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Friday, April 30, 2010

Happy 22nd Anniversary Poem

Happy 22nd Anniversary

1/1/2009

At the conclusion of an event-filled 2008,

We mark the beginning of a new, unfolding year,

While noting yet another anniversary so vital and rich.

Sharing the evolving of our individual, family and friend’s lives,

Adds splendor to embracing our advancing years most special,

Providing seeds from which to plant doings in the coming year(s).

To the Coast and Emeril’s we trod,

Toasting the nectar of memories and dreams,

While blessing the lessons learned through the various travails.

While this marital journey has been fraught with challenges unique,

We’ve taken what was offered and woven a web of effectiveness,

Providing support and focus around family and friends.

Ya done good girl, and I’m appreciative of the bounties

Our relationship has reaped,

Recognizing, without you, my life would be incomplete.

Your Hubby most devoted, Nate-O/Grandpa Nate-O

Sandy-B’s 64th Birthday Poem

Sandy-B’s 64th Birthday

Having traversed two full years of life-altering change,

Your 64th makes previous ones almost insignificant!

Encountering physical and emotional ravages of cancer and its treatment,

You’ve weathered it all, while journeying into the abyss lying therein.

Delving into understanding causal and curative factors,

You’ve become both erudite and confident about your own survival.

With regeneration of physical stamina and return to a more vital life,

A period of losses have been replaced with next-generation additions.

In the space of renewed hope and vibrant spirits,

May the coming year(s) bring joy and fulfillment in all you do.

Lovingly and devotedly,

Know your Hubby-Dear is by your side, onto the phases which lie ahead.

I love you in more ways that you can imagine, Nate

Jonathan & Emily Wedding Poem

Jonathan & Emily

5/19/2007

Each born into this world possessing gifts most rare;

Challenging parental efforts to shape and control;

Demanding freedom to follow their individual paths.

To fall in line and follow the familiar is not their bent.

Guided by each other’s internal navigator leads them to ventures,

Requiring they trust a hard-to-define source for direction.

In the face of pretense and superficiality,

They find strength in being vulnerable and transparent,

Endearing themselves to all who dare reciprocate.

Deeply connected to nature and the wonders therein,

Affords them space to renew their rich spiritual bases,

And ground them in what is real, changing and eternal.

So, via this sacred rite of marriage Jonathan and Emily launch another adventure,

Knowing their expanded community of family and friends are available for support,

While holding both physical strength and immeasurable quantities of high-octane love.

I love you deeply and enduringly, Dad/Nate

'Mother Bender' - Poem

Mother Bender

The matriarch of a blended family she has become,

A role she assumes with pride and nary a waver.

Ever-ready to engage problems/challenges, large or small,

A solution-seeker she is, a conflict avoider she is not.

Respected and admired, making the exchange of love deep and real,

Marked by compassion, and complimented by opinions quite strong.

So, on this Mother’s Day 2007, in Costa Rica no less, let it be known……

Her compadre and Hubby, stands proud and resolute in his association and all.

Happy Mother’s Day, my wife and partner in all

Nate

Memorial Letter to James Bender

August 5, 2007

Dear James & Family,

I regret that I was not able to attend the memorial service for Dorothy and its attending gatherings, as my life seems more and more complex in these retirement years! However, my thoughts, memories and prayers remain with all of you.

Dorothy’s passing has triggered multiple reflections and much reminiscing. I remember so vividly going over to the upstairs of Walter Potraz’s house, where you had your 1st married-life home, where even one of my birthday’s was celebrated. I always had a nice feeling about the prospect of being around you and Dorothy. I also have vivid memories of caring for Mark and Mike during different transitions and your ultimate moving to Aitkin.

While I barely remember kindergarten, I do retain impressions of Dorothy’s encouraging ways as a teacher. It no doubt contributed to whatever academic success I was able to achieve in the following years.

Perhaps the most endearing memory I have of the two of you, and the children that were created, is your collective ability to persevere and find a way to make do with minimal resources. I believe I have retained and applied those traits in my own life. In addition, you held an abiding faith that you were in God’s hands.

Lastly, I feel comforted in the fact that the next generation of Benders have been

fruitfully multiplied and reside in Minnesota! It is a shame that so much geographical distance has remained over these many years.

God Bless each and every one of you. With loving feelings and comforting thoughts I leave you.

Nate

In Remission on Valentine’s Day – 2008 - Poem

In Remission on Valentine’s Day – 2008

The journey has been long and “gut-checking,”

Marked by transformative undertakings, large and small.

From a ‘task-oriented’ mind-set has emerged a ‘flowing’ quality,

Which begets calm repose.

From SAD, animal-based foods, a Vegan, quite disciplined,

You have become.

From an erratic approach to exercise,

A consistent pattern of physical rigor you’ve adopted.

From deep emotional responses to the travails and joys of life,

More detachment you’ve developed, and thus appreciation for deeper meanings.

Revealed in this year of remission is a wife, daughter, mother and friend,

Now more equipped to embrace more wonders held in the autumn of your life.

With loving reverence from your Hubby Dear,

Nate-O

“Sandy B” - Poem

“Sandy B”

by ‘Hubby Dear’

Born into a rural Mississippi family huddled far from their roots,

Making a go of it while Daddy’s fighting a far away war.

Humble and parochial though her beginnings were defined,

Nothing could impede her determination to learn and compete.

Every challenge was tackled with quiet, sober resolve.

A trademark carried throughout her sixty two years.

Academic achievement became both inviting and rewarding,

A nursing degree, with honors she earned, a psychologist she became.

Uncovering continuing education opportunities in faraway Ohio,

Her dormant flowers found light and room to fully blossom.

Socially reticent, driven by personality type and genetic forces,

New confidence and capabilities emerged via training and therapy.

Eschewing pretense in favor of disarming authenticity,

Idle chit-chat is not her forte, for emotional matters hold strongest claim.

Committed to growing a blended family and fostering intimacy among all,

She’s created enduring purpose in making the mark of her legacy complete.

Child of the earth, mother earth she’s become, in the third stage of her life,

Tilling the soil, growing flowers and veggies, show her latest passion.

Now faced with the ultimate challenge of all – surviving cancer,

She embraces it with rigorous study, introspection and dietary change.

She’s drawn to a slower place and more contemplative processes,

Revealing deeper aspects of self, while avoiding spiritual poverty.

With Hubby at her side, this phase of her life has become an even richer partnership,

Fostering new energy, healing and curiosity about an unfolding future,

Happy 62nd Birthday!

Officer Candidate School - Poem

OCS

To Officer Candidate School they trod.

Twenty-six weeks of learning and stress.

Lead by Tac-Officers, in black hats so taunt,

Barking their orders, quite shrill and detached.

“Drop, you big dummy, drop!” yelled most often.

Harangued by upper-classmen at every turn,

Time only to do as one is told.

Taskings listed, many and long,

More to do than reasonably allowed.

Nary a moment for thought or play.

Graduation day has come in a flash,

Wearing the lowly gold bar has been their aim.

Commissioned for life as members unique.

Programmed to face the ravages of war.

Officers and Gentlemen, one and all.

Nate Bender (2006)

Lyrics to 'Blowing in the Wind'

Blowin’ in the Wind

How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail before she can sleep in the sand?

How many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

How many years must a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea? Yes, ‘n

How many years must people exist before they’re allowed to go free?

How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?

How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?

How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Nancy Stevenson - Poem

Nancy Stevenson

by Nate Bender –November 21, 2008

From a non-traditional family she did evolve,

Shaped by religious order and fine arts appreciation,

A yearning, restless spirit became one of her signatures.

In her youth, bonded at the hip with older brother Peter,

Evoking a lightness of spirit and play,

Offering seminal excursions into freedom of thought and action.

Intelligent, complex, literate, poetic, spiritual, and much more,

She undertook scholarly endeavors at Oberlin in faraway Ohio,

Wherein her life-partner was uncovered.

Now in the autumn years of her life,

More than ever, able to transmit wisdom so deep,

Possessing more freedom to explore, develop and self-validate.

In sum, Nancy Stevenson is the sister I never had and always needed,

Transmitting insights, adventures and affirmations so abundant and uplifting,

Inexplicably enriching and advancing my life to levels unknown.

God bless Nancy Stevenson!

April in the Pine Belt - Poem

April in the Pine Belt

April 29, 2008

Nate Bender

It’s late April in the Pine Belt;

Immersed in its verdant landscape all around,

Temperatures moderate, humidity low,

Breezes gentle and oh-so soft,

Sweet peas, kale, and collards have ended their run.

Sitting beside our pool, sipping champagne – part of dietary regime, no less!

My Babe near by, so vital and hearty,

My soul weeps with peaceful joy,

Permeated with feelings so blessed and divine.

Cost of War

Ronald J. Glasser, M.D. Bestselling Author of Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq

The Wounded Keep the Death Count Low

The real "body count" of this war is not only our dead, but our wounded. The real risk to our troops is no longer the numbers of dead but the numbers ending up on orthopedic wards and neurosurgical units.

“Americans who believe that the human cost of Iraq can be measured primarily by body bags, need to read ‘Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq.’”

—Michael Arnold Glueck, New Wounds, Orange County Business Journal, April 24, 2006

A War of Disabilities

For most soldiers, the war doesn’t end with the playing of taps. The tens of thousands of wounded are rarely heard and as a result, as pointed out in the recent Washington Post articles on the lack of adequate care at Walter Reed and in the current government hearings, these casualties are not getting the help they need.

  • Those not returned to duty within a week number (excluding PTSD) now number over fifty thousand.
  • Amputations are well over eight percent of those wounded—numbers not seen since our Civil War.
  • The number of traumatic head injuries is well over thirty percent of those wounded.
  • Physical injuries combined with TBI and PTSD puts the number of casualties at well over a hundred thousand and those numbers are growing.
  • The ultimate cost of this war has been calculated to be over 600 billion dollars for disability benefits and another 700 billion for medical care for the wounded and injured…and those numbers grow each day.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Peace and World Order

"Morphogenetic Systems" spawns from a group of friends and colleagues deeply convicted that there is a new potentiality for existence which can be achieved if we use the right thinking tools and develop ourselves into the higher order of human beings we have the potential to become.

We are convinced our world needs new guiding paradigms. Furthermore we believe these need to be conceived and developed by a network of people -- not a single person, organization or even nation -- for which the Internet provides a medium.

Our intent in this document follows:

To shift the focus of energies of civilized entities to lifting up the efforts of humanity toward pursuing higher order ends through dialogical processes focused on gaining alignment to paradigms which refocus us on ends that regenerate the natural potential of all living system while remembering that the beauty and value of God’s and man’s creations stem from bringing forth their unique essence.

Our goal is to facilitate thinking of the kind that can produce a world of greater conscience and greater hope than we have today.

A CALL TO COMMUNION - WE NEED TO AWAKEN OUR SPIRITUALITY

Being in the throes of terrorism creates a sad state for humanity and one in which there are great tendencies for deterioration in our quality of existence with one another. In this scenario terroriststend to be villains and, once that conception exists, we are led to hunt them down and lynch themmuch as we did in the Old West. We are convinced, however, that we are in the midst of a much greater problem than terrorism; we are jeopardizing the lives of all children everywhere and providing them sadly depleted abodes within which to live.

In this circumstance and from a worldwide perspective we ourselves are thieves, robbing our planet and robbing our children of their future.

It seems evident that we will continue to rob the future of potential as long as we pursue our present societal paradigms of action. In order to stop stealing from the future, we must adopt an aim of working in harmony with the energy fields of our planet and seeking to do this in a way that produces harmony with all our earthly family.

We must guide ourselves and all our institutions to make those changes which are based on seeing our real bank account in terms of harmony with the planet and compassionate relationship between all people. We, the United States and all other so-called developed nations, must move away from seeing our mission in monetary terms and our potency in terms of acquisition and might.

Instead, our real mission needs to be that of enabling our planet and all its systems to regenerate themselves such that they are oriented toward providing all living entities with new and renewing levels of vitality and viability.

And our potency needs to be measured through generating those sorts of processes that go past providing immediate “cures” to, instead, enabling new levels of health and providing everyone, everywhere with evolving capacities to create a higher order existence.

FUNDAMENTAL THOUGHTS

Belief 1 - Our process must culminate with a world family of nations bound together to eliminate terrorism and it must come to guide all our actions such that they show compassion for the citizens of all nations.

In support of this we in our nation need to conduct ourselves so that all nations have faith in us, that we lift up the hope of the common people of those nations and that we show a caring for and about the future of our planet in the interest of all the world’s children.

Belief 2 - When we are in the recession, economies have increased difficulties in focusing on the well being of people. Recessions occur in periods of national and international strife. We need to become increasingly conscious and conscientious about people – and especially the children – of the world. We believe, therefor, that we should create a new and higher order processes for creating foods that contain new levels of nourishment and create a new levels of health processes that provide people new levels of immunity and new levels of stress resistance.

Belief 3 - Humanity’s contemplative thoughts create order and organization to cosmic energies, resulting in paradigms that guide the pursuits of our earthly existence. Through our efforts to obtain these pursuits, this results in an ordering and organization of planetary energies. We can perceive the impact of these efforts on the evolution (or devolution) of our biosphere and in the harmonies or disharmonies generated throughout the human race. There is overwhelming evidence that the biosphere is in a state of degradation and depletion, indicating that we need a radical shift in our cosmic paradigms.

Nevertheless, in regard to seeking harmonious relationships throughout humanity, we have some extremely hopeful signs. We are approaching a state of a common caring for one another between nations. Our hope rests in the quality of collective thought given to taking actions that exercise the greatest stewardship for lifting humanity to a new order of existence.

Discussion of Belief Three:

We humans do not adapt to the world we find as do other animals, we recreate the world to match our own needs and ends. We develop complex systems of governance, management, and development in order to enable ourselves to continuously improve those cosmoses within which we find value. A cosmos is field wherein we develop organized systems as a means to approach their development. We define the parameters for managing these cosmoses in terms of paradigms. These paradigms serve to permit the pursuit of development by providing a conceptual boundary (an artificial man-made perimeter) which provide this cosmology, this cosmos of energy, with the goals and the systemic reinforcement to organize a pursuit of these goals.

Paradigms

Paradigms represent boundary setting thoughts in regard to cosmoses or in regard to relatively permanent systemic efforts of mankind. They bound off the nature of problem that then is addressed in regard to a systemic activity. Many, if not most, of the existing paradigms tend to be misleading in nature because they fail to address the real issues in regard to developing the order and organizing of energies essential to operating in harmony with the evolution of the potential of mankind and the planet. The net result is that they tend to produce entropic conditions wherein run down tends to occur in regard to the inherent natural energies of phenomena rather than enabling processes that are negentropic or run up the potential of natural energies. We need to define fields as not functional , but as interactive energy systems. A field needs to be energic rather than thing like. An energy field is a like nature of energy. We live in energy fields that have a number of different natures to them. Each nature of energy is wholistic.

Current Definition of Cosmos for Developing Agriculture

Direction Paradigm: Individual ownership of land and determination of use of that land by the owner.

Goal Paradigm: To maximize the yield gained from his particular piece of property by planting the crop which gives him the best return.

Instrument: Treat the crops that are grown in a way that reduces the variances of that crop and is maximally stimulating to growth.

Grounds Paradigm: Agriculture fits into the entrepreneurial free enterprise system.

These four define how we currently deal with agriculture. This is the mis-definition of an energy field. The whole thing is based upon false premises. As long as we pursue these paradigms we will continue to deplete the earth. We cut the earth into fields of individual control without regard to the influence on surrounding lands and waters. We use fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in agriculture with little attention to the broader impact and the longer term consequences. Paradigms related to a chemical means of growth are insidious because these practices deplete the soils making changes to more healthy means difficult.

The momentum of chemically based agricultural expansion has been fueled by the substantial profits made by chemical companies - which have resulted in their desire for expansion along multiple dimensions: expanding to other regions of the globe, inventing and selling new products when the old one’s failed (such as when pests built immunity), inventing chemicals particular to particular kinds of agriculture, genetic manipulation, etc. These business enterprises have managed to expand these paradigms and managing processes of agriculture to many regions of the globe. Because of their global nature, these processes now become of catastrophic consequence and we run a grave danger of poisoning the waters needed by all life forms for life. The paradigms proliferating chemical based agriculture represent a global dilemma. The “developed” part of the world managed to entrench “undeveloped” nations in similar problematic and degenerative practices in order to reap corporate financial reward. Analogy could be drawn with the paradigms by which the developed world has managed and proliferated transportation, housing, health care and other cosmotic fields of human endeavor.

Paradigms to Regenerate the Agricultural Cosmos:

If we were to define the cosmos based on the natural energy fields of nature rather than based on the artificial constructs of unilateral ownership, we would have a much healthier agricultural system. All natural energy systems operate the same way and all are dependent upon vitality, viability and regeneration. The Nile carries the essential nutrients that are inherent to this as an energy system. Once the Nile ceases to be the natural nutrient source of the delta, then the delta will deplete. If we can build the nutrient base of the River, we will improve the nutrient capability of this as an energy system. If we were to try to rewrite these statements so what is appropriate to energies, we would focus on working to improve or develop the nature of the water that supplies the Nile energy system. (Shomberg type work on the water supply) The more that you developed the potential of the water, the more we would enrich the Nile system.

Natural Energy System Paradigms

Direction paradigm: Define a natural energy system and what is essential to building its vitality, viability and evolution.

Goal Paradigm: To increase the quality of living phenomena that is inherently “natural” to the CV to achieving its full potential in regard to the vitality, viability and evolutionary potential in regard to all of the orders of energy that mankind possesses. (eg. Wine growing is natural here and drinking of wine in a communing way)

Instrument Paradigm: Create the educational base and the thinking base that is required to see the energy system that is here and the potential of that energy system such that the inhabitants of the place can create a vision that brings the development of the place into concert with the potential that God created.

Grounds Paradigm: There is an inherency in the way that God and the overall whole has been constructed - such that by engaging in appropriate processes, mankind has the capacity to transcend the limitation of things as they currently exist (eg. we can create a better grape if we worship the grape that we produce)

A cosmos by definition means an orderly system. There are many fields wherein humankind endeavors to develop cosmoses (systemic means of ordering) for our own purposes and in pursuit of our own ends. We would do well to redefine the paradigms of these cosmoses in ways that encourage their development in harmony with the planet and with more spiritual ways of living. We need to develop new ordered systems of agriculture driven by paradigms that engender growing crops that are increasingly healthy for those who eat them and where the growing method enriches the soil for future growth and revitalized the whole of the energy field wherein the crops are grown. We need to develop paradigms for each of these cosmoses (these fields of human endeavor) that relate to how we want as a human race to develop them in the future. We must make sure that our thinking is wholistic and complete and that we foresee the long term and broad social implications of the managing processes that we use. We cannot afford to continue to support the proliferation of chemical based agriculture, of hydro carbon based transportation nor the massive energy and resource consumptive practices across the globe. Dialogue regarding the cosmoses wherein humans develop and pursue ends must be done on a global basis and future direction must be determined and pursued across the globe.

Belief Four: We need to regenerate our managing systems in a way that is in harmony with the generation of planetary energies.

• One aspect of this is to enable entities to fulfill their destiny by realizing their archetypal patterns.

• Another aspect of accomplishing this is to eliminate the hazards that are producing disharmony regarding planetary energies

In order to do this we need to see the relevance of constructing our intelligence based on a body-mind or experiential capacity to see the evolution within a particular energy field such that we continuously build things toward their end-state potential which requires of us the capacity to go through transitions in systemic wholistic valuing.

Discussion of Belief Four

Planetary energies are a good way to look at what we are trying to create in the Middle East because the nature of energy is one of unification and drawing in, it is energy of a centripetal nature. We are trying to figure out what can draw this region together in a regenerative and rebuilding way, a way wherein people are naturally drawn and where they can find pride in who they are as they rebuild this region economically. It needs to be a solution that benefits the populous of the region, not just the wealthy or those in power. If energy of a positive nature provides people with a sense of hope for a better future and faith in the means that is used to produce this, then much of the terrorist activities will naturally be diverted toward this more positive regeneration. It is the frustration and lack of hope that breeds terrorism. It is the feeling of being trapped by an oppressor that leads to acts of terrorist violence. We need to set in motion something that creates a different energy field and a higher order way of life. A new Silk Road might be an idea worth pursuing. What would the goods traded be? What would the mode of transport be? How can we create the Silk Road as a meeting of minds and sharing of ideas as well as a trading of goods?

Activity: Planetarization= Creating an arena within which elevational energies are experienced.

Ground:

Regenerating an Area of the World: Unless we regenerate the relationships between people, nations and cultures, we will not be dealing with the feedstock for the current aggressive feelings especially between Islamic people and the Western world.

Instrument:

Regenerate the old Silk Road as the soul of the region and as the basis for evolving the unique artistry, religion and philosophy of each of the interconnected nationalities into a magnetic center that elevates humankind’s level of wonder, worship and admiration.

Direction:

Dialogue Processes

• Maintaining the organized use of energies throughout the world in ways that are harmonious with the regenerative capacities of the planet.

• Developing the higher order energies that are part of the inherent potential of all living systems in ways that are unique to the environment and culture of those systems such that the world is dramatic and not mundane.

Goal:

Use the cradle where national transaction was first spawned as current space within which we seek to produce a transnational culture which places the interests of understanding humanitarianizing processes first and which engages in the development of morphogenic systems as a means of potentializing the being capacity of all life forms.

Response to First Response:

Cosmic Energy - Seeing the way things are organized and toward what ends makes it much more possible for us to know how to work with them and develop them.

We can see upon examination, that man and nature are organized into systems. For each system there is an overall end and also approximations to this end that the system pursues. The approximations to this end come about by the limited availability of environmental energy to the system.

The cosmic energy available to an organized whole is represented by the area of the cone which shifts with the nature of the overall end. Modification to the pursuit of an overall desired end changes due to shifts in available energy arising in its proximate environment.

Quite frequently as humankind our overall ends for a cosmos (an organized whole which behaves in accordance with the cosmotic energy available to it) are erroneous. They can come about (systems) through lack of rightness or "wholisticness" or defining them to provide self-serving benefits to a limited few.

This can be illustrated by looking at the cosmos related to providing food.

The end in vogue here, relates to creating products (pesticides, herbicides) and bringing about incremental improvements in those products because this approach much better fits our economic machinery.

This erroneous definition of appropriate ends has led to depletion of soil and streams alike.

The Amish tend to do much better because the end against which they spend energy "serving Mother Nature in body and in spirit" is much more appropriate.

Bob Holliday wrote: On September 11th I was in Rome with my wife Joan for a conference in the Vatican titled: "Work as Key to the Social Question. The Great Social and Economic Transformations and the Subjective Dimension of Work." A paper on my experiences of bringing regenerative work into industry, co-authored with a Jesuit theologian expert in Bernard Lonergan, represented the only voice in the conference calling attention to the paradigms we are blindly pursuing, and systems we are accepting. All others seemed locked into the notion of change within an acceptance of the existing order of things. And there were many non-Catholics, 33 countries, international organizations such as U.N., International Labor Orgn. and others present. Engaging people who seemed to resonate with the energy of our paper, they were shocked to even be aware of another option, as well as disappointed that this nature of exploration was not predominant in the conference. And Pope John Paul II's words to us that each of us has a fundamental right to work "at a level of transcendency, transforming reality to always go beyond the results being achieved" seemed lost on the attendees. So the initiation of the Morphogenetic Systems arena gives me great hope that we can bring people to a place for understanding of choices we are not making, as well as those we should be making. And my hope is further reinforced by interactions in the arenas of my life that are filled with people looking for such an option. I appreciate the work to bring about an option to extend our collective understanding. Bob Holliday

Ed Klinge wrote: Thank you for all the work that has occurred to prepare a way for people to begin to look at what the terrorist attack lifts up for our nation and all humanity to reflect upon. This initiative will help those of us who get involved to begin to discover what we as humans need to become to be more in harmony with the biosphere, so we can stop being robbers of the future of our children and their children. As we go forward we will need to develop a process and take on active roles to help to enable the development of a collective higher soul and spiritual awakening in order to define the paradigms that will move our nation and world to higher ground. One form of process is the Morphogenetic Systems Web Site exchanges through which we can further develop our understanding of what humanity's new world paradigms need to be. Beyond this exchange we need to answer the question: how will this be complemented with face to face opportunities for people who choose enter into this initiative with us? Another area to further explore is to start sharing how we are acting out on this thinking by undertaking individual and collective roles. One such role that we are considering is to design and conduct a community dialogue using the ideas being presented here. I am looking forward to the reflections and interchanges we will be sharing. Ed Klinge

Our experience of this is at once revering distinctiveness while feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and unity with all. What if we could select an ancient place on this globe that was known as the silk road? All walks of nations could engage in its regeneration both in fact and in symbol. It could become the Camp David of the world. The place on this planet in which planetary undertakings would be developed through meaningful dialogue.

Morphogenetic Systems - Regenerating Humanity response to Ed Klinge:

We intend to put out an ongoing series of communiques that are aimed at stimulating interactive and dialogical processes that hopefully can be conducted on a face to face basis as well as through the web. We hope that different nodes in a network will develop in this country as well as in other countries where these ideas are further developed and propogated by dialogue processes. We feel that it is essential to produce energy centers seeking to implant higher order energies throughout the globe such that humand kind starts seeking different orders of solution than the customary exchange of aggresive acts.

Coalescence of Communiqué One 11/2/01

What is the seedbed of terrorism and what do we need to do to change this seedbed? Terrorism is a response to unwanted suppression and attacks the supply of the life blood of the antagonist and strikes fear into its citizenry. Morphogenesis is a process of bringing out the essence energies of a people and of a place to a degree such that the place itself stimulates communion between kindred spirits throughout different areas and among different belief types. Ultimately it is possible for us to bring new higher order energies to location on the planet (planetarize humanitarianism). These would be areas within which we could exchange both the best that we can create and the best of what we are.

We have sought to provide a case for dialogue as the essence process required for reconciliation of the world situation in the Mid East. In recent history, people of the Western World have acted from a superordinate position in regard to the peoples of the lesser developed world. Westerners initially colonized the less developed parts of the world. In so doing they set up tiered governments where the government of the colony was subordinate to the government of colonizing nations. We have moved away from the direct control of colonization. Instead of colonization westerners seek to try to predominate in influencing the alliances between nations and the goals that nations give allegiance to. The less developed elements of the world experience the combination of diplomacy and militancy the western world exercises to achieve its ends, as imperialism.

The seedbed of negative energy that has developed as a response to western interventions will most likely generate ongoing support for terrorist activities. Our conclusion is that in order to develop any lasting solutions we need to focus on a geographical area that encompasses the different societies involved. In this area we need to, through dialogue, develop interventions that planetarize the higher order energies that mankind can develop. Doing this requires networking kindred spirits in a dialogical process to bring about this planeterization of energies in an arena similar to that encompassed by the old Silk Road.

INTENT

(Required Energization)

Our first communiqué focused on regeneration and a transcendent intent. In this coalesced communiqué we are focusing on caring and have therefor developed the following corresponding unifying aims.

First Part of Transcendent Intent - To shift the focus of energies of civilized entities to lifting up the efforts of humanity toward pursuing higher order ends.

First Part of Unifying Aims - To achieve a way of life that unifies us into mutual care for one another. This is an impossible dream only if the terrorists hang on to the need for retribution for our desacrilizing of their holy places and the secularization of their culture, and we require the retribution of incarceration or punishment for all who are terrorists. We need to ascend out thoughts to the level where we become common in what we regard as being sacred with the common pursuit of bringing all of humanity into common sacred beliefs.

Second Part of Transcendent Intent - Through dialogue processes focused on gaining alignment to paradigms which refocus us on ends that regenerate the natural potential of all living systems.

Second Part of Unifying Aims - As we generate the spirit to create a new soul that embodies a new nature of thought against which we design our systems and processes will lead us to reverence for:

• The creative capacities of each culture,

• The distinctive goals that represent the super-ordinate beliefs for each culture,

• The obligation we all have to create the quality of humanity that represents our deepest longings to the need to refocus our aspirations toward the recreation of the earth that enable future generations to engage in life from a new plateau of greater potential. In order to do this, we need to remember that we all come from and are of service to a universal God that call upon us to live from a place that represents the best of us and that our only real life comes from serving His needs.

Third Part of Transcendent Intent - While remembering that the beauty and value of God’s and man’s creation stem from bringing forth their unique essence.

Third part of Unifying Aims - A great deal of how we develop and how all living things develop stems from the stream of existence from which we emanate. There is however a unique energetic quality embodied in all living things (and perhaps in all things) that is related to the unique identity and the unique potential of that thing in particular. Therefor all things come from two sources. Whereas that which is generated from previous existence is normally visible and available, that which is unique is an inner quality which must come into appreciation by developing deeper knowledge and understanding of the particular. However we gradually discover that the inner aspect of things is the only real thing. When “the real thing” becomes that which we relate to, we find that the thing, place, or person continuously blossoms forth with new potentiality, greater beauty, and enables us to be humble in the eyes of what God can create.

Why do we think a military strategy is doomed to failure?

Premises

(1) It is the underlying cause and the deep-seated emotions relating to the conflict that new paradigms and pursuits must reconcile and dissipate.

(2) We are fooled if we think we are dealing with people led by perverted leaders with “magical” powers.

(3) The multitudes involved in cheering responses to the terrorists attack indicate a preponderance of recruits is available to the “terrorists process.”

(4) Our “lashing out” responses will most likely result in perpetuation and reinforcement.

(5) Search and destroy will not work because the “terrorist network” occupies no fixed territory, requires no government support and can operate on a total non-formal basis.

If these premises are accurate, then a militaristic approach has very little chance of any success. We therefore need to solve the problem at a different level, i.e. that level represented in the intent.

The thinking that flows from this intent and these premises follows:

FUNDAMENTAL THOUGHTS

OUR AIM:

To crystallize a higher order world soul through creating contemplative thought about the cosmic paradigms that should guide our existential pursuits – in a way that we generate communing nodes of a network through all walks of humanity—such that our responses come from those hearts that put humanity first, not retribution.

Is the War on Terror Winnable? By Firoze Hirjikaka

Judging by what's on the news channels these days, there seem to be two hot-button, foreign policy issues agitating US politicians and the general public. The first is pulling American troops out of Iraq; and the second is capturing Osama Bin Laden. Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that both these events do take place in the foreseeable future. What overall impact will they have of the 'war on terror'? Not much.

Let's start with Osama. The US government has recently doubled the bounty on his head to $50 million. If the previous reward of $25 million did not produce any tangible result, it is highly unlikely that $50 million will either. I don't think the Bush Administration gets it. They are applying Western logic to a Mid-Eastern problem. Money is not the issue here. The only feasible way to capture or kill Osama is if he is betrayed by one of his inner circle. That eventuality is highly improbable. To his followers, the Sheikh - as he is known among them - is a mystical figure; a Messenger of God, if you will. He commands the type of loyalty - and fear - that Western leaders cannot comprehend. Betrayal is not an option. It would be tantamount to condemning the perpetrator's soul to eternal damnation.

The most likely scenario is that Osama - who has been on dialysis for years - will die of natural causes. And then what? Will Al Qaeda be magically vanquished? It would be dangerously naïve to think so. To Al Qaeda and its affiliates, Osama is mostly a symbol, a rallying point. This jihad they have embarked upon is greater than any individual. In their minds, it has been ordained by Allah. If Osama dies, Allah will provide another leader. This has already been illustrated in the case of Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaeda supremo in Iraq. His killing was touted as a great victory by the US; but it made no change to the situation on the ground. If anything, the terrorist violence has gotten worse since his elimination.

It is a similar situation with the US troops in Iraq. The reality is that the presence of American troops has become almost irrelevant. The different sectarian factions in Iraq are engaged in their own private war. The US troops have become, at most, a distraction. Whether they stay, or they leave, the killing will continue. It could be argued that the US soldiers are keeping a lid, of sorts, on the prevailing mayhem - a few thousand deaths instead of tens of thousands - and that is about all they can hope to achieve. There can be no 'victory', in the conventional sense, no matter how many 'surges' take place. 160,000 American soldiers cannot control a hostile population of 30 million. The math just does not work out.

So does that mean that the war on terror is unwinnable? Yes it does; in the foreseeable future, at least. History has shown that a war is won only when one side goes on a sustained offensive. An Allied victory in World War II would not have been possible without the Normandy invasion. And going on the offensive is precisely what the West cannot do. How can you attack an enemy you cannot even locate?

All America and its allies are doing - and can do - is being defensive; and trying to prevent the next attack. That is not the way to win a war. It does not mean that the terrorists are winning either. They do not have the military capacity to defeat the West. However, they can keep their 'enemy' in a constant state of vigil - and fear. They can make the enemy hemorrhage billions of dollars, with occasional pin pricks. They can make ordinary citizens look constantly over their shoulders; and be suspicious of those that do not 'fit in'.

It is already happening. The open society that the US has been justly proud of is being whittled away. America can no longer afford to welcome the 'toiling masses, yearning to be free'. Threat levels - and the Patriot Act - have taken the place of trust and generosity.

And it is only going to get worse. Al Qaeda and its cohorts have time on their side. They are not bound by artificial timetables. In their minds, they are fighting for God - and in the divine scheme of things - time is irrelevant. The victory promised by Allah may be decades in coming. They can wait. The question is; can the West? It may have no other choice.

Hx of Crusades

This article is about the XI, XII and XIII century religious military campaigns in the Middle East. For other uses, see Crusade (disambiguation).

The Crusades were a series of religiously-sanctioned military campaigns waged by much of Latin Christian Europe, particularly the Franks of France and the Holy Roman Empire. The specific crusades to restore Christian control of the Holy Land were fought over a period of nearly 200 years, between 1095 and 1291. Other campaigns in Spain and Eastern Europe continued into the 15th century. The Crusades were fought mainly against Muslims, although campaigns were also waged against pagan Slavs, Jews, Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemies of the popes.[1][page needed] Crusaders took vows and were granted penance for past sins, often called an indulgence.[1][page needed][2][page needed]

The Crusades originally had the goal of recapturing Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim rule and were launched in response to a call from the Christian Byzantine Empire for help against the expansion of the Muslim Seljuk Turks into Anatolia. The term is also used to describe contemporaneous and subsequent campaigns conducted through to the 16th century in territories outside the Levant[3] usually against pagans, heretics, and peoples under the ban of excommunication[4] for a mixture of religious, economic, and political reasons.[5] Rivalries among both Christian and Muslim powers led also to alliances between religious factions against their opponents, such as the Christian alliance with the Sultanate of Rum during the Fifth Crusade.

The Crusades had far-reaching political, economic, and social impacts, some of which have lasted into contemporary times. Because of internal conflicts among Christian kingdoms and political powers, some of the crusade expeditions were diverted from their original aim, such as the Fourth Crusade, which resulted in the sack of Christian Constantinople and the partition of the Byzantine Empire between Venice and the Crusaders. The Sixth Crusade was the first crusade to set sail without the official blessing of the Pope.[6] The Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Crusades resulted in Mamluk and Hafsid victories, as the Ninth Crusade marked the end of the Crusades in the Middle East.[7]

Historical context

Middle Eastern situation

The Holy Land is significant in Christianity because of the land's association as the place of birth, ministry, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians regard as the Saviour or Messiah. By the end of the 4th century, following Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity (313) and the founding of the Byzantine Empire, the Holy Land had become a predominantly Christian country.[8][9] Churches commemorating various events in the life of Jesus, had been erected at key sites.

The Muslim presence in the Holy Land began with the initial Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century. The Muslim armies' successes put increasing pressure on the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire.

Another factor that contributed to the change in Western attitudes towards the East came in the year 1009, when the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 1039 his successor, after requiring large sums be paid for the right, permitted the Byzantine Empire to rebuild it.[10] Pilgrimages were allowed to the Holy Lands before and after the Sepulchre was rebuilt, but for a time pilgrims were captured and some of the clergy were killed[citation needed]. The Muslim conquerors eventually realized that the wealth of Jerusalem came from the pilgrims; with this realization the persecution of pilgrims stopped.[11] However, the damage was already done, and the violence of the Seljuk Turks became part of the concern that spread the passion for the Crusades.[12]

Western European situation

The origins of the Crusades lie in developments in Western Europe earlier in the Middle Ages, as well as the deteriorating situation of the Byzantine Empire in the east caused by a new wave of Turkish Muslim attacks. The breakdown of the Carolingian Empire in the late 9th century, combined with the relative stabilization of local European borders after the Christianization of the Vikings, Slavs, and Magyars, had produced a large class of armed warriors whose energies were misplaced fighting one another and terrorizing the local populace. The Church tried to stem this violence with the Peace and Truce of God movements, which was somewhat successful, but trained warriors always sought an outlet for their skills, and opportunities for territorial expansion were becoming less attractive for large segments of the nobility. One exception was the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal, which at times occupied Iberian knights and some mercenaries from elsewhere in Europe in the fight against the Islamic Moors.[citation needed]

In 1063, Pope Alexander II had given his blessing to Iberian Christians in their wars against the Muslims, granting both a papal standard (the vexillum sancti Petri) and an indulgence to those who were killed in battle. Pleas from the Byzantine Emperors, now threatened by the Seljuks, thus fell on ready ears. These occurred in 1074, from Emperor Michael VII to Pope Gregory VII and in 1095, from Emperor Alexios I Komnenos to Pope Urban II. One source identifies Michael VII in Chinese records as a ruler of Byzantium (Fulin) who sent an envoy to Song Dynasty China in 1081.[13][14] A Chinese scholar suggests that this and further Byzantine envoys in 1091 were pleas for China to aid in the fight against the Turks.[15]

The Crusades were, in part, an outlet for an intense religious piety which rose up in the late 11th century among the lay public. A crusader would, after pronouncing a solemn vow, receive a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a "soldier of the Church". This was partly because of the Investiture Controversy, which had started around 1075 and was still on-going during the First Crusade. As both sides of the Investiture Controversy tried to marshal public opinion in their favor, people became personally engaged in a dramatic religious controversy. The result was an awakening of intense Christian piety and public interest in religious affairs, and was further strengthened by religious propaganda, which advocated Just War in order to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Holy Land included Jerusalem (where the death, resurrection and ascension into heaven of Jesus took place according to Christian theology) and Antioch (the first Christian city). Further, the remission of sin was a driving factor and provided any God-fearing man who had committed sins with an irresistible way out of eternal damnation in Hell. It was a hotly debated issue throughout the Crusades as what exactly "remission of sin" meant. Most believed that by retaking Jerusalem they would go straight to heaven after death. However, much controversy surrounds exactly what was promised by the popes of the time. One theory was that one had to die fighting for Jerusalem for the remission to apply, which would hew more closely to what Pope Urban II said in his speeches. This meant that if the crusaders were successful, and retook Jerusalem, the survivors would not be given remission. Another theory was that if one reached Jerusalem, one would be relieved of the sins one had committed before the Crusade. Therefore one could still be sentenced to Hell for sins committed afterwards.[citation needed]

All of these factors were manifested in the overwhelming popular support for the First Crusade and the religious vitality of the 12th century.[citation needed]

Immediate cause

15th century painting of Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont, where he preached an impassioned sermon to take back the Holy Land.

The immediate cause of the First Crusade was the Byzantine emperor Alexios I's appeal to Pope Urban II for mercenaries to help him resist Muslim advances into territory of the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine Empire was defeated, which led to the loss of all of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) save the coastlands. Although attempts at reconciliation after the East-West Schism between the Catholic Western Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church had failed, Alexius I hoped for a positive response from Urban II and got it, although it turned out to be more expansive and less helpful than he had expected.[citation needed]

When the First Crusade was preached in 1095, the Christian princes of northern Iberia had been fighting their way out of the mountains of Galicia and Asturias, the Basque Country and Navarre, with increasing success, for about a hundred years. The fall of Moorish Toledo to the Kingdom of León in 1085 was a major victory, but the turning points of the Reconquista still lay in the future. The disunity of Muslim emirs was an essential factor.

While the Reconquista was the most prominent example of European reactions against Muslim conquests, it is not the only such example. The Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard had conquered Calabria in 1057 and was holding what had traditionally been Byzantine territory against the Muslims of Sicily. The maritime states of Pisa, Genoa and Catalonia were all actively fighting Islamic strongholds in Majorca and Sardinia, freeing the coasts of Italy and Catalonia from Muslim raids. Much earlier, the Christian homelands of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and so on had been conquered by Muslim armies. This long history of losing territories to a religious enemy created a powerful motive to respond to Byzantine Emperor Alexius I's call for holy war to defend Christendom, and to recapture the lost lands starting with Jerusalem.

The papacy of Pope Gregory VII had struggled with reservations about the doctrinal validity of a holy war and the shedding of blood for the Lord and had, with difficulty, resolved the question in favour of justified violence. More importantly to the Pope, the Christians who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land were being persecuted. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Gregory's intellectual model, had justified the use of force in the service of Christ in The City of God, and a Christian "just war" might enhance the wider standing of an aggressively ambitious leader of Europe, as Gregory saw himself. The northerners would be cemented to Rome, and their troublesome knights could see the only kind of action that suited them. Previous attempts by the church to stem such violence, such as the concept of the "Peace of God", were not as successful as hoped. To the south of Rome, Normans were showing how such energies might be unleashed against both Arabs (in Sicily) and Byzantines (on the mainland). A Latin hegemony in the Levant would provide leverage in resolving the Papacy's claims of supremacy over the Patriarch of Constantinople, which had resulted in the Great Schism of 1054, a rift that might yet be resolved through the force of Frankish arms.

In the Byzantine homelands, the Eastern Emperor's weakness was revealed by the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which reduced the Empire's Asian territory to a region in western Anatolia and around Constantinople. A sure sign of Byzantine desperation was the appeal of Alexios I to his enemy, the Pope, for aid. But Gregory was occupied with the Investiture Controversy and could not call on the German emperor, so a crusade never took shape.

For Gregory's more moderate successor, Pope Urban II, a crusade would serve to reunite Christendom, bolster the Papacy, and perhaps bring the East under his control. The disaffected Germans and the Normans were not to be counted on, but the heart and backbone of a crusade could be found in Urban's own homeland among the northern French.

After the First Crusade

On a popular level, the first crusades unleashed a wave of impassioned, personally felt pious Christian fury that was expressed in the massacres of Jews that accompanied the movement of the Crusader mobs through Europe, as well as the violent treatment of "schismatic" Orthodox Christians of the east. During many of the attacks on Jews, local Bishops and Christians made attempts to protect Jews from the mobs that were passing through. Jews were often offered sanctuary in churches and other Christian buildings.

In the 13th century, Crusades never expressed such a popular fever, and after Acre fell for the last time in 1291 and the Occitan Cathars were exterminated during the Albigensian Crusade, the crusading ideal became devalued by Papal justifications of political and territorial aggressions within Catholic Europe.

The last crusading order of knights to hold territory were the Knights Hospitaller. After the final fall of Acre, they took control of the island of Rhodes, and in the sixteenth century, were driven to Malta, before being finally unseated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798.

A traditional numbering scheme for the crusades totals nine during the 11th to 13th centuries. This division is arbitrary and excludes many important expeditions, among them those of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. In reality, the crusades continued until the end of the 17th century, the crusade of Lepanto occurring in 1571, that of Hungary in 1664, and the crusade to Candia in 1669.[16] The Knights Hospitaller continued to crusade in the Mediterranean Sea around Malta until their defeat by Napoleon in 1798. There were frequent "minor" Crusades throughout this period, not only in Palestine but also in the Iberian Peninsula and central Europe, against Muslims and also Christian heretics and personal enemies of the Papacy or other powerful monarchs.

First Crusade 1095-1099

A medieval image of Peter the Hermit leading knights, soldiers and women toward Jerusalem during the First Crusade

In March 1095 at the Council of Piacenza, ambassadors sent by Byzantine Emperor Alexius I called for help with defending his empire against the Seljuk Turks. Later that year, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called upon all Christians to join a war against the Turks, promising those who died in the endeavor would receive immediate remission of their sins.[17]

Following abortive popular crusades in early 1096, the official crusader armies set off from France and Italy on the papally-ordained date of 15 August 1096. The armies journeyed eastward by land toward Constantinople, where they received a wary welcome from the Byzantine Emperor. Pledging to restore lost territories to the empire, the Crusaders were supplied and transported to Anatolia where they laid siege to Seljuk-occupied Nicea. The city fell on 19 June 1097.[18] The Crusader armies fought further battles against the Turks, facing grave deprivation of both food and water in their summer crossing of Anatolia. The lengthy Siege of Antioch began in October 1097 and endured until June of 1098. The ruler of Antioch was not sure how the Christians living within his city would react, so he forced them to live outside the citadel. The siege only ended when one of the gates to the city was betrayed by an Armenian dissident. Once inside the city, as was standard military practice at the time,[19] the Crusaders massacred the Muslim inhabitants, destroyed mosques and pillaged the city.[20] Local Christians assassinated Yaghisiyan, former ruler of the city. However a large Muslim relief army under Kerbogha immediately besieged the victorious Crusaders within Antioch. Bohemund of Taranto led a successful break-out and defeat of Kerbogha's army on the 28th of June. The starving crusader army marched south, moving from town to town along the coast, finally reaching the walls of Jerusalem on 7 June 1099 with only a fraction of their original forces.[21]

Siege of Jerusalem

Godefroy de Bouillon, a French knight, leader of the First Crusade and founder of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Main article: Siege of Jerusalem (1099)

The Jews and Muslims fought together to defend Jerusalem against the invading Franks. They were unsuccessful though and on 15 July 1099 the crusaders entered the city.[20] They proceeded to massacre the remaining Jewish and Muslim civilians and pillaged or destroyed mosques and the city itself.[22] One historian has written that the "isolation, alienation and fear"[1][page needed] felt by the Franks so far from home helps to explain the atrocities they committed, including the cannibalism which was recorded after the Siege of Maarat in 1098.[23] As a result of the First Crusade, several small Crusader states were created, notably the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem at most 120,000 Franks (predominantly French-speaking Western Christians) ruled over 350,000 Muslims, Jews, and native Eastern Christians.[24]

The Crusaders also tried to gain control of the city of Tyre, but were defeated by the Muslims. The people of Tyre asked Zahir al-Din Atabek, the leader of Damascus, for help defending their city from the Franks with the promise to surrender Tyre to him. When the Franks were defeated the people of Tyre did not surrender the city, but Zahir al-Din simply said “What I have done I have done only for the sake of God and the Muslims, nor out of desire for wealth and kingdom.”[25]

After gaining control of Jerusalem the Crusaders created four Crusader states: the kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli.[22] Initially, Muslims did very little about the Crusader states due to internal conflicts.[26] Eventually, the Muslims began to reunite under the leadership of Imad al-Din Zangi. He began by re-taking Edessa in 1144. It was the first city to fall to the Crusaders, and became the first to be recaptured by the Muslims. This led the Pope to call for a second Crusade.

Crusade of 1101

Main article: Crusade of 1101

Following this crusade there was a second, less successful wave of crusaders, in which Turks led by Kilij Arslan defeated the Crusaders in three separate battles in a well-managed response to the First Crusade.[27] This is known as the Crusade of 1101 and may be considered an adjunct of the First Crusade.

Norwegian Crusade 1107-1110

Main article: Norwegian Crusade

Sigurd I of Norway was the first European king who went on a crusade and his crusader armies defeated Muslims in Spain, the Baleares, and in Palestine where they joined the king of Jerusalem in the Siege of Sidon.

Second Crusade 1147–1149

After a period of relative peace in which Christians and Muslims co-existed in the Holy Land, Muslims conquered the town of Edessa. A new crusade was called for by various preachers, most notably by Bernard of Clairvaux. French and South German armies, under the Kings Louis VII and Conrad III respectively, marched to Jerusalem in 1147 but failed to win any major victories, launching a failed pre-emptive siege of Damascus, an independent city that would soon fall into the hands of Nur ad-Din, the main enemy of the Crusaders.[28] On the other side of the Mediterranean, however, the Second Crusade met with great success as a group of Northern European Crusaders stopped in Portugal, allied with the Portuguese King, Afonso I of Portugal, and retook Lisbon from the Muslims in 1147.[28] A detachment from this group of crusaders helped Count Raymond Berenguer IV of Barcelona conquer the city of Tortosa the following year.[29] In the Holy Land by 1150, both the kings of France and Germany had returned to their countries without any result. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who in his preachings had encouraged the Second Crusade, was upset with the amount of misdirected violence and slaughter of the Jewish population of the Rhineland.[4] North Germans and Danes attacked the Wends during the 1147 Wendish Crusade, which was unsuccessful as well.

Third Crusade 1187–1192

A statue of king Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart), outside Westminster Palace in London.

In 1187, Saladin, Sultan of Egypt, conquered Jerusalem after nearly a century under Christian rule, following the Battle of Hattin. After the Christians surrendered the city, Saladin spared the civilians and for the most part left churches and shrines untouched to be able to collect ransom money from the Franks.[30] Several thousand apparently were not redeemed and probably were sold into slavery.[31] Saladin is remembered respectfully in both European and Islamic sources as a man who "always stuck to his promise and was loyal."[32] The reports of Saladin's victories shocked Europe. Pope Gregory VIII called for a crusade, which was led by several of Europe's most important leaders: Philip II of France, Richard I of England (aka Richard the Lionheart), and Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick drowned in Cilicia in 1190, leaving an unstable alliance between the English and the French. Before his arrival in the Holy Land, Richard captured the island of Cyprus from the Byzantines in 1191.[28] Cyprus would serve as a Crusader base for centuries to come, and would remain in Western European hands until the Ottoman Empire conquered the island from Venice in 1571.[28] After a long siege, Richard the Lionheart recaptured the city of Acre and took the entire Muslim garrison under captivity, which was executed after a series of failed negotiations. Philip left, in 1191, after the Crusaders had recaptured Acre from the Muslims. The Crusader army headed south along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. They defeated the Muslims near Arsuf, recaptured the port city of Jaffa, and were in sight of Jerusalem.[28] However, Richard did not believe he would be able to hold Jerusalem once it was captured, as the majority of Crusaders would then return to Europe, and the crusade ended without the taking of Jerusalem.[28] Richard left the following year after negotiating a treaty with Saladin. The treaty allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land (Jerusalem), while it remained under Muslim control.

On Richard's way home, his ship was wrecked and he ended up in Austria, where his enemy, Duke Leopold, captured him. The Duke delivered Richard to the Emperor Henry VI, who held the King for ransom. By 1197, Henry felt ready for a crusade, but he died in the same year of malaria. Richard I died during fighting in Europe and never returned to the Holy Land. The Third Crusade is sometimes referred to as the Kings' Crusade.

Fourth Crusade 1202–1204

The Crusader states established in Greece in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.

The Fourth Crusade was initiated in 1202 by Pope Innocent III, with the intention of invading the Holy Land through Egypt. Because the Crusaders lacked the funds to pay for the fleet and provisions that they had contracted from the Venetians, Doge Enrico Dandolo enlisted the crusaders to restore the Christian city of Zara (Zadar) to obedience. Because they subsequently lacked provisions and time on their vessel lease, the leaders decided to go to Constantinople, where they attempted to place a Byzantine exile on the throne. After a series of misunderstandings and outbreaks of violence, the Crusaders sacked the city in 1204, and established the so-called Latin Empire and a series of other Crusader states throughout the territories of the Greek Byzantine Empire. This is often seen as the final breaking point of the Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and (Western) Roman Catholic Church.

Albigensian Crusade

Main article: Albigensian Crusade

The Albigensian Crusade was launched in 1209 to eliminate the heretical Cathars of Occitania (the south of modern-day France). It was a decade-long struggle that had as much to do with the concerns of northern France to extend its control southwards as it did with heresy. In the end, both the Cathars and the independence of southern France were exterminated.[33]

Children's Crusade

The Children's Crusade is a series of possibly fictitious or misinterpreted events of 1212. The story is that an outburst of the old popular enthusiasm led a gathering of children in France and Germany, which Pope Innocent III interpreted as a reproof from heaven to their unworthy elders. The leader of the French army, Stephen, led 30,000 children. The leader of the German army, Nicholas, led 7,000 children. None of the children actually reached the Holy Land: those who did not return home or settle along the route to Jerusalem either died from shipwreck or hunger, or were sold into slavery in Egypt or North Africa.

Fifth Crusade 1217–1221

By processions, prayers, and preaching, the Church attempted to set another crusade afoot, and the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) formulated a plan for the recovery of the Holy Land. In the first phase, a crusading force from Austria and Hungary joined the forces of the king of Jerusalem and the prince of Antioch to take back Jerusalem. In the second phase, crusader forces achieved a remarkable feat in the capture of Damietta in Egypt in 1219, but under the urgent insistence of the papal legate, Pelagius, they then launched a foolhardy attack on Cairo in July of 1221. The crusaders were turned back after their dwindling supplies led to a forced retreat. A night-time attack by the ruler of Egypt, the powerful Sultan Al-Kamil, resulted in a great number of crusader losses and eventually in the surrender of the army. Al-Kamil agreed to an eight-year peace agreement with Europe.

Sixth Crusade 1228–1229

Emperor Frederick II had repeatedly vowed a crusade but failed to live up to his words, for which he was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1228. He nonetheless set sail from Brindisi, landed in Palestine, and through diplomacy he achieved unexpected success: Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem were delivered to the crusaders for a period of ten years.

In 1229 after failing to conquer Egypt, Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire, made a peace treaty with Al-Kamil, the ruler of Egypt. This treaty allowed Christians to rule over most of Jerusalem, while the Muslims were given control of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa mosque. The peace brought about by this treaty lasted for about ten years.[34] Many of the Muslims though were not happy with Al-Kamil for giving up control of Jerusalem and in 1244, following a siege, the Muslims regained control of the city.[26]

Seventh Crusade 1248–1254

The papal interests represented by the Templars brought on a conflict with Egypt in 1243, and in the following year a Khwarezmian force summoned by the latter stormed Jerusalem. The crusaders were drawn into battle at La Forbie in Gaza. The crusader army and its Bedouin mercenaries were completely defeated within forty-eight hours by Baibars' force of Khwarezmian tribesmen. This battle is considered by many historians to have been the death knell to the Kingdom of Outremer. Although this provoked no widespread outrage in Europe as the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 had done, Louis IX of France organized a crusade against Egypt from 1248 to 1254, leaving from the newly constructed port of Aigues-Mortes in southern France. It was a failure, and Louis spent much of the crusade living at the court of the crusader kingdom in Acre. In the midst of this crusade was the first Shepherds' Crusade in 1251.

Eighth Crusade 1270

The eighth Crusade was organized by Louis IX in 1270, again sailing from Aigues-Mortes, initially to come to the aid of the remnants of the crusader states in Syria. However, the crusade was diverted to Tunis, where Louis spent only two months before dying. For his efforts, Louis was later canonised. The Eighth Crusade is sometimes counted as the Seventh, if the Fifth and Sixth Crusades are counted as a single crusade. The Ninth Crusade is sometimes also counted as part of the Eighth.

Ninth Crusade 1271–1272

The future Edward I of England undertook another expedition against Baibars in 1271, after having accompanied Louis on the Eighth Crusade. Louis died in Tunisia. The Ninth Crusade was deemed a failure and ended the Crusades in the Middle East.[35]

In their later years, faced with the threat of the Egyptian Mamluks, the Crusaders' hopes rested with a Franco-Mongol alliance. The Ilkhanate's Mongols were thought to be sympathetic to Christianity, and the Frankish princes were most effective in gathering their help, engineering their invasions of the Middle East on several occasions.[citation needed] Although the Mongols successfully attacked as far south as Damascus on these campaigns, the ability to effectively coordinate with Crusades from the west was repeatedly frustrated most notably at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. The Mamluks, led by Baibars, eventually made good their pledge to cleanse the entire Middle East of the Franks. With the fall of Antioch (1268), Tripoli (1289), and Acre (1291), those Christians unable to leave the cities were massacred or enslaved and the last traces of Christian rule in the Levant disappeared.[36][37]

Aftermath

The island of Ruad, three kilometers from the Syrian shore, was occupied for several years by the Knights Templar but was ultimately lost to the Mamluks in the Siege of Ruad on September 26, 1302. The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which was not itself a crusader state, and was not Latin Christian, but was closely associated with the crusader states and was ruled by the Latin Christian Lusignan dynasty for its last 34 years, survived until 1375. Other echoes of the crusader states survived for longer, but well away from the Holy Land itself. The Knights of St John carved out a new territory based on the Aegean island of Rhodes, which they ruled until 1522. Cyprus remained under the rule of the House of Lusignan until 1474/89 (the precise date depends on how Venice's highly unusual takeover is interpreted - see Caterina Cornaro) and subsequently that of Venice until 1570. By this time the Knights of St John had moved to Malta - even further from the Holy Land - which they ruled until 1798.

Northern Crusades (Baltic and Germany)

The Teutonic Knights in Pskov in 1240 as depicted in Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938).

Main article: Northern Crusades

The Crusades in the Baltic Sea area and in Central Europe were efforts by (mostly German) Christians to subjugate and convert the peoples of these areas to Christianity. These Crusades ranged from the 12th century, contemporaneous with the Second Crusade, to the 16th century.

Contemporaneous with the Second Crusade, Saxons and Danes fought against Polabian Slavs in the 1147 Wendish Crusade. In the 13th century, the Teutonic Knights led Germans, Poles, and Pomeranians against the Old Prussians during the Prussian Crusade.

In 1198 German Crusaders started Livonian Crusade. Despite numerous setbacks and rebellions, by 1290 Livonians, Latgalians, Selonians, Estonians (including Oeselians), Curonians and Semigallians had been all gradually subjugated. Denmark and Sweden also participated in fight against Estonians.

Between 1232 and 1234, there was a crusade against the Stedingers. This crusade was special, because the Stedingers were not heathens or heretics, but fellow Roman Catholics. They were free Frisian farmers who resented attempts of the count of Oldenburg and the archbishop Bremen-Hamburg to make an end to their freedoms. The archbishop excommunicated them, and Pope Gregory IX declared a crusade in 1232. The Stedingers were defeated in 1234.

The Teutonic Order's attempts to conquer Orthodox Russia (particularly the Republics of Pskov and Novgorod), an enterprise endorsed by Pope Gregory IX, can also be considered as a part of the Northern Crusades. One of the major blows for the idea of the conquest of Russia was the Battle of the Ice in 1242. With or without the Pope's blessing, Sweden also undertook several crusades against Orthodox Novgorod.

Other

Crusade against the Tatars

In 1259 Mongols led by Burundai and Nogai Khan ravaged the principality of Halych-Volynia, Lithuania and Poland. After that Pope Alexander IV tried without success to create a crusade against the Blue Horde (see Mongol invasion of Poland).

In the 14th century, Khan Tokhtamysh combined the Blue and White Hordes forming the Golden Horde. It seemed that the power of the Golden Horde had begun to rise, but in 1389, Tokhtamysh made the disastrous decision of waging war on his former master, the great Tamerlane. Tamerlane's hordes rampaged through southern Russia, crippling the Golden Horde's economy and practically wiping out its defenses in those lands.

After losing the war, Tokhtamysh was then dethroned by the party of Khan Temur Kutlugh and Emir Edigu, supported by Tamerlane. When Tokhtamysh asked Vytautas the Great for assistance in retaking the Horde, the latter readily gathered a huge army which included Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Russians, Mongols, Moldavians, Poles, Romanians and Teutonic Knights.

In 1398, the huge army moved from Moldavia and conquered the southern steppe all the way to the Dnieper River and northern Crimea. Inspired by their great successes, Vytautas declared a 'Crusade against the Tatars' with Papal backing. Thus, in 1399, the army of Vytautas once again moved on the Horde. His army met the Horde's at the Vorskla River, slightly inside Lithuanian territory.

Although the Lithuanian army was well equipped with cannon, it could not resist a rear attack from Edigu's reserve units. Vytautas hardly escaped alive. Many princes of his kin—possibly as many as 20—were killed (for example, Stefan Musat, Prince of Moldavia and two of his brothers, while a fourth was badly injured[citation needed]), and the victorious Tatars besieged Kiev. "And the Christian blood flowed like water, up to the Kievan walls," as one chronicler put it. Meanwhile, Temur Kutlugh died from the wounds received in the battle, and Tokhtamysh was killed by one of his own men.

Crusades in the Balkans

To counter the expanding Ottoman Empire, several crusades were launched in the 15th century. The most notable are:

Aragonese Crusade

The Aragonese Crusade, or Crusade of Aragón, was declared by Pope Martin IV against the King of Aragón, Peter III the Great, in 1284 and 1285.

Alexandrian Crusade

The Alexandrian Crusade of October 1365 was a minor seaborne crusade against Muslim Alexandria led by Peter I of Cyprus. His motivation was at least as commercial as religious.

Hussite Crusade

The Hussite Crusade(s), also known as the "Hussite Wars," or the "Bohemian Wars," involved the military actions against and amongst the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia in the period 1420 to circa 1434. The Hussite Wars were arguably the first European war in which hand-held gunpowder weapons such as muskets made a decisive contribution. The Taborite faction of the Hussite warriors were basically infantry, and their many defeats of larger armies with heavily armoured knights helped affect the infantry revolution. In the end, it was an inconclusive war.

Swedish Crusades

The Swedish conquest of Finland in the Middle Ages has traditionally been divided into three "crusades": the First Swedish Crusade around 1155 AD, the Second Swedish Crusade about 1249 AD and the Third Swedish Crusade in 1293 AD.

The First Swedish Crusade is purely legendary, and according to most historians today, never took place as described in the legend and did not result in any ties between Finland and Sweden. For the most part, it was made up in the late 13th century to date the Swedish rule in Finland further back in time. No historical record has also survived describing the second one, but it probably did take place and ended up in the concrete conquest of southwestern Finland. The third one was against Novgorod, and is properly documented by both parties of the conflict.[citation needed]

According to archaeological finds, Finland was largely Christian already before the said crusades. Thus the "crusades" can rather be seen as ordinary expeditions of conquest whose main target was territorial gain. The expeditions were dubbed as actual crusades only in the 19th century by the national-romanticist Swedish and Finnish historians.[citation needed]

Analysis

Elements of the Crusades were criticized by some from the time of their inception in 1095. For example, Roger Bacon felt the Crusades were not effective because, "those who survive, together with their children, are more and more embittered against the Christian faith."[38] In spite of such criticism, the movement was widely supported in Europe long after the fall of Acre in 1291. Historians agree that St. Francis of Assisi crossed enemy lines to meet the Sultan of Egypt. Hoeberichts cast doubt on the intentions most Christian historians assign to Francis. From the fall of Acre forward, the Crusades to recover Jerusalem and the Christian East were largely lost. Later, 18th century Enlightenment thinkers judged the Crusaders harshly. Likewise, some modern historians in the West expressed moral outrage. In the 1950s, Sir Steven Runciman wrote a resounding condemnation:

"High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed … the Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God".[38]

Historical perspective: Western and Eastern historiography present variously different views on the crusades, in large part because "crusade" invokes dramatically opposed sets of associations—"crusade" as a valiant struggle for a supreme cause, and "crusade" as a byword for barbarism and aggression.

Legacy

Politics and culture

The Crusades had an enormous influence on the European Middle Ages. At times, much of the continent was united under a powerful Papacy, but by the 14th century, the development of centralized bureaucracies (the foundation of the modern nation-state) was well on its way in France, England, Spain, Burgundy, and Portugal, and partly because of the dominance of the church at the beginning of the crusading era.

Although Europe had been exposed to Islamic culture for centuries through contacts in Iberian Peninsula and Sicily, much knowledge in areas such as science, medicine, and architecture was transferred from the Islamic to the western world during the crusade era.

The military experiences of the crusades also had a limited degree of influence on European castle design; for example, Caernarfon Castle, in Wales, begun in 1283, directly reflects the style of fortresses Edward I had observed while fighting in the Crusades.[39]. In addition, the Crusades are seen as having opened up European culture to the world, especially Asia:


The Crusades brought about results of which the popes had never dreamed, and which were perhaps the most, important of all. They re-established traffic between the East and West, which, after having been suspended for several centuries, was then resumed with even greater energy; they were the means of bringing from the depths of their respective provinces and introducing into the most civilized Asiatic countries Western knights, to whom a new world was thus revealed, and who returned to their native land filled with novel ideas... If, indeed, the Christian civilization of Europe has become universal culture, in the highest sense, the glory redounds, in no small measure, to the Crusades."[4]

Along with trade, new scientific discoveries and inventions made their way east or west. Arab advances (including the development of algebra, optics, and refinement of engineering) made their way west and sped the course of advancement in European universities that led to the Renaissance in later centuries

The invasions of German crusaders prevented formation of the large Lithuanian state incorporating all Baltic nations and tribes. Lithuania was destined to become a small country and forced to expand to the East looking for resources to combat the crusaders.[40] The Northern Crusades caused great loss of life among the pagan Polabian Slavs, and they consequently offered little opposition to German colonization (known as Ostsiedlung) of the Elbe-Oder region and were gradually assimilated by the Germans, with the exception of Sorbs.[41]

The First Crusade ignited a long tradition of organized violence against Jews in European culture.[42][citation needed]

Trade

The need to raise, transport and supply large armies led to a flourishing of trade throughout Europe. Roads largely unused since the days of Rome saw significant increases in traffic as local merchants began to expand their horizons. This was not only because the Crusades prepared Europe for travel, but also because many wanted to travel after being reacquainted with the products of the Middle East. This also aided in the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy, as various Italian city-states from the very beginning had important and profitable trading colonies in the crusader states, both in the Holy Land and later in captured Byzantine territory.

Increased trade brought many things to Europeans that were once unknown or extremely rare and costly. These goods included a variety of spices, ivory, jade, diamonds, improved glass-manufacturing techniques, early forms of gun powder, oranges, apples, and other Asian crops, and many other products.


From a larger perspective, and certainly from that of noted naval/maritime historian Archibald Lewis, the Crusades must be viewed as part of a massive macrohistorical event during which Western Europe, primarily by its ability in naval warfare, amphibious siege, and maritime trade, was able to advance in all spheres of civilization.
[28] Recovering from the Dark Ages of AD 700-1000, throughout the 11th century Western Europe began to push the boundaries of its civilization.[28] Prior to the First Crusade the Italian city-state of Venice, along with the Byzantine Empire, had cleared the Adriatic Sea of Islamic pirates, and loosened the Islamic hold on the Mediterranean Sea (Byzantine-Muslim War of 1030-1035).[28] The Normans, with the assistance of the Italian city-states of Genoa and Pisa, had retaken Sicily from the Muslims from 1061-1091.[28] These conflicts prior to the First Crusade had both retaken Western European territory and weakened the Islamic hold on the Mediterranean, allowing for the rise of Western European Mediterranean trading and naval powers such as the Sicilian Normans and the Italian city-states of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa.[28]

During the Middle Ages, the key trading region of Western Europe was the Black Sea-Mediterranean Sea-Red Sea.[28] It was the aforementioned pre-First Crusade actions, along with the Crusades themselves, which allowed Western Europe to contest the trade of the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea, for a period which began in the 1000s and would only be ended by the Turkish Ottoman Empire beginning in the mid-to-late 1400s.[28] This Western European contestation of vital sea lanes allowed the economy of Western Europe to advance to previously unknown degrees, most obviously as regards the Maritime Republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa.[28] Indeed, it is no coincidence that the Renaissance began in Italy, as the Maritime Republics, through their control of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas, were able to return to Italy the ancient knowledge of the Greeks and Romans, as well as the products of distant East Asia.[28]

Combined with the Mongol Empire, Western Europe traded extensively with East Asia, the security of the Mongol Empire allowing the products of Asia to be brought to such Western European controlled ports as Acre, Antioch, Kaffa (on the Black Sea) and even, for a time, Constantinople itself.[28] The Fifth Crusade of 1217-1221 and the Seventh Crusade of 1248-1254 were largely attempts to secure Western European control of the Red Sea trade region, as both Crusades were directed against Egypt, the power base of the Ayyubid, and then Mameluke, Sultanates.[28] It was only in the 1300s, as the stability of trade with Asia collapsed with the Mongol Empire, the Mamelukes destroyed the Middle Eastern Crusader States, and the rising Ottoman Empire impeded further Western European trade with Asia, that Western Europeans sought alternate trade routes to Asia, ultimately leading to Columbus's voyage of 1492.[28]

Caucasus

In the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, in the remote highland region of Khevsureti, a tribe called the Khevsurs are thought to possibly be direct descendants of a party of crusaders who got separated from a larger army and have remained in isolation with some of the crusader culture intact. Into the 20th century, relics of armor, weaponry and chain mail were still being used and passed down in such communities. Russian serviceman and ethnographer Arnold Zisserman who spent 25 years (1842–67) in the Caucasus, believed the exotic group of Georgian highlanders were descendants of the last Crusaders based on their customs, language, art and other evidence.[43] American traveler Richard Halliburton saw and recorded the customs of the tribe in 1935.[44]

Etymology and usage: The crusades were never referred to as such by their participants. The original crusaders were known by various terms, including fideles Sancti Petri (the faithful of Saint Peter) or milites Christi (knights of Christ). They saw themselves as undertaking an iter, a journey, or a peregrinatio, a pilgrimage, though pilgrims were usually forbidden from carrying arms.[citation needed]

Like pilgrims, each crusader swore a vow (a votus), to be fulfilled on successfully reaching Jerusalem, and they were granted a cloth cross (crux) to be sewn into their clothes. This "taking of the cross", the crux, eventually became associated with the entire journey; the word "crusade" (coming into English from the Medieval French croisade and Spanish cruzada)[45] developed from this.