CONTENTS
6.1. Eastern and Western Christianity: A Background of Separation
6.2. How did the Crusades Start?
6.3. First Crusade and Norman Anti-Hellenism
6.4. Second Crusade against the Greek Empire
6.5. Third Round: Venetian, Norman and German invasions
6.6. The Fourth Raid of the Antichrist
6.7. The Eastern Christian Counter-offensive
Summary
The wars between the invading Germanic tribes and the Greco-Roman Empire for the control of Italy lasted for centuries and provided the pretext for the Schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. By the eleventh century, Norman mercenaries had betrayed their Greek employers and had established their control of southern Italy. During the same period a number of German and French mercenary armies in Asia Minor were betraying their Greek employers to the benefit of the invading Islamic tribes.
The Crusaders against Christianity brings to light evidence deriving from medieval sources which goes against well-established academic theories and reveals that all first four Crusades aimed at the capture of Constantinople, the richest city and capital of Europe for a number of centuries. During the same period the Western Europeans were attacking from the west and the north, Islam was instructing many Asian and African peoples to attack the Greeks from the east and the south. After centuries of never-ending wars, and thanks to synchronized attacks of countless barbarian tribes coming from every direction for booty, the mighty Greek Christian Empire which included the most populous and richest regions of the medieval world, was depopulated and reduced to ashes. For centuries, both the Muslim and the European slave markets were busy buying and selling millions of Greek slaves.
Excerpts from 6.2: How did the Crusades Start?
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The Muslim world was repeatedly flooded with countless European slaves, but the Christians of Asia Minor and Caucasus stood firmly on their defence lines and they defeated the Jihadist armies. By 915 Greek troops from the East joined forces with many Greco-Romans in Italy to repel the Jihadists from Garigliano, and by 941 more Greeks from the East supported the Greeks and the Gauls in the south of France against the Muslims who had enslaved much of Fréjus, a region where people still celebrate their ancient Hellenic inheritance. By the early eleventh century other Christians had also organised new counter-attacks in France and Iberia, but the Muslims had already sacked European cities such as Pisa, Narbonne and Antibes.
After centuries of wars, Islam was eventually repelled from south Europe. Regarding that period which devastated much of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean civilisation, it should be clear to any serious historian that if the Greeks, the greatest Christian power up to the twelfth century, had not stopped the main bulk of the Islamic forces attacking from the East, no other Christian power was capable at that time of preventing Islam from conquering Europe. By comparison with a number of Greek cities and regions which were not conquered by the Germanic and Islamic tribes, most other European cities and regions were under-populated and consisted of jumbles of primitive buildings. Constantinople was a proper Hellenic megapolis, with a hippodrome having seats for 100,000 people. In terms of beauty, art and magnitude the residences of ordinary Greek aristocrats surpassed even the most luxurious royal palaces in the West. A thousand years before the present time, the Greek Christian world still had universities, organised banks, insurance companies, orchestras, theatres, fashion shows, hairdressers and hospitals up to standards that Europe only witnessed in the nineteenth century.(FN)
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Western Christian mercenaries were already paid to defend some Anatolian regions, but many of them, instead of providing a defence service, could not resist the temptation to loot the rich unarmed Christian populations. In some cases the Western mercenaries simply opted to join forces with the invading Muslim tribes in order to plunder the Eastern Christians together. By 1056 mixed mobs of Western Christian and Muslim robbers had attacked several regions in Asia Minor and Armenia, but many of the Western robbers were soon slaughtered by their Muslim colleagues.(FN)
Robert Grispin(FN) and the Frankish mercenaries he commanded demanded increased payments from their Greek employers and rebelled in 1069.(FN) Grispin had gone as far as plotting to exterminate the Greek Emperor,(FN) and his troops kept attacking civilians even after he was arrested and imprisoned.(FN) They destroyed many Christian areas in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia and as a result of the havoc they caused many regions became disorganised, were left undefended and perished at the knives of the invading Turkish Jihadists who penetrated as far as Iraq, Kurdistan, and Transcaucasia. During the same period, as if the raids of the Turks and Grispin’s robbers were not enough, a number of Eastern Christian leaders alarmed by the errors of their central administration, incited civil conflicts.
As this nightmare was unfolding, some Western Christian warlords realised that the Greeks were too busy defending their frontiers in the east, south and north, and took this opportunity to organise new and larger attacks from the west. Many Western historians are not aware or prefer not to acknowledge that during and after the famous battle of Manzikert in 1071 against the invading Muslims in Asia Minor, the Greeks were suffering massive attacks by the Normans and their various Germanic and other allies who had occupied much of Italy, the Balkans and other Greco-Roman regions. Clearly, the Greek forces had to fight in many fronts, all at once.
Many “professors” also do not wish to examine that during the evening before the battle of Manzikert, the German mercenary troops employed in the Greek army had left their ranks and were raiding and plundering the homes of the native Greek populations. When the Emperor ordered them to stop, the Germans attacked his troops and threatened the Emperor himself, with the result that the Emperor had to re-group his troops in order to withstand the German attacks.(FN) At the same time the French mercenary troops under the leadership of Roussel of Bailleul abandoned their posts and invaded several Greek cities and regions too. Later, Roussel even planned a large-scale attack on Constantinople. In essence, the Germans and French mercenary armies betrayed the Greeks, made treacherous deals and joined the Turks and the other Muslim forces who were fighting against the Greeks. The French and the Germans actually fought for the advancement and benefit of Islam.(FN)
At the same time that Islam was expanding in Asia Minor against the native Christian populations, Roussel was trying to establish his own separate state by enslaving many Greeks in Anatolia…
The situation for the Greeks was in fact dramatic. Countless hordes of the world’s barbarians were coming from every direction and were united in their desire to grab as much Greco-Roman wealth as possible…
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Excerpts from 6.3: First Crusade and Norman Anti-Hellenism
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In the years before the first Crusade special missions of recruiters reached as far north as the British Isles and Scandinavia. Greek educators, artists and reformers were also sent to Germanic and other regions to civilise the barbarians, organise their language with grammar and syntax and turn them into an allied force for progress…
In 1106, under Bohemond’s instructions, Pope Paschal II (1099-1118) had publicly called for a new Crusade in order to destroy the heretical Greeks. The new Crusade was planned and organised over 1105-1107 and was launched in 1107-8, but the Normans and their other allies were soon defeated by Alexios I after they again invaded the Greek city of Dyrrachion and the Western Balkans.(FN) According to a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman source, some of Bohemond’s men explained to him that they had lost by Alexios because they had raised ‘a hand against the Holy Empire. No hereditary right drew us to this bold enterprise; … only lust to rule the dominions of another induced you… greed of gain lured us on to suffer an intolerable burden of toil and peril.’(FN) …
Excerpts from 6.4: Second Crusade against the Greek Empire
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The Greek Emperor and his people were perceived as infidels who deserved to be slaughtered: ‘the Greeks had incurred the hatred of our men… they were judged not to be Christians, and the Franks considered killing them a matter of no importance and hence could with the more difficulty be restrained from pillage and plundering.’(FN)
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De profectione is also clear that after some Crusaders were so impressed with the riches of the Greeks they had seen inside Constantinople, they could no longer relax and had no intention of going elsewhere.(FN) They had lost sleep and became obsessed with plans to plunder the capital of Europe.
… Muslims and Crusaders together massacred and looted the civilian Greeks also inside the famous city of Attalia …
George Saos 