Humanity’s tendency to make massively important decisions with no evidence is not reserved to certain types of people. It is, in essence, a gamble. The only difference between some of our biggest blind guesses and betting on a roll of the roulette wheel is that you at least know there is a chance the roulette ball will land on your number, you know the wheel and ball exist, and usually you have to actually set foot in the casino before you place your bet. Such was not the case for one of the biggest bets. biggest payoffs, and worst losses humanity had ever suffered- it was called the Crusades. In particular we should look to the first crusade, the one that set the stage for two hundred years of bloody warfare that pitted Christians against Muslims and Christians against Christians.

No time to figure out what religion is what… it’s STABBING TIME!

In November in 1095 C.E., Pope Urban II delivered a sermon in Clermont, France in which he described the disasters and abuse that the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem had suffered since the Turks had captured the city. There was a sense of urgency to his plea, which is somewhat surprising since Jerusalem was captured four hundred years earlier. What was more pressing and what might have been part of the reason he gave the speech was that the Eastern Christian kingdom of Byzantium was losing territory to invading Turks at that time, and the ruler, Alexios I, had sent emissaries to ask Urban for military help. There was much more to the First Crusade than providing military aid to christian allies in Constantinople. Pope Urban knew this, but perhaps even he did not know the magnitude of what he had set in motion.

Onward STABBING TIME!

In the spring of 1096 an untold number of crusaders left Europe and headed for the holy land. The crusades were in part a kind of pilgrimage, which was an accepted and not uncommon practice of the time. Unlike earlier pilgrimages in which small groups would go to the holy land to worship and be humbled, crusades were armed pilgrimages meant to wrest the holy lands away from infidels. The first wave of crusaders were relatively unorganized and made up of commoners. The few that survived the journey where torn to shreds by the Turks. In the autumn of 1096, however, a contingent of tens of thousands of crusaders began the same journey, but were led and organized by well-known knights who acted something like allied generals.
They suffered greatly, many dying in battle but more due to disease and famine, however they did eventually succeed in their mission. In 1099, the year the Pope Urban II died, the first crusaders captured Jerusalem. The news of this great victory quickly spread back to Christian Europe and spawned the beginnings of a second crusade, but at the same time it was a defeat for the first crusaders. Their preconceptions about the Muslim Turks and the state of the holy land had to be reevaluated. They were still the enemy, of course. But now they were more human. The Christians who remained in Jerusalem eventually found that they only considered a Muslim an enemy if he was raising a sword against them. They mostly got along with neighboring Muslims even though they had slaughtered every Muslim in the city when it was captured. When the second and third crusades came, they found this tolerance in their fellow Christians strange. After two hundred years of fighting, Christian control of the holy land would be completely removed and the Crusades would come to and end.

I know we said it was stabbing time, but I’m having some mixed emotions right now.

The consequence was a complete change in the world. Instead of ending Muslim control of the holy lands, Pope Urban’s sermon started a chain reaction that opened up trade and exchange between the Muslim and Christian world. It led to greater Muslim control of the Near East, and created a strained relationship between Muslim’s and Christian’s that still effects us today. Perhaps the most surprising part of the crusades was that it was based solely on the idea that Muslim’s were destroying sacred lands, staining them with immorality. The only evidence, if it can even be called that, were reports from foreign Christians who were often asking for aid. The people of Europe who had contact with Muslims, Spanish and Sicilians, didn’t really participate in the crusades. It was quite possible that in any of the armies there were only a few people, if any, who had ever met a Muslim.
It was more that the stories all fit with a familiar narrative that European Christians had come to believe was true of Muslims. Add to that that the Pope offered not just salvation for your soul, but forgiveness of debt, and it is not so hard to believe that so many answered the call to ‘bear the cross.’

Two hundred years of blood shed based on questionable rumors.

Sources:

1. Fighting for Christendom, Christopher Tyerman, Oxford University Press, 2004

2. Fighting for the Cross, Norman Houseley, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008

3. The Popes, Claudio Rendina, trans. Paul D. McCusker, Seven Locks Press, Santa Ana, CA, 2002

4. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith, Oxford University Press, 1995

“Let’s talk about sex… baby.”

Making a declaration without having any evidence is often called an assumption. Assumptions are not inherently stupid. You might have a pretty good idea of something based on parallel experiences and so you are said to be “safe to assume.” But one of the most ridiculous examples of assumptions gone wrong is to be found in the Victorian era. A time during the nineteenth century of gentlemen and ladies, so named after Queen Victoria of England who reigned for 63 years and 7 months. The assumption was this: that women had no interest and found no pleasure in sex. What makes this such a classic example of making decisions without evidence (a cornerstone to human stupidity throughout history) is that the people who proclaimed this “fact,” didn’t bother to honestly ask any women. If they did ask it was with the assumption in mind and any woman who dared to say that she enjoyed sex was, obviously, a woman of low moral character.

Look at this obvious harlot.

Are we taking a boat ride down a canal? Is that what you’re saying?

Sources:

Just to get this out of the way… No, I’m not referring to the “Indian Burns” we used to give each other as kids. When we would twist the skin on someone’s forearm because, well just because that was the sort of thing you did as a kid. No, I’m referring to Native American’s preferred method of clearing a forest: controlled burns.

Could use a little more control to this burn…

See Native Americans needed to clear forest for a multitude of reasons: to grow crops, to have space to live, to scare up animals that they would hunt, and just because it seemed to help keep things clear and growing. There were certain types of plants that could only seed if the pods were burnt and since the Americas lacked earthworms, there needed to be something to get rid of all the dead leaves and plants on the forest floor. Burning worked brilliantly. While Europeans were slaving away with ax and saw, Indians were burning the bottoms of trees in order to get them down. It was probably more efficient and definitely a lot easier.

This is an actual picture of pre-Columbian Indians making a canoe with fire.

So this idea that Indians lived in these over grown, ancient forests is really a myth. They were clearing as much land and using it as much as their European, African, or Asian counterparts. So why do we think Native Americans lived in unspoiled wilderness? Because by the time colonists, especially the English, French, and Dutch, began to settle in North America- about 90 percent of the population of Indians had died due to disease in the previous century.

See Europeans were quick to move to the New World once it was discovered but the diseases they carried were much quicker. Malaria, smallpox, and yellow fever had already decimated Indian populations long before colonists began to truly take root in what would become the U.S. and Canada. And these were the places where European travelers found unspoiled forests, but they were far from ancient, perhaps only a hundred years old.

You’re old, but you’re not THAT old.

In fact, right around the time that the Indians were being decimated by disease and so stopped their traditional burning- the world began to experience what has been called “The Little Ice Age,” and some people theorize that the suddenly increase in plant matter and the lack of the massive amount of fumes from controlled burns may have lead to this temperature shift. In other words it was like a sudden reverse of the global warming we’re seeing now. An increase in forest and decrease in carbon gases led to global cooling.

My main source for most of this information is from an excellent book:

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann.