Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 17

The German Empire was a successor to the Holy Roman Empire. Not to be confused with the earlier Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire was a union of Central European territories dating back to Otto the Great in 962 AD. It was considered to be a continuation of the Frankish Empire, established in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West — essentially naming him the successor to the Roman emperors going back to Augustus, whose rule began in 27 BC.

Follow Leo’s popish thread, and you’ll get to Pope Urban II, who in 1095 called upon Europe’s Christians to make war against the Turks, especially the Seljuk Dynasty, who controlled the city of Jerusalem and the land surrounding it, considered to be the Christian Holy Land.

Urban’s war became the First Crusade, followed by at least nine more crusades over several centuries in which Christians from Europe traveled east to conquer territory in western Asia. Not surprisingly, these incursions contributed to enduring hard feelings on the part of many Muslims toward Christians and the West.

You may trace a thread between the Crusades and latter-day anti-U.S. sentiments, such as those held by the notorious terrorist organization called ISIS, for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. (Confusingly, it’s also called IS, ISIL [for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant], and Daesh.) That thread also crosses the one in which the United Nations partitioned what had been British Palestine (another post-WWI territory) into Arab and Jewish areas to make way for the modern nation of Israel.

Before the rise of ISIS, another terrorist group, al-Qaeda, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. The American response was a War on Terror(ism) that included the invasion of Afghanistan, where the leaders of al-Qaeda were supposedly hiding, and then the invasion of Iraq, whose leader was thought to be hiding banned weapons and aiding terrorist groups. That second invasion and war destabilized Iraq for many years, giving ISIS a place to form and grow. And I’m back where I started.