Crazy to think that massive expeditions to places so far away could be carried out in the Middle Ages, when medicine and technology were very rudimentary.
And organization! Most Crusaders, even the poor ones, would have brought along only money (or other valuables) to pay their way through, rather than having organized supply lines or even a set itinerary of depots who would be… expecting them. The poor state of roads and geographical knowledge also meant that, very often, smaller detachments would get lost.
The Byzantines would eventually set up some such logistics waypoints in their own territory simply to minimize the damage the Crusaders caused when passing through, but goddamn. That’s a low level of planning right there.
Every year this journey is symbolically re-enacted by participants in the Paris-Dakkar rally.
Poor middle-eastern peoples. They have two things that have been drawing westerners to them like locust for centuries: religion and oil. Talk about a curse…
Oil’s pretty recent - oil wasn’t widely used until the late 19th century AD.
Unfortunately for folk in the Levant in the medieval period, they were getting it from multiple sides - the Byzantines, Western Europeans, Arabs, and Turks were all fighting over the region. The Arabs took it from the Byzantines over the 7th-11th century AD. The Western Europeans and Turks joined the fray (for different reasons and with different targets) in the 11th century AD.
Well, all three Abrahamic religions originated from that general area, and everybody everywhere who believed their magical guy in the sky told them to take it back descended on them for centuries.
And then for the past few decades, the magical thinking started to decline, and westerners started to descend on them for the black stuff in their ground - which turns out to be just as addictive as magical thinking.
And now, the magical thinking is back with a vengeance, and the westerners descend on them under both pretexts. Because if there’s one thing Pete Kegbreath made very clear, it’s that the Iran War is as much about christy bullshit as it is about oil - maybe with a dash of Quentin Tarantino 🙂
And now, the magical thinking is back with a vengeance, and the westerners descend on them under both pretexts.
I want to add-on that when it comes to the elites, everything’s mostly just window-dressing after the core values of domination, power, wealth exploitation, etc. Religion and magical-thinking can factor in somewhat, but mostly that’s just for show. The orange thing some years back holding a photo-op in front of a church, holding their sacred book upside down is almost iconic of all that…
