knightTesadüf bu ya, bugün de Amin Maalouf’un The Crusades through Arab Eyes kitabını okurken, tarihî olaylara ve daha detaylı tasvirlere rastladım. İlk olarak, sayfa yirmi dokuzdan Antakya kalesinin 1097 yılında kuşatan Frenklerin Selçuklu emirinin yolladığı casuslarına verdikleri ceza:

“The emir’s agents had occasion to watch them kill a man, roast him on a spit, and eat his flesh, while shouting that any spy who was discovered would suffer a similar fate”

Kitabın üçüncü bölümü ise(The Cannibals of Ma’arra)  direkt çok daha karanlık olaylar dizisine ayrılmış:

In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled. The inhabitants of towns and villages near Ma’arra would never read this confession by the Frankish chronicler Radulph of Caen, but they would never forget what they had seen and heard. […] The Turks would never forget the cannibalism of the Occidentals. Throughout their epic literature, the Franj are invariably described as anthropophagi. Was this view of the Franj unjust? Did the Western invaders devour the inhabitants of the martyred city simply in order to survive? Their commanders said so in an official letter to the pope the following year: A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens. But the explanation seems unconvincing, for the inhabitants of the Ma’arra region witnessed behaviour during that sinister winter that could not be accounted for by hunger. They saw, for example, fanatical Franj, the Tafurs, roam through the countryside openly proclaiming that they would chew the flesh of the Saracens and gathering around their nocturnal camp-fires to devour their prey. Were they cannibals out of necessity? Or out of fanaticism? It all seems unreal, and yet the evidence is overwhelming, not only in the facts described, but also in the morbid atmosphere it reflects. In this respect, one sentence by the Frankish chronicler Albert of Aix, who took part in the battle of Ma’arra, remains unequalled in its horror: Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”

Thetriumphofdeath

Resimler elbette çok sonralardan ilki Dürer’den ikinci ise Bruegel’den. Tahmin edebileceğiniz üzere konuyla da, Haçlı Seferleri diyelim,  alakaları yok, ben sadece çağrışımları üzerinden koydum. Son olarak bunları yazma sebebim Avrupalıları kötüleyip, Türkleri/Müslümanları bir mazlumluk aurasına bezemek değil, aman bir yanlış anlaşılma olmasın.