Must Have Seemed As Normal

Reading about the Crusades, from the perspective of Jerusalem.  This biography of the great city by Simon Sebag Montefiore is splendid.  And slowly I am developing an appreciation for the incessant struggle for rule of that hallowed Abrahamic ground.  The rule of the state of Israel, as studied over the ages, is the blink of an eye.  Seventy years?  Frankish control of the city lasted longer during the First Crusades:  1099 - 1187.

These “Franks” as the broad swath of Europeans who made their way to the Holy Land were referred to, suggest a rather unruly, brutal lot.  All the worst stereotypes of loutish, barbarism bloom full when the Western Europeans arrive.  When they sack Jerusalem, they kill everyone, in an orgy of limb removal, throat aeration.  And then, they held it.  I guess I hadn’t realized this.  They held Jerusalem for nearly a century.  At the time it must have seemed as normal as the Israeli rule of today.  Frankish rule was just the way it was.  The European Christians tried to set all up as eternal, but it was merely, another temporal, bracketed shift. 

Now, I find myself oddly waiting for the arrival of the Mongols.  I can't recall precisely when they arrive on the scene. (They are believed to have raided the area in around 1300, but there was less engagement than I recall) If memory serves, the Mongols, who sacked everything from Damascus to the boarders of Vienna will be on the scene soon.  Schooled in the art of Chinese siege warfare they are about to make a mockery of the Turkic and Arab defences.  The Western Europeans who were spared the worst because folks had to return home to pick a new Khan after the death of The Great Khan Ögedei.

In the mean time, I’m left to consider the tenacity of my forebears. They don’t come off looking very good.  They’re course, brutal, zealots who seem to grab something indeterminate and then surrender it once again, as they lack the unity to act like an empire, rather than simply a version of Christendom.  The role of Christianity, the faith of conversion in the germination of imperialism all seem rather pronounced.   Why else is Eleanor of Aquitaine bothering with the Levant?  There is something aggressive and nearly diseased about the Europeans and their need to assert their power, crudely, beyond their territory.  Perhaps it is no different from Alexander the Great, 1500 years earlier, but I consider him part of the Hellenic, Mediterranean landscape.  These French and Norwegians and Germans with their different language but similar Latin faith, were an odd amalgamation of races threaded by faith, in a manner quite different from the Macedonians or indeed the Romans.

I’m on a plane to Hong Kong. I’ve got lots of work to do, but I don’t really want to do it.  I want to go back to my book and push forward until the Mongols come. They do reach Jerusalem, don’t they?  They don’t care about “the book” and all that is Abrahamic.  Perhaps they bypass the city en route to Cairo, which I recall they conquered. (They didn’t).  Their general terms were surrender now or face complete annihilation.  More butchery beckons.