First Crusade and Modern History
Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)
All,
Was doing some historical research and came across some interesting facts.
Did you know that the impetus of the First Crusade (1099) was driven by Islamic internal strife that was wrecking the Holy Land and the persecution of Christians by the Fatimid caliphate?
During the early years of the 10th century, the Fatimids came to rule most of North Africa and key northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula. They built Cairo to serve as their capital, rivaling/replacing Damascus.
The Fatimids were Shi'a and their rise to power still stands as the high water mark of Shi'a Islam, although current the Islamic Republic of Iran may eventually surpass them.
The Fatimid Shi'a exhibited an extreme intolerance of Christians undoing several centuries of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was destroyed early in the 11th century and life for Christians became continuously more difficult.
Christians were regularly beaten by mobs incited by religious hatred and churches were looted (one story has it that the Holy Grail was stolen at this time and eventually made its way to the Kingdom of Leon in Spain).
Making a bad situation impossible, the Fatimids fought a series of brutal wars with the Sunni Seljic Turks (who ruled Syria, Iraq, Iran and beyond) with the Holy Land as the main battlefield.
In fact, during the decades just prior to the First Crusade, control of Jerusalem had switched from the Fatimids to the Seljiks and then back to the Fatimids.
Christians suffered greatly during these upheavals. The crusades soon followed.
When the Fatimids were overthrown by Saladin in the12th century, the caliph moved to present day Iraq where Baghdad was built and became the new capital.
That remained the capital almost continuously until Baghdad was destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th century (for a short period Raqqah in Syria served at the capital which today is the home of the Islamic State caliphate).
With the destruction of Baghdad, the capital moved back to Cairo until the rise of the Ottomans who moved it to Istanbul where it remained until the Ottoman Empire was replaced by the Republic of Turkey in 1923 thus ending the caliphate (perhaps Erdogan will bring it back?).
When you think about it, one could argue that we are witnessing the most convulsive era the Islamic world has seen in almost a millennia -- a link between today and the 11th century.
