Yup. Hunting down and slaughtering Jews, man, woman and child, was totally justifiable. Teach us our racist, trash lessons.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...0QFjAE&usg=AFQjCNG9rOxCqX8Fq0j3nPX-vMxEwLdrLA
Good article.
It underlines the fact that superstitious and emotionally charged peoples,
when threatened with invasion, and susceptable to xenophobia,
will sometimes take the law into their own hands,
and act out violently on minorities.
As the author shows, this was not ordered nor sanctioned by the Crusades,
and more importantly, most of the local violence against Jews, Gypsies,
and other minorities was done not by Crusaders at all, but unorganized
local mobs of peasants and villagers.
The local violence against Jews and other minorities was horrific,
and tragic, but not authorized nor sanctioned by the Crusades,
nor carried out by the Crusader forces.
In a similar way, many people in Europe were persecuted by secular authorities,
as witches and heretics throughout
the Inquisition,
but the church itself did not for the most part arrest people or carry out
sentences. These punishments were done by local constables, secular princes,
with sentencing often carried out by secular courts,
and town sherriffs, using existing laws.
In some cases, roving bands of thugs under the authority of an Abbott
or Bishop or cardinal would scour the land for heretics,
but this was largely a ploy to confiscate property under pretext.
The Inquisition itself began as an honest inquiry into heresy and unfair
commercial practices such as unregulated money-lending etc.
Sadly, it was quickly corrupted into a large-scale nightmare.
This was fueled in large part by the belief that confessions under torture
must be real, and that this was a legitimate way to discover truth.
It has taken centuries for us to learn that confessions under duress
and torture are not worth very much in themselves.
To this day, the lesson has not been learned in some circles.
We can come away with a more nuanced and complex view of the Crusades,
and not succumb to oversimplified stereotyping of the Crusades
as aggressive and wrong.
In fact the Crusades were an emergency defensvie measure against Islamic conquest.