"Battle of Kosovo, over 400 years ago today, in 1300's" Topic

I posted this to the 1400's forward in error, and correct that here. This battle was in 1389?

30,000 Turks over 12,000 middle-eastern Christians.

link

GdeP

Thanks for sharing that link.

It is an interesting article, which provides a good understanding for the tensions in the region, even 600+ years after the events.

A very one sided understanding!

A very good article for those deprived of history or blinded by faith.

Considering that the forces of Islam came out of Arabia to spread their religion across the world by the sword, I am not seeing what is so one sided here…

Yawn . . .

Goragad, then you are placing your ignorance on show, try reading a bit wider!

Read wider?

I suppose that when Emperor Alexios I Komnenos called for assistance from the West he was reacting to the efforts of Muslim missionaries rather than the conquest of Byzantine territory by Islamic invaders.

I realize that there is a body of revisionist history out there that, for example, see the Crusades as an invasion of a peaceful Islamic Middle East, but the territorial expansion of Islam came through conquest. And the condition of non-Muslim inhabitants of regions governed by Muslim rulers was at best that of second class citizens. Not surprising that there was later conversion by some of the subject population.

What a ridiculous piece of ham-fisted propaganda.

With islam, using hal gets it even trickier.

And I suppose all the Europeans all over Middle Eastern lands both before and after the Crusades were invited there by the natives?

Goragrad I doubt there is anyone on the planet who denies that the spread of Islam involved the sword. But that is equally true of Christianity and it is never the whole picture. It is very easy to be drawn into seeing only the armed aspect of these phenomena; as wargamers of course that is typically our entry point so of course it looms large. But the reality is that Islam, just like Christianity, has gained converts for all sorts of reasons, the genuine conversion due to a spiritual awakening being just one. Others were converted by force, falling in love, strategic marriage, a way of escape – Islam made inroads in India because people of low caste were drawn to its promise of egalitarianism (witness too the rise of the Nation of Islam in the US as a response to the civil rights movement and the Jim Crow laws etc). Many women were amongst the earliest converts because *some* Arab tribes were very patriarchal.

The rise of any new movement is always complex and, therefore, fascinating. For us, in a time where Islam is held to be the villain, it's well worth us remembering that there were hundreds of years when Islam was a leading region of artistic, scientific and philosophical progress. And I don't know where you live, but where I am, it still seems to produce a lot of the best doctors :-)

Cheers,
John

Sorry jeeves, prior to the Crusades aside from the Greeks/Macedonians and Romans who did tend to go where not necessarily invited, who were the uninvited Europeans meddling in the Middle East?

The Vandals were in North Africa for a while.

Other than that merchants to the best of my recollection not many uninvited Europeans in the Middle East.

A lot of Christian European slaves were 'invited' there though.

Post-Crusades visitation other than Pilgrims didn't really start until recent years.

Sorry John, Christianity does not have a built in injunction to convert by the sword. Particularly in earlier years there were instances and of course the Teutonics. But not a mandate from The Prophet.

As my ancestors all came to the US from Slovenia I have long had an interest in the history of the region. Trying to tell me how undeserved the Eastern European view of Islam is is a waste of effort.

One merely has to look at the news to see that there are those in Islam who share their ancestors' worldview.

"Sorry jeeves, prior to the Crusades aside from the Greeks/Macedonians and Romans who did tend to go where not necessarily invited, who were the uninvited Europeans meddling in the Middle East?"

Yeah, apart from successive waves of European conquerors dominating North Africa and the Middle East for a millennium, and European religious fanatics massacring both infidels and funny-looking Christians alike over there and elsewhere for a couple of centuries, when have uninvited Europeans meddled in the Middle East? Apart from conquest and colonialism ever since, which obviously don't count either.

Never! Apart from those times, never!!

Writing historical revisionism is fun.

Goragrad wrote:
. . . prior to the Crusades aside from the Greeks/Macedonians and Romans who did tend to go where not necessarily invited, who were the uninvited Europeans meddling in the Middle East?"

So from the first significant European occupation of the Middle East with the Macedonians, through to the end of the Byzantine occupation (800+ years that you conveniently discount), and then the Crusades, that's European meddling in the Middle East for over 1000 years out of about 1500.

"A lot of Christian European slaves were 'invited' there though."

Yes there were slaves, Muslim and non-Muslim, held by Muslim and non-Muslim. I take it you are not going to claim that Christians have not engaged in slavery at times in our history. No one here is trying to claim Islam to be morally superior, just that a simplistic "Islam bad, Christianity good" view of history does not lead anywhere productive.

And yes, a glimpse of the news shows that there are people with a backward (and often unislamic) world view who want a strangely mediaeval "Caliphate" in the Middle East. They're not popular with the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

Where I live, a white supremacist just entered pleas of not guilty in the murder of 51 Muslims in two mosques in my city, despite filming and live streaming himself carrying out the slaughter. Two of those whom he murdered in cold blood were people I had known for over 30 years. One of the shootings took place at a mosque only a kilometer from my workplace. I had a class full of terrified students in lockdown for several hours. He cited "Christian" values and referenced "Christian" martyrs, some from the Balkans. People like him are not popular with the overwhelming majority of Christians.

"Sorry John, Christianity does not have a built in injunction to convert by the sword. Particularly in earlier years there were instances and of course the Teutonics. But not a mandate from The Prophet."

You're dancing on the head of a pin. The Old Testament is overflowing with instructions to the Israelites to smite their rivals: men, women and children. Most Christians treat those as historically specific and not commandments. A few seem to think they're still real and relevant. Most Christians see those few as not representative. Most Muslims treat ISIS and their ilk as not representative.

"As my ancestors all came to the US from Slovenia I have long had an interest in the history of the region. Trying to tell me how undeserved the Eastern European view of Islam is is a waste of effort."

The closed mind does you no credit. The Balkans have had a violent history, but not just between Muslim and Christian. There have been conflicts between orthodox and Catholic and attacks on Jews. There have been racial attacks against Roma. Nothing that has happened in the past between Muslim and Christian in the Middle Ages (eg Kosovo) justifies an ongoing anti-Muslim perspective.

The article itself is a bizarre attempt to justify contemporary anti-immigrant thinking by reference to a battle most people have never heard of, that happened half a millennium ago, by a self-described far right magazine. Its value to this list is, in my opinion, curiosity only.

"One merely has to look at the news to see that there are those in Islam who share their ancestors' worldview."

Yes, and to judge by this article, there are those in the Christian West who share their ancestors' worldview. Neither are helpful.

Cheers
John

Ha the grey case, relativity applied to history, jugement etc. Nice specimen.
Because some of yours did the bad things then it makes my bad things less bad. Sure if eveyone is bad it does get to become good. Like if a majority are wrong they must be right.
Presented as a no choice absolutist righteousness. We know that, it is nowadays even worse than ever the norm.
And it will get soon all the compulsory labels sticking to those who do deviate from the One Way:
Far right, to facsist to racist to… ( soon to find new ones they get eroded in effects- over used. ). Tiring- or even funny. One can count points to see when, how fast it comes.
It might be that people who unvoluntarily lived under Ottoman yoke for hundreds of years have a more valid experience of it than say, Norvegians.

I can't work out who you are even responding to. Sometimes irony becomes so obtuse as to be meaningless.

Certainly I never called anyone a fascist. I said that was not appropriate as it is often thrown around as an 'all too easy' label.

Essentially my view is that when a religion covers covers so many hundreds of millions of people and the vast majority of them are good, decent peace loving people, whose views on many things we may happen to disagree with, there is nothing to be gained by demonising their faith, eg by identifying a miniscule fanatical number of them as somehow revealing the "true nature" of that system of belief. We could as easily do that for Christian, Buddhist or Hindu fanatics as for Muslims. Any such extrapolation and generalisation would be wrong. Most people of any faith are good and decent. And I say that as an atheist.

We play a game that taps into the ancient past of many civilisations, many of which have done some pretty awful stuff in the past (Assyrians anyone?). But in a perverse way it also gives us a way in to understanding the things that unite us as people. There's nothing absolutist or righteous about that, quite the opposite. My own (not so distant) ancestors lived under the British yoke in Ireland but I have no intention of declaring the British irredeemably barbaric. Actually they're mostly a pretty ice (and witty) bunch of people.

Cheers,
John

What a ridiculous piece of ham-fisted propaganda.

No that is what actually happened.

Oh and both armies took heavy losses, though the Turks had more troops to throw into the region.

The Christians didn't and region after region fell to the Turks because of this.

But with what is happening in Europe today they will control of most European countries within the next 50 years.

It is too bad that the Western European countries were far to busy killing each other during that time and did not think much further than their own borders.

We need to keep some perspective here. If we can't move on more than two centuries after what the article described all came to an end, how can we ever.

And who does the article quote as an authority? The xenophobic racist Viktor "We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others," Orban, exactly the type of rhetoric that drove the Mosque massacres in New Zealand.

As for "Turks (I presume you mean Muslims) will control of [sic] most European countries within the next 50 years", this is patently untrue. The Pew Research Center's highest increase prediction would put the Muslim population at 14% by 2050. That assumes a level of Muslim immigration equivalent to 2014-16 – ie a rate that already no longer exists. Even then, a majority within 50 years is completely unrealistic. The Muslim population in Europe would have to more than treble again within the following 15 years.

I'd imagine any Muslim (or other minority) members of this site might be finding the Islamophobia exhibited here to be quite disturbing. I'm not going to add anything more to this debate because it's not really wargame related, other than to issue a plea that people don't use this forum to post further anti-Muslim content. Articles about things Muslim (or Mongol, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Animist or any other) tyrants did in the past is one thing, articles that try to justify current Islamophobic politics through reference to centuries old events are a whole different thing.

Cheers,
John

You want to discuss this further head on over to the Blue Fez.

We are limited here on the TMP.

History is History

But so is Real Life and I think you should do some research on what is happening in London.