Orthodox jihad

I was earlier this week reading Steven-with-V Runciman's old book on the Eastern Schism between the Latins and the Greeks, which book I generally appreciated. One off-note I noticed was the claim that Orthodoxy didn't have a doctrine of sanctified warfare.

Christendom doesn't naturally have warfare as holy in of itself. It does however own an apocalyptic tradition, which in the Orient trended to the Last Emperor motif. As with ISIS, that meant warfare. Stephen Shoemaker wrote a whole book on that.

Anyway I found Yuri Stoyanov, buried in a collection of Armenian apocalyptic scholarship. As Heraclius went, John Tzimiskes followed: he cut a swathe deep into southern Syria, even taking Damascus. More than a century before the Crusade, sure but... not much more.

One difference between East and West was that the West had warrior clerics; but, when you consider the hooliganism that monks got into during "the last pagan generation", I'm really not seeing a distinction in how the violence is organised. The Fourth Lateran is coming AD 1215 but of course that's a few Crusades too late.

Runciman notes quite a few instances where East and West castigated each other for sins common to both cardinal regions, such as the use of castration. I'm chalking crusading as another instance.