08 - The Middle Ages - The Crusades

This week and next, we’ll be looking at two of the more controversial episodes in church history - this week the Crusades and next week the Spanish conquistadors.

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The Background of the Crusades

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I want to start with a quote from Mark Galli, Managing Editor of Christian History Magazine:

Christian History Magazine—Issue 40: The Crusades From the Editor—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Mark Galli)

Recently, a group of Christian leaders, mostly missionaries to the Muslim world, gathered in Jerusalem, at the spot where 900 years earlier Christian knights and soldiers stormed the walls. They read historical accounts of the Jerusalem massacre. Then they formally apologized for the Crusades. I apologize for their apology.

Why would he say that?

He goes on to say...

“For too long, modern Christians have assumed the crusaders are not spiritual parents but distant uncles: “If these crusaders were real Christians, they wouldn’t have done such a thing!”

But the crusaders were real Christians. They deplored their sins. They longed for forgiveness. They loved fellow Christians in the East. They yearned to do something noble and lasting for their Lord. They prayed and fasted before battles and praised God after victories. Their devotion and courage make ours look juvenile.

So much of what they did was wrong. Yes, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So there’s little point in becoming judgmental. Better to try to understand the crusaders in the context of their times.”

And that’s what we’ll try to do this morning. And the book I relied upon to help with that more than any other resource was Rodney Stark’s “God’s Battalions, the Case for the Crusades” which I think does an excellent job of what Galli suggests. Stark doesn’t sugar coat the crusades but he also doesn’t universally demonize them.

Nothing in history happens in isolation. History is an unbroken chain of events, one leading to the other all ultimately leading to the return of Christ.

In other words, events don’t just pop up out of nowhere. Just like time, space and matter don’t come from nothing, neither do historical events. There are always antecedent events. There are always cause and effect relationships.

For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nations of Europe aligned themselves within various mutual defense treaties. If one nation in the alliance was attacked, the other nations in that alliance pledged to go to their defense.

To paraphrase the old saying, it’s all fun and games until the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne gets assassinated. The events that followed that event triggered one after another of these mutual defense pacts and soon the entirety of Europe was thrust into a long and bloody war. The First World War didn’t just start one day because someone decided they wanted to go to war, it was the culmination of a series of events.

However, if you read about the Crusades, you sometimes get the impression that Europeans, were just sitting around looking for something to do and decided one day, because they were just wicked, greedy people, to hurl themselves at the innocent Muslims in the Middle East and take away their land.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The Crusades, like the First World War, were the culmination of a series of events and those events didn’t start with the Christian West, they started with Islam.

Islamic Expansion

As we saw in an earlier lesson, in the year 610, a man named Muhammad claimed to have been visited by the angel Gabriel and told he was a prophet of God. From that event came the religion of Islam. Muhammad died in 632. Less than one hundred years after his death, Muslims had conquered vast swaths of the Christian Roman world. This included most of the Middle East, all of North Africa, Cyprus and most of Spain.

Among the first places to fall to Islam is what we call the Holy Land, and it’s most important city, Jerusalem. Jerusalem fell to Muslim armies in 638, only six years after Muhammad’s death.

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Areas that had been Christian for hundreds of years started falling like dominoes to Islamic armies and there was, for the most part, no one to come to their aid. Christians in Spain, as we’ll see in our next lesson, were fighting to push back Islam but for the most part, the rest of these formerly Christian lands garnered little attention from western Christians.

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This began to change because of the importance of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

Pilgrimages

After Constantine became emperor in the fourth century, his mother Helena made a trip to the Holy Land. During this trip she supposedly identified many of the sites mentioned in the Bible and recovered several relics associated with the life of Jesus Christ. This led to the practice of believers taking pilgrimages to the Holy Land to see these sites.

Perhaps the most important site was the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection - the Empty Tomb. Over that spot a church was built - the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher still exists today as well but it’s not the original fourth century building as we’ll see shortly.

Initially, after the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 638, Christian pilgrims were still allowed to visit the Holy Land and as time went on, these pilgrimages gained more and more significance for Christians in the west.

It was believed that making such a journey was meritorious, in other words, it bought you something in your pursuit of holiness, and they even began to be assigned as penance for more egregious sins.

SLIDE (Roman Catholic theology in the Middle Ages chart)

Many a Christian knight was assigned penance of a visit to the Holy Land to atone for having killed someone. The profession of Knight tended to be one where you killed people.

One man named Thorvald the Far-Traveled, an Icelandic Viking, went on a pilgrimage in 990 seeking to atone for having killed two poets who had mocked his faith and another man who criticized his preaching. (Stark, p.89)

Rodney Stark writes that:

“…by the end of the fifth century there were more than three hundred hostels and monasteries offering lodging to pilgrims in the city of Jerusalem alone.” (God’s Battalions, p. 82)

So, in the minds of Medieval Christians, to be cut off from these pilgrimages was be to be cut off from a means of dealing with one’s sin. A serious thing in the Medieval mind.

One thing we must remember as we look at the history of Christianity is that orthodoxy always leads to orthopraxy, right doctrine leads to right practice. (slide?)

All religious doctrine leads to a corresponding practice (at least for those who take their religion seriously) so understanding what people believed is key to understanding their actions.

It seems crazy to us that a group of people would fly an airplane into a skyscraper killing themselves. But when you understand Islamic theology, you get a better understanding of what was driving that.

It’s also why getting doctrine correct is so important. Because our behavior is always a function of what we believe to be true (that’s not always what we say we believe, BTW).

On October 18, 1009, the caliph who ruled Jerusalem ordered the complete destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as part of an Islamic campaign against Christian places of worship throughout the region (Wikipedia). This was only about 90 years before the first Crusade and is one of the things that captured the imaginations of western Europe and set them on the road to the Crusades.

There was also the matter of the safety of Christian pilgrims.

As time went on, more and more instances of Christian pilgrims being denied safe passage, being robbed and even murdered by Muslims came to light. Here’s a partial list from the years following the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:

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1022 - Gerald of Thouars, a French abbot was imprisoned and executed by Muslims upon reaching the Holy Land.

1026 - Richard of Saint-Vanne was stoned to death for celebrating the Mass in Islamic territory

1040 - Ulrich of Breisgau was stoned to death by a Muslim mob near the river Jordan.

1064 - Bishop Gunther of Bamberg and a large party of pilgrims were ambushed by Muslims near Caesarea and two-thirds of the party were killed. (Stark, p. 92)

So, report after report of events like this are making their way back to Europe. People are going on Christian pilgrimage, doing the penance assigned by their priest, and the Muslims are robbing and killing them.

The Seljuk Turks

While these were all factors, the tipping of the scales happened as a result of the rise of the Seljuk Turks and the threat they posed to Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. So, it was actually a military threat that led to the military response we call the First Crusade.

Late in the tenth century, a group of nomadic tribes from the area that is now Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were converted to Islam. The didn’t give up their nomadic ways initially and continued to raid cities and towns, even other Muslim ones. (Stark, p. 93)

However, eventually they started to exercise control over the areas they raided rather than just hitting and running. Beginning in the eleventh century under a man named Teghrul Bey, they seized Persia and set themselves up in its capital of Baghdad. Next they attacked and conquered Armenia, then a Christian kingdom and a territory of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. Their conquests continued until much territory that had belonged to the Byzantines was now under Seljuk Turkish rule.

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In 1071 there was a showdown between the Turks and the Byzantines at Manzikert, in modern day Turkey, where the Byzantine army was roundly defeated by the Turks. Included in this defeat was the capture and killing of Byzantine emperor Romanus IV.

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This shook Constantinople to the core leading to the abdication of Romanus’ successor, Emperor Michael V and to the installation of a man named Alexius Komnenus as emperor. (Stark p. 95-96)

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Remember his name. He plays an important role not only in getting the crusades going but in how the western Christians prosecuted the crusades. The long and short of it is that Alexius was a bit of a snake - but more on that later.

Overview of the Crusades

Lasted from 1095 to roughly 1272 - almost 200 years. There were a total of eight major crusades with other smaller efforts in between. Because of time, we’ll only go into some detail on the first of the Crusades.

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The First Crusade

The first Crusade was not a direct result of Christians in the West deciding to put an end to the persecution and harassment of pilgrims to the Holy Land, but in response to a plea for help from Christians in the East.

The impetus for the First Crusade was a plea from Emperor Alexius Komenos to Pope Urban II asking for help.

Urban II became Pope in 1088.

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In 1095 Urban held a church council in the city of Clarimont in what is now France. Most of the council was taken up with ecclesiastical reforms but on the last day, Urban made the speech heard ‘round the world, or at least across western Europe. The speech was a response to the plea from Byzantine Emperor Alexius asking for help against the Islamic armies.

By this time the city of Nicea was in Muslim hands and Nicea was only 25 miles from Constantinople so about from here to Dahlonega.

The Byzantines felt the Muslim armies breathing down their neck and they reached out to their Christian brothers in the west for help. (Stark, p. 142)

Urban II made a speech wherein he plead with Christians in the west to go and help their brothers in distress and not only that, to free the Holy City of Jerusalem from Islamic control.

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The crowds responded with cries of “Deus vult!” or God wills it! and this became the battle cry of the Crusades.

So, how did this speech turn into action, large scale action, on the part of western Europeans?

For that we need to talk more about theology.

In addition, Urban made participation in the Crusades equivalent to service in a monastery. (Stark p. 107)

Remember at this time that things like being a monk were looked on as true Christian service with everything outside the church being a less spiritual way to live. There was this hierarchy that said the most spiritual people were monks and priests. This gave knights and others the ability to pursue their vocation in a way that made them equivalent to monks and priests in the spiritual hierarchy. I don’t have to leave my family and my position and and my career to become a monk to be the best kind of Christian, I can just go on crusade!

This brings up an important point.

One of the criticisms of the Crusades is that it was the church bearing the sword. That’s not really true. The same group bore the sword in the Crusades as in other military engagements in Europe - the professional fighter class of nobles and knights, who as this move by Urban told us, stood outside the church as it was then understood.

Now, in addition to this, there were others who went on Crusade, among them so-called holy men such as Peter the Hermit, but the fighters who actually made the difference were professional soldiers, under command of government nobles, not the church.

But, perhaps most important thing Urban did from the perspective of getting buy-in is he made participation in the Crusades kind of an uber Indulgence:

“Whoever goes on the journey to free the church of God in Jerusalem out of devotion alone, and not for the gaining of glory or money, can substitute the journey for all penance for sin.” - Pope Urban II

That’s quite an inducement. Are you weighed down by your sins? We’ll here’s a way you can deal with all of them at once!

These weren’t people looking for money or lands or glory.

Rodney Stark estimates that a typical crusader had to raise four to five times his annual income before he could set out - again, the church wasn’t paying for it. Many of them did this by selling or mortgaging family estates and other property. Crusading was a net financial negative for most participants, not a path to riches.

These were people looking to help fellow Christians, return the Holy Land to Christian control and find forgiveness for their sins. We can argue with their theology but let’s not impute motives to them they would not have had.

Here’s another thing to consider, especially when we think about why the church was involved in this endeavor, why did the Byzantine emperor ask the Pope for help defending Constantinople instead of one of the kings in western Europe? Specifically instead of the Holy Roman Emperor, who at the time was German king, Henry IV.

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Because, like it or not, the Roman Catholic Church during this time was the unifying force in western Europe. Urban’s predecessor, Pope Gregory VII, had taken a strong stand against state control of the church and through something called the “investiture controversy” had established the church as the sole arbiter of who held church offices. Prior to that kings were appointing the church officials within their realm. When kings and nobles could no do that, they lost any hold they had on the church and the tables turned with the folks who had the keys to the kingdom, in charge of all the clergy in western kingdoms. So, you have different monarchs but one overarching superstructure, the church.

That has to be taken into consideration as we think about this. It’s not so much the church taking up the sword but that the church was the guiding organization for the civil government. We don’t live in a time when that is normal so it seems strange to us but it would not have seemed so to Medieval people. The pope was God’s representative on earth and kings and princes took direction from him on spiritual and, sometimes other, matters.

Response of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to 9/11:

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“The U.S., in collaboration with other nations and organizations, has a moral right and a grave obligation to defend the common good against mass terrorism. Therefore, there is a right and duty to seek out and hold accountable, in accord with national and international law, those individuals, groups and governments which are responsible. The real risk that terrorists will use weapons of mass destruction in the future only reinforces the urgency of this task.”

This response was not from the same position of authority as the one in 1095 but it’s similar in that it calls for, in this case the nation of the United States, to take the necessary steps to right the wrong. That’s really very similar to what Urban II was doing.

The People’s Crusade

The first wave of Crusaders is commonly called the “People’s Crusade.”

After Urban’s speech, people spread out across Europe preaching crusade and encouraging people to sign up to help - to take up the cross. Among them was a man named Peter the Hermit.

SLIDE Peter the Hermit

Peter was a French priest from the town of Amiens. Little is known of his life prior to his entry into history during the Crusades. He traveled around Europe calling people to take up their cross and help liberate the Holy Land and began to gather a large follows that traveled with him.

As the nobility, knights and others were preparing to go, this group decided they needed no preparation, in fact, such preparation might indicate they weren’t trusting God enough. After all, if God willed for them to liberate the Holy Land, nothing could stop them, right?

In April of 1096 (Urban had set August as the departure date), a few thousand peasants set off behind Peter the Hermit for Constantinople. When they arrived in July, Emperor Alexius welcomed them but urged them to wait for the main force that would come in a few months. They, however, had not come to wait, they had come to take action against the enemies of God. So, after a couple of months of restlessness, they struck out for Nicea, twenty-five miles away and in the hands of the Turks. They were slaughtered and the women and children taken captive. Peter the Hermit managed to escape, returned to Europe and continued to be involved in the Crusade.

There’s a lesson in this.

Luke 14:28–29 “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him,”

Good lesson in presumption versus faith.

The Prince’s Crusade

The second wave of the first Crusade was known as the Prince’s Crusade. That’s because it was led by nobles and consisted of an army of fighting men who’d actually prepared.

The two main leaders were:

Godfrey of Bouillon, a Frankish knight

Baldwin Count of Boulogne, also a Frankish knight.

Both men sold their property and estates to help finance the crusade.

SLIDE Crusade Routes

This group got under way in multiple waves between August 1096 and October 1096 arriving at Constantinople between December 1096 and May 1097. Notice it took them longer to travel than the People’s Crusade. They were a fighting force with horses and supplies and other things and naturally moved more slowly.

For the sake of time we’re going to skip a lot of what happened on the front end of this effort and deal with the three main engagements of this army - with one exception, the Alexian Oath. Alexius had thought maybe the West would send him some mercenaries to help him fight the Turks but when a full on army turned up, he became nervous. Upon arrival, Emperor Alexius required that the leaders of the armies sign an oath that whatever lands and property the recovered from the Turks would be returned to the Byzantine Empire because that’s from whom it was taken. After some back-and-forth they all signed it.

Nicea

As we’ve mentioned, Nicea was only twenty-five miles from Constantinople and as such was their first target. The professional soldiers achieved a much different result than the enthusiastic but unprepared “people’s Crusade.” A seige of the city began on May 14, 1097 (Stark, p.142) The Turks sent reinforcements who engaged with the crusader army to try and break the seige but were defeated, leaving Nicea ripe for an attack. The Crusader army began to prepare for an all-out assault to capture the city.

But, long story short, Emperor Alexius was negotiating for the surrender of the city behind the backs of the crusader armies and on the morning they planned to begin the assault, they awoke to find the Byzantine banner flying from the towers of Nicea.

The city had surrendered to Alexius. This began a, well founded, distrust of Alexius among the crusading armies who saw him as using them for his own ends. He’d sent none of his own troops to help with the fighting at Nicea and then swooped in at the end claiming the prize. This kind of behavior from him is going to continue so bad blood between Byzantium and the west continues to grow.

Antioch

The next major engagement of the First Crusade as they make their way towards Jerusalem was at the city of Antioch, also a former Christian city. If you remember from the Book of Acts, this is where people were first called “Christians.” It’s also the church to whom the Jerusalem council wrote in Acts 15 instructing them they did not have to follow the Jewish ceremonial law in order to be saved.

According to Rodney Stark, it was also the third largest city in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era. This is, in some ways, the mother city of Gentile Christianity and it is under the boot of Islam. Christians were still the majority in the city but the ruling Emir treated them badly, even turning the cathedral into a horse stable. (Stark, p.148). So, the populace was not on his side which would end up being to the Crusaders’ advantage.

The seige of Antioch began in October 1097. But because the crusader forces did not have enough troops and equipment to surround the entire city, the Turks were able to continue to supply it. The Byzantine navy and army could have intervened to stop this but they did not, so again, Alexius was not backing them up. So began a long seige that did not end until June 1098.

In the end, the city was taken by the Crusaders because their commander, Prince Bohemond of Taranto, found a traitor in the city. Surprisingly it wasn’t one of the disaffected Christians but a Muslim convert in command of one of the defensive towers. This man opened a gate to the Crusaders and as they poured into the city, the Christian population turned on their oppressors from within. (Stark, p. 151). So, Antioch too was now again in Christian hands.

This victory was short lived however because the Turks sent reinforcements and soon the ones who laid seige to Antioch from the outside were now besieged within its walls.

This is when one of the most remarkable events of the Crusades happened - or is supposed to have happened depending on how you look at it.

Trapped in the city with an overwhelming Turkish force outside and the Byzantine army and Alexius again doing nothing to help, the situation seemed dire.

“On June 11, a priest reported that Christ had appeared to him during the night and promised divine aid to the crusaders in five days.” (Stark p. 152)

Then, three days later, Count Peter Bartholomew claimed St. Andrew had appeared to him revealing that buried within the city of Antioch was a powerful relic that would ensure their victory - the Holy Lance, the spear that had pierced Christ’s side.

People were sent to dig where Bartholomew directed them and, low and behold, an iron spearhead was found.

This assured the crusaders that God was with them and would ensure their victory. So, much like Constantine centuries earlier marching to victory under the banner of the Chi-rho because of a vision, on June 28, carrying the Holy Lance with them, they left the protection of the city walls and attached the larger Turkish forces, thoroughly routing them and leaving the road to the ultimate prize, the city of Jerusalem, open before them.

Jerusalem

Unlike Antioch and Nicea, the defenders of Jerusalem were not Turkish Muslims but Fatimids from Egypt. They had taken Jerusalem from the Turks a year earlier. The Fatimid governor of Jerusalem was a man named Iftkhar al-Dawla.

According to Stark, when al-Dawla became aware of the approaching crusader army, he drove away all the livestock in the areas around the city and poisoned the wells outside the city walls. He also expelled the Christian population of the city - which outnumbered it’s Muslim population. (Stark, p. 155)

The crusader army that remained at this point was only about 300 mounted knights and 10,000 or so infantrymen. (ibid)

Their attack on the city began on June 13, 1099.

They had some initial success while on the outskirts of the city but when they reached the walls, they realized they lacked the necessary equipment to scale them and enter the city. Their ladders were too short and they had no seige machines.

But once again, providence was on their side.

Stark writes:

“At this critical moment, six Christian ships - two from Genoa and four from England - arrived at Jaffa, about twenty-five miles away. All six carried food, but the Genoese ships also carried cargoes of ropes, nails, and bolts needed for making seige machines.” (p. 156)

By July 13, 1099, they were ready to move the newly built seige machines and ladders into position. By the fifteenth, the walls had been scaled and street by street fighting began. By the sixteenth it was all over and what’s been described as a bloody massacre left Jerusalem once again in Christian hands.

SLIDE (Taking of Jerusalem by Emile Signol, 1847)

Much has been made over the sack of Jerusalem during the first Crusade. As you recall from the opening quote, that’s what was being apologized for.

Even Mark Galli writes:

Christian History Magazine—Issue 40: The Crusades Worship at the Tomb

Meanwhile, crusaders rushed through the streets and into houses and mosques, killing everyone they met—including women and children. All Friday afternoon and night, the killing and looting continued as soldiers and pilgrims rushed through the city, “seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods.”

Justo Gonzalez says:

“There followed a horrible blood bath. All the defenders were killed, as well as many civilians. Women were raped, and infants thrown against walls. Many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge in the synagogue, and the crusaders set fire to the building with them inside. According to an eyewitness, at the Porch of Solomon horses waded in blood.” (Gonzalez, p.296)

Stark says:

“…the commonly applied ‘rule of war’ concerning seige warfare was that if a city did not surrender before forcing the attackers to take the city by storm, the inhabitants could expect to be massacred as an example to others in the future…Granted it was a bloody age, but nothing is to be gained either in terms of moral insights or historical comprehension by anachronistically imposing the Geneva Convention on these times…What most likely happened was, as the distinguished John France put it, ‘not far beyond what common practice of the day meted out to any place that had resisted.” (Stark, Pp. 157-59)

The victors, even in a righteous cause, sometimes are unnecessarily cruel in pressing their advantage. If you’ve never read an account of the allied fire-bombing of Dresden near the end of WWII, you should do so.

It’s also believed by some that the account of large numbers of Jews being burned alive in the synagogue is either exaggerated or untrue. A letter from the time was found in 1952 written in Hebrew seeking funds from other Jews to ransom Jews taken captive when Jerusalem fell which would not seem likely if most or all of them were killed. (Stark, p.159)

Remember, these were soldiers. This wasn’t monks and priests going around hacking people to death, it was soldiers of that day acting like soldiers of that day.

Remember also the orthodoxy / orthopraxy equation. If my theology says I can do things to remit my sins, I’m much more likely to sin if I believe I can later make payment for doing so. But what if the thing I’m engaged in right now will take care of all my sins…well, you have a recipe license.

Remember too that the accounts tend to be exaggerated. We have accounts, for example, telling us the number of people participating in crusades that are impossible given the population of Europe at the time. People sometimes exaggerate in service to their story. Ever heard of the Million Man March?

The Crusader Kingdoms

“The First Crusade captured a long strip of territory along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and created the feudal Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. It survived until 1291, so around 200 years, when its last remnant fell to the Muslims...” (CHIPL, Shelly, p.189)

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“For a time four kingdoms, led by Jerusalem, were established along the eastern Mediterranean coast of the Holy Land.” (ibid, p. 191) Those were:

Kingdom of Jerusalem

Kingdom of Antioch

Kingdom of Edessa

Kingdom of Tripoli

After Jerusalem was freed from the Muslims, most of the crusader soldiers returned home to Europe. This left those kingdoms sparsely defended. In 1144 the Crusader kingdom of Edessa was recaptured by Islamic warriors. This led Bernard of Clairveux to call for a second crusade to counter that lest Jerusalem again fall into Muslim hands. This time, the Crusader armies were not successful and were routed by Islamic forces sending shock waves through Europe and causing some people to question Bernard’s judgment. (The Age of Faith, Will Durant, p. 595)

It was around defense of and support for these Crusader Kingdoms that most of the rest of the Crusades revolved. There ended up being, by most counts, eight major crusades. In the end, the west lost the resolve and lacked the resources to prop these kingdoms up from afar. And because of the duplicity and resulting animosity between east and west, the much closer armies of Byzantium did not help with the maintenance of the defense of these kingdoms. In the end, the entire area reverted back to Islamic rule where most of it remains today with the exception of the modern nation of Israel.

How It Ended

So, should we emulate the Crusades today? It’s kind of a moot point because the reality is we can’t. Remember, the Crusades weren’t just a bunch of people going off on their own to fight the infidel. They did so at the request of and under the authority of the ruling powers of their day. People are still called by their governments today to go to battle to defend their nation or their nation’s allies but we have a different understanding of the roles of the church and state.

“Arguably, the Crusades expressed the best and the worst of this synthesis. There were times when the fusion of warrior-heroism and Christian virtue produced something noble and exemplary during the centuries-long effort to reclaim the Holy Land. And there were times when the fusion failed and produced something ugly and lamentable. But even the failures teach us about the aspirational ideals of Christendom. We cannot understand the rise of Western culture without the religious unity imposed by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, and likewise, we cannot understand the flourishing of Christendom unless we understand that it grew up out of the soil of warrior kings and barbarian kingdoms.” - Kevin DeYoung

Primary resource for this lesson is “God’s Battalions” by Rodney Stark