Customer Reviews

Knights and Armor

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There is a portion of the same book which says that Seljek Turks were "hostile to Christians" and threatened Chrisitan travelers. It further states that the Emperor of Byzantium asked for help from the Pope in Rome and that the Pope (Urban II) called on Christians to go to the Holy Land and free it. Again, the simplified version of history here has implied that the Turks were warring against Christianity and that the Pope fearing for Christians in the Holy Land sought help from the nobles and their armies. What a crock of you-know-what. First of all, the Turks were sweeping across the Anatolian peninsula, conquering land, whether Muslim or Christian. They were actually relatively easy on the people who were dominated. They did not perform wholesale slaughter, because they knew that they needed the people to work the land. Second, Emperor Alexios I, of Byzantium didn't ask the Pope to send hordes of Christian knights. All he wanted
were a few mercenaries to help bolster his defenses of Constantinople. Next, Pope Urban's motives were to stem the wars in Europe by giving the lords there something else on which to vent their destructive tendencies. He couldn't have cared less about what was going on in Jerusalem. Lastly, the nobles weren't concerned with freeing the Holy Land from Muslims, as much as they were looking for new domains to loot. The text in the Usborne book also does not mention that virtually every non-Christian was slaughtered during the taking of Jerusalem by these "holy" crusaders.


I want to make clear that some Usborne books are very good and accurate, when dealing with non-Muslim issues. It may be that the author(s) do not know or realize that they have made such mistakes, and false implications in their books.