# Sword and Scimitar  ## Metadata - Author: Raymond Ibrahim - Full Title: Sword and Scimitar - Category: #books ## Highlights - First, in most cases Islamic armies saw themselves as expansionary and messianic, eager to engage the West and annex its territory and convert its people. Inasmuch as Western armies were on the offensive, it was in the context of their belief that they were reclaiming areas of the Middle East, Northern Africa, Southern Europe, and Asia Minor that had been Roman or earlier belonged to the Hellenistic Greek world for over a half millennium before the birth of Islam. This may seem a self-evident point, but Ibrahim locates the tensions in the context of the times, in which Muslim forces at least saw themselves as absorbing formerly Westernized states and Western armies saw themselves as retrieving land that had been Roman or Greek for centuries. ([Location 64](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=64)) - Tags: #pink - Western armies, while fragmented and marked by factions and political rivalries, still saw their common bond of Christianity as the only way to unite to fight off Islam. ([Location 72](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=72)) - Tags: #pink - Third, Ibrahim sees a continuity between past and present; that is, Muslim religious leaders and jihadists have characteristically seen Christianity as both antithetical to the Islamic world and inherently ripe for conquest or conversion. ([Location 78](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=78)) - Tags: #pink - If current Islamists reflect age-old antipathies—compare the messaging of the Islamic State, their zealotry intentionally patterned after the dogma of their predecessors—so too Western reactions to them are far from sudden outbreaks of prejudice and xenophobia, but rather the self-defensive mechanisms of nearly 1,400 years. ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=81)) - Tags: #pink - Fourth, often Muslims enjoyed as much, if not more protection living in Christian lands than did Christians in Islamic lands—and often without special taxes and levees predicated on their non-Christian status. ([Location 87](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=87)) - Tags: #pink - What was, will be; what was done before, will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9 ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=99)) - Tags: #pink - “We tend nowadays to forget that for approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear.”1 Despite all this, the only conflicts highlighted today include the crusades, European colonialism, and any other Western venture that can be made to conform to the popular view that Europeans initiated hostilities against non-Europeans. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=110)) - Tags: #pink - When Osama bin Laden opened his messages to the West with the words “Peace to whoever follows guidance,” few knew that these irenic words were lifted directly from Islamic prophet Muhammad’s “introductory” letters to non-Muslim kings; even fewer knew that Muhammad’s follow-up sentence—which bin Laden wisely omitted—clarified what “following guidance” really means: “submit [to Islam] and have peace.” ([Location 122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=122)) - Tags: #pink - When Yasser Arafat made a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 that was criticized by fellow Arabs and Muslims as offering too many concessions, the Palestinian leader justified his actions by saying, “I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca”—that is, a truce that Muhammad abolished on a pretext once he was in a position of power and able to go on the offensive. ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=125)) - Tags: #pink - A word of warning: premodern men—kings or chroniclers, Muslims or Christians—were by today’s standards vociferously candid and spared no invective for what they deemed was the source of conflict—namely, the belief system of the other. Although their aspersions are usually seen as unnecessarily provocative hype and thus left out of polite histories, I have kept a fair amount in this book in the belief that they go a long way in explaining how each saw the other, and hence why they fought and died. ([Location 160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=160)) - Tags: #pink - Muslim hostility for the West is not an aberration but a continuation of Islamic history. ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=175)) - Tags: #pink - I have been commanded to wage war against mankind until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.… If they do so, their blood and property are protected. —Muhammad bin Abdullah, Prophet of Islam1 ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=196)) - Tags: #pink - The message was simple and revolved around the concept of submission—Islam in Arabic—to Allah’s commandments (as delivered to and by Muhammad); whoever obeyed became a Muslim (“one who submits”). ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=208)) - Tags: #pink - That Muhammad had only won over some one hundred followers after a decade of peaceful preaching in Mecca—but nearly the whole of Arabia after a decade of successful raiding, “an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually”5—speaks for itself. ([Location 222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=222)) - Tags: #pink - The appeal of Muhammad’s message lay in its compatibility with the tribal mores of his society, three in particular: loyalty to one’s tribe, enmity for other tribes, and raids on the latter to enrich and empower the former. ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=236)) - Tags: #pink - Thus the umma—the Islamic “Super-Tribe” that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers—was born*; and its natural enemy remained everyone outside it. The Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa al-bara’ (“loyalty and enmity”), which Muhammad preached and the Koran commands, captures all this.* ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=243)) - Tags: #pink - As one researcher summarizes, non-Muslims are described in the Koran as “vile animals and beasts, the worst of creatures and demons; perverted transgressors and partners of Satan to be fought until religion is Allah’s alone. They are to be beheaded; terrorized, annihilated, crucified, punished, and expelled, and plotted against by deceit.” ([Location 249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=249)) - Tags: #pink - From here the argument can be made that Muhammad’s most enduring contribution to world history is that, in repackaging the tribal mores of seventh-century Arabia through a theological paradigm, he also deified tribalism, causing it to outlive its setting and spill into the modern era. Whereas most world civilizations have been able to slough off their historic tribalism and enter into modernity, to break with tribalism for Muslims is to break with Muhammad and his laws—to break with cardinal Islamic teachings. ([Location 256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=256)) - Tags: #pink - That Islamic scriptures portray paradise in decidedly carnal terms—food, drink, gold, and “eternally young boys” who “circulate among” the believers also await the martyr—should not be surprising considering the aforementioned primitivism of Muhammad’s society. ([Location 275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=275)) - Simply put, the West is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed. ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=318)) - Muhammad’s chief reason for denouncing Christianity revolved around Christ. While he agreed that Jesus was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and was essentially sinless, he rejected claims that Christ was crucified and resurrected. Muhammad/Allah especially denounced claims that Jesus was the Son of God—which is tantamount to the greatest crime in Islam, shirk, the idolatrous association of others with Allah, or polytheism.* ([Location 338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=338)) - In other words, Islam’s three choices had come to Jews and Christians: either they converted, died fighting, or kept their religions by paying extortion money and accepting an inferior position as dhimmis in Muslim society.§ ([Location 356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=356)) - As for you, there is no lower and more despicable people—wretched, impoverished Bedouins who know nothing but poetry.* Despite that, you commit injustices in your own nation and now ours.… What havoc you have created! You ride horses not your own and wear clothes not your own. You pleasure yourselves with the young white girls of Rome and enslave them. You eat food not your own, and fill your hands with gold, silver, and valuable goods [not your own]. Now we find you with all our possessions and the plunder you took from our coreligionists—and we leave it all to you, neither asking for its return nor rebuking you. All we ask is that you leave our lands. But if you refuse, we will annihilate you!22 ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=556)) - Prior to battle, Abu Sufyan had told these female Arabs that, although “the prophet said women are lacking in brains and religion,”* they could still help by “striking them [Arab men] in the face with stones and tent poles” should they ever retreat to camp, “until they return [to battle] in shame.” ([Location 595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=595)) - Despite the popular claim that Islam bans forced conversion, the martyrdom of early Christians who refused to convert to Islam permeates both Muslim and Christian sources—it is still a very real phenomenon today—and was one of the chief reasons that premodern Christians saw only the spirit of Antichrist in Islam.† ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=700)) - Tags: #pink - According to Muslim and Coptic historians, the Arab invaders also burned the Great Library of Alexandria. Amr sent a message to Caliph Omar inquiring what he should do with the tens of thousands of books and scrolls found within this massive building. Omar (in)famously responded: “If they agree with our Book [Koran], we do not need them; if they disagree, we do not want them. Burn them.” The amount of ink-stained papyri—which if preserved would have rewritten history as we know it—were reportedly so great that, serving as fuel, it kept the many bathhouses of Alexandria, now enjoyed by its conquerors, continuously lit for six months, says Baghdad chronicler Abdul Latif.54 Although most Western historians attribute the destruction of the great library to non-Muslims, the important point here is that Muslim histories and historians record it—meaning Muslims believe it happened—thus setting a precedent concerning how infidel books should be treated. ([Location 734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=734)) - Tags: #pink - It would be the Copts’ lot to lead lives synonymous with persecution. For it was they who bore the brunt of the great Roman persecutions under Emperor Diocletian in the early 300s; then they suffered under the Persians (619–629); then they suffered under the Roman Cyril (630–640); then they suffered under the Muslims—till the present. ([Location 788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=788)) - Tags: #pink - Egypt is also instructive in showing how and why heavily Christian lands became Islamic. Early Muslim chronicles make clear that centuries of persecution and financial fleecing saw more and more Copts proclaim the shahada, making Egypt what it is today, a Muslim-majority nation. ([Location 791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=791)) - Tags: #pink - The Muslim march west—the notion of “manifest destiny” is far older than the European colonization of America—continued with little respite after the conquest of Egypt. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=802)) - Tags: #pink - As for the last vestiges of Christian power, in 698, Carthage fell to Islam, bringing a close to centuries of Roman rule in North Africa. Musa “cruelly laid it to waste and leveled it [by fire] to the ground,” writes Paul the Deacon.87 Once the jewel of North Africa, Carthage was left desolate for two centuries, as Tunis became the new center of orbit. By 709, the whole of North Africa was under Muslim rule. All that was left to invade and plunder was Europe, where the last free Christians reigned. Their time to choose between conversion, jizya, or death was nigh. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=854)) - Tags: #pink - By now, the classical, Hellenistic world—the once Roman, then Christian empire—was a shell of its former self. Even archeology attests to this: “The arrival of Islam upon the stage of history was marked by a torrent of violence and destruction throughout the Mediterranean world. The great Roman and Byzantine cities, whose ruins still dot the landscapes of North Africa and the Middle East, were brought to a rapid end in the seventh century. Everywhere archeologists have found evidence of massive destruction; and this corresponds precisely with what we know of Islam as an ideology.” ([Location 859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=859)) - Tags: #pink - Thus not because He loved them [Muslims] did the Lord God give them power to seize the land of the Christians, but because of the lawlessness of the Christians. The likes of it never had occurred nor may it occur in the entire generations of the earth. For why did men put on the clothes of adulterous women and prostitutes, adorn themselves as women and openly stand in the squares and markets of towns and change their natural practice for an unnatural one…? Likewise, women did the same things as the men had done. Father, son and brother had intercourse with one woman who touched every kinsman.… For this reason God delivered them into the hands of the barbarians, that is, because of their sin and stench. The women will pollute themselves through the men who already are polluted and the sons of Ishmael will cast lots [for them].90 ([Location 878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=878)) - Tags: #pink - 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. ([Location 919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=919)) - Tags: #pink - because the Eastern Roman Empire failed to deal a decisive blow to the invaders and send them back to Arabia, the unity of the ancient Mediterranean was shattered and the course of world history forever altered. 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.” ([Location 932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=932)) - Tags: #pink - He is deceiving. For do prophets come with swords and chariot? Verily, these events of today are works of confusion.… You will discover nothing true from the said prophet except human bloodshed. —Jewish scribe, c. 6342 ([Location 1028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1028)) - Tags: #pink - “To them [Muslims] it was a vexation that the Cross maintained its dominion, in competition with Allah,” writes scholar Julius Wellhausen; “in their conception, the war against the Byzantine emperor was preferable to all others, and they incessantly devoted themselves to this war.”3 This fixation traced back to Muhammad. In the context of his Tabuk campaign against the Romans, the prophet had inaugurated unending war on Christians as captured in Koran 9:29 ([Location 1035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1035)) - Tags: #pink - 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. ([Location 1086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1086)) - Tags: #pink - In fact, in Byzantium, women were expected to be retiring, shy, modest, and devoted to their families and religious observances.… The behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.”14 ([Location 1104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1104)) - Tags: #pink - 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 as to argue that “it was the caliphate’s demand for European slaves that called forth the Viking phenomenon in the first place.” ([Location 1108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1108)) - Tags: #pink - For instance, after proclaiming that Allah had permitted Muslims four wives and unlimited concubines (Koran 4:3), Muhammad later declared that Allah had delivered a new revelation (Koran 33:50–52) offering him, the prophet alone, a dispensation to sleep with and marry as many women as he wanted—prompting his child-bride Aisha to quip, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”† ([Location 1148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1148)) - Tags: #pink - 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 religion appealing and justified his own behavior by easing the sexual and moral codes of the Arabs and fusing the notion of obedience to God with war to aggrandize oneself with booty and slaves.† ([Location 1155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1155)) - Tags: #pink - Indeed, for people who find any criticism of Islam “Islamophobic,” the sheer amount and vitriolic content of more than a millennium of Western writings on Muhammad may beggar belief.‡ ([Location 1162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1162)) - Tags: #pink - Although it began under Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), it was during the reign of his son, Caliph Al-Walid (r. 705–715)—that “great hater of Christians,” to quote a chronicler—that the jihad resumed and the spirit of “Anti-Christ” intensified.28 ([Location 1176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1176)) - Tags: #pink - Many Christians converted to Islam in order to avoid punishment as well as to be freed of tribute.” ([Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1210)) - Tags: #pink - By now, Caliph Omar II realized all was lost. Maslama, who could only have welcomed the summons, was recalled. On August 15, 718—exactly one year since it began*—the siege of Constantinople was lifted. But the Muslims’ troubles were far from over. Nature—or from a Byzantine perspective, God—was not through with them: a terrible storm swallowed up many ships in the Sea of Marmara; and the ashes from a volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini set others aflame. Of the 2,560 ships retreating back to Damascus and Alexandria, only ten reportedly survived—and of these, half were captured by the Romans, leaving only five to reach and tell the tale to the caliph. 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.† ([Location 1305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1305)) - Tags: #pink - Leo, “who was as zealous in his Christian faith as Omar was in his, refuted Islam on the basis of the Christian Gospel as well as on the basis of the Koran.”61 Standard Christian shock at the “incredulity” of the Arabs for believing that Muhammad, whose “tremendous imposture” should be self-evident, was a prophet was only one of the frank emperor’s many criticisms: Nor do I wish to pass over in silence the abominable authorization given you [Muslims] by your legislator [Muhammad] to have with your wives a commerce that he has compared, I am ashamed to say, to the tilling of fields [e.g., Koran 2:223]. As a consequence of this license, a goodly number of you have contracted the habit of multiplying their commerce [sex] with women, as if it were a question of tilling fields. Nor can I forget the chastity of your Prophet and the manner full of artifice whereby he succeeded in seducing the woman Zeda.§ Of all these abominations the worst is that of accusing God of being the originator of all these filthy acts, which fact has doubtless been the cause of the introduction among your compatriots of this disgusting law [treating women as “tilling fields”]. Is there indeed a worse blasphemy than that of alleging that God is the cause of all this evil?62 ([Location 1327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1327)) - Tags: #pink - Something of a premodern defender of human rights, Leo further informed Omar that he “ought to be ashamed of the fact that at so modern a time as ours, when God has delivered the human race by breaking the bonds of the law, you announce yourself as a defender of circumcision.” Worse, whereas circumcision had a symbolic place in God’s “ancient law” for men, “among you, not only males but also the females, at no matter what age, are exposed to this shameful practice.” ([Location 1343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1343)) - Tags: #pink - Finally, the differences between Christ’s peace and Muhammad’s jihad were for the emperor those between light and darkness*: “You call ‘the Way of God’† these devastating raids which bring death and captivity to all peoples. Behold your religion and its recompense [death and destruction]. Behold your glory ye who pretend to live an angelic life.” ([Location 1346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1346)) - Tags: #pink - 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 lessened the burdens and taxations of his subjects, so that the Umayyad aristocracy, seeing their income diminish, had him assassinated in 720. ([Location 1355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1355)) - Tags: #pink - Of further interest to reflect on is that according to Arab chronicles, in the moments before he died, Omar “forgave” and even helped his assassin, a lowly slave who had poisoned him, escape—a remarkably “Christian” thing for the imperial head of what had hitherto been a ruthless war machine devoted to enslaving and plundering all and sundry.68 ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1362)) - Tags: #pink - 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. ([Location 1370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1370)) - Tags: #pink - “Every community has its monasticism (rahbaniya), and the monasticism of my community is jihad in the path of Allah;” as such, these warrior monks preceded the crusading military orders by centuries. ([Location 1378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1378)) - Tags: #pink - Tarek continued to penetrate northward into Spain, “not passing a place without reducing it, and getting possession of its wealth, for Allah Almighty had struck with terror the hearts of the infidels.”† ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1557)) - Tags: #pink - None of this should suggest, as some modern Western historians do, that Spain willingly capitulated to the Muslims, seeing that their rule was no harsher and possibly more lenient than the Visigoths’. Muslim chroniclers often write of how “the Christians defended themselves with the utmost vigour and resolution, and great was the havoc which they made in the ranks of the faithful.” ([Location 1562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=1562)) - Tags: #pink ## New highlights added September 1, 2025 at 8:21 PM - One Muslim chronicle confirms that the Christians “were killed to such an extent that a valley there where the two sides had met was filled [with their corpses].”90 Sultan Muhammad declared victory and, as the stars shined above the bloodied fields of Manzikert, renewed cries of “Allahu Akbar!” resounded, as the victors scoured the earth and despoiled the dead.* ([Location 2340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2340)) - Tags: #pink - 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. ([Location 2367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2367)) - Tags: #pink - Even Michael Attaleiates, who was at the battle, noted that the Turks “attributed everything to God, as they had accomplished a greater monument of victory than they could have under their own strength.”109 But there are other, less hagiographical similarities: as at Yarmuk, the Roman army at Manzikert consisted of various nations, with tensions and disunity between them; and whereas Roman defeat at Yarmuk was followed by the conquests of Syria and Egypt, Roman defeat at Manzikert was followed by the conquest of hitherto stalwart Anatolia, or Asia Minor. ([Location 2417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2417)) - Tags: #pink - 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. ([Location 2431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2431)) - Tags: #pink ## New highlights added September 6, 2025 at 9:49 PM - MORE THAN THREE CENTURIES BEFORE POPE URBAN II CALLED for crusades against the Muslim East, and more than three centuries after Hattin, Spain was and continued to be—for a total of almost eight hundred years—a microcosm of the perennial war between Islam and Christianity. ([Location 3275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3275)) - Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human nature to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils.”‡ Native Spaniards had two choices: acquiesce to Arab rule or “flee to the mountains where they risked hunger and various forms of death.”3 ([Location 3283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3283)) ## New highlights added September 3, 2025 at 11:42 AM - Atrocities were not limited to Asia Minor or its indigenous Christians: “As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted injuries on Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem, beat them, pillaged them, [and] levied the poll tax [jizya],” writes Michael the Syrian;† moreover, “every time they saw a caravan of Christians, particularly of those from Rome and the lands of Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways.” ([Location 2550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2550)) - 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. Thus, in the early eighth century under the Umayyads, some Arabs—described as “untamed and beastly, illogical in mind and maniacs in their desires”7—captured, tortured, and executed seventy Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem for refusing to convert to Islam (minus seven who complied under torture). Shortly after that, another sixty pilgrims were crucified in Jerusalem. In the late eighth century, under the Abbasids, Muslims destroyed two churches and a monastery near Bethlehem and slaughtered its monks. In 796, Muslims burned another twenty monks to death. In 809, and again in 813, multiple monasteries, convents, and churches were attacked in and around Jerusalem; Christians of both sexes were gang raped and massacred. In 929, on Palm Sunday,* another wave of atrocities broke out; churches were destroyed and Christians slaughtered. In 936, “the Muslims in Jerusalem made a rising and burnt down the Church of the Resurrection [the Holy Sepulchre] which they plundered, and destroyed all they could of it,” records one Muslim chronicler.8 As Rodney Stark puts it, “Almost generation after generation, Christian writers recorded acts of persecution and harassment, to the point of slaughter and destruction, suffered at the hands of Muslim [Arab, Persian, and Turkish] rulers.”9 That said, the persecution and carnage had reached apocalyptic levels by the 1090s. ([Location 2559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2559)) - It was in this context that, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II (r. 1088–1099) made his famous appeal to the knights of Christendom. According to Robert the Monk, who may have been present at the Council of Clermont in France, Urban held nothing back: 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, to stakes and shoot arrows at them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women?… Who is to revenge all this, who is to repair this damage, if you do not do it?… Rise up and remember the manly deeds of your ancestors, the prowess and greatness of Charlemagne, of his son Louis, and of your other kings, who destroyed pagan [and Muslim] kingdoms and planted the holy church in their territories.10 ([Location 2573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2573)) - In short, when he spoke at Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban was drawing on a long legacy. After the Fatimid Shia caliph had annihilated the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009, a smaller structure had been rebuilt around Christendom’s holiest site in 1048; now this too was under attack, Urban explained, by those “enslaved by demons.”17 Christians had to act now or never. ([Location 2605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2605)) - In other words, when Urban made his call in 1095, Christians everywhere felt ready to take the war to—instead of always receiving it from—the ancient foe. ([Location 2624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2624)) - As foremost crusade historian Jonathan Riley-Smith puts it, “The crusaders, moved by love of God and their neighbor, renouncing wives, children, and earthly possessions, and adopting temporary poverty and chastity, were described as going into a voluntary exile.”20 Despite popular depictions of crusaders as prototypical European imperialists cynically exploiting faith, recent scholarship has proven the opposite,21 that every crusader “risked his life, social status, and all his possessions when he took the cross.”22 Nor was it “those with the least to lose who took up the cross, but rather those with the most.”23 Great lords of vast estates—not dispossessed “second sons,” as once believed—parted with their wealth and possessions upon taking the cross.* ([Location 2629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2629)) - for the “message was clear,” writes Thomas Madden: “Christ was crucified again in the persecution of his faithful and the defilement of his sanctuaries.”25 Both needed rescuing; both offered an opportunity to fulfill one of Christ’s two greatest commandments: “Love God with all your heart” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). ([Location 2640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2640)) - 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, explains historian Christopher Tyerman. Christ himself distinguished between political and spiritual obligations (Matt. 22:21). He praised a Roman centurion without calling on him to “repent” by resigning from one of the most brutal militaries of history (Matt. 8: 5–13). When a group of soldiers asked John the Baptist how they should repent, he advised them always to be content with their army wages (Luke 3:14). Paul urged Christians to pray for “kings and all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2). In short, “there was no intrinsic contradiction in a doctrine of personal, individual forgiveness condoning certain forms of necessary public violence to ensure the security in which, in St. Paul’s phrase, Christians ‘may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty’ (1 Tim. 2:2).”27 Or as that chief articulator of “Just War” theory, Saint Augustine (d. 430), concluded, “It is the injustice of the opposing side, that lays on the wise man the duty to wage war.” ([Location 2650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2650)) - Riley-Smith elaborates: 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.… So the case for each expedition had to be a good one and a feature of papal general letters was the care taken in arguing it as cogently as possible. Expeditions to the Levant, North Africa, or the Iberian Peninsula could be justified as responses to present Muslim aggression or as rightful attempts to recover Christian territory which had been injuriously seized in the past. ([Location 2661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2661)) - The fate of those kept alive—as usual, the young and comely—was often worse: The Turks divided up among themselves some of the captives, whose lives they had spared—or rather reserved for a more painful death—and submitted them to dismal servitude at the hands of cruel masters. Some were exposed in public, like targets, and were pierced by arrows; others were given away as gifts, while others were sold outright… [and taken to Khorasan and Antioch where] they would endure wretched slavery under the worst masters imaginable. They underwent a torture much longer than that endured by those whose heads were severed swiftly by the sword.37 ([Location 2711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2711)) - Even so, “in hand-to-hand conflict, horseman against horseman, foot-soldier against foot-soldier, the Europeans and Byzantines had the better of the Turks.”44 Muslims also conceded this point;* to them the Western knights were fearless mountains of steel, seen as “‘leftovers from the race of Ad’ [meaning giants] or not men at all. They carried stout broad-headed lances or spears of tempered steel.” ([Location 2746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2746)) - Indigenous Eastern Christians marveled at the sight of these foreign titans who, with the crucifix etched on them, had come to fight and kill the enemies of Christ: “When we passed by the villages of the Armenians,” Fulcher writes, “it was astonishing to see them advance toward us with crosses and standards, kissing our feet and garments most humbly for love of God, because they had heard there that we would defend them from the Turks under whose yoke they had been oppressed for a long time.”47 Such greetings occurred frequently.† ([Location 2753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2753)) - The men on Godfrey’s tower—he himself was perched atop it and wrought great havoc with his crossbow against the defenders—managed to capture a part of the wall, whence scaling ladders were quickly dropped and ascended by crusader after crusader. Some fought their way to and opened the city gates to the main force outside. They wildly stormed the city and massacred everyone in sight, mostly Muslims and Jews, but also a few indigenous Christians (most of whom had been expelled from the city before the siege, as at Antioch). ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2875)) - Though deemed most worthy of the honor, Godfrey rejected the title of King of Jerusalem—refusing to “wear a golden crown in the place where Christ was crowned with thorns”72—and was instead coronated “Advocate [meaning Defender or Guardian] of the Holy Sepulchre.” The Syrian and Armenian Christians who were ejected before Jerusalem’s capture were returned to repopulate the city. Jews and Muslims were also later invited back. ([Location 2895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2895)) - Local Muslims largely responded with apathy to the Frankish conquest of Jerusalem. In all the surviving literature, only one source indicates that there were any calls to jihad. Ali bin Tahrir, a Damascene cleric wrote Kitab al-Jihad, another unoriginally titled rehashing or “Book of Jihad” in 1105. He argued that if Muslims are obligated to go on regular jihads “to plunder the wealth, the women, and the property of the unbelievers,” how much more must Muslims respond with jihad when the infidels themselves take the offensive against Islam? Instead it was the newly arrived crusaders who had “zealously practiced jihad against Muslims,” complained the scholar, while Muslims “brought only listlessness and disunity to war, each striving to leave this duty to others.” Ali’s conclusion? “Devote yourselves to the duty of jihad!”73 These early calls largely fell on deaf ears for obvious reasons. ([Location 2899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2899)) - Nor did the arrival of the crusaders create Muslim unity: “While the Franks—Allah damn them!—were conquering and settling in a part of the territories of Islam,” fumed Ibn al-Athir, “the rulers and armies of Islam were fighting among themselves, causing discord and disunity among their people and weakening their power to combat the enemy.”74 In this context, the pure doctrine of jihad—warfare against infidels, against the… ([Location 2909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2909)) - Nor was there anything particularly strange about the latest conquerors. Muslims originally conflated Franks with Byzantines—both cross-carrying infidels. “Following a tradition attributed to the Prophet—‘unbelief is one nation’—no particular need was felt to differentiate one infidel from another or to distinguish crusading from other forms of Christian warfare.”75 Thus, in 1099, it mattered little to local Muslims who lorded over… ([Location 2913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2913)) - After the initial massacres at Jerusalem and elsewhere—which the locals were accustomed to from Shia and Sunni infighting—the new rulers allowed Muslims to return, granted them freedom of worship (forced conversions to Christianity were… ([Location 2917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2917)) - As Riley-Smith puts it, “The Westerners appear to have constituted for most Muslims little more than an irritant, although Arab writers loved to dwell on traditional stereotypes: that they were unhygienic,… ([Location 2920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2920)) - Less prosaically, Jubayr exhibited a certain ambivalence concerning life under Christian rule. He noted that Muslims “live in great comfort under the Franks; may Allah preserve us from such a temptation… [Muslims] are masters of their dwellings, and govern themselves as they wish. This is the case in all the territory occupied by the Franks.”78 But it was the seduction of life without the draconian dictates of sharia that… ([Location 2925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2925)) - The crusaders ruled for some forty-four years after capturing Jerusalem with little interference from surrounding—and largely still disunited—Muslim rulers. Finally, with the rise of Imad al-Din Zengi (r. 1127–1146)—a particularly ruthless Turkish warlord and atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo—the old duty of jihad reawakened.* ([Location 2945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2945)) - After four months of this, on Christmas Eve, 1144, Edessa fell again to Islam. “The enemy rushed together from all directions, entered the city, and put all whom they encountered to the sword,” writes William of Tyre (b. 1130). “Neither age, condition, nor sex was spared.” ([Location 2953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2953)) - Saladin (b. 1137)†—formerly one of Nur al-Din’s viziers, conquered Fatimid Egypt in 1171, effectively ending more than two and a half centuries of Shia rule and becoming Egypt’s first sultan. On his master’s death, he quickly moved and added more Muslim territories to his growing empire, thereby realizing the crusaders’ greatest fear: a united Islamic front. ([Location 2978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=2978)) ## New highlights added September 4, 2025 at 11:41 AM - As soon as they [Franks] were encamped, Saladin ordered all his men to collect brushwood, dry grass, stubble and anything else with which they could light fires, and make barriers which he had made all round the Christians. They soon did this, and the fires burned vigorously and the smoke from the fires was great; and this, together with the heat of the sun above them caused them discomfort and great harm.… When the fires were lit and the smoke was great, the Saracens surrounded the host and shot their darts through the smoke and so wounded and killed men and horses. ([Location 3023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3023)) - Saladin was no fearer of death. During an earlier battle, when an advisor had urged him not to expose himself to danger, the sultan asked, “What is the most noble death?” “Death in the path of Allah,” responded his aid (meaning martyrdom during jihad). “Well then”—concluded Saladin, citing jihad’s win-win rationale—“the worst that can befall me is the most noble of deaths!” ([Location 3042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3042)) - King Guy and other captured nobles—including that most “powerful and violent infidel” Raynald—were hauled to Saladin’s tent to await their doom.109 The sultan was magnanimous to Guy, explaining that “a king does not slay a king,” and saved his invective for the Arabic-speaking Count of Châtillon. Always willing to place advantage before revenge—and thereby further winning the reputation of magnanimity—the shrewd sultan invited Raynald to convert to Islam and reap its rewards. ([Location 3072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3072)) - I know that you thirst for nothing other than Christian blood!”* Saladin instantly drew out his scimitar and struck the defiant infidel—before his henchmen pounced on, decapitated, and triumphantly paraded Raynald’s head around the Muslim camp. Thus ended that “most dangerous enemy of Islam.”† He was only the first; every other dedicated foe of Islam was denied ransom and consigned to slaughter. Saladin commanded that all captive Templars and Hospitallers‡—at least one hundred warrior-monks sworn to defend the Sepulchre of Christ to their dying breath—be brought before him. After boasting “I shall purify the land of these two impure races,” the sultan “ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison,” ([Location 3081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3081)) - Because so many professional fighting men were lost at Hattin, the crusaders’ kingdoms were left vulnerable. By July 10—a mere six days after the battle—the indefatigable sultan had speared through and captured Jaffa, Caesarea, Haifa, Sidon, and Acre. By September, Saladin stood before the strong walls of Jerusalem, now swollen with Christian refugees, “each one of whom would choose death rather than see the Muslims in power in their city,” to quote Ibn al-Athir; for “the sacrifice of life, possessions and sons was for them a part of their duty to defend the city.” ([Location 3097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3097)) - With nothing to lose, the desperate, holed-up crusaders declared that, if death was to be their lot, they would first have vengeance: they would destroy the Dome of the Rock, slaughter thousands of Muslim prisoners held in the city, kill their own children, destroy their own possessions, and set the city ablaze. Saladin would win nothing: “What advantage do you gain from this ungenerous spirit of negation,” they asked, “you who would only lose everything by such a gain?”114 The practical sultan saw the wisdom in this: large ransoms, freed Muslims, intact possessions, and undamaged mosques were preferable to yet another bloodbath of infidels. Those who could ransom their lives were permitted to do so, and Jerusalem’s gates were opened to the conquering hero of Islam. ([Location 3106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3106)) - “The Koran was raised to the throne and the [Old and New] Testaments cast down,” as Saladin “purified Jerusalem of the pollution of those races, of the filth of the dregs of humanity.”116 Muslims appreciated the continuity: “This noble act of conquest was achieved, after Omar bin al-Khattab [the caliph who first conquered Jerusalem from Christendom in 637]—Allah have mercy on him!—by no one but Saladin, and that is a sufficient title to glory and honour.” ([Location 3117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3117)) - Although many Christians were able to purchase their freedom and quit Jerusalem unmolested, much more could not. Saladin clemently granted freedom to the aged and infirm; the rest, approximately fifteen thousand, were sold into slavery. “Women and children together came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us, bringing a smile to Muslim faces at their lamentation,” ([Location 3122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3122)) - He had Coptic Christians tortured and crucified, commanded “whoever saw that the outside of a church was white, to cover it with black dirt,” and ordered “the removal of every cross from atop the dome of every church in the provinces of Egypt.”120 And yet just as Alp Arslan was depicted by Christians as magnanimous but by Muslims as supremacist, so have 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.121 ([Location 3140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3140)) - This Third Crusade, spearheaded by England’s King Richard, marked the high point of crusading and saw some of the fiercest fighting between Muslim and Christian, often to the latter’s favor. ([Location 3148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3148)) - 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. ([Location 3168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3168)) ## New highlights added September 8, 2025 at 11:45 AM - As in the East, the intentional destruction or mutilation of churches into mosques was meant to highlight Islam’s supremacy. ([Location 3359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3359)) - archeological facts speak for themselves: although churches dotted Spain’s landscape when Islam came in 711, “today, the remains of even small ‘Mozarabic’ [dhimmi] churches can be found only outside the former ‘al-Andalus,’ and none of them in major urban centers.”21 ([Location 3370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3370)) - “Umayyads particularly valued blond or red-haired Franc or Galician women as sexual slaves,”29 which were harder to acquire from better fortified Byzantium, “al-Andalus became a center for the trade and distribution of slaves.”30 In exchange for peace, north Christians sometimes even had to make annual tributes “not of money, or horses, or arms, but of a hundred damsels (all to be distinguished for beauty) to ornament the harems.”31 ([Location 3394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3394)) - 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. Ibn Hazm may have had them in mind, and not the average cloistered female Muslim, when he wrote that women “have nothing else to fill their minds, except loving union [sex] and what brings it about, flirting and how it is done, intimacy and the various ways of achieving it. This is their sole occupation, and they were created for nothing else.”33 ([Location 3405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3405)) - When a thirteen-year-old Christian slave boy rejected his repeated sexual advances, Abd al-Rahman III had him slowly tortured and then beheaded.36* ([Location 3419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3419)) - Being made to feel inferior was one thing; many dhimmis learned to live with it. But two other sharia provisions created—and continue to create†—deep frustrations. The first, still colloquially known as Islam’s “blasphemy” law, banned on pain of death any speech that could be interpreted as offensive to Muhammad and/or Islam (including preaching the Gospel, which contradicts—and thus makes a liar of—Muhammad). The second, Islam’s apostasy law, also bans on pain of death any Muslim attempts to leave Islam (which, then and now, is particularly evident when a Muslim actively converts to and practices another religion, usually Christianity, as opposed to merely being indifferent to Islam). These laws had a suffocating effect on freedom of thought, speech, and even conscience, and led to frequent uprisings by Christian dhimmis and recent/nominal converts—followed by brutal Muslim suppressions and wholesale massacres. ([Location 3436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3436)) ## New highlights added September 9, 2025 at 2:50 PM - prince Juan Manuel (d. 1348) once observed before highlighting the difference between Just War and just plain old jihad: “There would not be war between them on account of religion or sect, because Jesus Christ never ordered that anyone should be killed or forced to accept his religion.”62 As for the popes in Rome, they regularly exhorted the kings of Spain “to expel them [the Muslims] and drive them far from the lands which the Christian people had cultivated for a long time before.” ([Location 3541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3541)) - In 1086, one year after Alfonso’s recapture of Toledo, the African tribesmen met and—through the old nomadic feigned cavalry retreat followed by outflanking tactic—crushed the Christian hero at the battle of Sagrajas (or Zallaqa)—“one of the most bloody ever fought between Christian and Moor.”65 The king himself barely escaped the carnage with severe wounds. Afterward, the foreign victors erected a mountain from some 2,400 Christian heads, whence triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar” rang.66 Unlike the racially and religiously watered-down Muslims of al-Andalus, this was a new—or rather old—breed of Muslims: in appearance and behavior they resembled those Africans that first invaded the Peninsula in the eighth century under the leadership of Tarek and Musa; and in certain respects this was the second mass invasion of Spain in the name of Islam. ([Location 3560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3560)) - Anticipating his call at Clermont in 1095 by six years, Urban decreed that Christians fighting and dying against Muslims in Spain earned remission of sins.* He even forbade enthusiastic Spanish knights from joining the crusades in the East: “For there is no virtue in delivering Christians from Saracens there while exposing Christians here to the tyranny and oppression of the Saracens,”67 explained the pope.† ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3569)) ## New highlights added September 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM - Finally, between May 13 and 20, “the faithful of Christ gathered at Toledo from all parts of the world… to give battle in support of Christendom in Spain.” On May 16, fasting men and women made barefoot processions around the Lateran Basilica in Rome and prayed “that God might be propitious to those engaged in battle”; similarly, “litanies and prayers were offered in France for the Christians who were about to fight in Spain.”93 ([Location 3695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3695)) - The two forces could not have looked any more different: most of the approximately twelve thousand Spaniards were heavily armored; knights carried three-foot-long double-sided swords. In comparison, most of the African Muslims were near naked, their shields made of hippo hides. But their numbers—thirty thousand—and unbridled ferocity made up for it. ([Location 3724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3724)) ## New highlights added September 12, 2025 at 3:10 PM - From the start, Christian monarchs had generally given newly conquered Muslim populations two options: depart unmolested or remain under the king’s protection, which was often enforced with rigor.* Some Muslims stayed and converted to Christianity. Others, known as mudejares—from an Arabic word meaning “tamed” or “domesticated”—remained as Muslims and were subjected to the same dhimmi stipulations imposed on Christians under Islam. Still others—Muslim purists—not deigning to be ruled by infidels, left for Muslim-held territories, which, after 1252, always meant Granada. ([Location 3848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3848)) - A 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.” ([Location 3858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3858)) - Under such circumstances, sharia is clear: Muslims should try to emigrate. But there has always been one important caveat: whenever Muslims find themselves under infidel authority, they may say and do almost anything—denounce Muhammad, receive baptism and communion, venerate the cross, all anathema to Islam—so long as their hearts remain true to Islam. ([Location 3863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3863)) - Unsurprisingly, then, taqiyya defined Islam in post-Reconquista Spain.† Once the edict to convert or emigrate appeared, virtually the entire Granadan population—hundreds of thousands of Muslims—openly embraced Christianity but remained crypto-Muslims. Publicly they went to church and baptized their children; at home they recited the Koran, preached undying hate for the infidel and their obligation to liberate al-Andalus.‡ ([Location 3873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3873)) - Thus, when a rumor arose in 1568 that the Ottoman Turks had finally come to liberate them, formerly “domesticated” and “tamed” Muslims near Granada, “believing that the days under Christian rule were over, went berserk. Priests all over the countryside were attacked, mutilated, or murdered; some were burned alive; one was sewed inside a pig and barbequed; the pretty Christian girls were assiduously raped, some sent off to join the harems of Moroccan and Algerian potentates.”140 In the end, if Muslims could never be loyal to infidel authority—constantly colluding and subverting, including with foreign Muslims—and if conversion to Christianity was no solution due to the dispensation of taqiyya, then only one solution remained: between 1609 and 1614, all Moriscos were expelled from the Peninsula to Africa, at which point the nearly one-thousand-year-old war for Spain was truly at an end.† ([Location 3897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=3897)) - Cleansed of all Christian “filth,” Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey boasted, “the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation—that chokes and destroys the Christians.”20 From this dilapidated but strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans “launched a campaign of terror” throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing God’s work.21 “They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil,” explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was taken captive in Gallipoli, adding, “and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves them!” ([Location 4100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=4100)) - The frontlines of a typical Ottoman army consisted of unpaid irregulars, or bashi bazouks (literally, “Crazy Heads”)—vagabonds who subsisted entirely on pillage and plunder, whatever they could grasp. As their name denotes, they were undisciplined and reckless, and as such were often sent ahead of the main force to harass and sow confusion among the enemy. While most were infantry, some (the akinji) were light cavalry. Behind these came the professional soldiery, including cavalrymen (sipahi) and infantrymen, the dreaded Janissaries. ([Location 4119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=4119)) - Many parents did what they could to prevent the snatching of their sons’ bodies—which could further “end up as victims of Turkish pederasty,”26 or the “Turkish Disease”—and souls.§ Some parents mutilated their boys in ways that would make them useless to their new masters. Sometimes “the children ran away on their own initiative, but when they heard that the authorities had arrested their parents and were torturing them to death, returned and gave themselves up.” In one instance, “a young Athenian who returned from hiding in order to save his father’s life… chose to die himself rather than abjure his faith.” ([Location 4135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=4135)) - Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.” ([Location 4151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=4151)) ## New highlights added September 22, 2025 at 10:41 AM - Like Constantinople before it, symbolic and practical reasons made Vienna especially enticing to Ottoman eyes: it was the Austrian capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the Turks’ Christian archenemy for a century and a half; and it was a strategic gateway into the heart of Europe; from it, Italy (and Rome) to the south and the disunited German kingdoms to the north could easily be invaded. ([Location 5163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5163)) - Such a lord was Kara—meaning “black”—Mustafa (so known for his swarthy complexion). In 1676, at age forty-two, he became Ottoman Grand Vizier, second only to the sultan. His military ambition was rivaled only by his “insatiable avarice”: he owned three thousand female slaves and concubines, seven hundred black eunuchs, and thousands of wild and exotic animals. He paid for this ostentatious lifestyle by doing “favors” for those willing to buy them, and “spared nothing to satisfy his avarice. So it may be said,” writes Sieur La Croix (or Le Croy), a diplomat stationed at the Ottoman Empire’s French embassy, “that the Vizier had more ready money than his master.”66 This “fanatically anti-Christian” Grand Vizier67—who in 1674 captured a Polish town, flayed his prisoners alive, and sent their stuffed hides to the sultan—burned to achieve what even the Magnificent Ghazi could not: the conquest of Vienna. ([Location 5167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5167)) - Apprehensive of Turkish intentions in advance, Pope Innocent XI had been petitioning Catholics everywhere to unite in a formal crusade against the approaching infidels. Germans and Poles, moved by both pious and practical considerations—if Vienna fell, Rome and Catholicism would fall, and the Turks would be on their own borders—responded to the appeal and began making war preparations. (Needless to say, Catholic France ignored the summons and even exploited the situation by making militant inroads into the Holy Roman Empire’s territory. Little wonder “the Crescent Moon climbs up the night sky, and the Gallic cock sleeps not” was a common saying in Austria.73) ([Location 5198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5198)) - any man prefer, let him depart peaceably, taking his goods with him.”76 Starhemberg ignored the summons and continued with preparations. 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.77 ([Location 5216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5216)) - Complementing this victory outside the wall was the suffering behind it: without fresh water—the Turks had cut off all external conduits—and with corpses, sewage, and rubble piling everywhere, an epidemic of dysentery—“the Turks’ strongest ally”—plagued Vienna. ([Location 5233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5233)) ## New highlights added September 23, 2025 at 2:43 PM - By 1699, the Ottoman Empire—“which had terrified Christendom for over three hundred years”114—was reduced to signing the humiliating Treaty of Karlowitz, which required it to cede large territories back to its infidel enemies§ and thus marked the beginning of the end of Islamic power. As Bernard Lewis puts it, “The last great Muslim assault on Europe, that of the Ottoman Turks, ended with the second unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683. With that failure and the Turkish retreat that followed, a thousand years of Muslim threat to Europe came to an end.”115 This is not entirely correct. For wherever and whenever Islamic empires waned but Muslims remained—recall Spain’s morphing experiences with Islam after 1492—the jihad collapsed back to its more primordial, piratical form.¶ ([Location 5364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5364)) ## New highlights added September 27, 2025 at 3:11 PM - according to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “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.” (With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”117 ([Location 5375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5375)) - 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 ([Location 5381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5381)) - 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. ([Location 5383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5383)) - Unable to hold his tongue, he “asked these Turks why they treated the poor Christians with such cruelty, [and] they replied that such behavior had very great virtue; that was the only answer we ever got.”120 (The dumbfounded clergyman apparently failed to realize that “the honour of Islam lies in insulting kufr and kafirs [non-Muslims],” as prominent Indian cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Sirhindi (d. 1624) once said. ([Location 5388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5388)) - Considering that the blood of a non-Muslim was deemed “equal to that of a dog,” to quote second caliph Omar—and in keeping with Islam’s built-in tribalism whereby outsiders were deemed subhuman—the sadistic treatment of infidels was always par for the course. ([Location 5392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5392)) - Among these unfortunates [Slavic slaves] there are many strong ones; if they [Tatars] have not castrated them yet, they cut off their ears and nostrils, burned cheeks and foreheads with the burning iron and forced them to work with their chains and shackles during the daylight, and sit in the prisons during the night; they are sustained by the meager food consisting of the dead animals’ meat, rotten, full of worms, which even a dog would not eat. The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures. ([Location 5400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5400)) - Any European rebuffing the homosexual advances of their masters—“male slaves were often used for sexual purposes”130—were especially brutalized by their disgraced would-be rapists:* A young Christian on one occasion killed his master under provocation so gross as fully to justify the act [a subtle reference to attempted sodomy]. He was dragged to the place of execution over the rough and pointed stones, subjected to the insults of an excited and brutal crowd. On his arrival there each of the spectators seemed to take a pleasure in assisting at the work. He was crucified against the wall with four large nails; a red hot iron was thrust through his cheeks to prevent him from speaking, and, in this condition, he was slowly burnt to death with fire brands. Such acts of cruelty were by no means uncommon. ([Location 5419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0785MRSPN&location=5419))