. It is possible that the deal had German and French support since Alexius Angelus had meetings with German and French nobility before he arrived at Venice. Who was not part of the deal? Pope Innocent III and many of the crusaders. 

On June 24, 1203, the Fourth Crusade had reached Constantinople. They demanded that Isaac II Angelus and his son Alexius Angelus should be restored to the throne. When Alexius III, who was then the Emperor, refused, the crusaders went on a rampage. In July 1203, Alexius III fled from the city. Isaac II Angelus and Alexius Angelus were proclaimed the joint rulers of the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders had accomplished their mission. But now a new problem arose—the two new Emperors were unable to honor the lavish promises that they had made to the crusaders and the Venetians. This led to a rapid deterioration in the popularity of their regime. 

The two Emperors were arrested on 27 January 1204—apparently without the knowledge of the crusaders. Isaac II Angelus died soon after his arrest (perhaps due to poisoning). On 8 February 1204, Alexius III was killed by strangling. Despite the failure of Isaac II Angelus and Alexius Angelus to honor their commitments, the crusaders interpreted the deposition and murder of the two Emperors as a coup. They besieged Constantinople for more than a month. On 12 April 1204, they managed to enter the city. For three days, they rioted, vandalized, and looted, causing significant damage to life and property in Constantinople. 

The irony is that the two regimes that the Fourth Crusade toppled were Christian: Zadar and the Byzantine Empire. The Fourth Crusade never went to Palestine. The crusaders never marched towards Jerusalem.. They stayed in Constantinople and founded a new kingdom to which they gave the name Romania. They first offered the imperial crown to Enrico Dandolo who refused it. Baldwin I was crowned as the first emperor of Romania on 9 May 1204. The surviving members of the Byzantine Empire’s aristocracy founded their own empire in Nicaea, where they awaited for an opportunity to win back the Empire that they had lost.

On Viking Wisdom

“Wake early if you want another man’s life or land. No land for the lazy wolf. No battle’s won in bed.” ~ A viking saying (Edda of Saemund the Wise, a collection of the sayings of Odin). This viking saying makes sense—a nation that does not awake early to the political realities will lose its land and culture. 

The vikings were not doctrinaires. Their religious and cultural tradition was wholly oral. But they were good political thinkers. There is a lot that can be learned from their history. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, they played a significant role in awakening the West from the slumber in which it had fallen after the end of the Western Roman Empire.

On Byzantine Intellectualism and Politics

Bulk of the Greek texts that are available today (around 40,000 of 55,000) have been transmitted through Greek scholars of the Byzantine Empire. In 1453, when the Byzantine Empire fell to the forces of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, the Greek scholars fled to Western Europe with most of their texts, which must have contributed to the ongoing intellectual revolution (the Renaissance) happening in that part of Europe. In the area of intellectualism, the Byzantines were a success. Their failures are cultural and political. They wanted to be a great empire without fighting to defend their culture and the borders of their empire. 

The idea of a “holy war” was abhorrent to the Byzantines. They believed that though a war might sometimes be necessary, it could never be holy—since killing was a sinful activity. Their political strategy was devoted to maintaining political power without having to fight wars. The crusaders could not have done anything to help the Byzantines, who were overconfident that they would keep prevailing in the region by the virtue of their intellectualism. The Byzantines thought that they could neutralize every foreign adversary through diplomacy and negotiations, and if military force had to be deployed, they could rely on mercenaries to do the dirty work of fighting. They expected the crusaders who arrived in the First Crusade to act as their mercenary troops and were appalled when they realized that the crusaders intended to free the holy land. 

Despite their intellectualism, their knowledge of religion, culture, and history, the Byzantines could not develop a political and spiritual connection with the crusaders. During the time of the crusades, the intellectualism of the Byzantines had a rather negative impact—it prevented them from seeing the political reality that their Empire was doomed.

Kant: The Spectator of the French Revolution

Kant was supportive of the idea of a French Revolution before 1789, the year when the real French Revolution began. He was convinced that the revolution would lead to the rise of a culture of liberty, science, reason, and religious ethics in Europe. But he never publicly voiced his support for the French Revolution and he was shocked when he learned of the massive violence that the revolutionaries were unleashing in France. To his close associates, he used to say with agitation that the revolutionaries were children with weapons who had gone out of control. 

In her book Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt writes: 

“[Kant’s] final position on the French Revolution, an event that played a central role in his old age, when he waited with great impatience every day for the newspapers, was decided by this attitude of the mere spectator, of those "who are not engaged in the game themselves" but only follow it with "wishful, passionate participation," which certainly did not mean, least of all for Kant, that they now wanted to make a revolution; their sym­pathy arose from mere "contemplative pleasure and inactive de­light.”

Thoughts on the Fall of the Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire did not fall due to the crusades but because it had become politically ossified, culturally and religiously confused, and militarily unsustainable. The Byzantine leaders could not judge what the rise of the Ottoman Empire meant for their nation. They thought that they could negotiate and even collaborate with the Ottomans. By the time they realized that negotiations wouldn’t work against the Ottomans, who were determined to conquer everything that the Byzantines had, it was too late. 

The crusaders cannot be held responsible for the rise of the Ottoman Empire either—that was caused by factors related to the ambition and vision of the Ottoman emperors, their ability to take advantage of the opportunities for expansion in the oriental lands and southeastern Europe, their military might, and the geographical and political situation during the Middle Ages. 

There is a gap of 250 years between the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire in 1453—it is hard to draw a connection between the two events. The Latin Empire which followed the 1204 sack of Constantinople lasted for two generations. During this period, the leaders of the Byzantine Empire retreated into smaller states, one of them was the Empire of Nicaea, which reconquered Constantinople in 1261 and proclaimed that the Byzantine Empire had been resurrected. 

The irony is that the resurrection of the Byzantine Empire made it an even better target for the Ottomans, who were as much interested in the legacy of the Byzantines as they were in territory and wealth. The Byzantines ignored the fact that empires always prove easy to proclaim but are hard to govern and defend.

If the Byzantines had visionary politicians, culture leaders, and military commanders, they could have secured their Empire after 1261. But they squandered their time and energy in negotiating with implacable enemies and seeking help from Western Europeans who were themselves powerless against the political ambition and military might of the Ottoman Empire.

On The Political Influence Of Books

“Is it this simple to influence the world. If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize at one effort the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — "My Heart Laid Bare." But — this little book must be true to its title.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe in 1844. 

I disagree with Edgar Allan Poe. It is not simple to influence the world. A book can influence the word only if it appears at the right place, at the right time, and is discovered by the right kind of politicians. Marx could become the great revolutionary philosopher of the twentieth century because politicians like Lenin and Trotsky realized that they could use Marxism to overthrow the regime of Emperor Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov. The success of Lenin and Trotsky in overthrowing the Russian monarchy turned Marxism into the most lethal political weapon of the twentieth century.

Every Marx needs men like Lenin and Trotsky for influencing the destiny of the world.

My Faith in Barbarians

I have great faith in barbarians and none at all in intellectuals. Those who know me will understand that I am saying this because I have read history and philosophy. Civilizations are created by the barbarians and they decline and fall when the intellectuals take control of their politics and culture.

Holy Land: The Fountainhead of Civilization

The idea of a Holy Land is the fountainhead of civilization. The origin of every civilization can be traced to some parcel of land which the founders of that civilization revered as the Holy Land which is worth dying for. When people identify with a Holy Land, they develop a culture and a civilization. There has never been a civilization in which a majority of the people do not identify with a Holy Land. Even the communist nations, which believe in the myth of atheism, have their own Holy Land, where they gather to perform their communist rituals. In Russia (since the time of the Soviet Union), China, and other communist states, the area where the bodies of the communist elite are buried or preserved for display in an embalmed state (like Lenin’s and Mao’s body) are seen as holy shrines. The desire to believe in a Holy Land is the most basic of all desires.

Religion and Science

Science and technology do not possess the power to refute God and religion. This is because a belief in God and religion is not the mark of an irrational, uneducated, and naive mind, as the atheists claim. The religious people are often more well-read, rational, philosophical, and brilliant than those who reject religious belief. 

To prove the existence of their God, many religious thinkers have developed philosophical (theological) theories which are brilliant because they are rationally argued. People believe in God because they are driven by a biological instinct to transcend the material world and find a spiritual explanation for the universe. Some of the best philosophers, scientists, discoverers, and innovators in history were people with a religious bent of mind. The idea that religious people cannot make advancements in science and other intellectual endeavors is simply atheist propaganda. 

The need for God, theology (religion), and Holy Land is more fundamental to human beings than the lust for the marvels of technology.

History Does Not Vindicate The Truth

History is made by the historians and not by the people who participate in the political events of any particular period of time. You might feel certain that the political truth is on your side, that your cause is logical and workable, and that though your cause does not enjoy much support today, history will vindicate your political position. But if the historians of the future are against your type of politics, then you won’t find support in the pages of history either—you will be discarded by history just as, in the present, you are being discarded by your contemporaries.

Who is History’s Favorite Child: the USA or China?

The most important historical event of the nineteenth century was the defeat of Napoleon, since it set the stage for the Pax Britannica (the British Empire became the global hegemonic power). The decline and fall of the British Empire was the most important historical event of the twentieth century, since this century was not about the communist movements (the rise and fall of the Soviet Union) but about anti-imperialism. 

What will be the most important historical event of the twenty-first century? If the USA falls due to a combination of factors, which includes the collapse of its currency, soaring inflation, political scandals, massive civil unrest, and military pressure from its geopolitical adversaries, then that will be the most important historical event. Perhaps history will throw us a surprise and the empire that falls in the twenty-first century will be the one that most intellectuals think is destined to dominate the world in this century and the next: China. 

One thing is certain: Only one civilization will make it to the twenty-second century, either the USA or China. The world is too small for both to coexist.

Runciman’s Judgement of the Crusades

Steven Runciman concludes the final volume (Volume 3) of his A History of the Crusades with this judgement on the two centuries of the crusades: 

“The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself is nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

In geopolitical terms, there is another way of judging the crusades. The massive warfare and colonization attempts during the period of the crusades revitalized the Western civilization which had been slumbering since the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The crusades enabled the West to develop an ideology, it gave them a cause to fight for, it made them aware of their own weaknesses and the strengths of their rivals, and eventually, the hard lessons learned from the crusades enabled the West to develop into a world power.