Into the Valley of Revelation Rode the Reasoned 5000th

[Redbeck]

An enormously busy day, welcome to our 5000th member Ideaz2, rising up on the side of the right to live a peaceful, water and harvest plentiful life for all human kind and sentient beings on planet Earth.



WASDALE HEAD - English Lake District - Watercolour Original by Elizabeth A. Fox

[Redbeck]

The most celebrated of the Crusade preachers was a man known as Peter The Hermit. Originally from Amiens, in northern France, Peter who was both a monk and a hermit lived a sternly ascetic life. On a pilgrimage, he claimed to that while visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christ had appeared in a vision and directed him to start 'cleansing the holy places of Jerusalem' of pagans and unbelievers.

He began preaching this message as soon as he returned to Western Europe, travelling from town to town on a donkey with a following entourage of beggars and reformed prostitutes. Although a strange character, he was a very effective organizer. People flocked from miles around to hear the barefoot prophet's powerful message of righteous poverty, spiritual redemption and apocalyptic holy war. Some were even unshakeable in their claims to have experienced miracles in his presence.

Peter’s fiery sermons were underpinned by a wave of ominous natural signs that manifested themselves across Europe. Each sign was interpreted by the preacher as both a call to holy war in the East and the coming of the end of days. Famine, disease, comets, lunar eclipses, strange cloud formations and birth deformities all took on prophetic meaning. Rumours even began circulating that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne had resurrected after three hundred years, in order to lead the Christian armies to victory in Jerusalem.

As a result in March 1096, four months before the First Crusade officially got underway, Peter The Hermit crossed over into German territory accompanied by a vagabond army that swelled by the day. The Peasants Crusade had begun and was soon to become a convergence point for other armed bands led by an assortment of renegade monks, petty warlords and psychotic religious fanatics rallying to the supposed call of God to liberate the Holy Land.

The Peasants Crusade carved a destructive anti-Semitic path across Europe, throughout the summer of 1096. Even their fellow Roman Catholics were not safe. One group under Emicho of Flonheim, a minor lord of the Rhineland who had a reputation for lawlessness and brigandage conducted pogroms against the jewish population. Within this fanatical element of the crusade, one sect is said to have worshiped a goose, which they believed to be enchanted by the Holy Spirit; while others venerated a female goat, but above all they were also brutal anti-Semites. Meanwhile, mobs of other members of the Peasants crusade led by a Saxon monk named Folkmar pillaged the counties of Hungary. Not forgetting Gottschalk , a priest from the Rhineland, followed by yet another group of mean spirited crusaders who ravaged the Trans-danubian region

Their appallingly unchristian behaviour en route to the Holy Land inevitably led to more conflict with yet more Christian forces, this time Byzantine troops and the peasant crusaders sustained heavy losses, as they were in the main a gathered rabble rather than trained soldiery. Then once into Asia minor although depleted inn numbers the raping and pillaging began again, as a result they were then attacked by the Seljuks a tribe of ancient Turkey defending their citizens.

Most of them were slaughtered outright and the Peasant’s Crusade crushed, nontheless not entirely, for there were survivors who somehow managed to get back to Constantinople and regroup as part of the official Crusader armies (named the Prince’s Crusade) as the holy war raged with renewed fervour in early 1097.

This is not a salutation of Peter the Hermit, although he no doubt set out with the best, although potentially delusionary, intentions, but more to remind us as to the futility of holy wars or any form of war for that matter. Let us try and be truthful, they are rarely fought in the cause of freedom but most often for fundamentally dishonest reasons: territorial gain, for massive financial benefit of the already rich further impoverishing indigenous people , control of natural resources that should be owned by all, or unadulterated megalomaniacal power religious or otherwise.

However, the real rationale behind this tale is perhaps that hopefully, one day soon, we can all fully open our eyes, discarding the clouded judgement of deceit pedalled by both the media under political influence of frequently vilified but in truth their real masters. Indeed sufficiently wide to learn to learn lessons from history from the top to bottom in every compartment of society. For not only are we killing the planet but humankind along with it. These are darkening days if we do not stop fighting each other, there will be nothing left.

[Redbeck]

Guernica by Pablo Picasso 1937

The painting was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a village in the Basque Country of northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian warplanes at the request of the Spanish Nationalists.

[Redbeck]

Folly of Fear Francisco de Goya etching 1864 [classified as among his war paintings]