#but. wow. i did not know people just trust and believe mother giselle on this

[wardenhowe]

i'm very not normal about exalted marches and this post is so good that i'm just going to add more to it. sorry.

the first crusade of the actual catholic roman church actually had no intentions of converting people to catholicism. they wanted to re-establish their, as they saw it, "rightful" claim over the holy land and reunite the eastern and western catholic church (and help the byzantine empire). so the whole "no converts with blood" can still withstand and work in the context of exalted marches with no missionary goals but like. colonial goals.

overall the idea of the crusade was developed by medieval church scholars from the idea of a just war by augustine. so they totally justified the (first, at least) crusade. like they totally thought that all the horrors they were commiting were extremely just.

so while, objectively, no exalted march was ever justified, all of them were in the context of the andrastian church. that's like the extremely interesting part about them. certainly, in hindsight some of them are harder to justify than others but. don't just take the words of one andrastian woman at face value when she is discussing extreme amounts of violence that were done in the name of her very religion. like, okay, let's say no converts through blood holds any meaning (as if this couldn't get twisted super easily by andrastian scholars), that just means the blood that was spilled in the exalted marches wasn't done for conversion purposes but simply for erasing those that would not be converted (or that the chantry didn't even want to convert in the first place). like, it doesn't matter how you look at it, the andrastians spilled tons of blood in the name of their faith. they don't have to want to convert people for exalted marches to be horrible acts of violence against people that do not have the andrastian faith. they are such an obvious stand in for actual crusades i'm.... i'm shocked people think some of them were Fine, Actually. like no??? they were not??? anyway. everything harker said was already extremely correct but i wanted to add some fun information about the crusades because they work so perfectly for the exalted marches!!!

honestly i just need to talk to who wrote mother giselle because i NEED to gauge how much this stuff was written intentionally