Friday, March 29, AD 2024 5:45am

On The Crusades, Pt 3

Starting with finances.

IN THE STANDARD MODEL, the crusaders were imagined as second sons with no inheritance, as robber barons, as highwaymen, or as others with nothing to lose out to get rich on the fabled wealth of the Orient. More recently, historians have started to look at the surviving data (such a marvelous thought!) and have found that this was not the case.

The pilgrimage to the East was self-funded, for one thing. No one was paying the knight’s plane tickets. In fact, there were no planes!³ So everyone had to get there on his or her⁴ own.

Crusading was expensive, up to five times one’s annual incomes. (Louis IX’s Seventh Crusade⁵ in the mid-thirteenth century will cost more than six times the annual revenue of the Crown.) To cover the nut, knights and lords sold freeholds, settled property disputes at a disadvantage, liquidated estates, borrowed from relatives, submitted grant proposals, and maxed out their credit cards. This was so extensive that preparations for the First Crusade introduced considerable inflation into Western Europe⁶ and instigated a net flow of wealth from West to East. (So much for getting rich on the wealth of the East.) One of the reasons why the Fourth Crusade will get hijacked to Constantinople was that it will run out of money before it even gets rolling.

See those footnotes, there?  They’re very readable, but I didn’t copy and paste them here– you’ll have to go read it at The TOF Spot.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, January 17, AD 2019 6:28am

It’s not their fault they’re imbeciles. It’s the leftist take-over of the public education monopoly. Almost everything your kid is taught is unadulterated, unleavened bunkum. They are taught what to think. not how to think.

When I was in HS in the 1960’s one particularly bright teacher quoted an article saying that all issues/questions in the 20th century could be solved by two things: “E equals MC squared,” and “the Industrial Revolution.” Today’s less-than-perspicacious publik sckool teachers have expanded that. In the world of post-modern nonsense, all things are answered by one or a combination of the following: genderism, genocide, fascism, fundamentalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, white nationalism, white supremacy, . . . . Is there any wonder your kid is patently stupid?

In the old days, crusades, along with fasting, pilgrimages, prayer, etc. were assigned as penances for sins. The concept of personal concern for the salvation of one’s soul is completely unknown among the leftish propagandists that call themselves “teachers.”

I will spare you the diatribe about how civics and math are racist because Obama thinks there are 57 states and “2 + 2 = 5.”

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