The Crusaders Ate Buttocks

The Crusaders were knew for their brutality. Although filmmaker Ridley Scott portrayed Orlando Bloom as a romantic Knight seeking solace in the Holy Land, the path to Jerusalem was one of looting and pillage, and the horrific massacres of every single Jew they came across.

cannibal2 26U3N 19672

And once they got to Jerusalem they massacred everyone - men, women and children - that they caught. Contemporary accounts both Christian and Muslim both the death toll at the hands of the Crusaders on the first day alone at 65,000-70,000. Crusaders themselves noted that their horses were walking in rivers of bloods, literally. But Hollywood has another image.

Ridley Scott also portrayed the Crusaders in "Kingdom of Heaven" as more civilized then the Arabs. In reality, the Crusaders were incredibly backwards.

I shall quote from the account of a reliable Arab Syrian prince, Usamah Bin Munqidh (d. 1188) who was a contemporary of the Crusades and left us a most interesting account that I recommend (Kitab Al-I`tibar--fortunately available in an excellent translation by Philip K. Hitti as, An Arab-Syrian Gengtleman and Warrior in the Period of The Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh (Kitab Al-I`tibar), (NY: Columbia University Press, 1929) (I have this first edition, in addition to the Arabic edition of course, but I believe that Princeton University Press republished Hitti's excellent translation in recent years). Usamah tells us the following story about Crusaders' science: "The Lord of Al-Munaytirah wrote to my uncle asking him to dispatch a physician to treat certain sick persons among his people. My uncle sent him a Christian [Arab] physician named Thabit. Thabit was absent but ten days when he returned. So we said to him, "How quickly have you healed your patients!" He said: "They brought before me a knight in whose leg an abscess had grown; and a woman afflicted with imbecility. To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet. Then a Frankish physician came to them and said, "This man knows nothing about treating them." He then said to the knight, "Which would you prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?" The latter replied, "living with one leg." The physician said, "Bring me a strong knight and a sharp ax." A knight came with the ax. And I was standing by. Then the physician laid the leg of the patient on a block of wood and bade the knight strike with the ax and chop it off at one blow. Accordingly he struck it--while I was looking on--one blow, but the leg was not severed. He dealt another blow, upon which the marrow of the leg flowed out and the patient died on the spot. He then examined the woman and said, "This is a woman in whose head there is a devil which has possessed her. Shave off her hair." Accordingly they shaved it off and the woman began once more to eat their ordinary diet--garlic and mustard. Her imbecility took a turn for the worse. The physician then said, "The devil has penetrated through her head." He therefore took a razor, made a deep incision on it, peeled off the skin at the middle of the incision until the bone of the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman expired instantly. Thereupon I asked them whether my services were needed any longer, and when they replied in the negative I returned home, having learned of their medicine what I knew not before."

There is a very offensive scene where Orlando Bloom's character is seen digging an irrigation canal for the Arabs who seemed to be fumbling before he arrived. Those Arabs were tilling the lands for centuries before the "white man" arrived, but Americans need to be believe the myth that "Israel made the desert bloom."

This whole post is by way of introduction to note that the Crusaders resorted to eating the buttocks of Arabs:

Both writers enliven their narratives with blood-curdling details culled from Muslim and Frankish sources: the decapitated heads of prisoners paraded on spikes to humiliate and enrage the enemy; battlefields where dead horses resembled hedgehogs from the quantity of arrows sticking into them; winter sieges where the people "tormented by the madness of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of dead Saracens, which they cooked and ate insufficiently roasted".

I mean, I know we are irresistible, but, come on!