Heyo
Veteran Member
Yeah, but the former happened 250 years after the later.They lost Constantinople to the Turks (because of the Venetians/4th Crusade)
1204 - the crusaders ransacked Constantinopel
1453 - the Ottomans took the city
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Mediaeval Thread
- Thread starter Rival
- Start date
1204 - the crusaders ransacked Constantinopel
1453 - the Ottomans took the city
Heyo
Veteran Member
Why was there so little iron and steel in the high medieval period?
That was a question that bugged me for quite some time and though it is not canon afaik, the answer from Arne, archaeologist, smith and charcoal burner, convinced me.
The use of iron and steel in Europe took a deep dip during the period from about 1100 to 1350. The usual personal knife before that was a Sax, about 25 cm of fine steel, after that the "Nierendolch" (bollock dagger), about 20 cm long, was en vogue. Between those times, no personal knife longer than 11 cm was found. The bindings of buckets and barrels were willow in the high medieval times and steel was a rare commodity overall.
The explanation is the medieval climate optimum. Times were good, harvests were relatively save and the population grew. Advances in agriculture (crop rotation, new plows) did their part. Many towns and cities with names ending in -rode (a place were land was cleared, trees uprooted) were founded during that time. Most of the forests were cut down for fields and meadows, the wood used for building.
Less wood was available for charcoal burning (and there are fewer findings of kiln for that period). That meant less steel production and the available steel had to be distributed to more people. (Inherited Sax were cut in pieces so that every child could have a personal knife.)
That was a question that bugged me for quite some time and though it is not canon afaik, the answer from Arne, archaeologist, smith and charcoal burner, convinced me.
The use of iron and steel in Europe took a deep dip during the period from about 1100 to 1350. The usual personal knife before that was a Sax, about 25 cm of fine steel, after that the "Nierendolch" (bollock dagger), about 20 cm long, was en vogue. Between those times, no personal knife longer than 11 cm was found. The bindings of buckets and barrels were willow in the high medieval times and steel was a rare commodity overall.
The explanation is the medieval climate optimum. Times were good, harvests were relatively save and the population grew. Advances in agriculture (crop rotation, new plows) did their part. Many towns and cities with names ending in -rode (a place were land was cleared, trees uprooted) were founded during that time. Most of the forests were cut down for fields and meadows, the wood used for building.
Less wood was available for charcoal burning (and there are fewer findings of kiln for that period). That meant less steel production and the available steel had to be distributed to more people. (Inherited Sax were cut in pieces so that every child could have a personal knife.)
Heyo
Veteran Member
John Waller, working with the Royal Armouries of Leeds, not only shows sword fighting but also teaches it. I had the honour to attend one of his seminaries.
The Leeds Armoury has so many swords that they gave some to him for practice so we could train with originals. (Very carefully. Though they were dulled the edge is still too narrow for serious training.)
Augustus
…
Augustus
…
[copy/paste from an old post but may be of interest]
Another misconception is that in popular culture, the sack of Jerusalem by the crusaders in 1099 is often presented as an act of singular brutality. It is then contrasted with the retaking of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187 which is presented as being magnanimous and chivalric. Neither of these are particularly accurate though.
In addition, such images are also co-opted to support modern political agendas, which is all the more reason to highlight why they are wrong.
First, and most importantly, the comparison is completely invalid in the first place as it compares apples to oranges. The crusaders took the city by force, while the Muslims retook it via a negotiated surrender. This makes a world of difference.
In medieval warfare, trying to take a walled city was no cakewalk. A siege could take many months, and maintaining one for this long was never a given as it was no picnic for the besiegers either who often faced great hardships. The other option, trying to capture the city by force was a perilous task, likely resulting in very heavy casualties for the attackers and again by no means certain to succeed.
Based on this reality, certain norms appeared in siege warfare regarding a 3rd option: negotiated surrender, which was promoted by 2 means: carrot and stick.
The carrot generally required [many of] those inside to retain their life and liberty, usually in exchange for some form of tribute and/or subjugation, otherwise why else would you surrender? The stick was that if you made them take it by force, you could expect no mercy when the city fell, inhabitants would be massacred or enslaved.
Given the nature of medieval warfare, such tactics were clearly logical and probably contributed to fewer overall deaths than the alternatives.
When Jerusalem was taken by the crusaders, it followed a siege, during which the rulers had been calling for Muslim armies to come to their aid and kill the besiegers, which obviously worried the crusaders. The attackers had also suffered significant casualties when they eventually took the city, and under these circumstances the norms of warfare meant a massacre would be expected.
When this happened it was certainly brutal but not abnormally so. It is often portrayed that the Crusaders massacred close to the entire population, but this is not correct. Jewish sources, for example, show significant numbers of people ransomed. In addition, some Muslims who surrendered were granted passage. While accurate numbers don't exist, it would be much closer to 25% than 85%.
Interestingly, Christian sources actually overstate the severity of the massacre which is why it is often believed to have been worse than it was. This often seems counterintuitive to the modern mind where we expect atrocities to be downplayed or covered up, but was a common feature in the pre-modern world.
The laws of warfare stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.
Simon Sebag-Montefiore - Jerusalem: The Biography
Overall, it was a brutal sacking of a city which is repellent to modern sensibilities, but was par for the course in Medieval times.
In contrast, the city being retaken by the forces of Saladin is often portrayed as very chivalrous and civilised, and is contrasted to the crusaders sack as an example of the nobility of Saladin (and nowadays, to make a point about 21st C politics). This is also somewhat of a myth though, and derives not from Islamic sources, but Victorian romanticised ideas of Saladin as a 'noble savage' popularised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott in The Talisman.
Although it is out of fashion to portray Saladin as a holy warrior lusting for Christian blood, this is precisely how he appears in the admiring biographies written about him by his household officers Baha ad-Din Ibn Shaddad and ‘Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani; the same is true of the portrait of Saladin that emerges from the Kamil at-Tawarikh (The Epitome of Histories) of the more critical Ibn al-Athir. ‘Imad ad-Din relates admiringly how two days after Hattin, Saladin sat on his dais and watched on with joy as a whole band of scholars, Sufis, ascetics, and other devout men took turns slashing away at captured Templars and Hospitallers. “How many ills did he cure by the ills brought upon a Templar.” Exults Imad ad-Din. “I saw how he killed unbelief to give life to Islam,and destroyed polytheism to build monotheism”
At first, Saladin demanded an unconditional surrender as the only alternative to it being taken by force . Concessions were only offered after Balian, who was in charge of the defence, threatened to kill every Muslim in the city and destroy every Muslim holy site before the city fell. Only then were terms for a negotiated surrender grudgingly offered.
The Muslim warrior elite shared with the Franks an ethos of reciprocity, and the two together, religious zeal and the drive to avenge injury, brought an enormous pressure to bear upon Saladin in 1187 to take Jerusalem by storm rather than accept surrender, to deal with the Franks just as the Franks had dealt with the population of Jerusalem when they had taken it almost a century earlier, “with murder and enslavement and other savageries!” ‘Imad ad-Din assures his readers that in response to Balian of Ibelin’s plea to spare the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Saladin responded, “Neither amnesty nor mercy for you! Our only desire is to inflict perpetual subjection upon you. ... We shall kill and capture you wholesale, spill men’s blood and reduce the poor and women to slavery.”
Both Ibn al-Athir and ‘Imad ad-Din explain that the only reason that Saladin failed to carry through on his threats is because Balian countered with his own. As recounted by Ibn al-Athir, Balian, despairing of obtaining the sultan’s mercy, declared:
“Know, O Sultan, that there are very many of us in this city, God alone knows how many. At the moment we are fighting half-heartedly in the hope of saving our lives, hoping to be spared by you as you have spared others; this is because of our horror of death and our love of life. But if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold – 5,000 of them – and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honour, or win a noble victory!”
Faced with the spectre of the destruction of Islam’s shrines and the slaughter of thousands of Muslims, Saladin called a council of his advisers. “All of them were in favour,” Ibn al-Athir writes, “of granting the assurances requested by the Franks, without forcing them to take extreme measures whose outcome could not be foreseen.” Saladin saw the wisdom of this counsel and began negotiations although in his inimitable inflated style. This apparently was the “official version” of the surrender emanating from Saladin’s camp.
Cultural Representation and the Practice of War in the Middle Ages - Richard Abels
Journal of Medieval Military History
As a condition for surrender, the population could pay a ransom to be allowed to leave, although up to 15,000 were eventually enslaved as they couldn't afford the payment. It is generally believed that Saladin was relatively generous in setting the level of the charge, and did allow people who paid to leave with their possessions and gave them safe passage, but he was hardly the paragon of virtue he is often portrayed as.
So, while it is quite common to see these stories repeated today, they are almost always presented inaccurately or completely out of context as both sides basically did exactly what was expected in the circumstances.
Another misconception is that in popular culture, the sack of Jerusalem by the crusaders in 1099 is often presented as an act of singular brutality. It is then contrasted with the retaking of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187 which is presented as being magnanimous and chivalric. Neither of these are particularly accurate though.
In addition, such images are also co-opted to support modern political agendas, which is all the more reason to highlight why they are wrong.
First, and most importantly, the comparison is completely invalid in the first place as it compares apples to oranges. The crusaders took the city by force, while the Muslims retook it via a negotiated surrender. This makes a world of difference.
In medieval warfare, trying to take a walled city was no cakewalk. A siege could take many months, and maintaining one for this long was never a given as it was no picnic for the besiegers either who often faced great hardships. The other option, trying to capture the city by force was a perilous task, likely resulting in very heavy casualties for the attackers and again by no means certain to succeed.
Based on this reality, certain norms appeared in siege warfare regarding a 3rd option: negotiated surrender, which was promoted by 2 means: carrot and stick.
The carrot generally required [many of] those inside to retain their life and liberty, usually in exchange for some form of tribute and/or subjugation, otherwise why else would you surrender? The stick was that if you made them take it by force, you could expect no mercy when the city fell, inhabitants would be massacred or enslaved.
Given the nature of medieval warfare, such tactics were clearly logical and probably contributed to fewer overall deaths than the alternatives.
When Jerusalem was taken by the crusaders, it followed a siege, during which the rulers had been calling for Muslim armies to come to their aid and kill the besiegers, which obviously worried the crusaders. The attackers had also suffered significant casualties when they eventually took the city, and under these circumstances the norms of warfare meant a massacre would be expected.
When this happened it was certainly brutal but not abnormally so. It is often portrayed that the Crusaders massacred close to the entire population, but this is not correct. Jewish sources, for example, show significant numbers of people ransomed. In addition, some Muslims who surrendered were granted passage. While accurate numbers don't exist, it would be much closer to 25% than 85%.
Interestingly, Christian sources actually overstate the severity of the massacre which is why it is often believed to have been worse than it was. This often seems counterintuitive to the modern mind where we expect atrocities to be downplayed or covered up, but was a common feature in the pre-modern world.
The laws of warfare stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.
Simon Sebag-Montefiore - Jerusalem: The Biography
Overall, it was a brutal sacking of a city which is repellent to modern sensibilities, but was par for the course in Medieval times.
In contrast, the city being retaken by the forces of Saladin is often portrayed as very chivalrous and civilised, and is contrasted to the crusaders sack as an example of the nobility of Saladin (and nowadays, to make a point about 21st C politics). This is also somewhat of a myth though, and derives not from Islamic sources, but Victorian romanticised ideas of Saladin as a 'noble savage' popularised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott in The Talisman.
Although it is out of fashion to portray Saladin as a holy warrior lusting for Christian blood, this is precisely how he appears in the admiring biographies written about him by his household officers Baha ad-Din Ibn Shaddad and ‘Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani; the same is true of the portrait of Saladin that emerges from the Kamil at-Tawarikh (The Epitome of Histories) of the more critical Ibn al-Athir. ‘Imad ad-Din relates admiringly how two days after Hattin, Saladin sat on his dais and watched on with joy as a whole band of scholars, Sufis, ascetics, and other devout men took turns slashing away at captured Templars and Hospitallers. “How many ills did he cure by the ills brought upon a Templar.” Exults Imad ad-Din. “I saw how he killed unbelief to give life to Islam,and destroyed polytheism to build monotheism”
At first, Saladin demanded an unconditional surrender as the only alternative to it being taken by force . Concessions were only offered after Balian, who was in charge of the defence, threatened to kill every Muslim in the city and destroy every Muslim holy site before the city fell. Only then were terms for a negotiated surrender grudgingly offered.
The Muslim warrior elite shared with the Franks an ethos of reciprocity, and the two together, religious zeal and the drive to avenge injury, brought an enormous pressure to bear upon Saladin in 1187 to take Jerusalem by storm rather than accept surrender, to deal with the Franks just as the Franks had dealt with the population of Jerusalem when they had taken it almost a century earlier, “with murder and enslavement and other savageries!” ‘Imad ad-Din assures his readers that in response to Balian of Ibelin’s plea to spare the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Saladin responded, “Neither amnesty nor mercy for you! Our only desire is to inflict perpetual subjection upon you. ... We shall kill and capture you wholesale, spill men’s blood and reduce the poor and women to slavery.”
Both Ibn al-Athir and ‘Imad ad-Din explain that the only reason that Saladin failed to carry through on his threats is because Balian countered with his own. As recounted by Ibn al-Athir, Balian, despairing of obtaining the sultan’s mercy, declared:
“Know, O Sultan, that there are very many of us in this city, God alone knows how many. At the moment we are fighting half-heartedly in the hope of saving our lives, hoping to be spared by you as you have spared others; this is because of our horror of death and our love of life. But if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold – 5,000 of them – and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honour, or win a noble victory!”
Faced with the spectre of the destruction of Islam’s shrines and the slaughter of thousands of Muslims, Saladin called a council of his advisers. “All of them were in favour,” Ibn al-Athir writes, “of granting the assurances requested by the Franks, without forcing them to take extreme measures whose outcome could not be foreseen.” Saladin saw the wisdom of this counsel and began negotiations although in his inimitable inflated style. This apparently was the “official version” of the surrender emanating from Saladin’s camp.
Cultural Representation and the Practice of War in the Middle Ages - Richard Abels
Journal of Medieval Military History
As a condition for surrender, the population could pay a ransom to be allowed to leave, although up to 15,000 were eventually enslaved as they couldn't afford the payment. It is generally believed that Saladin was relatively generous in setting the level of the charge, and did allow people who paid to leave with their possessions and gave them safe passage, but he was hardly the paragon of virtue he is often portrayed as.
So, while it is quite common to see these stories repeated today, they are almost always presented inaccurately or completely out of context as both sides basically did exactly what was expected in the circumstances.
I have this book. I'll need to dive into it some more.
Augustus
…
I saw one article that noted there were more trials in places where Protestants and Catholics were in competition rather than in areas where one side one dominant over the other.
The greater the degree of uncertainty, often the more superstitious the people (and consequently the greater the opportunity for those who 'solve' problems related to superstitions)
One person I remember compared the witch trials to the 'woke' madness now - a big fad of finding the racists/bigots/phobes etc. The hysteria does seem somewhat comparable.
amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
Or like the robin hood story, or the life of merlin, which is a short book I read a few times. One wonders if they had much of a place to hide.. or did they find deep tracts of woods that might have still existed, here and there. Pigs and cows might blow the cover in a lot of places, kind of sculpting out the lower parts of the woods
More like finding the people who wouldn't submit to religious purity tests, or as an excuse to off people with nontraditional views (at least some of which were espoused in bouts of what was likely mental illness), and a lot of women who had children outside wedlock. Towards the latter 17th century it was almost exclusively 'women who wouldn't do something a man said.' So I guess it's more like they were executed for being woke.
Last edited:
You are correct about Central Europe. Medieval England was much more strict with land husbandry and arable land not used for farms (who conducted most of their business with the church anyway) was considered property of the king. Especially since arborist needed to maintain forest-sized farms for lumber in very specific ways. You could get dispensation to graze on or hunt on king's land but you needed to be in good standing with both king and church. And it usually costed you. As did most everything else by the Tudor period. Including the various church and king-owned water mills used for grinding, fulling cloth, etc, as well as large bread ovens and even kilns.
Last edited:
Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
Yes, a lot of people have really ludicrous, counterfactual ideas about leftism, including an ongoing paranoid narrative about "woke madness", "political correctness gone mad", "woke witch trials" and other, similarly spurious bedtime stories to scare their fellow conservatives with.
What I am puzzled is why you would bring this up in a thread about the Middle Ages, considering that the Witch Craze was a feature that was far more prominent in Reformation era than at any point of the historical Middle Ages.
The Holy Inquisition, which was the institution most frequently dealing with accusations of witchcraft in continental Europe during the historical Middle Ages, largely ignored these cases in favor of dealing with heretic faiths whom they considered far more dangerous to the primary of the Catholic Church. Specifically, the Waldensians, Cathars, Beggar's orders etc. faced much more concerted persecution during that era than any alleged "witches". That would only change after the publication of Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum, at the tail end of the 15th century, but even then, arrests of "witches" didn't really reach the intensity they did during the Reformation era.
On the British Isles, it wasn't even the Inquisition that dealt with these issues in the first place - as far as I know, witchcraft was considered a secular crime there, and dealt with by local lords or royal agents instead. It was only with the Protestant Reformation that witch trials really picked up in volume and frequency all over Europe, what with the entire concept of a unified Christianity having been so thoroughly undermined that many people genuinely believed they were living in the end times (and considering the many religiously motivated persecutions, deportations and massacres of the era, I can somewhat sympathize with that notion).
Last edited:
Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
I'm pretty sure the latter practice existed in most of continental Europe as well, but as far as I know, at least in the Holy Roman Empire - being much more politically fragmented than England after the Norman conquest - most of that revenue would be collected by the local lord of the land, with the Emperor being largely left out of the loop.
My understanding is also that England re-introduced a cash economy earlier than many other places in Europe, where many peasants would still pay their dues in labor rather than money. In Central and East Europe, serfdom and the practice of taxation via forced labor remained widespread long after it had been phased out in most of Western Europe, being formally abolished in e.g. Germany and the Habsburg Empire only with the revolutions of 1848, and even later in Russia and Poland, around 1860 if I remember correctly.
Last edited:
Heyo
Veteran Member
Rise and Fall of the Feudal System - a Hypothesis
The feudal system was originally a civil contract into which the "rulers" and the "ruled" agreed with benefits for both sides. The knights were professional fighters, responsible for keeping the citizens save. Only those who owned land had to fight in wars. For that they were paid by the citizens in taxes (mostly goods and services).
That contract was broken by the nobility when they stopped fighting themselves and conscripted peasants for war.
The feudal system was originally a civil contract into which the "rulers" and the "ruled" agreed with benefits for both sides. The knights were professional fighters, responsible for keeping the citizens save. Only those who owned land had to fight in wars. For that they were paid by the citizens in taxes (mostly goods and services).
That contract was broken by the nobility when they stopped fighting themselves and conscripted peasants for war.
Last edited:
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
The later part of the 17th century would have been the time of the Salem Witch Trials (1693). It is one of the last ones to ever happen, but no one was safe from it, with there being no aspects of it being exclusively women.
And even before then witch trials had fallen so out of favor they had been outlawed in many places, strongly frowned upon and discouraged in some, and some places not having one for so long they fell out of favor and use. The Salem trials are indeed a strange event on many levels.
Amd they weren't executed for being woke. Some of it was jealousy, were pretty sure class and property was a part of it, and mass hysteria.
Overall, it seems to me the "woke" crowd of purity tests, demanding pure societies, and turning even minor and trivial things into a major offense is who was doing the trials.
There are, afterall, many reasons I go on about wokishness being very similar to conservative protestant evangelicals. The woke crowd doesn't kill people though, they kill careers and wrongly judge and condemn. Just as the witch trials.
Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
Indeed, the bad things we remember about the witch trials are that some influential men lost their careers.
Since we're now making light of genocide, does anybody else feel that people disagreeing with one another is exactly like World War Two?
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
I can't name one guy who lost his career over it. I can name a few who lost their life, however.Indeed, the bad things we remember about the witch trials are that some influential men lost their careers.
Kooky
Freedom from Sanity
Really? How many men had their lives ended by "the woke crowd", to use your terminology?
What's the current death toll of the SJW's genocide against men and women of insufficient wokeness?
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
Really? The discussion was on witch trials with it being said the witch trials resemble to woke crowd who demands purity and conformity. Much the what was at the center of much religious oppression over the millennia.
As for the woke SJdubs, their damage count includes many careers, including those wrongly blamed, such as Middle Eastern Muslims who fled those lands for their lives and get criticized themselves for it, up to be called "Sam Harris' house Muslim."(they're also very hypocritical and live by double standards, much like the Crusaders and Inquisitors and witch trial judges).
Augustus
…
Indeed, the bad things we remember about the witch trials are that some influential men lost their careers.
Since we're now making light of genocide
What makes you categorise the witch trials as a genocide?
A few hundred people a year across Europe from no specific community or social grouping wouldn't seem to meet any meaningful usage of the term.