The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

At the beginning of the seventh century, the Mediterranean world was Christian. But, within fifty years of Muhammad’s hejira to Medina in 622, the armies of Islam had swept over the southern coast of the Inland Sea. Early in the eighth century, Arabs and Berbers brushed aside weak Visigoth resistance, overran Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees into France, where one of the decisive battles of history was fought. At Tours, the “Hammer of the Franks,” Charles Martel defeated the Muslims, who withdrew back over the mountains. ‘“Thus was Christendom saved in the tongue between the rivers, a little south of Chatellrault, and a day’s march north of Poitiers,“wrote Hilaire Belloc.50 Except for the tiny kingdom of the Asturias, which would be the base camp of the Spanish Reconquista, Islam dominated the Iberian peninsula for centuries. Not until 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella finally drive the Moors out of Spain. In the East, the Islamic invasion came later. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered the Balkans and defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. In 1453, Constantinople fell. In 1683, the Turks were at the gates of Vienna when they were stopped by the Polish king John Sobieski. But not until 1913 were they finally driven out of most of the Balkans.