Adam Creason - Crusaders and Nature to Creation

 The numerous Crusades between the 11th and 13th centuries have garnered innumerable questions and controversies regarding the Crusades’ conception, justification, and motivation. In an attempt to connect religion and ecology to historical events, this blog post will draw upon the knowledge I have gathered from my class, HIST 408: The Crusades.

                The central component of this comparison is the question of the connection between man and land, while applying this connection to the motivations and goals of the Crusades. Taking place within and spanning the 11th-13th centuries, the Crusades were a set of Holy Wars fought by Western Christians against the Muslim occupiers of the Holy Lands. Outwardly sanctioned and partly organized by the Pope, these Crusades aimed to take back the Holy Land, namely Jerusalem, from Muslim control. What resulted was nearly 200 years of sporadic Crusading to the Holy Lands in the name of Christ. This connection between the Crusaders and the Holy Land allowed the Christians to justify the war, pillaging, torturing, and massacres of the land’s inhabitants and surrounding villages. However, this Crusader and even Christian connection to land completely misses the true connection, a connection even made in Christian literature. This true connection is not based on pure religious motivations, but it is rather based on how man interacts with nature. Heidegger mentions that man’s connection to land is to dwell, to protect, to preserve, to care for. As mentioned in Nature to Creation, man has forgotten the true essence of one aspect of the book of Genesis which stated that man must interact and appreciate and preserve the land. They must appreciate this land without seeing it as too ‘wild’ or as a bank of undrawn resources to profit from. The Crusaders completely missed this essence. Blinded by their false connection to Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, Crusaders and the Popes themselves were able to justify the shattering of the 10 commandments. Widespread accounts from all sides of the conflicts describe the massacre of men, women, and children in the Holy Lands as they are labeled enemies of Christ and thus must be removed from Christ’s land. Instead of protecting and preserving the land, the Pope and Crusaders used it as a justification for absolution, glory, and pillage.

                Was there a true connection between man and land or ecology that motivated the Crusaders? No, the connection between the Crusaders/Popes and the Holy Land was not a true connection between man and nature as it was based upon false pretenses that completely disregarded the natural connection between man and nature. This is an essential point to be made regarding the Crusades, as its major justification was that the Western Christians had a religious and spiritual right to the land of Jerusalem. There seems to have been no connection between man and dwelling, nature, etc. in the crusades.

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