WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) Read Online Free PDF Page A

he could not commend William ‘for an act which levelled both the bad and the good in one common ruin by a consuming famine.’
    With much of the north now devastated and acquiescent, William began a process of breaking up the great estates of the Anglo-Saxon thanes, distributing smaller parcels of land among his Norman followers. He was careful never to give any one lord so much land in one place that it could be used as a power base from which to stir up trouble against the king. He emphasized the fact that the land came from the king, its ultimate owner, and that lords held it in trust from him. Thus the land-owning system of Anglo-Saxon England disappeared and was replaced by the system that came to be called feudalism.
    After the northern rebellions of 1069-70, William’s rule in England became much harsher. To ensure his power, he began a major programme of building forts and castles the length and breadth of his realm. He brought from Normandy a style of castle-building that resulted in fortifications much more impregnable than anything the Anglo-Saxons built. The Norman castle, later built of stone but in William’s time mostly of wood, were based on the ‘motte and bailey’ castle, erected on a high mound so that they rose threateningly above the surrounding countryside. Norman lords occupied these castles, which were built by English serf labourers. Once William was assured that England was quiet, he returned to Normandy after 1072 and seldom visited his English possessions thereafter.
    Oderic Vitalis had asserted that William should be punished for the ‘barbarous homicide’ he had carried out during the harrying of the north. Of course, he never was punished – except, perhaps, in his own mind. On his deathbed in 1087, William the Conqueror is said to have admitted that he had persecuted the native inhabitants of England beyond all reason. ‘I am stained with the rivers of blood I have shed,’ he said. Perhaps it was partly contrition that led him to leave his English lands to his second son, William Rufus, a man thought to be less hard and ruthless than his elder brother, Robert, who became Duke of Normandy on the death of his father.
    As for other participants, Edwin of Northumberland was killed by his own men during another, abortive, rising in 1071, after which Morcar was imprisoned by William. Although he outlived William, Morcar was returned to prison by the new king, William Rufus, and disappeared from history. Edgar the Atheling, who had never been much more than a hook on which to hang rebellious thanes’ ambitions, was reconciled with William in 1074 and spent the rest of his life as a minor courtier. He took part in the First Crusade.

The First Crusaders Take Jerusalem From The Infidel
    1099

     
    From the time of its founding by the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century, Islam was remarkably successful in its waging of jihad, or holy war, to convert the peoples of Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean to what they saw as the true faith. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad in 632, the three greatest cities in the Christian Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire – Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – had all fallen to Islam. Syria and Egypt, also parts of the Byzantine Empire, and the Persian Empire had all been overwhelmed.
    Largely because the Holy Places of Christendom were in the Byzantine Empire, the capital of which was Constantinople (now Istanbul), Western Christianity long ignored events in the area. It was not until the 11th century that Western Christianity awoke to the danger of complete annihilation that faced the Christian Church in the eastern Mediterranean and chose to do something about it.
    Medieval religious enthusiasm was at its height in Western Europe when, in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called on the Christian laity to take up arms for the reconquest of Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands since 638. The pope was answering a call for