Tea at Trianon: Crusaders: Noble liberators or brutal invaders?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 23, 2009

Crusaders: Noble liberators or brutal invaders?

With my new novel about the Albigensian Crusade just released, this article was of enormous interest to me. Here is an excerpt:

When Pope Urban II called for a Crusade in 1095, he was hoping to accomplish two tasks, says Stark. First, he hoped to liberate the Holy Lands from Muslim control, which Stark says the pope believed was totalitarian and brutal. Second, Urban hoped to give the warring knights of Europe something better to do than kill each other.
"Pacifism would not have flown at that time," he says. While the knights who went on Crusades believed in their faith, they'd also been trained to fight from the time they were children," Stark says.
"These knights did such terrible things that their confessors kept saying, 'I don't know how you will ever atone for this -- why don't you try walking to Jerusalem barefoot.' And they would do it -- they took their faith very seriously."

More HERE.