Let me ask you something. Is there anything that you would die for?

I promised, I've been promising for a while when I would talk about the Crusades,

and really I'm just going to talk about the first Crusade, which takes place in the 10 Nundies AD.

And the reason that I'm talking about it now is because, like I said last week,

when you read the song of Roland, you have to know a little bit about the history

that it describes, that is the 8th century AD,

and the reign of Charlemagne, the Battle of Rancidot Pass,

and talk about all of that last week. But this week, I'm going to talk about the other thing

you have to know about, and that is the history of the period when the poem is being composed.

So like I said, the poem is probably composed over the course of the turn of the 12th century.

So the 1090s are when this first Crusade occurs. And so you can see in the song of Roland,

the ideology, some of the ideas and the rhetoric that had been going into shaping the first Crusade,

also going to shaping the song of Roland. Here is what I am not trying to say to you today.

I am not trying to say to you that everything that every Christian ruler has ever done has

been good and perfect and fine, and not trying to give you a revisionist history of the Crusade.

What I am trying to do, though, is I'm trying to get deeper than just this sort of knee jerk thing

that we have now from our comfortable position of Western liberalism, where we say,

oh, wasn't it awful that those nasty Christians went and murdered all of those brown people

in cold blood, right? Like we have this idea, President Obama, back when he was president,

said something like, you know, we Westerners can't get up on our high horse because we had the

Crusades, and that was this terrible sin in our past. And I spent a little bit of time last week

just suggesting, right, that it's completely absurd for us from our position of stability

...