CONSTANTINE THE GREAT by Reagan Hendrix (uplifting book club books .TXT) 📖

Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox. Constantine XI seemed to not understand the unifying factor of his empire and the schism led Constantinople to crumble easily when confronted by an opponent.
THE CRUSADES

THE CRUSADES
The crusades were first called for by Pope Urban II, and “were great expeditions undertaken by the Christian nations of Europe for the purpose of rescuing the holy places of Palestine from the hands of the Mohammedans.” (www.middle-ages.org.uk). The Church called for the Crusades in the eleventh century and “the notion of a Holy war, crusade, entered Christianity in the eleventh century, and was directed against the religion which from its earliest days had spoken of a Holy war, Islam.” (Christianity: The First 3000 Years, Diarmaid MacCulloch).
On the other side of the conflict, Islam “divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of war. Christianity…has no abode. Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As a faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East where it was born. The Christian World, therefore, was [a] prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders from the next thousand years.” (www.thearma.com)
The objective of the crusades was to hold off Muslim influence in Europe, for Islam was conquering many territories and breaching into European, or Christian,
Domain. Pope Urban II addresses his followers in an attempt to rally men together to fight the Muslims invading into their territory.
“The noble race of Franks must come to the aid of their fellow Christians in the East. The infidel Turks are advancing into the heart of Eastern Christendom; Christians are being oppressed and attacked; churches and holy places are being defiled. Jerusalem is groaning under the Saracen yoke. The Holy Sepulcher is in the Muslim hands and has been turned into a mosque. Pilgrims are harassed and even prevented from access to the Holy Land.” (Gbgm-umc.org)
The European powers in Europe were feeling threatened by the amount of land the Muslims had conquered and “at some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam.” (www.thearma.org). Later, the Catholic church saw, according to Dr. P. V. N. Myers in a General History for Colleges and High Schools, that the “Crusades influenced the wealth and power of the Catholic Church, Political matters, commerce, feudalism, intellectual development, social effects, [and] material effects.” In addition, “when the crusaders returned from the Middle East, they brought back Chinese silks, Persian carpets, sugar, spices, and other exotic goods which were previously unknown in Europe. The growing demand for these luxury imports lead to the launching of a final crusade, to conquer Constantinople and the eastern half of the old empire. This gave Italian merchants control over the trade routes to Asia, and Italian cities soon grew famously wealthy (Politics and Religion-The Rise of Democracy)”. Which later led leaders, such as King Richard the Lionheart, to go on the Third Crusade, called for by Pope Gregory VIII, in hopes of ruling Jerusalem (“he [Richard] and Philip began to squabble over who would be king of the soon-to-be-restored Jerusalem” FactsOnFile), as well as imposing taxes for his benefit at conquered territories (when King Richard the Lionheart conquered the island Cyprus, he “sold the island to the Knights Templar after exacting a 50 percent tax from the liberated Cypriots.”-FactsOnFile).
Religion was used, evidently by the Catholic Church calling for the Crusades. Though it appears that the crusades were called for, originally, to keep Christianity strong and to reclaim Jerusalem, it developed into a way to gain wealth and the Church and crusaders alike used it to gain political prominence and fortune.  

THE PALESTINE CONFLICT

THE PALESTINE CONFLICT
Although this region has been an epicenter of conflict throughout the ages, the specific area of focus for this paper is aligned with the western influence in a post-World War I era.
Theodor Herzl, a noted advocate for the early Zionist movement articulated the need for declaration of an independent Jewish state in his book “Der Judenstaat 1904 – The Jewish State” when proclaiming “The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migration. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country, and will remain so, even in those highly civilized – for instance, France – until the Jewish question finds a solution on a political basis”. In this passage of Herzl’s book, the broader issue of continued struggles and persecution will plaque the Jewish thereby citing need for a safe harbor existence of a sovereign homeland.
It was during this same time period that the Ottoman controlled Palestine, Syria and Lebanon was surrendered to Britain and France at the defeat of the Ottoman supported Germans in World War I. Although in Efraim and Inari Karsh’s book “Empires of the Sand”, it is argued that European imperialism was more benevolent than threatening and coexisted with Middle Eastern imperialism, “this amounted to a ‘scramble for Palestine’ in the classic imperialist tradition …for the simple reason that none of the region’s Arab regimes viewed Palestine as a distinct entity and most of them had their own designs on this territory”. This would suggest that Britain had no immediate plans to make changes in the region. It was during this same time frame that the United States, who had supported the advances of Europe against Germany in World War I were also being influenced to help address the plight of the Zionist movement. In 1916 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Brandeis was a strong proponent for the advancement of Zionist ideology as illustrated in a speech he delivered in April 1915 at the conference of Rabbi’s where he outlined a position of support when saying “When men and women of Jewish blood suffer, because of that fact, and even if they suffer from quite different causes, our sympathy and our help go out them instinctively in whatever country they live.” It was clear to Britain that American supported the Zionist advances. So clear in fact that in 1917 Arthur Balfour (Britain’s Foreign Minister) authored the Balfour Declaration and asked President Wilson to endorse (INSERT QUOTE BALFOUR), which he eventually did after encouragement from Brandeis which would lead to the passage of the Lodge-Fish Resolution 1922 in the U.S (“Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”).
Clearly the objectives for the Zionist were to end suffering and secure a safe haven of sovereign unification as outlined in Brandeis speech of 1915. As victors in the conflict with Ottoman ruled Palestine and an obvious ground swell of support for a Jewish State, an inevitable migration of Jews to the region began to take hold.
For the part of the Arabs in the region, under Ottoman rule which was aligned with the Germans in World War I, strategic positioning of support behind the British would eventually lead to opposition of Ottoman rule in the region and collaboration with Captain T.E. Lawrence(INSERT QUOTE) in the north, to help secure a victory for the British. Early in the war, the Arab leader Sharif Hussein supported the organization of region Arabs in support of the Ottoman cause, however Hussein’s son Abdullah Hussein convinced Sharif to begin negotiations with the British sensing the power shift and momentum of the war efforts. Abdullah later went on to become King Hussein after the war and further supported the British agenda of creating a Jewish State alongside an Arab ruled Transjordan. In 1937 Abdullah supported the Peel Commission efforts to establish a Jewish State(“Executive in 1944 supported partition accompanied by transfer, and that is why Jordan's Emir Abdullah and Iraq's prime minister Nuri Said, among other Arab statesmen, supported such a population transfer if Palestine was to be partitioned” super- http://www.standwithus.com/pdfs/flyers/Response%20from%20Benny%20Morris.pdf), which although was never adopted, did illustrate Abdullah’s support for the separation.
In opposition to the efforts of Abdullah, was Mohammad Amin al-Husayni the Mufti (Sunni Religious Spiritual Leader) of Jerusalem. Using a religious battle cry and creating opposition to the call for a Jewish State, al-Husayni called for all Islamic faithful to join in violent protest to the establishment of Jewish settlement in the region.
Abdullah and al-Husayni were early players in the disagreements in the region between an Arab desire for Statehood and acceptance alongside a broader western supported initiative of a Jewish State in the same region. Given the geographical proximity to Jerusalem and the religious history of the area for Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, a battle for land and power, political, and religious sensitivities have led this region to play a major role in the agendas of much larger nations.
In this brief review we examine how the changing of control through war, the agenda of a people who have been mistreated and are simply looking for a place to call home, and the protective nature of a people seeking to hold on to their land, heritage and way of life that has been encroached upon previously end up in a boiling pot of distrust and self-serving positioning. In addition to outside influences from supportive nations with greater wealth and underlying intentions to secure natural resources from the region, and the continued lack of a genuine quest for peace becomes more prevalent.
It should therefore be inferred that the great many of people simply looking for the basic necessities of life; home, shelter, food, water, safety are being thrown into constant turmoil by the leaders seeking not to create a world of harmony and peace, but instead to cultivate an environment of fear and distrust for the sake of personal, power, political, economic, and geographical agendas. In many cases the most effective way to excite the needed masses