If you want to avoid the Levantine crusades w/ a PoD after 1000 AD

If you want to stop the Crusades after 1000 AD


  • Total voters
    67

GdwnsnHo

Banned
The point is not about Crusaders being needed by Byzantines, the point is about Crusaders being convinced they are needed to deal with a growingly more unstable situation that prevents the safety of more and more popular Palestinian pilgrimages while that the fusion between milites mentality and classical medieval Christianism is already done.

Fair play - but if there are too few to capture everything on their own, or there is only the Pilgrims crusade, they may not succeed, and fall upon the ERE for help/training for which the ERE would most certainly expect to be their overlords.

Actually, the question is how much they wanted to reclaim their old turf : there's reasons why they allied with Fatimids, why they didn't pushed too much on Syria (preferring making the Emirate of Alep a client), why Basile II failed to take Tripoli, Roman III being humiliated face to the pocket dynasty of Mirdasids while trying to annex Alep, etc.
Without mentioning the Norman and Pechengeg pressure on their western borders in the same time, we can ask indeed at which point Byzantines didn't felt they had to limit their expansion, and focus on more strategical regions (such as Armenia) or places more christianized (Armenia being such far more than XIth Syria or Palestine).

I guess you have me trumped here, not that solid on my Crusader-Period Byzantium.

So far, arguing of a more important disorder in Middle-East (that wouldn't be that much different from the IOTL situation) wouldn't logically lead to Byzzie-wank.

Byzzie-wank-wise, I'll totally concede - but I think you're overlooking how much more chaotic the middle east would be - rather than 2 states competing to be the Caliph, you have 3 claimants, the ruling Caliph, with a Persia-Seljuk war on the side that could become another - that is just disorder, that is carnage. The region would bleed itself dry, and then external forces come along.

(Shame butterflies may well kill of Saladin, it'd be great to see an assertive Kurdish state at this point led by him emerge from the chaos, but I digress).

That's, and I'm sorry to say that, is basically wishful thinking.
Once again, the whole Xth and XIth history of Middle-East was about civil wars and geopolitical disorders. It never allowed Byzantines to appear like saviors of the day, or made their campaigns in the region easier or in anyway "amicable occupation".

Even the occupation of Armenia was met with quite big hostility from Armenians, which shared more features with Byzantines than any other people around, but Arab/Arabized Syrian and Mesopotamian populations would have simply accepted if not welcomed Byzantine troops? I, to say the least, have a really hard time swallowing this pill.

Ok, I was being drastically optimistic there.

I'll concede that utter chaos may not have been the levantine-crusade diversion I thought it might have been.
 
Top