Traveller in time

It’s hard to suppress a feeling of schadenfreude when reading accounts of the crusaders going to the Holy Land in support of Christianity and finding that the indigenous Christians were often the lowest of the low, whereas the infidel leaders, rich and educated, were much more like those whom the Western leaders instinctively admired and wanted to meet. And these Christians were technically heretics, their religious observances thick with dodgy practices, their allegiances fixed on Patriarchs nobody had heard of or respected. It must have seemed a bit like not finding weapons of mass destruction — which didn’t stop our boys from invading again and again.

The descendants of those Christians are still there, still poor and still persecuted (so that was a success, then). In recent years several writers have shown interest in their plight, specifically in their dwindling numbers and the consequent abandonment of some of their churches, many of which are of the earliest foundation and housed venerable artefacts.