In the words of Steve Miller and his band, time keeps on slipping into the future. Do you want to feel old? Well, guess what? The Crusades were 900 years ago.
That’s right, I bet it feels like just yesterday that Pope Urban II put out a papal bull calling for all good Christians to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from the heathen Saracens. But it was 900 years ago! Ugh, time needs to start slowing down or we are going to lose our minds.
You’re probably are thinking “well sure, that’s the First Crusade, but I remember Richard the Lionheart going into battle against Saladin, that had to be only two or three years ago right?” Nope. That was 800 years ago. If you can believe it, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and even the leper king Baldwin IV are now dead! It makes it hard to go back and look at the mosaics depicting the events without feeling a bit of bittersweet nostalgia about the whole thing.
We certainly can’t forget the day that Enrico Dandalo, Serene Doge of Venice, sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. We were pissed. We all were chanting ‘resist’ and wanted to vote that blind bastard out for what he was doing to Eastern Christendom, but he just kept sacking. And then we live to see it repeat itself with Donald Trump. Time’s a real bitch, and it makes fools of us all.
Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It’s easy to look back and yearn for the days of capturing Damietta, or resisting the Turks in Malta, or even being turned into an immortal vampire in Dark Ages Romania, but we need to look forward. A lot of people peaked during the Crusades and now spend their lives trying to chase that high again. But despite the calls for another Crusade, lets say we just let it be in the past.
Also for you younger folks, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated 160 years ago. Wild.