Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

by Raymond Ibrahim

the pope in Rome eagerly sought to unite Western Europe, which had been devoid of an emperor since 476. Another Frankish chief, another Charles—in fact, the grandson and namesake of Charles Martel—came to the rescue. 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. The shouts of acclamation that thundered in St. Peter’s “pronounced the union, so long in preparation, so mighty in its consequences, of the Roman and Teuton, of the memories of the civilization of the South with the fresh energies of the North,” wrote James Bryce (d. 1922), a British jurist and historian. “From that moment modern history begins.”