What if jerusalem was part of a nestorian turk empire? Would there still be crusades?

>Albigensian Crusade
> Cathars thought human spirits were the genderless spirits of angels trapped within the physical creation of the evil god, cursed to be reincarnated until the Cathar faithful achieved salvation through a ritual called the consolamentum.

We ended up with the boring christians.

Esoteric Christians sects are a wild fucking ride.

Better be boring Christians than one of the manichean sects believing to achieve good in dualistic good/evil dichtomy person must descend into the depth of evil.

The boring ones got up to some evil shit too. Might just be that the novelty of metaphysical transubstantiation and the separate but involved pure divine spirit wore off after reading a bunch so the esoteric ones seem new and sexy.

Nestorian Turk? What's the PoD?

A belief shared by both the Bogomilists and the Arian Church.

All came to this conclusion seemingly independently.

Not him, but I assume Nestorianism becomes the dominant faith of the Sassanian Empire, which manages to repel or even outright destroy Muhammed's armies during the rise of Islam and continued to dominate the Levantine world for another couple of centuries. The First Crusade was largely triggered by the Byzantines calling on the Pope for help against Muslim invaders. With both sides being non-Catholic Christians, there's almost no way the Pope could have called for a holy war without some other pretext.

That wouldn't work, methinks. Besides, he said Turks; the Seljuks only came around after the Arab Explosion under Islam had taken out Persia, the Levant, and Egypt.

Besides, the Sassanids were IIRC largely hit harder by the Plague of Justinian, there's no way they would have taken Jerusalem and the Levant from the Romans.

But if the Sassanids did convert and then managed to hold off the Arab armies who got contained in the Levant and Egypt, then the Seljuks coming down could have taken out the Sassanids and converted to Nestorianism, then snagged the Levant because Deus Vult, and be aiming at Egypt rather than Anatolia because fellow Christians.

The call for the 1st Crusade wouldn't have been there.

Cathar tradition was that priests could fuck anyone they want, including other men's wives. It was common for their priests to round up a posse, break into a man's house, and rape his wife and daughters or drag them back to the priest's house to be his sex slaves.

Also, the Cathar thought that anyone who had gone through the consolamentum was a Perfect, and thus couldn't commit sin no matter what they did. So Perfects could do literally anything they want without repercussions, which lead to behavior like the above and even worse.

Just because the Catholic church sucks, doesn't mean all the heretics were good people.

The Sassanian Empire was Zoroastrian, another monotheist religion which considered themselves to be top dog.

I'm well aware. However, they also held lands with strong Nestorian influences, and the alt-history would have them converted to Nestorianism.

Which could be done out of the same reason that Constantine converted.

You have to take those accounts with a grain of salt, because they're written by the enemies of the Cathars. The winner writes history, and all.

No, many of them were written by former Cathars themselves. Like ex-cult members in the modern day. The bit about priests raping people's wives is specifically from a noblewoman who had ran off to join Catharism and experienced it first hand.

And how many people confessed to witchcraft who actually practiced?

The information we have on Catharism isn't wholly reliable.

So you presume we believe only the vaguest accounts by the Cathars themselves that they used to recruit people into the cult? In two hundred years people like you will be claiming Jonestown wasn't really the site of a mass suicide and that the People's Temple was unfairly maligned by its enemies.

Much of the documentation we have on the Cathars comes from their enemies and those who wanted to delegitmize them. Thus a lot of stuff has to be taken with a grain of salt.

That does not mean that the Cathars were all good people and were awesome and full of light and purity. It means that the records are suspect and should be treated with suspicion.

Just like the records of the People's Temple, eh?

False equivalence.

The authorities on Jonestown are not the equivalent to the Catholic Church that needs to stamp out heresy, nor the French King who needs to legitimize increasing his power in the area.

Ah, but they are biased capitalists and christians who are rejected Jim Jones' peaceful message.

Face it, you're nothing more than a revisionist who favors Cathars because it's rebellious against mainstream Christianity or else because some of its subsects allowed female priests.

Why this hostility towards someone pointing out that the information we have on the Cathars is somewhat unreliable and mostly from their enemies?

I mean, I get it. People play up the Cathars as this awesome group of reformists and they fought the power against mainstream Catholicism, and it needs to be pointed out that it's not all fun and roses.

But you're taking it to another level entirely. I'm not even a fan of Catharism; I'm more likely to be supportive of the Lollards or Hussites than Cathars, and generally I'm an Orthodox Byzantiphile anyhow.

Didn't say it they were good people, just interesting. The variety of divine justifications for fucked up shit we get up to is neat. Messed up, but neat.

The winners raped people too. Rape and europe got together like rape and most places for most of human history of violent conquest. A bunch. Don't like it, wouldn't do it, but its a thing that happened a lot.

You two argued about a thing I wasn't implying for a while. Just saying different interpretations of Christianity are interesting and got up to some curious stuff that we don't hear about much.

>ust saying different interpretations of Christianity are interesting and got up to some curious stuff that we don't hear about much.

I'm in agreement that they're interesting in terms of variations and different reactions and approaches to the various challenges of their time - and frankly, if not for Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings, I wouldn't have known what a Cathar was, so you've a point.

Yes I to mess around in ck2.

Yes ,cause HERESY!

Have you ever thought about taking the end result of a CK2 grand campaign, sprinkling in light fantasy, and turning it into a tabletop setting?

Could you point me in the direction of a source on that?

I've done this far too frequently as a DM.

Don't worry user, your secret is relatively safe.

I think tomorrow before work I'll set up my PC to do an osberve game after giving a custom character some overpowered stats and a bloodline trait, see what the results are when I come home.

Knowing my luck, it'll be a CTD.

>Orthodox Slavic populations
Yeah, but they had backwards and pagan concepts of Christianity that definitely would have been constituted as heretical

Don't even try to justify Teutonic Order and their bullshit

>Hey, you guys seem like a bunch of Though Templars(tm), why don't you come over here and get rid of those pagan Lithuanians who have been bothering us?
>Alright, the Lithuanians are now Christian. I guess that's one way of settling the dispute. Now you can get back to Jerusalem and h-
>Why are you still attacking them?
>Why are you attacking ME?
>L-Lithuania! H-help!

I do not think a giant norse blob of doom would be a good setting.

Well yes, the whole point was to list crusades against heretics.

>would have them converted to Nestorianism

Why though? A large portion of The Sassanid Empire's identity was built around Zoroastrianism, you may as well have the Abbasids converting to Buddhism or the Byzantines becoming Muslim.

I get what you're saying but you need to calm down. He isn't saying they were right, just that historical accounts need to be taken with a grain of salt especially ones like this. Generally I don't have an issue with accounts written by the Church because so much of what we know about shit popes, and their own crimes and flaws was also written by the Church as well. I honestly think they were just as likely to record history as it happened or as accurately as they could as just about anyone else in just about any other place. Doesn't mean they are always right or unbiased, just that there isn't always some super nefarious self serving reason that history was recorded the way it was.

>I can't really think of one

Hussite Wars.

Yes? Crusade IV was literally "let's kill the Orthodox Roman Empire and take all its stuff before bumble fucking it all up and creating the set up for spread of islam into southern spain and most of eastern europe"

it wasnt sanctioned by pope though, it was because of the Venetians

>spread of islam into southern spain

You're a few centuries too late for that.