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September 26 - October 12, 2025
Less hagiographically, some early Christian and Muslim sources attribute the initial Islamic conquests to the use of cunning and terrorism. The Chronicle of 754 says that the “Saracens, influenced by their leader Muhammad, conquered and devastated Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia more by stealth than manliness, and not so much by open invasions as by persisting in stealthy raids.
The idea that Muslim fanaticism was responsible for the Arabs’ victories was also adopted by European writers. As late as 1963, Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb maintained that “it was religious enthusiasm which provided the impetus for the Arab conquests.”
Just seventy-three years after Yarmuk, all ancient Christian lands between Greater Syria to the east and Mauretania (Morocco) to the west—approximately 3,700 miles—were forever conquered by Islam. Put differently, two-thirds (or 66 percent) of Christendom’s original territory†—including three of the five most important centers of Christianity—Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria‡—were permanently swallowed up by Islam and thoroughly Arabized.
Little wonder some historians hold that “the battle of the Yarmuk had, without doubt, more important consequences than almost any other in all world history.”
Though the ensuing battles and sieges were long and brutal—they began in 674 and ended in 678 and are now collectively referred to as the First Siege of Constantinople—few details are extant.
history’s first flame thrower, apparently invented by a Syrian refugee who had fled the Arab advance.
Concerning this first notable Christian victory over the hitherto unstoppable warriors of Allah, eminent Byzantine scholar George Ostrogorsky writes: “The Arab attack which Constantinople experienced then was the fiercest which had ever been launched by the infidels against a Christian stronghold, and the Byzantine capital was the last dam left to withstand the rising Muslim tide. The fact that it held saved not only the Byzantine Empire, but the whole of European civilization.”
Two years later, in 680, Muawiya died at age seventy-eight, and with him the dream of becoming the one to conquer Constantinople—the one he had heard the prophet prophesize of when still a youth. But honors and riches were not the only things that had motivated him. Muslim chronicles say his pivotal role in Islam’s first schism, the First Fitna—which saw Muawiya ascend to the caliphate on a pyramid of dead Muslim bodies—had, as he aged, instilled in him a brooding fear of the hellfire awaiting him; hence the first Umayyad caliph’s obsession with conquering Constantinople, which might appease
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The Byzantines as a people were considered fine examples of physical beauty, and youthful slaves and slave-girls of Byzantine origins were highly valued.… The Arabs’ appreciation of the Byzantine female has a long history indeed. For the Islamic period, the earliest literary evidence we have is a hadith (saying of the Prophet). Muhammad is said to have addressed a newly converted Arab: “Would you like the girls of Banu al-Asfar [the yellow (haired?) or pale people]?”
Muhammad’s question was meant to entice the man to join the Tabuk campaign against the Romans and reap its rewards—in this case, the sexual enslavement of attractive women. In other words, as “white-complexioned blondes, with straight hair and blue eyes,” to quote another academic, Byzantine women were not so much “appreciated” or “highly valued” as they were lusted after.
Thus began the caliphate’s centuries-long slave trade arrangement with pagan Scandinavian pirates who shared in Islam’s hostility for Christians. Starting in the mid-600s and for nearly three centuries thereafter, “Viking raids were elicited by the Muslim demand for white-skinned European slaves.”15 Indeed, it is “impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade,” argues M. A. Khan, a former Muslim from India, “because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.”16 Emmet Scott goes so far
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with a sometime hatred for Christian symbols. This is unsurprising considering that they were all pagans only a few years before; even during the initial invasions, many if not most Arabs and Bedouins had joined the Muslim caravan solely for the prospects of booty.
The oldest parchment that alludes to a warlike prophet was written in 634, a mere two years after Muhammad’s death.
Based, then, on Muslim sources, early Christian writers of Semitic origins—foremost among them Saint John of Damascus (b. 676)—articulated a number of arguments against Muhammad that remain at the heart of all Christian polemics against Islam today.* The only miracle Muhammad performed, they argued, was to invade, slaughter, and enslave those who refused to submit to him—a “miracle that even common robbers and highway bandits can perform.” The prophet put whatever words best served him in God’s mouth, thus “simulating revelation in order to justify his own sexual indulgence”;24 he made his
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Those whom his forces conquered were either forced to convert to Islam or financially bled dry. Suleiman wrote to the governor of Egypt and commanded him “to milk the camel [reference to indigenous Coptic Christians] until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.”
In all, of the original 200,000 Muslims who set out to conquer the Christian capital, plus the additional spring reinforcements, only some 30,000 eventually made it back by land.†
Such letters issued by newly made caliphs calling on infidel kings to renounce their beliefs and submit to Islam are common and follow the pattern of Muhammad’s missives to Heraclius and others.
According to one tenth-century Christian account, when Omar read Leo’s response, “the Caliph was very confused.” But eventually the “letter produced on him a very happy effect. From this moment he commenced to treat the Christians with much kindness. He ameliorated their state, and showed himself very favorable towards them, so that on all hands were heard expressions of thankfulness to him.”67 That he was assassinated some two years after his exchange with Leo lends some credence to this claim. The official Muslim story is that Omar initiated a series of altruistic reforms that significantly
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Indeed, the enormity of this defeat had a direct impact on the codification of jihad. “We must remember that the Islamic law of war itself came into
existence during this period, largely in response” to the failed and humiliating siege.
Even the oldest extant Arabic manual on jihad, Kitab al-Jihad (“Book of Jihad”), was compiled by one of these frontier warriors, namely, Abdallah bin Mubarak.
His Book of Jihad remains a classic among militant Muslims around the world.
Nor should the architect of this victory be forgotten: “By his successful resistance Leo saved not only the Byzantine Empire and the eastern Christian world, but also all of western civilization,”
By the early 730s Muslims controlled all the major cities of the Frankish Mediterranean coastline, between the Pyrenees and the Rhône; and they ruled with an iron fist.
On Christmas Day in the year 800 inside the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned Charles the Great, better known as Charlemagne (742–814), as the first Holy Roman Emperor.
“Without Islam the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.”
Anticipating the crusades by over two centuries—and for the same reasons—he also decreed that any Christian who died fighting Muslim marauders would earn heaven, so bad was the devastation.
This is a feature of pre-modern Islamic states that we cannot ignore. In addition to conquest, we have depredation; in addition to political projects and state-building, we have destruction and waste.”
Because much of the existing wealth had already been plundered in the previous centuries, these raids on coastal Europe thrived on capturing and selling “white slaves [who] were a particularly desirable commodity.”73 Indeed, the “House of Islam in the tenth century had little use for any of the produce and natural resources of Europe, except one; the bodies of the Europeans themselves.
Had Abdul Rahman’s men not been stopped by force of arms at Tours—had they instead killed Charles and continued to overrun Francia—they would have stayed.
Such terseness ultimately reminds one of an observation Edward Gibbon made concerning the dearth of Byzantine sources concerning the early Muslim conquests: “The Greeks, so loquacious in controversy, have not been anxious to celebrate the triumphs of their enemies.”82 The same can be said of Muslims.
human booty
Lol
Yet for others, Amorium provoked more rage than grief. A “never again” attitude against the caliphate was in the air, and the Christian empire was soon on a warpath of vengeance.
Although the Persian and Arab establishment was originally unimpressed by Turkish piety,* they praised the new converts because they “fight in the way of Allah, waging jihad against the infidels,” which always went a long way to exonerate otherwise un-Islamic behavior.
Adding insult to injury, the defenders catapulted a pig into the Muslim camp while shouting, “O sultan [Tughril], take that pig for your wife, and we will give you Manzikert as a dowry!” “Filled with anger, Tughril had all Christian prisoners in his camp ritually decapitated.”
50 As usual, extreme Muslim piety manifested itself before Christian eyes as extreme hostility.
A zealous jihadi—or “nefarious infidel” to Christian eyes—climbed atop the city’s main cathedral “and pulled down the very heavy cross which was on the dome, throwing it to the ground,” before entering and defiling the church. Made of pure silver and the “size of a man”—and now symbolic of Islam’s might over Christianity—the broken crucifix was sent as a trophy to adorn a mosque in modern-day Azerbaijan.
Worse, the once proud and imperious Romanus became the first Roman emperor in over a thousand years to experience the ignominy of being taken prisoner from the field of battle.
A final, ironic aspect concerning Romanus’s captivity is worth relaying: early Christian chroniclers, who often depict Sultan Muhammad as a bloodthirsty Antichrist figure, concede that he behaved magnanimously with Romanus; Muslim historians, who often depict Muhammad in glowing terms, portray him as behaving meanly and pettily with Romanus. In this, one wonders if Christian and Muslim authors projected their own ideals concerning how victors should treat the vanquished.
The Eastern Roman Empire lost much after Manzikert. It lost the richest and most fertile part of its empire, whence its hardiest soldiers and not a few warrior-emperors (including Leo III and Nikephoros II) historically came from; it lost its prestige and reputation as the world’s greatest power for seven centuries—not just in the eyes of Muslims who had still been reeling under the shadow of defeat from the empire’s tenth-century comeback, but Western eyes as well. As Steven Runciman put it, “The Battle of Manzikert was the most decisive disaster in Byzantine history. The Byzantines
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It is often suggested that it was only during these times, when the Turks were running amok, that Christians living around the Holy Land were persecuted. This is incorrect. Similar bouts of persecution regularly erupted under other Muslim peoples and dynasties from the very start.
That said, the persecution and carnage had reached apocalyptic levels by the 1090s.
They [Muslim Turks] have completely destroyed some of God’s churches and they have converted others to the uses of their own cult [mosques]. They ruin the altars with filth and defilement. They circumcise Christians and smear the blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw it into the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their intestines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they drive their victims around the stake until, when their viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground. They tie others, again,
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In short, when he spoke at Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban was drawing on a long legacy.
Despite popular depictions of crusaders as prototypical European imperialists cynically exploiting faith, recent scholarship has proven the opposite,
Much of this is incomprehensible to the modern West, including (if not especially) its Christians. How could the crusaders be motivated by love and piety, considering all the brutal violence and bloodshed they committed? Not only is such a question anachronistic—violence was part and parcel of the medieval world—but centuries before Islam, Christian theologians had concluded that “the so called charity texts of the New Testament that preached passivism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behavior of the private person” and not the state,
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What was evil in war itself? Augustine had asked. The real evils were not the deaths of those who would have died anyway, but the love of violence, cruelty, and enmity; it was generally to punish such that good men undertook wars in obedience to God or some lawful authority.…
Western historians long portrayed Saladin as a chivalrous knight, even though the “portrait of him drawn by” his Muslim biographers “is that of the pious [Muslim] leader rather than of a gallant knight, and it fails to explain the fascination” surrounding him.
Yet perhaps the most unforeseen and ironic aspect of the crusades is that a distorted and demonized version of them was eventually disseminated in and continues to haunt the West—while exonerating ongoing Muslim aggression as “payback”—to this very day.
Forced or indoctrinated into being promiscuous, some of these hapless women appear to have done their job well. Due to Cordoba’s status as a slave epicenter—practically every Muslim emir was born to a pale concubine—large numbers of sex slaves and forced prostitutes were always on public display trading their wares.
