You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [11]
Abraham Abulafia was never executed. He timed his trip exactly to a date specified in the Zohar written over a thousand years earlier:
And on the sixth day [Friday] on the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month the star will appear and be gathered to the seventh day [the Sabbath]. And after seventy days, it will be covered up and will be seen no more. On the first day it will be visible in the city of Rome, and on that day three high walls of the city of Rome will fall, and the great palace there will collapse and the ruler of that city will die.
Pope Nicholas III suddenly died of a heart attack on August 22, 1280, which fell on the twenty-fifth day of Elul, the sixth month counting from Nissan. This date agrees with the Zohar regarding the demise of the ruler of Rome. Abulafia was released from jail, but even the Jewish communities of Italy were afraid to help him, as the new pope was likely to believe that Abulafia had killed the pope. The congruency between the predicted date of the death of the Roman ruler according to the Zohar and the death of Nicholas III remains far from coincidental.
Was it the magic of the Kaballah? Does it matter? Pope Nicholas III set a record for really bad theological and social decisions. Quite a distinction for anyone to achieve.
You Armed Whom?
Give a hungry man a fish and he eats; give him a fishing pole and he eats many times. Give him a weapon and he may get very cranky. In this case you had to wonder just what the cardinal was thinking. Or rather if he was thinking at all.
THE CRUSADE THAT RAN AMOK
HUNGARY, 1514
Bill Fawcett
It had been almost three hundred years since the Crusades to the Holy Land had ended in complete failure — long enough for both the horrible suffering and the lack of success to be forgotten and the myth of the Holy Crusades to be remembered. At this time Hungary was one of the leading powers of Christianity. It had been the first line of defense in the Balkans since Constantinople fell. The cardinal in charge of Hungary, Thomas Bakocz, was faced with a dilemma. The Turkish empire, and with it Islam, was growing in strength. For years Bakocz had encouraged the Hungarian nobility to take direct action against the Turks, but there had been very little interest in such a high-risk endeavor when the Turks were not directly threatening the nobles he approached.
So what was the cardinal to do? He saw, perhaps with great insight, that the continuing growth in Turkish strength promised disaster for Christian Hungary. The time to act was now, while Hungary was still strong. Something had to be done. And there was something. It had been centuries since a crusade had been declared against infidels. There had been a few against Christian heretics. Heretics were often seen as a greater threat than infidels by the church. Cardinal Bakocz would declare a crusade. If the nobles wouldn’t fight, then he’d call on the mass of serfs who suffered virtual enslavement on the Hungarian nobles’ estates.
The response to a papal bull declaring the crusade against the Turks published on April 16, 1514, was beyond even the cardinal’s greatest hopes. Life as a serf in sixteenth-century Hungary went from miserable and dreary to much worse. A serf who tried to leave the estate was often hunted down and both he and his family tortured. Free only on paper — and most serfs couldn’t read — the serf was a virtual slave unless he left to do the work of the Lord. So in answer to a call for a crusade, any serf could safely leave the drudgery of the land he was bound to and even be guaranteed heaven as a side benefit. There was probably not a lot of debate in any serf’s mind on what to do. Within a few months over 100,000 serfs had gathered in answer to the cardinal’s call. They even had an experienced and proven leader, Gyorgy Dozsa. Dozsa was a Transylvanian