The Blackberry Walk

Recommended to me by the Youtube algorithm - that friend from which most of our recommendations today come - was a video on how the Crimean War was 'the last crusdade'. A quite interesting book I read called 'The Great and Holy War' had the thesis that the First World War was the last crusade, noting the religious symbology both sides of the war wielded against one another. Typically, with eyes to historical Catholic crusades, the Albigensian crusade is the last crusade in Christendom. And I'm sure, given the time, a bounty more of theories as to when the last crusade occurred could be dug up and displayed to be argued over. The truth of the matter is, there is no last crusade. The crusade, however maligned the history today, is the creation myth of Western thought; and the moment the West ceases to crusade is the moment the West ceases to be the West. The Spenglerian view of the West, which I agree with, is that the West was born with Charlemagne and the Great Schism. Before these events, western Europe lived in the embers of the Classical era, in a different kind of worldview, or ontological relation to the world, that gradually changed. If you read about Byzantium - even the Byzantium contemporary with Charlemagne - you'll discover just how alien a culture it was. Much of the brutality and lack of loyalty to the point of anarchy, has far more in common with the Crisis of the Third Century than the regal stability of the West. In a sense, Eastern Christendom descended from the germ of Roman civilisation, whilst Western Christendom descended from the germ of German civilisation - the civilisation which became the ruling elite after the fall of Rome. The schism between these two halves was inevitable. One of the defining moments of Western history which isn't given the weight it deserves is the fourth crusade. In the fourth crusade, the crusaders got distracted on their way to Jerusalem by Constantinople, and found a greater calling in sacking the city bearing the name of the man who Christianised Rome. This original fratricide of the East - a kind of Cain and Abel moment - is what I believe gives what Spengler calls the West's 'Faustian spirit'. The sacking of the vast wealth of Constantinople aided in funding the building of the Great Cathedrals of the High Middle Ages; and the theft of the vast wealth of knowledge in Constantinople aided in nurturing a mediaeval intellectual Renaissance in Europe. Before the final fall of the great city in 1453, many Greek intellectuals fled to the West with the vast libraries of Byzantine learning in tow. And although the great Renaissance men of the West claimed to find literature and tracts in dingy corners of old libraries and abbeys, the interpretation widely considered today is that these works arrived from the East. As we can see, the crusade is not only a war against one's enemies in the form of Islam, but also one's enemies in the form of heretics. The Albigensian crusade is the greatest example of this. Here, the less than aptly named Pope Innocent III sent the knights of Europe to slaughter the Cathars, a heretical sect in south-east France. Justifying the indiscriminate killing, the pope purportedly said "Kill them all, for God knows His own." The object of the crusades, that being Jerusalem, is a strange one. Christian theology from the earliest days never saw Jerusalem as their object. Christ foretold the falling of the Second Temple, and Revelations refocuses upon the new Jerusalem, the City of God, which isn't yet of this world. When Rome became Christianised Jerusalem became a place of pilgrimage, but also a kind of biblical sight-seeing tour. Constantine's mum 'discovered' the hill of Golgotha, and the cave in which Christ's body was kept, and many more sacred locations, which many in the empire flocked to see. After the capture of the Holy Land by Islam, it was not as if Christians could no longer go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Islam is generally accepting of men of the book, so long as they pay the 'jizya' which was a tax of Jews and Christians, and many Christians and Jews still lived in Levant (until the persecution of the past 50-100 years). What, then, were the object of the crusades? It took the fall of Jerusalem to the sons of Ishmael and the failures of the crusades for God to prove to the Church that Jerusalem no longer held any meaning - a point which many could use today - but from the perspective of the Church, it was a great unifying event. The crusades bound Western identity, where the nobility of each nation and their peasantry fought side by side, brother with brother against a common foe and, most importantly, with the cross (note the crux inside of crusade). The crusade not only bound the idea of the west, but created the grammar for a just and noble war. Fast-forwarding the reel of history, we see any number of wars that had to be proclaimed as just, particularly in the modern day. However today, society at large does not adhere to the Catholic church, but rather to the Humanist church - one of the most radical branches of the Protestant reformations, one which no longer believes in God (but then again, neither do the Quakers anymore). Where the First World War was fought with religious imagery, as Phillip Jenkins in the aforementioned book lays out, the Second World War was fought by highlighting Hitler's atrocities, not only to the Jews, but to the Poles, the Slavs, and to the many other brutalised and persecuted groups. In many cases, this was explained through religious terms, through individuals like Bonhoeffer and Niemoller, but most commonly to this day through the conception of human rights. The Vietnam War was fought for the sake of liberty of the evil forces of Communism. The Iraq War was to prevent Saddam Hussein using the infamous WMD which he didn't have, to liberate the Iraqis into the greatest tyranny of all: anarchy. Today with the war in the Levant, Israel, itself a Jewish crusader state akin to the states of the First Crusade, is on a kind of crusade against the Gazan infidels, who it appears they're aiming to annihilate a la the biblical invasions of Joshua. And even if Israel is not a Christian country, it is cut from the Western cloth, with much of their population and most of their elites harking from the US. In summary, crusading has never ended, and claims of the last crusade are as fraught as predictions of the apocalypse. Only once the West has ended will crusading end; it's an integral part of the culture's genetics, and to see it subside would be to see the dawn of a new era. Perhaps I'm now being the doomsdayist, but it feels as if we are living in the Late Western era. Much like the late Roman era, the generative power which once made Western civilisation strong has dissipated, and the society has fallen into a state of decadence. But the seed of the West has been spread far and wide across the Earth, first through European colonialism, and then through American pseudo-colonialism; in some cases the seed is treated as a welcome crop, and in others as a harmful weed. No one can be certain what form the next era will take.