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The Long Waves of Time

When analyzing Quincy Wright’s (1965) data on frequency and intensity of warfare among the Western countries, we noticed a cycle, superimposed on the cycle of wars, wars with periodicity of about 200 - 300 years. Comparing this cycle with the cycle typical of the Chinese wars, both cycles showed similar periodicity for the time intervals when, in China, the Confucius philosophy was predominant.  Several researchers, independently analyzing Quincy Wright’s (1965) data on frequency and intensity of warfare have also observed this ‘long wave’ cycle, identified by Denton and Phillips in Some Patterns in the History of Violence (1968) as likely caused by 

an action-reaction process in political philosophy, taken in the broad sense to include the general attitude of the elites toward the ‘correct’ society, a cycle of profound changes, heralding a new epoch.

 Search for the Long Waves of Time

 

 

 

To outline tentative contours of this cycle, we had first to choose the anchor points of our time scale, our best guess being the closing centuries of the Roman Empire, from about 275 to 476, and at the other pole the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, marking the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hypothesizing a sine wave with amplitude of about 200 years, the long wave cycle of wars would have about eight inflection points. As the religion dominated most of the history of the West, the religious and secular epitomes are not meant in an absolute, but in a relative sense.

Rise of Christianity

 Roman Emperor Aurelianus (r. 270-275) was the last Roman emperor who ruled the strong and united empire with the Sun God as the principal deity. After his assassination in 275, the rise of Christianity gained momentum and accelerated. In 313 Emperor Constantine mandated Christianity the official state religion and in 330 moved the capital of the Roman Empire to the Nova Roma, later renamed Constantinople (present Istanbul). Soon after Christianity became the state religion, Constantine legislated that

participation in pagan services is punishable by death.

About 50 years later, Emperor Julian, called by his friends the Philosopher and by the Christians the Apostate, attempted to restore the classic Roman heritage. Julian shared with Celsus the major objections of the Romans against the Christians of which the central was that by transferring their primary allegiance from the ancestors to the God,

Emperor Julian is the protagonist of Gore Vidal's book Julian (1964) describing his life and times. Emperor Julian's books, beautifully written, include the Hymn to the King Helios, Letter to a Priest where Julian outlines a strategy for restoration of classic Roman religion, and Against the Galileans, describing many of the appalling aspects of Christianity. Emperor Julian was assassinated in 363 by a fanatic Christian.

During this epoch, Agorius Praetextatus  (320-384) was one of the leaders of the Gentile intellectual movement in an increasingly Christian late imperial Rome. In the face of the Christian juggernaut, Praetextatus, his wife Pauline, and a circle of friends including writers Symmachus and Macrobius, fought the battle for the Roman classic religion and ideals. After Praetextatus death in 384, St. Jerome rejoiced that Praetextatus is now in hell.

In 476, Germanic warrior and king of Italy, Odoacer, deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last western Roman emperor. During this period, the frequency of warfare was high, as waves of invasions by Franks, Goths, and Vandals partitioned and finally overwhelmed the Western Roman Empire.

Saeculum Obscurum

Caesar Baronius, head librarian of the Vatican Library, coined the term Saeculum Obscurum in his Annales ecclesiastici (1588). However, these Dark Ages were enlightened at the beginning by Anicius Boethius (480-524) and at the end by Venerable Bede (672-735).

 Seventeen years after Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, invited Odoacer to a banquet where he had him assassinated. Theodoric became Odoacer's successor as a king of Italy.

 Theodoric began to suspect that certain of his nobles were plotting with the emperor in Constantinople to overthrow his government, and Albinus, an ex-consul and friend of Boethius’ was charged with treason. Boethius, at that time Theodoric's Magister Officiorum, Master of the Palace defended Albinus in court, was himself accused of being part of the plot, imprisoned at Ticinum in northern Italy and later executed. During his imprisonment, Boethius, wrote his Consolation Philosophiae.

 Boethius is often called ‘the last of the Romans, the first of the Scholastics.’ as he translated Aristotle and Euclid (Geometria Euclidis a Boethio in Latinum translata) into Latin and these translations were used by scholastic philosophers 600 years later..

 As the Roman Empire was disintegrating, Vandals occupied its North Africa provinces, Goths expanded their control to Spain, and Franks settled in Gaul (France) and parts of Germany.

 

Carolingian Reformation

At the early years of the Carolingian Age, the lucid writings of Venerable Bede’s (672-735) and his followers provide insight into the general obscurity of these times. Venerable Bede’s (672-735) wrote on various topics, such as history (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), orthography, grammar, and theology. Bede also composed a summary of the works of Roman naturalists.  Bede’s legacy was continued by Alcuin (c.735-804), the intellectual successor of Bede, who established a school at Aix-la-Chapelle with the classical curriculum of the medieval education: the seven liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Alcuin’s students, such as Rhabanus Maurus, known for his poetry and De arte grammatica, carried Bede’s legacy into the interior of Europe.

The Carolingian Reformation proper commences with the ascent of Charlemagne (r. 774-814) who established the Holy Roman Empire in 800. The atmosphere of Charlemagne’s times was told by Emmanuel Roidis in his 1866 novel Pope Joan. In 1960, the Roidis' book was made into a movie by Lawrence Durrell. Joan was a female Pope who ruled the church between the pontificates of Leo IV (847-855) and Benedict III (855-858). Her name was expurgated from the Vatican records and the resulting gap was filled by the extension of the actual reigns of the adjacent popes. Joan studied in Athens and after her arrival to Rome she disguised herself as a male to get a job as a papal notary. After the death of Leo IV she was elected Pope. During a papal procession, she gave birth to a child. Her enraged entourage stoned both Joan and her newborn child to death.

Historians of religious bent credit Charlemagne with great political, religious, and humanitarian vision. Other historians describe Charlemagne as religious fanatic. Bernard Bachrac characterizes Charlemagne as

'a gluttonous and superstitious illiterate, or semiliterate,
who had a considerable capacity for brutality.
His accomplishments were due mostly to the ruthlessness
with which he treated any opponents.'

During the times of Charlemagne, the Byzantine Empire was rocked by the Great Iconoclasm Controversy. The Old Testament forbids making images (thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image), however, the New Testament does not reiterate this prohibition. In Greek, eikono-klasmos means image-breaking. This controversy between Iconoclasts and Iconolaters was among the early manifestations of the Old-New Testament doctrinal differences that later came into prominence during the Protestant Reformation. Charlemagne got involved when the Byzantine Empress Irene asked the hand of Charlemagne’s daughter for her son. Charlemagne at first agreed, but when he learned that Irene does not support the Iconoclasts, he broke the engagement. 

The alienation of the European people from their native cultures was accelerated during the times of Charlemagne and presaged what happened to the native people of the Americas and their indigenous cultures following the voyages of Columbus. Charlemagne's crusade against 'heathens' took place in the course of his Thirty Years' War (774-804) during which most of the indigenous cultures of Europe disappeared. The violence and atrocities of Charlemagne's Thirty Years' War include the executions of thousands who refused to convert to Christianity and resulted in deaths of about a half and in some regions close to two thirds of the pre-war population. During Charlemagne's Thirty Years' War, people who refused to be converted were executed. These executions took place in recurring waves, reaching its peak in 782 when Charlemagne executed in a single day over 4,000 Saxons who refused to convert to Christianity. During his campaigns against Saxony, in his conversations transcribed by his biographer Eginhard, Charlemagne often repeated that

 'Saxony must be Christianized, or wiped out.'

During Charlemagne's Thirty Year's War, most of the Western Europe was converted to Christianity. Charlemagne, who signed documents as Carolus, Rex and Sacerdot, the King and the Priest, maintained a close collusion of the secular and ecclesiastical powers. Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope Leo III as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 and was canonized in 1165. The end of the Charlemagne’s Empire can be characterized by the Cadaver Synod (896), the bizarre trial of Pope Formosus.

 The frequency of warfare during this period was high. Charlemagne's empire rested almost entirely on the force and after his death and a prolonged civil war, the empire was divided (887) among his heirs into three areas, roughly corresponding to present France, Germany, and Italy, marking the end of this epoch. 

 

The Age of Byzantium

This era spans a time period following the end of the Carolingian Dynasty and the First Crusade. Among the best loved literary heritage of the Byzantine Empire is the Pentateuch of the Harlequin romance novels (Callimachos and Chrysorrhoe, Belthandros and Chrysantza, Lybistros and Rhodamme, Imberios and Margarona, Florios and Platziaflora) where the girl is kidnapped by a monster or a foreign king and her boyfriend gets involved in combating supernatural or magical forces before they are together again to live happily ever after.

This was also the age of Vikings. The Vikings came from the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) and settled in Island and Ireland. and Russia. The Swedish Vikings mainly traveled east, into Russia, and sailed down the Volga River. From the south, Byzantium was sending missionaries to its northern Slavic neighbors who, aside of religion, were also promoting literacy and were bringing with them a modicum of classical Greek and Roman learning.

Crusades

This period is demarcated by the First Crusade (1096) and by the fall of Acre (1291), the last of the fortresses crusaders erected in the Middle East. During the First Crusade, Jerusalem was conquered at the cost of more than 60,000 lives;

 'there was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes.
 Happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Savior's tomb, to honor it and to pay off our debt of gratitude.'

The crusades ended when religious fervor was replaced by disinterest and doubts about God's will to liberate the Holy Land. The times of crusades are undoubtedly the epoch of high military activity. This period marks the apex of Church power and closest association of spiritual and secular powers in Europe.

Renaissance 

The key event fomenting the transition from the age of Crusades to the Renaissance was the Black Death epidemic of plague. The Black Death was a devastating pandemic that struck Europe in the years 1347–1350, killing up to a third of Europe's population, an estimated 34 million people. A series of contemporaneous plague epidemics also occurred across large portions of Asia and the Middle East, indicating that the European outbreak was actually part of a Eurasian pandemic. The Christian church lost spiritual authority and prestige, as the church promised cures and treatment, but did not make good at these promises. The scope of this disaster turned explanations such as “that it is God’s will” into platitudes.” People wanted cures, but the priests and bishops didn't have any; most of them fled as the others who could. People prayed to God, but God either did not listen or perhaps there was not any, leaving people angry and disillusioned as it dawned on many that the religion is nothing else but a gigantic fraud hoisted on the gullible and trusting. After the Black Death passed, Boccaccio wrote his Decameron and the life returned to normal and was probably best depicted by the Limbourg brothers in their Tres Riches Heures, painted between 1412 and 1416. During its Golden Age, Francois Villon wrote his poetry, Sandro Botticelli illustrated Dante's La Divina Comedia, and painted his Madonnas.

 

Reformation

The Renaissance of the classical learning of Greeks and Romans with its stress on humanism and reason was opposed by the Protestant Reformation. The Age of Reformation has two distinct periods, the Spanish Century and the Time of Royal France. Reformation coincided with the times of witch burning. Although the witch-hunts occurred sporadically from about 1450’s, they emerged as a major social event in 1500’s, reaching their height around the times of the Thirty Years' War, when witch trials became ubiquitous throughout Western Europe and spread to the American colonies. The upsurge in witch burning during these years reflected the heightened tensions between Protestants and Catholics, as each side of this religious controversy was convinced that the opposing side was inspired by the devil. The witch burning ceased around the time of the French Revolution

During Reformation religious conflicts escalated and culminated during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). There was widespread interest in the occult,  magic, horoscopes, and astrology.

 

Isabella of Spain (1451-1504)

The Spanish Century (1525 -1648)

The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella is best known for their sponsorship of Columbus' voyage in 1492. This marked the beginning of the Spanish Empire. In the remaining 24 years of their reign, exploration and exploitation of the West Indies expanded and accelerated. Upon Ferdinand’s death in 1516, the Spanish crown went to their grandson, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Charles V (1500-1558). By inheritance, he became the ruler of Austria, Belgium, Bohemia, Hungary, Netherlands, and parts of Italy and France. Moreover, Charles V's Spanish subjects conquered vast territories in Central and South America. No other Emperor has ruled so vast a region. Charles’ heraldic coat-of-arms bore the inscription plus ultra (always further) and his conquistadores referred to their sovereign as the ruler of the world.

Columbus Flagship Santa Maria

Heralding the Century of Spain is the Columbus voyage to the West Indies. Columbus ships Pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria sailed from Spain in 1492 and Pinta and Nina returned in 1493.Vicente Pinzón who had been the captain of Niña on Columbus' first voyage, left Spain in 1499, explored the coast of Brazil, discovered the Amazon River, and returned to Spain in 1500. Pinzón voyage is a prototype of many expeditions that followed Columbus 1492 westward sailing.

 Among Emperor Charles V explorers were - Hernan Cortes who defeated the Aztecs in Mexico; Francisco Pizzaro who conquered the Inca kingdom in Peru; Francisco Coronado, who searched for the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cibola and found the Grand Canyon instead; and Ferdinand Magellan whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the world. Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with five ships in 1519 of which one, Victoria, arrived in Spain in 1522, three years after leaving. 

Luther greeted Charles’ election as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire with great enthusiasm. He wrote that ‘God gave us as our head a young person of noble blood and evoke in our hearts great, good hope’ and wanted to enlist Charles' support to fight the papacy: 'Magnificent Emperor Charles, Christian nobles, devoted to Christ, how long are you going to suffer the devil’s voice of the papal Antichrist?’ However, Charles did not let himself be swayed by his personal antipathy to the Pope into an inimical stance to the papacy. Charles and Luther are the embodiments of the great Catholic-Protestant controversy. Shortly after Charles’ election, they faced each other at the Diet of Worms (1521). Luther summarized his position and ended that

‘Here I stand, my conscience tied to the word of God.’

Charles replied that he will not hesitate

'to stake my kingdom, my realms, my friends, body and blood,
 life and soul’ to defend the unity of Christians.

Luther departed Worms for Wartburg and continued his campaign promoting Protestant ideas. Charles was forced by other pressing matters to leave Germany and did not return for many years. During this time, Luther's teachings took hold in Germany and spread to the other states of Europe. Charles was preoccupied by the war with France, the Turkish invasions culminating in the 1529 siege of Vienna, the corsairs who threatened the Spanish shipping in the Mediterranean, and by the matters of his growing overseas empire. Charles underestimated Luther. He thought his problems with Protestantism would fade when Luther and Henry VIII died in 1546. However, in 1551 the German Protestant princes allied with France against Charles and forced a war during which Charles nearly lost his life. He narrowly escaped and found refugee in the Alpine city of Villach. The war was concluded by the Peace of Augsburg granting the German princes the right to choose either Catholicism or Protestantism and to determine the religious character of their territory: cuius regio, eius religio.

However, the Emperor’s troubles were just beginning. In 1555 Cardinal Caraffa was elected the Pope Paul IV. Before his election, for a whole generation, Cardinal Caraffa used the Inquisition to terrorize Italy. About himself he said that

'I have never conferred a favor on a human being.'

Charles opposed Caraffa's papal nomination; however he was elected in spite of the emperor. Pope Paul IV relations with England had been disastrous. This inquisitor-turned-pope stripped Queen's Mary's Cardinal Pole of his office and ordered him to come to Rome to face Inquisition. Upon the death of Mary and Pole, he called Elizabeth 'illegitimate' and rejected her claim to the crown. As the Emperor Charles V opposed his nomination, Caraffa was consumed by hatred and declared crusade on Spain. Under the General Duque de Alba the Spanish Armed Forces prevailed, but Charles gave up. The idea that he, who had his whole life striven for Pax Christianitatis, would become a target of a Crusade was too much for him to bear.

 He transferred the rule of his Spanish dominions to his son, Philip II, his German dominions to his brother, Ferdinand I, and retired to a comfortable mansion adjacent to the monastery of San Yuste. There, surrounded by his collection of paintings, he listened to music and constructed mechanical clocks and automata. Charles died on September 21, 1558; 45 years after Vasco de Balboa saw the waves of the Pacific Ocean, heralding his eventful reign of struggle, discovery, and adventure.

Phillip was six years older than Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603). During their times, the Spanish and British Empires were engaged in a continuous struggle for world dominance, fueled on the personal side by Elizabeth’s rejection of Philip’s offer to marry her.

In 1529, Ferdinand repelled the Ottoman armies at the Siege of Vienna. In 1547 the Bohemian Protestant nobles rebelled against Ferdinand when he ordered the Bohemian army against the German Protestants, but Ferdinand prevailed and continued his life-long struggle against the tide of Protestantism. Among Ferdinand's successors were Rudolf II (1552-1612), patron of Tycho de Brahe and Johannes Kepler and Ferdinand II (1578-1637) who suppressed the second rebellion of the Bohemian Protestants in 1618 that initiated the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Among the significant writings of this era are Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Astronomia Nova (1609) and Harmonices Mundi (1619) Keplers had to move from city to a city, as his mother was accused of witchcraft and in continuous danger of being apprehended and burned at the stake. Kepler was excluded from the Lutheran church and did not convert to Catholicism either. He lost his teaching post at Graz due to his lack of religious beliefs and moved to Prague to work with the Danish astronomer, Tycho de Brahe at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II. After Tycho died in 1601, Kepler inherited his post as Imperial Mathematician. Using the data that Tycho de Brahe had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of the planet Mars was not a circle, but an ellipse, with one focus located at the center of the Sun. Johannes Kepler also discovered the basic principles of integral calculus, used logarithms in his calculations before Napier, explained that tides are caused by the Moon, discovered that Sun rotates about its axis, explained the role of both eyes in depth perception, investigated the formation of pictures with a pin hole camera, designed eyeglasses for near- and far-sightedness, coined the word satellite.

 

The Century of France (1648-1789)

The peace of Westphalia (1648) ending the Thirty Years' War heralded the century of France. French philosophers provided the theoretical, philosophical, and legal foundations of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 that stopped the Witch Trials and ended the Burning Times Epoch. The torture was abolished and the burning stakes were extinguished.

The ideas of France's scholars, Denis Diderot, Claude Helvetius, Marquis de Condorcet, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie asserting that the understanding of human affairs and human destiny will come from science and natural philosophy, were widely accepted. Denis Diderot edited the famous Encyclopedia, promoting a materialistic view of the universe. Voltaire opposed the intolerance of Christianity and Cesare Beccaria protested the oppressive legal justice system.

Louis IV, Roi-Soleil                 Louis XV, le Bien Aime       Louis XVI, le Dernier (r. 1643-1715)                        (r. 1715-1774)                 (r. 1774-1792)

The reign of Louis XIV, France's Sun King, a picturesque age so well described by Alexandre Dumas in his historical novels. In 1683, Louis broke the religious hold of Protestants on France by revoking the Edict of Nantes.

Louis XV's best known mistress was Marquise "Reinette" de Pompadour. She spent her adolescence in Catholic convent. At the age of nine, she was told by a fortuneteller that she would win the heart of a king, which she did at the age of 22, when she was invited to a royal mask ball at Versailles. There were eight identically costumed figures one of them being the king. Reinette, dressed as Goddess Diana, chose to dance with one of them which turned out being the king. They became friends and later lovers. When the king lost the battle at Rosbach, she consoled him with au reste, après nous, le déluge.

Marie Antoinette as one of the leading characters of Riyoko Ikeda's Rose of Versailles (ベルサイユのばら).

Louis XVI married at the age of 15 Marie Antoinette, Princess of Bohemia, daughter of the Empress of Austria Maria Theresa. Louis supported the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, earning animosity of the British, who together with a faction of dissatisfied French nobles continued to undermine his authority. In 1792 France was proclaimed a republic. Louis XVI was executed the following year, as was his wife Marie Antoinette. Louis was executed on charges of treason, Marie Antoinette, among others, on fraudulent charges of child molestation. They were 38 years old. In 1973, Marie Antoinette was serialized as one of the main characters of the best-selling shojo manga The Rose of Versailles, later adapted into an anime series by Japanese television.

The Age of Enlightenment

The age of Enlightenment consists of two distinct periods, that of 19th and 20 Centuries. The end of the Age of Enlightenment was likely presaged by the fall of the Soviet Union, followed by trends and events that resulted in the restoration of torture at the beginning of the 21^st Century.

Decades preceding the onset of the World War I mark the time when this epoch reached its apex. It was the time of Jules Verne (Cinq semaines en ballon, L’île mysterieuse), Alexandre Dumas (Le comte de Monte Cristo), Victor Hugo (Les misérables), Emile Zola (Nana), Honore de Balzac (Le Père Goriot), Stendhal (Le rouge et le noir), Stéphane Mallarmé (Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard), Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire (Les fleurs du mal). If one author could characterize the decades preceding the World War I, it may be Anatole France.

The age of enlightenment was secular. Among the writers on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum are

Resurgence of Religion

The balance of power, the result of WW II, was disturbed with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. History suggests that imbalance of power leads initially to a series of small wars, an escalation of violence, and the increased probability of a major military conflict. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the world has destabilized. The threat of mutual annihilation that kept the superpowers at bay for the last half century has receded. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, in the Summer of 1993, there appeared in Foreign Affairs a study by Harvard University Professor Samuel P. Huntington called the Clash of the Civilizations. According to Huntington, the next major conflict is likely to be conflict where the West will face the Islamic world and confront the Confucian states of the Far East. To alter this course of events, envisioned by Huntington, would involve concerted effort of those who prefer a global community where peaceful conflict resolutions have precedence over the violent ones.

Shortly after the Fall of the New York Twin Towers on November 11, 2001, there appeared in Pacific News (March 6, 2002) a sequel to Huntington's Clash of the Civilizations by Yu Bin, Professor of political science at Ohio's Wittenberg University. Called the Clash of the Uncivilized, the Yu Bin's article is excerpted as follows:

September 11, 2001 unleashed the most uncivilized part of every major religion in the world. Islamic fundamentalists, Jewish hard-liners and Christian right-wingers are plunging themselves into holy wars of their own definition and making. President Bush determined to settle unfinished business with Saddam Hussein, regardless of disagreement with allies, guaranteed backlash against the United States. This, coupled with the widely held perception of American indifference toward Palestinian suffering, has made America morally hypocritical in the eyes of many. This is strategically destabilizing for a highly interdependent, fragile world system. In Europe, this global surge of uncivilized clashes has given rise to both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic momentum. Extremist conservative forces are running the show in much of the world, and the silence, impotence and disappearance of moderate forces globally has contributed to the current malaise

It is still possible to tame this uncivilized beast before it consumes us all. The world needs to address this increasingly dangerous situation not just with smart bombs, but also with political wisdom, meaningful diplomacy, patience, fairness and generosity. Such an effort would make the United States a power to be respected, not just feared.

 

The end of the world

 

Thomas Long (2000) in his Medieval New England Apocalypse relates the story of the runaway bestseller The Day of Doom (1662) by a Puritan preacher, Michael Wigglesworth. The Day of Doom is a description of Judgment Day. The book (a lengthy poem) begins:

Still was the night, serene and bright,

when all men sleeping lay;

Calm was the season, and carnal reason

thought so it would last for ay.

The depiction of a nocturnal serenity is interrupted by a gigantic earthquake followed by a tsunami. All the living and the dead are assembled before the Judge for their ultimate trial. The damned are dispatched to their punishments of endless misery in a fiery lake filled with sulfur, including the unbaptized infants. This Wigglesworth justifies by the Puritan notions (inherited from St. Augustine) of predestination and the necessity of grace. The trial reflects the prevalence of legal imagery in a dream vision that inspired Wigglesworth book. Puritans believed that they were living on the cusp between the Old Age and the New, between the City of Man and the City of God and imagined that the institution of the New Jerusalem would bring about the Second Coming of Christ.

A similar argument was advanced by Pope Urban II when instigating the First Crusade. An eye witness, abbot of Nogent, Guilbert, recorded that Urban

'emphasized the sanctity of the Holy Land, which must be in Christian possession
 so that prophecies about the end of the world could be fulfilled.'

 As George Monbiot observes,

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion: Jesus will return to Earth when the Third Temple will be rebuilt. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth. The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. American pollsters estimate that about 33% of Republicans belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war.
'

...and beyond 

A reader on the Amazon's Internet site recently wrote:

No religion is responsible for more bloodshed and suffering than the monotheistic religions. The ascendancy of Christianity and Judaism ushered in a dark Age for the West./ Both religions have given birth to a society based primarily upon lies and ignorance where the independent thinking is under relentless attacks. Christianity and Judaism are now poised to deliver humanity back to the age of the Crusades.

The onset of the contemporary era is indelibly marked by the collusion of secular and religious powers, something our founding fathers feared the most. As observed above, the closest parallel to this era seems to be the age of crusades. At that time, the military superior West invested significant effort to alter the religious character of the Middle East. After the initial military victories, crusaders embattled themselves on a strip of land bordered by in a chain of fortresses called the Outremer.

 As most invaders throughout the history who did not merge with the local population, they were ultimately forced out. Killed one by one, they left in 1291. This military adventure lasted 195 years and its cost was about 20 million lives.

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Huntington, S.P. (1996) The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Krus, D. J. & Blackman, H. S. (1980). Time-scale factor as related to theories of societal change. Psychological Reports, 46, 95-102 (Request reprint).
Long, T.L. (2000) Medieval New England Apocalypse. International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds (England), July 2000)
Makridakis, S., & Wheelwright, S.C. (1978) Interactive forecasting: univariate and multivariate methods. San Francisco: Holden-Day.
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Shayegan, D. (1996) Le choc des civilisations. Esprit (4, 96).
Wigglesworth, M. (1662) The Day of Doom. In Seventeenth-Century American Poetry. Harrison T. Meserole, ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968, 55-113.
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