I’ve spent years fascinated by the Crusades - Crusader Kings III, Hardcore History podcast, deep-dive into Arabic chronicles on Wiki, museums in Venice. Most Western accounts focus on knights and kings. But I really wanted to know: what did it look like for the people being invaded?
Here’s what I found.
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The Invasion Script
- War is framed as a sacred duty, not conquest
- Fighters are promised forgiveness for past sins
- Landless men see a chance at titles and property
- A charismatic leader consolidates power by channelling internal chaos outward
- The home country has too many idle poor - it’s easier to point them at an enemy than employ them
- Regional feuds, economic failures, and domestic violence are exported abroad
- The invader ignores all local political structures
- No real intention to negotiate - only to impose
- Civilians are collateral, not people
- A cult of lost greatness: "We were an empire once"
- Shocking barbarism surprises even allied observers
- Looting is the actual engine - ideology is the paint job
- Supply chains collapse; hungry men become more brutal
- Soldiers don’t know where they are or why they’re fighting
- Invaders believe locals will greet them as liberators
- Rape is deployed systematically
- Cultural sites, libraries, and religious buildings are deliberately destroyed
- Mercenary bands commit the worst atrocities, giving the official army deniability
- Symbolic cities become obsessions, far beyond strategic value
- Collaborators emerge among the invaded; they are remembered forever
- The defenders, dismissed as inferior, prove tactically and morally superior
- Foreign volunteers arrive to help the defence
- International trading partners play both sides
- Veterans return home broken and radicalise domestic politics
- A diaspora forms that will never forget
- The invasion fuses a fractured population into a single identity
Then I realised I wasn’t reading about the Middle Ages anymore.
Replace "Pope" with "Putin."
Replace "liberating the Holy Land" with "denazification."
Replace "Christendom" with "Russian World."
Replace "infidels" with "Nazis."
Replace "Jerusalem" with "Kyiv."
Replace "crusader states" with "people’s republics."
Replace "Templars" with "Wagner."
The script doesn’t change. Only the names. The pattern is the same.
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Imperial invasions follow the same logic across a thousand years. The aggressor always believes their own mythology. The receiving side always knows exactly what it is.
Ukraine, 2022–2025, is a crusade viewed from the other side - the first country on the border to experience the barbarism.
CPO at https://t.co/BNZzlkTfVp. Founder of https://t.co/hOAmca8qLm and https://t.co/dRwgbZCSOw. Coffee-making, parenting, building, exploring: RU → CN → NZ → CL → UK → NZ → PL → UK?