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August 23 - Jerusalem conquered

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Komnenos View Drop Down
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  Quote Komnenos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: August 23 - Jerusalem conquered
    Posted: 22-Aug-2005 at 18:55
On August 23,1244 Jerusalem was conquered by Kharezmian mercenaries in the service of the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt, As-Salih Ayyub, and the city that had changed hands several times during the Crusades, was never to be held by a Christian ruler again.

The conquest of Jerusalem had been the declared aim of the Crusades, and in 1099 the armies of the First Crusade had re-captured the city, the holy place of three world religions, for the first time from Muslim rulers who had held it since 638. Salad-ad Din had re-taken it again in 1187 and successfully defended his gains against the Third Crusade, led by Richard I of England and Philip Augustus of France.

For the last time, Jerusalem had fallen into Christian hands in 1229, during the Sixth Crusade of Frederik II of Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor.
Frederiks crusade had been an almost private enterprise, without support from any other European powers, and especially not from the Catholic Church whose Pope Gregory had excommunicated the Emperor in 1227. Although the Popes motives had been entirely political, another move in the longstanding struggle between Empire and papacy for supremacy, and the domination of Italy, the official explanation was somewhat different. Frederik II had been accused on previous occasion that he would not adhere to the Christian religion as a Holy Roman Emperor should do. In his Imperial court in Sicily, where he had been brought up and spent most of his reign, he had surrounded himself with Muslim advisors and a Saracen bodyguard. He had shown an understanding and tolerance of the Muslim and Jewish faiths that been unusual at the least for a Christian King. Rumors had thus crept up that accused him of being an agnostic heathen, probably not wholly unfounded, and, far worse, of being a secret Muslim, and the Pope had had a wonderful excuse to expel the Emperor from the Church for not fulfilling his Christian duties.



The medieval Jerusalem

The suspicions of Frederiks enemies about his religious sympathies were somewhat substantiated when he landed in Palestine in 1228. Instead of hacking and maiming his way through the Holy Land, as a good Christian was supposed to, Frederik had entered in negotiations with the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt Al-Kamil, who was an equally enlightened ruler. The two soon came to an agreement, a ten year long truce was declared, and the most important cities of Christendom in the Holy Land, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth were ceded to the Christians, in exchange for Frederiks help against Al-Kamils enemy, his brother, the Sultan of Damascus.
In February 1229 Frederik II triumphantly entered Jerusalem, having achieved with a bit of clever diplomacy and without spilling a drop of blood what several other Crusades had failed to do by the force of arms. He crowned himself King of Jerusalem, but was rather disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm that was shown in Europe for his historic achievement.
Frederik left shortly after again to sort out some urgent matters in Italy, and Sultan Al-Kamil died in 1238. His son As-Salih succeeded him in 1240, after some family disputes, and although the truce had already expired in 1239, it took another five years before Jerusalems fate was sealed.
On August 23, 1244, the Kharezmians, a Turkic people that had come out of Transoxiania to briefly rule Persia in the 11th and 12th centuries and who had become allies of As-Salih during the Ayyubid civil wars, stormed the un-walled Jerusalem and pillaged the city for days, destroying churches and monasteries and killing most of its population.
Although the French King Louis IX made one last desperate effort to regain Palestine for the Christian faith, the renewed loss of Jerusalem in 1244 was blow that decisively dampened the crusading spirit of European knights.
In 1291 it was all over.
The Mameluks, who had come to power in Egypt in 1250, overrun what was left of Christian possessions, and Acre, the last surviving city of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was taken in 1291.
In 1517 the Ottomans conquered Jerusalem and it remained in their possession until 1917. The rest is, as they say, history.


What else happened on this day?


1305 The Scottish rebel leader William Wallace was hanged, drawn, beheaded, and quartered in London.( If that wasnt bad enough, a far worse fate befell Wallace, when seven hundred years later, Mel Gibson turned the story of his life into a truly awful movie.)

1821 After an eleven year war, Mexico gains its independence from Spain.

1939 Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret addition to the pact, Baltic states, Finland and Poland are divided between the two nations.

1942 Somewhat ignoring the non-agression treaty of three years earlier, German forces began an assault on the major Soviet industrial city of Stalingrad. From Aug. to Feb. 1943, The Battle of Stalingrad, 600 miles southeast of Moscow, was fought and ended with the encirclement and destruction of the German 6th Army Group

Full list:

Wikipedia

Edited by Komnenos
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Belisarius View Drop Down
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  Quote Belisarius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-Aug-2005 at 21:25
Braveheart was not that bad of a movie. In fact, even though I am very picky about historical accuracy, I quite enjoyed it. Historical rape, torture, and murder? Definately. Bad movie? Not at all.
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  Quote Nagyfejedelem Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24-Aug-2005 at 13:46

What else happened on this day?

1944 Insurrection in Bukarest against Nazis. After that Soviets captured German forces in Romania, and Romanians could reconcuer North-Transylvania.

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