Management Agreement Addendum: Fill & Download for Free

The Crusades are among the most dramatic mass movements in world history, and they continue to catch our imaginations for good reasons.Generally, there is agreement there were nine “Eastern” crusades, maybe five “Northern” crusades, and between one and seven “Anti-heretic” crusades. We can generalize a little and say that, while they were all uniquely medieval products of specific circumstances, attitudes, and values of the High and Late Middle Ages, it can also be said that the crusades had some things—such as religion—in common.However, even that is not really a common thread except in the most general way. Where religion was the major motivator for the Eastern campaigns, the same cannot be said for the rest. For the Northern crusades, religion was an addendum, and for the anti-schismatic campaigns, the religious motive was essentially an excuse—a cover—for power politics. Those crusades were the germinating seeds of European nation-state building.For those who have no desire for the details that support these conclusions, I have included a “short answer,” here at the start.The Short Answer:I. What were the reasons behind the Eastern Crusades?The reasons for the Eastern crusades were (1) to aid and defend those who desperately needed and asked for help, (2) to rescue those who wanted to be rescued, and liberate territories that had been taken, by force, from them, and (3) to honor God by serving others through penitential warfare, Christian love, and the imitation of Christ.They were halted due to costs, repeated failure, the personal nature of crusading, and changes that took place in Europe.II. What were the reasons behind the Northern Crusades?The primary ‘reasons’ that drove the northern crusades were: to capture trade routes, grab land for the land hungry, increase the revenues and reputations of pirates and princes, to prevent rampant piracy by the opponents, to obtain natural resources and loot from them, and to subdue the people in a way that would make them peaceful neighbors—permanently—by converting them to Christianity through force.They were halted when they succeeded.III. What were the reasons behind the anti-schismatic crusades?(1) HeresyThe Pope called for action against heretics. This was necessary for crusade, but the religious motive was really a cover for the political motives of the various local authorities.(2) Nation BuildingThese crusades represent the first steps of European nation-state building and the beginnings of the death of feudalism.If you want to know more, read on.I. THE EASTERN CRUSADES“Our current understanding of crusade ideology is centered on the concepts of pilgrimage, penitential warfare, just war, Holy War, the defense of the church, liberation, Christian love, and the imitation of Christ.” [1]These are seen as the primary reasons for the eastern crusades, that are well established historically, but these crusades are also surrounded by popular myth that allege all kinds of contrary things about them.First, Dispel MythsOne otherwise generally reliable Western Civilization textbook claims that “the Crusades fused three characteristic medieval impulses: piety, pugnacity, and greed. All three were essential.”[2] They support this by claiming early crusaders were mostly disenfranchised second sons who wanted to get rich.The crusaders were pious for the most part, and who knows, they probably were pugnacious too, since it took a lot of that to survive the conditions of crusading, but whatever else they were, they weren’t motivated by greed.During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have thoroughly exploded this myth.A charter is a record of sales or loans of lands and/or rights. Charters reveal that crusading knights were generally wealthy men—first born sons—who already had titles, land, and prosperity.[3] To finance the long and arduous expedition to the near east, they sold their possessions, lands, and the rights to their lands. In fact, they sold so much so fast that they caused widespread inflation. Europe is littered with thousands of the charter-records of these transactions.Crusading was incredibly expensive. The wealthy were the only ones who could afford to go, and even wealthy lords were often impoverished by joining a Crusade. Greed may have been a motive for an individual here or there, and there were even a few who became rich by crusading, but their numbers are dwarfed by those who were bankrupted by it.[4] [5]The Lord in the lead paid expenses for his household, including his soldiers, to go crusading.Another popular myth claims the crusaders were “thuggish Westerners who trundled off unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims.[6] One otherwise dependable text even claims: “The soldiers of the First Crusade appeared basically without warning, storming into the Holy Land with the avowed—literally—task of slaughtering unbelievers.”[7]These are both absolute myth.1.The single greatest cause of the eastern crusades was a plea for help from the Byzantine Empire which genuinely needed that help.In the AD 600s, most of those in the territory surrounding the Mediterranean Sea were Christians.This included the Byzantine Empire which existed along the eastern Mediterranean, inside the boundaries of the old Eastern Roman Empire, where orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion.Outside of those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. For example, most of the Christian population of Persia were Nestorian Christians. The Visigoths of Spain were Arian Christians as were the Vandals in North Africa. Certainly there were many different Christian communities spread throughout what was then Arabia.When Islam began in the early 600s, Mohammad and his followers divided the world into two spheres: the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—any non-Muslim religion or ideology—was seen as having no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state, under Muslim rule, but in ancient Islam, Christian and Jewish states had to be destroyed and their lands conquered and absorbed and the people converted.Mohammad began taking over the Arabian peninsula by destroying the Christian and Jewish communities in, or shortly after, AD 633, after which Jews and Christians alike were subsequently expelled from the peninsula.Those in Persia came under severe pressure.Muhammad died in 632, and in the century or so after, (from 632 to 750), his followers unleashed a series of seemingly unstoppable military campaigns that consumed much of Christendom.The Rise of IslamMotivated by the lure of plundered wealth, the pressures of overpopulation, and the command to make Holy War, the Arabs proceeded to build a world state that rivaled the Roman Empire at its peak.[8]By AD 732, one century after Mohammed’s death, Islam had conquered and taken Egypt, Palestine, Syria, most of Asia Minor, and parts of southern France and had already begun knocking on doors all around Europe. By 740, North Africa had been added along with most of Spain. Italy and her associated islands were under constant threat and would come under Muslim rule in the next century.In the eighth century, Muslim armies through fierce military might, had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks finished conquering Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. By the time of the crusades, two thirds of the former Roman Christian world had been taken over through military conquest.The holdings of Byzantium (and the resources they contained) were reduced to little more than Greece.In desperation, the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.Pope Urban the II subsequently called upon the knights of Christendom to do so at the Council of Claremont in 1095.2. Rescue and LiberateThe Pope’s plea produced in the west the second leading cause of the eastern crusades: a desire to rescue the Christians of the East who were being harassed, taken, killed, forcibly converted and/or mistreated,[9] and to liberate from Moslem rule the territory they had taken.Jerusalem had been conquered in 637. Getting it back was the first step toward that overall goal. These “reasons” were announced and recorded by the various Popes, espoused by his representatives, and committed to by all.The response was universal across all of European Christendom. Thousands of noble warriors, and common ones, from multiple countries, and varied backgrounds took the vow and prepared to go to the aid of those who had asked for help.Multinational support from the English, French and the Holy Roman Empire.There were splinter groups like the Peasant’s Crusade and the Children’s crusade who were ill-prepared and mostly starved or were killed, but the First official crusade with a real army was led by Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Flanders, and Bohemond of Otranto.This Crusade of Christian knights, their families, and their fighting men, crossed into Asia Minor in 1097 to rescue the Christians of the East, and to liberate the territories that had been conquered and taken against the will of the people, and their chosen government, beginning with Jerusalem.Throughout the entire period of crusading, this focus on rescue and liberation remained.[10]We even have a modern parallel that can help us understand this perspective.This is strikingly similar to the First Gulf War of our modern day. In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait—just as early Muslims had invaded Byzantium. Kuwait called for help, just as Byzantium did; they reached out to the west, as Byzantium had. The United States was vocal in its public justifications for involvement, just as the Pope was.The most prominent modern justification was the necessity to protect the territorial sovereignty of Kuwait—much like the crusades stated intent was to return captured Byzantine territory to Byzantium after they had finished recapturing it. The possibility of potential future danger to the West was also raised—and in the case of the crusades, was real.The US drummed up support for an international coalition and 34 countries united to rescue Kuwait and liberate the country through force of arms— just as the crusaders came from different nations and intended the same.The First Gulf War was a response to one country’s aggression.The crusades were a response to more than four centuries of aggression.3. ReligionReligion was a major “reason” for the eastern crusades.Crusaders volunteered, though they knew it would be a hard and costly campaign, because the willing acceptance of difficulty and suffering was viewed as a way to purify one’s soul and follow in the footsteps of Christ. This idea is still found in Christian doctrine.Crusading was also, from the very beginning, seen as an act of Christian charity, of selfless love, of “laying down one’s life for one’s friends.” Crusading was seen as an act of duty and service to God and to others.As manifestations of Christian love, the crusades were as much the products of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages, with its concern for living the vita apostolica (apostolic life—the life of a true disciple) and expressing Christian ideals in active works of charity, as were the new hospitals, the pastoral work of the Augustinians, and the service of the friars.The charity of St. Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders, but both sprang from the same roots.[11]This did not change as long as these eastern crusades lasted even though the later crusades were not called for by the Pope. For example, the Seventh and Eighth crusades were led by the French king Louis IX.Louis had defeated the English in 1242 but afterward, he had fallen seriously ill, at Pontoise-lés-Noyon, with a form of malaria. He was miraculously cured, and it was then, in December 1244, that he made a vow to take up the cross and go free Jerusalem.Jerusalem had, once again, fallen into Muslim hands on August 23, 1244, and the armies of the sultan of Egypt had also seized Damascus. Louis led the seventh and eighth Crusades to rescue and liberate— just as the first crusaders had.The Eighth Crusade under King Louis IX of France.For them, in their day, the evidence strongly suggests that most crusaders were genuinely devoted Christians motivated by a sincere desire to please God by liberating those who had expressed a desire to be liberated, by expiating personal sin, doing their duty, and imitating the suffering of Christ, and by putting their lives at the service of their Byzantine “neighbors” as understood in the Christian sense.[12][13]Intolerance was not a ReasonIt is difficult for modern minds to reconcile our post-Reformation understanding of what we think good values are supposed to be, and the bloody nature of crusading, but it’s the responsibility of the modern interpreter of history to adjust their thinking to the Middle Ages and not judge the Middle Ages by modern standards.Social tolerance and religious freedom are post-Enlightenment values.It cannot be fairly claimed that intolerance was a reason for the crusades since tolerance and intolerance were not starting points for ideas about relations among the people of this era.Crusaders were products of their times, circumstances, and character—just as we are—and can only be judged by what they knew and not what they didn’t know.Illegitimate Wars of colonialism was not a ReasonThese men were not pacifists. They were supporters of just war, and by definition the Eastern crusades were a just war.The crusaders had no intention of staying in the East and most didn’t. In fact, so many went home after the First crusade, the crusader forts were left critically undermanned, which ultimately led to Jerusalem falling back into Moslem hands.Forced Conversions were not a ReasonThe Crusaders used force and violence to defeat their armed, militant opponent’s armies and retake territory— these were wars, after all—but they did not, at any time, use force as a means of imposing Christian belief. Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that none of the military religious orders confronting the Muslims sought to impose baptism by threat of force.They did hope to establish conditions conducive to the peaceful conversion of Muslims. [14] But Muslims living under Christian lords were not coerced into baptism, either at the time of conquest or later, and though they lost public use of their mosques, they were permitted to freely retain their religion.[15]Why were the Eastern Crusades halted?CostsOne of the chief reasons for the foundering of the Fourth Crusade, and its diversion to Constantinople, was the fact that it ran out of money before it had gotten properly started, and was so indebted to the Venetians that it found itself unable to keep control of its own destiny.Louis IX’s Seventh Crusade in the mid-thirteenth century cost more than six times the annual revenue of the crown.Eventually the sums necessary to mount a crusade simply made it impossible to continue.[16]They failedWhen we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was in the middle ages, but the colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting because they were an attempt to counter that, but in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam.The Muslim world was eventually victorious because of the insightful and charismatic leadership of Nur al-Din, and Saladin, and by the Baybars’ unflinching ruthlessness.Participation was VoluntaryCrusaders were not drafted. Crusades were constructed as voluntary and personal.[17] It is this very nature of Christian crusading that was the cause of its ultimate defeat.Crusaders mostly saw themselves as fulfilling a duty of service to God, offering succor to fellow Christians, and even imitating the sufferings of Christ, and this did not readily lend itself to unity of purpose where military goals were concerned.[18] They were frequently disorganized, often at odds about who should be in charge, and occasionally refused to cooperate with each other, dividing their armies, and going their separate ways. This made them much easier to defeat.Europe changedAs the centuries passed, the European crusaders became part of what eventually brought Byzantium to an end. There is no doubt the western crusaders began with every intent of helping the Byzantines, but in the end, there was no longer a Byzantium to aid.By that time, Europe was experiencing both Renaissance and Reformation. Colonialism had begun. Economic prosperity was increasing and there was fierce competition between the European nations states for money, land and power.Leaders, both Christian and Muslim, secular and spiritual, came to realize the ideals of Holy War could be harnessed for other more gainful purposes. Royal programs of militarization, the imposition of autocratic government, the attempt to control and direct violence—ostensibly for the common good—served the interests of the ruling elite more than crusading ever had.THE NORTHERN CRUSADESThe Northern (or Baltic Crusades), went on intermittently from 1147 to 1316. They were attempts by the Teutonic Order, along with the nobility of northeastern Germany, to bring the pagan Baltic tribes under their control, convert them to Catholicism, and most importantly, grab their land and gain wealth. [19]The Northern Crusades are different from the Eastern Crusades in several important aspects:[20]1) The Military Religious OrdersThe Northern Crusades were primarily led by the military religious orders from beginning to end. The military orders— (the Order of the Temple, also known as the Knights Templar, the Order of St. John, also called the Hospitallers, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, and the Teutonic Knights)—did not play a large role in the First Crusade, though they did later become a very powerful force in crusader politics. [21]2) They Did Not FailUnlike the Eastern Crusades, the Northern Crusades were ultimately successful in achieving their goals.3) Not DefenseAlso unlike the Eastern Crusades and the Reconquista, the Northern Crusade cannot be claimed to be defensive except in a very tenuous manner.The German Empire had a long tradition of sending Christian missionaries to the area northeast of Germany known as the Wendish ‘frontier,’ a hotspot of many wars, often resulting in the untimely death of said missionaries. Efforts at evangelism were also efforts at peace, since these sides fought and raided each other, but the resulting deaths and other atrocities against Christians, (reported by such figures as the archbishop of Magdeburg in 1108 AD), stirred the desire for a military response instead.4) ConquestThere was no question of reclaiming previously Christian lands - this was simple conquest.In the twelfth century, there were free pagan people living around the Baltic Sea in northern Europe called the Wends. They raided the areas around them—Denmark and Prussia and Germany and Poland— and those areas raided them. There was nothing unusual in this. It does not indicate these people were amoral or unique. Raiding and taking land and people made life uncomfortable and dangerous, but it had been the norm for centuries.The various Germanic nobles wanted it stopped. Missionary work hadn’t worked. The nobles saw this as an opportunity for territorial expansion and the gaining of material wealth in the form of land, furs, amber, and slaves—and the imposition of a peace they couldn’t refuse.Christianization of the Baltic 1199-13295. Forced ConversionsThat meant the Northern Crusades had, as their end, not only the conquest of land, but the mass conversion of the population, by force if necessary. This represents a significant ideological and moral shift within Christianity.There had been no concept of Holy War within Christianity before the crusades. Holy War wasn’t developed as an idea until sometime in the 1200s. And there had been no forced conversion approved by the church before this time either. [22]Augustine had allowed force to be used in the fourth century to discipline Christians who had gone astray and become a criminal, physical threat to others, but there was no allowance for force to be used on those outside the church to impose Christian belief.Indeed, there still exist multiple writings, by multiple Popes, church leaders, and church doctrine, that had, for centuries, actively opposed such a thing. Credere voluntatis est: to believe depends upon free will, wrote St. Thomas Aquinas (II-II:10:8). [23][24]But church records of the Middle Ages show Christianity massively adjusting its rhetoric, its law, its theology, rituals, and even its finances, to accommodate this new militant aspect. [25]Some scholars say hundreds of years of conflict with militant Islam reshaped Christianity. Some say European culture itself was becoming militant and intolerant.Whatever the causes, in the Middle Ages, beginning with the Wendish Crusade, the Church began to endorse forced conversion, something it had not done before, and had previously spoken against.6) The Non-crusade CrusadeThe Northern Crusade was not designated as a Crusade properly speaking.In 1147, Pope Eugenius III issued the papal bull Divina dispensatione, which, while not declaring the Northern Crusades to be legitimate crusades in the strict sense, nevertheless made the same indulgences available to the Northern crusaders as had been made available to the others.The stage for the Northern Crusades was set in 1144 when a new Islamic leader named Imad al Din Zangi launched successful attacks against the European footholds in Palestine. Edessa fell in 1146, and panic at the Muslim threat spread across Europe. A cry went up for a Second Crusade to return to the East before Jerusalem was retaken.Unlike the First Crusade, which was called for and ordained by the pope, this new call for crusade came from private individuals.Pope Eugenius III supported the idea, however, and enlisted Bernard of Clairvaux as the church’s chief crusade promoter. Bernard was a well known reformer, preacher, writer and mystic. He had great political influence and traveled across Europe calling upon men to enlist in "the cause of Christ."[26]But when the call to crusade went out, many German leaders declined. While soldiers of various western European realms were preparing to return to the Middle East to defend the crusader states against the Turks, central and northern European soldiers obtained permission from Pope Eugenius III to fulfill their vow, and ‘take part’, by going East instead.The Wendish Campaign [27][28]The first year of the crusade (1147 AD) against the Wends was more show than conquest.Saint Bernard had urged the soldiers to convert the heathens, but as the bishop of Stettin said when he watched the crusading army depart, “If they had truly come to strengthen the Christian faith … they should do so by preaching, not by arms.” Besides, the motivation of the combatants—primarily knights and princes—was more related to acquisition of land and power than holiness. Forced conversion mostly failed in this first campaign.The cohesion of the Saxons, Danes, and Poles crumbled in less time than it had taken the religious leaders to convince them to unite in the first place.The Danes believed the Saxons had accepted a bribe to stand by idly while the Wends mauled the Danish forces. The Saxons thought the Danes weak and unfit for alliance.The bishops could not stop bickering among themselves over tithes and titles, and the barons despised them for their greed.Most important was the fact that not a foot of Wendish territory was taken.The church suffered most from the Wendish debacle. Many churchmen felt that conversion of the Wendish pagans should not depend upon military might, but on missionary teaching and example as it traditionally had. Bernard of Clairvaux’s reputation as a crusading leader dwindled, and the Wends got a temporary respite in fighting.In 1152, Frederick Barbarossa became the new Holy Roman emperor, and he was more interested in southern Europe and Italy than Wendish pagans to the east.Unfortunately for the Wends, however, his cousin Henry the Lion had his eyes set firmly on the east, and by the time his cousin took the crown, he had already started building a power base to seize more Wendish territory.Henry the Lion’s intrusion into Wendish territory was sporadic but successful. He grew wealthy off the land he had conquered, building cities and trade centers and profiting equally from both the German and the Wendish peoples. He and the majority of his vassals made peace with the Wendish leader, Nyklot, who had fought hard to hold onto his land, but now found trade with Henry and his allies more profitable and less painful.To the north of Henry lay the lands of Adolf II of Holstein who waged almost nonstop war against the Wends, not for religious reasons, but for territorial and mineral rights. He too succeeded.At the same time, the religious orders continued their own campaigns. The most zealous was led by Eskil, a Danish noble who became archbishop of Lund in 1138 and held the position for 40 years. When his army, and that of Danish king Valdemar, moved against the Wends in 1159, Eskil led his men with such unrelenting vigor that he reprimanded his warriors whenever they stopped to rest.He also encouraged the building of monasteries and ordered Danish warriors to stop slaughtering those Wends who promised to be baptized, but Eskil and his soldiers harried the Wends relentlessly until his death in 1177.Painting of the taking of Arkona and the downfall of idols in 1169. King Valdemar and Bishop Absalon.In 1177, Valdemar defeated the Mecklenburg Wendish forces in battle and seized their territory. When Valdemar died in 1182, the Wends again rose in rebellion, but were defeated by Valdemar’s son, Canute. The land was now effectively under Danish rule.[29]From 1147 to 1185, northern Europe had gone through a great metamorphosis.The German Christian church gained power while the nobility was off fighting for Wendish lands.In civil war-torn Denmark, a new unity became possible after the people joined forces against their ancient enemies, the Wends.Many of the Wendish people escaped eastward, but those who remained behind eventually made common cause with the Christians to root out their cousins.The Wendish Crusade was the first of many, including the Crusades against Livonia, Prussia, Estonia, and Finland (1200-1292), the Lithuanian Crusade (1283-1410), and the Novgorod Crusade against the Russians (1400-1562).Forced conversion became widespread during the Livonian Crusade and the Prussian Crusade. In Old Prussia, the tactics employed in the initial conquest and subsequent conversion of the territory resulted in the death of most of the native population whose language, consequently, became extinct.THE ANTI-HERESY CRUSADESThe most famous of these campaigns was the war against the Aligensians, also known as the Cathars, the largest of the heretic groups of the late 1100s and early 1200s. The sect was founded by crusaders from the Second Crusade who were converted by the Bogomils on their way home to France. They settled mostly in the Languedoc region south of France.There are two distinct lines of reasoning explaining why the Albigensian Crusade occurred.[30]It was the Pope.Some scholars, such as Jonathan Sumption and Stephen O’Shea, paint Innocent III as the mastermind of the crusade. According to Sumption, it was Innocent’s idea all along to use the King of France, as his tool, to mount an offensive against the heretics in the Languedoc.This seems unlikely. How could Innocent know ahead of time that Phillip would volunteer? There is no reason to suspect a “secret agreement” between them before the call went out—why would it need be secret if he was going to respond publicly anyway? It makes no sense.It also seems insupportable when examining the details of the campaign: many of the sites attacked contained no heretics yet they were key sites for a conquest of the region; the Pope withdrew his support more than once and the campaign continued anyway; and the heretics continued to exist and practice after the war ended.If the Pope was the primary mover behind the crusade, these are virtually impossible to explain.It was the King.Jean Markale and other scholars have suggested that the true architect of the Albigensian Crusade was King Phillip Augustus of France.[31]This is supported by the fact that all the men who marched from town to town, burning, killing, raping and looting, were from northern France. (In a takeover, local soldiers are not generally good to rely upon.)In further support of this view, it is a fact that King Phillip Augustus of France was a monarch in considerable distress.He had little control of his fracticious nobles in the north, and had absolutely no control over the southern nobles. Phillip needed a way to channel the aggressive nature in the north and establish dominance in the south.Under law in the Middle Ages, the lands of defeated barons could be legally confiscated.The Albigensian heresy provided the King with the perfect opportunity.Markale states that it was Phillip who actually petitioned Innocent for permission to conduct the Crusade.Both these men were probably necessary for this crusade to happen and if either one had opposed it, it’s most likely it never would have occurred, but an examination of events does clarify that Markale is no doubt correct, and the king was the prime mover behind it.The Albigensian crusade was political and only used religion as a cover for a conquest.(1) HeresyIt is beyond difficult for a modern post-Reformation post-Enlightenment mind, accustomed to thinking in terms of multiculturalism, freedom of religion, and social tolerance, to understand the mindset of the Middle Ages where heresy is concerned.Popular understanding leans toward seeing it as an issue created by the church, to increase its power and control, that was imposed from above on the poor innocent victimized people under their evil sway.This is largely Protestant propaganda from the 15th century, which the Enlightenment thinkers gleefully picked up and ran with in the next two centuries.But it’s not history.Civil UnrestIn history, heresy was a problem of civil unrest. This unrest usually took the form of mob violence which began from the bottom—not the top—and moved into top in the form of legal anarchy among the civil leaders and nobles. The nobles owned the lands, and made the laws for their lands, and they started exiling and burning and hanging whoever they pleased by simply shouting ‘heretic’—and then confiscating their property.Mob ViolenceIn the Middle Ages, a heretic was regarded—by the people—in much the same manner as we might regard someone carrying a highly contagious and incurable deadly disease—imagine the response in a crowded airport if suddenly someone was discovered to have the corona virus. We would lock such a person up where they would not come into contact with anyone.The people of the Middle Ages killed heretics. Moreover, they often killed them in public, in horrible ways.In 1076, Pope Gregory VI excommunicated the residents of the entire town of Cambrai because a mob had seized and burned a ‘heretic’ there.A similar occurrence happened in 1114. The Bishop of Soissons (modern day France) imprisoned some heretics, climbed on his donkey, and left to ask the advice of the holy synod on what to do with them.While he was gone, the “town’s folk”, fearing what they termed the “habitual soft-heartedness of ecclesiastics,” stormed the prison, took the accused outside of town, and burned them alive.In 1145 clergy at Leige managed to rescue some victims from the crowd.Two of the most famous heretics killed during this era were Peter of Bruys who was burned at the stake as a victim of popular fury, and Arnold of Brescia who died under the henchman's axe as a heretic but who was actually a victim of his political enemies.The church thought that rooting out the cause—getting rid of heresy and heretics through conversion, persuasion, or force—was the only possible solution to all this turmoil.(2) MurderKnowing the chaos that unchecked heresy could bring to his beloved Church, Innocent III released a hand-picked group of papal legates led by Piere de Castelnau to squelch the Cathars through reason and persuasion.For years, they traveled around the region, preaching the doctrine of Rome, and engaging Cathar perfecti in debates wherever possible. In 1206 the founder of the Dominican friars began to preach to the heretics as well.These efforts produced few results. The Cathar movement soon grew uncontrollable, spreading rapidly, permeating the church and secular society at all levels.In our modern day, our response to that is, so what? But in the Middle Ages, this was like a terrorist cell that just kept growing.In 1208, Pierre de Castelnau, who had traveled to Languedoc once again to attempt to persuade the heretics, was murdered. It was recorded as death by unknown assailants, but it was commonly believed to have been perpetrated by servants of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, a well known supporter of the Cathars.(3) The PopeInnocent III is regarded as one of the greatest pontiffs of the Middle Ages. [32]It is not refuted by any source that the Albigensian/Cathar doctrine was a heresy in the eyes of the Roman Church. The two dogmas were anathema to each other.In the Languedoc region of what is now southern France, they existed side by side. This put Innocent III was in a dire position and he knew it. He was poised to lose the entire region of Languedoc to a heresy he truly hated.He knew that if the Languedoc was lost to Catharism, that it would only be the beginning. It would open the door for other heresies to flourish and spread. He viewed the heresy as if it were an infection, one that needed to be stopped before it spread, causing permanent harm.Piere de Castelnau was dead, and Innocent held Raimon de Toulouse responsible. Innocent now had his excuse to call for the invasion of the Languedoc. Raymond was excommunicated, and Pope Innocent called upon some civil authority to respond and suppress the Albigensians.King Phillip Augustus of France answered the call.The key to understanding this campaign is in why he answered that call.(4) True CrusadeThe Pope determined this campaign against the Albigensian heretics qualified as a true Crusade, which meant that Church monies could be used to pay for ordinary solders, and those who fought were guaranteed a redemption of their sins.The Pope did insist that a minimum 40-day enlistment was required for a full remission of sins.The campaign thus became characterized by lengthy sieges, a chronic lack of money for anyone not directly belonging to the king, and the slipping away of crusaders every 40 days.(5) Nation Building, Politics and Power to the King [33]If you were to examine a map of central Europe in 1200, you would note that none of the nation states as they exist today are on that map.What we now know as Spain, was 9 separate kingdoms in the middle ages. Italy was divided into four. France was 7 separate kingdoms. Germany was 19—depending upon how you count them. Follow the map into Eastern Europe of the High Middle Ages, and you will find many separate states there as well.This is not how things ended up in a few centuries, and that process of change is what led to many wars, including this one.Nation BuildingBorders in the Middle Ages were porous. There was no such thing as a passport-check point. Borders also shifted, as one noble Lord would attempt to take over land and resources and do away with unfriendly neighbors who were attempting to do the same to him. The Turks and the Ottomans were a constant threat. Combine porous borders, with international threats, and local enemies at your back, and it might seem clear that survival required a new and different approach.Unifying the states around you into one single state, and centralizing its power into one central figure, began to seem the best answer—especially if you were the central figure with the power. The heads of state consolidated power into their own hands by taking it from others.Power to the kingRobert Moore, author of ’The Rise of the Persecuting Society,’ argues that from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, all of European society (including the church) became less tolerant and more militant as a result of this centralization process.[34]They hired paid soldiers and create standing armies of their own. This meant they no longer had to depend upon the nobles to provide soldiers, and that in turn took power from the nobility.They changed law. Previously the nobles made and enforced law on their own lands, but the state began creating law and enforcing it from above through their new police forces. “Crimes against the state” were invented and anyone on the fringes of society was in danger of being charged.They took power by taking it from minorities. This is the era when we see persecution of Jews and other minorities, crusades against Muslims, and the increasing acceptance of forcible conversion.[35]PoliticsWhen the Pope put out the call to prosecute the Cathars, King Phillip of France answered, but King Phillip Augustus had a much simpler reason for wanting to invade southern France than the Pope had. All of those lands were supposed to belong to him, yet the Languedoc nobles paid him no mind. [36]Records of the time refer to the invaders as “the French” because the locals did not think of themselves as belonging to France. Instead, they tended to support Phillip’s enemies, Castile and Aragon.Phillip’s power was waning, and his credibility with the northern nobles was stretched thin. He needed a way to consolidate his power base in the north, and punish his rebellious southern Lords, and gain any land and wealth he could.The Cathar heresy gave Phillip the perfect excuse. [37]The Campaign [38]The Albigensian Crusade began in 1209 and lasted until 1229. Phillip (not the Pope) put Simon de Montfort in charge. Phillip paid for provisioning his men.As the Crusader army left Lyons in the summer of 1209, they moved down the Rhône River toward the holdings of Raymond VI of Toulouse—and met their first snag.Raymond was the figurehead of the enemy, the man suspected of murdering the papal legate Piere de Castelnau, so he was he crusade’s first target. However, he had opened up negotiations with the Pope, and, after a suitable penance and giving up a little land, he joined the Crusader army as an ally instead of an enemy!They had already begun and now they had to shift targets! And there were limited targets available. So they went instead to an area controlled by a man named Trencavel who was not a heretic himself but was known to allow them in his district. This was the city of Béziers.Raymond Trencavel heard they were coming and left, abandoning the city to its own devices. The crusaders did not follow him. It wasn’t him they wanted. Instead, they arrived at Béziers and started to pitch their camp outside the city.The Bishop of the town, Renaud de Montpeyroux, tried to avert bloodshed by coming out of the city to negotiate. He returned with the message that the town would be spared provided it would hand over its heretics.The bishop had drawn up a list of 222 individuals likely to be leaders of their communities, but in a meeting with them at the Cathedral, it was determined that to hand over these people was not possible because they had too much support within the town.So the bishop asked the Cathars to leave the town to save themselves. This proposal was also rejected.The bishop then took the few Cathars who would go and they left without interference.The FightOn 22 July, the crusaders were busy setting up camp and getting settled in — still days away from starting the actual siege — when a group of people from the town came out of the gate overlooking the river Orb. They began to harass the mercenaries and pilgrims of the crusader army.A brawl ensued.Soon the attackers from the town found themselves outnumbered and they retreated back into the town in disarray. Except the mercenaries quickly took advantage of the chaos and followed their retreat, storming the walls of the city that were not yet properly manned.The walls were easily taken, and the mercenaries entered the gate, all without orders from their leaders. The crusader knights, soon realizing that the defenses had been broken, joined the mercenaries in battle, easily overwhelming the town garrison.The mercenaries were now rampaging through the streets, killing and plundering, while those citizens who could run, sought refuge in the churches and cathedrals. But there was no safety from the raging mob of mercenaries. The doors of the churches were broken open, and all inside were slaughtered.Some twenty years later, an apocryphal story about this arose where the papal legate, one of the leaders of the crusaders, was said to have responded: “Kill them all, let God sort them out.” But historian Laurence W. Marvin says it is unlikely the legate ever said any thing at all. “The speed and spontaneity of the attack indicates that the legate probably did not know what was going on until it was over." Marvin says there is no evidence this is anything but a story, composed at a later date, told for effect.[39]Marvin adds they did not kill them all at any rate: "clearly most of Bezier’s population and buildings survived" and the city "continued to function as a major population center" after the campaign.But there is no doubt there was a massacre committed by the mercenaries. The town's population at the time is estimated at between 10,000–15,000, and while some escaped, many were killed. The city had probably only had 700 heretics, but the killing was indiscriminate and totaled many more, though no one really knows how many died.After the massacre, the mercenaries set fire to the town.Horror and terror spread through the land.Massacre at BéziersAs a consequence of the massacre, the Pope cancelled the Crusade status of the campaign.Then later, he gave it back again.Then they massacred and burned another town, and he canceled it again.Then he gave it back again— off and on—over the next 15 years.The thing that is so significant about this is that it had no discernible impact on the conduct of the campaign. If the Pope had really been in charge, it would have.The mighty castle of Carcassonne fell within a month of the massacre at Breziers, and Trencavel was put in a prison from which he would not escape alive. Simon de Montfort then took Trencavel’s lands.Trencavel hadn’t been a heretic, but there were heretics in his lands.Many of the targets in this series of campaigns were not Albigensian strongholds at all. They were instead key locations for taking over the region.It was now clear to everyone, this was a campaign of conquest. This was not about conversion.There was only one attempt to convert the Albigensians as they did in the Northern Crusades, and that was at the seige of Montségur which happened in 1243, long after the campaign was over. [40]The whole region turned into a perpetual war zone with a collapse of law and social order. Guerrilla warfare spread. Massacres, burnings and mutilations continued.In 1211, Raymond of Toulouse fled to England.In 1217, he returned to his stronghold at Toulouse, and the following year, De Montfort placed that city under siege. De Montfort was killed there, when he was hit by a boulder fired from a catapult. The crown prince Louis then took De Montfort’s territories.The war rumbled on at the local level until 1226 when the new king of France, Louis IX (r. 1226-1270 AD) took over and turned out to be one of the most committed of all medieval Crusader kings. A series of French victories came in the next two years, and Raymond VII of Toulouse was defeated, agreeing to the king’s (not the Pope’s) terms of surrender, in 1229.The Treaty of ParisThe Treaty of Paris was signed on April 12, 1229 by the son of the Raymond VI, Raymond VII, of Toulouse and Louis IX of France. It marked the end of 20 years of fiighting. Raymond agreed to all conditions. He agreed to join the fighting against other heretics in the future, to destroy the walls of his capital, to marry his daughter to the King’s brother, and he agreed that, after his death, all his land would be annexed to the Crown of France.[41]He also agreed to pay for and found a university at Toulouse to appease the church because the Albigensians were not destroyed. They continued. Their churches and institutions and many followers were still present and active in the region—on a reduced scale—and there was no provision in the treaty for further efforts at stopping them.The University began, and the church went back to its original methods of reason and persuasion, and while this approach was slower, it was also far more successful. By the early 1300s, the Albigensians had ceased to exist as an organized and distinct body of believers.The Albigensian crusade (1209 – 1229) was supposedly conducted by the Roman church against the Albigensian “heretics”— except it was actually conducted by the French king and his representatives who wanted political power and the lands of the southern Languedoc region.[42]Other anti-schismatic/heretic campaigns are the same type.The Drenther Crusade was launched against the inhabitants of Drenthe in 1228 and lasted until 1232. There are only two sources concerning this conflict that still survive, and one indicates this was actually a civil war over the Bishop’s rights caused by his harsh practices. The Bishop Willibrand put it to the Pope that the Drenthers were heretics for defying him, and though the Deeds of the Bishops of Utrecht presents the crusade as authorized by Pope Gregory IX, there is no other evidence of any papal involvement, and it is possible that the bishop acted on his own initiative.[43]The Stedinger were free farmers and subjects of the Prince of Bremen. Grievances with the Bishop over taxes and property rights turned into full-scale revolt. When an attempt by the secular authorities to put down the revolt ended in defeat, the archbishop mobilized his church and the Papacy to have a crusade sanctioned against the rebels for rebelling.[44]The Bosnian Crusade (1235 until 1241) was supposedly against unspecified heretics but was, essentially, a Hungarian war of conquest of Bosnia. Led by the Hungarian prince Coloman, the crusade came to an abrupt end when Hungary itself was invaded by Tatars. [45]Peter III the Great, King of Aragon, conquered Sicily in 1282. The Pope declared the Aragonese Crusade against him and officially deposed him as king, on the grounds that Aragon was a papal fief. Civil war ensued. [46]The Despenser's Crusade took place during the great Papal schism (which lasted from 1378 to 1417) and the Hundred Year’s war between England and France. "For all its canonical propriety, [it] was the Hundred Years' War thinly disguised." [47]The one exception to the political nature of these crusades might actually be the Hussite Wars. Also called the Bohemian Wars or the Hussite Revolution, they were a series of wars that lasted from 1419 to approximately 1434. The King of Bohemia, King Wenceslaus IV, had plans to be crowned the Holy Roman Emperor, so he suppressed the Hussites, followers of Protestant reformer John Hus, who was executed by the Catholic church for heresy in 1415.Wenceslaus died, his brother inherited, he launched a crusade, civil war ensued; five crusades later, the lands of Bohemia had been totally ravaged, the Bishopric was in such bad shape that it still hadn’t fully recovered fifty years later, and the entire country went Protestant. [48]The crusades are religious and economic and political and military. They represent all the great motivations for war, the bad and the good—land and power and wealth, as well as the desire to defend one’s home and others from unwelcome domination. They show us at our best and our most base.They represent a time most of all, a time when our modern world was first forming, and its birth pangs were being felt throughout society at every level. Change is hard. The crusades are part and parcel of those changes.Footnotes[1] Crusading as an Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216[2] http://Warren Hollister, J. Sears McGee, and Gale Stokes, Th e West Transformed: A History of Western Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Cengage/Wadsworth, 2000), 311.[3] The Crusades: A Complete History[4] http://Norman Housley, “Costing the Crusade: Budgeting for Crusading Activity in the Fourteenth Century,” in Th e Experience of Crusading, ed. Marcus Bull and Norman Housley, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 59.[5] Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign[6] Remembering the Crusades[7] http://Warren Hollister, J. Sears McGee, and Gale Stokes, Th e West Transformed: A History of Western Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Cengage/Wadsworth, 2000), page 311.[8] The Western Humanities, Complete[9] The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain: Dario Fernandez-Morera: 9781610170956: Amazon.com: Books[10] The Concise History of the Crusades[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24419031?seq=1[12] The Pilgrimage Origins of the First Crusade[13] God's Battalions[14] http:// R.B.C. Huygens, ‘ Un nouveau texte du traite ´‘ De constructione castri Saphet ’’ , Studi medievali , 6 (1965), 386.[15] http://B.Z. Kedar, Crusade and mission. European approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton, 1984), 77-8, 146-7[16] Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades: Christopher Tyerman: 9780192803252: Amazon.com: Books[17] The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam[18] Amazon.com: The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (9780060787288): Thomas Asbridge: Books[19] The Northern Crusades[20] The Baltic Crusades [21] Strange Bedfellows : The Rise of the Military Religious Orders in the Twelfth Century - Medievalists.net[22] Moral Agency in Crusade and Colonization: Anselm of Havelberg and the Wendish Crusade of 1147[23] Bearing False Witness[24] https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1117&context=ghj[25] Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages[26] Bernard of Clairvaux[27] A Detailed History of the Wends[28] Baptism or Death: The Wendish Crusade, 1147-1185 - Warfare History Network[29] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40108524?seq=1[30] https://www.nku.edu/content/dam/hisgeo/docs/archives/Vol21_2005-2006perspectives.pdf#page=47[31] http://Jean Markale, Montségur and the Mystery of the Cathars, trans. Jon Graham (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2003),[32] Innocent III[33] The Albigensian Crusades[34] The Formation Of A Persecuting Society: Power And Deviance In Western Europe, 950-1250[35] https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1117&context=ghj[36] The Occitan War[37] The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II[38] The History of the Albigensian Crusade[39] The Occitan War[40] Siege of Montségur - Wikipedia[41] Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229[42] God's Heretics[43] Drenther Crusade - Wikipedia[44] Stedinger Crusade - Wikipedia[45] Bosnian Crusade - Wikipedia[46] Aragonese Crusade - Wikipedia[47] Despenser's Crusade - Wikipedia[48] Hussite Wars - Wikipedia

BEGIN ADDENDUMToday is October 15, 2016. When I wrote the answer below, some 10 months ago, many facts about Trump were not well known. Since then, much evidence of past misdeeds have come to light, and Trump has also repeatedly damned himself by his own words.So I’m updating my original answer:Trump is, in my not-so-humble opinion, a racist. Unequivocally.From Huffpost’s Here Are 13 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist:He attacked Muslim Gold Star parentsTrump’s retaliation against the parents of a Muslim U.S. Army officer who died while serving in the Iraq War was a clear low point in a campaign full of hateful rhetoric.Khizr Khan, the father of the late Army Captain Humayun Khan, spoke out against Trump’s bigoted rhetoric and disregard for civil liberties at the Democratic National Convention on July 28. It quickly became the most memorable moment of the convention.“Let me ask you, have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” Khan asked Trump before pulling a copy of the document from his jacket pocket and holding it up. “I will gladly lend you my copy,” he declared.Khan’s wife Ghazala Khan, who wears a Muslim head scarf, stood at his side during the speech but did not speak.In response to the devastating speech, Trump seized on Ghazala Khan’s silence to insinuate that she was forbidden from speaking due to the couple’s Islamic faith.“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News that first appeared on July 30.Ghazala Khan explained in an op-ed in the Washington Post the following day that she could not speak because of grief over her son.“Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?” she wrote. “Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”He claimed a judge was biased because “he’s a Mexican”In May, Trump implied that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over a class action against the for-profit Trump University, could not fairly hear the case because of his Mexican heritage.“He’s a Mexican,” Trump told CNN of Curiel. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings — rulings that people can’t even believe.”Curiel, it should be noted, is an American citizen who was born in Indiana. And as a prosecutor in the late 1990s, he went after Mexican drug cartels, making him a target for assassination by a Tijuana drug lord.Even members of Trump’s own party slammed the racist remarks.“Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a reaction to Trump’s comments, though he clarified that he still endorses the nominee.The comments against Curiel didn’t sit well with the American public either. According to a YouGov poll released in June, 51 percent of those surveyed agreed that Trump’s comments were not only wrong, but also racist.Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump was wrong to complain against the judge, while just 20 percent think he was right to do so.When asked whether he would trust a Muslim judge, in light of his proposed restrictions on Muslim immigration, Trump suggested that such a judge might not be fair to him either.The Justice Department sued his company ― twice ― for not renting to black peopleWhen Trump was serving as the president of his family’s real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did with white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicants by telling them apartments weren’t available.In fact, discrimination against black people has been a pattern in his careerWorkers at Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, have accused him of racism over the years. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. A state appeals court upheld the fine.The first-person account of at least one black Trump casino employee in Atlantic City suggests the racist practices were consistent with Trump’s personal behavior toward black workers.“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, told the New Yorker for a September article. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”Trump disparaged his black casino employees as “lazy” in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”Trump has also faced charges of reneging on commitments to hire black people. In 1996, 20 African Americans in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor a promise to hire mostly minority workers for a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.He refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for himThree times in a row on Feb. 28, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who told his radio audience last week that voting for any candidate other than Trump is “really treason to your heritage.”When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.By Feb. 29, Trump was saying that in fact he does disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn’t do so on CNN was because of a “lousy earpiece.” Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper’s questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.It’s preposterous to think that Trump doesn’t know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.His white supremacist fan club includes the Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.A leader of the Virginia KKK who is backing Trump told a local TV reporter earlier this month, “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”And most recently, the Trump campaign announced that one of its California primary delegates was William Johnson, chair of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign subsequently said his inclusion was a mistake, and Johnson withdrew his name at their request.He questions whether President Obama was born in the United StatesLong before calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” Trump was a leading proponent of “birtherism,” the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate president. Trump claimed in 2011 to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. He insisted at the time that the researchers “cannot believe what they are finding.”Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year.But Trump continues to insinuate that the president was not born in the country.“I don’t know where he was born,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. (Again, for the record: He was born in Hawaii.)He treats racial groups as monolithsLike many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. But that’s just as uncomfortable to hear, because he’s still treating all the members of the group — all the individual human beings — as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims” and “the blacks.”In that sense, Trump’s defensive explanations are of a piece with his slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of acknowledging that there’s as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and black people as there is among white people.How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?“I’ll take jobs back from China, I’ll take jobs back from Japan,” Trump said during his visit to the U.S.-Mexican border in July. “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”“The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”Donald Trump, July 2015How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?“I’m doing good for the Muslims,” Trump told CNN in December. “Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,” disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.“I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people,” Trump said, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.How did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?“I have a great relationship with the blacks,” Trump said in April 2011. “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”Even when Trump has dropped the definite article “the,” his attempts at praising minority groups he has previously slandered have been offensive.Look no further than the infamous Cinco de Mayo taco bowl tweet.Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrumpHappy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/10157008375200725:0 …Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had a good breakdown of everything that was wrong with Trump’s comment.“It’s like eating a watermelon and saying ‘I love African-Americans,’” Bush quipped.He trashed Native Americans, tooIn 1993, when Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local Native American tribe, he told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that “they don’t look like Indians to me... They don’t look like Indians to Indians.”Trump then elaborated on those remarks, which were unearthed last year in the Hartford Courant, by saying the mafia had infiltrated Indian casinos.In the 1980s, Donald Trump was much younger, but just as racist as he is now.He encouraged the mob justice that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park FiveIn 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park.“They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers and other violent criminals. “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”The public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.The men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, after they’d already spent years in prison, when DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice process.Trump, however, still thinks the men are guilty.He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protesterAt a November campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.The following day, Trump implied that the attackers were justified.“Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the protester is part of a larger, troubling pattern of instigating violence toward protesters at campaign events that has singled out people of color.One reason Trump may have exhibited special disdain for that particular demonstrator in November, however, is because he believes the entire Black Lives Matter movement lacks legitimate policy grievances. He alluded to these views in an interview with the New York Times magazine this week when he described Ferguson, Missouri, as one of the most dangerous places in America. The small St. Louis suburb is not even in the top 20 highest-crime municipalities in the country.He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man “passionate”Trump’s racial incitement has already inspired hate crimes. Two brothers arrested in Boston last summer for beating up a homeless Latino man cited Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it.“Donald Trump was right — all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told police officers.Trump did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten carried away.“I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”He stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic meme created by white supremacistsWhen Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition in December, he tried to relate to the crowd by invoking the stereotype of Jews as talented and cunning businesspeople.“I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” Trump told the crowd, touting his book The Art of the Deal.“Is there anyone who doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?” Trump said. “Perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to.”But that wasn’t even the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican group’s support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign donations.“You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money,” he said. “You want to control your own politician.”Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their two children in an observant Jewish home.Then in July, Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton meme that featured a photo of her over a backdrop of $100 bills with a six-pointed Jewish Star of David next to her face.“Crooked Hillary - - Makes History!” he wrote in the tweet, which also read “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” over the star.The holy symbol was co-opted by the Nazis during World War II when they forced Jews to sew it onto their clothing. Using the symbol over a pile of money is blatantly anti-Semitic and re-enforces hateful stereotypes of Jewish greed.But Trump insisted the image was harmless.“The sheriff’s badge ― which is available under Microsoft’s ‘shapes’ ― fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it,” he said in a statement.Mic, however, discovered that the the meme was actually created by white supremacists and could be found on a neo-Nazi forum more than a week before Trump shared it. Additionally, a watermark on the image leads to a Twitter account that regularly tweets racist, sexist political memes.He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racistAt a campaign appearance in California in June, Trump boasted that he had a black supporter in the crowd, saying “look at my African American over here.”“Look at him,” Trump continued. “Are you the greatest?”Trump went on to imply that the media conceals his appeal among African Americans by not covering the crowd more attentively.“We have tremendous African-American support,” he said. “The reason is I’m going to bring jobs back to our country.”In fact, Trump has the lowest level of African-American support of any Republican presidential nominee since 1948, according to FiveThirtyEight. As of the most recent polling, just 2 percent of black voters plan to vote for him ― fewer than the percentage who plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson.It’s may not be surprising that Trump has brought so much racial animus into the 2016 election cycle, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump, was the target of folk singer Woody Guthrie’s lyrics after Guthrie lived for two years in a building owned by Trump pere: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts.”And last fall, a news report from 1927 surfaced on the site Boing Boing, revealing that Fred Trump was arrested that year following a KKK riot in Queens. It’s not clear exactly what the elder Trump was doing there or what role he may have played in the riot. Donald Trump, for his part, has categorically denied (except when he’s ambiguously denied) that anything of the sort ever happened.END ADDENDUMI don't think he actually is a racist, but I don't think it matters. What does matter, I think, is the psychological relationship between Trump and his followers. I'm not a trained psychologist, but I do think he is a textbook example of someone with a narcissistic personality disorder, also known as megalomania. Here are its signs (from Wikipedia):Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by an over-inflated sense of self-importance, as well as dramatic, emotional behavior that is in the same category as antisocial and borderline personality disorders.In addition to these symptoms, the person may display arrogance, show superiority, and seek power.The symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder can be similar to the traits of individuals with strong self-esteem and confidence; differentiation occurs when the underlying psychological structures of these traits are considered pathological. Narcissists have such an elevated sense of self-worth that they value themselves as inherently better than others, when in reality they have a fragile self-esteem, cannot handle criticism, and often try to compensate for this inner fragility by belittling or disparaging others in an attempt to validate their own self-worth. Comments and criticisms about others are vicious from sufferers of NPD, in an attempt to boost their own poor self-esteem.Who are his supporters? They are almost exclusively white people who lack a good education and are anxious about the state of the country and their personal well-being and status as citizens.So you have an insecure man who craves personal validation speaking to groups of people who want their anxieties addressed.Trump needs people to cheer him on, so he experiments with different ways to present himself. He sees that the more outlandish his behavior, the more a certain group of people flock to him.Now all Trump needs is to bind these people to his stage persona. He does that by assuaging the crowd's anxieties with a simple, emotionally powerful theme: other people are the cause of our distress. Those people can come from any group: Mexicans, Moslems, liberals, you name it. By using scapegoats, Trump transforms anxiety into hatred. Hatred soothes anxiety by making one's emotions somebody else's fault.So, Trump gets psychological validation from the crowd, and the crowd gets its anxieties addressed. The circle is complete.And thus we find ourselves in the midst of a hurricane....