Is Crusading a uniquely Catholic thing?
- Thread starter Winston Smith
- Start date
Well, you'd first need to have a state that is Jewish enough to be willing, and powerful enough to be able. A Jewish Crusade (or a Starofdavidade, if you will) will probably not be about spreading Judaism into infidel lands, because that's not what Judaism is about. I can see it most likely driven by attempts to liberate fellow Jews from religious persecution.
It is what Judaism used to be about.
Milkhemet Mitzvah and Milkhemet Reshut wars are basically crusades or 'jihads'.
No. A fairly early patriarch ruled out that kind of thing.
Yup. When Nikephoros Phokas, I believe, wanted his dead soldiers considered martyrs, because they died in battle against the Muslims, he was definitively told no.
The problem is that the definition of "Crusade" outside a Western Christian context is kind of complicated.
For example, Islam has the "Jihad" concept, that can be similar in certain ways and contexts and completely different in other ways and contexts.
It is broader and narrower at the same time.
The "Crusades" of the Middle Ages were a specific historical phenomenon and that notion just made no sense outside Western Christianity. In Early Modern times, the concept appeared, applied to a different context but arguably still recognizable, in the context of some wars between the Turks and several Catholic powers. It can be usefully expanded to encompass some aspects of the Early Modern european colonial expansion, and is surely relevant when discussing Iberian expansion against Muslims in the Peninsula and in North Africa or beyond.
You can have broadly similar phenomena in Eastern Cristianity. Actually, if using the idea as broadly as I am doing, you can argue that some conflicts in the history of Eastern Christianity IOTL may be labeled "crusades". I doubt that this word adds much to our understanding of those phenomena.
For example, Islam has the "Jihad" concept, that can be similar in certain ways and contexts and completely different in other ways and contexts.
It is broader and narrower at the same time.
The "Crusades" of the Middle Ages were a specific historical phenomenon and that notion just made no sense outside Western Christianity. In Early Modern times, the concept appeared, applied to a different context but arguably still recognizable, in the context of some wars between the Turks and several Catholic powers. It can be usefully expanded to encompass some aspects of the Early Modern european colonial expansion, and is surely relevant when discussing Iberian expansion against Muslims in the Peninsula and in North Africa or beyond.
You can have broadly similar phenomena in Eastern Cristianity. Actually, if using the idea as broadly as I am doing, you can argue that some conflicts in the history of Eastern Christianity IOTL may be labeled "crusades". I doubt that this word adds much to our understanding of those phenomena.
Of note, Japan had a similar forms of religious based warfare from some Buddhist sects, the yamabushi(?) soldiers....
In many ways
Emperor Heraclius's war with the Sassanids could be, and has been, considered the first real Crusade.
Emperor Heraclius's war with the Sassanids could be, and has been, considered the first real Crusade.
Wolfpaw
Banned
Indeed; Eastern Orthodox history is very uneasy with the concept of "Holy War" and finds it hypocritical, self-serving, and generally odious.
This did not, of course, stop Ivan Grozny from launching--what was for all intents and purposes--a Crusade while tsar.
Definitely. Many alt-historians (myself included!) tend to assume: keep the Christians around long enough, and sooner or later they're going to start crusadin'.
Specifically, they arose out of the idea of pilgrimage. Outside the context of war in the Holy Land - and even more specifically, to retake Jerusalem - the phenomenon is not going to occur, at least not in any recognizable way. Crusading began as an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem (something the Byzantines certainly did not anticipate when they requested military aid!), and then expanded to cover other kinds of wars in other places.
Yes. The movement, as it were, spread and eventually got beyond the control of the people who first conceived it. And ideas from the original Holy Land crusades were applied elsewhere.