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Within the regions ruled by Islamic governments, Muslims reached 40 percent of the population by about 850, and close to 100 percent by 1100. In Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, “the primary conversion process was essentially complete by 1010.”
we should probably date the rise of a solid Muslim majority in Egypt to the late ninth or tenth century, and a hundred years later in Syria and Mesopotamia.
Asia Minor, which between the eleventh century and the fifteenth suffered a radical and near-total destruction of church institutions, and the massive destruction of Christian populations.
the Seljuk conquests were a very long, drawn-out process, lasting for centuries rather than a few years, and the ensuing wars devastated Christian society.26
in 1071, the Turks won an epochal victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, war raged across Asia Minor and the Levant, largely due to the pressure of incoming Turkish forces on the Byzantine Empire, and only incidentally because of Western crusader attempts to reverse their victories.
The collapse of Byzantine power in the thirteenth century left a power vacuum filled by warring Muslim states, and the Mongols added a new and vastly destructive element to the mixture.27
Though the Western sack of Jerusalem in 1099 is rightly notorious—forty thousand people may have perished—such massacres were far from rare, and Tu...
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Asia Minor, which probably had 12 million people in the early Byzantine period, had barely half that by the thirteenth century.28
In the 1140s, the Turks took Edessa the Blessed, killing or enslaving virtually its entire population, then estimated at forty-seven thousand.
the Turks shredded Christian ecclesiastical institutions beyond repair.
During the thirteenth century, the Muslim states suddenly found themselves under attack from a lethal enemy whose activities made the Western Crusades look like fleabites. The Mongol assault on the Islamic world began in 1219 when the forces of Genghis Khan attacked the Khwarezmid Empire of central Asia, taking such great cities as Bukhara and Samarkand.
When Merv fell in 1221, the Mongols slaughtered virtually every man, woman, and child in the city, not to mention many thousands of refugees from surrounding areas. Contemporary accounts claim that the dead ran into the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.
Ani in Armenia never recovered from the sack of 1236, while Mongol devastation ended the golden age of the Christian kingdom of Georgia. In 1258, the Mongols under Hulegu, Genghis’s grandson, perpetrated a historic massacre in Baghdad itself, ending the caliphate and conceivably killing eight hundred thousand residents.
Bar-Hebraeus later eulogized the genocidal Hulegu and his wife as “great luminaries and zealous combatants of the Christian religion.”
Hulegu’s own son married a Byzantine princess, and he favored Christianity and Buddhism over Islam.
In 1295 the new khan, Mahmud Ghazan, persecuted Christianity and Buddhism, and his successors followed his policies. Particularly severe was Ghazan’s brother and heir, Oljeitu (1304–16); originally baptized a Christian under the name Nicholas, he now became a fervent Muslim, taking the name Muhammad.
After half a millennium in which any of three great religions could reasonably hope to win the religious loyalties of the central Asian peoples, that contest was now firmly resolved in the cause of Islam.
“The persecutions and disgrace and mockings and ignominy which the Christians suffered at this time, especially in Baghdad, words cannot describe.” The persecution reached its height with wholesale massacres, at Arbela in 1310 and at Amida in 1317. At Amida, where twelve thousand were carried into slavery, the destruction of churches and monasteries was so thorough that the fires reputedly burned for a month.49
In later centuries, patriarchs made their home at the Rabban Hormizd monastery in the mountains near Mosul.
In 1304, Turkish forces obliterated the city of Ephesus, where Paul once confronted a mob chanting the glories of Artemis: all Christians were either killed or deported.
The new Muslim militancy had dreadful consequences for the network of smaller Christian states that had existed on the fringes of the Muslim world—Armenia and Georgia, Ethiopia and Nubia. After 1250, the Mamluks pursued their jihad not only against European crusaders, but against neighboring Christian regimes. After 1260, the Mamluks expanded into Syria and began pressing on the Armenian state.
In 1307, the khan Oljeitu ordered the Georgians to give up Christianity upon pain of destruction, and a savage war ensued.55 The campaigns of Timur after 1380 destroyed much of Georgia, especially the churches and monasteries, and one king allegedly accepted Islam.
The Muslim invaders proclaimed a sultanate of Habasha (Abyssinia), and many Christians defected to Islam. The nation’s monasteries were sacked, its art and manuscripts destroyed or plundered, so that much of our knowledge of earlier Christian Ethiopia perished forever.
In 1307, the French king arrested the members of the Knights Templar on trumped-up charges of devil worship, heresy, and conspiracy, destroying what had been the greatest crusading order.
Europe suffered its horrific Great Famine between 1315 and 1317, with reports of widespread cannibalism in 1318–20. Populations contracted sharply across Eurasia, and grossly weakened societies lingered on to face the horrors of the Black Death in the 1340s.
(This age of crisis is the backdrop to the Scottish national revolution portrayed in the film Braveheart.)
The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish Government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915. —James Bryce, the 1st Viscount Bryce
In 1933, Muslim forces in the new nation of Iraq launched a deadly assault on the few surviving communities of the Nestorian or Assyrian peoples, in what had once been the Christian heartland of northern Mesopotamia. Government-sponsored militias cleansed much of the far north of Iraq of its Assyrian population, killing thousands, and eliminating dozens of villages.
Men, women and children were massacred wholesale most barbarously by rifle, revolver and machine gun fire…. Priests were killed and their bodies mutilated. Assyrian women were violated and killed. Priests and Assyrian young men were killed instantly after refusing forced conversion to Mu...
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Lemkin developed this theme over the following years, and in 1943 he coined a new word for this atrocious behavior—namely, genocide.
The modern concept of genocide as a uniquely horrible act demanding international sanctions has its roots in the thoroughly successful movements to eradicate Middle Eastern Christians.
Particularly startling for our time traveler from 1900 would have been the almost inconceivable vision of modern-day Turkey as an almost wholly Muslim land.
Middle Eastern Christians in 1900 actually represented a much larger part of the overall population (some 11 percent) than do American Jews today (2 percent) or European Muslims (4.5 percent). The removal or destruction of that community represented a historic transformation for the region, no less than for the Christian world.
by the time they took Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire included most of the Balkans, and by 1500 they controlled the whole Black Sea region. By 1520 they ruled most of the Muslim world west of Persia, as far as Algiers, and thus became the main antagonist for Christians, in Europe or beyond.
Their European conquests advanced rapidly through the sixteenth century, under such aggressive leaders as Selim I (1512–20) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66). In 1526, the Turks conquered Hungary, destroying what was then one of the major European powers. Turkish advances were not reversed until the Christian victory at Vienna in 1683.4
Ottomans were often more aggressively anti-Christian than were the original Arab conquerors of the Middle East.
Ottoman warfare was extremely destructive, not because it was “Islamic,” but because it drew so heavily on methods that stemmed from the Turkish heritage in central Asia. Ottoman forces carried out notorious massacres against Christian populations, and particularly targeted Christian clergy and leaders. In 1480, the Turks destroyed the Italian city of Otranto, killing twelve thousand and executing leading clergymen by sawing them.
From the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, the Turks ruled over a substantial Christian population on European soil, and enforced the kinds of forms of religious discrimination that had been commonplace throughout the Middle East.
Muslim conquest of the Balkans largely left Christian communities in place and did not destroy ecclesiastical structures: the Orthodox churches would recover, in Greece, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. But we should note just how successful the Ottomans were in establishing Islam in the Balkans, by weakening Christianity and encouraging apostasy; by encouraging conversions to Islam, and by importing immigrant Muslim populations.
Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
During the great period of Spanish and Portuguese empire building in the century after 1550, the leading edge of Christian expansion was the Roman Catholic Church, now fortified by the militancy of the Counter-Reformation.
As Catholic clergy and missionaries roamed the world, they found the remnants of many ancient churches, which they determined to bring under papal and Roman authority.9
At its height, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa, and especially in Europe included millions of subject Christians.
Even in 1900, Muslims made up just half the empire’s overall population: Christians comprised 46 percent; Jews, 3 percent.
The Orthodox found the Muslims no more obnoxious than the Catholic nations, whose activities in recent centuries had left horrendous memories. Apart from the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204, later Catholic invaders like the Venetians had been almost as tyrannical to their Orthodox subjects as were the Turks. Even in the last days of the empire, a Byzantine official famously declared, “Better the Sultan’s turban than the [Catholic] Cardinal’s hat!”
Suggesting just how isolated and exotic the Nestorians seemed, nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel accounts bracketed the church’s followers with the Yezidi “Devil-Worshipers” who lived nearby.
(As recently as the mid-1890s, Christians had suffered widespread massacres.) Even so, by 1900, Christians still constituted 15 or 20 percent of the population of Asia Minor. In Constantinople itself, Christians in 1911 made up half the population—at least four hundred thousand strong—compared with 44 percent Muslim and 5 percent Jews. The city’s population was 17 percent Greek Christian, 17 percent Armenian.
Christians made up 31 percent of the people of greater Syria.
In 1907, the Catholic Encyclopedia reported in loving denominational detail on the enormous diversity that still prevailed in much of the Middle East. The city of Amida, modern Diyarbakir, was still 40 percent Christian, with a polyglot gaggle of bishops and higher clergy:
CHRISTIANS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AROUND 1910 (including Egypt and Persia but excluding Ethiopia) Denomination Numbers (in thousands) Greek Orthodox 1,662 Armenian Orthodox 1,073 Copts 600 Maronites 309
