European History in the "Neoprogressive Era:" The Crusades, a Case Study

Those of you who have been reading my blogs here on Gather for awhile probably know that I am a retired History teacher.  You also probably know that one thing I feel strongly about is that much of the political radicalism we have been seeing in recent years, especially since the election of the most radical Presidential candidate of a major party in American history in 2008, is significantly a consequence of changes in the way American history and the history of Western Civilization have been taught.

Exactly what the differences are might remain unclear to you, other than perhaps a general sense that there has been a "dumbing down" process characterized by lowered requirements for knowledge, and that the knowledge which is taught has been altered by deemphasizing or ignoring positive features of the history of the West in favor of emphasizing negatives.

You may also be aware that for some years now, in the medium where most people get at least some of their knowledge of the world, television, the proliferation of cable networks has allowed more specialization.  There is even a "History" channel.  It was long considered a "man's" channel because it favored military history, the history of technology and the like.  Today though, not so much.  And even the military history has changed.

Recently I watched part of a history of Europe in the Middle Ages.  That would be from the Fall of Rome around 500 AD until the Renaissance period of roughly 1500-1800.  This is a period I taught thousands of college students about between 1968 and 2002.

When I taught it, when we got to the subject of "Feudalism," it went like this: mainly Germanic barbarian tribes ruled northern and western European territory by force after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476.  After relying on booty from conquered lands to survive on, they began to settle permanently on the land they controlled. 

In order to support themselves and maintain their power and the services of their warriors, the tribal chieftans gave out land use rights to the warriors.  The warriors thereby became the chieftan's "vassals," pledging their loyalty and support to their "lord" in exchange for the land use rights he granted them. 

The vassals in turn made deals with the peasants on the land.  The peasants, as "serfs," would be protected and be allowed to use the land to build homes, grow crops and raise livestock, in exchange for a rent and perhaps a few service obligations to their "lord," the chieftan or "king's" warrior-vassal.

In having to cover a greater time period in a more limited number of hours, the History Channel's version was considerably briefer but instructive of a certain point of view by what it included and excluded:  tribes fought with each other for wealth.  The "soldiers" became restive when they had no one to kill. 

Soon their chiefs got the idea of taking them on The Crusades against Moslems who occupied the Middle East, including places where Jesus had lived. 

Big armies of Christians painted crosses on their shields and went on a total of nine crusades.  Arabs in the Middle East were slaughtered by Christians in huge numbers over a very long time.  The Christian soldiers were elated to be able to resume their main activity, killing.

What about Feudalism, you may ask.  So did I. 

What I had read about, learned and taught about the Crusades in the 1970s, 80s and 90s had been a "little" different too:

Four hundred years after Mohammed created and led the Islamic faith to conquer most of the Middle East and North Africa, a new group of Moslem converts known as the Seljuk Turks occupied the Christian "holy places" in Palestine, killing Christians and barring any from entering the area on pilgrimages from Europe.  Going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land had long been valued as a highly meritorious activity in God's eyes. 

Over several decades of the later 1000's, Christian Popes had called for help from European political leaders in freeing the Christian holy places from Moslem control so pilgrims could resume their pious journies. 

In a rousing speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II finally drew a response.  This was due both to an increase in the level of Christian piety and the rise of "primogeniture," a way for vassalages and even kingdoms to be passed down relatively peacefully from fathers to sons. 

Primogeniture was giving all of your holdings to the eldest son so the power of the family would not be split. Younger sons got relatively little or nothing unless the oldest son was generous.

In too many cases in the past, sons who had been given fairly equal inheritances by dividing the holdings of the father had fought each other to try to get more than their alotted share, often ending up weakening the net family power considerably.   

Thus by the eleventh century (1000s) there were many younger sons in Europe without the ultimate sign of status, wealth and power: land.  Many of these landless younger sons were easy recruits for Crusades, which offered the possibility that after the holy land was retaken, it would be divided up by the Crusaders.

After the Crusader conquest of much of the Middle East, "Crusader states" were created, more or less along the lines of European feudalism.  But the Crusader states did not last long, because the Moslems beat them back in response to later crusades until they were all driven out.  By the fourth crusade in the early thirteenth century, due to squabbling among themselves over objectives, hardly anything was accomplished.

Here's a quiz for you about what you learned. 

1. If you were a student exposed only to the History Channel version I mentioned, how would your view of the History of Western Civilization be different from the view you might have if you had learned your Western history from me or someone who taught the subject similarly? 

2. Are you still wondering why so many of today's students are willing to blame "predatory American greed" for their troubles rather than themselves, and why so many are "into" vandalism and public disruption rather than peaceful protest?