The Crusades Quotes

This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.

Jerusalem is ours as much as yours; indeed, it is even more sacred to us than to you.... Do not imagine that we can to you or compromise on this. The land belongs to us from the beginning, while you have only just arrived and have taken it over only because of the weakness of the Moslems living there at the time. God will not allow a single stone to be rebuilt as long as the war lasts. As for the cross, its ownership is a high card in our hands and it cannot be surrendered except in exchange for something of priceless benefit to all Islam.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

… musty deposits of 2000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness.

When they had despoiled all the country near to Damascus, they advanced to Jerusalem, took it by storm, and put all the Christians to the sword. The women and girls, having suffered every insult from a brutal disorderly soldiery, were loaded with chains. They destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; and when they found nothing among the living, to glut their rage, they opened the tombs of the Christians, took out the bodies, and burnt them.

Sacred struggle …. Holy war

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

Stories of the Crusades are still told in Moslem cafes and families as if they occurred yesterday.

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

On the top of Solomon's Temple, to which they had climbed in fleeing, many were shot to death with arrows and cast down headlong from the roof. Within the temple about 10,000 were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain. Not one of them was allowed to live. They did not spare the women or children.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.

You have but one method to avoid the tempest that threatens you. Receive priests, who will teach you the Christian religion, embrace it, and adore the Cross; otherwise I will pursue you everywhere, and God shall decide whether you or I be master of Egypt.

May the sighings and groanings of the Christians enter the ear of the most high and incomparable prince; may the tortures and griefs of the captives strike his heart! And, not to make our letter too long, lest we should waste away in this vain hope and be for a long time consumed by the shadow of death, may his royal majesty deign to write to us and tell us his pleasure

The Saracens … since they hold the temple in great veneration, may come there as often as they choose in the character of pilgrims, to worship according to their custom, and … we shall henceforth permit them to come, however, only as many as we may choose to allow, and without arms, nor are they to dwell in the city, but outside, and as soon as they have paid their devotions they are to depart.

I am the prince of those who follow the religion of Jesus Christ, as you are of those who obey the laws of Muhammad. Your power inspires me with no fear. How should it? I who make the Muslims in Spain tremble!

Announce to the people of Damascus, or rather to all Muslims, that God has enabled us to gain a complete victory over the Christians, at the moment they had conspired our ruin

In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.

I name the Assassins, who are to be cursed and fled. They sell themselves, are thirsty for blood, kill the innocent for a price and care nothing for either life or salvation.

Are you ignorant that we know the use of arms, and that we inherit the valor of our ancestors? No one has ever attacked us without feeling our superiority. Recollect the conquests we have made from the Christians; we have driven them from the lands they possessed; their strongest towns have fallen under our blows.

The Crusaders who slaughtered their way to Jerusalem in 1099 were as Christian as the Christians of the Renaissance and of today.

He heard a report of the approach of innumerable Frankish armies. Now he dreaded their arrival for he knew their irresistible manner of attack, their unstable and mobile character and all the peculiar natural and concomitant characteristics which the Frank retains throughout; and he also knew that they were always agape for money, and seemed to disregard their truces readily for any reason that cropped up…. The Latin race is always very fond of money, but more especially when it is bent on raiding a country ; it then loses its reason and gets beyond control.

At the same time the Turks did not cease to attack and slaughter the crowd of foot-soldiers who were unable to follow the army. We pitied the fate of our suffering people, perishing by famine and by the arrows of the enemy; and by the advice of our princes and barons, we led the army back from that desert land to the sea, in order that it might regain its strength. We preferred to preserve the army for greater achievements rather than to win so bloody a victory over archers.