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September 26 - October 12, 2025
“a war is just which is carried on after a declaration to recover property or to repel enemies.”
That the caliph sought to extirpate Christianity by fire and sword is documented in other sources. In a widely circulated letter attributed to Muhammad al-Nasir himself, he boasted that Muslims had “cleansed Jerusalem of the filthiness of the Christians,” and that the latter should “submit to our empire and convert to our [sharia] law.” Otherwise “all those who adore the sign of the cross… will feel our scimitars.”†
The tapestry covering the entrance of the caliph’s tent was sent as a trophy to the monastery of Las Huelgas, where it still hangs as a reminder of when Christian kings met and defeated the combined forces of Muhammad.
Muhammad al-Nasir died unlamented on Christmas Day the following year. And he was wrong: “The Christian victory at Las Navas marked the end of Muslim ascendancy in Spain and helped to undermine the Almohad empire, which now entered a period of rapid decline,”
For centuries thereafter, the liberation of Spain was celebrated by parading an effigy of Islam’s prophet—the “Mahoma”—before it exploded in fireworks. Although Vatican II formally banned the ritual, it continues to this day in smaller villages.
final “Muslim uprising in 1499, and the crushing of this revolt in 1501, led to an edict that Muslims had to convert to Christianity or leave the peninsula.”131 Contrary to popular belief, the motivation was less religious and more political; it was less about making Muslims “good Christians” and more about making them “good citizens.” So long as they remained Muslim, they would remain hostile and disloyal to Christian Spain; and because secularism, atheism, and multiculturalism were not options then, the only practical way Muslims could slough off their tribalism was by embracing
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Ögedei Khan, the famous Genghis Khan’s (d. 1227) son and successor, had ordered his men to conquer all lands unto the “Great Sea,” or Atlantic Ocean.
and each dedicated to the ghazwa (or ghaza)—an Arabic word for “raid” that is so laden with connotations of jihad as to be virtually synonymous with it.‡
The Hungarians arrived only to witness the grisly spectacle of a vast Muslim army surrounding and massacring their Western coreligionists. Sigismund boarded and escaped on a ship in the Danube. “If they had only believed me,” reminisced the young king (who lived on to become Holy Roman Emperor thirty-seven years later); “we had forces in plenty to fight our enemies.” He was not alone in blaming Western impetuosity: “If they had only waited for the king of Hungary,” wrote Froissart, a contemporary Frenchman, “they could have done great deeds; but pride was their downfall.”61
Never again would the West unite and crusade in the East. “Henceforward it would be left to those whose borders were directly threatened to defend Christendom against the expansion of Islam.”65 All of this was a sign of the times, of a burgeoning secularization in the West that prioritized nationality over religion.
“The massive enslavement of slavic populations during this period gave rise, in fact, to our word ‘slave’: in Bartolomeo’s time, to be a slave was to be a Slav.”77 Further telling is that “the Turkish word kiz, meaning ‘girl,’ ‘slave girl,’ and ‘sexual slave girl’ (or ‘concubine’) came to mean also ‘Christian woman’ in Islamic usage.”
the end, some one hundred thousand fighters and one hundred warships came.
writes Leonard of Chios, a Catholic prelate who was present (other contemporary Byzantine records confirm this point). “He asked nothing for himself, except the buildings and walls of the city; all the rest, the booty and the captives, would be theirs.”
“until harassed and worn out the enemy will be unable further to resist.”133 On and on, wave after wave, the hordes came, all desirous of booty or paradise—or merely evading impalement.
“Fellow soldiers, this one thing was lacking to make the glory of such a victory complete. Now, at this happy and joyful moment of time, we have the riches of the Greeks, we have won their empire, and their religion is completely extinguished. Our ancestors* eagerly desired to achieve this; rejoice now since it is your bravery which has won this kingdom for us.”
“Had the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe—and America—might be Muslim today.”
And though “what Constantinople was to the Ottoman sultan, Granada was to Ferdinand and Isabella,”4 the war with Islam was hardly over from Spain’s perspective.
This comes out clearly in Columbus’s own letters: in one he refers to Ferdinand and Isabella as “enemies of the wretched sect of Mohammet” who are “resolve[d] to send me to the regions of the Indies, to see” how the people thereof can help in the war effort;7 in another written to the monarchs after he reached the New World Columbus offers to raise an army “for the war and conquest of Jerusalem.”
Christian Just War theory was utterly unintelligible to them: a people’s refusal to submit to Mongol rule was all the reason needed to massacre and/or enslave them.§
In short, and as contemporary European observers had long said of the Turks, “the Tartars had [also] adopted Islam because it was the easy religion, as Christianity was the hard one,” to quote Ricoldo of Monte Croce (d. 1320).20 Whereas Islam complemented their preexisting way of life, Christianity only challenged it.
He ordered the nose and ears of Marco Antonio Bragadin, the fort commander, hacked off. Ali then invited the mutilated infidel to Islam and life: “I am a Christian and thus I want to live and die,” Bragadin responded. “My body is yours. Torture it as you will.” So he was tied to a chair, repeatedly hoisted up the mast of a galley and dropped into the sea, to taunts: “Look if you can see your fleet, great Christian, if you can see succor coming to Famagusta!” The mutilated and half-drowned man was then carried near to St. Nicholas Church—by now a mosque—and tied to a column, where he was slowly
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The don emerged alive but the pasha did not. When the central Turkish fleets saw Ali’s head on a pike in the Sultana and a crucifix where the flag of Islam once fluttered, mass demoralization set in and the waterborne melee was soon over. The Holy League lost twelve galleys and ten thousand men, but the Ottomans lost 230 galleys—117 of which were captured by the Europeans—and thirty thousand men.
As Miguel Cervantes, who was at the battle, has the colorful Don Quixote say: “That day… was so happy for Christendom, because all the world learned how mistaken it had been in believing that the Turks were invincible by sea.”
Two Christian vassals marched with the Ottoman host: the Lutheran count, Thokoly; and the Calvinist Transylvanian prince, Apafi.
He knew that Mustafa had earlier passed through the neighboring city of Perchtoldsdorf and offered it identical terms—only to renege once the besieged Austrians opened their gates by massacring and enslaving them.
“between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.”
Described by Christians as the “heathen giant who feeds on our blood,”118 the khanate is estimated to have enslaved and sold “like sheep” some three million Slavs—Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians—between 1450 and 1783.119
Moreover, whereas the European transatlantic African slave trade was fueled by a racial bias, the Muslim slave trade of Europeans—which in the sixteenth century far exceeded the former—was fueled by that old sadistic contempt for infidels.
In his Book of Martyrs, John Foxe (d. 1587) wrote, “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers,” where the slaves were regularly treated “with perfidy and cruelty.”
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and
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But because the first war vessels would not be ready until 1800, American jizya payments—which took up 16 percent of the entire federal budget—began to be made to Algeria in 1795.
Four months later, in October 1806, the first American edition of the Koran was printed in the United States. As the editor’s note makes clear, its publication was not for the “cultural enrichment” of Americans—as is often claimed today—but to inform them why they had been at war for the last four years. After opening up by saying, “This book is a long conference of God, the angels, and Mahomet, which that false prophet very grossly invented,” the editor concluded: “Thou wilt wonder that such absurdities hath infected the better part of the world, and wilt avouch, that the knowledge of what is
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Algiers had to release all Americans, make no more claims for tribute, and even pay $10,000 in indemnities for ships and other stolen property. Tunis had to pay $60,000 and Tripoli $30,000 for the ships and properties they had stolen.
Thus the United States’ first war—which erupted before it could even elect its first president and intermittently lasted some thirty-two years—was against Islam; and the latter had initiated hostilities on the same rationale that had been used to initiate hostilities for the preceding 1,200 years.
“The Marines’ Hymn,” boasts of fighting everywhere for “right and freedom”—including as far as “to the shores of Tripoli”; the oldest U.S. military monument was made to honor those Americans who fought and died in the Barbary Wars.
It was only in the twentieth century that Christian concerns began to disappear from international diplomacy.”
