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I managed to get a few hours atleast. Sooo tired though. *yawn*
Have you been to the Tool concert yet?!

   

OPP,
A movie about a crusading Swedish muslim killer? I must say I'm totally surprised to see this posted by you of all people but I will say it's one of the more interesting things I think you've posted. Not only am I looking forward to the movie I do hope you'll seize the opportunity to learn more about the context of the Crusades your hero fought in and to see the similarities between what he fought and what is being fought today.

   

Starring:

Yeshua ben Yusef as Saladin

This actor who plays Arn looks a little like Matt Damon. I hope it doesn't suck like Kingdom of Heaven did.

   

You're in for another surprise then. -Not to say the templars are portraid as criminals or brutes in any way. Quite the contrary, untill a sinister and ambitios character take the rains.

Edit: Oh! and I do understand the context of the Crusades and see the similarities between then and now. Believe me. It was for riches and ambition then and it is so today. Back then they used religion to rally around. This time around it's terrorism.

   

I've seen the "uncut version" of KoH and it still felt like they were forcing a plot around the historical events and characters. It was a clear improvement, however.

   

I've never believed the tripe about the Templars anyway. In some respects, the betrayal of the Templars by a Pope was part of what led me to leave the Roman Catholic Church as a kid.

And I don't think you understand the context I speak of. The Templars went to the Holy Land to evict the muslim invaders from what had been Christian lands at that point. They did have great wealth, of course, because as you see in Iraq, this kind of war is not cheap to fight. The Templars themselves took vows of poverty and financed their individual expenses on their own whenever possible.

Do I think the Roman Catholic Church exploited the honorable motives of the Templars for financial gain? Absolutely!

But the Templars themselves were uniformly good men who set out with honorable motives and I'm glad to see Sweden pay homage to one of her own warriors from that time.

I should add, when the movie comes out I have no doubts that you'll see some protests from the muslim community. Hopefully, peaceful protests.

   

The Templars were created as an order to safeguard and protect pillgrims of all religions with claim to the holy places. That's an honorable venture. They later became a millitary power in their own right and that's when the corruption started. Arn Magnusson is not an historical person and only loose evidence of a templar returning home from the holy lands to West Gothia, with a great deal of influence, has been found. They are prevented from investigating this further however as the church, where a suspected templar migth have been burried, does not allow for archaeological diggings. However, ground sonar has been used and it does seem likely that a person was burried beneath the stone floor. A larger metal object was also detected (Sword perhaps?) along with templar crosses at the entrance, one which you were suposed to kiss before entering which was a templar custom. It's still very much speculation, though.

EDIT: This is not to say that the events in the movies are fiction. Many of the characters are historical figures, both those in the holy lands and those in Sweden and the story is based on historical events, such as the events that lead to the creation of the Swedish Kingdom and the Krusades.

   

BTW, did you guys watch the full length Promo or the short exerpt on the first page?

Press trailer and then View Promo on the official international website to see the full length 10 min promo.

   

X 1000

I guess the fact that Islam had previously conquered 2/3 of Christiendom in almost 500 years of Jihad in which 50 % of Christians on earth were killed in not enough to convince a hyppie like you that the Crusades were not for "money".

   

Without the Knights Templars OPP would be a turban-wearing bearded taliban and the girl on his avatar would be dressed in a sexy burka.

Oh, never mind, there'd be no avatar because there'd be no computers...

   

Ummm...... the Crusaders did their fair share of killing 'fellow' Christians. They sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and hastened (the fall was inevitable)its fall into Muslim hands. The Venetians especially, and other powerful trading cities in Italy generally, wanted the Byzantines out of the way so they could negotiate trade deals with the heathen saracen kings they claimed to be battling against. Their god and cause was Mammon, not Christ and the Cross.

   

That is indeed a shame.



Double disagreeing here.

First, the Crusaders -- even if they often put their energy on the wrong types -- certainly did more for the Byztantin empire than against it.

Just look at those maps...





Now imagine what wat left of Byztantine territory in Anatolia by 1094, when the Emperor Alexius Comnenus asked the Pope for help.

Even if they sacked Constantinople and other Christian cities in Eastern Europe on their way, the Crusaders kept the muslim armies buzzy in the Holy Land for 2 centuries, and the consequences of that have prouven to be very positive.

After all, Constantinople did not fal 'till 1453. Without the crusades, you can be sure it would have fallen way before that !

Second, the fall was NOT inevitable. We COULD have saved the Eastern Christian Empire -- just like we saved the Western Christian Empire -- by managing our power in a better way.



One chance the Pope Pius V made them quit their idioties in time to save Christiendom...

Lepanto, 1571 : The Battle That Saved Europe

Of course, for the Venicians to wake up, we had to wait that the Muslims Turcs try to invade Venetian-held Malta + invade Cyprus (sound familiar ) and flay and skin like an animal trophy the Christian commander of Farmagusta city.

   

At first, the cause was for the cross and even when the first crusaders reached Constantinople, there was so much distrust that the Byzantines wanted them outside the city. More for the empire? Hardly, after the Crusaders took Antioch and then Jerusalem, they did it for themselves, not the Byzantine empire. Hence you get the Latin kingdoms. Did the Byzantines gain more territory? Nope. The Byzantines deteriorated after the Muslim conquests and their military skill or lack of proved it. Bad judgment and poor decisions made the inevitable. Not to mention the corrupt nature of Byzantine emperors. All those maps prove is that the Byzantines lost more territory and will gradually over the future hundred years,even more.

Perhaps you are confused with the Crusaders who were Latin and the Byzantines who were Greek...two different cultures plus the same religion doesn't equal the same ambition or cause. If you think these people were united, you are wrong which is a cause for the failure of the rest of the crusades.

Well, it sure as hell wasn't for the Byzantines. The Latin kingdoms lost their kingdoms in the east, every one of them in the mid 1200's and only Constantinople lasted out until 1453. Then the Ottoman Turks continued to conquer all Byzantine territory until they were stopped at Vienna. It was a gradual decline and eventually conquered, how was that positive? It's called inevitable.

Well, the whole point of the Crusades were to reconquer the holy lands, meaning Antioch and Jerusalem and pretty much all of Anatolia. If the Byzantines were stronger with better leadership and more united instead of corrupt, it may haven't have fallen at all.

What?????? The Western portion (wouldn't call it an "Empire until 800 by Charlemagne) was saved by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours which stopped the Moors. Europe was already weak because of the Bubonic plague and more disunited than ever. By 1453, with the exception of Venetians who were more concerned with their profit, nobody in Europe cared about Constantinople. In addition, the Moors, Muslims, still occupied the southern part of Spain until the "Reconquista" which lasted until 1492. It was inevitable, a single city state, which admirably pushed off such conquests, not once but twice by the Muslims in the 700's but only to be taken over by their own religion, the irony.

The Byzantine empire even before the Crusades were weak, corrupt, already in decline and even more so afterwards.

Perhaps if the Latins and Greeks weren't fighting each other, it would have lasted longer.

   

The Schism of 1054 didn't exactly help matters either. The Popes saw an opportunity to assert their authority over the Eastern Churches, that they deemed heretic (almost as bad as being a heathen Muslim in their eyes) because of their failure to acknowledge the filioque clause.

Through weakening the political power of the Eastern Empire, Rome hoped to be able to lure the Eastern Churches into its clutches and assure its supremacy, eradicating Greek Christianity. The fourth Crusade failed miserably and Rome ended up cutting off its nose to spite its face.

   

By "for the Byzantine Empire", I mean indirectly.

Yes, the Crusades were badly organised, commanded and executed. But even if the West's response to the call was not exactly what the Byzantines had hoped for, they kept the Muslims occupied for a good while.

Check that map :



Now add an other decade-and-a-half of Jihad, and you had the Byztantine Empire right before the Crusades. At the beat things were going, Constantinople would surely have very soon fallen to Islam.

When they started, the Muslim's energy was directed towards them. When the Crusades ended, the Jihad resumed in Anatolia. 8 years after the end of the Crusader's presence in the Holy Land, the Muslims captured the Byzantine city of Bilecik in 1299.



Hum, yes.

During the 12th century, the Byzantines managed to re-gain a SIGNIFICANT part of Anatolia ('cause the Crusaders pressure in the South, as I have said earlier).



So it looks like the Byzantines gained territory in the Asian part of their Empire because of the Crusades, unlike what you have said.



Thanks for pretty much proving my point. If we had cared more about Constantinople and the Byztantine Empire we could have saved it. If we had really joined force with the Byztantines, in a Reconquista of the Anatolian peninsula, we could have crushed the invaders, just like we did in Spain. There was nothing "innevitable", if we had acted otherwise, we could have kicked the Mohamedans back to Arabia and killed the Ottoman Empire while it was still a baby.



*caugh*

Even if the Crusaders took control of Byzantium in 1204, the Byzantine Empire was re-established in 1261.



True.

For the rest, I stand to what I said : the Crusades had more positive consequences than negative consequences on Christiendom, thus slowing down the islamic wave.

" Qu’accomplirent les croisades ? Grâce à elles, l’Europe gagna du temps et ce délai a peut-être fait la différence, en lui permettant de se relever et de recouvrer son éclat au lieu de disparaître et de connaître la dhimmitude. Si Godefroy de Bouillon, Richard Cœur de Lion et tant d’autres n’avaient pas risqué leur vie pour défendre l’honneur du Christ et de l’Église à des milliers de kilomètres de chez eux, les jihadistes auraient presque certainement déferlé sur l’Europe bien plus tôt. Non seulement les forces croisées les immobilisèrent à une période cruciale, les forçant à combattre pour la possession d’Antioche et Ascalon plutôt que de Varna et Vienne, mais en plus elles rassemblèrent des armées qui n’auraient pas existé sinon. L’appel du pape Urbain fédéra des hommes autour d’une cause ; si cette cause n’avait pas existé, ou si personne ne l’avait fait connaître à travers l’Europe, beaucoup de ces hommes n’auraient jamais été des soldats. Ils auraient été bien mal préparés pour repousser une invasion musulmane de leur patrie. "

-- Robert Spencer in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades

   

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