Latin Crusade Quotes

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable. What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes. I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

when Latin crusading armies arrived in the Near East to wage what essentially were frontier wars, they were not actually invading the heartlands of Islam. Instead, they were fighting for control of a land that, in some respects, was also a Muslim frontier,

You know what ‘congregate’ means? It’s from the Latin. ‘Greg’ means herd. ‘Con’ means with. We’re with our herd.

Islam had, from its earliest days, embraced warfare. Muhammad himself prosecuted a series of military campaigns while subjugating Mecca, and the explosive expansion of the Muslim world during the seventh and eighth centuries was fuelled by an avowed devotional obligation to spread Islamic rule. The union of faith and violence within the Muslim religion, therefore, was more rapid and natural than that which gradually developed in Latin Christianity.

The first Latin up a ladder was Aubery Clements, marshal of France, one of Philip’s leading knights. It was said later among the Christians’ forces that, before climbing the breach, Aubery had called out defiantly: ‘Either I shall die today, or God willing, I will enter Acre.

Using numbers compiled by the US-funded Freedom House organization, historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960 to 1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America "vastly exceeded" the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.

In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them. Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.

It is time, however, to consider the special part destined to be played by England in the drama of the Mussulman future. England, if I understand her history rightly, stands towards Islam in a position quite apart from that of the rest of the European States. These I have described as continuing a tradition of aggression inherited from the Crusades, and from the bitter wars waged by the Latin and Greek Empires against the growing power of the Ottoman Turks. In the latter England took no part, her religious schism having already separated her from the general interests of Catholic Europe, while she had withdrawn from the former in the still honourable stage of the adventure, and consequently remained with no humiliating memories to avenge. She came, therefore, into her modern relations with Mohammedans unprejudiced against them, and able to treat their religious and political opinions in a humane and liberal spirit, seeking of them practical advantages of trade rather than conquest. Nor has the special nature of her position towards them been unappreciated by Mohammedans.

The Crusaders come to one immediate decision. They decide that the Orthodox Greek Christians, the Georgian Christians, the Armenian Christians and the Jacobite Christians no longer could hold services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Only the Latin rite could be celebrated in Jerusalem.

While Saladin is attacking Reynald at Kerak: "As it happens, Raynald is hosting a wedding party for his wife's son, Humphrey of Toron, and princess Isabelle, King Baldwin's half sister, who is eleven years old.The pounding continues increasingly, but the guests have traveled from all over the Latin East for this party and they are not about to put an end to the festivities over a mere Moslem attack. Finally, Lady Stephanie, Raynald's wife, has her servants take some dishes from the wedding feast to Saladin's tent. Saladin is delighted to receive the gifts and offers profuse thanks to lady Stephanie. He then ask where the newly weds will be spending the night. When the servants point out the location, Saladin orders his army not to bombard that tower until morning.

Baybars hated Christians generally, but his loathing knew no bounds where Latin Europeans were concerned. When he captured Antioch in 1268, he wrote to the city’s crusader ruler that, had he not escaped, [y]ou would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of false Testaments scattered, the patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling over the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes.

The Crusades were a notorious waste of lives and reputations. However, economically and culturally they were an undeniable success. They opened up Latin Christendom to trade with the more affluent world of Byzantine Greece and Islam. New goods and products entered ports and cities. A new affluent lifestyle caught the imagination of Europe’s nobility. They began wearing silk gowns and perfume, eating food laced with Asian spices, playing chess and polo, listening to music played on lutes and rebecs, and reading new forms of poetry and literature—as well as taking regular baths, a custom borrowed from the East.

During the barbarian invasions and the Dark Ages that followed, the power to read and write Latin became the privileged property of a tiny few. It was only the relentless reproduction of Boethius’s works, by generations of forgotten monks and scribes from Subiaco and Monte Cassino in Italy to Kells in Ireland, that allowed some fragments of that Greek legacy to enter the Western consciousness. When writers talk about the monks of Ireland “saving civilization,” this is what they mean: how from the age of Charlemagne to the Crusades, they copied and recopied the manuscripts of Boethius, alongside Saint Augustine, Cicero and Virgil, and Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible.

When the great conqueror Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 CE, the pact between warrior kings and the Latin Church was cemented, and by the eleventh century Christianity—in the West at least—was a religion happy to embrace those who killed and maimed, so long as they did so with respect for the liturgies—and the property—of the Church.

The men and women who took part in these penitential wars in the hope of spiritual salvation were known in Latin as crucesignati—those signed with the cross.

Not surprisingly, the crusaders developed an intense hatred of Greek fire. One unfortunate Turkish emir thus paid a heavy price when wounded in a skirmish beside a Frankish siege tower. He had been carrying a container of Greek fire, hoping to destroy the engine, but now a Latin knight ‘stretched him out on the ground, emptying the contents of the phial on his private parts, so that his genitals were burned’.

Most awkwardly, in the middle of all this [the Vietnam War], TIME reported that a group secretly financed by the CIA had funded Graham's Latin American crusade, which came as a complete surprise to Graham and prompted a repudiation: "I would never accept funds from any government agency," he declared, "especially the CIA.

by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1261. The Latin Christians, who diverted from their original goal of capturing the Holy Land,

Charles Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal-defense planning for Presidents Johnson and Kennedy from 1961–66 and is now an associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described U.S. trainees in Latin America as “indistinguishable from the war criminals hanged at Nuremberg after World War II,”* adding that “for the United States, which led the crusade against the Nazi evil, to support the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads is an outrage.

The influence of the langues d’oc and d’oïl produced a situation in which French had started exporting itself even before it had become a fully developed language with a coherent writing system. Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Romance impressed itself on Europe as the language of worldly business, helping to relegate Latin to the religious sphere, although the latter did remain a language of science and philosophy for many more centuries. In the Mediterranean region, fishermen, sailors and merchants used a rudimentary version of langue d’oc mixed with Italian that people called the lingua franca (“Frankish language”), and over time this spoken language soaked up influences from Italian, Spanish and Turkish. (Today a lingua franca is any common language used in economics, diplomacy or science, in a context where it is not a mother tongue.) The Mediterranean lingua franca never evolved into anyone’s mother tongue, which is why there are very few written traces of it. A rare rendition of it appears in a seventeenth-century comedy by the French playwright Molière, who had been a wandering actor before he entered Louis XIV’s Court. In his Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman), Molière creates the character of a fake Turk who speaks in lingua franca (for obvious comical effect): Se ti sabir, / Ti respondir; se non sabir, / Tazir, Tazir. Mi star Mufti / Ti qui star ti? Non intendir, / Tazir, tazir. If you know, / you must respond. If you don’t know, / you must shut up. I am the Mufti, / who are you? I don’t understand; / shut up, shut up.2 It was the Crusades, which were dominated by the French, that turned lingua franca into the dominant language in the Mediterranean. More than half a dozen Crusades were carried out over nearly three centuries. Many Germans and English also participated, but the Arabs uniformly referred to the Crusaders as Franj, caring little whether they said oc, oïl, ja or yes. Interestingly, Arabic, the language of the common enemy, gave French roughly a thousand terms, including amiral (admiral), alcool (alcohol), coton (cotton) and sirop (syrup). The great prevalence of Arabic words in French scientific language—terms such as algèbre (algebra), alchimie (alchemy) and zéro (zero)—underlines the fact that the Arabs were definitely at the cutting edge of knowledge at the time.

After the capture of another place, La Minerve, about 140 believers were found, women in one house, men in another, engaged in prayer as they awaited their doom. De Montfort had a great pile of wood prepared, and told them to be converted to the Catholic faith or mount that pile. They answered that they owned no papal or priestly authority, only that of Christ and His Word. The fire was lighted and the confessors, without hesitation, entered the flames. It was near this spot, in the neighbourhood of Narbonne, that the Inquisition was established (1210), under the superintendence of Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. When, at the Council of Toulouse (1229) it was made a permanent institution, the Bible, excepting only the Latin Psalter, was forbidden to the laity, and it was decreed that they might have no part of it translated into their own languages. The Inquisition finished what the crusade had left undone.

Do you happen to remember me, young man?’ asked the archbishop kindly, surprisingly speaking in French instead of Latin. ‘No, Monseigneur, I cannot honestly say that I do,’ replied Arn with embarrassment, looking at the ground.